Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,57

fake-stone front across from Doughy’s Bagels, one of her favorite bagel shops, on the other side of Pico. I had not expected that she would materialize.

“Uh, hi?” I called out from the car.

She stood there not smiling, Coach bag over her shoulder, and gave a little wave.

“Shit,” I muttered, and put the car in reverse and parked.

Was she here seeking an apology for the way I had behaved? Now she was looking down at the ground, as though there were something fascinating happening there. As I got out of the car and walked toward her, I noticed that she had clasped her hands in front of her and they were trembling. It was not the trembling of a supernatural creature, but the trembling of a human being. This made me very uncomfortable.

“Hello,” I said, swallowing dryly.

“Hello,” she said, still looking down at the ground.

“Went to Doughy’s?”

“No,” she said. “I came… to say I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” I asked, surprised. “Why are you sorry?”

“Because I didn’t tell you the whole truth,” she said.

It felt like my lungs had forgotten what to do, that my inhalations were no longer automatic, and I had to force myself to breathe intentionally. To distract myself from my impending suffocation, I came up with a movie plot. Miriam was about to confess to me that we were living in some surreal Jewish fable. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel was being played by Uncle Lavie’s wife’s dead great-uncle, an actor from the Yiddish theater. The rabbi and Miriam had both been sent by my dead grandparents to instill in me some Zionist pride, by way of clove cigarettes, hot cholent, and a stolen kiss. I was Cary Grant and Miriam was Eva Marie Saint, the honey trap—or, in this case, the milk-and-honey trap.

“When you asked if girls could kiss, I knew what you were saying,” she continued. “And when we were talking about whether or not I’d ever kissed anyone, I guess I wasn’t completely honest.”

“Oh?”

“There was a girl in my high school named Bluma Sternberg. We were good friends, actually, for a long time, since elementary school. In high school we would sneak out to the movies because her parents were more strict than mine and she wasn’t supposed to be watching films that weren’t religious. But I got her into the classic movies, and she was hooked.”

“Uh-huh…” I said.

“I used to go over to her house, because she wasn’t allowed to come over to mine. Her parents were afraid we weren’t kosher enough—that something might slip in terms of our dishes, brisket in the milchik bowl, I honestly don’t know. Maybe they thought we were unclean.”

“Bastards. As though your mother isn’t running an impeccable household.”

“I know! Anyway, so I would always be at her house. I would sneak over a bottle of something from my parents’ house, something they would never notice was missing, crappy wine. She loved to drink! Or at least, she learned to drink with me and seemed to really love it. In fact, she may have even liked it more than she liked me. She didn’t really have many other friends at the high school, because it wasn’t the most religious one in the city. I’m really not even sure why her parents sent her there. But anyway, I would hang out in her room and we would drink there together. One time she asked me if I would want to do some romantic things like we saw in the movies. If we would maybe want to practice for when we were married.”

“Whoa!”

“I got really scared when she asked me that. But I was also excited, because, well, I really liked her a lot. So I asked her how we would practice. She said just by hugging for the first week, so that’s what we did, just hugged. Then she said we could also kiss if I wanted, and I said yes I did want to. So we kissed. And then we really started making out.”

I was surprised she knew what making out was. I mean, of course she knew what it was, with all the classic movies and stuff. But still it surprised me to hear her say the words.

“I started going over there more and more often,” Miriam said. “I would always bring something to drink, and we would always make out in her room.”

“Just kiss each other?”

“Yeah mostly,” she said. “And we would rub—you know—we would rub each other’s bodies, but only over our clothes, never underneath. I think