Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,35

Then she picked it up and threw it in the trash. The store was empty except for the two of us.

“I’d love a smoke,” she said. “Want to go out back for a clove?”

I nodded.

She squinted in the sun as she tried to light her cigarette. I offered her my sunglasses, and she accepted them. They were Ray-Bans, Blues Brothers–style, and they looked ridiculous on her. She looked like she was in a wedding band. She handed me the clove she had lit, then she lit one for herself, inhaling deeply. When she exhaled, it looked like she was blowing loop-de-loops. They were beautiful, actually, a series of perfect circles in a ray of sun.

“You blow rings?” I asked her.

“What?”

“Smoke rings,” I said.

I held up my hand and poked through the center of one of the rings. But just as I made contact, the ring dissipated into a lazy cloud. She laughed at me from behind the sunglasses. They were too boxy on her, and I tried to imagine what kind of sunglasses would look better. I pictured her in round, mirrored shades. They would match the shape of her face and also lend her a bohemian air: Miriam as Mama Cass, Miriam as goddess of the canyon. Or she could go pure early ’60s nostalgia—Hollywood beehive Miriam with a cat-eye frame in white or checkerboard or cherry red. I decided that I would definitely buy her a pair and bring them to her as a present. Then she could smoke in the sun whenever she wanted—in style.

I wanted to buy her all kinds of gifts. I pretended that my generosity came from gratitude, fondness, but there was definitely a deeper motivation behind my desire to give. I wanted to “improve her” like a project, make her more fashionable. It was not so much about goodwill as it was about my own fear.

People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively—films, Netflix series—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irresistible whimsy. When I felt a recommendation coming on, I’d lie and say I’d already seen the thing: just so I didn’t have to hear the plot explained. Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren’t on Twitter.

But in my desire to curate Miriam, I’d become just another version of an obsessive recommender. I wanted to show the world how beautiful she was, to present a different type of beauty, and in doing so, to own part of her. I felt that if the world embraced Miriam, I’d be healing something in me—making amends with young Rachel. But I didn’t entirely trust the world to grasp her beauty. So I sweetened the pot with little aesthetic upgrades.

“I know you’re not doing anything for Shabbat,” she said. “You must come over to my family’s house this evening for dinner. I insist. You will love it.”

Now she wanted to introduce me to her family? This seemed very intimate, kind of fast. Or was it just an abundance of platonic friendliness in her, a kind and generous nature, nothing to do with romance? She was doing a mitzvah: reaching out to a fellow Jewish woman who was without family. It was Semitic sympathy, diasporic decorum. It was the right thing to do.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Okay,” I said. “I can.”

“Fabulous.”

She was so cute, exhaling the last of her cigarette, stubbing it out under her foot and clapping her hands together as if to say, That’s that. When she clapped, her left hand cast a shadow inside her right hand. The shadow was ovular. It looked like an eye.

For a moment, I really wondered if I was seeing an eye in the palm of her right hand. The eye winked. I blinked. Then it was gone.

CHAPTER 33

I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear to Shabbat. I didn’t want Miriam’s family to think I was being disrespectful, so I cut out of work early and popped over to Saks Off Fifth, where I bought a long black cotton dress that buttoned at the wrist and came down to my ankles. I had always felt culturally Jewish, even though I wasn’t religious. But now in my ignorance of Orthodox customs I felt like a straight-up WASP. In some ways I liked that feeling: streamlined, self-contained.

I stopped at Schwartz Bakery and picked up a