You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs. Laurie Graff

      Roman paused. “I wanted to tell you that I’m marrying Julie.”

      I paused.

      “It’s right for me,” he said. “It’s right for my life here, with the company. Our families are here. I’m sorry. I don’t feel I was fair to you.”

      I wondered if he had been fair to himself. There was so much in New York he had yet to discover. Inside the city. Inside himself.

      “Do you love her?” I held my breath hoping the right answer would not hurt too much.

      “She would follow me anywhere,” he said. “Look, if you ever need anything. Money, anything, you can always contact me. Always. I’ll always remember you.”

      “I’ll never forget.”

      I never have. Sometimes on a moist and balmy New York night, when I take a walk, I can still see all the colors of the Roman rainbow.

      8

      My Worst Date… Almost

      New Year’s

       Day Chelsea, NYC 1992

      The day after the party he called. I was bedridden, feeling comatose from the twenty-four-hour bug that had hit six hours earlier.

      “I was so glad you gave your card to my sister,” he said.

      I’d thought his sister was his wife. They were holding hands all night.

      “Can we go out?”

      “Okay,” I mumbled in my delirium.

      “I’m so anxious to see you,” Arthur blathered. “I’ve never been this excited before. How’s Thursday? What do you like to do for fun? Am I too forward?”

      “No. No.”

      “Do you think it’s a possibility we’re going to have a great time?” he questioned. “I want you to come to this date really open with positive feelings. I’ll talk to you before Thursday. I can’t wait. This will be the best date of our lives.”

      We never went out. He never called.

      Arthur must have literally burst from anticipation.

      9

      The Clan of the Cab Bears

      Passover

      Port Authority, NYC 1992

      “Need some help?” the homeless man asked while he watched me schlep my bags from the Airport Bus Center through the Port Authority.

      “No, thanks,” I said, kicking the flowered one that was bigger than me and wouldn’t stay on my shoulder. The yellow cabs were all lined up on Eighth Avenue, just waiting to be hailed.

      “We have to make a quick stop,” I told the cabby while I stood to the side and watched him put my baggage in the back seat. He was a big, chubby guy with wild, messy brown hair in baggy jeans and flannel shirt.

      “It better be fast,” he said.

      “Why? You have someplace to go?” I asked him, thinking that after he dropped me off, he’d probably like to go back twenty years, run over to the student union, lead a peace march and drop some acid.

      “Well, no,” he said. “I just don’t feel like stopping.”

      I opened the door to get out.

      “But I will,” he said.

      “Thanks a bunch.”

      We sped between the traffic up the avenue.

      “You just get back from a trip?” he asked.

      “Uh, yeah.”

      “Where’d you go?” he asked, stopping the cab at a red light.

      Through the window, I watched a man shoving leaflets at passersby.

      “Check it out. Check it out,” he said, hoping to entice them into entering the House of Heavenly Delights. I looked up and saw an enlarged color photo of two women having their way with each other, while a man, dressed as the devil, held a pitchfork over their heads.

      “Florida,” I said.

      “Vacation?”

      He was turning out to be pretty chatty, this…I looked to the front seat to see the name on his identification card. Alan Cohen.

      “Passover,” I answered. Mom, Henry and I flew down to spend the holiday with Aunt Cookie and Uncle Sy. It had become a new tradition since my aunt and uncle had retired there five years ago. Uncle Sy’s Passover seder was so different from the holiday I remembered as a little girl when Grandpa Lou was still alive. He would recite the whole haggadah in Hebrew. My cousins and I would twist and turn in our seats for what seemed like a century until, finally, we could eat. After the meal, Grandpa Lou would hide the Afikoman, the magic piece of matzoh, and give a quarter to the kid who found it. All of us kids would search the Brooklyn apartment high and low only to find that, once again, our grandfather had hidden it in his suit jacket.

      Some years later, after Grandpa Lou had passed on, Sy had stood at the head of his Long Island table and flipped on a small tape recorder. After a series of static sounds, Sy’s voice had filled the room. “Your mission tonight, if you choose to accept, is to skip the formalities and go directly to the Passover meal catered à la Cookie.” Everyone thought it was very funny, except for Grandma Rose, who was missing her husband and the days when “the holidays” meant her house.

      “Yeah, Passover. Yeah,” said the cabby with the recognition I expected. “The folks glad to see you?”

      “Thrilled.” There seemed no point explaining my folks didn’t really live there.

      “Boca?” Alan Cohen asked in shorthand.

      “West Palm.”

      “Nice.”

      Alan Cohen probably had family in Boca, I thought, and wished that he had gone down for Passover to see his parents. They probably lived in a development with two swimming pools, four tennis courts and a clubhouse. Alan would always think he was going to play tennis when he visited, but it never happened. He probably never went to see them much, being the black sheep of the family. Alan had probably had great potential. He was probably the salutatorian of his graduating class at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. His parents had thought he would be a doctor, or at very least, a dentist. But he went away to college, did too many drugs and never got out of the Sixties.

      “So…” he said. He was determined to keep the conversation going. “Does your family do a whole seder thing, or do you just eat?”

      I pictured Sy standing at the head of the table wearing a blue satin yarmulke on his head, a gold Jewish star around his neck and a yellow-and-white kitchen apron tied behind his waist.

      “Why is this night different from all other nights?” he asked. “Because tonight we’re not going to ask the four questions. Every year you ask me the same questions, and for thirty years I’m giving the same answers. So, if you don’t know the answers by now, you’re out of luck.”

      “We did a little seder,” I told Alan the interested cabdriver. “You know, the usual stuff.”

      Sy was in rare form this year. “Now I want everyone to listen to the instructions on how we will proceed with tonight’s seder. First, this will be an abbreviated version of the abbreviated version we generally have. Only, I will say the blessing over the wine and that’ll be it. There’s no reason for us to go around the table and have everyone say the kiddush. So I will say the blessing and you all say Amen. Are you with me so far?”

      “Like what’s your usual?” asked Alan. “How many minutes is yours? Ours were like about fifteen minutes. Me and my cousin, Ricky, always tried to sneak in some decent wine. That Manisohewitz crap is not anybody’s