“What? Your hair does look better longer. I’m your mother. I want you to look your best. Is that a crime?” I said.
“Just because you think about your body all the time, just because you never eat more than three bites of dessert, just because you work out like a crazy person doesn’t mean I have to feel or behave the way you do!” she said.
“Of course you don’t have to feel the way I do,” I said.
“Which bothers you more? That I could attract a man like Aaron Levin, or that you couldn’t?”
“AVIVA!” I said. “Enough. That is a ridiculous and ungenerous thing to say.”
“And I know you said something! I know you said something or did something! Admit it, Mom! Stop lying! Please stop lying! I need to know what happened, or I’ll go crazy!”
“Why does it have to be anything I said? Maybe being at the school reminded him of how young you are and how inappropriate this relationship is? Isn’t that possible, Aviva?”
“I hate you,” she said. “I am never speaking to you again.” She left the house and she shut the door.
NEVER LASTED UNTIL August.
At the end of the summer, Mike and I rented a house in a little town outside of Portland, Maine. I called Aviva and said, “Haven’t we not been speaking long enough? I’m sorry for anything I’ve done and anything you think I’ve done. Come to Maine with me and Daddy. I miss you terribly. And Daddy misses you, too. We’ll eat lobster rolls and whoopie pies every day.”
“Lobster, Mom? What’s come over you?” Aviva said.
“Don’t tell Grandma, but I refuse to believe in a God who doesn’t want me to eat lobster,” I said.
She laughed. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’ll come.”
We had been there about four days when she said, “It feels like last year was a dream,” she said. “It feels like I had a fever, and the fever has finally broken.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“Still,” she said, “sometimes I miss the fever.”
“But you don’t see him anymore?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not.” She corrected herself. “I mean, I don’t see him socially. I see him at work.”
I was impressed with her that she had somehow managed to keep working for the congressman. “Is that hard?” I asked. “Seeing him, but not being with him?”
“I almost never see him,” she said. “I’m not that important now that I’m not that important.”
EIGHT
A few days after Camelot, Roz calls me and asks if she might use my ticket for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Her sister is coming to town, and wouldn’t it be nice for the three of them to go together? I say yes, because who wants to see a musical version of The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Whenever you subscribe to a regional theater season, there’re always a few duds. She says she’ll pay me for the ticket, and I say your money’s no good here, Roz Horowitz. It’s a mitzvah to not have to go to Edwin Drood.
Roz laughs and then she says, “Oh, Rachel, how could you?”
I know what she is going to say before she says it. I know that Mr. Elbow in My Seat has told her that I tried to kiss him and not the other way around. He’s made a preemptive strike. I should have called her, but in my defense, who wants to get in the middle of someone’s marriage? Even knowing what he’s done, I’m still not sure how to proceed. She’s not the first woman in the world to end up married to a cheating louse. It can happen to anyone. Do I really want my friend to have to divorce? At her age? Do I wish her a future that involves profile pictures and swiping and squeezing into Spanx to go on dates with alte cockers? No, I do not.
“Roz,” I say, “Roz, my dear one, I think it was a misunderstanding.”
“He says you tried to give him”—she lowers to an outraged whisper—“a hand job, Rachel.”
“A hand job? Roz, that is fantasy.” I tell her what happened. Why in the world did he make up the hand job? What is wrong with him?
“I know you’re lonely, Rachel,” Roz says. “But you’ve been my best friend since 1992, and I know what you’re like. You’re lonely and you’re vain and you meddle. I believe him.”
I say, “I would never betray you for him. For the farkakte glass guy? I would never. After all that we’ve been through together.”
Roz says, “Rachel, stop.”
So I stop.
I’m sixty-four years old. I know when to stop.
NINE
When she went back to the University of Miami in the fall, Aviva decided to move off campus to a tiny studio apartment in Coconut Grove. We had a good time decorating that little place together. We did a whole “shabby chic” thing. We bought wood furniture from Goodwill and sanded it and painted it cream, and we bought faded floral sheets, and a beige quilt from an antique store, and we had a turquoise bowl filled with seashells, and gardenia and lavender scented soy candles, and we painted the walls white, and we hung sheer voile curtains. And we lucked into a genuine Wegner Wishbone chair in birch. This was before the midcentury craze, so I think we got it for about thirty-five dollars. The last thing I bought was a white orchid.
“Mom,” she said, “I’ll kill it.”
“Just don’t overwater it,” I said.
“I’m not good with plants,” she said.
“You’re twenty-one,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re good with yet.”
It was so beautiful and perfect and blank, this little place, I remember wishing I could move in with her, and I felt almost jealous of Aviva. Everything in her apartment could be exactly the way she wanted it.
It was a happy time in our relationship and a happy time in my life in general. The board had decided not to seek out a new principal, and I was made permanent principal of BRJA. They had a cocktail party for me. They served smoked salmon on toast points. Unfortunately, the salmon had turned, and though I did not eat the salmon, everyone who did got sick. I did not take this as a sign.
Roz took me out to lunch for my forty-ninth birthday. She said that I looked great and asked me what I’d been doing.
I said, “I’m happy.”
“I’ll have to try that,” she said.
I don’t know why—maybe I’d had too much wine—but I started to cry.
“Rachel,” Roz said, “oh my God, what is it? Has something happened?”
“The opposite,” I said. “Something that I thought was going to happen didn’t happen, and I feel so relieved and grateful.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Roz said. She poured me another glass of wine. “Was it your health? Mike’s health? Did you find a lump?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Aviva?” Roz said.
“Yes, something to do with Aviva.”
“Do you want to tell me? You don’t have to tell me,” she said.
“Roz,” I said. “She was having an affair with a married man, and now it’s over. It’s over, thank God.”
“Oh God, Rach, that’s nothing. She’s young. It’s the special privilege of youth to make mistakes.”
I lowered my eyes. “It wasn’t just the affair. It was who it was with.”
“Who was it, Rachel?” she said. “You don’t have to say.”
I whispered the name in her ear.
“Good for Aviva!”