“Mind your own business, Ezra,” Aaron snaps back. “Just for a change of pace.” He stews in silence for a minute, then slaps down the pair of deuces. “Besides. You think
“A hundred and ten,” Ezra corrects. “And I’m letting you win.”
“Yeah? Well, how stupid is that?”
Ezra only shrugs. “Der oylam is a goylem,” he answers. The world is stupid.
Rachel has extracted a cigarette from Aaron’s pack of Luckies and reaches for the green glass ashtray. She lights up from Aaron’s Zippo and peers at his hand again. She has a desire just to be nearer to him. Maybe because she feels guilty for lying to him, or rather
She was honestly shocked at how quickly Tyrell attempted to let her off the hook. Maybe it was the lawyer in him on the lookout for a defense, for a loophole. She had been no more than a child herself when it happened, he’d pointed out. How old was she? Only sixteen? That’s still a child. A child suffering under a crushing amount of pressure. She was not the criminal in this situation. She was a child wrongly forced by an immoral adult to make a choice that she should never have been faced with. A choice between life and death.
Yes, Rachel had agreed. A terrible choice. Her life for a girl’s death. Why? How is it that such unforgivable choices are given? Perhaps she’ll never know. Or perhaps Ezra has actually provided the answer to her question. The simplest answer possible. Der oylam is a goylem.
The world is stupid.
23.
Love. So complex. So organic, it can grow or die. It can drug a person, elate or poison them. Or both. Rachel thinks about her mother. Eema held love in contempt but never stopped hunting for it. Never stopped mixing it into her palette. It radiates from her portrait of the red muse.
Looking into the bathroom mirror that night, preparing for bed, Rachel can see her eema’s face. Not from a spectral image but in her own reflection. In the eyes? The shape of the mouth? The cheekbones, less plump and more etched? The older she becomes, the more of her mother shows up in the mirror. She carries the resemblance as a burden of memory. She is responsible for maintaining not only her own face, but the face of her eema. The face of the dead. Dressed in her flannel nightgown, she rubs Phoebe Snow greaseless cold cream onto her skin, forming a mask, while Aaron noisily scrubs his teeth in his pajamas.
“Do you think that some women are born to be lesbian?” she asks him.
His mouth is foamy, and he unplugs the toothbrush long enough to spit some toothpaste and squint at her in confusion. “Do I
Rachel repeats the question. “
“How the hell should I know?” He returns to brushing with extra vigor and then spits. “And do you have to keep using that word?” He slurps water from his palm to rinse.
“
“Prob’ly not, but why risk it?” Aaron shrugs, wiping his hands, then balling up the hand towel to wipe his mouth.
Rachel starts removing the excess cream with a Kleenex. “In Yiddish, there’s not even a word,” she says.
“Really? And here I thought Yiddish had a word for everything,” he tells her. He bares his teeth in the mirror to check that there’s nothing been missed. “Why are you asking me this? Have you been reading one of those crazy Village rags again?”
“Just wondering.”
“Okay. Well, ya got me. I’ve never known one in my life. I mean, not a lot of lesbians in Flatbush, I don’t think. Though God knows I’ve met a couple of real ballbusters.”
“You think lesbians are ballbusters?”
“I dunno, honey. You asked, I answered.” He gulps a mouthful from the bottle of Listerine and winces at the burn, swishing it around as if he’d like to rinse the entire conversation from his mouth, then spits out. “Can we talk about something else, maybe?” he wonders. “Something less creepy, like the atom bomb or tuberculosis?” One final inspection of his bared teeth, then he gives Rachel a squeeze and a peck on the neck before he wanders out of the bathroom.
“You know, I use this bottle of Listerine too,” she calls out after him. “Now it is full of my husband’s germs.”
“It’s mouthwash,” he calls back. “It
***