I follow up with, “What do you want to do?”
This seems to me to be a pretty straightforward question. But she looks at me with this total incomprehension, like she’s watching footage of the world being blown up, and I’m the little blurb on the corner of the screen saying what the weather is like outside.
I try again.
“You hungry?”
She just holds her hand to her mouth and looks out the front windshield.
“You thirsty?”
For all I know, she’s counting the streetlamps.
“Know any other bands playing?”
Tumbleweed blowing down the armrest between us.
“Wanna watch some nuns make out?”
Am I even speaking out loud?
“Maybe see if E.T. is up for a threeway?”
This time she looks at me. And if she isn’t exactly smiling, at least I think I see the potential for a smile there.
“No,” she says. “I’d much rather watch some nuns make out.”
“Okay, then,” I say, swerving the car back toward the Lower East Side. “It’s time for a little burlesque.”
I say this with some authority, even though I have only the faintest of faint ideas of where I’m going. Dev once told me about this place where strippers dressed like nuns and did this tease to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” And that was only one of the acts. I figured it was too kitsch to be pervy—and that seemed to be Norah’s range right there. As far as I could tell.
As we’re driving across Houston, Norah reaches over and turns on the radio. A black-lipsticked oldie: The Cure, “Pictures of You”—track four of my Breakup Desolation Mix.
This, and every other song on this disc, is dedicated to Tris….
And if this is the soundtrack, my mind and my broken heart collaborate to provide me with the movie—that night she was so tired she said she needed to lie down, so she climbed over the seat and laid out in the back. I thought I’d lost her, but then five minutes later my cell phone rang and it was her, calling me from my own backseat. In a sleepy voice she told me how safe and comfortable she felt, how she was remembering all those late-night drives back from vacation, and how she’d stretch herself out and feel like her parents were driving her bed, nothing unusual about the movement of the road under the wheels and the tree branches waving across the windshield. She said those moments made her feel like the car was home, and maybe that’s how I made her feel, too.
Eventually she fell asleep, but I kept the phone against my ear, lulled by her breathing, and her breathing again in the background. And yes, it felt like home. Like everything belonged exactly where it was.
“I so don’t need this right now,” Norah says. But she doesn’t change the song.
“Have you ever thought about their name?” I ask, just to make conversation. “I mean, for what?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Cure. What do they think they’re the cure for? Happiness?”
“This coming from the bassist for The Fuck Offs?”
And I can’t help it. I think, Wow, she knows our name.
“Dev’s thinking of changing it to The Fuck Ons,” I tell her.
“How ’bout simply Fuck On?”
“Maybe one word? Fuckon?”
“The Friendly Fuckons?”
“My Fuckon Or Yours?”
“Why is he such a f**king Fuckon?”
I look at her. “Is that a band name or a statement?”
“He had no right to do that. None.”
We break into silence again. I lob a question right into it.
“Who is he, then?”
“An ex,” she says, slumping back in the seat a little. “The ex, I guess.”
“Like Tris,” I say, relating.
She sits up and gives me a purely evil glance. “No. Not like Tris at all. This was real.”
I pause for a second, listen to our breakup playing under the conversation.
“That was mean,” I say. “You have no idea.”
“Neither do you. So let’s drop it. I’m supposed to show you a good time.”
I take this last sentence as a kind of apology. Mostly because that’s what I want it to be.
I’m winding through the Lower East Side now, on the streets that have names and not numbers. The night is still very much young here, hipster congregants exhaling their smoke from sidewalk square to sidewalk square. I find a parking space on the darker side of Ludlow, then convince Norah to retrace Jessie’s steps until we’re in front of a pink door.
“Camera Obscura?” Norah asks.
I nod.
“Bring on the nuns,” she says.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to knock or just open the door. The answer is given to me in the form of a burly bouncer dressed in a Playboy Bunny outfit.
“ID?” he asks.
I reach for my cousin’s license from Illinois, won in a particularly intense Xbox challenge.
Norah pats her pockets down. Blankly.
And just as I think, Oh f**k, she says those exact words.
6. NORAH
Oh f**k. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!
I mailed the letter turning down the acceptance to Brown just this morning. And only now, in the middle of this night or is it morning and why does time cease to tick when I see Tal, only now do I get it. Kibbutz in South Africa: BIG FUCKING MISTAKE. Like, HUGE. What was I thinking? So we’ve broken up five times over the last three years. Somehow in the back of my mind was the thought that either (1) Tal and I would work things out next time, and what better place to do that than away from our families and friends in a commune on the flip side of the world, or (2) we wouldn’t work things out yet again, but I’d be the best freakin’ worker that kibbutz had ever seen; and as a bonus, Tal would die of jealousy when I fell madly in love with some beautiful surfer boy from Capetown and left Tal weeding gardens while I bailed on the kibbutz to backpack across the world with my new surfer love who hopefully would have a pretty-looking name like Ndgijo.
Except that would never happen to me. How did such a reputedly smart girl get herself in this predicament, on the brink of adulthood, with no future to grab on to? These last few weeks I’ve been missing Tal as much as I’ve been bemoaning him as the Evil Ex. I’ve held on to the hope of surprising him by showing up in South Africa, yet when he was RIGHT THERE in front of me in Manhattan, what did I do? I froze. Suddenly all my fantasies of reconciliation were gone, suddenly all I could remember was how I was never good enough for him, Jewish enough, political enough, committed enough. Tal wasn’t a lying cheating skank like Tris, but who had I been kidding? He had been, as Caroline likes to remind me, a “controlling f**kface.” So right there, in a f**king Yugo, next to the poor schmuck I introduced myself to by making out with him, I finally had the moment of clarity that Mom and Dad and Caroline have been waiting for me to have since I was fifteen: ENOUGH! Caroline has been right all along. Tal and I are better off living our lives apart from one another.
Oh f**k. Did I just say that aloud? I’m trying to pay attention to the Nick guy but I can’t get Tal’s words in front of the club off repeat playback in my mind: She talks a great game, but when you actually get to the field, you realize it’s f**king empty.
The Tin Woman! Tal called me the f**king Tin Woman! I lost my virginity and my whole youth to him, and that’s his review of me? At least I can be grateful that when Tal took off from South Africa back to Manhattan without telling anybody, he couldn’t possibly have received my letter yet; I only just mailed it. I was so hell-bent on the sentiment, I posted the letter international f**king snail mail when I could have just e-mailed him. I drew smiley faces on the outside of the envelope! Oh, God, I want to be sick right now.
Norah, why are you such a regression bitch? One night last weekend spent holding Caroline’s hair back while she puked in the toilet, feeling lonely and lost—for me, not for Caroline; she had an army of dudes outside the bathroom waiting for her to sober up—and I let the dark side of my mind, the Tal side, win out. As Caroline slept it off later that night in the extra twin bed that’s been in my room for her since kindergarten, I wrote to Tal. Was it all the caffeine I consumed riding the night out with Caroline, or the leftover ganja haze of the reggae club where we’d passed the night? Secondhand smoke may be deadlier than firsthand straight-edge inhale, at least when it comes to impairing my ability to distinguish between lonely longing for the Evil Ex and actually trying to get back together with him.
I hope Tal never finds out the Tin Woman was ready to compromise. I didn’t outright say I wanted to get back together. But I said I was willing to consider it. I told him I could be vegan. I could be more Jewish. I could be kosher f**king vegan! I could learn to care about saving the sea otter and only drinking fair-trade coffee. I could believe that Tal and his brothers in Tel Aviv actually have talent and will become the next big thing, an older, punk-infused, pro-Israel, f**k-Europe, politicized version of Hanson. I would at least consider living with his miserable controlling psychotic mother in Tel Aviv once Tal starts his mandatory Israeli Army service next year, and oh alright fine, she could teach me how to cook the meals he likes and how to hang linens on a line in the sun so his sheets would always be crisp and fresh.
That f**king letter! Shit! I was like Saddam Hussein in the South Park movie, professing to Satan, I can change! I can change!
No. I can’t change. I shouldn’t change.
Caroline may be a lush and a slut but she’s not a complete moron. She begged me not to post the letter, but I wouldn’t listen to her. “What the f**k do you have to change for?” she said. “He should f**king change, uptight bastard. Why are you doing this? If you need some end-of-adolescence protest, couldn’t you like just wreck your dad’s Jaguar on the Palisades Parkway or something? Are you really going to put us through you and Tal, the nightmare couple, one more time? And lose out on Brown for it? Norah, you know you’ll meet someone else, don’t you?” Only I didn’t believe her—until tonight.
What good is Caroline now, passed out in Nick’s friend’s van? I wonder if her cell is turned on. I need to tell her Tal is back! And I f**ked up but now I have officially woken the f**k up.
“Norah?” the Playboy Bunny bouncer responds to my pronouncement of oh f**k, which is no small relief because I don’t have a fake ID. When your dad is the well-known head of a major record label, it tends not to be necessary at most clubs in Lower Manhattan.
“Toni?” I say. S/he grabs me in a hug. Toni interned for Dad last year while deciding whether s/he wanted to pursue a career in the music industry; s/he was also my biggest advocate in my futile campaign (thus far) to convince Dad to produce an all-punk band tribute album to the Spice Girls. “Still working on that demo?”
S/he pulls out a CD strapped inside the bushy tail at her back. “Just finished it! Will you pass it on?”
“Sure,” I say, hoping Nick will not interrogate me about who am I, some eighteen-year-old flannel-shirt-wearing B&T girl, to be passing on demos.
“Go right on over to the VIP area,” Toni says. “I’ll make sure your drinks are on the house.”
“I don’t drink,” I remind Toni.
“Oh, live a little,” s/he says, bumping me at the hip. “Miss Straight Edge, bend ’round the corner for once in your life.” Toni turns to Nick. “Illinois? Twenty-three years old? Give me a f**king break. But have fun, kids.”
S/he gives Nick a playful slap on the ass as we walk in and Nick doesn’t react like Tal, who would have pounced back at a drag queen daring to touch him. Instead, Nick laughs and turns back around to return the gesture on Toni’s ass. S/he gives him a butt shimmy dance in return. “I like this one, Norah!” s/he says. “Big improvement. Good egg.”