A Meal of Fat Ox

Jonathon and I arranged to see each other in town on Sunday. When we met up, we got falafels and sat, eating them on a bench in the street, watching the tourists go by. I struggled to keep my soggy pita together so the falafel balls wouldn’t spill down my shirt. The chummus dripped over my hand and Jonathon caught a stream of the sticky cream running down my pinky with his finger. My skin tingled at his touch. I jerked my hand away.

“Messy, huh?” Jonathon said. I laughed a little too loud, and ducked my head. “Hey,” he said as we stood to go. “Would you want to be my girlfriend?”

I was sixteen years old. In seminary. In Israel. Abandoned by my family on account of an immodest sweater, the latest and worst of my heinous crimes. And now Jonathon, a friend of a friend’s brother, a handsome modern Orthodox boy, wanted me. Me.

I nodded, swallowing down the smile that threatened to consume my face and betray my cool facade.

“Okay,” he said. “I gotta get back. Do you want to hang out tomorrow?”

I nodded again.

Jonathon’s girlfriend.

“So there,” I whispered to the silent phone when I passed it on the way to my dorm room.

“So there,” I hissed at the bulletin board empty of any message that bore my name. So there.

Jonathon’s girlfriend.

He was my first kiss on the mouth the next evening. His warm breath smelled like onions as he approached my face. His lips pressed gently on mine as he dragged his hand through my hair.

When I lay in bed that night, I put my palm over my mouth, over my hair, mimicking his touch, trying to relive its electricity.

“You don’t drink enough water,” he said the next night. I had skipped the evening lecture at school to come be with him. I was afraid that not only God was glowering down at me from the dark sky, but the Rabbis too were hiding behind the black shadows, about to pounce on me in my truancy and sins. But the joy of Jonathon’s eyes on me was too strong. It pushed away the guilt.

“How do you know that?” I asked, wondering if when a boy touched a girl that somehow gave them some knowledge of them, of what they ate or drank.

We were sitting on a bench down the block from his yeshiva, me next to Jonathon, his guitar beside him. A group of trees blocked the moonlight, keeping us hidden from the street, a light breeze ruffling the leaves.

“Your lips are dry,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” I ran my finger over the flakes of skin that stuck to my lips, ashamed.

“Will, I mean, maybe could you, would you teach me to French kiss?” I asked, pushing forward, trying to prove my worthiness, distract from my flaws.

That is purely an illustration of my fear of shame. Because I was so innocent then, so touched by God. But shame was my devil. Shame over my ignorance as Jonathon’s lips met mine, shame over my ignorance not knowing the song he sang:

“Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation, with the black haired girl.”

Now I know every song on the radio. I know every word to “American Pie”. I know all the celebrity gossip and all the names of Angelina Jolie’s children: Maddox Chivan, Zahara Marley, Shiloh Nouvel, Pax Thien, Knox Léon and Vivienne Marcheline. Once, when I was little, they had a contest for who could memorize more of the 613 mitsvos. I got down a dozen a day, chanting quietly to myself over and over the Hebrew words. Then they announced the contest would only be for boys.

The next day I called Jonathon from the orange payphone down the block from my school. I didn’t use the dorm phone. I wanted privacy.

“Yeah,” Jonathon said, after a pause.

“Hi! It’s Baila. How are you?”

“Fine. I can’t talk. You see, this isn’t, uh, I don’t want to do this anymore. Let’s not see each other anymore.”

“What?” the word ripped from my mouth in shock, loud, almost a shout. “What are you talking about? I don’t understand.” I put a hand over my other ear to block out the car horns blaring in the street.

“Listen,” he said. “I gotta go. I, like, I can’t do this.”

“Are you breaking up with me? I don’t get it! What happened?” I cried.

“I gotta go, goodbye. Good luck with everything, ok?”

He hung up the phone. I held the dead receiver to my chest and rested my forehead against the metal side of the phone booth. I banged my forehead against the metal, hard, so it smacked my skin. No. No. No.

I called his dorm again.

“Hello?” a strange man said when the receiver was lifted, his voice falling from low in his throat.

“Is Jonathon there?” I asked, sucking in my tears, leaning on the phone booth for strength.

The line went quiet.

“No,” the man said after a minute. “He doesn’t want to come to the phone.”

“Can you tell him it’s Baila?” I pleaded. “I really really need to talk to him.”

I could hear some muffled conversation.

“No,” the man said. “He won’t come.” He hung up the phone.

That night I didn’t sleep. I needed to talk to someone. There was no one to speak to. I tried calling silently to Hashem, but the night lay empty and I got no relief from praying. My roommates twisted and sighed in their sleep. I clutched my pillow and cried.

The next morning, I didn’t go to class. I walked back to the payphone at the bottom of the hill. I called Jonathon’s dorms again. The man I had spoken to the night before picked up the phone.

“Is Jonathon Duron there?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “ This is Daniel Kazdin. His roommate. Is this Baila?”

“Yes.” I rested my head against the phone booth.

“You shouldn’t call him,” he said, a gentleness coating his deep voice. “He said it’s over.”

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

“Listen,” Daniel said, “that’s the way it is. Men can be like that, you know. You get what you got and you gotta move on.”

My crying became audible.

“Hey, listen,” Daniel said. “You want to talk? Sometimes you just gotta talk it out. We can hang out and you can get it out of your system, make you feel better.”

“Ok.” I wiped my nose on my hand.

We arranged to meet that night at a park behind his yeshiva.

When I came up the dark street, I found him slouched on a bench, his legs wide, the bright moon spilling onto his face.

“Baila, right?”

I nodded.

“I’m Daniel Kazdin.” He put out a hand and I hesitated for a moment, but then I shook it. My first handshake with a man. I had to hold back a nervous giggle at the adult oddness of the pumping motion. His palms were large enough that my hands felt like children’s hands encased in his strong grip.

“Come sit,” he said, gesturing to the bench. I settled beside him, crossing my legs and wrapping my arms around my chest, staring at the cement ground, the tears over Jonathon welling up in my eyes.

“Listen babe,” Daniel said, “I know you’re upset; it’s good you came out to talk. There’s a lot to learn about life, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience. It comes and goes, love, like, lust, whatever you want it call it, babe.” He stretched and yawned, bringing his arm down on the bench behind me. “We all have needs, you can’t tie a guy down, you just gotta roll with the punches. Especially Duron, he’s a young dude, he wants to sow his oats. Hey, hey,” he said and leaned in to cup my chin in his hand. “Don’t cry babe, don’t cry anymore, come here.”

I let him draw me into his arms, against his chest. Swept up in my dismay and rejection I had no boundaries. I was easy prey for his desire. His hands soothed me. The night swam in a drunken haze as I inhaled the pleasure of his comfort. I let his hands play over my stomach.

“That’s how it is, babe, that’s how it is,” he murmured. Soon, his fingers were slipping up my shirt, under my bra and onto my breasts. I lay back against him, my body rigid, my skin on fire, and let him do what he wanted.

“I could drive a girl crazy,” he whispered in my ear. Hashem. Hashem. Oh my God. My thighs melted at his touch.

“Now you have a tiger cub in you. I’m a lion,” he said to me, as he pawed at my body. He lifted me to stand with him and rubbed up behind me, panting. I didn’t know what he wanted but my body surged with the most luscious pain about to peak. I couldn’t stand the pleasure. I begged him to stop and after a few seconds, he did, leaning his sweaty face over my shoulder, catching his breath, his chin digging into me.

“Here,” he said, “dance with me.” He lifted my hand and stepped away in a neat move, but I didn’t know what he wanted, I didn’t know how to dance like that.

“You can’t waltz?” he asked. I shook my head. “Here, here,” he said. “Now step back, oh!” My legs, my hips were too clumsy, my breath came too short, too fast for me to focus on following his direction.

When I got home, I lay in bed shaking as my stomach rolled up into my throat and waves of nausea hit me.

In the morning, I showered in the bathroom stall, my bare feet avoiding the hair rats that lay around the drain. I soaped my body, running my hands over my arms, my breasts, my behind. My body was no longer the body of Baila. Baila, that small slim child, had been swallowed by some woman’s sickeningly voluptuous series of fatty curves. I raked my nails over my skin that Daniel had touched, as if to scrape out the pleasure he had raised in me. This wasn’t my body. This wasn’t me.