Every morning at Pop’s Deli is the same. That’s what I like about it.
The sky cracks gray and hazy no matter what kind of day comes after. The air is cold even in the dead of summer. It’s autumn now, but I don’t care. The leaves, brick red and brown and gold, all look like a dull cloud of sepia before the sun comes up. I throw on my jeans, a white T-shirt, my apron, and my shoes. I decide I’m not going to go to school today. Pop won’t care. When the office calls, he’ll tell them I’m sick, like he always does, and I won’t even have to ask.
When I go downstairs, Pop has just lifted the metal door that covers the storefront. It rattles on its way up and sends light all through everything, the deli case and the floor I mopped till it shone last night before closing. I go to get the chopped liver and the whitefish from the walk-in fridge, shielding my hands with a second skin of latex, then scoop them into the containers. I slice up onions and lettuce and tomatoes. I set out orange-pink lox on a platter and lay down a sheet of saran wrap over it. Pop and I work beside one another, not talking, not needing to. This work is all that’s necessary.
Eventually, our rhythm is broken by the jangling bell on the door. It’s Chava, the butcher’s girl. She gives a wink to me, greets me quickly—“Hey, sweetness”—like she always does, and I’m silent, like I always am. Then she sets about arguing with Pop about what he’s going to take for the day. Roast beef or turkey? Sweet white round slices of chicken breast? Soon they’re bickering about Chava’s tattoos again. It’s the usual topic of conversation.
I watch them, listening. I don’t talk to Chava, not yet. It’s not that I don’t want to, but I don’t really know how to draw myself out of myself, to pretend I’m an ordinary person. When you’ve lived through what I’ve lived through, it marks you just as permanently as any tattoo.
She’s interesting, though, with her pushed-up sleeves and crooked mouth. Like someone who has seen things, felt things, and tucked them inside her back pocket for safekeeping. There are tattoos you show, and ones you keep hidden. I think we both understand that.
“How could you do that to yourself?” Pop says, gesturing up and down at the whole package that is Chava. A dangling bullish nose ring and colorful sleeves that snake out beneath her work shirt. Letters in Hebrew and vivid splashes of color. Dragons. Fish. “A Jewish girl should not be tattooed.”
“A nice Jewish girl?” Chava teases. Pop waves his hand at her dismissively, but she presses on. “Whoever said I was nice?”
“When I was in the army, they wanted me to get tattoos. They said everyone in our division had to get tattoos.” Pop was in Vietnam. He hardly ever talks about it, I’ve learned, except the same handful of stories, over and over again. Like this one. I don’t look up from my work. “Fighting bees. You think I did it?”
“I don’t know,” Chava answers. “You tell me.”
“No. I told them, get out of here! They tattooed my family in the camps. My father would roll in his grave. Besides, what would the rabbi say?”
“He’d say, ‘Haven’t seen you in years, Arthur,’ ” I pipe up, hardly raising my eyes from the bagels I’m setting out in their basket.
My grandfather grumbles. I guess you could call him a Passover Jew, but not even that. He hasn’t set foot in the synagogue since my parents’ funeral, five years ago.
“Enough,” Pop says sternly. “Chava, you’re a beautiful girl. I just don’t know why you’d do that to yourself.”
“Why don’t you ask me?” she asks him, with challenging eyes. My grandfather doesn’t say anything. Chava’s smile is wily. “Thought so. Do you want the roast beef, or not?”
Pop looks at me. I shrug.
“Sure,” I say, speaking to Pop and not Chava. “Sold well last week.”
He asks me, because he knows I understand. I understand, because I work. It’s what we do in my family. It’s how life moves forward. Soon the sun will come up in earnest, and Pop’s Deli will be busy, and the rhythm will wash the world away.
It’s days like these I never want to give up.
* * *
It’s lunch hour, and time passes in a flash if you let it. I’m busy slicing sandwiches and toasting bagels and pouring customers steaming paper cups of coffee, asking them if they need room for milk. At first, I don’t see the boy who shrugs under a trench coat, his dark hair tousled into his eyes. And then I do see him, but it doesn’t matter. I’m too busy to pay him any attention. Until he makes me.
“ ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,’ ” he’s saying, bending over to gaze down into the deli case. His breath is fogging the glass. I’m watching it suddenly. Watching him. “ ‘He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart—’ ”
“ ‘Liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes,’ ” I say, and I’m sure I sound a little stunned. I’m not used to boys coming into the deli to quote some of my favorite modernist literature. Even I can’t resist that. A boy like him, who, from the first moment, seems to love the things that I love. With his hands in his pockets, he stands up, grinning at me. His teeth are kind of crooked, like his parents could never afford braces.
Or at least that’s what I’m imagining. My family could never afford braces either.
“You know Ulysses,” he says.
“Yeah, of course,” I tell him, my head still spinning. Reading is the only thing I care about besides the deli. “I love James Joyce.”
“That’s rare,” he tells me. “You must still be in high school.”
When people look at me, I blush. I hate it, hate how it makes me look like my feelings are open to everyone else. I’d rather be a cipher, tough, hard, unreadable, just like Pop. But I’m blushing furiously right now, right into the white collar of my T-shirt.
“I’m a senior,” I say to him. I glance over to where Pop is busy with Mrs. Feldman, arguing over the cost of lox. “Hey, are you going to buy something?”
“I thought I might try the liver,” he says, tapping the glass. Smudging it. I’ll have to clean it later, but suddenly I don’t mind. I’m grinning instead. Grinning and blushing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy under fifty order the liver before.
“We don’t make it fried with crustcrumbs.”
He’s looking at me, a smile in the corners of his mouth.
“How would you recommend it?”
“Oh, I hate liver,” I say, and then laugh. He’s laughing too. It’s remarkable, how we’re laughing together. I’m not much of a laugher. “But if you have to do it, I’d go classic. You can never go wrong with a bagel.”
“Sure,” he’s saying, watching me. Watching me blush. “Sesame. Toasted. Black coffee, too.”
“Sure thing,” I say.
* * *
I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t think about the boy after that. The one who quoted Ulysses. The one who ate chopped liver and wore a wrinkled trench coat like it was some kind of statement. Or maybe he isn’t a boy; maybe he’s a man, but a youngish one. College, I think, thinking about it too much, a freshman, no more than a sophomore. Something about his hands. I think about it at school the next day, when I decide to go in for no particular reason, and I think about it over dinner while me and Pop eat and watch the news. I think about it when my brother calls and nags me about college. I think college for the first time. And for the first time it sounds vaguely palatable. Do boys read James Joyce in college, or do they read him all on their own, like I did?
“You need to get your applications together,” my brother tells me. “High school doesn’t last forever.”
“I’m working on it,” I say, and for the first time in my life, Ethan goes quiet. He always thinks he knows what’s best for me—doesn’t understand that I’ve always known how to take care of myself. I follow signs when I see them, tea leaves in a particular pattern, birds crossing my path on a certain day. It’s not religion, not exactly, but my own strange sort of faith.
I know already that that morning, that conversation, that boy—it means something. It’s a disruption from my usual life, which usually I would hate. But I don’t mind it. Don’t mind him. I’m dreaming, which feels big and dangerous. At the same time, I don’t expect to ever see him again. He may have gotten me to pick up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for the four-thousandth time, but he’s a symbol. I think that’s all he’ll ever be.
Until he appears two weeks later, just before we close for the day—when the only people who are there are me and Pop and the old men who always linger over their newspapers until nearly three thirty, closing time. I’m mopping when the door jingles open and in walks the boy, the smell of autumn all around him.
“ ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,’ ” he says, grinning at me. It’s a nervous grin.
“You’re back!” I say, wondering if I can ignore the way my face heats so that we can both pretend it isn’t happening.
“I came back a few times,” he says. “But you were never here.”
“You must have quite the taste for liver.” I look down at the floor, mopping furiously.
“Where were you?” he presses.
I shrug, still not looking. “You know. School.”
“But not today?”
I shrug again. No, not today. Today, I needed the deli. The humming lights. The customers. The whitefish.
“Listen,” the boy says, like school or not, it doesn’t matter, “I want to take you out.”
Me. Out. I eye him. I am not the girl boys “take out.” I am not a creature with a body, with feelings. And those are things boys like, right? Except this boy. This boy likes James Joyce.
“Don’t look so offended,” he says, letting out a small, nervous laugh. I like that laugh. It’s like his rib cage is opening up right in front of me, his beautiful pink guts spilling out.
“I’m not offended!” I say, too loud. “I’m just surprised.”
“You shouldn’t be. I know this place that makes great Persian food. It’s called Manijeh’s. C’mon. Please?” There’s a longing in his face, sad and a little intense, and normally—like if I were at school and saw a boy looking at a girl like that—I’d roll my eyes. But I’m just blushing, wondering, Has he been thinking about me like I’ve been thinking about him?
“Um,” I say, “I have to ask Pop.”
That’s a lie. I don’t have to ask Pop anything. We don’t really have rules in my house. My older brother Ethan was nearly eighteen when we moved in and only stayed that one summer. And I’m a pretty boring human being. I don’t drink and I don’t smoke and I’ve never dated before. But it feels right to check in with him, to ask him, in a way, Do you see what’s happening here too?
I glance over my shoulder to find that Pop’s been watching us, paused in cleaning the counter. Both of his bushy white eyebrows are raised, and he glances at Mr. Schneider and Mr. Walton at their table, and both seem to let out silent chuckles before going back to their newspapers.
“Go,” Pop says. “Be young. Have fun for once.”
If I were a different girl, I’d go and kiss my grandfather on the cheek. But that’s not who I am, who he is. So I turn back to the boy.
“Okay. Okay, then. I’m Naomi, by the way. But I guess you know that.” I take off my name tag, my apron, leave them both at the counter. The boy is watching me, looking amused.
“Simon,” he says, finally breaking out into a grin.
* * *
We walk to the restaurant, our knuckles brushing, but not exactly touching. There’s a little buzz in the back of my head: I’m on a date I’m on a date I’m on a date. I’m not sure if I’m thrilled or terrified, but either way, it makes it hard to keep up with the conversation.
“So Pop is, like, literally your pop?” Simon asks.
On a date I’m on a date . . . It takes me a little too long to answer. “Yeah, my grandfather. Everyone calls him Pop, though. Forever. He was raised by his aunt and uncle, and they said that he was a little old man even at like nine years old.”
“I can get behind that,” Simon tells me, pausing to straighten the lapels of his trench coat as if for effect. I laugh.
“What’s with the old-man getup, anyway?” Maybe I asked a little too boldly. He frowns, but doesn’t look all that upset.
“I often feel like I was born in another era. Back in the time of your pop, maybe.”
I stuff my hands down in my pockets.
“I’m glad I wasn’t.”
“Oh?”
“Well, you know. There’s the fucking Holocaust. And ’Nam. Separate water fountains. Rampant sexism. No birth control.”
I don’t realize that I’ve said it until I do, and I blush worse than ever, bright, bright red, like a rash all over my neck and ears and face. Simon’s looking at me. But he only nods.
“I guess you’re right. I’ve never thought of it that way before.” It’s as if for Simon, life has always been the same privileged pleasure for everyone. He holds the door open for me. I feel myself blush even worse than before.
“Ah, sorry,” I say. But I’m not sure why I’m apologizing.
* * *
I’m so nervous that I hardly eat and speak even less. Simon seems comfortable enough talking for both of us, though he’s nervous too. He never even bothers to take off his coat, and he keeps talking with his mouth full and then apologizing.
“. . . so my mom and dad wanted me to major in something useful, like accounting. Sorry. But I said that there’s nothing more useful than literature and—excuse me—philosophy. My mom got my dad on board.”
“That’s good,” I say as I swirl my food around my plate. I try to imagine what it’s like to be Simon, majoring in philosophy and literature, taking night classes, drinking black coffee, and scrawling notes longhand in his Moleskine. It feels like a world away.
“Sorry. I’m talking too much.” I smile a little bit more to hear him admit it. He smiles back. “How about you, Naomi? What are your thoughts on college?”
I shrug, pushing my collards back and forth on my plate. I remember my fantasies, what I told Ethan. I’m working on it. But I haven’t really done anything. Just fantasized. Even those fantasies feel far away—almost impossible. “I like to read. Not just James Joyce. Everything, I guess.”
“Do you think you’ll join me in the army of unhirable English majors?”
I grin. But then the corners of my mouth twitch a little. The other night I stayed up late, googling colleges like other kids might google porn. Nothing fancy. State, or the reach schools I’ve heard the other students talking about in the cafeteria. The entrance requirements made my lungs feel like they were collapsing. “I don’t know. My grades are pretty bad right now. They’ve been for . . . a long time, really.”
“High school sucks,” Simon says with all the wisdom of a college freshman. “It’s not just you. It sucks for everybody.”
I look at him, and for a second, I swear I see a flash. Simon, getting his head slammed into a locker in the hallway. Simon, reading all the wrong books under his desk in tenth-grade English class. Simon, in a wrinkled suit and suspenders that are stylish but stylish in the wrong way, getting called into the principal’s office over a letter he wrote to the high school paper.
“No,” I say. “It’s not like that for me.” Actually, sometimes it is like that. But quieter, and with more internal screaming.
“What then?” he asks, and for the first time in a long time I have the sense that someone is really listening to me.
“School used to be really easy,” I say, tearing my eyes away from him, because it hurts to talk about it, which is why I never talk about it. “I was in TAG—talented and gifted, you know? All through elementary school. And then my parents . . . well, they croaked. When I was in middle school. A car accident. I sort of started to wonder what the point was.”
“I’m sorry,” Simon says. “I can’t imagine.”
I don’t say anything. I guess I’m supposed to say thanks or it’s okay, but I can’t. Because he can’t imagine. And I don’t have to. I lived it—the long, crushing days before and after.
“My parents are pretty great,” he admits, almost like it’s another apology. “I’m . . . really, really lucky.”
“You are,” I agree. I look at him and can feel the tears in my eyes, even though I don’t want them. Fuck. Crying is worse than blushing, isn’t it? I’m not supposed to be like this, but something about Simon has everything on the surface, breaking through.
“Let’s talk about happier things,” he says gently. I feel myself exhale. I am distilled relief. “Tell me. What was the last book you read and hated?”
This is easy. This I can talk about. I tell him about Nine Stories, and he looks like I’ve just committed sacrilege, but it’s okay—I can tell.
And that’s when I decide Simon is okay too.
* * *
We’re together after that. We don’t discuss it, but we just are. My days are more or less the same as they always were, school, or not school. The deli, or not. But my nights—my nights are full of Simon.
His hands, broad and cool, and his body, which is nearly hairless, and his hair, which is straight and dark and he is always pushing out of his eyes, until I learn to push it out of the way for him. Until I learn he doesn’t mind. He leans his cheek into my hand, his lips on my palm. We kiss and I’m rattled and I feel something. I feel a lot.
We move fast, and maybe it’s scary, but maybe it’s the only way it can go for me. I was never going to slowly open like a flower. All or nothing, that’s how it has to be. I needed someone to pull me into the light.
When I come home late, Pop smiles at me over his newspaper and television but doesn’t ask where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to. He doesn’t pry. Pop’s that kind of guy.
But my brother Ethan gives me a hard time on the phone. “Pop says you’re hooking up with some boy.”
“He’s not just some boy,” I tell him. “His name is Simon.”
“Pop says he’s in college? Is he some kind of perv?”
“He’s only a year older than me, Ethan. How old was Cadence when you started dating?”
My brother doesn’t answer. We all know he dated a fourteen-year-old for a while right after Mom and Dad died. It was probably just a grief thing, but it freaked everybody out. Even though Pop gives me a wide berth, you can bet he had something to say about that.
“Anyway,” Ethan says. “You need to be working on your college applications.”
Back to business. That’s how Ethan’s always gotten through it. He’s an accountant now, and I think he’d love me to have a future that looks like his: eight thirty to six, suit and tie, changing his network password every four months, respectable.
“I’m thinking about college!” I protest. Which is absolutely true. When I spend the night at Simon’s, it’s in his dorm bed. The two of us are pressed together, his roommate snoring only a few feet away. I go with him to his philosophy class one night and sit next to him as he argues about dualism versus materialism, and the professor looks proud when Simon steamrolls some other freshman with his argument.
“If you could objectively prove that we’re more than just meat machines, then sure. I guess that argument would make sense. But realistically we’re nothing more than a series of impulses—”
“But there have been studies,” the other student objects meekly. Simon rolls his eyes.
“Where they weighed the soul after death? Yeah. Total bunk.”
Simon is so sure of himself, in a way I never could be. Even though I don’t agree with him, there’s something so forceful about the way that he speaks that I feel myself wavering. I imagine what it’s like to live with that much assurance, that much moxie. But I know I never will. If Simon’s fire, then I’m a stone. I’ve had to be to survive.
I’ve enjoyed imagining myself in Simon’s shoes, in Simon’s life. Even though it feels like a fever dream, distant and impossible.
“Okay, where are you applying?” my brother snaps after a long silence. He really doesn’t believe that I know how to take care of myself. Maybe he’s right that I don’t. I chew my lip.
“Um. State.” I know that State will be a reach, but it’s where Simon goes. It feels like a possibility, at least.
“You need to apply to a minimum of six schools. Eight to ten would be ideal. What are your safeties?”
“I don’t have any,” I tell him. I’m losing interest in this conversation. I know I’m saying the wrong things. I don’t want Ethan’s advice, anyway. He’s not my dad, not my mom. I had parents once. I don’t now. He might be my brother, and he might be older than me. But he hardly knows me, not really. Pop is watching Wheel of Fortune in the next room, and I can hear Vanna’s polite smattering of applause. I listen to that instead of listening to Ethan.
“Naomi—” my brother begins, but I don’t let him finish.
“Ethan, I’m fine. I’ll talk to you next week.”
And I hang up before he can protest further.
* * *
Simon’s parents love him. Simon’s parents send him money. He says he’s eligible for work-study, but his parents don’t want him to be distracted. That’s how we can afford to go out to eat as much as we do. Simon tries everything. Soul food and fusion food and little Mexican pastries that taste like magic and lard. He tells me about music while we eat at all the best restaurants on Hungry Heart Row. He tells me about books. He tells me about Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who I don’t understand, and don’t really care to. Sometimes I look at Simon and think, I’m objectifying you. Because I’m not really listening to him. I’m watching his eyes flutter under his thick, girlish lashes, watching his sweet mouth move, thinking of kissing him, not really thinking about the words coming out.
He wants me to talk more. In his dorm, when the sky is red as minestrone overhead, he wakes me up with the pressure of his mouth on my freckled shoulders.
“I know you think about things, Naomi. Brilliant things. Amazing things. I know your feelings are deeper than mine. Why can’t you share with me? You’re safe with me.”
I kiss him back and say nothing. My body is vibrating. I think, My body can speak for me. I don’t feel safe with him, but that’s not unique to Simon. I never really feel safe with anyone except Pop. Other people might leave at any moment like my parents did. Except for him.
Maybe one day I’ll feel safe with Simon, though. Maybe one day our lives will fit together in a way that makes sense. I imagine myself in my own dorm room, posters taped to the walls, eating takeout with him. I imagine highlighting my own textbooks and reading the best quotes to him. In my imagination, I laugh easily. Like I never do in real life.
It hasn’t happened yet, though. In the morning, I set up the deli case with my grandfather. Working in silence, our hands shrouded in an onion skin of latex. The sound of the slicer moving up and down the saran wrap. Pop hums faintly. In the deli, almost alone except for Pop, nothing hurts.
* * *
One night Simon comes over for dinner. I don’t know what he’s expecting—bagels and liver? Pop hasn’t had a real home-cooked dinner since my bubbe died, a year before my parents. And even that wasn’t exactly haute cuisine. Her meals were delicious, but strange. Spaghetti with canned tomatoes and cottage cheese on top, that kind of thing. Anyway, when the oven timer goes off, Pop pulls out three foil-wrapped TV dinners with a dish towel and sets them on our kitchen table.
“I’ll let you have the chicken,” he says to Simon, thumping him gently on the shoulder. This is unusual generosity from Pop. I’m not sure Simon understands that. I wonder if he’s second-guessing his dinner choices, wishing he’d just eaten in the cafeteria tonight.
But Simon’s a polite boy, so he says, “Thank you, sir,” and digs in. Pop looks pleased as he sits down over his Hungry-Man.
“Call me Pop,” my grandfather says.
“So, Pop,” Simon begins, eyeing my grandfather. “How did you come to own a deli?”
My grandfather shrugs. He’s not much for stories. “My uncle owned a deli, and I grew up behind the counter.”
“Like Naomi?”
Pop looks at me. Shrugs again. “So when my uncle retired, he said, ‘Arthur, do you want to own a deli?’ Different now, though. With the Served and the blobbing—”
“Blogging, Pop,” I say, and even though he’s probably just teasing us, I feel myself blush. Which is funny, because Pop doesn’t usually embarrass me much at all. But having Simon talk to him this way is almost as bad as being looked at. All of my family’s strangeness, laid out to see.
“You must have had other dreams,” Simon says suddenly, like he’s been mulling over this question. He might consider himself a gourmand, might love to consume the fruits of our bagels, but I don’t think it really makes any sense to him, why anyone would want to actually live a life so small.
“Dreams?” Pop says, slathering mustard on his gray slab of steak. “Eh. As a boy, I thought maybe I’d be a pharmacist. I thought a pharmacist was really someone.”
Simon is frowning. I chew silently, waiting for Pop to go on, dreading what he might say. I’m not ashamed of Pop, but I know that he’s not exactly what Simon expected.
“But deli, pharmacy. It’s all the same.”
“Is it?” Simon asks. Pop doesn’t answer. He points his fork at Simon.
“And what do you dream about being, my boy?” Simon smiles faintly. This, he can handle talking about. His answer makes me feel warm and happy to hear it. He’s ambitious. Sometimes I wonder if his ambition will rub off on me. Sometimes I hope it will.
“I’d like to be a professor,” he says. “And a writer. Both, I guess.”
“What do you write?” Pop asks. Simon’s eyelashes flutter.
“I’ve started a few short stories.” The implication thuds between our plastic dinner trays in the middle of the table. He’s started a few. He hasn’t finished any.
“I figure when I’m older I’ll finish them,” he says. “I don’t have a lot of life experience.”
Pop looks at him, his jaw tight. Then he nods.
“Hmm” is all he says.
* * *
After Simon leaves, Pop and I sit in front of the television. Usually, this time of night is a relief. Long boring quiet and the evening news. Pop shouting the wrong answers at Alex Trebek while I dog-ear pages in my latest book. But tonight I’m looking at Pop, my stomach all knotted.
“Go ahead, Naomi,” my grandfather says, not looking up from the television. “Ask.”
I smile grimly. “You hated him, didn’t you?”
Pop laughs. A dry laugh. “No, I don’t hate anyone.”
“But you don’t like him?”
“He’s fine,” Pop says. Like that’s the end of it. He’s not going to say anything else, because Pop never really talks about how he’s feeling. Everything meaningful goes into the gaps, the silences. And there’s a lot of silence here.
Fine. Fine, I think, all that night and through the next work day. Funny how being fine feels suddenly all wrong.
* * *
“Your test scores are excellent,” Mrs. O’Keefe, the guidance counselor, says. She’s sitting on one side of her desk. I’m sitting on the other. I’m trying to look like the weight of her gaze doesn’t make me wither inside.
I know my test scores are good. She doesn’t have to tell me that.
“But your grades . . . ,” she begins.
I know my grades suck. She doesn’t have to tell me that, either.
“State might be a stretch,” she says. “Though with the right essay it might be possible. Have you thought about what you want to write about?”
I shrug. “Working in Pop’s Deli, I thought,” I tell her. I could describe the ladies who come in on their lunch break. The old men with their oniony smells. I can talk about how I make their lives better with smoked salmon and capers, and how, even though there are fewer customers than there used to be, we’ve formed a community there. I can use just enough detail that it might be clear how an everything bagel is a metaphor for the whole world.
Mrs. O’Keefe’s mouth looks stern. “That’s a beginning,” she says, “but you really need to touch on the reasons behind your low grades.” There’s a long pause. I don’t like it. “Have you thought about writing about your parents?”
Now it’s my turn to pause.
“No, I haven’t thought about that.”
When I leave her office, my eyes are stinging. I don’t go back to school for two days after that. Halfway through the school year and already I’ve almost burned through my absences. It’s beginning to be a problem. On my date with Simon, I’m feeling raw and unsettled. All my feelings are close to the surface.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he says. He holds my hands, tenderly rubbing my wrists with his thumbs. I want to be normal. I want to trust my boyfriend. So, for once, I talk to Simon, hoping he can help, and even though he’s listening, nodding, the moment he opens his mouth, I know it’s all wrong.
“Well, why not write about your parents?”
If I wrote about my parents, I’d have to tell the truth. They were drunk the night that they died, and most nights before that. That my mom used to drink too much wine and talk about Pop hitting her when she was young, even though he’s never hit me. That he was hurt in the war, and before that, in the camps when he was a toddler, before he could even remember his name. He doesn’t talk about it, but it’s all there, written in my blood. There isn’t one reason that I’m a failure. There are a million reasons, stretching back forever.
The pogroms. The Inquisition.
If I wrote about my parents, I’d have to talk about how it hurts, still. And we don’t talk about feelings in my family. We pull ourselves together. We keep going. Steady, steady. People like Simon can afford to have feelings. People like me and Pop, survivors? We work, and don’t feel anything at all. We can’t escape who we are, but maybe we don’t need to. Maybe our future is predicated on what came before.
That’s why I want to write about the deli. Work is survival. Food is survival. Anything else, though? Vulnerability. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to Simon, with his loving parents and good grades and artfully thrifted clothes. But I can’t afford to be vulnerable, no matter how badly I wish I could be.
“ ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,’ ” I say suddenly. Simon is frowning at me.
“What?”
“Did you ever think about why he ate that stuff?” I ask. Simon’s expression hasn’t changed. When he doesn’t answer, I just go on. “He was Jewish, you know. Mr. Leopold Bloom.”
“No he wasn’t,” Simon says.
I shake my head. I laugh a little, even though it isn’t funny. “Yes he was. Organ meats. Who eats organ meats?”
“Lots of cultures . . . ,” Simon begins uncertainly. “Anyway, he wasn’t Jewish in any way that matters. He was Irish Catholic, wasn’t he? He wasn’t, like, a practicing Jew.”
“I just think it’s interesting,” I say. “He carries around all this pain from losing his son. And his father. Sometimes I think it’s part of being Jewish. We’ve got this legacy of loss. And the way he eats, like he’s been starving. He’s got this hole that can’t be filled. At least Stephen ends up being his son in the end, kind of. Bloom teaches him how to read Hebrew. He can’t get his son back, but he figures out a way to live on. Like, a new legacy.”
Simon is staring at me. There’s something I don’t like about his gaze, proud and a little defensive. Like he’s hiding something. Like he doesn’t want to be found out.
“You haven’t finished the book,” I say. I never considered it, that Simon would lie about that. That anybody would lie about such a thing, especially a pretty boy with broad, soft hands whose parents love him.
“Of course I have,” he tells me. But I know for certain in that minute he’s lying. “Anyway, what’s that have to do with your parents?”
Somehow it has everything to do with my parents. My parents who suffered. My parents who died. Who lived imperfectly until they didn’t anymore. Who left me here to live imperfectly too.
I feel a flash of pity for him. Ordinary Simon, in his trench coat, stealing snippets of words from more extraordinary times. If I’m angry, I’m only angry at myself for not seeing it before. For not seeing him for who he truly was.
“Let’s go out to eat,” I say softly. I want to make up, to go back to how things used to be. “What do you feel like tonight?”
Simon’s sitting on the edge of his dorm bed in his boxers, shaking his head.
“I think I want to go to the cafeteria tonight,” he says. Only students are allowed in the cafeteria, and we both know it. I’m not a student. I don’t think I’ll ever be a student. “I think I need some time to myself.”
I’m not sure what to say, so I stand. Even just standing there, my shoulders a little slumped, I feel foolish and false.
“Okay,” I tell him. “I’ll see you soon.”
I kiss him on the cheek, because I’m supposed to. It’s an ordinary kiss. Steady and safe, I tell myself. Steady and safe.
But I know that I’m not. And I never was.
* * *
I walk through Hungry Heart Row, my stomach empty, my mind all ajumble. It’s a Friday, and it feels like everyone is out on a date. A couple breezes by me, a boy in a mismatched jean jacket and jeans, and a girl, flour in her hair, their fingers entangled. They smell like pastries. My stomach growls.
I can’t afford to eat out at an actual restaurant without Simon—it’s not like Pop pays me—but I’m not sure I want to, anyway. But going back home isn’t all that appealing either. I wander down Pepper Street and duck into the Chinese grocery for a snack. Wandering through the tidy aisles, I feel an odd pang of comfort at the sight of all those dried, fishy treats and red-bean baos. It’s not the kind of food you’ll find anywhere else, but it sustains you. Just like the food at the deli. I pick up a packet of something, squinting at the foreign letters. And then I laugh softly to myself. It’s not like I can read Hebrew, either.
“You, girl,” says a woman down the far end of the aisle. She’s well dressed, but under the makeup you can see that she’s practically Pop’s age. Ancient. “You need your fortune read tonight?”
It’s half a question and half a statement of fact. I put the snacks back on the shelf and look to my right and left.
“No one else here,” she says, and chuckles. I recognize her, of course. Ethan used to tell me that Grandma Ma, who told fortunes in the back of the Chinese grocery store, was a witch. But I don’t think witches dress like this, in pressed clothes and carefully applied drug-store lipstick. Do witches even wear lipstick? I decide they don’t, and that Ethan is full of it.
“Okay,” I find myself saying, really without thinking at all. Simon would probably laugh to see how I meander through the aisles and then push through the beaded curtain in back. He doesn’t believe in this stuff, doesn’t think we’re anything more than matter.
I think Simon is full of it too.
After all, I’ve been waiting for a sign. What better sign is there than this? There’s magic in the world, tonight and every night. If only he would open his eyes to see it.
There are boxes of stock lining the walls, a hand-painted calendar hanging in the buzzing fluorescent light. I sit on a stool across from Grandma Ma. She has me shake a canister of sticks.
“Make a wish,” she says, and winks in that weird old-person way that Pop sometimes does.
A normal person might wish for Simon to understand her better. Or for a brilliant college application essay about her dead parents to spring forth fully formed from her mind. My wish is as jumbled as the sticks, though. I’m not even sure what I’m wishing for.
No, that’s not true. I know what I should wish for. College, a guy like Simon. But it doesn’t feel like it’s what I need.
Maybe that’s okay, I say to myself for the first time, watching her shake the sticks. Maybe when the answer comes, I’ll know.
One stick jumps out, and Grandma Ma reads the characters for me. “Seventy-two,” she says. “That’s no good.”
She reads my fortune out of a book. Something about strife and sadness. It feels about right. I’m still starving, still thinking about how Simon lied. How he looked at me when I told him that I didn’t want to write about my parents. How Pop said Simon was just plain fine.
Grandma Ma is still reading from her book. “Here,” she says. “Important event. Your love affairs seem wrong, but will be righted soon through a generous friend.”
“Who?” I ask, the word spilling out, desperate sounding.
Grandma Ma shrugs. “The sticks don’t tell me that.”
* * *
I pay for my fortune and too many freeze-dried snacks. I go home. Eat alone in my room. I wait. When Simon calls the next day, I know what’s coming. And I’m not wrong.
“I just don’t really think we—”
“We’re not on the same page,” I finish for him. Simon is quiet on the other side.
“Are you sure?” he finally asks, as if he wasn’t planning on dumping me anyway. I tuck the phone in against my cheek, shrugging, even though he can’t see it.
“Can we still be friends?” he asks. “Talk about books?”
And what? Tell him how Ulysses ends? I could laugh, but it isn’t funny.
“Sure,” I say again. But somehow, deep down in my gut, I know I’m never going to see him again.
* * *
There’s a relief in endings. A door shuts, and you find yourself on the other side. For me, breaking up with Simon means I’m back to normality. Back to skipping school and pickled herring. Back to To the Lighthouse, which I always like better than Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, anyway. Back to Wheel of Fortune and Ethan nagging me about college. Back to avoiding the question. Pop and I didn’t talk about Simon’s arrival, and we don’t talk about his departure, either. He’s just gone, leaving a gaping hole in my life where there wasn’t one before. I tell myself it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t really all that interested in college, anyway.
Until one day Pop slides me a brochure from across the table, right beside my tray of Hungry-Man. It’s from the community college. There’s a stock photo of students, smiling too much, laughing too much. But the words above them. That’s what matters.
“Restaurant Management and Culinary Arts?” I ask, picking it up. Pop lifts one bushy eyebrow.
“The business isn’t like it used to be,” Pop says. “If you’re going to take over the store someday, I won’t have it fail.”
He pounds a fist on the table, rattling his glass. I jump. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him feel strongly about something in, well, ever. His eyes are crinkly, though, almost smiling. Almost joyful. My grandfather never went to college, never became a pharmacist. But, taking the life he’d been given, he found a way to move on anyway.
I’m staring at the brochure. I’m trying not to smile back. “Where’d you get this?” I ask, because I know this kind of scheme isn’t the sort of thing Pop would come up with on his own.
“From Chava, the butcher’s girl,” he says. “She takes classes in, I don’t know . . . slaughtering.” He waves his hand through the air. I laugh.
“Thanks, Pop,” I say softly, because it’s all I can say.
It’s not State, and it’s not Ethan’s plan for my future either. It’s something else. Not a new book, but a new chapter in the same book. Pop’s book. Mine.
My grandfather’s mouth is smiling, but he says nothing.
* * *
The gray cracks early. I put on my white T-shirt, my jeans, my shoes. It will be winter soon, grim and true, and then spring and then summer. As I shuffle down the stairs to the deli, I see the whole year rolling out ahead of me. Steady and safe, but new and different, too. A future, but my future. One that belongs to nobody else.
Pop and I fill the baskets with bagels. We slice the thick loaves of rye. I get the chopped liver from the back fridge, feeling the cold prickle my arms, feeling nothing else at all.
Today is like any other day. But it isn’t. When the bell rings on the front door, and Chava comes in, Pop doesn’t move from where he’s slicing onions. He only ticks up one eyebrow, glancing at me so quickly that for a second, I think I’ve imagined it.
“Hey, sweetness,” Chava says, approaching the deli case. I’m looking at her through the glass, looking at her big, hazel eyes. Her lashes are long. Her image is quickly fogged with the heat of her breath, which I’ll have to wipe away later. But I don’t mind.
“Hey,” I tell her, speaking to her for the very first time. “What do you have today?”
She tells me about her roast beef and her turkey and her chicken breast. She says not to order the chicken breast, actually. Go with the roast beef instead. Somewhere in there, I thank her for giving Pop the brochure, and the corners of her mouth lift a little. But soon we’re talking about work again. What’s selling. What isn’t.
It’s easy. It’s ordinary. But maybe there are signs here, signs I’ve been ignoring.
“Hey,” I say suddenly, “I’ve been wanting to ask you something. Two things, actually.”
Chava’s eyebrows tick up. “Yeah? Shoot.”
“Okay, well,” I say, licking my lips, a little nervous to be talking to her at all. “Why do you always call me sweetness?”
She hooks her thumbs in her belt loops. “Besides the obvious?” she asks. I should be blushing, but I’m not. It’s too comfortable, too natural for that.
“Yeah, yeah,” I tell her. “Besides that.”
“Your name. It’s what it means. It’s from the Bible, the Book of Ruth. Don’t call me Naomi, or sweetness, call me Mara, because I am bitter.”
I feel my mouth crack open, my teeth showing. “I like that,” I say.
Her nose wrinkles. “Good thing your name isn’t Mara. So what’s the second thing you wanted to ask?”
I hesitate only a moment. I’m being brave, but it doesn’t feel like bravery. Chava is not Simon. She’s like me. Marked. Different. So I step out from behind the deli case. Reaching out across the counter area, my fingertips graze her inked arm.
“What do your tattoos mean?” I ask her. She glances at Pop, a pointed piece of punctuation in her eyes. He’s not looking at us, but I can see how he’s listening, in the way that his knife pauses on the cutting board just a moment between thwacks.
Chava’s the one blushing now. But when I look at her, she looks relieved.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she says.