The Last Jewish Virgin

Chapter 7

30 7 A nother uneventful week passed, and then on Friday night, the night before I was to pose for Mr. Rock, I lay in bed, miserable, eyes shut tight, trying to will myself to sleep. As on most Friday nights, my mother was at Tante Molly’s apartment , observing Shabbat with her, lighting candles and reciting feminist prayers. To my surprise, I found myself missing the predictable comfort of their Shabbat ritual, although I hadn’t participated in ages. I’d stopped right after my bat mitzvah, despite knowing how much I was hurting my mother. I opened my eyes once more and gazed up at the ceiling, noticing for the first time an intricately swirling pattern in the faded white paint above me, which slowly began to coalesce into a detailed image: Once again I’m standing on the rim of that deep, moon-like crater, across from Mr. Rock. The landscape is exactly the same, craggy and pockmarked, as though the site of some recent major devastation. Again I wear my vampire outfit, and he wears all black. I’m unable to reach across to him. I throw my head back, exposing my neck, longing for him. And then, as suddenly as it appeared, the vision vanished, and the ceiling returned to its original form. As if to ground myself, I pressed my body hard into the mattress, and fell asleep. Janice Eidus 31 I awoke just as the sun rose in the sky like a splash of lemon. I sat up, feeling almost paralyzed with confusion. Had my unhealthy desire for Mr. Rock completely unhinged me? No, I was fine. I had known people who really had gone off the deep end, a few girls back in high school who’d become anorexic, for instance, and had to be hospitalized. One girl who cut herself. One who ran up all her mother’s credit cards and heard voices. I was nothing like them. I was simply sleep-deprived and worried about my new so-called job as Mr. Rock’s model. In the bathroom, as I splashed cold water on my face, an unfamiliar loneliness descended like a heavy weight upon my chest. Towel-drying my face, I wondered whose presence would alleviate this rock-solid loneliness. Was it the artistic, friendly, Colin Abel with his creamy skin and deep-set, amber eyes? Or the sadistic, black-clad Mr. Rock, the featured player in my disturbing dreams and visions? Or was it my own presence I longed for, the presence of The Last Jewish Virgin, the self-contained young woman I had been not so very long before? I dragged myself to the kitchen where my mother sat at the table in her old grey bathrobe with baggy sweat socks on her feet. This was a familiar sight, as was the way she was writing with an old-fashioned leaky ballpoint pen in a lined spiral notebook. Probably, she’d been up for quite a while. She was working on her new book, Jewish Madwomen Speak, an anthology that she and Tante Molly were coediting. The summer before, I’d gone out with them for lunch at a noisy Mexican restaurant to celebrate their signing the contract with a publisher. They were as excited as schoolgirls. “Molly and I are going to invite Jewish women in the arts, sciences , medicine, politics, and anything else we can think of,” my mother said to me, “women who’ve been called eccentric, crazy, ball-busting, bad Jews, you name it, about the influence—positive and negative—of feminism and Judaism in their lives.” Dipping a crisp corn chip into the spicy guacamole we three were sharing, she added, “And we’ll ask them how they reconcile and connect the two—if they do.” 32 The Last Jewish Virgin I sensed that she wanted me to be as excited as they were, and I believed that I was trying to be. “That’s great,” I said, immediately aware that my flat voice was a tip-off that I wasn’t trying as hard as I wanted to think that I was. Tante Molly’s braided hair had been nearly hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat that she periodically removed to fan herself with, since the restaurant’s air conditioning was on the blink. She sipped a salty Margarita. Unlike my mother, she drank freely in front of me...