Naomi could still wear the silver-threaded sheath dress she had worn to the Blondie after-party where she had danced with the girl who would one day be Madonna. It was because she had danced with that girl, who was like propane in search of a match, that Naomi grabbed Joe before the party was over and raced him to the car where she gave him a surprise right there at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal.
But who was that old woman in the mirror, wearing her dress?
The woman appeared whenever Naomi confronted a reflecting surface, in the bedroom, in public restrooms, in the rearview mirror, in dark panes of glass. Naomi couldn’t look the old woman in the face. She had become adept at looking at the woman’s hair, which was gray and stylishly short; then, one by one, the ears, eyes, nose, smile, and teeth.
She couldn’t look her reflection in the face, and yet she had once faced down a shareholder rebellion. She couldn’t confront the old woman, but she had corralled venture capitalists and kept board members with big egos in check. CEOs had scribbled on other people’s proposals, “Has Naomi seen this?” But now she feared mirrors.
Her Grandma Mollie would sigh and say, in her Old Country accent, “I look like a vitch.”
Naomi reminded herself that the dress had only required two alterations. And there, just below the belt line, in the fabric below her left hip, the cigarette burn. Lou Reed.
Joe, dressed in his black trousers, his suspenders hanging from his hips like cables from a ship that couldn’t dock, and his white ruffled shirt unbuttoned at the neck, wandered barefoot into their bedroom. He held a wedge of paper in one hand and a pair of black socks in the other. Joe wondered if he’d seen that dress before, but a lifetime of marriage had taught him not to ask fashion questions. His wife always looked good to him, and he said so. “You always look good, honey,” he said. He kissed the back of her neck, his generous belly bumping her in the tucchis.
“Thanks,” Naomi said. She turned around and announced, “OK, you’re Charlotte.” Charlotte was her best friend and trusted counselor. Naomi held up two pairs of earrings, each with strips of metal like wind chimes, one pair in each hand. “Which ones should I wear?”
Joe was still holding the wedge of paper in one hand and the black socks in the other, but even if his hands had been empty he wouldn’t have known the answer. Fortunately, he’d learned how to return the volley in this conversation, which was all his wife needed when Charlotte was unavailable. He tilted his head judiciously. “That pair,” he said, “is longer than that pair. It also has more–bronze.”
“Hmm,” Naomi said. She reexamined her choices. “Maybe hoops.”
Joe understood that he was off the hook. “Um, this play,” he said, flapping the pages at her. “Mishy has written a very long play. How many intermissions do we get? I haven’t hit anything about intermissions in the script.”
“Joe, it’s the theater. It’s not a Red Sox game. You can’t wander off to get fried chicken during the seventh-inning stretch. Why are you holding those socks?”
“Oh,” Joe said. “The socks. They don’t match.”
Naomi turned her concentration to his socks with the sudden focus of a hunting bird and said, “They are both Gold Toe black dress socks. Of course they match.”
Joe frowned. “I don’t know. They don’t feel right. I put them on and I was walking off-balance. I was thinking I should start labeling my socks. A big L, a big R.”
“Joe, don’t make the laundry more complicated than it is.” She took the socks out of his hand, stretched them, dangled them in the air, then handed them back. “Get dressed already! Michael will be here in 30 minutes.”
“The play’s hilarious,” Joe said. “Our nephew is a funny guy. He has a funny family. I love the scene where he’s visiting his parents and he can’t sleep because they’re fighting over how many blankets to throw on him. What a metaphor for being smothered. You’d think from reading this that your brother Andy just got off the boat from Anatevka.”
“Andy never liked the modern world, but he’s a good brother. When he got his license, he drove us wherever we wanted. The beach. The mall. He took me and my friends to see David Cassidy. But Mishy doesn’t think his family is funny. He thinks he crawled out of a hellhole. Don’t tell Mishy his play is funny, Joe, you’ll hurt his feelings. That reminds me. He doesn’t want us to call him Mishy anymore. Now he’s Michael.”
“How am I supposed to remember that? I’ve been calling him Mishy since the day you introduced me at your nephew Jake’s bar mitzvah at that awful hotel in Hyannis. The one with the potato salad? What’s wrong with the name Mishy? In my family I’m still Joey!”
“It was my nephew Mel’s bar mitzvah,” Naomi explained. “Jake’s bar mitzvah was two years later. Not on Cape Cod, in North Carolina. I gave you that chart of my family but you’ve never so much as glanced at it. Mishy says Mishy is his Yiddish baby name.” She had her hoop earrings in. She turned her head to check one ear, then quickly turned again to check the other, trying to outmaneuver the unwelcome woman in the glass.
“I know we’ve always called him Mishy,” she said. “But now it’s Michael. We all have to learn that. Like the way Jake is now a they and not a he. Like the way I didn’t know that a schmata was a rag until I got to college and I realized I was saying Yiddish words for English. That’s all I heard growing up. Then Andy married Erika and they had Michael but they called him Mishy. But Mishy says he’s a grown man and enough is enough.”
Joe sat on the edge of the bed and said “whoosh.” He always said “whoosh” when he sat down. He hauled his suspect socks on over his pale, swelling feet and ankles.
“So in this production,” he said, “which I take to be autobiographical even though I am somehow not in it, we have an actress playing his first wife and an actress playing his third wife, but no one playing his second wife or the woman he’s currently engaged to, which by my count means here comes Mrs. Mishy 4 point 0. Plus the actress playing the first wife was his real-life third wife.”
Joe finished with his socks and stuck his legs straight out. Everything seemed to be in order, but he hadn’t started walking yet.
“And to think I knew Mishy when he was a pisher who was afraid of the vacuum cleaner,” he said. “Remember the time I hid in the garbage can and pretended to be Oscar the Grouch? The kid ran for days, plus the can fell over and I pulled a hamstring. I suppose his artistic sensibilities have changed since then. How has he had time to marry four women? Is he even 40? It’s a good thing I printed this”–he waved the script–“because I’m going to mark it up as the play goes along.”
Naomi checked the clock. She had to get into other clothes and get her husband into the rest of his clothes.
“Joe,” she said, “you’re not paying attention. Again. Would you please pay attention? Is that too much to ask? OK. There is no Mrs. Mishy 4 because we’re not supposed to call him Mishy. The upcoming Mrs. Mishy–the woman Michael is engaged to! Dammit!–is Lauren, she’s shy, and she’s from an uptight Catholic family. I’m not sure she can tell us apart. Anyway, she didn’t want to be in the play. May, the third wife, agreed to play the first wife because she said she likes the idea of playing an alpha bitch. It’s a good part. Glenda, the second wife, is dead. You want her to jump out of a cake? But look, she’s right here in the stage directions on the first page: ‘A memorial candle slowly burns throughout the production, always bright, always there.’ ”
“I like how fireworks shoot out of the little glass cup in the final scene,” Joe said.
“You always fall for the low comedy. Unzip me.” Naomi turned her back to Joe.
“How do you know all this, anyway?” Joe stood up. He felt off-balance. He was almost certain he was wearing two lefts. He unhooked the hook at the top of the zipper and slowly zipped the zipper down. Naomi was wearing a bra but he knew better than to unhook that, too, while she was deciding what to wear.
“Because I read the play, Joe, and because everyone in this family talks. You think we don’t? We’re not like your family, where someone could run off to Mexico for the winter and not tell anyone and somehow that’s OK.”
Joe thought that sounded like a relaxing way to spend the winter.
“I got it all from Sonya,” Naomi said. “She and Glenda were in the same sorority. The rest of us didn’t really know her, because she died so fast, poor thing.”
“Sonya,” Joe recited. “I did too read your chart. Sonya, your youngest cousin. Sonya’s husband is Miltie. And Sonya and Miltie’s kids are Bobby, Robby, Knobby, Dotty, and Irving.”
“Very funny. Joey.”
“What does your brother think of this mishegoss?” Joe asked. “I couldn’t write something like this while my parents were still alive. I’d have to perform it on a stage in Iceland or maybe on a rock in the middle of the Pacific.”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. She was standing in her underwear. Joe loved looking at her, but she didn’t want him to look at her and all her blemishes and loose places and the blue venous highways on her once clear and taut skin, so she kept her back to him. She had pulled the green dress from the closet and was inspecting it for wrinkles. It was unobtrusive but indestructible, with deep pockets. No one would look at her. No one would think, what is she trying to prove, that she didn’t have kids so now she still has a figure? Better that they not look, not notice, not see her. Better that she could put everything she needed in her pockets.
“I think my brother is so old now that all he cares about is that Mishy is making a living from the theater,” she finally said. “Andy is letting everything else slide. Except golf.”
“Wait a minute,” Joe said. He sounded different. Naomi turned to check what had happened.
“Are you going to wear that dress? That green dress?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Naomi said. “It travels well. It’s versatile. It goes with everything. You’ve seen it before, Joe. What’s the fuss?”
Joe took the dress from his wife and studied it, as if it were trying to trick him. “I finally understand something about women’s clothes,” he said.
“You do? What?”
“I recognize this dress,” he said, slowly, picking his way. “Every time we’re set to go somewhere, somewhere fancy, you put on the silver dress, and it still fits, and then you take it off and put on the other dress. The silver dress is the fun dress. This dress is what you wear to the office. This is the dress you wear when you suit up for the bankers.”
“I told you. It’s versatile. The silver dress doesn’t work. I’ve had it since we were in our twenties. It’s not appropriate for me now.”
“Says who? Is there a style council I don’t know about? Why can’t you wear the silver dress? You just proved that it fits.”
“Joe. You’re not a woman. No one is looking at you. Men wear tuxedos so they can blend in. You’re a wall of black and white. In a tux, all of you look good and all of you look the same,” Naomi explained. “This dress would look outlandish on a woman my age.”
“Naomi,” Joe said. His voice was sharp and deliberate, not the gentle whining and general befuddlement he had slipped into, not the cajoling purr from the era of his late-night, ultra-smooth radio show, but from more angular days, from punk, from genres without names, from his dj sets at raves, from when she had fallen in love with him.
“Naomi,” he asked, “what is this bullshit? If this dress is outlandish, why do you still own it?” He riffled the pages of the manuscript in its massive clamp. “You and your brothers and sisters are in your nephew’s play. You’re the stars. The first generation born in America. Mishy calls you ‘The Invincible Eight.’ Of course you’re outlandish! You’re larger than everybody else’s fucking life!”
Joe tossed the manuscript onto the bed and hoisted his suspenders over his shoulders, first the left, then the right. He tightened the snaps as if he were parachuting into D-Day. He shoehorned himself nimbly into his tuxedo shoes.
“Joe,” Naomi said, “I haven’t worn this dress in years.”
“At weddings, no,” Joe said. “For family, no. But come on. This is a big night. Every other woman our age is wearing something fun. Why not you?”
“Because they have grandchildren!” Naomi said. She was furious. She was accustomed to getting dressed and getting it over with. “They have kids! Their kids have kids! What am I? Am I useless? I hate these events! Better to stay in the background. In the crowd. Blend! In!”
No human can look fearsome while wearing nothing but underwear, but Naomi, in that moment, came close.
Joe spun the black plastic shoehorn in the fingers of his right hand, as he would one of his drum sticks. He spun it onto the bed. After some thought he said, “I never said kaddish for my father.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No. It’s just something else that never happened. Look, we didn’t have kids. We have each other. Naomi and Joe. That’s us. And we’re about to retire. And when we retire, we’ll still be us, but we’ll be different.”
“Different how?” Naomi asked. “Because we won’t be working?”
“I don’t know. How should I know? You’ll get bored and start a company and kick the ass of every idiot who ever made twice the money for half the work. I’ll run marathons in the desert. We’ll build a boat and sail it around the world until it sinks. Different!”
Naomi put her hands on her husband’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Then we’ll need a plan,” she said.
“Baby,” Joe said in his dj voice. “Never let the words get in the way of the groove.”
Joe stood beside his wife, produced his bowtie from a pants pocket, and stood at attention before the mirror. Naomi marveled again that the mirror never went to war with men.
“Tonight, after the play, when we’re at the party,” Joe said, while deftly knotting his tie, “while everyone is congratulating Mishy, and the actors who play all of you are asking you what’s the real dirt on your family, a young woman, a kind young woman, a little bird, a fligln, who looks like she should be in middle school but by some miracle is a walking, talking adult with a driver’s license and a job, will say she loves your dress. Because it’s a good dress and you look good in it. And you will tell her thanks. You will tell her you danced too close to Lou Reed and he accidentally poked you with his cigarette and made that hole. And he was really sorry. And then she’ll have a story to carry around with her. And if she doesn’t know from Lou Reed, call me over and I’ll sing the song. Because I’m your husband and that’s what you’re going to do.”
“But–”
“But I’m not listening,” he said, as he helped her step back into the silver dress. “I’m remembering the sound of Lou Reed saying something in Yiddish. Let me zip you back up.”
As he did the honors, Naomi asked him, “Are you thinking of Madonna?”
“Who wouldn’t,” he said. “What the hell would she wear? I’ll tell you what the hell would she wear. You’re standing in it. Now saddle up. Let’s take a walk on the wild side.”
The doorbell rang. Their ride. Naomi heard the swish of Joe’s slacks as he walked down the hall to the door. She heard him flip the lock. She heard her husband, the fond uncle, open the door and exclaim, “Michael!”
