At lunchtime, I went over to Yo!Good to see if Miriam might be working. There was no way I could eat any yogurt, or any more food at all. I realized that this meant I was only going there to see her.
“Hi,” she said. “I was wondering if I was going to see you again.”
“Hi.” I grinned.
“Do you want me to make you something special?”
“No,” I said. “I just came here to see you.”
“Ah,” she said, smiling and tapping a plastic spoon against the counter.
I couldn’t tell if this was a nervous gesture or if she was drumming out a celebratory beat—tap tap, tap tap! I am glad you have come to see me Rachel! Here is my staccato indication of that! And what did glad even mean? There was such a wide range of glads, from platonic amusement to amorous hysteria. Would I ever decipher the precise timbre of her gladness, the origin from which it sprang, whether it was an I think you’re cool, or, if I were blessed, an I want you so bad? I felt like I would die if I didn’t find out soon. I also wasn’t sure what I would do if I did find out. I knew that I wanted to be around her—a lot. I knew that I wanted to taste each of her moles: the caramel one on her cheek, the dark chocolate drop on her Adam’s apple, the two milk chocolate drops on the left.
“What song is that?” I asked her.
“What?”
“The spoon,” I said.
“Oh.”
She hadn’t known she was drumming. She put the spoon down on the counter. Then she picked it up and threw it in the trash. The store was empty except for the two of us.
“I’d love a smoke,” she said. “Want to go out back for a clove?”
I nodded.
She squinted in the sun as she tried to light her cigarette. I offered her my sunglasses, and she accepted them. They were Ray-Bans, Blues Brothers–style, and they looked ridiculous on her. She looked like she was in a wedding band. She handed me the clove she had lit, then she lit one for herself, inhaling deeply. When she exhaled, it looked like she was blowing loop-de-loops. They were beautiful, actually, a series of perfect circles in a ray of sun.
“You blow rings?” I asked her.
“What?”
“Smoke rings,” I said.
I held up my hand and poked through the center of one of the rings. But just as I made contact, the ring dissipated into a lazy cloud. She laughed at me from behind the sunglasses. They were too boxy on her, and I tried to imagine what kind of sunglasses would look better. I pictured her in round, mirrored shades. They would match the shape of her face and also lend her a bohemian air: Miriam as Mama Cass, Miriam as goddess of the canyon. Or she could go pure early ’60s nostalgia—Hollywood beehive Miriam with a cat-eye frame in white or checkerboard or cherry red. I decided that I would definitely buy her a pair and bring them to her as a present. Then she could smoke in the sun whenever she wanted—in style.
I wanted to buy her all kinds of gifts. I pretended that my generosity came from gratitude, fondness, but there was definitely a deeper motivation behind my desire to give. I wanted to “improve her” like a project, make her more fashionable. It was not so much about goodwill as it was about my own fear.
People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively—films, Netflix series—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irresistible whimsy. When I felt a recommendation coming on, I’d lie and say I’d already seen the thing: just so I didn’t have to hear the plot explained. Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren’t on Twitter.
But in my desire to curate Miriam, I’d become just another version of an obsessive recommender. I wanted to show the world how beautiful she was, to present a different type of beauty, and in doing so, to own part of her. I felt that if the world embraced Miriam, I’d be healing something in me—making amends with young Rachel. But I didn’t entirely trust the world to grasp her beauty. So I sweetened the pot with little aesthetic upgrades.
“I know you’re not doing anything for Shabbat,” she said. “You must come over to my family’s house this evening for dinner. I insist. You will love it.”
Now she wanted to introduce me to her family? This seemed very intimate, kind of fast. Or was it just an abundance of platonic friendliness in her, a kind and generous nature, nothing to do with romance? She was doing a mitzvah: reaching out to a fellow Jewish woman who was without family. It was Semitic sympathy, diasporic decorum. It was the right thing to do.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Okay,” I said. “I can.”
“Fabulous.”
She was so cute, exhaling the last of her cigarette, stubbing it out under her foot and clapping her hands together as if to say, That’s that. When she clapped, her left hand cast a shadow inside her right hand. The shadow was ovular. It looked like an eye.
For a moment, I really wondered if I was seeing an eye in the palm of her right hand. The eye winked. I blinked. Then it was gone.