Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,51

of what might happen between us, she wouldn’t have come at all. Secretly, she did want something to happen. Also, not at all. She was me, walking into a bakery and trying not to binge. Or I was just being hyperanalytical and the drink had nothing to do with her feelings about me.

“You smell good,” she said.

I grinned at her, and my mind began racing again. Was this the kind of lingering little compliment a person would give if they didn’t want to encourage another person to make advances toward them? I was a cobra, slithering behind her every word.

Stop fucking thinking for one second and try to have a good time, I said to myself.

Never in my life have I had a good time, I replied.

It was true: I had a bad relationship with the tree of life. I didn’t water it properly, pruned too much. I needed to fertilize it, or something, find joy. I’d just begun admonishing myself when Miriam said, “Listen, I’m not super hungry.”

“Oh,” I said.

I must have looked devastated.

“Sorry,” she said guiltily. “You should order whatever you want, and I will eat some of it.”

This was heresy! She was just going to leave me out here to creep my way through the menu all alone? What about our chopstick games? What about our sauce play? I needed her confidence, her culinary wisdom, also her protection from the judgment of the waiter. I couldn’t order too much. But you couldn’t come to Golden Dragon and not order too much. So much for trying to reenact our last visit. She’d veered off script, and I did not want to improvise.

Then I noticed that she was wearing the Ruský Rouge. She was giving me a sign! Or did it mean nothing? I was having heart palpitations, and everything was unanswerable.

“The lipstick looks pretty on you,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said. “I figured out how to put it on good, and it only took four botched attempts.”

“I like that you’re wearing it. I like giving you things.”

“Why?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say what I wanted to say, which was, Because you make me feel so good just to be around you.

So I said, “I don’t know. I just do.”

I decided I would pray for a sign. But I didn’t really know how to pray, another of the inadequacies in my Hebrew school education. I could remember building a miniature sukkah out of graham crackers, icing, and candy, stealing half of the supplies and shoving them in my backpack to binge on in my bedroom at home later. But nothing about how to really talk to god.

I imagined googling, How to make a golem fall in love with you. Maybe that’s all that prayer was anyway—a cosmic google. In that case, any iPhone could be a synagogue. I wished I could FaceTime with Rabbi Judah.

The waiter came over, and I ordered a pu pu platter and the same sesame chicken dish, hoping she would eat it with me.

“Have you ever had a boyfriend?” asked Miriam, when the waiter walked away.

“Yes, of course!” I said, laughing, as though it were obvious. Then I softened. It was an honest question, and for Miriam, it was totally possible that I hadn’t.

“Oh,” she said.

“You haven’t had one, right?” I asked. “I am going to assume that’s correct.”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“What about a girlfriend?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean, have you ever had a girlfriend?”

She blushed. I could tell she knew exactly what I meant.

“I’ve had girls who are friends, of course. But never anything like that.”

And that was all she said. She didn’t say I’m not gay or I’m not a lesbian. She didn’t say that it was something she could never have in the future. I didn’t dare press her further.

When they served the pu pu platter, she told me to go ahead and eat first if I was hungry, that she was only going to eat a little. The situation was growing tragic. The whole point was to share!

“Well, I’m not eating both egg rolls,” I said. “So you might as well have one.”

“Okay,” she said, and picked up an egg roll. As she bit into it, she seemed to relax a little. Then she filled her plate with more of the platter.

I loved watching her eat, the way she licked a little bit of sauce off her lip, the way she licked her fingers. She ate like a woman for whom food possessed no dilemma, turbulence,