Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,58

we both felt that as long as we had our clothes on then we weren’t doing anything really bad, you know?”

“Right,” I said.

I was jealous of this Bluma Sternberg—jealous that she’d gotten to be with Miriam in this way. It felt like a different jealousy than I’d ever experienced. Usually, I compared myself to a woman and felt jealous of her body or her boyfriend. This was more of an ache—a hard ache in my chest, and also, I noticed, in my groin. I didn’t like that someone else had been with her first. I didn’t like that I hadn’t been the one to uncover this side of her.

“Bluma didn’t have a lock on her bedroom door, which meant we always had to sneak around and be on the alert. At least she had her own bedroom, which is rare in Orthodox families. But her parents must have gotten suspicious, or figured out what was going on, because one day her mother snuck up to the door and just burst in on us.”

“Oh god, what happened?”

“She immediately started beating Bluma. Just—beating her up with her hands. Then I tried to stop her and she hit me too.”

“That’s horrible!”

“She screamed at her—partly in Yiddish, which I couldn’t understand, because my parents didn’t speak it in our house. But the part in English was terrible.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“She called her a slut. She called her a… dyke. And me a dyke too. Her mother threatened that she was going to tell my parents, which terrified me. For days I waited for that hammer to drop. But she never did.”

“Why do you think she threatened but didn’t say anything?”

“The more people who knew, the more chance there was of gossip spreading. She did not want what had happened to leave that room. But a few days later, after school, she found me and pulled me aside. She said that if I ever went near her daughter again, she would kill me. And then she took Bluma out of my school.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t tell your parents that she beat you.”

“They’d want to know the reason why!”

“You couldn’t tell them?”

“You must be kidding. I would be disowned.”

“Really?”

As the word left my mouth, it sounded judgmental. But I wasn’t judging her at all. I thought of my own mother, not religious, and how terribly she had reacted to my own admission. I had wished, because they seemed so kind, that the Schwebels could be different.

“If they thought I liked a girl, it would be unacceptable,” said Miriam.

“Oh,” I said.

It was getting cold out.

“All of that is to say I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea or anything, but… I was embarrassed to tell you that story. I knew what you were asking about the kiss. I just—anyway, I would like us to stay friends.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that too.”

So she’d had an experience with a girl. And she’d enjoyed it. Now I was convinced that she’d known what she was doing with me all along, this kosher coquette. Well, I wasn’t about to drag her over any thresholds.

“It’s getting late,” I said. “I should probably go upstairs.”

“Yes, I should go home,” she said.

I wanted to say, Come upstairs with me, please. Just come up with me to my stupid, nothing apartment with its white walls and vacant fridge and bare wood floors and so much emptiness.

Instead, I said, “Good night.”

CHAPTER 50

That night I dreamt about white lilies. I was starving. I was in a field of them, licking rainwater off the petals to try to fill my stomach. As I licked, I had to avoid getting any pollen or petals in my mouth, because the lilies were poisonous. But I was so hungry! At one point, while I sucked the droplets off one of the petals, I found myself biting into the petal itself—chewing that up and sucking out the juice from inside. It felt exciting to be doing something I shouldn’t do. It felt good to be nursing myself on the earthy, vegetal flavor. I ate it all the way to the stem. “I’m not dying,” I said. “I’m not dying.”

“Of course you’re not,” came a voice. “Nobody brings flowers to a Jewish funeral.”

It was Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. He was standing inside a tall, white calla lily, the one calla lily amongst all the other regular lilies, which thrust skyward like an upturned trumpet.

“Hi Rabbi,” I said, wiping pollen off my lower lip.

“Hello, Rachel,” he said, his long