“We broke up.”
“How come?”
“He slept in a Victorian nightgown, had a baby called Jean-Pepe with his lesbian neighbors, and yelled ‘Look me in the eye!’ every time he came.”
“So … How come?” asks the first friend.
*
Frank has been sober ninety days. We still haven’t slept together. He wants to wait, and I don’t mind. I figure I’ve waited long enough for him. What’s a few more months? We celebrate the best way I know how with someone both celibate and abstinent. Illegal fireworks.
*
I can’t believe it, but my agent liked the new episodes. She’s pitching them to an animation studio in Japan. Japan!
*
Turns out, my father has left me some money. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me to move out of New Jersey and get a place of my own in the city. Now all I have to do is find an apartment and a way to tell my mother I’m moving out. I wonder if I could get breaking the news to her included in the broker’s fee?
*
Frank and I spend a Sunday looking around open houses downtown.
“These all look like apartments people have been murdered in,” he whispers to me.
“I think the ‘natural death’ apartments are out of my price range,” I say.
“A few months in one of these dumps, and you won’t have to worry about that,” he says. “Because you’ll have hung yourself from the ceiling.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “None of these places have high enough ceilings for that.”
“I think I could find us a place with higher ceilings than this,” he says.
“Us?” I say.
“You and me,” he says. “A fresh start somewhere new. Think about it.”
*
I do think about it. I think about it for a week straight. I find my mother in the garden potting her fall perennials. She looks up at me and rubs soil on her forehead with the back of her gardening glove.
“Do you know how Nietzsche defined a joke?” she says. “As an epigram on the death of a feeling.”
“Ma,” I say. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“Isn’t that brilliant? Nietzsche rocks my world.”
“It’s about my living situation.”
“I gave you Thus Spoke Zarathustra when you were fifteen and having your first existential crisis,” she says. “Do you still have it?”
“Frank asked me something the other day.”
“Nietzsche had a poet’s soul,” she says. “Like you.”
I grab a trowel and start digging. I am never leaving.
*
A group of owls is called a parliament. A group of emus is called a mob. A group of larks is called an exaltation. A group of doves is call a piteousness. A group of ravens is called an unkindness. A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. A group of peafowl is called an ostentation. A group of parrots is called a pandemonium. A group of starlings is called a descent. A group of turtledoves is called a pitying. A group of finches is called a charm. All of these words can also describe a group of Jewish women.
*
I go pick Frank up from his evening AA meeting on Perry Street. Outside, people are smoking and laughing. They look pretty normal to me. A couple of suits, a couple of older Village artist types. One person appears to be in surgical scrubs.
We go to the Italian restaurant on Tenth Street where the terrible service is inversely commensurate to the excellent food. Frank tucks his napkin into his shirt before the meal begins, as is his way, and pulls off a hunk of bread from the plate that is plonked in front of us.
“Best bread in the city,” he says, swirling it in olive oil.
“How was the meeting?” I ask.
“Incredible. So moving. The speaker had twenty-five years and was so spiritually fit. And grateful, you know? His prayer and meditation practice was off the hook.”
I raise an eyebrow. Frank rubs his forehead and laughs. “I sound insane,” he says.
“You sound happy,” I say.
“I am,” he says. “Still feels weird even saying it.”
“Well, get used to it, baby,” I say. “You are not, thank the heavens, going to be your family’s Uncle Bernie.”
“My family’s who?”
“My Uncle Bernie has a drinking problem,” I say. “And, apparently, an extra female chromosome.”
“Right,” says Frank. “You want to share a starter?”
“The tomato salad looks good,” I say.