“Tired,” you say. “Classes, work.”
He turns up the music. He likes hip-hop, but it always seems like an act. He is somewhat obsessed with staying young.
The song that plays is “Ms. Jackson” by Outkast. You’ve never heard it before. At the beginning of the song, the first-person narrator/singer apologizes to a girl’s mother for how he’s treated her daughter. You cannot think of anything you want to hear less.
“Can we listen to something else?” you ask.
“Give it a chance,” he says. “Seriously, Aviva, you have to open your mind about hip-hop. Hip-hop is the future.”
“Fine,” you say.
“Outkast is our Walt Whitman. Outkast is—”
You hear the sound of breaking glass, crumpling metal.
The car’s air bags deploy.
The driver’s side window’s glass is cracked, and through it, the outside world looks like a surreal version of a stained glass scene in a church. Through it you see palm trees and the windshield of the other driver’s car, a petal pink Cadillac, and an old woman with her head slumped over—she might be dead.
“Looks like stained glass,” you say.
“More like cubism,” he corrects you.
The woman will turn out to have Alzheimer’s disease. Her license had been suspended three years ago. Her husband didn’t even know she still had keys. “How she loved that car,” is what he’ll say when he hears the news that she’s dead.
The congressman sprains his wrist. You end up with a neck injury, nothing serious, but you don’t know that at the time. In the moment, it’s terrifying.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice sounding remarkably calm.
You feel light-headed, but you know you need to leave the scene. You want to protect him from what will happen if the cops find out that he is having an affair with a former intern. You think he’s a good man. No, you think he’s a good congressman, and you don’t want him to suffer through a scandal.
“I should go,” you say.
“No,” he says. “You stay here. If the woman is dead, there will be an investigation, and you are my witness. If you leave and your presence is later discovered, it will seem as if we were trying to cover up something. It’s the difference between a scandal and a crime. It’s the difference between a storm that will pass and the end of my career. When the cops come, you are an intern who I am giving a ride home. You can say this confidently because it’s true.”
You nod. Your head feels heavy and light at once.
“Say it, Aviva.”
If you run.
If you stay.
“I am an intern,” you say. “Congressman Levin is giving me a ride.”
“I’m sorry, Aviva,” the congressman says.
“For what?” you say numbly. “She drove into you. It wasn’t your fault.”
“For what’s to come.”
You wait for the police. It starts to rain.
Click here.
You are in a storm.
You are pelted by rain, and your clothes are soaked through.
Your house floats away.
There goes your dog, but there’s no time to mourn.
Your photo albums are lost or damaged and waterlogged beyond repair.
Your insurance doesn’t work.
You are clinging to a mattress.
You have no one to call for help.
Your family and friends have perished in the storm.
The ones who are still alive are angry that you have lived.
You think the rain will never stop.
But eventually, the rain stops, and when the rain stops, the newspeople arrive.
The newspeople love the story of the GIRL ON THE MATTRESS IN THE STORM.
“Who is this girl on the mattress?”
“Where did she go to school?”
“Was she popular at school?”
“Why is she wearing so few clothes?”
“She should wear more clothes if she’s going to end up washed up on a mattress!”
“Why didn’t she know better?”
“I heard the girl on the mattress was basically a psycho. She was a stalker. She was a storm chaser.”
“Does she suffer from low self-esteem?”
“You’d think the storm would prefer someone thinner and better looking.”
“I consider myself a feminist, but if you decide to cling to a mattress in the middle of a storm, that’s on you.”
“Oh my God, the girl on the mattress kept a blog!”
“Stay tuned for an exclusive with the ex-boyfriend of the girl on the mattress! Says Grossman was ‘always pretty needy and clingy.’ ”
It’s odd, you think, how everyone loves (hates) the girl on the mattress, but no one seems that interested in the storm.
Click here.
It seems as if people will never tire of news of the Girl on the Mattress, but then a bigger storm hits, one with flashier elements, like Terrorism and Apocalypse and Death and Destruction and Mayhem.
And they forget about you, more or less.
If you decide to never leave your house again and become a Boo Radley–style shut-in.
If you decide to go on with your life.
You continue with your life. Of course you do. What choice do you have really? You get out of bed. You do your hair. You get dressed. You put on makeup. You make sure to eat salads. You make conversations with waiters. You smile when someone looks at you. You smile too much. You want people to think you are a nice person. You go to the mall. You buy a black dress. You buy makeup remover. You read magazines. You work out. You avoid the Internet. You read books. You tire of salads. You eat frozen yogurt. You make jokes with your dad. You never talk about the thing that happened with him or with anyone else. You masturbate a lot. You don’t call the congressman.
You go to your grandfather’s funeral, your father’s father. You weren’t close to him the way you were to your mother’s father, but you cry anyway. He once brought you a puppet from Argentina. You don’t have any grandfathers left now. You cry. You cry too much. You suspect you aren’t even crying about your grandfather.
You go to the synagogue’s ladies’ room. You go into the stall, and you hear two old women enter the bathroom behind you. You can hear them spraying perfume on themselves. The synagogue’s bathrooms are always stocked like drugstores: perfume, but also gum, hair spray, lip balm, moisturizer, mouthwash, hair bands, combs.
“This scent is delicious,” the first woman says. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” the second woman says. “I don’t have my reading glasses, but I think it’s a knockoff of something else.”
“It’s not a knockoff,” the first woman says. “There was an uproar last year. Shirley—”
“Which Shirley?”
“Hadassah Shirley. Hadassah Shirley said it was immoral for the synagogue to stock imitation perfumes in the bathrooms, so now they’re all bona fide.”
“Hadassah Shirley is ridiculous,” the first woman says.
“But she does know how to get things done,” the second woman says. “And keep your voice down. Hadassah Shirley is everywhere.”
“She didn’t come today,” the first woman says.
“I noticed,” the second woman says. “Poor Abe Grossman.”