Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,77

her ass its own planet. I would paint her if I could paint. I’d carve her in stone if I could really sculpt. I’d make all kinds of Miriam idols and I’d worship each one of them. But all I knew how to do was sit there grinning stupidly, thinking. I wanted to freeze time right here, in this moment when she was leaving, only to come right back to me.

When I heard the door close, I began projecting a slideshow in my mind of future Miriams and Rachels. There was Miriam on the toilet in the bathroom of a shared apartment, door not even closed, pee tinkling. Miriam and Rachel on vacation in the Russian forest gathering mushrooms. Miriam as nurse administering Jell-O, ice cream, tea with honey to a sick Rachel. I saw Miriam in a blue coat and matching hat, standing outside the mall, in the suburban New Jersey winter. Miriam, knife in hand, ready to deliver the verdict on my first attempt at cooking pepper steak. Miriam the mother clutching candlesticks at the head of a long dining table, though I could not picture our children. Miriam and Rachel as crones playing mah-jongg in Boca Raton and reading fortune cookies.

She returned with a feast: chocolate-covered cake donuts, bagels, cream cheese and lox. Also hot chocolate. I lay on the bed watching her unwrap all of the delicacies and thought, Mama. Then I thought, No, sister. Then I thought lover and friend, but none of those words felt completely right.

We ate breakfast in bed, naked. Miriam fed me and I fed her. I wondered if one day I would tell her what I had been like before, about the eating disorder, all the years with it. I wondered if she would understand. I felt there was a danger in sharing the real details of that sickness—that it would taint the lovely way we ate together. I wanted our throats to stay free, not clogged with diagnoses from my history. There were other words I didn’t bring up for similar reasons. I didn’t want to diagnose the relationship. I never used the word girlfriend, as in, Are you my girlfriend? I never asked, What are we?

She had barely finished eating when I climbed on top of her. I slid my way up and down so that our bare pussies were pressed against each other. I imagined our clitoral hoods conjoined, our clits giving each other kisses in the friction. I looked on the nightstand and saw the clay figure: the swirls of pink, blue, yellow and green. It had no eyes, but it winked at me. It had no mouth, but it smiled.

CHAPTER 72

All afternoon, we napped. I dreamt that I was as big as Miriam. We flew around together on the gold dragon as it exhaled light and steam. We sailed over the Hollywood sign, swooped past Griffith Park Observatory, two gorgeous fat women on display. We both wore the same long, black silky dress—like the yellow one she’d worn the first night we’d gone for Chinese food, but in black. We both wore the same Ruský Rouge lipstick. The lipstick was everywhere, smeared across all the straws and stars and forks and moons and Twizzlers and movie screens and televisions and buildings and money of the world. We swapped lipstick from mouth to mouth, totally open for all the world to see. We turned on men and women alike. The men wanted us, and the women wanted to be us. They envied our gorgeous freedom. We were a double mirror, reflecting their own deep desires. The mirror was framed in gilt bamboo.

We kissed each other between sips of Scorpion Bowl. We kissed each other between bites of sesame chicken. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel sat on a giant scallion pancake in the clouds. He nodded approvingly.

“So it’s all real!” I said to the rabbi.

“Real, shmeal,” he said. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. There are emanations of god we can’t even see. What’s important is that you feel it.”

“But I want to know.”

“You think anyone knows? A mother loves the way she sees her child. A people love their myth of a homeland. You love your Miriam.”

I offered him the Ruský Rouge. He wrote the word LIFE in the sky. Then he playfully tossed a fortune cookie at my head.

“Remember,” he said. “The spiritual world and the physical world go hand in hand.”

CHAPTER 73

When I awoke, Miriam was playing with my shorn hair.

“It’s almost