Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,67

you really want to come over for Shabbat that badly? I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It has nothing to do with you. I just thought the table might be a little too full.”

I didn’t want to have to push. I wanted to be wanted, as I had been in that first Shabbat incarnation, before anything physical had happened between us. Yet I felt I had to push, just to test and see what she was willing to do. I wished I was cool enough or strong enough not to test her. I didn’t want to show that I wanted or needed anything from her. But the truth was I did want and need her. Why did it feel so much safer to be wanted or needed than to be the one who wanted or needed?

I was terrified of being rejected. I didn’t want to be a loser. That was the word that came into my head whenever I ran the risk of caring about someone: loser. I couldn’t remember my mother ever saying it to me. It was something I must have come up with all by myself. What did it mean, anyway? If Miriam hurt me, would that make me a loser?

Miriam was not the malicious sort. I knew she would never take pride or joy in hurting me. It was not about power or control for her at all. It was me who saw people and the world that way.

“Forget it,” I said to her.

“No,” she said. “I’m being silly. I just get nervous, I guess.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “Will you come? I really want you to come.”

She kissed the side of my face and then my neck. I closed my eyes and envisioned us again as the ancestral shtetl women. We were in a dark cottage that smelled of cholent. Everything stank like potatoes, chicken schmaltz, turnips, beef. The house was so tiny that we were forced to be intimate. Only now, in this vision, I was not a woman, but Miriam’s husband. She was trying to convince me to do something or other—let her trade the mule for a new saucepan, maybe—by kissing me.

No, that was not right. Start again. We were in the dark cottage. It was still pungent with potatoes. But she was nobody’s wife, and I was nobody’s husband. I was a woman. We were daughters of the village. We were both beautiful. She was plumper than I was, but I was a well-fed beauty too. I suppose we were wealthy, then, even though the house we were in was so small. Was it my parents’ house or her parents’ house? Was it a house we had snuck into?

No, that was not right either. We were not in a house at all, but in the forest. We had snuck away with each other to an evergreen forest, two daughters of the shtetl, friends since childhood. We had snuck away in the dark of night so that we could have the whole forest floor to ourselves to make love. We had just fucked. We had fucked each other in our skirts. We had fucked each other in mutual desire and now we were lying on the forest floor curled up together, two girls in pine needles, under starlight. This was the definition of holy. Tell the village matchmaker not to bother with us. Here in the forest there was no potato smell, no pogroms. Only the scent of evergreens.

I opened my eyes. Miriam didn’t seem worried about our future. I wondered if her faith in god made her believe that everything was going to work out for us. I decided that I would borrow some of her faith, siphon that solace of existing only here, in these sheets, because I didn’t want to think about the alternative. I hugged her, kissed her mouth softly. She was very warm. We were safe for now.

CHAPTER 60

When Mrs. Schwebel opened the door, she gave me a big smile.

“Rachel!” she said.

Then she noticed my outfit, the pants and matching blazer, and her face changed. She looked me up and down. I wondered if it was bad that I’d worn pants on Shabbat.

“I brought you this,” I said, handing her a bottle of kosher white wine.

“Wonderful,” she said briskly.

In the hall, I pulled Miriam aside.

“Should I have worn a skirt?” I whispered. “I feel like your mother doesn’t like that I’m wearing pants.”

“No,” she said. “We’ve had women come over for Shabbat wearing pants.