Bubbe’s kugel has raisins in it. I’ve hated raisins since I was six. I’m eating my third helping standing up next to the good plates, with my cock half hard in my trousers. My grandmother’s favourite niece has been looking at me across the table since the blessing. I’ve been thinking about her mouth since Tuesday.
She’s eighty. The apartment’s in Queens and it smells like her. Which is to say it smells like 1978. Everything in the living room is under plastic except the framed photographs. They’re everywhere. On the sideboard, the mantel, the little table by the door. There’s a cousin in about half of them I’ve never met. I don’t know his name. One of them is a young man in a Nehru jacket who’s somehow my great uncle.
“David from accounting,” I say, for the fourth time, to my aunt. She’s stopped asking questions. She’s just nodding along now, waiting to see how deep I go.
“He’s in Boston.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“He’s very tall.”
“He’s very tall,” she says, and goes back to the salad. I take another kugel. And a raisin. I don’t spit it out. It’s Bubbe’s kugel. You don’t spit at a kugel. You chew harder and hope.
The truth is something I’m not telling anyone tonight. I have no idea who David from accounting is. I’ve been inventing him in escalating detail for four months. I’m inventing a fiancé at my grandmother’s eightieth birthday because if I don’t produce one, she’s going to produce one for me. She has a candidate. The candidate is Sarah.
Sarah’s sitting three feet away at the table in a cardigan, in a mood, texting me under the table. Sarah, whom I fucked three years ago in a hotel in Times Square for about four hours. Then I didn’t speak to her for eleven months. Now she’s my grandmother’s designated future wife. She doesn’t know I know. Bubbe has a list.
Bubbe’s list is a legal pad. She keeps it in the drawer by the phone. It’s been there since before I was born. It’s not a shopping list. It’s a list of unmarried grandchildren and what they’re doing about it. My name’s on it twice. The first time she wrote me down, I told her I was “seeing someone.” She wrote that down like it was a job.
She has four candidates for me. Sarah’s one of them. The other three are a dentist in Valley Stream, a doctor in Flushing who’s “very serious,” and a widower her sister-in-law knows who’s “not short.” I’m the only one of the four who has, at some point in the last decade, been in a bed with a member of this family. If that gets out, I’m finished.
My phone’s in my jacket pocket. I’ve been getting a Grindr notification every eleven minutes since I walked in. The pop is very loud. I forgot to mute it. I’ve had three go off in the last two minutes. One went off in the middle of Happy Birthday, right on the word dear. Four people looked at me. My cousin Fay said “are you texting?” I said “no, it’s my mother’s ringtone.” A lie so stupid it should be a crime. My mother has no ringtone. She has a flip phone. She’s had a flip phone since 2004.
Sarah’s text: babe. babe. are you seeing this. are you ACTUALLY doing this
Sarah’s text: there are 40 people in this apartment and one bathroom
Sarah’s text: I have a girlfriend now, you disaster
“Chad,” I say out loud, by accident. Fay looks up.
“Chad?”
“Nothing. Cousin Chad. In Boston. With David.”
“Of course there’s a Cousin Chad,” says Sarah, out loud, in the voice of a woman who’s been doing this for six years. My aunt hears of course there’s a Cousin Chad and nods. Because of course there’s a Cousin Chad.
My phone goes off again. Pop.
“Chad wants to know if I host or travel,” I say. At this point it’s cheaper.
“Do you host?” says my aunt.
“I host a lot,” I say. Sarah puts her forehead on the table.
My aunt’s been drinking since six. She’s reached the stage of the evening where she asks the same question in a slightly different way. “Rosie,” she says, taking my arm with both of hers. “When your grandmother was eighty, your mother was already married.”
“She was twenty-nine.”
“Twenty-nine!” She says it like she’s caught me out. “And you’re thirty-four and you’re in a bathroom at your own grandmother’s party.”
“I’m at my grandmother’s party.”
“You’re at your grandmother’s party with a woman.”
“That’s my cousin Sarah.”
“Your cousin Sarah,” she repeats. She gives me a look that’s going to be in my life for some time. Then she squeezes my arm. “She’s very pretty, your cousin Sarah.” In the tone of a woman who’s decided something. I have to go stand next to the good plates for a bit.
The photographs are the other thing. Every surface in that apartment has one. I’ve been looking at all of them for three hours, because it’s the only way not to look at Sarah. There’s Bubbe with the horse, in 1951, with a girl in a party dress and a lead rope and the expression of a woman who’s already won something. There’s my mother at sixteen with the Nehru-jacket cousin. Apparently he’s Bubbe’s brother’s boy from the war. He’s in this apartment somewhere, alive, at eighty-something. He’s been at every one of these parties for fifty years. I’ve never once been introduced to him, because I don’t know his name.
There’s a photograph of Sarah, at about nine, in a bath, holding a rubber duck. I’ve looked at it approximately four hundred times since I got here. The thing that’s been sitting in my chest all evening isn’t that I want to fuck her. It’s that I want to be in the room with her. And I want to do it without inventing a boyfriend to explain it.
The bathroom’s the only free room in the building. I know it the way you know a building. I’ve been in it since I was seven, sitting on the edge of the tub at Christmas while four grown men argued in the kitchen and my grandmother pretended there was no television.
The bathroom’s small. It has a mirror over a cabinet and a fluorescent tube that buzzes in a way I could identify in the dark. The door has a lock that’s a chain and a chain that’s decorative. On the other side of that door, right now, forty-one people are singing Happy Birthday to my grandmother for the fourth time. They keep restarting it when she says “again.”
Sarah gets up first. She says she needs to powder her nose, which is a thing nobody’s said since 1974. She walks out of the room. I follow her out about ninety seconds later. My mother says “where are you going.” I say “the bathroom.” My mother says “you were just in the bathroom.” I say “the other bathroom.” There’s only one bathroom. My mother lets it go. She’s spent the last six hours letting things go.
The pop goes off in my pocket while I’m standing in the hallway. It’s very loud in a hallway.
“Jesus,” says Sarah, in the hallway. Then we’re in the bathroom. The door’s shut. The chain isn’t going to hold anything. The fluorescent’s buzzing. She’s looking at me with her handbag still on.
“This is insane,” she says.
“You texted me forty-one people.”
“That’s not what I texted you.”
“You texted me that there were forty people and one bathroom, which is an invitation.”
“It was an observation.”
“Sarah.”
“Give me a second.” She puts her handbag down on the edge of the tub, which is a thing we didn’t discuss. The zip is loud. I’m already hard, which is mortifying and also the entire reason I came upstairs.
She undoes my belt. She’s faster than she was three years ago. Or maybe I’m slower. Or maybe the three years were the two of us being extremely good at this in a way that doesn’t need practice. My cock is out and in her hand. She looks at it and says “you haven’t changed at all.” I say “you have.” She says “I’ve got a girlfriend now, you disaster, be nice.” She goes down onto one knee on the bath mat in a cardigan and a pencil skirt at my grandmother’s eightieth birthday party.
“Wait,” I say.
“Wait what.”
“There’s a thing on the phone.”
“There’s always a thing on the phone.”
“There’s a thing on the phone right now specifically.”
She stands up. She pulls her skirt down. She looks at me. Then she takes my phone out of my pocket. She opens it. She reads it. She starts to laugh, which isn’t a good sign, because her laugh carries.
“Chad,” she reads, “twenty-four, wants to know if you host or travel, and he has sent you a photo of his dog.”
“There’s a dog?”
“Big dog.”
“That’s a good dog.”
“It’s an enormous dog.” She scrolls. “He says he’s a top. He says he hosts.”
“Tell him I host.”
“Tell him yourself, you’re going to be on Grindr in four minutes.”
And she puts the phone down on the shelf above the sink, next to my grandmother’s denture tablets and a bar of Palmolive. She goes back down onto one knee. She says “come here, you disaster.” She takes my cock in her mouth the way she used to, which is to say she takes it like she’s annoyed at it personally.
“Sarah—”
She looks up at me with her mouth full and raises an eyebrow. I shut up.
She works. There’s no other word. She gets her hand around the base and her tongue under the head. She licks the head of my cock like she’s reading it. She finds the thing she always found, the place on the underside where the skin changes. She’s found it three years later without any trouble at all. She sucks my shaft into her throat and holds it there while her nose is in my stomach and her throat works. I put my hand on the back of her neck. I feel her swallow. I hear it over the buzz of the fluorescent.
Somebody outside laughs. Somebody else says “is she all right in there.” A second voice says “leave her.” My grandmother’s voice, unmistakable: “she’s fine, she’s powdering her nose.”
My phone goes off on the shelf.
Pop.
Sarah doesn’t stop. She goes mm around my cock, which she’s never done in her life. I have to put my hand over my own mouth.
“Chad,” she says, pulling off, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Chad wants to know if you host.”
“Tell him yes.”
“Tell him yourself, you absolute—” She starts to laugh again. I put my hand over her mouth. She bites it.
I get her up onto the edge of the tub. The tub’s cold through her skirt. She doesn’t care. I push her panties down to her knees. She has her knickers round one ankle still and doesn’t help. I get in behind her. My cock is against her ass and she’s slick already. Which has never once stopped being a surprise. Which has been the entire problem of my life.
“Sarah, the door—”
“Chain.”
“The chain’s decorative.”
“Everyone knows the chain’s decorative. Your grandmother has never once locked that door in her life. Your grandmother doesn’t lock the bathroom door. She has no key. She’s been meaning to fix it since 1974.”
I push in and she makes a noise I’ve been thinking about for three years. The specific one. The one she only makes when she’s being quiet about it. I hold her hips and I fuck her over the edge of her own grandmother’s bathtub. My shaft all the way in. Her hole gripping. Outside, somebody starts singing again. It’s the song again, the fourth time. Sarah puts both hands over her ears and laughs into them. I put my mouth against the back of her neck and tell her she’s going to come. She says “don’t you dare make me come in my grandmother’s bathroom.” I say “watch me.” I get my hand around her clit. She comes in about nine seconds, gripping the edge of the tub, biting her own wrist, with her knickers still round one ankle. I don’t stop. She says my name twice. Then she says something in Yiddish. I don’t understand it. I’m fairly sure it’s a complaint.
Then it’s me. I put her hand back on her own clit. I come inside her over the edge of the tub with my hand on her belly. I shout, which I shouldn’t. The sound goes straight through the door.
And she doesn’t let me stop, because Sarah’s never once let me stop. She turns around on the tub and puts her arms around my neck and jumps. I catch her. I’m holding her up against the mirror with my cock still inside her and her legs around my waist and her back against the glass. The mirror’s cold on her spine. She’s warm and slick and dripping down my thigh. She’s laughing, actually laughing, with her forehead against my neck. She says “my grandmother’s going to hear that.” I say “she has heard worse.” She says “she has heard nothing like that.” She bites my shoulder hard enough to leave a mark. I thrust up into her. She takes every one of them. Her thighs clamp around my back. Her mouth opens on my ear. I can hear her breath going ragged. She says my name like it’s the last word she has.
She rides me and I take her up the wall and her back slides on the glass. The buzzing tube flickers once. She screams, properly screams, with her hand over her own mouth. I’m close and I tell her. She says “do it, do it, don’t you dare not.” I put her down on the bath mat. I finish inside her on my knees on my grandmother’s bathroom floor with her fingers in my hair. This time I don’t shout. I go quiet. She notices. She holds my head and says “oh,” which is a completely different sound.
The singing stops.
“Oh my God,” says Sarah.
“Was that loud?”
“You’re an animal.”
The bathroom’s very bright and very quiet. I’m leaning on the tub with my forehead against the mirror and my own breath in my face. The fluorescent’s going pop-pop-pop. Which is the fluorescent, and not my phone. I’m going to think about that sentence for the rest of my life.
My phone’s still on the shelf. Pop.
“Chad,” says Sarah, without looking at it.
“Chad.”
“He sent another photo of the dog.”
“Tell him I’m busy.”
“We’re going back in there?”
“We’re going back in there.”
She pulls her skirt up and her knickers up and puts her handbag on her shoulder. She looks at the door. Then she looks at me. She says, “your grandmother’s going to knock.”
“Fine.”
“And when she does, I’m powdering my nose.”
“Fine.”
“I’m going to powder my nose for the rest of my life.”
My shirt’s untucked and my hair’s wet at the back. There’s a mark on my shoulder where Sarah bit me, which I’m going to have to explain to my mother. There’s a smell of her on my hands that I’m going to be smelling for the rest of the evening. My knees are going to be sore tomorrow on the tile.
And then there’s a knock and the door opens, because it was never locked. My grandmother’s standing in the hallway in her good cardigan with her glasses in her hand.
She looks at me. She looks at Sarah. She looks at the two of us, in a hurry, in a bathroom, at her eightieth birthday.
“Rosie,” she says. She’s called me Rose since I was five and I’ve never once corrected her.
“Bubbe.”
She looks in the mirror. She looks at the both of us in the mirror, with Sarah’s hands still on my belt and my shirt pulled out of my trousers. She adjusts her glasses and says:
“Look at you in this mirror, my love. You are an absolute goddess and you deserve to feel this worshipped every single second.”
And then she kisses my cheek and whispers, so only I can hear it:
“I knew, bubbelah. I knew since you were five. Eat more kugel.”
And she goes back out. I can hear her say, in the hallway, in her good voice, to everyone:
“Rosie is not well. We are giving her some air.”
And my phone goes off one more time.
Pop.
