Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,78

sundown,” she said. “I have to go home for Shabbat.”

I had forgotten it was Friday. The clock said 4:27. I didn’t want to let her leave. I took her hand for a moment, then I let it go. I couldn’t ask to go with her. I was not welcome there. I wished there were a version of reality that could embrace us all: Mrs. Schwebel and candlelight and challah and song and wine and Miriam and me as we were. But it was better to stay in bed and dream of her than to be together in a realm where we had to pretend that physically we were strangers to each other.

“When will you be back?” I asked.

“Tomorrow night,” she said. “As soon as the sun goes down again.”

I was afraid. I had no control. I took the clay figure off my nightstand and held it, hoping it would make me feel more courageous. I still felt afraid. So I handed it to her.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“It’s a gift,” I said. “A sculpture. Something I made.”

“Is it supposed to be… me?” she asked.

I was surprised by the question. I sat there for a moment and wondered what I should say.

“Yes,” I said finally. “It’s you.”

“The boobs are wrong.” She laughed.

“I know,” I said. “But the hair is right.”

CHAPTER 74

On Saturday evening, I went to Doughy’s and bought another incredible feast: bagels, cream cheese, whitefish salad, sliced tomatoes, Jordan almonds, chocolaty mints. It was the kind of dairy feast my grandparents used to make after Yom Kippur to break the fast, and I knew that Miriam would love it. I liked these echoes of the past, the way a food could rouse a memory from death. As I walked home it was still light outside. Then I waited in my apartment for the sun to set.

By 7:30, the sky was totally dark and Miriam had not arrived. I began to worry. Had she changed her mind about coming? Had her parents stopped her? In her temporary absence, I began to dread a more permanent absence. I could do nothing but lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. It was strange how we traveled together in my mind so easily across space and time, but we couldn’t just be here together. My vision of our future, the slides I’d allowed myself to play, were fading fainter. Soon, the only light would be my clock in the darkness, ticking.

I put my pillow on top of me, to try to conjure her. She was breath and moan and hips. I could replicate, to an extent, the feel of her breath by breathing on my own hand, the sounds of her moans by moaning into my pillow, but I could not fashion her hips: not with my pillow, or by touching my own hips, which I had so feared were growing wider, but now realized were not wide enough at all.

I thought about the story of the trees, the woman who chose her family over the evergreens. But I had felt Miriam’s blessed desire for me so clearly. I looked out the window and saw something moving on the lawn in the darkness. It was just a woman with a dog. Miriam would be here any minute.

At 9:15 I got up and made myself a bagel with cream cheese. At 10:08, I ate another one. At 11, I placed a piece of Saran Wrap over the giant block of cream cheese, wrapped it up, and put it in the fridge. As I closed the refrigerator door, I remembered being a little girl and asking my mother if I could taste sugar and cream cheese on the same spoon.

She had said I could try it in a few weeks if the weigh-in at my annual pediatrician checkup was good. But I was dying to try it, and so I snuck into the pantry and refrigerator while she was in the shower and made it for myself. It was like a small, beautifully granular cheesecake. I couldn’t wait until I grew up and had my own apartment, all to myself, so I could eat cream cheese and sugar whenever I wanted.

A few days later, my mother noticed grains of sugar in the cream cheese container. Nothing escaped her.

“Do I have to put a lock on the pantry and the fridge?” she asked.

But now I had my own apartment and could do what I wanted. I took the cream cheese back out of the fridge and