Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,45

while I drank my tea and ate the challah. The tea was sugared and nondairy creamed, and the challah sweet.

“In my day, in Monsey, you would never have thought of staying home from synagogue,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “Everyone was up in everyone else’s business. The women were always secretly taking attendance.”

“More nosy than here in Los Angeles?” asked Miriam.

“You think the community gossips here? It is nothing compared to Monsey. You could not do anything as a child, good, bad, or otherwise, without someone else sniffing around you and reporting it back to your parents. And I’m not even talking about having a drink, but something as simple as lifting your skirt above your ankles for a moment on a hot day. You are lucky, Miriam, that we are so liberal.”

I wondered if Mrs. Schwebel ever desired to be even less religious than she was now. Did she ever want to lift her skirt even higher? Above her knee? What would she have done with her life if she hadn’t been religious at all? She might have gone to college, gotten an MBA. I could see her as the CEO of a nationwide chain of restaurants, rebranding Dairy Queen, infusing the Blizzard with lactobacillus and other friendly bacteria. Mrs. Schwebel as industry renegade, Mrs. Schwebel profiled in Forbes magazine, arms bared, no wig. I wasn’t sure that was necessarily any better or more important than what she was doing right now.

“Whatever, Mom,” said Miriam. “Everyone here is up in each other’s business too. Like when Chaya Spielvogel started secretly dating a goy. Everyone knew in about four seconds what was going on, because Tali Diamond gossiped about it to a bunch of other people. Tali was supposed to be her best friend!”

“Oh, that’s different,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “I mean, that is something of major interest, you know? If I were the Spielvogels, I would be very ashamed.”

So that was her official stance: no non-Jews for her kids. Was this how the Jews had stayed around for so long? We didn’t recruit or attempt to convert anyone. We didn’t go on pilgrimages, and we had no missionaries. But those who were already Jewish—we wanted to keep them Jewish at all costs.

In the living room, the sun was warming everything, warming me too. I couldn’t imagine anything as delicious as sitting here with Miriam and her mother, gently filled with challah, sipping hot tea, so languid. What would Mrs. Schwebel think about the fact that I wanted to date her daughter? On the one hand I was Jewish; on the other hand I was a woman.

I watched Mrs. Schwebel smooth her red wig. I imagined that my mother would see the wig as archaic. My mother ate shrimp, ignored Shabbat, and hadn’t been in a synagogue since my bat mitzvah. She referred to Orthodox Jews as “Oy, those people.” But I was sure that she and Mrs. Schwebel shared some of the same prejudices when it came to their daughters. In this regard, neither of them had come very far from the shtetl.

I thought about the mikvah, the ritual bath where women would go together on their periods. Warm women, wet women, women together, women taking care of one another, women naked in the same hothouse. Some of them must have secretly gotten it on.

When the rest of the family returned from synagogue, I felt like it was my family returning from synagogue, but a family I liked. It was as though they knew me well by now, despite knowing barely anything about me. It was as though you could know a person without knowing the details of their life. You could know their light, because you shared the same light, the way I’d known the prayers the night before without knowing I knew them. I had never imagined this kind of warmth could be so safe, abundant. I’d spent so much time cutting and carving away at myself, worshipping cold. I feared that light and warmth were a trick, a tease, false offerings that lured you into relaxing, and just when you made yourself vulnerable, they would be seized. Better to adapt to the cold. Better to thrust the cold on oneself. Be prepared.

Yet with the Schwebels it was so easy. The light was sustained, plentiful. It wasn’t going anywhere. And so I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, maybe even overindulged compared to what a normal person would eat. I wasn’t sure exactly what that was yet, to eat