Rachel Ephraim

 Rachel Ephraim

Zelda

The year I turned sixteen, I caught my mother painting a self-portrait in the guest room. I’d gone looking for wrapping paper, and there she was—an elegant doctor’s wife—smocked and pensive. A canvas, half-painted in flat, dull lines, leaned against the bureau mirror.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in here,” I said. The air smelled pungent, so I opened a window even though it was mid-December. Maybe the interruption annoyed my mother, but she didn’t ask me to leave. Instead she pushed and pulled her paintbrush through the air like a trombone slide. I went to the closet and fetched the tube of silver paper we kept for wedding gifts and other fancy affairs.

“I can’t get my eyes right,” she mumbled. “If you get the eyes, you get the whole thing.” She seemed to be quoting this last bit.

The room was beginning to chill when she turned to me and asked, “What do you think, Amber?” and then nodded her head toward the painting. If somewhere along the way she’d taught me how to say something kind about something ugly, I’d forgotten.

“What is this?” I asked instead. “What are you doing?”

My mother’s wrist went limp, and the paintbrush in her hand fell to her side. I watched a glob of paint fall on the skirt of her dress. She hadn’t matched the colors right, and a forest green splotch smeared across the Kelly green fabric. “Something, Amber. I’m doing something.”

And then she did ask me to leave.

It hadn’t always been that way between us. There was a time when my questions weren’t an affront to my mother’s choices, a time when she looked at me as if I were an inquisitive child worth her musings. Once, there’d been an exchange of softness. But soon after the breast cancer—after the double mastectomy and dad’s affair—she disappeared inside herself the way I thought only men could do. The way to draw her back, I’d found, involved saying something she deemed “insane,” although there was no predicting what words possessed that power.

Once, I asked why she hadn’t gotten reconstructive surgery. Didn’t she want those perky C cups Noa’s aunt had received last Chanukah? Why did she prefer to walk around town boasting her pain?

My mother, who’d been reading a novel on the couch at the time, sat up. She looked at me with a cold stare.

“That’s what you think I’m doing?”

I told her I didn’t know what she was doing, I was just asking.

“Well, don’t,” she said, and went back to her book. Gone again.

The year I turned sixteen was also the year my friend, Tracy Stein, threw herself a party. We were all Jewish, so the occasion wasn’t sweet—how goyish—but we didn’t want to be left out either. The party was more than a party: it was a weekend getaway at some rundown hotel, a Borscht Belt resort that had seen its heyday by the time we arrived in the early aughts. My mother used words like “tired” and “seedy” as I packed my bags, but even she deemed my attendance compulsory. In fact, ever since Tracy’s mother had died in the first grade, the whole lot of us Scarsdale girls promised to give her all that she asked of us, in perpetuity. It was the least we could do. Some of us bended to Tracy’s requests easily, while others, like Miriam Cohen, constantly threatened to renege on the contract. Even on the car ride north, Miriam complained that it wasn’t fair, that she’d been invited to a senior party where she suspected Robert Katz would now get with that field hockey dog Jennifer Blau, even though he was supposed to be hers.

“Meanwhile, Tracy gets everything she wants,” Miriam whispered to me in the back of Mr. Stein’s van.

“Not everything,” I whispered back.

It was the four of us—me, Tracy, Miriam and Noa—and for that weekend, we were all motherless. When we arrived, we found that the hotel was more than just a little sleepy. We’d expected the resort to be in its golden years, but what we’d found was a hospice nurse starting a morphine drip. The decor, six decades out-of-date, needed more than a face lift. Water stains blistered the ceiling. The walls, salmon-colored, matched the patterned carpets, which still remained piled high on the sides, but in the center had been rubbed down to the backing. In the lobby, a Dark-eyed Junco groomed its feathers atop a payphone while octogenarians shuffled down corridors like zombies.

“And what’s that smell?” Miriam asked. (This game lasted all three days: like a fifty-year-old fart; like an inflamed gallbladder; like the time I blew Jeremy Schultzman after football practice.) For a bunch of otherwise prissy girls, we settled into the decay quickly and with ease. Without knowing it, the flickering high hats and desolate ballrooms were what we’d been dreaming of back home; somehow, this was the place we’d been collectively craving since puberty de- stroyed the familial love we’d once known. This is what it looked like to be on the other side of childhood heartache, to be on our own.

Except we weren’t really on our own. Tracy’s father and his girlfriend Zelda, a blonde woman my mother privately referred to as that shiksa, checked us in. Over the years, everyone’s mother had set Mr. Stein up with a friend, or a cousin, or even a sister, but after a while, no one bothered anymore; he zipped through girlfriends like TV dinners. Where he’d found this one none of us knew, and the possibilities became another game we played: in the check-out line of a fish market; at the town dump; in a church!

Zelda handed me the key to our room. “You look like the responsible one,” she said.

Someone had thought to bring a pair of boxing gloves. Or maybe no one had brought them. Maybe they were just there, some decoration of a bygone era that one of us tore off the wall. Unpacked or stolen, it was Noa who slid the right one over her knuckles and started throwing punches in the air. We all looked like versions of Anne Frank—dark-haired, hollow-eyed—but Noa was the most thin-lipped and mousey of us all. She was always joking, always screwing her face into ugly contortions to make us laugh.

While we lounged around the hotel room—some of us on the bed, supine, others on the floor with our knees to our chests. Noa grunted as she pretended to practice her one-two. We were post-paintball and pre-birthday cake; no one was expecting Miriam to pick up the left glove and lace up. When Noa drmatically retreated to the corner of the room to have Tracy rub her shoulders,

I objected.

“We’re just playing,” Miriam said. “Loosen up.”

Miriam wore a button-down silk shirt with only one button fastened in between her breasts. As she bounced around the room, the flaps of her shirt exposed her tanned stomach. I looked at Tracy, her face placid but eyes alight. What did Tracy want to happen?

“Eat her up,” Tracy said.

Looking for a makeshift microphone, I grabbed Tracy’s hairbrush spilled from her suitcase, tufts of curly black hair matted into its bristles. I jumped up, took both gloves with my free hand, and announced the fight.

“Ladies and ladies,” I began. “In one corner, we’ve got the Rabid Rabbit. She’s quick, she plays dirty, and her signature move is none other than the Death Hump.” On cue, Noa hurriedly thrust her hips in the air. Tracy laughed, so the rest of us laughed too.

Truth be told, every time I saw Tracy give that wide, toothy smile, I felt looser. For ten years, the image of Tracy just after her mother’s funeral had stayed with me. Before she’d died, Mrs. Stein had bought her daughter a black velvet dress and gold lamé Mary Janes, but by the morning of the shiva, Tracy’s hair looked snarled. When an old woman shooed all the kids outside, I invited Tracy to join, but she’d stayed on the couch and said she didn’t know if she could. She wanted to, but she just didn’t know. In the car on the way home, my mother said softly to my father that she kept a pair of small clippers in a tin box under the bathroom sink. She’d used these clippers just for me ever since I could remember, and I spent the rest of the ride in the backseat of that boxy Volvo looking at my nails, trimmed and rounded. Whatever held Tracy in its net on that couch that afternoon, a piece of it came then for me and my mother.

How was it then that my mother, very much alive during that sweet sixteen winter, no longer worried about the minute details of my care? She now relied on the death of Mrs. Stein the way some mothers used breastfeeding to quiet an infant’s stirring. You’re lucky I’m around, she liked to say when I reminded her it was dinnertime. Count your blessings that you and Tracy don’t have more to discuss, she replied when probed. More than ever, she made sure that if I was tempted to put myself first, or declare I had better things to do than have a sleepover with Tracy Stein, who truth be told could be a little boring, I remembered that funeral hair. Hair like brambles. Hair like the dolls’ I’d once loved, but then forgotten.

“In the other corner, we have Miriam in her Delirium,” I said. “She’ll fuck your boyfriend and then copy your homework.”

Miriam gave a polite curtsy.

I released their gloves from my hand and stepped out of the way. Noa hopped around the room, bucking her teeth. Miriam, with sharp focus, came at Noa without hesitation, like she’d actually prepared. Their gloves met, tentatively at first, but then Miriam’s popped at full speed. I whispered to Tracy, “I’m gonna call it,” but Tracy whispered back that it was just a bit of fun, that it wasn’t so serious. That was right before Noa’s glove slipped into Miriam’s mouth.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry,” Noa said. “I didn’t mean to—”

As Miriam inspected her front tooth with her tongue to see if it might wiggle, I anticipated some long, dramatic rant about how much Miriam had given up for this lame weekend, how she had other places to be aside from this janky-ass hotel in the middle of nowhere. Instead, she looked at us squarely.

“I have a better game to play,” she said.

Miriam had learned the game at sleep away camp, said it felt better than sex with any of the boys in bunk B. “Kinda like whip-its,” she promised and then asked for a volunteer. Noa, still guilty about the punch, raised her hand.

Positioning Noa against the wall, Miriam asked her to take one really large breath. Noa looked at us with another stupid face—a wide-eyed expression that displayed trepidation but good humor—and then ballooned her chest. “Now huff out,” Miriam instructed, and Noa began to make the noises of an animal panting in distress.

“Good,” Miriam said. “Just like that.”

Quickly, Miriam put her hands around Noa’s neck. We looked on, stunned and curious, as Miriam squeezed. It took no time at all before Noa slid against the wall, and when she came to, she seemed as though she’d just been born. Dumb, blinking eyes. Mouth agape. She craned her neck to peer up at the ceiling, then picked up her hands and held them in front of her eyes for inspection.

“Are you ok?” Tracy asked.

“She’s fine,” Miriam asked. “Better than fine, right?”

We all waited for Noa to explain.

“I feel like, I don’t know, like I’m tingling? Like I want to call up Bobby Stern and explain a few things? Like I just ran a marathon, maybe.”

“See?” Miriam said to us. Her lip had swollen, but it only accented Miriam’s sensuality and the secrets she’d somehow gained access to when I wasn’t looking. “Who’s next?” she asked, hands on hips.

I stood up. “I’ll go,” I said.

My mother had warned me before I left that my weekend getaway might not turn out to be as fun as I imagined. She said a few things about Tracy’s dad, who she thought did the best he could, but would not know how to throw the kind of party we were all used to. “You think we still need pin-the-tail and piñatas to have a good time,” I’d laughed. I wished then that my mother could see me heading toward the wall to be gently strangled. How little she knew about the kinds of things my friends and I liked to do, I thought. How wrong she’d been in her assessments about her very own daughter.

“Just a little bit,” I said to Miriam before I took a deep breath in. “Don’t do it fully.”

“It’s an all or nothing deal,” she said, and she mimed the exhale again. Miriam’s hands on my neck felt cold, and when I tried to tell her to ease up, I couldn’t speak. I more than wanted to call the whole thing off; I wanted to disappear, but I felt lightheaded, dizzy.

“Not bad, huh?” asked Noa when I awoke on the floor, but I didn’t feel like I’d run a marathon. My jeans felt wet, the floor around me wet. Tracy and the girls came to my side, but I pushed them away.

“Sometimes that happens,” Miriam said. “And not everyone likes it. I don’t really like it.”

I wanted to punch Miriam with my bare fists, but Noa took my hand, pulled me off the floor, and instructed me to shower. It felt good to be told what to do, and when I stripped off my clothes, Noa put them into a clean garbage bag so they wouldn’t dirty anything else in my suitcase. By the time I came out of the bathroom, everyone was getting ready for dinner. Miriam apologized for the scare, said that it had happened to a few girls at summer camp too, but they’d all laughed about it, eventually.

In the dining room, Tracy’s dad and Zelda sat at a two-top near the door. Tracy had invited them to join us at the big table, but Zelda declined. “You don’t want us old fogies getting in the way,” she’d said, and Tracy’s father nodded in agreement.

Over appetizers, we watched Tracy watch Zelda feed Mr. Stein the olives from her martinis. While we ordered various pastas and wondered aloud about the teen boy sitting with his parents near the windows, Tracy kept her eyes on Zelda who danced her fingers along Mr. Stein’s arm. We tried our very best to bring Tracy back into the fold: that kid’s surfer vibe is rad, if you know what I mean; he makes me want to shave, if you know what I mean; I wouldn’t mind a double scoop, if you know what I mean. Still, every time Zelda’s laugh filled the dining hall, Tracy disappeared a little more.

Between the boxing match and the asphyxiation, we still hadn’t found the release valve. To lighten the mood, Noa asked us things about girls back home: who’d had an abortion, who ate baby food for lunch, who ran blades across their calves and then wore pants all summer? Miriam took out a flask of vodka from her bag and passed it under the table. Noa took dainty sips with her head ducked below her plate, but Tracy took long swishes in plain sight. By the time our entrées arrived, her eyes were half-lidded.

“Look at her,” Tracy said, looking at Zelda. “She thinks she’s special.” Miriam took the flask from Tracy’s hands and finished the vodka. “If I’m ever that ugly pretending to be beautiful, one of you slap me, ok?”

“I bet she told her friends she was going on a romantic getaway with her rich boyfriend,” Tracy said.

“Who cares?” Miriam said. “He’ll dump her like the rest of them.”

Tracy winced, as though her dad’s inability to keep a girlfriend might be worse than the girlfriends themselves. When Tracy got out of her chair, we all thought she was heading toward her father and Zelda. Instead, she walked toward the surfer boy. As she stumbled up to his table, the family gave Tracy a few kind smiles, but as soon as she left, the mother whispered into the father’s ear. The boy, red-cheeked, pushed his food around and snuck furtive glances in our direction.
When Tracy returned to her seat, we asked for the full report. What had she said? How had she said it? She’d let the kid know that we were wild girls, girls on our own, girls who knew how to have fun. An invitation was made. As Tracy divulged the scant details, I watched the boy’s mother approach Mr. Stein and Zelda. She said a few words, returned to her seat, and left Mr. Stein with his hand to his forehead, eyes closed. Zelda removed the napkin from her lap, folded it neatly, and then headed toward us.

Zelda was about as stable as Tracy in her gait. Her blonde hair, which had been tied up in a neat twist when we’d arrived, was now flyaways and fallen tendrils. It was easy to see that Zelda had packed with another weekend in mind, a weekend in which her boyfriend was neither a widow nor a father. Her silver pumps and tight red dress belonged in Vegas, but if Zelda felt out of place, it didn’t show. Somewhere along the way she’d probably had a mother who’d clapped at her every song.

“Hey girls,” she said, sliding into the empty seat beside me. She said this casually, like a friendly waitress looking to get off her feet. We all waited for something more, but she looked around the table with a complacent smile. Underneath the yeasty aroma of dinner rolls, sugary perfumes came in and out of focus as elderly women ambled to and from the salad bar. A baby cried, then soothed; someone in the kitchen dropped a glass.

“When I turned sixteen, I kissed my best friend Shirley,” Zelda finally said.

We all looked at each other with consternation. Noa snorted an uncomfortable laugh, but Zelda’s glassy expression did not break. Nothing about the weekend had seemed usual, but this? After all that we’d done, didn’t we deserve to be yelled at for our bad behavior?

“That’s all I wanted that year,” Zelda continued, “to know what it felt like to kiss the person I loved most, right on the mouth.”

“What did it feel like?” I asked, and Miriam nudged me in the side for encouraging her. To my surprise, drinking had lent me a childlike aura of full presence. I’d spent the first half of dinner boring psychic holes into Zelda’s back on Tracy’s behalf, but was now stripped of all forethoughts and manipulations.

“Soft,” Zelda said. “Really pretty nice until Shirley told me to get the hell outta her room, then outta her life.”

Zelda laughed that robust laugh I’d heard vibrate down the hallways all weekend. Up close, I could feel the shaking power of a woman who refused to hide. “Did you ever kiss her again?” I asked, now desperate for every scrap of information I might come to possess about Mr. Stein’s girlfriend. It worried me, this blooming need to have more.

“Never,” Zelda said, and then, “That mom over there is a real twat.” She spoke this last part in a low whisper while nodding her head in the direction of the surfer boy, who caught the gesture and looked away. “Sixteen is shit. It’s all shit, really, but we do what we can, don’t we?”

I looked to Miriam. With just one glance, might we come to a mutual conclusion about this outrageous woman? But she wouldn’t unhook her gaze from the ceiling fan, which spun in steady rhythm.

Zelda slapped both palms down on the table, rising with great effort before putting her hands to the ceiling in a display of showmanship. “They’ve been schooled,” Zelda said to the room at large. “The girls have been tamed!” She took a curtsy, but when she tried to leave the table, her ankle twisted in the silver pumps and she stumbled to the floor. Mr. Stein ran over, and even though Zelda laughed as he helped her, she couldn’t put any pressure on her right foot. They left quickly and we ate the rest of our dinner in silence, speaking only to repeat, “The girls have been tamed!”

We said this as we passed soup through our lips, as we rolled the icing of birthday cake across our tongues. Even Tracy got in on the fun. “Sixteen is shit,” she said as she opened a few of the gifts we’d brought.

Past midnight, we were all awake, some lit still, others winding down. I was somewhere between drunk and asleep, enlightened and nauseous. Tracy and the surfer boy had met up by the ice maker, and we took turns watching through the peephole of the door as she blew him. It was terrible, all her effort, all that time on her knees. The blow job trapped us from going anywhere, and the longer Tracy worked, the more I reasoned that leaving this god awful place would return me to sobriety. My mouth tasted metallic. I had the subterranean feeling that if I took off, I might survive myself.

As soon as Tracy came through the door—straight to the bathroom with a mouthful of semen—I busted into the hallway for some air. I could hear all the girls asking Tracy about the boy, but I wanted to get as far away from them as I could. I wandered the hallways a bit until I ended up in front of Mr. Stein’s door. My fist balled up and began knocking before I had a chance to intervene, and when Zelda came to the door with an ice pack wrapped around her ankle, she looked like the kind of normal lady you’d see at the grocery store, like a music teacher or a bank clerk. As Zelda stood there in her flannel pajamas, I had to squint just to make sure Mr. Stein hadn’t picked up someone new in between dinner and bedtime.

“Everything ok, hun?” Zelda asked.

“Homesick,” I said, and it felt like the first true thing I’d said in a long time. “Don’t leave home often?” She closed the door and entered the hallway. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her deflated breasts hung low. I was always leaving home. I’d been gone for whole months at a time, so what was three days? I told Zelda as much.

“You want me to drive you back?”

She said this like it wouldn’t be a big deal for her to jump ship on her romantic weekend, like it made sense for my desires to trump hers. I felt moved by her casual offer, but then played out the scenario of my mother coming to the door at 3:00 a.m. Maybe she’d say something to Zelda like, “You didn’t have to.” Maybe she’d say to me, “Well, welcome home,” but I wouldn’t feel like I’d arrived. I’d probably just long for a hotel room where my best friends slept two to a bed.

“I don’t want to go home,” I said. “Not even tomorrow.”

“Been there,” Zelda said, tilting her head in sympathy. “Still there, actually.” I hadn’t cried in a very long time, and up until that moment, I wasn’t sure I still could. Zelda wrapped her arm around me and pulled me closer. She smelled of hairspray and cigarettes, and I thought of her ex-best friend Shirley, somewhere out there. When Mr. Stein came to the door in a bathrobe, Zelda shooed him away. All these gestures, they were becoming too much. I began to walk back toward my room.

“Just need some sleep,” I said.

“A good medicine,” Zelda agreed.

When I got back to the room, the television was on and everyone was in bed. Noa had fallen asleep with her leg hooked around Tracy, who drooled like a contented child. There was an empty spot next to Miriam. She was still awake, but when I climbed into bed, she turned toward the wall with a big yawn.

“Where’d ya go?” she asked.

“Just wandering the hallways,” I said.

Miriam turned to me then and looked me in the eye for too long. She’d done this when we were kids too; when I’d hidden a toy she wanted, she could find it this way. I resisted the temptation to avert my gaze and thought of the great big birthmark on her bum. I’d seen it once, when we’d run naked through the sprinkler long ago. It seemed that I was always thinking about her birthmark, even though I hadn’t seen it in years. Miriam would arrive at school in pants, or shorts, or a skirt, and I’d imagine the brown spot on her left cheek, the shape of an avocado, hidden beneath the fabric.

“What do you think of Zelda?” I asked.

“Zelda?” Miriam yawned. “She’ll never last.”

“She’s so desperate,” I said.

“So gross,” Miriam whispered.

I watched Miriam’s eyelids flutter until they closed completely, and soon after her face went slack. Even though I felt tired, I couldn’t fall asleep until the sun began to glow through the curtains. As much as I tried to go under, I spent all night observing Miriam sleep. If I remember anything about that weekend, it was the certainty I felt then that I’d spend my life drowning in insatiable wonder.

Years later, back in Scarsdale for my mother’s funeral, I ran into Tracy Stein. We hadn’t talked since high school, but there she was, standing by the tulips at the florist. She wore her hair slicked back into a neat bun, and her skin looked so fresh I imagined she moisturized twice a day, maybe more. Between her silk blouse and diamond studs, it seemed Tracy had learned how to become a woman all on her own, without instruction.

“How’s everything?” she asked, but I didn’t want to get into it.

“Good, good,” I said. “Life, you know?”

I was still in the clothes I’d worn on the plane and feared I smelled stale, unloved. “How’s your dad?” I asked. “How’s Zelda?”

“Who?”

I spent too long describing her, but Tracy couldn’t remember. Even when I brought up our weekend in the Catskills, she corrected me and said that I was thinking of Greta, the one with the little bulldog. I didn’t have the time to explain that Zelda would never own a bulldog—I was burying my mom within the hour—so I said, “You’re probably right,” and she laughed and said, “There were so many.” Only later, only after I scooped that ceremonious handful of dirt to toss over my mother’s coffin, did I call up Miriam to let her know I’d been thinking about her lately. It had been a while since we’d talked, years now, but Miriam didn’t call attention to the distance.

“Amber, Amber, Amber,” she said, and I could picture the scene of her: arms crossed, standing in a flood of porch light, patiently waiting for my return.