Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,38

over?” Mrs. Schwebel asked Miriam.

“Of course you are,” said Miriam. “How are you going to get plastered and drive home?”

Her mother laughed but didn’t disagree with her.

“Tomorrow we can sleep in while the boys go to synagogue,” Miriam said, rising. “Then we’ll all have a nice lunch and you can meet some of our friends who will be coming by. It’s a beautiful two days. It’s not Shabbat without Saturday.”

“Well, I don’t have a change of clothes or anything, because I hadn’t thought about that—staying over.”

“You can borrow some of Ayala’s,” said Mrs. Schwebel. Then she turned to Ayala.

“Rachel is going to borrow some of your clothes, okay?”

Ayala gave her a dirty look.

I ordinarily hated sleeping at anyone else’s house, mostly because it meant I had less control over what I ate, but also because I liked privacy in general. I preferred to be sequestered in sleep. But what could it mean for Miriam and me to get plastered together and then for me to sleep over? I felt anxious, but in an exciting way.

“So it’s settled,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “Girls, hurry up. It’s three minutes to sundown.”

CHAPTER 34

The basement was already prepared for me. A sofa bed had been pulled out and made up with a soft pink-and-green blanket, old but comfortable. Everything was like that in this house: soft, old, and comfortable. It reminded me that for some people life was about the tactile, about relaxation, about feeling good. This could be the Schwebels’ rhetorical motto: Why wouldn’t you take three pillows? Why wouldn’t you use an extra blanket? Why wouldn’t you just be comfortable?

“I’m going to turn the space heater on too,” said Miriam. “I’ll just set it to low. If you need to adjust it in the middle of the night, it’s fine.”

“God’s okay with it?” I asked.

“God wants you to be snug.”

We returned to the table and sat down. Then Mrs. Schwebel stood up and lit the candles to signal the beginning of Shabbat. She waved her hands in front of her eyes, as though she were conducting a symphony.

“Shekhinah,” she said, smiling. “Divine light.”

She began to sing the blessing over the candles, and the rest of the family joined in. It dawned on me, with delight, that I knew the blessing she was singing. It was the old “Baruch atah” song I had learned in Hebrew school. I knew the blessing over the wine and the blessing of the bread too. They were just alternate “Baruch atah” iterations.

They sang the blessings to a slightly different tune than I had learned. As they broke into other songs, I realized this was the case for most of the melodies. I knew a lot of words, but the tunes varied. Then they sang “Oseh Shalom,” and I suddenly felt very lonely. “Oseh Shalom” had been my grandmother’s favorite song. Now they were singing it in a completely different tune, and I wanted to say, No! You’ve got the tune all wrong! This is not how you do it! Or, at least, I wanted to teach them my grandmother’s melody.

But I wondered if perhaps it was my grandmother’s melody that was wrong. Maybe that was the melody they gave to lesser Jews and nonbelievers. I felt sad that my grandmother had thought she was singing it correctly her whole life.

“Where do you go to schul?” asked Eitan, after we finished “Oseh Shalom.”

“I don’t go to school anymore. I work.”

“Schul. It means synagogue, not school,” said Mrs. Schwebel gently to me.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m not currently attending a schul either.”

I felt around in my skirt pocket for one of the five pieces of nicotine gum I’d let loose in there.

“What other songs do you know?” asked Miriam quickly.

It was hard for me to think up what I knew. I remembered one that I really liked, a song I learned just prior to my bat mitzvah. The song had a beautiful tune, one that had really transported me and made me feel filled with a gentle bliss. But I was scared to sing it, because it was in English—not Hebrew.

“Come on,” Miriam said. “If you know ‘Oseh Shalom,’ you must know some others.”

“Fine,” I said.

I took a breath. Then I sang.

“It is a tree of life to them that hold fast to it, and all its supporters are happyyy! It is a tree of life to them that hold fast to it, and all its supporters are happyyy!”

“Interesting,” said Mr. Schwebel. “That’s a line from Mishle, actually. The book