The DJ, a short middle-aged man wearing hamburger-size earphones, turns on a mike, pumps a fist in the air. “Who’s ready to get down?” The crowd lets out shrieks and a chorus of Yeahs. Then the lights flash, and a few strobes rotate wildly to the opening bars of “Eye of the Tiger.” “Folks, let’s put our hands together for the woman of the hour, she read from the Torah today, she’s officially taken on the commandments, she’s our very own bat mitzvah wo-man, she’s Dorrrr-Eeet!”
And out she comes, to a standing ovation, her face shellacked with foundation and blush, and, Erin could swear, shadowing down each side of her only-a-matter-of-time nose, grinning madly and waving like Miss America. “Eye of the Tiger” segues into a hora. Alex sprints out onto the now-crowded dance floor and joins three others, grabbing one leg of a chair to hoist Dorit up into the air, her head coming dangerously close to the R of the huge pink D-O-R-I-T suspended from the ceiling. Substantial diamond studs in her ears catch the light spastically with every upward thrust of the chair.
Erin heads directly to the bar and orders a Jack-and-Coke, a throwback, the first drink she’d ever had ordered for her, the first drink she’d ever tasted on its way back up.
“What up, Auntie Erin?” Zac, it occurs to her, despite the parallel colloquial, is too young even for Sarah.
“Hey! Here.” She hands him her Jack-and-Coke and signals to the bartender for another. Zac’s face lights up.
“Cool!”
“L’chaim!” she fairly shouts before taking a hearty swallow.
Zac looks left and right. “Cheers,” he says, leaning in. He knocks the whole thing back. “Thanks.”
“Go dance!” Erin tells him.
He curls a lip. “Riiiight. Why aren’t you dancing?”
She shrugs, smiles coyly, motions for him to finish what’s left of her drink and orders them two more.
In the sparkling handicapped bathroom off the other end of the lobby they’re joined by two girls just growing into their growth spurts. One is a Gertie-fetishizer from earlier. They’re impossibly lovely and improbably unthreatened by the presence of Erin, a bona fide adult, no getting around it. The girls plop down on the floor, not a thought for their dresses. Erin perches on the toilet, giggles nervously. On one level she’s thrilled to have been included in this gathering, that old feeling of having been tapped for the inner sanctum making her feel strong and superior. All the other people, the ones out there, are losers. And on another level, well, it’s hard to ignore the grownup issue.
Zac rolls a joint, licking the paper expertly.
“Nice,” Erin says like an idiot. He passes it to her. Age before beauty, she thinks, sucking on it as he holds up an orange lighter.
“Dorit’s a total dog,” one of the girls comments, holding in smoke.
“Nasty,” the other agrees.
The first exhales. “This party’s la-ame.”
“Totally,” Erin says. “Amen!” These are her people. She takes the joint from Zac again. These people get her.
“The theme is gay.”
“Emily Meltzner did the same thing.” The first girl squints as she blows out a long, graceful stream. They all watch it disappear.
“What was yours?” Erin asks her.
“Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice,” she says, folding her hands in her lap and batting her eyelashes prettily.
“Ha,” says Erin. “And yours?” she nods at the other girl.
“Gardening.” She fairly lights up, recalling it. “It was so cool. Each table was a different herb or something, and everyone at the table got some seeds to plant…. It was actually really cool.”
“It actually was,” Zac says, holding smoke. He coughs it out, and they laugh and laugh. Everything slows down, unravels: calm, linear, cloudless.
“What about you?” Erin sighs, flushed from all the laughing. She nudges Zac flirtatiously with her foot, which she’s slipped out of her terribly outmoded black mules. The girls both have on these adorable ballet flats; the first’s are covered with glitter and the second’s are metallic gold.
“Basketball.”
They all mull this for a moment. Into the empty space creeps Erin’s awareness that she’s in her late thirties with a crappy marriage and small child and dead mother and vanished central memory of having been these kids’ age, and she gives it the finger, closes her eyes, opens them again.
“I can remember everything about mine except my parsha,” Erin says softly. “I had a Soviet twin and everything.” When no one responds — did they hear her? — she wonders whether she spoke out loud. “Cute shoes!” she tells the girls. “Where’d you get them?”
“Oh,” girl one says, looking at her feet. “Thanks. Fred Segal.” Erin can’t afford Fred Segal, not by a long shot.
“I love Fred Segal. Maybe if my fucking husband opened his own practice, I’d be able to shop there.” She shakes her head, giggles, makes eye contact with girl two. “He’s a dumb-fuck.” Erin thinks about this, giggles some more. “Our marriage is totally, like, over.” No one says anything. “We haven’t had sex in like a year.” The girls look at the floor.
“That sucks,” someone says.
“Yeah,” Erin says. “Omigod, did you guys see Dana? Do you believe what a complete idiot that woman is?”
“Who’s Dana?” Zac relights the dwindling joint, sucks on it hard, flicks the lighter a few times.
“We should get back,” girl one says.
“No!” Erin pleads. “Let’s stay in here!” These are her friends. She likes it in here with them, the shiny surfaces and cool tile and expensive scented candle smell mixed with sweet weed, this inner, ageless sanctum. But they’re getting up, looking in the mirror. Girl two takes a lip gloss out of her bra and touches up.
“Nah, we should really go back,” Zac says.
“Pussies!” Erin blurts. They look at each other nervously.
When they open the door she can hear the beat of the Electric Slide. They’re leaving her, the assholes. She watches them helplessly from her perch on the toilet. She thought they were her pals. She has nobody.
“See you in there?” Cute Zac lingers briefly.
“Yeah.”
“’Kay. See ya!”
When the door slams shut behind them, she gets up and relocks herself in, locks the strains of the Electric Slide out. Then she sits down on the floor where girl one had been, hugs her knees into her chest, and then rolls onto her side and curls up fetal.
She tries not to go back to wanting to remember her Torah portion, but the wanting is just there, unbidden. What was it, goddammit? Which one? The harder she tries to remember the less she’ll be open to remembering, so she tries to avoid the wanting. The wanting is the problem, has always been the problem, will always be the problem. This, if she were sober, might inspire her to take a new tack with Alex. But she isn’t sober, so it doesn’t occur to her that way, and won’t: not ever. She stretches out on the floor, on her back now, legs splayed. She thinks about tearing Alex a new asshole re: Toldot. She thinks about telling him, on the way home, everything she learned on Chabad.org, about claiming it that way for herself, as her own. But even what she read today has slipped away: Jacob and Esau, a birthright, deception, fighting, whatever. She tries to ignore the music from the ballroom, tries to avoid imaginings of the DJ dancing lamely, the leis and Glow Sticks and confetti circus of it all, the girls with socks slipped on over their hosiery for dancing. Thriller, the YMCA, Dana protesting speciously as they lift her up overhead in a chair.