When I called Rachel, she answered the phone cheerfully. I should have listened more carefully to that tone, should have let it linger longer before I brought the sky crashing down over her. Last year, around this time, just as the weather was starting to turn and leaves began popping up on all the trees, our uncle died in his sleep; our grandparents were visiting for the week and found him the next morning.
I am in a jet somewhere over the Pacific, and a friend is offering me Grey Goose and cranberry juice. We are both seventeen, but no one is enforcing drinking laws—we are the only two passengers. This is a private plane, because the private island we’re heading towards doesn’t have a commercial airport. We sprawl across leather seats and continue to raid the bar and talk about college plans. We both want to go to Princeton.
For a class called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” that I took last semester, we were tasked with many activities meant to make us aware of what it meant to be a woman, and a woman in a body, and a woman in a body in a society alternatingly fascinated and disgusted with that body.
Whenever i feel like I don’t know where my life is going, my father is there to console me. He tells me that his life—or at least the version of it that I know—only really began when he was 35. He reminds me that especially given his untraditional experiences, he and my mom have no expectation that either I or my brother follow the typical pattern of get a degree, get a job, get married, all right out of college.
I’ve never seen my birth certificate, but I know what it says. I can see the angular font in my head, bold blocky letters spelling out my name: Hannah-Sophie Vester. Perhaps the ink, thick and sticky, smudged just a little and that’s where that mark, printed defiantly between Hannah and Sophie, came from. Just a typo, a wayward smudge. Another look, though, and who wouldn’t recognize the hyphen for what it is?
“The madame will be joining us soon. Her horse sprained his ankle on the journey down Second Avenue,” my grandpa said in a mock British accent. My grandpa is a writer, and jumps at opportunities to knit fantasy into everyday experience, be it with affected accents or outrageously butchered attempts at Mandarin.
I am nine years old, give or take a couple years, and I have learned rage. Like a clumsy Hulk, I crush and I smash and I murder what must be dozens, if not billions, of ants.
For a person with dietary restrictions, food in America is like a dense minefield of things he or she cannot eat. Meat and cheese are everywhere, sneakily stuck in the most unsuspecting locations.
After i made the reservation, opentable.com asked me if I wanted to send an invitation to the other guest(s). I smirked to myself at the flaw in their system that it would ask such a question after making a reservation for one.
The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”
Exodus chapter 34, verse 26: “Thou shalt not boil a kid in his mother’s milk.” Some 5,000 (or 2,000, depending on who you think wrote the Torah) years ago, God told the Jewish people not to mix milk and meat. … Read More
“Come to Chabad for dinner with me and Hannie tonight!” It’s early in October when my roommate, Molly, makes the invitation. In my ignorance, I thought she was just pronouncing “Shabbat” differently and that we’d be going to the CJL for dinner.
