Bagels and Bialeys

Gayle Brandeis

It all started when Toby Horwitz confessed to his wife that once, as a teenager, he had jacked off using a bagel.

“You did not!” Rachel tried to sound indignant, but she couldn’t stop laughing, her black, curly hair spilling into her eyes. She shook her head and picked up an Everything from the platter that sat between them on the table, piled with bagels and bialeys from a deli on Fairfax. She turned it slowly around in her hand to inspect its sexual potential.

“Wasn’t the hole a bit big?” she put her hand through the bagel so it dangled around her wrist like a bracelet.

“What? Are you disparaging my manhood?” Toby smacked Rachel playfully with a rolled up Calendar section from the Los Angeles Times. “You don’t think I could fill up a bagel hole?”

“No, really,” Rachel shook the bagel back onto her plate. Poppy and sesame seeds still clung to her arm, along with a few oily brown shreds of onion. “You know I think your manhood is lovely. But bagel holes are a bit—roomy, I guess you’d say? These are, at least. Then there are some you can’t even stick your pinky through.”

“The holes in the Sam Deli bagels were just the perfect size, honey,” Toby stuck his tongue out at Rachel through a cranberry bagel and waggled it around.

“Wasn’t it kind of rough?” Rachel was in her inquisitor mode, leaning back in her chair, arms folded over her chest.

“I slathered the inside of the hole with cream cheese,” he grinned.

Rachel cocked an eyebrow.

“The ingenuity of the young and horny.” Toby shrugged and dipped his finger into the whipped low-fat sun-dried tomato pesto cream cheese they both loved, and slid it into Rachel’s mouth. She sucked it off distractedly.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never looked at a bialey that way,” said Toby, as if all women lusted after bread products.

Rachel shook her head with conviction, Toby’s finger still in her mouth. She didn’t tell him that she herself as a teenager had once committed a minor indiscretion with a kosher dill, a new one, still firm and bright green. The thought that a rabbi had blessed the jar made Rachel feel incredibly dirty afterward. She had difficulty looking at Rabbi Tepper for weeks.

Toby pulled his wet finger back and picked up a bagel and a bialey, one in each hand. “They’re a perfect yoni and lingam, don’t you think, Rache?”

“You know, I doubt they were designed with Indian mythology in mind,” Rachel smiled. They had first met in a Hindu Art class at UCLA twelve years ago, a class that for some reason was teeming with Jews like themselves. The first time Toby asked Rachel out was the day they had learned about those anatomically suggestive stone fertility symbols. “You’re only after my yoni, aren’t you?” Rachel had replied sarcastically, but nevertheless, she had agreed to meet him for dinner that night at the kosher Indian restaurant, Bombay Bubbe’s. She had been more than a little bit curious about his lingam, herself. Twelve years later, she was still curious, for which she was grateful.

“You never know.” Toby now leaned across the table toward her, slowly bringing the bialey close to the bagel, sliding it through the lip of the hole, then drawing it back out again. “Things are often a lot more connected than they seem.”

He started to move the bialey in and out of the bagel, slowly at first, but then faster and faster, until crumbs and seeds and hard garlic pellets were flying all over the place. Finally, Toby and Rachel had no other choice. What could they do but knock aside all the bread products and coffee and orange juice and newspapers? What could they do but make crazy, leavened love right there on the kitchen table, their bodies fitting together as perfectly as any stick and any hole—warm, wet flesh, or bread, or stone.