Dee looks at me as if the answer is obvious. “You look.”
Twenty-three
NAME: Willem
NATIONALITY: Dutch
AGE: 20 as of last August
GREW UP IN AMSTERDAM.
PARENTS: Yael and Bram. Mom isn’t Dutch Mom is a naturopathic doctor
1.9 meters, which is about 6’3”; 75 kilos, which is about 165 pounds.
Acted with the theater troupe Guerrilla Will last summer
This is the complete list of hard biographical facts that I have on Willem. It takes up barely a third of a page in one of my abandoned lab notebooks. When I finish, the list is like a taunt, reality’s bitchslap. You think you fell in love with someone, and this is what you know about him? Eight things? And how would I find him with these eight things? Forget looking for a needle in a haystack. That’s easy. At least it would stand out. I’m looking for one specific needle in a needle factory.
Eight things. It’s humiliating. I stare at the page and am about to tear it out and crumple it up.
But instead, I turn the page and start writing a different list. Random things. Like the amused look on his face when I admitted I’d thought he was a kidnapper. And the way he looked at the café when he found out I was an only child and asked if I was alone. The goofy happiness as he bounded around the barge with Captain Jack. How good it felt to know that I was responsible for him looking that way. The way Paris sounded under the canal. The way it looked from the back of the bike. The way his hand felt in the crook of my hip. The fierceness in his eyes when he jumped up to help those girls in the park. The reassurance of his hand, grasping mine as we ran through the streets of Paris. The raw expression on his face at the dinner table when I’d asked him why he’d brought me there. And later, at the squat, how he looked at me and I felt so big and strong and capable and brave.
I let the memories flood me as I fill one page. Then another. And then I’m not even writing about him anymore. I’m writing about me. About all the things I felt that day, including panic and jealousy, but more about feeling like the world was full of nothing but possibility.
I fill three pages. None of what I’m writing will help me find him. But in writing, I feel good—no, not just good, but full. Right, somehow. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in a long, long time, and it’s this more than anything that convinces me to look for him.
The most concrete thing on the list is Guerrilla Will, so I start there. They have a bare-basics website, which gets me pretty excited—until I see how out of date it is. It’s advertising plays from two summers ago. But still, there’s a contact tab with an email address. I spend hours composing ten different emails and then finally just delete them in favor of a simple one:
Hello:
I am trying to find a Dutch guy named Willem, age 20, who performed in last summer’s run of Twelfth Night. I saw it and met him, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and went to Paris with him last August. If anyone knows where he is, please tell him that Lulu, also known as Allyson Healey, would like him to get in touch with her. This is very important.
I list all my contact info and then I pause there for a moment, imagining the ones and zeros or whatever it is that emails are made of, traveling across oceans and mountains, landing somewhere in someone’s inbox. Who knows? Maybe even his.
And then I press Send.
Thirty seconds later, my inbox chimes. Could it be? Could it be that fast? That easy? Someone knows where he is. Or maybe he’s been looking for me all this time.
My hand shakes as I go to my inbox. Only all that’s there is the message I just sent, bounced. I check the address. I send it again. It bounces again.
“Strike one,” I tell Dee before class the next day. I explain about the bounced email.
“I don’t do sports metaphors, but I’m pretty sure baseball games are generally nine innings.”
“Meaning?”
“Dig in for the long haul.”
Professor Glenny sweeps in and starts talking about Cymbeline, the play we’re about to start, and announcing last call for tickets for As You Like It before giving a brief warning to start thinking about oral presentations at the end of the year. “You can either work alone or with your partners, do a regular presentation or something more theatrical.”
“We’ll do theatrical,” Dee whispers.
“It’s the Glenny way.”
And then we look at each other as if both getting the same idea. After class, we go up to the lectern where the usual coterie of groupies are simpering.
“Well, Rosalind, here to buy your As You Like It tickets?”
I blush. “I already bought mine. I’m actually trying to get ahold of someone I lost touch with, and I don’t have very many leads, but the one I do have is through this Shakespeare troupe that I saw in Stratford-upon-Avon last year, and they have a website, but the email bounced, but I saw them do a play less than a year ago . . . ”
“In Stratford-upon-Avon?”
“Yeah. But not at a theater. It was sort of an underground thing. It was called Guerrilla Will. They performed at the canal basin. They were really good. I actually ditched the RSC’s Hamlet to watch them do Twelfth Night.”
Professor Glenny likes this. “I see. And you’ve lost a Sebastian, have you?” I gasp and I blush but then I realize he’s just referring to the play. “I have an old mate in the tourist bureau there. Guerrilla Will, you say?”
I nod.
“I’ll see what I can dig up.”
The following week, right before spring break, Professor Glenny hands me an address. “This is what my friend found. It’s from police records. Apparently your Guerrilla Will friends have a habit of performing without permits, and this is from an old arrest. Not sure how current it is.” I look at the address. It’s for a city in England called Leeds.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome. Let me know how it ends.”
That night, I print out the copy of the email I sent to Guerrilla Will but then I change my mind and write a handwritten letter to Willem.
Dear Willem:
I’ve been trying to forget about you and our day in Paris for nine months now, but as you can see, it’s not going all that well. I guess more than anything, I want to know, did you just leave? If you did, it’s okay. I mean it’s not, but if I can know the truth, I can get over it. And if you didn’t leave, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry that I did.
I don’t know what your response will be at getting this letter, like a ghost from your past. But no matter what happened, I hope you’re okay.
I sign Lulu and Allyson and leave all my various contact details. I put it inside an envelope and write Forward to Willem, in care of Guerrilla Will. The night before I leave for spring break, I mail it.
I spend a boring break at home. Melanie’s vacation doesn’t coincide with mine, and I both miss her and feel relieved not to have to see her. I hole up in my room and prop my old science books all around me and spend the time doing Facebook searches and Twitter searches and every imaginable social networking search, but it turns out, only having a first name is kind of a problem. Especially because Willem is a pretty common Dutch name. Still, I go through hundreds of pages, staring at pictures of all different Willems, but none of them are him.
I post a Facebook page as Lulu with pictures of Louise Brooks and of me. I change the status every day, to something only he’d understand. Do you believe in accidents of the universe? Is Nutella chocolate? Is falling in love the same as being in love? I get friend requests from New Age freaks. I get requests from perverts. I get requests from a Nutella fan club in Minnesota (who knew?). But nothing from him.
I try searching for his parents. I do combination searches: Willem, Bram, Yael and then just Bram, Yael. But without a last name, I get nothing. I search every Dutch naturopathic site I can find for a Yael but come up with nothing. I Google the name Yael, and it’s a Hebrew name. Is his Mom Jewish? Israeli? Why didn’t I think to ask him any of these questions when I had the chance? But I know why. Because when I was with him, I felt like I already knew him.
Twenty-four
Spring break ends, and in Shakespeare class we start reading Cymbeline. Dee and I are halfway through, at the really juicy part where Posthumus, Imogen’s husband, sees Iachimo with the secret bracelet that he gave Imogen and decides this is proof that she cheated on him, though of course, the bracelet was stolen by Iachimo, precisely so he could win his bet with Posthumus that he could get Imogen to cheat.
“Another jumped conclusion,” Dee says, looking at me pointedly.
“Well, he did have good reason to suspect,” I say. “Iachimo totally knew things about her, what her bedroom looked like, that she had a mole on her boob.”
“Because he spied on her when she was sleeping,” Dee says. “There was an explanation.”
“I know. I know. Just like you say there might be a good explanation for Willem disappearing. But you know, sometimes you do have accept the evidence at face value. In one day, I saw Willem flirt with, get undressed by, and get a telephone number from a minimum of three girls, not counting me. That says ‘player’ to me. And I got played.”
“For a player, boy talked a lot about falling in love.”
“Falling in love, not being in love,” I say. “And with Céline.” Though when he spoke of his parents, of being stained, I recall the look on his face, one of unmasked yearning. And then I feel the heat on my wrist, as if his saliva were still wet there.
“Céline,” Dee says, snapping his fingers. “The hottie French girl.”
“She wasn’t that hot.”
Dee rolls his eyes. “Why didn’t we think of this? What’s the name of the club she worked at? Where you left your bag?”
“I have no idea.”
“Okay. Where was it?”
“Near the train station.”
“Which train station?”
I shrug. I’ve sort of blocked it all out.
Dee grabs my laptop. “Now you’re just being ornery.” He taps away. “If you came from London, you arrived at Gare du Nord.” He pronounces it Gary du Nord.
“Aren’t you clever?”
He pulls up Google Maps and then types something in. A cluster of red flags appear. “There.”
“What?”
“Those are the nightclubs near Gare du Nord. You call them. Presumably Céline works in one of them. Find her, find him.”
“Yeah, maybe in the same bed.”
“Allyson, you just said you had to have your eyes wide open.”
“I do. I just don’t ever want to see Céline again.”
“How bad do you want to find him?” Dee asks.
“I don’t know. I guess, more than anything, I want to find out what happened.”
“All the more reason to call this Céline person.”
“So I’m supposed to call all these clubs and ask for her? You forget, I don’t speak French.”
“How hard can it be?” He stops and arranges his face into a puckered expression. “Bon lacroix monsoir oui, tres, chic chic croissant French Ho-bag.” He smirks. “See? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
“Is that French too?”
“No, that’s Latin. And you can ask for the other guy too, the African.”
The Giant. Him I wouldn’t mind talking to, but of course, I don’t even know his name.
“You do it. You’re better at all that than me.”
“What you on about? I studied Spanish.”
“I just mean you’re better at voices, pretending.”
“I’ve seen you do Rosalind. And you spent a day playing Lulu, and you’re currently masquerading as a pre-med student to your parents.”
I look down, pick at my nail. “That just makes me a liar.”
Just One Day - English romantic Novel
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
“No it doesn’t. You’re just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they’re already in us. That’s why we pretend them in the first place.”
Kali is taking first-year French, so I ask her, as casually as possible, how one might ask for Céline or a Senegalese bartender whose brother lives in Rochester. At first she looks at me, shocked. It’s probably the first time I’ve asked her something more involved than “Are these socks yours?” since school started.
“Well, that would depend on lots of factors,” she says. “Who are these people? What is your relationship to them? French is a language of nuance.”
“Um, can’t they just be people I’m wanting to get on the phone?”
Kali narrows her eyes at me, turns back to her work. “Try an online translation program.”
I take a deep breath, sigh out a gust. “Fine. They are, respectively, a total bitchy beauty and a really nice guy I met once. They both work at some Parisian night club, and I feel like they might hold the key to my . . . my happiness. Does that help you with your nuance?”
Kali closes her textbook and turns to me. “Yes. And no.” She grabs a piece of paper and taps it against her chin. “Do you happen to know the brother from Rochester’s name?”
I shake my head. “He told it to me once, really fast. Why?”
She shrugs. “Just seems if you had it, you could track him down in Rochester and then find his brother.”
“Oh, my God, I didn’t even think of that. Maybe I can remember it and try that too. Thank you.”
“Amazing things happen when you ask for help.” She gives me a pointed look.
“Do you want to know the whole story?”
Her raised eyebrow says Do pigs like mud?
So I tell her, Kali, the unlikeliest of confidantes, a brief version of the saga.
“Oh. My. God. So that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you have been such a loner, always saying no to us. We thought you hated us.”
“What? No! I don’t hate you. I just felt like a reject and felt so bad you guys got stuck with me.”
Kali rolls her eyes. “I broke up with my boyfriend right before I got here, and Jenn split with her girlfriend. Why do you think I have so many pictures of Buster? Everyone was feeling sad and homesick. That’s why we partied so much.”
I shake my head. I didn’t know. I didn’t think to know. And then I laugh. “I’ve had the same best friend since I was seven. She’s the only girlfriend I’ve ever really hung out with, so it’s like I missed the integral years of learning how to be friends with people.”
“You missed nothing. Unless you missed kindergarten too.”
I stare at her helplessly. Of course I went to kindergarten.
“If you went to kindergarten, you learned how to make friends. It’s like the first thing they teach you.” She stares at me. “To make a friend . . .” she begins.
“You have to be a friend,” I finish, remembering the saying I was taught in Mrs. Finn’s class. Or maybe it was from Barney.
She smiles as she picks up the pen. “I think it’ll be simpler if you just ask for this Céline chick and the bartender from Senegal, leave out the brother, because how many Senegalese bartenders are there? Then if you get the bartender, you can ask if he has a brother in Rochester.”
“Roché Estair,” I correct. “That’s what he called it.”
“I can see why. It sounds much classier that way. Here.” She hands me a piece of paper. Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. She has written both the French and the phonetic translations. “That’s how you ask for them in French. If you want help making the calls, let me know. Friends do that.”
Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. One week later, I’ve uttered this phrase so many times—first to practice, then in a series of increasingly depressing phone calls—that I swear I’m saying it in my sleep. I make twenty-three phone calls. Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. . . . That’s what I say. And then one of three things happens: One, I get hung up on. Two, I get some form of non—and then hung up on. Those I cross off the list, a definitive no. But three is when the people launch into turbo-French, to which I am helpless to respond. Céline? Barman? Senegal? I repeat into the receiver, the words sinking like defective life rafts. I have no idea what these people are saying. Maybe they’re saying Céline and the Giant are at lunch but will be back soon. Or maybe they’re saying that Céline is here but she’s downstairs having sex with a tall Dutchman.
I take Kali up on her offer of help, and sometimes she can suss out that there is no Céline, no Senegalese bartender, but more often than not, she’s as baffled as I am. Meanwhile, she and Dee start Googling every potential Senegalese name in Rochester. We make a few embarrassing calls but come up empty.
After the twenty-fourth miserable phone call, I run out of nightclubs anywhere in the vicinity of Gare du Nord. Then I remember the name of the band on the T-shirt Céline had in the club, the one she gave to Willem—and me. I Google Sous ou Sur and look up all their tour dates. But if they played at Céline’s nightclub, it was a long time ago, because now they’re apparently broken up.
By this point, more than three weeks have passed since I mailed my letter, so I’m losing hope on that front too. The chances of finding him, never all that great, dim. But the strangest thing is, that feeling of rightness, it doesn’t. If anything, it grows brighter.
“How’s your search for Sebastian going?” Professor Glenny calls after class one day as we’re lining up to get our Cymbeline papers back. The groupies all look at me with envy. Ever since I told him about Guerrilla Will, he has a newfound respect for me. And, of course, he’s always loved Dee.
“Sort of dried up,” I tell him. “No more leads.”
He grins. “Always more leads. What is it the detectives in film always say? ‘Gotta think outside the box.’” He says the last part in a terrible New York accent. He hands me my paper. “Nice work.”
I look at the paper, at the big red A minus on it, and feel a huge rush of pride. As Dee and I walk to our next classes, I keep peeking at it, to make sure it doesn’t shape-shift into a C, though I know it won’t. I still can’t stop looking. And grinning. Dee catches me and laughs.
“For some of us, these A grades are novel,” I say.
“Oh, cry me a river. See you at four?”
“I’ll be counting the moments.”
When Dee comes in at four, he’s bouncing off the walls. “Never mind thinking outside the box—we got to look inside the box.” He holds up two DVDs from the media center. The title on one reads Pandora’s Box, and there’s a picture of a beautiful woman with sad, dark eyes and a sleek helmet of black hair. I immediately know who she is.
“How are these going to help us?”
“I don’t know. But when you open up Pandora’s Box, you never know what’s gonna fly out. We can watch them tonight. After I get off work.”
I nod. “I’ll make popcorn.”
“I’ll take some leftover cakes from the dining hall.”
“We know how to party on a Friday night.”
Later, as I’m getting ready for Dee, I see Kali in the lounge. She looks at the popcorn. “Having a snack attack?”
“Dee and I are watching some movies.” I’ve never invited Kali anywhere. And she almost always goes out on weekend nights. But I think of the help she’s offered, and what she said about being a friend, and so I invite her to join us. “It’s sort of a movie/fact-finding mission. We could use your help. You were so smart with your idea of trying to find the brother in Rochester.”
Her eyes widen. “I’d love to help. I’m so over keg parties. Jenn, wanna watch a movie with Allyson and Dee?”
“Before you say yes, be warned, they’re silent movies.”
“Cool,” Jenn says. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Neither have I, and turns out to be a little like watching Shakespeare. You have to adjust to it, to get into a rhythm. There are no words, but it’s not like a foreign film, either, where all the dialogue is subtitled. Only major pieces of dialogue are shown with words. The rest you sort of have to figure out from the actors’ expressions, from the context, from the swell of the orchestral music. You have to work a little bit.
We watch all of Pandora’s Box, which is about a beautiful party girl named Lulu, who goes from man to man. First she marries her lover, then shoots him on the eve of her wedding. She’s tried for murder but escapes jail, going into exile with her murdered husband’s son. She winds up sold into prostitution. It ends with her getting killed on Christmas Eve, by Jack the Ripper, no less. We all watch it like you’d watch a slow-motion train wreck.
After we finish, Dee pulls out the next one, Diary of a Lost Girl. “This one’s a comedy,” he jokes.
It’s not quite as bad. Lulu, though she’s not called that in this one, doesn’t die in the end. But she does get seduced, have a baby out of wedlock, get the baby taken away from her, wind up cast out and dumped in a horrible reform school. She too dabbles in prostitution.
It’s almost two in the morning when we flick on the lights. We all look at each other, bleary-eyed.
“So?” Jenn asks.
“I like her outfits,” Kali says.
“The outfits were indeed extraordinary, but not exactly enlightening.” Dee turns to me. “Any clues?”
I look around. “I got nothin’.” And really, I don’t. All this time, I’ve been thinking I was like Lulu. But I’m nothing like the girl in those movies. I wouldn’t want to be.
Jenn yawns and opens a laptop and pulls up a page on Louise Brooks, who apparently had a life as tumultuous as Lulu’s, going from A-list movie star to a shopgirl at Saks, winding up a kept woman, and finally a recluse. “But it says here she was always a rebel. She always did things her own way. And she had a lesbian affair with Greta Garbo!” Jenn smiles at that.
Kali grabs the computer and reads. “Also, she pioneered the short bobbed haircut.”
“My hair was cut into a bob when we met. I probably should’ve mentioned that.”
Kali puts the computer down and takes my hair out of its ponytail and folds it up to my chin. “Hmm. With your hair bobbed, you do sort of look like her.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. That I looked like her.”
“If he saw you that way,” Jenn says, “it means he thought you were very beautiful.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe this is all some game to him. Or calling me Lulu was a way to distance me, so he never had to learn anything about me.” But as I throw out the less romantic scenarios—and let’s be honest, the more likely ones—I don’t feel that usual clutch of shame and humiliation. With these guys at my back, nothing feels quite so fraught.
Kendra’s staying over at Jeb’s, so Kali offers her bed to Dee, and she crashes on Kendra’s bed. When all of us nestle under our covers, we call out good night to each other, like we’re in summer camp or something, and I feel that sense of rightness, stronger than ever.
Dee starts snoring straightaway, but it takes me a long time to drift off, because I’m still wondering about Lulu. Maybe it was just a name. Maybe it was just pretend. But at some point, it stopped being pretend. Because for that day, I really did become Lulu. Maybe not the Lulu from the film or the real Louise Brooks, but my own idea of what Lulu represented. Freedom. Daring. Adventure. Saying yes.
Kali is taking first-year French, so I ask her, as casually as possible, how one might ask for Céline or a Senegalese bartender whose brother lives in Rochester. At first she looks at me, shocked. It’s probably the first time I’ve asked her something more involved than “Are these socks yours?” since school started.
“Well, that would depend on lots of factors,” she says. “Who are these people? What is your relationship to them? French is a language of nuance.”
“Um, can’t they just be people I’m wanting to get on the phone?”
Kali narrows her eyes at me, turns back to her work. “Try an online translation program.”
I take a deep breath, sigh out a gust. “Fine. They are, respectively, a total bitchy beauty and a really nice guy I met once. They both work at some Parisian night club, and I feel like they might hold the key to my . . . my happiness. Does that help you with your nuance?”
Kali closes her textbook and turns to me. “Yes. And no.” She grabs a piece of paper and taps it against her chin. “Do you happen to know the brother from Rochester’s name?”
I shake my head. “He told it to me once, really fast. Why?”
She shrugs. “Just seems if you had it, you could track him down in Rochester and then find his brother.”
“Oh, my God, I didn’t even think of that. Maybe I can remember it and try that too. Thank you.”
“Amazing things happen when you ask for help.” She gives me a pointed look.
“Do you want to know the whole story?”
Her raised eyebrow says Do pigs like mud?
So I tell her, Kali, the unlikeliest of confidantes, a brief version of the saga.
“Oh. My. God. So that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you have been such a loner, always saying no to us. We thought you hated us.”
“What? No! I don’t hate you. I just felt like a reject and felt so bad you guys got stuck with me.”
Kali rolls her eyes. “I broke up with my boyfriend right before I got here, and Jenn split with her girlfriend. Why do you think I have so many pictures of Buster? Everyone was feeling sad and homesick. That’s why we partied so much.”
I shake my head. I didn’t know. I didn’t think to know. And then I laugh. “I’ve had the same best friend since I was seven. She’s the only girlfriend I’ve ever really hung out with, so it’s like I missed the integral years of learning how to be friends with people.”
“You missed nothing. Unless you missed kindergarten too.”
I stare at her helplessly. Of course I went to kindergarten.
“If you went to kindergarten, you learned how to make friends. It’s like the first thing they teach you.” She stares at me. “To make a friend . . .” she begins.
“You have to be a friend,” I finish, remembering the saying I was taught in Mrs. Finn’s class. Or maybe it was from Barney.
She smiles as she picks up the pen. “I think it’ll be simpler if you just ask for this Céline chick and the bartender from Senegal, leave out the brother, because how many Senegalese bartenders are there? Then if you get the bartender, you can ask if he has a brother in Rochester.”
“Roché Estair,” I correct. “That’s what he called it.”
“I can see why. It sounds much classier that way. Here.” She hands me a piece of paper. Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. She has written both the French and the phonetic translations. “That’s how you ask for them in French. If you want help making the calls, let me know. Friends do that.”
Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. One week later, I’ve uttered this phrase so many times—first to practice, then in a series of increasingly depressing phone calls—that I swear I’m saying it in my sleep. I make twenty-three phone calls. Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. . . . That’s what I say. And then one of three things happens: One, I get hung up on. Two, I get some form of non—and then hung up on. Those I cross off the list, a definitive no. But three is when the people launch into turbo-French, to which I am helpless to respond. Céline? Barman? Senegal? I repeat into the receiver, the words sinking like defective life rafts. I have no idea what these people are saying. Maybe they’re saying Céline and the Giant are at lunch but will be back soon. Or maybe they’re saying that Céline is here but she’s downstairs having sex with a tall Dutchman.
I take Kali up on her offer of help, and sometimes she can suss out that there is no Céline, no Senegalese bartender, but more often than not, she’s as baffled as I am. Meanwhile, she and Dee start Googling every potential Senegalese name in Rochester. We make a few embarrassing calls but come up empty.
After the twenty-fourth miserable phone call, I run out of nightclubs anywhere in the vicinity of Gare du Nord. Then I remember the name of the band on the T-shirt Céline had in the club, the one she gave to Willem—and me. I Google Sous ou Sur and look up all their tour dates. But if they played at Céline’s nightclub, it was a long time ago, because now they’re apparently broken up.
By this point, more than three weeks have passed since I mailed my letter, so I’m losing hope on that front too. The chances of finding him, never all that great, dim. But the strangest thing is, that feeling of rightness, it doesn’t. If anything, it grows brighter.
“How’s your search for Sebastian going?” Professor Glenny calls after class one day as we’re lining up to get our Cymbeline papers back. The groupies all look at me with envy. Ever since I told him about Guerrilla Will, he has a newfound respect for me. And, of course, he’s always loved Dee.
“Sort of dried up,” I tell him. “No more leads.”
He grins. “Always more leads. What is it the detectives in film always say? ‘Gotta think outside the box.’” He says the last part in a terrible New York accent. He hands me my paper. “Nice work.”
I look at the paper, at the big red A minus on it, and feel a huge rush of pride. As Dee and I walk to our next classes, I keep peeking at it, to make sure it doesn’t shape-shift into a C, though I know it won’t. I still can’t stop looking. And grinning. Dee catches me and laughs.
“For some of us, these A grades are novel,” I say.
“Oh, cry me a river. See you at four?”
“I’ll be counting the moments.”
When Dee comes in at four, he’s bouncing off the walls. “Never mind thinking outside the box—we got to look inside the box.” He holds up two DVDs from the media center. The title on one reads Pandora’s Box, and there’s a picture of a beautiful woman with sad, dark eyes and a sleek helmet of black hair. I immediately know who she is.
“How are these going to help us?”
“I don’t know. But when you open up Pandora’s Box, you never know what’s gonna fly out. We can watch them tonight. After I get off work.”
I nod. “I’ll make popcorn.”
“I’ll take some leftover cakes from the dining hall.”
“We know how to party on a Friday night.”
Later, as I’m getting ready for Dee, I see Kali in the lounge. She looks at the popcorn. “Having a snack attack?”
“Dee and I are watching some movies.” I’ve never invited Kali anywhere. And she almost always goes out on weekend nights. But I think of the help she’s offered, and what she said about being a friend, and so I invite her to join us. “It’s sort of a movie/fact-finding mission. We could use your help. You were so smart with your idea of trying to find the brother in Rochester.”
Her eyes widen. “I’d love to help. I’m so over keg parties. Jenn, wanna watch a movie with Allyson and Dee?”
“Before you say yes, be warned, they’re silent movies.”
“Cool,” Jenn says. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Neither have I, and turns out to be a little like watching Shakespeare. You have to adjust to it, to get into a rhythm. There are no words, but it’s not like a foreign film, either, where all the dialogue is subtitled. Only major pieces of dialogue are shown with words. The rest you sort of have to figure out from the actors’ expressions, from the context, from the swell of the orchestral music. You have to work a little bit.
We watch all of Pandora’s Box, which is about a beautiful party girl named Lulu, who goes from man to man. First she marries her lover, then shoots him on the eve of her wedding. She’s tried for murder but escapes jail, going into exile with her murdered husband’s son. She winds up sold into prostitution. It ends with her getting killed on Christmas Eve, by Jack the Ripper, no less. We all watch it like you’d watch a slow-motion train wreck.
After we finish, Dee pulls out the next one, Diary of a Lost Girl. “This one’s a comedy,” he jokes.
It’s not quite as bad. Lulu, though she’s not called that in this one, doesn’t die in the end. But she does get seduced, have a baby out of wedlock, get the baby taken away from her, wind up cast out and dumped in a horrible reform school. She too dabbles in prostitution.
It’s almost two in the morning when we flick on the lights. We all look at each other, bleary-eyed.
“So?” Jenn asks.
“I like her outfits,” Kali says.
“The outfits were indeed extraordinary, but not exactly enlightening.” Dee turns to me. “Any clues?”
I look around. “I got nothin’.” And really, I don’t. All this time, I’ve been thinking I was like Lulu. But I’m nothing like the girl in those movies. I wouldn’t want to be.
Jenn yawns and opens a laptop and pulls up a page on Louise Brooks, who apparently had a life as tumultuous as Lulu’s, going from A-list movie star to a shopgirl at Saks, winding up a kept woman, and finally a recluse. “But it says here she was always a rebel. She always did things her own way. And she had a lesbian affair with Greta Garbo!” Jenn smiles at that.
Kali grabs the computer and reads. “Also, she pioneered the short bobbed haircut.”
“My hair was cut into a bob when we met. I probably should’ve mentioned that.”
Kali puts the computer down and takes my hair out of its ponytail and folds it up to my chin. “Hmm. With your hair bobbed, you do sort of look like her.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. That I looked like her.”
“If he saw you that way,” Jenn says, “it means he thought you were very beautiful.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe this is all some game to him. Or calling me Lulu was a way to distance me, so he never had to learn anything about me.” But as I throw out the less romantic scenarios—and let’s be honest, the more likely ones—I don’t feel that usual clutch of shame and humiliation. With these guys at my back, nothing feels quite so fraught.
Kendra’s staying over at Jeb’s, so Kali offers her bed to Dee, and she crashes on Kendra’s bed. When all of us nestle under our covers, we call out good night to each other, like we’re in summer camp or something, and I feel that sense of rightness, stronger than ever.
Dee starts snoring straightaway, but it takes me a long time to drift off, because I’m still wondering about Lulu. Maybe it was just a name. Maybe it was just pretend. But at some point, it stopped being pretend. Because for that day, I really did become Lulu. Maybe not the Lulu from the film or the real Louise Brooks, but my own idea of what Lulu represented. Freedom. Daring. Adventure. Saying yes.
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
I realize it’s not just Willem I’m looking for; it’s Lulu, too.
Twenty-five
APRIL
Miami Beach
Mom and Dad are waiting for me at my gate in the Miami airport, Mom having arranged for their flight to get in a half hour before mine. I’d hoped I might have gotten out of this year’s Passover Seder. I just saw Mom and Dad for spring break a few weeks ago, and coming down for Seder means taking a day off from school. But no such luck. Tradition is tradition, and Passover is the one time of year we go to Grandma’s.
I love Grandma, and even if the Seders are always mind-numbingly dull and you take your life in your own hands eating so much of Grandma’s home cooking, that’s not why I dread them.
Grandma makes Mom crazy, which means that whenever we’re visiting, Mom makes us crazy. When Grandma visits us at home, it’s dealable. Mom can get away, go vent to Susan, play tennis, organize the calendar, go to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe I don’t need. But when we’re at Grandma’s old-people condo in Miami Beach, it’s like being trapped on a geriatric island.
Mom starts in on me at the baggage claim, sniping at me for not sending thank-you notes out for my birthday presents, which means she must have asked Grandma and Susan if they’d gotten theirs. Because other than Jenn and Kali—who baked me a cake—and Dee—who took me out to his favorite food truck in Boston for dinner—and Mom and Dad, of course, there was no one else to send thank-you cards to this year. Melanie didn’t send anything. She just posted a greeting on my Facebook page.
Once we get into a cab (the second one, Mom having rejected the first one because the AC was too weak—no one is safe from Mom when she’s on a Grandma trajectory)—she starts in on me about my summer plans.
Back in February, when she first brought this up, asking what I was going to do over the summer, I told her I had no idea. Then, a few weeks later, at the end of spring break, she announced that she had made some inquiries on my behalf and used some connections and now had two promising offers. One is working in a lab at one of the pharmaceutical companies near Philadelphia. The other is working in one of Dad’s doctor friend’s offices, a proctologist named Dr. Baumgartner (Melanie used to call him Dr. Bum-Gardner). Neither job would be paid, she explained, but she and Dad had discussed it and decided they’d counter the loss with a generous allowance. She looked so pleased with herself. Both jobs would look excellent on my résumé, would go a long way toward offsetting what she referred to as the “debacle” of my first term.
I’d been so irritated, I’d almost told her that I couldn’t take those internships because I wasn’t qualified; I wasn’t pre-med. Just to spite her. Just to see the look on her face. But then I’d gotten scared. I was getting an A in Shakespeare Out Loud. An A minus in Mandarin, which was a first for me. A solid B in my biology class and labs, and an A in ceramics. I realized I was actually proud of how well I was doing in my classes and I didn’t want Mom’s inevitable and perennial disappointment to poison that. But that was going to happen no matter what, though I was sticking to my plan A—to show her my final grades when I made the announcement.
But finals are still three weeks away, and Mom is breathing down my neck right now about these jobs. So as we pull into Grandma’s high-rise, I tell her that I’m still mulling it over and then I skip out of the cab to help Dad with the bags.
It’s so strange. Mom is the most formidable person I know, but when Grandma opens the door, Mom seems to shrink, as if Grandma is some ogre instead of a five-foot bottle blonde in a yellow tracksuit and a KISS THE MESHUGGENEH COOK apron. Grandma grabs me in a fierce hug that smells of Shalimar and chicken fat. “Ally! Let me look at you! You’re doing something different with your hair! I saw the pictures on Facebook.”
“You’re on Facebook?” Mom asks.
“Ally and I are friends, aren’t we?” She winks at me.
I see Mom wince. I’m not sure if it’s because Grandma and I are FB friends or because Grandma insists on shortening my name.
We step inside. Grandma’s boyfriend, Phil, is asleep on the big floral couch. A basketball game blares from the giant television.
Grandma touches my hair. It’s to my shoulders now. I haven’t cut it since last summer. “It was shorter before,” I say. “It’s sort of in between.”
“It’s better than it was. That bob was awful!” Mom says.
“It was a bob, Mom. Not a Mohawk.”
“I know what it was. But it made you look like a boy.”
I turn to Grandma. “Was she traumatized by a bad haircut in her youth? Because she seems unwilling to let this go.”
Grandma claps her hands. “Oh, Ally, you might be right. When she was ten, she saw Rosemary’s Baby and begged me to take her to the children’s beauty parlor. She kept making the lady go shorter until it was all off, and as we were leaving the salon, another mother pointed Ellie out to her son and said, ‘Why don’t you get a haircut like that nice little boy?’” She looks at Mom, smiling. “I didn’t realize that still upset you, Ellie.”
“It doesn’t upset me, because it never happened, Mother. I never saw Rosemary’s Baby. And if I had, at ten, that would’ve been entirely inappropriate, by the way.”
“I can show you the pictures!”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Grandma eyes Mom’s hair. “You might think of trying that pixie again now. I think you’ve been wearing the same style since Bill Clinton was president.” Grandma gives another wicked grin.
Mom seems to shrink another inch as she touches her hair—straight, brown, in a low ponytail. Grandma leaves her like that, pulling me into the kitchen. “You want some cookies? I have some macaroons.”
“Macaroons are not cookies, Grandma. They’re coconut cookie substitutes. And they’re disgusting.” Grandma doesn’t keep anything in the house with flour during Passover.
“Let’s see what else I have.” I follow Grandma into the kitchen. She pours me some of her diet lemonade. “Your mom is having such a hard time,” Grandma says. When Mom’s out of sight, she’s sympathetic, almost defending her, like I was the one who riled her up.
“I don’t see why. She has a charmed life.”
“Funny, that’s what she says about you whenever she thinks you’re being ungrateful.” Grandma opens the oven door to check on something. “She’s having a hard time adjusting, with you being gone. You’re all she’s got.”
I feel a pit in my stomach. Another way I’ve let Mom down.
Grandma puts out a plate of those gross jelly candies I can never resist. “I told her she should have another child, give her something to do with herself.”
I spit out my lemonade. “She’s forty-seven.”
“She could adopt.” Grandma waves her hand. “One of those Chinese orphans. Lucy Rosenbaum got a cute one as a granddaughter.”
“They’re not dogs, Grandma!”
“I know that. Still, she could get an older one. It’s a real mitzvah then.”
“Did you tell Mom that?”
“Of course I did.”
Grandma always brings up things the rest of us don’t. Like she lights a memorial candle on the anniversary of when Mom had her miscarriage all those years ago. This, too, drives Mom crazy.
“She needs to do something if she’s not going back to work.” She glances out toward the living room. I know Mom and Grandma fight about Mom not working. Once, Grandma sent a clipping from a news magazine about how badly the ex-wives of doctors fared financially in the event of divorce. They didn’t speak for months after that.
Mom comes into the kitchen. She glances at the jelly candy. “Mother, can you feed her some real food, please?”
“Oh, cool your jets. She can feed herself. She’s nineteen now.” She winks at me, then turns to Mom. “Why don’t you take some cold cuts out?”
Mom pokes in Grandma’s refrigerator. “Where’s the brisket? It’s almost two now. We should put it in soon.”
“Oh, it’s already cooking,” Grandma says.
“What time did you put in?”
“Don’t you worry. I got a nice recipe from the paper.”
“How long has it been in?” Mom peeks in the oven. “It’s not that big. It shouldn’t take longer than three hours. And you have to cover it in foil. Also you have the heat way up. Brisket’s meant to slow-cook. We’re starting the Seder at five? When did it go in?”
“Never you mind.”
“It’ll be like leather.”
“Do I tell you how to cook in your kitchen?”
“Yes. All the time. But I don’t listen. And we’ve dodged many a case of food poisoning because of it.”
“Enough of your smart mouth.”
“I think I’ll go change,” I announce. But neither one is paying attention to me anymore.
I go into the spare room and find Dad hiding in there, looking wistfully at a golf shirt. “What are the chances I can escape for a round?”
“You’d have to throw down some plagues at the Pharaoh first.” I look out the window to the silver-blue strip of sea.
He puts the golf shirt back in the suitcase. How quickly we all give in to her. This Seder means nothing to him. Dad’s not even Jewish, though he celebrates all the holidays with Mom. Grandma was supposedly furious when Mom got engaged to him, though after Grandpa died, she took up with Phil, who’s not Jewish, either.
“I was just kidding,” I say, even though I wasn’t. “Why don’t you just go?”
Dad shakes his head. “Your mom needs backup.”
I scoff, as if Mom needs anything from anyone.
Dad changes the subject. “We saw Melanie last weekend.”
“Oh, really?”
“Her band had a gig in Philadelphia, so she made a rare appearance.”
She’s in a band now? So she can become Mel 4.0—and I’m supposed to stay reliably me? I smile tightly at my dad, pretending like I know this.
“Frank, I can’t find my Seder plate,” Grandma calls. “I had it out for a polish.”
“Just visualize the last place you had it,” Dad says. Then he gives me a little shrug and heads off to help. After the Seder plate is located, he helps Grandma get down serving bowls, and then I hear Mom tell him to keep Phil company, so he sits and watches the basketball with napping Phil. So much for golf. I go out onto the balcony and listen to the competing sounds of Mom and Grandma’s bickering and the game on the TV. My life feels so small it itches, like a too-tight wool sweater.
“I’m going for a walk,” I announce, even though there’s no one on the balcony but me. I put on my shoes and slip out the door and walk down to the beach. I take off my shoes and run up and down the shore. The rhythmic beat of my feet on the wet sand seems to churn something out of me, pushing it through the sweat on my sticky skin. After a while, I stop and sit down and look out over the water. On the other side is Europe. Somewhere over there is him. And somewhere over there, a different version of me.
When I get back, Mom tells me to shower and set the table. At five, we sit down, settling in for a long night of reenacting the Jews’ escape from slavery in ancient Egypt, which is supposed to be an act of liberation, but somehow with Mom and Grandma glowering at each other, it always winds up feeling just like more oppression. At least the adults can get drunk. You have to down, like, four glasses of wine during the night. I, of course, get grape juice, in my own crystal carafe. At least I usually do. This time when I go to drink my first sip of juice after the first blessing, I almost choke. It’s wine. I think it’s a mistake, except Grandma catches my eye and winks.
Twenty-five
APRIL
Miami Beach
Mom and Dad are waiting for me at my gate in the Miami airport, Mom having arranged for their flight to get in a half hour before mine. I’d hoped I might have gotten out of this year’s Passover Seder. I just saw Mom and Dad for spring break a few weeks ago, and coming down for Seder means taking a day off from school. But no such luck. Tradition is tradition, and Passover is the one time of year we go to Grandma’s.
I love Grandma, and even if the Seders are always mind-numbingly dull and you take your life in your own hands eating so much of Grandma’s home cooking, that’s not why I dread them.
Grandma makes Mom crazy, which means that whenever we’re visiting, Mom makes us crazy. When Grandma visits us at home, it’s dealable. Mom can get away, go vent to Susan, play tennis, organize the calendar, go to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe I don’t need. But when we’re at Grandma’s old-people condo in Miami Beach, it’s like being trapped on a geriatric island.
Mom starts in on me at the baggage claim, sniping at me for not sending thank-you notes out for my birthday presents, which means she must have asked Grandma and Susan if they’d gotten theirs. Because other than Jenn and Kali—who baked me a cake—and Dee—who took me out to his favorite food truck in Boston for dinner—and Mom and Dad, of course, there was no one else to send thank-you cards to this year. Melanie didn’t send anything. She just posted a greeting on my Facebook page.
Once we get into a cab (the second one, Mom having rejected the first one because the AC was too weak—no one is safe from Mom when she’s on a Grandma trajectory)—she starts in on me about my summer plans.
Back in February, when she first brought this up, asking what I was going to do over the summer, I told her I had no idea. Then, a few weeks later, at the end of spring break, she announced that she had made some inquiries on my behalf and used some connections and now had two promising offers. One is working in a lab at one of the pharmaceutical companies near Philadelphia. The other is working in one of Dad’s doctor friend’s offices, a proctologist named Dr. Baumgartner (Melanie used to call him Dr. Bum-Gardner). Neither job would be paid, she explained, but she and Dad had discussed it and decided they’d counter the loss with a generous allowance. She looked so pleased with herself. Both jobs would look excellent on my résumé, would go a long way toward offsetting what she referred to as the “debacle” of my first term.
I’d been so irritated, I’d almost told her that I couldn’t take those internships because I wasn’t qualified; I wasn’t pre-med. Just to spite her. Just to see the look on her face. But then I’d gotten scared. I was getting an A in Shakespeare Out Loud. An A minus in Mandarin, which was a first for me. A solid B in my biology class and labs, and an A in ceramics. I realized I was actually proud of how well I was doing in my classes and I didn’t want Mom’s inevitable and perennial disappointment to poison that. But that was going to happen no matter what, though I was sticking to my plan A—to show her my final grades when I made the announcement.
But finals are still three weeks away, and Mom is breathing down my neck right now about these jobs. So as we pull into Grandma’s high-rise, I tell her that I’m still mulling it over and then I skip out of the cab to help Dad with the bags.
It’s so strange. Mom is the most formidable person I know, but when Grandma opens the door, Mom seems to shrink, as if Grandma is some ogre instead of a five-foot bottle blonde in a yellow tracksuit and a KISS THE MESHUGGENEH COOK apron. Grandma grabs me in a fierce hug that smells of Shalimar and chicken fat. “Ally! Let me look at you! You’re doing something different with your hair! I saw the pictures on Facebook.”
“You’re on Facebook?” Mom asks.
“Ally and I are friends, aren’t we?” She winks at me.
I see Mom wince. I’m not sure if it’s because Grandma and I are FB friends or because Grandma insists on shortening my name.
We step inside. Grandma’s boyfriend, Phil, is asleep on the big floral couch. A basketball game blares from the giant television.
Grandma touches my hair. It’s to my shoulders now. I haven’t cut it since last summer. “It was shorter before,” I say. “It’s sort of in between.”
“It’s better than it was. That bob was awful!” Mom says.
“It was a bob, Mom. Not a Mohawk.”
“I know what it was. But it made you look like a boy.”
I turn to Grandma. “Was she traumatized by a bad haircut in her youth? Because she seems unwilling to let this go.”
Grandma claps her hands. “Oh, Ally, you might be right. When she was ten, she saw Rosemary’s Baby and begged me to take her to the children’s beauty parlor. She kept making the lady go shorter until it was all off, and as we were leaving the salon, another mother pointed Ellie out to her son and said, ‘Why don’t you get a haircut like that nice little boy?’” She looks at Mom, smiling. “I didn’t realize that still upset you, Ellie.”
“It doesn’t upset me, because it never happened, Mother. I never saw Rosemary’s Baby. And if I had, at ten, that would’ve been entirely inappropriate, by the way.”
“I can show you the pictures!”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Grandma eyes Mom’s hair. “You might think of trying that pixie again now. I think you’ve been wearing the same style since Bill Clinton was president.” Grandma gives another wicked grin.
Mom seems to shrink another inch as she touches her hair—straight, brown, in a low ponytail. Grandma leaves her like that, pulling me into the kitchen. “You want some cookies? I have some macaroons.”
“Macaroons are not cookies, Grandma. They’re coconut cookie substitutes. And they’re disgusting.” Grandma doesn’t keep anything in the house with flour during Passover.
“Let’s see what else I have.” I follow Grandma into the kitchen. She pours me some of her diet lemonade. “Your mom is having such a hard time,” Grandma says. When Mom’s out of sight, she’s sympathetic, almost defending her, like I was the one who riled her up.
“I don’t see why. She has a charmed life.”
“Funny, that’s what she says about you whenever she thinks you’re being ungrateful.” Grandma opens the oven door to check on something. “She’s having a hard time adjusting, with you being gone. You’re all she’s got.”
I feel a pit in my stomach. Another way I’ve let Mom down.
Grandma puts out a plate of those gross jelly candies I can never resist. “I told her she should have another child, give her something to do with herself.”
I spit out my lemonade. “She’s forty-seven.”
“She could adopt.” Grandma waves her hand. “One of those Chinese orphans. Lucy Rosenbaum got a cute one as a granddaughter.”
“They’re not dogs, Grandma!”
“I know that. Still, she could get an older one. It’s a real mitzvah then.”
“Did you tell Mom that?”
“Of course I did.”
Grandma always brings up things the rest of us don’t. Like she lights a memorial candle on the anniversary of when Mom had her miscarriage all those years ago. This, too, drives Mom crazy.
“She needs to do something if she’s not going back to work.” She glances out toward the living room. I know Mom and Grandma fight about Mom not working. Once, Grandma sent a clipping from a news magazine about how badly the ex-wives of doctors fared financially in the event of divorce. They didn’t speak for months after that.
Mom comes into the kitchen. She glances at the jelly candy. “Mother, can you feed her some real food, please?”
“Oh, cool your jets. She can feed herself. She’s nineteen now.” She winks at me, then turns to Mom. “Why don’t you take some cold cuts out?”
Mom pokes in Grandma’s refrigerator. “Where’s the brisket? It’s almost two now. We should put it in soon.”
“Oh, it’s already cooking,” Grandma says.
“What time did you put in?”
“Don’t you worry. I got a nice recipe from the paper.”
“How long has it been in?” Mom peeks in the oven. “It’s not that big. It shouldn’t take longer than three hours. And you have to cover it in foil. Also you have the heat way up. Brisket’s meant to slow-cook. We’re starting the Seder at five? When did it go in?”
“Never you mind.”
“It’ll be like leather.”
“Do I tell you how to cook in your kitchen?”
“Yes. All the time. But I don’t listen. And we’ve dodged many a case of food poisoning because of it.”
“Enough of your smart mouth.”
“I think I’ll go change,” I announce. But neither one is paying attention to me anymore.
I go into the spare room and find Dad hiding in there, looking wistfully at a golf shirt. “What are the chances I can escape for a round?”
“You’d have to throw down some plagues at the Pharaoh first.” I look out the window to the silver-blue strip of sea.
He puts the golf shirt back in the suitcase. How quickly we all give in to her. This Seder means nothing to him. Dad’s not even Jewish, though he celebrates all the holidays with Mom. Grandma was supposedly furious when Mom got engaged to him, though after Grandpa died, she took up with Phil, who’s not Jewish, either.
“I was just kidding,” I say, even though I wasn’t. “Why don’t you just go?”
Dad shakes his head. “Your mom needs backup.”
I scoff, as if Mom needs anything from anyone.
Dad changes the subject. “We saw Melanie last weekend.”
“Oh, really?”
“Her band had a gig in Philadelphia, so she made a rare appearance.”
She’s in a band now? So she can become Mel 4.0—and I’m supposed to stay reliably me? I smile tightly at my dad, pretending like I know this.
“Frank, I can’t find my Seder plate,” Grandma calls. “I had it out for a polish.”
“Just visualize the last place you had it,” Dad says. Then he gives me a little shrug and heads off to help. After the Seder plate is located, he helps Grandma get down serving bowls, and then I hear Mom tell him to keep Phil company, so he sits and watches the basketball with napping Phil. So much for golf. I go out onto the balcony and listen to the competing sounds of Mom and Grandma’s bickering and the game on the TV. My life feels so small it itches, like a too-tight wool sweater.
“I’m going for a walk,” I announce, even though there’s no one on the balcony but me. I put on my shoes and slip out the door and walk down to the beach. I take off my shoes and run up and down the shore. The rhythmic beat of my feet on the wet sand seems to churn something out of me, pushing it through the sweat on my sticky skin. After a while, I stop and sit down and look out over the water. On the other side is Europe. Somewhere over there is him. And somewhere over there, a different version of me.
When I get back, Mom tells me to shower and set the table. At five, we sit down, settling in for a long night of reenacting the Jews’ escape from slavery in ancient Egypt, which is supposed to be an act of liberation, but somehow with Mom and Grandma glowering at each other, it always winds up feeling just like more oppression. At least the adults can get drunk. You have to down, like, four glasses of wine during the night. I, of course, get grape juice, in my own crystal carafe. At least I usually do. This time when I go to drink my first sip of juice after the first blessing, I almost choke. It’s wine. I think it’s a mistake, except Grandma catches my eye and winks.