because it would drown out the torture in my head.
“You’ve got to. Because I personally cannot go on any more being, like, the surrogate boyfriend at weddings. I am too committed to Gary. You’ve got them all thinking that the worst-case scenario is you marrying me, old faithful, their favorite shiksa —”
“Shegetz,” I said, spitting blood.
“Whatever. I can see all the raised eyebrows now.” He sucked in his cheeks, rolled his eyes the way he always does when imitating his parents or mine. Usually it makes me laugh but that day it made me hate him, so much that I had to close my own eyes a minute in case he saw it—the hatred, I mean—jetting out of me like laser beams. He didn’t, though. “Nu, Zischa? What’s with the Alonzo boy? Any good news? So he’s a goy, so what? Like they say, if it works don’t fix it! Tell the two of them to maybe take a shit or get off the pot, if you know what I mean!”
I knew. But couldn’t help resenting him, even more than usual. If I hadn’t felt like chucking up my very guts I would have said something, too, when we turned onto 14th Street—told him he wasn’t funny any more, and to leave me alone about it. Told him that ever since he started seeing Gary—the Great Gary Hesse, grad student extraordinaire, in truth a straw-haired bespectacled nobody who I keep calling Rudolf or Hermann by mistake—he has been a real goading pain in the posterior about my lack of a love life. And I wanted to tell him, too, to keep his Wop-Spic hands off my people. Because I was in this very foul, very racist mood.
It occurred to me that Danny was always telling me what to do. How much weight to lift. What girls were my type, and who he thought I would look aesthetically pleasing alongside of. What clothes to wear. What classes to take.
Like this stupid lit course on Hawthorne and Melville you have to be a junior or senior to get into, he said that I had to take it, absolutely had to. So I waited for it until now, senior year, like I was waiting for the Messiah, and I dropped Journalism 458 because it meets at the same time, and all the while he was telling me how I wouldn’t regret it, how the professor, Kay Goldstein, was this fabulous woman who knew everything about everything and how he thought she was kind of riveting and sexy in a plump lipsticky sort of smart Jewish way, in addition to which he thought maybe she was gay—at least he had heard rumors to that effect—but it didn’t matter anyway because she was just the best teacher in the world, she had made him, on several occasions, want to put his head in his hands and get down on his knees and just weep with insight and compassion.
I listened to all this as if it was the word of God, not just of Danny Alonzo. I signed up for the course. And then it turns out that over the summer this once-in-a-lifetime Dr. Kay Goldstein has dropped dead, and some nobody is going to teach it instead.
*
We went past the Projects, sun glinting like a spider’s web of light through the cracked windshield. He reached over and brushed my forehead with his knuckles. For a moment, I wanted to cry.
“It’ll be all right, Ellie. You’ll see.”
I kept the sunglasses on but gave a squinty look.
“When you tell them, it’s like walking on the moon without a spacesuit. You sweat. Your heart goes crazy. You can’t breathe. But you do it, and so do they, and before you know it the moon walk is over and you’re coming back alive.”
Then what? I thought, hoping maybe he’d shut up for a change. He didn’t.
“Not that they jump for joy, or anything. I mean, who wants to hear that the seed of their loins has gone queer? But they get over it. They do. And you know what?”
What, jerk?
“You feel freer in a way. You feel, like: Okay, now I am liberated. I am free to finally love someone.”
I cried, keeping my mouth shut tight and the blood in it. Tears gathered under the bottom rim of my sunglasses, spilled down both cheeks. He
“You’ve got to. Because I personally cannot go on any more being, like, the surrogate boyfriend at weddings. I am too committed to Gary. You’ve got them all thinking that the worst-case scenario is you marrying me, old faithful, their favorite shiksa —”
“Shegetz,” I said, spitting blood.
“Whatever. I can see all the raised eyebrows now.” He sucked in his cheeks, rolled his eyes the way he always does when imitating his parents or mine. Usually it makes me laugh but that day it made me hate him, so much that I had to close my own eyes a minute in case he saw it—the hatred, I mean—jetting out of me like laser beams. He didn’t, though. “Nu, Zischa? What’s with the Alonzo boy? Any good news? So he’s a goy, so what? Like they say, if it works don’t fix it! Tell the two of them to maybe take a shit or get off the pot, if you know what I mean!”
I knew. But couldn’t help resenting him, even more than usual. If I hadn’t felt like chucking up my very guts I would have said something, too, when we turned onto 14th Street—told him he wasn’t funny any more, and to leave me alone about it. Told him that ever since he started seeing Gary—the Great Gary Hesse, grad student extraordinaire, in truth a straw-haired bespectacled nobody who I keep calling Rudolf or Hermann by mistake—he has been a real goading pain in the posterior about my lack of a love life. And I wanted to tell him, too, to keep his Wop-Spic hands off my people. Because I was in this very foul, very racist mood.
It occurred to me that Danny was always telling me what to do. How much weight to lift. What girls were my type, and who he thought I would look aesthetically pleasing alongside of. What clothes to wear. What classes to take.
Like this stupid lit course on Hawthorne and Melville you have to be a junior or senior to get into, he said that I had to take it, absolutely had to. So I waited for it until now, senior year, like I was waiting for the Messiah, and I dropped Journalism 458 because it meets at the same time, and all the while he was telling me how I wouldn’t regret it, how the professor, Kay Goldstein, was this fabulous woman who knew everything about everything and how he thought she was kind of riveting and sexy in a plump lipsticky sort of smart Jewish way, in addition to which he thought maybe she was gay—at least he had heard rumors to that effect—but it didn’t matter anyway because she was just the best teacher in the world, she had made him, on several occasions, want to put his head in his hands and get down on his knees and just weep with insight and compassion.
I listened to all this as if it was the word of God, not just of Danny Alonzo. I signed up for the course. And then it turns out that over the summer this once-in-a-lifetime Dr. Kay Goldstein has dropped dead, and some nobody is going to teach it instead.
*
We went past the Projects, sun glinting like a spider’s web of light through the cracked windshield. He reached over and brushed my forehead with his knuckles. For a moment, I wanted to cry.
“It’ll be all right, Ellie. You’ll see.”
I kept the sunglasses on but gave a squinty look.
“When you tell them, it’s like walking on the moon without a spacesuit. You sweat. Your heart goes crazy. You can’t breathe. But you do it, and so do they, and before you know it the moon walk is over and you’re coming back alive.”
Then what? I thought, hoping maybe he’d shut up for a change. He didn’t.
“Not that they jump for joy, or anything. I mean, who wants to hear that the seed of their loins has gone queer? But they get over it. They do. And you know what?”
What, jerk?
“You feel freer in a way. You feel, like: Okay, now I am liberated. I am free to finally love someone.”
I cried, keeping my mouth shut tight and the blood in it. Tears gathered under the bottom rim of my sunglasses, spilled down both cheeks. He
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