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I.
Paul and I are arguing about the penis of our unborn son.
“It’s genital mutilation!” he says to the open refrigerator, removes a large container of 0% Fat Chobani.
“It’s not,” I reply, sitting at the dining room table that once furnished my father’s childhood home. I look directly at Paul, who is standing in the open kitchen. “Every man in my family, like, forever, has been circumcised. You agreed to raise Jewish children. This is what that means.”
“It makes sex less enjoyable,” he says, gesticulating with a spoon that is covered in a thin layer of yogurt.
“Nobody knows that.”
I move towards him, but he turns around, and so I hug him from behind. He doesn’t want to be touched, though, and almost shudders as my hands grasp at him. He shirks my hug, spins to look at me.
“Think about it,” he says, his voice cracking. “Giulia, for once in your life fucking think about something. You’re going to let some rabbi cut our son and suck the blood with his mouth. Yeah, I’ve read about it. There were all these cases of herpes, you know. Because the rabbis had herpes and then the babies got herpes.”
The use of my name stings most—it’s only when he’s really angry that he calls me Giulia. Otherwise, I’m Bug. But anger rises within me, too, and I can’t tell if I’m responding to his or if it’s been there all along.
“I think about things,” I say. “And it’s a mohel.”
“What?”
“Rabbis don’t perform circumcisions. Mohels do.”
It’s three in the afternoon, but I shuffle to the bedroom, feeling heavy at only eighteen weeks. Arthur, the dog, follows me, and we slip into the unmade bed together. The window unit Paul always sets to sixty-two degrees muffles but does not block the sounds emanating from the “courtyard,” trash being thrown into bins, a kid crying. I’ve grown to love the contrast between the cold on my cheeks and the warmth underneath the covers, a sensation Paul taught me to appreciate. It cuts the smell, too, of living, essentially, above a dumpster.
I should be happy it’s a boy. He’s a boy. That’s the kind of child you’re supposed to want. Honestly, it’s probably irresponsible to bring a girl into the world in 2018. Having a daughter is just like having an open wound that can walk around without you, a distinguished essayist once said to me in a meeting. But I have been praying for one all the same, and suddenly, it’s real: all the unknowable harm I will do to this yet unborn child of mine. We live in the state of New York, and I still have six weeks in which I do not need a reason, but as soon as the thought enters my mind, I try not to have it, as though you can do that, as though you can will away a notion with its opposite.
I called it the Horowitz Compromise when I pitched it to Paul several years ago, which probably didn’t help because Paul is not particularly fond of my best friend from college, Sylvia Horowitz. The irony is that I have never known Sylvia to compromise. I mean not once, ever, and I lived with her for three years in dorm rooms and three in Brooklyn. Syl’s a reporter for Vice News Tonight, so she curses a lot on television, professionally. This is the perfect job for her because she’s obsessed with politics and can also roll the most beautiful joint.
“It’s really fucking simple,” she said to me over spaghetti at the only vaguely affordable restaurant in Fort Greene. “I told John, the kids can have your last name, but they’re going to have my religion. I mean, there’s two things you get from your family, right? Your religion and your last name. He gets one. I get the other.”
“You get more than two things from your family, Syl,” I said.
“Yeah, sure. But, I mean, shit your parents get to decide. Trust me, Jules,” she said, dropping her fork into her empty pasta bowl to grab my hand, her nails perfectly painted red. “This will work. And if it doesn’t, just take Paul to Auschwitz.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see if anyone was looking. Healthy chatter filled the small room, the clinking of silverware, the faint buzzing of indie rock, the light smell of garlic. The large window that faced Dekalb was steamy; no one seemed to be paying us any mind at all.
Sylvia gestured to the waitress, pointed to the empty pinot. “Can we have another?”
“I want Paul to think Judaism is fun,” I said.
“Is it, though?”
“Well, it’s not just about the Holocaust. You know, there’s also like, Channukah.”
“Channukah is shit Christmas. I’m telling you. This is the solution.”
I couldn’t resist. “Finally,” I said.
Sylvia rolled her eyes as she laughed.
I wake up to Paul sliding into the bed from the bottom in an attempt not to disturb me. It’s ten pm, according to the alarm clock on my bedside table that will, at six, begin to slowly emanate light, mimicking the sunrise. I’m not sure if I’m at the stage of pregnancy where you’re supposed to want to sleep all the time, but I do. We had taken the afternoon off to spend together post-sonogram—me from my job as a publicist at a small literary publishing house, Paul from writing—but we have clearly passed the hours in opposite corners of our very small apartment, me unconscious.
“I’m sorry,” I say, moving towards Paul, even though I am not sorry. I am not sorry that we fought or that I am descended from an unbroken line of genital mutilators. But I also want to run my hand through his soft, sandy hair, and I do, kissing him with more pressure than I intended. And I am, actually, a bit sorry, in a way that is always with me.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says. “I love you the most, Bug.”
Later, I can’t sleep. I remember the winter more than a decade ago, my junior year of high school, which my father spent writing a play that we would later understand was an early attempt at working things out about his mistress. That he wrote a play at all was odd enough, because he was a psychiatrist and had never shown the slightest inclination for playwriting.
He read the piece aloud to my mother and me at our dining room table. The play was about a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, the hoax Jewish mystic messiah from the 17th Century. Think Jesus but he never took off, I wrote in my diary at the time. Actually, if you Wikipedia Sabbatai Zevi, a reference to one of my mother’s illustrious Kabbalah-preaching forefathers from Livorno shows up. He wasn’t a Sabbatean, though, just related to someone who was, by marriage.
In my father’s play, the Sabbatean goes to visit his old friend Baruch Spinoza in Amsterdam because he’s having a crisis of faith. Once he’s there, the disillusioned Sabbatean wanders into a church and meets a virtuous Christian woman. They fall in love, but never have sex? Ultimately, our Sabbatean hero has a long conversation with Spinoza that is a lot like Copenhagen (though, obviously, not in subject-matter and without stakes of any kind, except, as it turned out, our own), and returns to wherever he’s from, back to his boring Jewish wife and children.
Needless to say, the play was terrible, but that didn’t hurt my mother or me any less when we finally understood it. All those hours in the living room, my father reading us every role—at least he didn’t do voices.
The next morning, Paul and I are late to his cousin’s baby’s baptism. It’s my fault. I took too long walking Arthur.
“Listen,” I say as we rush down 16th street, “when you stand, I’ll stand. When you sit, I’ll sit. But when you kneel, I’ll sit.”
“There isn’t much kneeling,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “But I don’t kneel.”
We arrive, and it is clear the priest is either drunk or senile, so our tardiness does not seem, ultimately, to be a problem.
“Did we do that part already?” the elderly man asks the crowd, as Paul and I settle into our seats at the back. Xavier has recently been renovated, and it gleams with new paint, bright red and blue light streaming through the pristine stained-glass windows. The chapel smells strangely fresh, like it might secretly be a garden.
“We did, Father,” I hear Paul’s mother say, from the first row. She is seated next to her brother, the baby’s grandfather. Paul’s father is on her other side, his back perfectly straight in a dark blue suit jacket. I am anxious for her to see us, to have my attendance marked—even though she is always warm and kind, even though she likes me. I cough, and Paul shoots me a glance. It must have sounded forced, at least to him. But soon we are all beckoned to the apse, told to gather around the font. I rush ahead, my heels echoing on the marble floor. Paul holds my hand, trying to steady me.
“It’s okay,” he mouths.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Paul’s father says, softly, after I touch the sleeve of his jacket. Paul’s mother turns around; her face shines.
“How are you feeling, darling?” she says.
I realize I do not know if Paul has told them the news we received yesterday, if they are now aware of the sex of their future grandchild. I want to ask Paul, but I don’t know how to do it silently and his fingers feel heavy in my hand as we watch the baby receive water and oil. In his white lace dress, Shane is perfectly quiet, almost smiling.
“Shane’s so good,” I say to Paul’s mother, and she nods, wiping a tear from her cheek, letting her hand rest on her face for a moment.
The service appears to be over, and I am asked to take photos. Paul’s cousin is beautiful. Her blue eyes shine against her cropped black hair, which has been straightened for the occasion. She’s lost almost all the baby weight and holds Shane close to her chest. The scene looks impossibly natural to me, her husband beaming down at her and their son. I focus her iPhone screen, tapping just around baby Shane’s face. I can see the photo on their mantle in a dark wooden frame. I can see it in a hundred frames at Target, ready for purchase.
For my parents, it wasn’t a problem that Paul isn’t Jewish, the way it had been with other boyfriends. They like Paul, how he is sweet and quiet and makes me happy, how he loves classical music and the New York Review of Books.
“After all,” my father said when the subject came up, “Paul’s an intellectual.”
“More or less the same thing,” my mother said—laughing, but not entirely joking—from the galley kitchen.
Dad was stirring his tea in a dark blue Times Literary Supplement mug, seated in his favorite chair in the living room, making himself comfortable after one of our Sunday dinners. I had just announced that Paul and I were moving in together.
“And your children will be Jewish no matter what,” my father said. “Because you’re Jewish.”
“I am,” I said.
At the post-Christening luncheon, in the upstairs room of an old, terrible pub in Gramercy, Paul’s mother sits across from me at a long table. “A boy!” she mouths.
I smile and immediately cover my lips with a paper napkin. Coffee and tea and final shots of whiskey are served to signal that the meal is coming to a close. Paul finishes his tea in one gulp, a gesture he shares with my father, and says he wants to go home to walk Arthur and hit his page count. I kiss him lightly on the lips and say that I am meeting Freddie—my friend since pre-school, fellow only-child, surrogate brother—at Caffe Reggio. Paul looks surprised. I hadn’t mentioned it, but I texted Freddie under the table, “where you at?” already knowing the answer. On the first warm day of spring, he can only ever be one place: smoking at Reggio, a café that has inedible food and bad lighting but is old and therefore charming. I cut down through Union Square, my ears enveloped in noise canceling headphones. In a British twang, Richard and Linda Thompson sing about breaking up. I can feel the tourists all around me, the farmer’s market alive with out-of-towners and New Yorkers buying bespoke tomatoes, but I see no one, the iPhone screen image of Paul’s cousin and her husband and baby overwhelming my vision.
I pass the building where Isaac, the boy who broke my heart in college, grew up. As I walk below the loft where Isaac’s parents probably still live, I realize I dreamt of him last night, for the first time in ages. Or, at least, I have that old lingering feeling I used to get when I would wake up weeping. My kitten heels hurt. I should be more careful now that I am walking for two, and yet I have the strong desire to take off my shoes and march barefoot through the streets of Manhattan, something I have not done in years, but did do, mostly as a drunk teenager, though being an adult, who is not allowed to consume alcohol or coffee or even smoke a cigarette means keeping your shoes on even when they hurt. And mourning my relationship with Isaac is from a different time, the years when the only competency I had was heartbreak, when I was a disaster at my job. The industry was going belly-up, which frankly seems to be the position it is perpetually in, flipping over on its backside. In those years, I was not very good on the telephone, and I didn’t like to impose on others—terrible characteristics in a publicist. That first summer, I was tasked with convincing all of our authors to demean themselves on the Internet.
“AMA,” I would say continuously, all day, to the elderly gentlemen at the other end of the line. “It stands for ask me anything.” My cubicle mate, the longer and leaner and tanner Miranda, would chortle from behind me. She worked in editorial.
“You want me to answer intimate questions from strangers on the web?” The almost-Philip Roth would say, his Bronx accent peeking out from behind its regular Oxford hue.
“Yes.” I would sigh, half-reading an angry email from my boss, my feet now on my desk, trying to breathe and stretch. “We find it sells loads of books.”
That was a lie. Nothing did.
But Sylvia and I took up the trope. That summer we were twenty-two and living together in Brooklyn for the first time, each of us savoring our small, dispensable incomes, quickly consumed by the berry-infused gin cocktails of Fort Greene.
“Went on a date with a guy who reads Harry Potter in Latin, AMA,” I texted her.
“Stuck on the 2 for an hour under a huge, smelly armpit, AMA,” Sylvia answered.
“Spent all day looking at photos of Isaac and his new girlfriend on vacation in Italy, AMA,” I offered, violating a decree from Sylvia and Freddie, issued in rare agreement. Jesus Christ, they said, no more mentions of Isaac.
“My boss asked me to peel his avocado for him, AMA,” Sylvia wrote in response, because really there was only one rule, and it was simple and unspoken: you never actually asked anyone anything.
From halfway down the block, I see Freddie reading the same book he always seems to be carrying about Marxism in India, a pack of American Spirits on the table.
“Hey, babe,” he says and immediately extinguishes his cigarette. “Should we leave? There’s so much smoke here. You look beautiful. Only slightly zaftig, glowing.”
I roll my eyes. “That’s what everyone says to us pregnant gals.” I reach across the table, grab his hand and squeeze it. “I’m so happy you’re home,” I say and inhale, loving the smog of MacDougal, the light tinge of tobacco that emanates from his Barbour, the softness of his palm. Freddie’s just returned from three years at The Hindustan Times and is now under contract for a book about the split between two communist parties in India.
“How was the baptism?” he says. His phone lights up to tell us he has gotten a match on Tinder.
“Ohh, he’s cute.”
“Hmm,” Freddie replies, not particularly satisfied. “Anyway, I shouldn’t be distracting myself. I have to deliver in five months.”
“Same.”
Freddie laughs in a way that lights up his entire face, and I am overtaken by the warmth of that expression, a grin I have known almost all my life. I have seen Freddie’s face grow with the fat of pre-pubescence and shrink with the gauntness of teenage depression. I have seen his face when it was beardless, when a sickly hormonal stubble protruded from it like acne, when a full beard hid the large amount of beer we consumed in college, when he was attempting to be a clean-shaven professional. But his smile has always been the same.
“It’s a boy, by the way.”
“Holy shit, Jules,” he says. “A boy.”
“Shit, though, Paul and I had a massive fight. About, you know, snip, snip.”
Freddie lights a cigarette in his mouth and then immediately stubs it. “Fuck, sorry. What about the Horowitz Compromise?”
Like Paul, Freddie is not a particular fan of Sylvia, and I wonder if I detect a slight sneer in his voice.
“I don’t know. Maybe he changed his mind. Now, that it’s flesh and blood, so to speak. I guess it’s a hard thing for a father, to have a different kind of penis than his son.”
Freddie spits out his cappuccino. Some of it drips down his Barbour. He looks around to see if anyone has noticed.
“Just me, babe,” I say. It occurs to me that no one has come to take my order, and I’m full of love for Reggio and New York City, more generally, where no one cares what you want to drink or if you spit it out in public.
“I’m sorry Jules,” Freddie says, dabbing lightly at his coat with a napkin, “but you have to laugh at the father-son penis dichotomy.”
“Fine, sure, yes,” I say, but I can’t quite laugh. “Your dad never converted, though, right? So, your parents must have had this conversation?”
“Are you asking me about my dad’s dick, Jules?”
“No, Jesus, of course not.”
Freddie laughs. “I mean, I’m sure my parents talked about it. Obviously, they talked about it,” he says. “But it was so much more of a thing that my dad was Black than that my mom was Jewish. And he didn’t mind, I think, raising me Jewish, because he didn’t particularly identify as a Christian.” Freddie pauses. “Did something happen at the baptism?”
“Just the usual. Baby, bathwater.”
“Come on, be real with me.”
I sigh. “It was like, really, really lovely, and that made it almost impossible to bear. I just, I saw it, how I’m going to deprive our child of his simple, rightful place in Paul’s family. And, I mean, what is the big deal, really, if my baby is baptized? Except, I guess, that it is possibly the worst violence I could do to my parents.”
“Except that,” Freddie says.
“And there was this moment when everyone, I mean everyone, got up and took communion. Everyone except me. And I thought, one day Paul’s mother, Paul’s father, they are going to die, and every person in that whole family will go and take communion, even Paul, who hasn’t been to confession in years, and I’m going to put my hand on our son’s shoulder, I’m going to hold him back and say, no, we don’t do that. And it’s just like, why?” I stop, looking past Freddie’s face, which holds a wry smile, and stare at the hungover NYU students who have gathered at Mamoun’s for three p.m. falafel. “Do you remember what you said when Isaac dumped me? You came to pick me up in Astor place, and we walked the whole length of Manhattan together. It was fucking freezing.”
“It wasn’t the whole length of Manhattan. It was like 70 blocks.”
“I said, ‘I don’t understand. Isaac and I were perfect together. On paper, we were perfect.’ And you said, ‘yeah, Isaac was your best paper boyfriend.’”
Freddie looks up from his half drunken cappuccino and forces my eyes to meet his. “I stand by it,” he says.
“Maybe it would have been easier, though,” I frighten myself by saying, “Isaac.” I look at my hands, which are chapped from the winter that is perhaps now finally ending, and I think Freddie might get up, that he might leave, that he might walk back to the New York Public Library, to his little office at the Cullman Center, which is lined with dusty history textbooks that have been recalled for him from all over the world, because the statute of limitations on Isaac is definitely up and, even if the old edict hasn’t been necessary in years, I’m certain it still applies. And I think of Paul, whom I love so wholly, who knows how to kiss my neck just where it hurts, with whom I have an entire secret language of familiar jokes, of references, a shorthand for every experience we’ve had, just like a family. Yes, I think of Paul who is already my family, and I wonder if he can hear me, all the way from Brooklyn, as he wipes Arthur’s paws with a paper towel, just as I asked him to, or who doesn’t do that, sharing a knowing glance with him. I think of my husband who maybe has a secret with our dog and will one day share countless with our son.
“Jules,” says Freddie. “I don’t think it’s easy to have a baby with anyone.”
I don’t respond. Freddie and I just look at each other, my hands resting on the table and his resting on mine, and when the waitress comes to take my order, we jump slightly at the sound of her voice, at the revelation that anyone lives in this city aside from us.
As I sip my decaf macchiato, Freddie says, “you know my godmother, Susan? She was babysitting me once when I was a few months old, and she took me to that Catholic Church on Park, St. Ignatius Loyola, and she had me baptized.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, she felt so guilty about it, she told my parents immediately afterwards. My mom was really pissed, but she forgave her, eventually.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I mean, it’s like you said, what difference does it make? Now,” he pauses, tapping the well-worn volume about communism in India with his middle finger, “are you going to let me read this book or what?”
“Of course,” I say. I pull out a galley in need of a press release, but I don’t even lift the cover. Instead, I watch Freddie read, watch him make occasional notations in margins, scratch at a yellow legal pad.
“Stop staring at me,” he says.
“Sorry,” I say. I open the galley, and soon I’m in it, the story of some Nazi hunters in South America. Agent Zigzag meets James Bond the tagline boldly proclaims, and to my surprise it more-or-less delivers.
“Uncircumcised,” Freddie says, “by the way,” when I’m deep in Argentina.
“What?” I look up at him, and he smiles.
“My dad.”
“Thanks for the visual.”
“Please, you were practically begging for it.” He pauses. “You know, Jules, I’m not sure how much this whole thing really matters. You have a baby, and you do this, or you don’t do this, x happens, or y happens, and then, the baby, he walks into the future without you.”
“Yeah, but not right away.”
“Yes, but Jules, eventually. Eventually.”
This time it is me who guffaws, spits a little coffee. It rolls down the front of my dress. Freddie leans across the table, dabs.
Instead of getting on the subway, I walk downtown, through SoHo, across the bridge to Brooklyn, and—again—I’m thinking of something my father said, something I thought didn’t matter anymore, how at dinner one night, after his affair came to light, he said he couldn’t promise that he would stop seeing the woman he loved. None of the righteous rage of adolescence that filled me then comes to me now, none of the shock. What I feel instead is more unsettling because for so long I lived that memory as a child, but now my position in it has changed; I can’t tell exactly where I’m sitting within it.
At that dinner, I think, I told my father that my mother and I were a package deal, though I wasn’t sure it was true. Crying made food tasteless, mealy. Sobs overpowered food in my throat. I do remember sitting there at the table and hearing those words, when we asked my father to promise to stop seeing the woman and he said, “I can’t promise that.” I can’t remember if my mother asked him or if I did. I can’t remember whose mouth opened and spoke. But I wonder if my father ever thinks about that moment when he said he couldn’t promise he would stop, because not for a while now, but many days, in the years since that dinner, long after the alchemy of the human heart reconciled my parents, I did.
The day after the baptism, it’s cold again. Nothing of yesterday’s spring has lasted. Paul and I have brunch at our secret spot, and then he convinces me to get back into bed with him. I imagine we will have sex, but instead I truly do sleep. I wake up several hours later, with all his warmth around me. I’m in a large sweater that used to be my mother’s and, for the first time in several weeks, my belly does not feel uncomfortable. Paul is awake.
“Did you sleep?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “But you did.”
He kisses my ear and begins to fuck me gently, but I say, “not so soft. I can take it. It’s okay.”
Afterwards, Paul says “Bug? I need you to tell me that you want this. The circumcision. I need to hear that this is coming from you. Not from your parents. Or because you think your grandparents would have wanted it. You, Bug.” He speaks quietly, as though our neighbors can hear us, might be listening in after the loud sex.
I slip my mother’s sweater back on, hoping that an answer will come to me in the seconds it takes to get the wool over my breasts. Paul says nothing, and I stare at the ceiling. Suddenly my pussy feels sore, a little raw.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t give you what you want. Believe me, I wish I could.”
Then I make my way to the bathroom to pee and wipe myself, but when I return, I’m angry, and clearly, Paul is, too.
“Do you know what your problem is, Giulia?” he says, as I slide next to him. “Do you? It’s that you’ve never stopped wanting to please your parents. Most of all. That’s what you want. Most of all.”
“Oh, fuck you. You know what my problem is, Paul?” I resist the urge to mimic him. “It’s a lot of people telling me what my fucking problem is.”
“So, it’s me.”
“Yes, right now it’s you.”
“No, Jules, your problem is you.”
“It can be both, asshole,” I say, which is a little funny, and somehow turns the fight, makes us laugh, then kiss.
“You know,” I say, pushing Paul away, “for a little while, when I was in college, I was sleeping with a guy who was a Holocaust denier.”
“What?”
“Yeah, well, not a denier exactly, he just thought six million was an exaggeration. Like it was one mil max.”
“Okay.”
“And I got so angry when he told me, I remember leaving his room really early one morning, and calling my parents’ house, and I got my dad, whom I had just recently started speaking to again, and I couldn’t tell him precisely what was wrong, so I just talked about how weird it feels sometimes, takes you by surprise, to be Jewish, and I said, ‘Sometimes, I wonder, if on god’s green earth there is a place for me.’ And you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘There is. It’s called the library.’”
“Ha. Did you sleep with that guy again?”
“Come on,” I say. “Don’t ask me that.”
II.
Gabriel is born on an unusually cool day in August. The nurse hands him to me, still covered in the gunk of pre-life, and I hold him and Paul looks down at me, all of us crying a little and laughing more. Our parents split a bottle of champagne at a diner on First Avenue, and now, each slightly tipsy, they enter the room and admire Paul, and Gabriel, and me, all of us exhausted, except, actually, Gabriel, who is so awake with the world that he does not seem to want to shut his eyes even for a second and while all I want to do is sleep. I wonder if I ever will again, knowing that Gabriel is here and might be needing me.
When we return home, the three of us, I try to rest for a few hours, while Gabriel naps, while Paul naps, but instead I sit in our small living room, the hardly necessary baby monitor on my lap, as my husband and my baby, my baby, are both in our bedroom, seconds away. In the bright light of the afternoon, I realize that Paul and I forgot our first wedding anniversary, just days ago. We were married on August 12, 2017. Freddie officiated, but Paul agreed to break a glass, and he even grinned when my father and uncles carried him in a chair during the hora. My mother and I spent months making a google doc that contained phrases like “The Jordan Almonds Question” and “IMPORTANT: back up pasties,” but what I remember of the day is a woozy kind of feeling, my love on display. I was proud and grateful and also a little embarrassed. I had spent half a year planning, but actually it was simple: Paul and I loved each other, and we hoped to keep on loving each other, forever.
Directly after the Sunday brunch at Russ & Daughters, we took a plane to Venice and then a night train to Cortina, and we spent the next ten days hiking in the Dolomites. So, for several weeks we didn’t know much about the events in Charlottesville, other than that a young woman had died. It was only after we got back, that first morning when I was up at three am with jetlag, that I saw the video from Vice News Tonight. I knew that Sylvia didn’t like the journalist who was reporting live from the rally, “that bitch,” she sometimes called her, competition for the best stories. But after the episode ended, I pressed play and watched it again.
The next night, I saw my mother for dinner. We met at a mediocre Italian restaurant that had lovely outdoor seating. It was a rare late August New York night—seventy-five degrees and clear, hardly humid, heralding the beginning of a sweet fall. The twenty-eighth of the month, the city was practically ours.
“Bellissima,” my mother said, as she enveloped me. “My married daughter.”
Eventually, our conversation turned to Charlottesville.
“I keep thinking,” I said, “about the opening to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ‘The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ It was so strange, so bizarre, to watch these people who, I mean, they don’t know any Jews, do they? I mean, where they live, are there even Jews there? They’re so crazy racist, like crawl out of your skin racist, against Black people. They hate them so much, and, sure, Hitler was inspired by Jim Crow, but they say, ‘blood and soil’ and they use swastikas and they say the word ‘Jew’, but they don’t mean us. It’s the symbols they love, that they’re repurposing, that they’re using again, just like Marx said about Louis Bonaparte.”
“Oh, baby,” Mama replied. “That’s a very silly thing to say. They don’t know anyone but themselves. It doesn’t matter who lives near them. They know a thousand different ways to hate all kinds of people who aren’t like them. You’re just, so American, or something, you don’t know anything about this.”
Later, as we split a slightly soggy panna cotta, the conversation had moved on, but out of nowhere, Mama said, “you know, my father wanted to have us baptized. My brothers and me. Even though he was the one who cared about Judaism. I mean, Nonna was practically a crypto-Catholic. But, and listen she was the one who told me this story, and it was after he was dead, but apparently he said, ‘We could just spare them from all of this,’ and she said ‘no,’ she said ‘you can’t just do that. It doesn’t work that way.’”
We finished our dessert in silence.
Afterwards, I met Sylvia at our favorite cocktail bar in Prospect Heights. A white tile exterior framing a frosted glass window, an unmarked door, strong whisky drinks. It was gentrified Brooklyn’s excuse for a speakeasy.
It only took a sip to get her talking.
“I mean, I was at your wedding,” she said. “And trust me there’s nowhere in the world I would have rather been. It was gorgeous. It was perfect. Just like you. But like, now that bitch just saunters all over the office, even more than before, with her big, stupid glasses and her blond hair, just because she sat in a room with a Neo-Nazi as he showed her all his guns, just because she got into a car with a correspondent from The Daily Stormer, like she’s fucking Christiane Amanpour. I mean, have you seen it?”
“Yeah, I saw it, Syl. I saw it a few times.”
“Oh, and did it reveal more to you with each viewing? Did you finally understand the United States of America?”
“No,” I said. “I wish it made me angry, but it just makes me sad. I mean, at first, I had this stupid reaction that was like, why would I fucking replace you? I get to drink whisky cocktails at bars with the best possible lighting. You have to live a shit life in your shit town wherever the fuck you’re from and, like, maybe if you weren’t so fucking stupid and hateful you’d have some joy in your life, but, like, what am I supposed to do about it?”
The moment I finished, I knew I had said something ugly. My cheeks were burning, and I wondered if, for the first time ever, I was embarrassed in front of Sylvia, whose light grey eyes I felt on my face, even in the darkness.
“The point is we have already replaced them,” she said, as she gestured to the bartender for a refill, pointing to both our glasses with one finger, as if by magic.
“I know,” I said. For a minute, we didn’t speak, and it felt like the whole bar was silent, even though it was crowded, even though the glasses were almost alive, clinking with gigantic ice cubes that would take hours to dissolve within them, even though there was the faint hum of AC and ever-present indie rock. “They’re waiting outside this bar,” I said, weakly.
“They can’t get in,” she replied, smiling, maybe also crying a little, like me.
“It’s restricted,” I said.
“Damn straight it is,” she said. And then: “Thank you,” to the bartender. Sylvia fixed her eyes on me, unblinking, an old look, from another, more intimate era, from the time of drunken one a.m. mozzarella sticks. “They never would have sent me to Charlottesville,” she said. “It would have been too dangerous. It wasn’t because of your wedding, I mean. It’s because of my stupid curly hair and my dumb name.”
“I know,” I said.
“AMA,” she said, to turn our tears to laughter.
And even though Sylvia and I both know now that this is wrong, that Jews will not replace us references an even crazier conspiracy theory than we could have imagined, I still prefer this explanation, because I don’t want to feel superior, not really. What I want is the same blanket of ignorance that covers them to warm me, too. Move over, I say, when I’m my worst self, make a little room for me.
Gabriel is eight days old, and it is time. Paul has heard me on the phone, making the arrangements. We’re going to do it at the large synagogue in Park Slope. Afterwards, we’ll go to brunch at the trendy new fried chicken restaurant on Flatbush. As I attempt to pull on pantyhose, I feel my breasts leaking into an organic cotton feeding bra, and I am surprised to see Paul pull the knit tie my mother bought him for his birthday from the closet.
“I don’t know if I’ll have time to shower,” he says.
I am always on the verge of tears these days—exhausted, overwhelmed—but I have not yet openly wept, until now.
“Oh, Paul, really?” I say, embracing all of him, kissing his neck.
“Of course, Bug,” he says. “I couldn’t just let Gabriel go there, all alone, to his first traumatic experience. But I smell awful.”
And I know that this is not any less painful for Paul than it was five months ago, but, in this moment, he is infinite and mysterious and mine. He is going to let me have this because of the diapers that are stacked on our dresser and the breast pump that made me howl in pain at three in the morning and the formula that is lined up next to half eaten cartons of Chinese takeout, because we have done it, or are doing it. Building a life.
“Oh, we all do,” I say. “We stink to high heaven.”
And, in the synagogue, Paul doesn’t faint, when the mohel does it. He doesn’t look proud or happy, but he also does not seem afraid. My father looks strangely green, but I don’t have time to dwell on it because Gabriel screams and then I scream. I’ve made a mistake, I’ve hurt my son, on purpose. This is wrong, I think, and the certainty of that statement feels strange, it is so unusual for me, but Mama puts her hand on my shoulder.
“It’s ok,” she says. “He’s ok. He’s tougher than he looks.”
I don’t know if she means tiny Gabriel, or lanky Paul, but I think, probably both, because then she says: “You too, amore. Tough stuff in there.”
We swore we would never do it, but in the only tidy corner of our apartment, Paul and I take a picture of Gabriel with blocks that spell out ONE MONTH. Likes spill in. Per our agreement, Paul rents a desk at a coworking space a few blocks away. I still have two months of maternity leave, but we are counting on Paul’s delivery and acceptance payment to cover our maxed-out credit card bills. Usually, my mother visits at some point during the day, so that I can shower, and at lunchtime Paul comes by and we split whatever takeout he has chosen. I break up stretches of daylight by going for walks around the park with Gabriel and Arthur, and each time I pass the subway its heinous mouth tempts me. I have not left our neighborhood since returning from the hospital. Spit up is baked into my skin, no matter how much I wash myself, but mostly I just try not to always have my hand on Gabriel’s chest. It will fuck him up later, I’m sure, if from his earliest days he has a mother who is always checking that he is breathing. But in the deliriousness of early motherhood, in the anxiety that eats me whole, I find some hope. Because when I said that the alchemy of the human heart reconciled my parents, I was lying, or I was not telling the whole truth. They made a choice to keep loving one another; they worked hard at it. We were good at being a family, they decided. They could relearn how to be in love. And when I went off to college, my father wrote me an email every single day. I archived them without reading. But he did not stop writing. Only now, as I’m breastfeeding, do I open them, my phone balancing above Gabriel’s head. I find records of my father’s days, nothing missives: I miss you so so so so much…Tonight we had dinner with the Feldsteins…Mama has a cold and sore throat, she had to stay home from work and so we had to put off dinner with the Taylors…I hope you are eating breakfast (probably not). I want to write back to them now, almost ten years late, but all my imagined responses seem theatrical. Even if I mean what I want to say, it feels almost adolescent to break a silence that has gone on so long that it has silenced itself. Dear Dad, I type above my baby’s maybe-sleeping head, I was not eating breakfast then nor am I now, please forgive the tardiness of this response, I hope that sometime in the last decade you have seen the Taylors. But I am not as brave as my father, I can’t live with the possibility that what I feel might appear to be a performance, and so I don’t send this email, instead I hit delete and wrap Gabriel up, take him down into the F train, because I cannot stand the walking radius of our apartment any longer. We go to a café in Carroll Gardens, and I painstakingly drink an iced tea on top of his head, while he rests in his Baby Bjorn. I watch for any condensation that may fall on his fuzzy brow—steady one hand with the other.
This is how it begins, our subway rides, and one day I plan to get off at York Street to walk the promenade and all of the sudden Gabriel is crying so loudly and I try talking to him and telling him he’s a good baby and a sweet baby, even though he cannot yet track me with his eyes, and finally I just give him a pacifier and then we’ve missed our stop, we’re in Manhattan. I step into the dinginess of East Broadway and the display tells me that Gabriel and I must wait seven minutes for the train back into Brooklyn. He is calm, though, he doesn’t seem to mind—because he doesn’t know, I tell myself, he doesn’t know anything, nothing that you do matters as long as you keep him alive—and the station is almost empty, anyway, because who takes the F train from East Broadway at 11:15 a.m.? We arrive back at the apartment minutes before my mother, and I wonder if we were actually on the same train, in different cars. She does not seem suspicious.
And so, soon it becomes not just the subway, but Manhattan. Not every day, but some days. And this is how, on a Wednesday afternoon, we find ourselves, Gabriel and I, in front of Xavier. Weekday mass will not begin for half an hour, the board outside announces, but we are moving up the steps, the Baby Bjorn uniting us. We can just go in for a look, I think, like tourists, like we’re in France or Italy. Inside, my steps echo and I wonder if we are alone, just us and the overwhelming autumn light.
“Can I help you?” a voice asks behind us, as we approach the font.
I turn to see the elderly priest, the one who seemed either drunk or senile.
“Hello,” I say.
And I wonder if I can say it. I wonder if I can form the words. I imagine the lie that could transform into the truth. I could ask, “would you save my baby from eternal damnation?” and I would be saying, could you bless him and could you bless me and could you promise that all my sins against him will be knowable, that I will know them? And I might say, I want to save my son, but I want it to be a secret—and then I will know what I did to him, only me. Or it might be: take care of my baby and take care of me and give us shelter and hold us close and make us feel alive but not afraid.
But my mouth opens, and I say, “thanks so much. Just looking.”
And I do not meet the priest’s eyes, and I move, swiftly, down the steps, and it’s drizzling lightly, but I’m prepared with a pocket-sized umbrella, and I balance it in my left hand, just above Gabriel’s sleeping head. I am overwhelmed by the desire to call Sylvia, not to keep this secret to myself, though I know I will never tell a soul about this. I imagine calling her, or Freddie, or my mother, or Paul, our baby nestled below me. AMA, I could whisper into the receiver. AMA, AMA, AMA.