You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs. Laurie Graff

Dubya, looking oh so presidential in jeans and cowboy boots, give another inspiring speech recited off a TelePrompTer. I’d never have to hang around and watch people I love grow sick and die, or witness my young face and body turn old. I’d never get some awful disease, shrivel up in the hospital, and lose my dignity while chin hairs grew unruly and unattended. I wouldn’t have to look for a new agent, and I could finally stop dating.

      Good idea. Now. How?

      Instantly every idea seems awful. No guns. No razors. No noose and no ovens. The only possibility would be pills, and who am I kidding? I don’t have a prescription and I’m not going to get one, because I’m never going to do this. I don’t want to die. I want to get a great acting job, and fall in love, and get married. I want to honeymoon in Italy, and buy a huge co-op on Central Park West. I want to go to Zabar’s, and eat cherry cheese strudel.

      With the exception of the cherry cheese strudel, dying seems easier to accomplish. But if I screwed up, which I would because I don’t want to do it, it would only be interpreted as a call for help. Then I’d have to use the balance of my medical insurance to go to some kind of rehab and therapy, and for sure I would lose my apartment. By the time I got back rents would be even more expensive, even more of the good guys would be taken, and everyone would point at me as the one who tried to off herself. It would probably go on my permanent record. No. It’s easier to take two Tylenol, warm up some hot milk, read a chapter of Heartburn and a few tarot cards until I fall back to sleep.

      Forget that. I cannot sleep. I am obsessed. Forty and single. My God, wait, I’m forty-five and single! How did this happen? Oh, so what if I am forty-five and single. So was my mother when she married Henry. No, Millie was just forty. And she was Divorced With Child Single, not Never Been Down That Aisle Single. Still, how much worse is it than when I was thirty and single? Or thirty-five and single? Or fort— Oh… Ohh…

      Much worse. Much, much worse.

      Decades of people’s good-intentioned sayings flash before me.

      “It only takes one.”

      “There’s lots of other fish in the sea.”

      “When it’s right, you know.”

      “You’re next.”

      “Every pot has a cover.”

      “When it’s your time, it will just happen.”

      “Let go and it will come to you.”

      “You never know what a day brings.”

      “What’s yours is still out there.”

      “Trust in the universe. All unfolds according to plan.”

      Decades of dates flash before me. I think about those men. What were their names? Oh yeah, I remember…and then there was that completely idiotic…and, OH!!, that was truly…

      Hmmm… I can think about that. Those stories. Count them like sheep. Instead of feeling mortified, maybe I can laugh. Embrace it. Rejoice. This is it. This is my life!

      Well, I don’t have to go that far, but it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to simply accept it as mine. I’m still here. I’m not dead and I can still date. And maybe it’s really not so horrific. Maybe it’s not such a big deal. Maybe you just have to kiss a lot of frogs.

      2

      Wake Me When We Get There

      Flashback—Easter Week

      Brooklyn, NY 1969

      My mother took me to my favorite store, The Little Princess, on Queens Boulevard to buy the dress. It was dark-blue velvet with an empire waist, and a white satin ribbon that tied under the breasts, though I didn’t have any yet. I wore it when she married Henry.

      It was a nice wedding. I was the flower girl. I walked between the folding chairs, and threw rose petals on the hardwood floors of Rabbi Bernstein’s study. Millie, my mother, thought that was a goyishe thing to do, but I had insisted since they always did it that way on TV. The rabbi forgot to pour the wine into the glass, and Henry pretended to drink it during the prayers so as not to hurt his feelings. My mother laughed so hard she shook, and my grandma Rose thought she was crying.

      “Now she’s finally taken care of,” my grandma told me when she tucked me into bed that night. I got to stay with my grandma while my mother and Henry went to Miami for their honeymoon. I was sleeping in Grandpa Lou’s bed. My grandparents had had single beds throughout their marriage. Grandpa Lou died three years ago. I was eight. The year before he died my mother brought me to Brooklyn for my Easter vacation to learn how to swim at the local YMCA. It was a special program that guaranteed that in just five days every child would learn how to swim. Faithfully every morning, Grandpa Lou and I walked what felt like miles to the Y. He waited in the lobby while I took my swimming lesson. The instructors called me Blue Eyes and told me I had the prettiest bathing suits. I wore a different one each day. But I hardly got them wet. I only sat on the ledge of the pool like a beauty queen or waded in the shallow end. I didn’t want to go in the water. It was cold. I was scared. After every lesson I would see Grandpa Lou and cry. He didn’t want me to go back. He and Grandma Rose had a big argument about it.

      “Gants gut meshuggeh with the swimming lessons,” I heard him tell Grandma Rose in the kitchen. “She’s going to get pneumonia.”

      “Sha! The kinder will hear.” Grandma Rose talked in a loud hushed voice. She talked in English and Yiddish. “Millie wants her to learn how to swim,” said my grandmother.

      I didn’t want to stop going. I just wanted to stop being scared, and I didn’t know how to do that. So every day we went. Every day I cried. Every day they fought.

      At the end of the week my grandmother came down with hives, and my mother came to the final class to see my progress. Every kid swam the length of the pool except me. With much coaxing I was able to do a ball float. I didn’t learn how to swim until Henry taught me.

      I lay in Grandpa Lou’s bed and thought about how he would come in the locker room after each lesson. “Cover up,” he said, while he took off his coat and put it over my bathing suit. I could tell Grandma Rose was thinking about him, too, as she tucked me in.

      “Are you in tight, mamala?” she asked. She brushed a few wisps of hair off my face and stuck them behind my ear. “You’ll see, Karrie, one day you’ll be a bride. You’ll marry a rich man. He’ll buy you a big diamond ring, and he’ll take care of you. And you’ll do it right the first time. Not like your mother. Okay. That’s finished. Henry’s a good man. A mensch. Not like your father, that clown.”

      She wasn’t joking. My real father had run off to join the circus when I was four. At least that’s what I thought. For a few years we received postcards from around the country saying, “Hi, Cookie! What’s doin’ tips and all? The circus has come to town. Love, Mel.”

      My mother said he wasn’t really at the circus, he just wrote that. And I wasn’t sure if writing to “Cookie” meant writing to me or my mom. But I always pictured him eating fire and jumping through hoops. Traveling across the country, and putting up circus tents. After a while the cards stopped, and I forgot about him.

      Then about a year after the swimming lessons, my mom told me one night that Maggie McGraw from the apartment upstairs would be watching me because she had to pay a shiva call. She told me that Henry Eisenberg’s wife had died. I knew Henry Eisenberg from the neighborhood and he was always nice to me. He lived in the apartment building around the corner.

      My mother went to his building that night and took the elevator to the sixth floor. When she got off the elevator she saw an open door. She looked at the name on the door and walked in. Millie said it was raining and she left her wet umbrella in the hall.

      My mother went in the living room and sat down. A lit memorial candle burned on the end table. The only person there was an old man. He was sitting on a cardboard box that was supposed to look like a wood crate. That’s what people sat on when they had to sit shiva.