Jack With a Twist

“A buttered bagel always does the trick for me,” my mother says, “and we have to get you back, good as new, before we send you back into the city.”

“I’m not going back into the city,” I say, with my mouth full of bagel. My mother furrows her brow and regards me. I take a huge gulp of coffee and rearticulate, “I’m not going back into the city.”

“I heard you the first time,” my mother says, “But I don’t understand. Don’t you want to go back home and make up with Jack?”

“No,” I say, taking another huge gulp of coffee.

“Well, you don’t have to go back tonight,” my mother says, laughing. “You can stay out here and take the train to the city in the morning. Then you can go back to your apartment after work.”

“I’m not going back,” I say, polishing off the first half of the bagel in two bites.

“What do you mean, you’re not going back?” she says, laughing. “Eventually you have to go back to your apartment. It’s your home. Your home with Jack.”

“I’m not going back,” I say, looking down at the tray.

“Brooke, you’re not going to give up your whole life over one fight,” my mother says. “Be reasonable here. Now, I know that you are hungover and not thinking properly, but—”

“That’s the thing, Mom,” I say, “I am thinking properly now. The problem was that I wasn’t before. But now I am. I was just ignoring all of the things that were wrong, all the things that were bothering me.”

“Those are silly things,” she says, “none of it was real. What is real is the fact that you and Jack love each other. Once you’re feeling better, you’ll see.”

“What about how his family has been treating us?” I say.

“There’s always an adjustment period when the families meet,” she says. “Do you think that my family and your father’s all just magically loved each other at first? No, they didn’t. We had our problems, too. But, you work at it. And look at how close we all are now.”

“What about the fact that Jack never stood up for us?” I ask.

My mother gets up from the edge of my bed and walks to my window. She looks out at our backyard, at the huge pine that is in the center of it, and exhales deeply.

“I don’t know,” my mother says, and doesn’t turn around to face me as she does. “I just don’t know.”

“Well,” I say, getting up to join my mother at the windowsill, “neither do I.”

I don’t get back out of bed until six o’clock that evening, when the smell of New Hunan Taste fills the house all the way up to my bedroom.

“You want an egg roll or a spring roll, BB?” my dad asks me as I pad downstairs, still in my pajamas. My dad is in sweatpants and my mother is in a fancy teal-colored yoga suit that I know for a fact she bought at Saks.

“Egg roll,” I say as my mother pours me a Diet Coke. “I’ll get the ice.”

I walk to the freezer and grab a few cubes of ice. As I go back to the table, I’m suddenly very cognizant of the fact that my parents are smiling manically at me, sort of the way you’d imagine that the family of a mental patient would treat that person. Everything’s just fine, honey.

“I’m fine,” I say, looking at them.

“We know that,” they say in unison.

“Boneless spare ribs?” my father asks, reaching across the table to pass them to me. Now, I know that my father is a kosher butcher, but his deepest darkest family secret is that one of his most guilty pleasures in life is the boneless spare ribs at New Hunan Taste. Which is why he normally hoards them all to himself.

“You’re offering me boneless spare ribs?” I say, my expression blank.

“You can have anything you want, BB,” my mother says. “Right, Barry?”

“Anything you want, BB,” my father says, still pushing the boneless spareribs on me. I decide to test him. I take the tin and systematically take out all of the well-done pieces. My father and I both love the well-done pieces, and I watch him as he watches me pick them out. The smile remains plastered on his face and as I look between he and my mother, I realize that they must both be very good poker players.

“You don’t have to treat me like a mental patient,” I say. Their expressions don’t change at all; in fact, they barely move at all. They are like those animals in the woods who, upon being attacked, try to freeze themselves so that the crazy attack animal leaves them alone.

“We’re not, honey,” my mother says. “It’s just that you hardly ever come home and we’re so happy to have you, aren’t we Barry?”

“So happy,” he says, still smiling. “Mu shoo?”

I take the mu shoo, but make a big show of how happy and decidedly not insane I am as I pour the hoisin sauce onto a pancake. It continues like this for the rest of dinner—we all smile at each other incessantly and use really good table manners and don’t chew with our mouths open at all. The perfect little Stepford family. That is, if the Stepford wives were mah-jongg-playing petite Jewish women.

Finally, the torture is over and it’s time for fortune cookies.

“What does yours say, Barry?” my mother asks my father, giggling. They had one of their first dates together over Chinese food, so fortune cookies always make my mom especially giddy.

“‘A smile is your personal welcome mat,’” my father announces, flashing his pearly whites. “How about you, Mimi?”

“That one is perfect for you! Mine says: ‘Don’t worry about money,’” she says, squinting, since she needs reading glasses but refuses ever to wear them in front of my father. “‘The best things in life are free.’ Hmm. Obviously these people have never been to Saks. What does yours say, BB?”

“‘You would make a great lawyer,’” I say, tucking my fortune under my plate, along with my napkin.

“Really?” my mother says, “maybe there really is something to these fortune cookies!”

“That’s not what it says,” my father says, eyes burning into me as if he can read my mind. “What does it really say, BB?”

How is it that my father always knows when I’m lying? Even when I was a little girl, he always just knew.

Growing up, my mother’s most prized possession in the world was a cameo that belonged to her grandmother. Alabaster white and a shade of delicate pink set in gold, it was the most beautiful thing my thirteen-year-old eyes had ever seen. I desperately wanted to wear it to my junior high school dance—certain that it would make my crush, Danny, immediately fall in love with me on the spot. My mother flatly refused. I was dumbfounded—how could she say no? Didn’t she know how important this dance was to me? I made an unsuccessful plea to my father. He explained to me that it was the only thing my mother had left of her grandmother and that it had huge sentimental value. It couldn’t be replaced. I told him that it wouldn’t need to be replaced, since I would only be borrowing it for one evening—mere hours, really, if you thought about it—but, he remained unconvinced.

My first losing oral argument.

In my heart of hearts, I just knew that if my mother knew how unbelievably important it was for me to wear her cameo, she would have said yes. So firm was my belief that, on the night of the dance, I took it. While she was downstairs in the kitchen, I walked into her room, stealthily as a cat, and went to her jewelry box. A wooden box painted an antique gold, I opened it, slowly, quietly, revealing its insides encased in a rich red velvet, as if it were a buried treasure. I ran my fingers over the soft fabric. My mother, from out of nowhere, appeared behind me and looked over my shoulders, making me jump. I tried not to look guilty.

“I bet we can find you something special in there,” she said and picked out a pair of pearl earrings for me. “Those will be beautiful,” she said, holding them out for me to try on. “They were a Sweet Sixteen present for me from my Aunt Florence.”

I smiled and she beamed back at me. As she admired the earrings in my ears, I slowly put my hand behind me, into the jewelry box, and took the cameo.

I never even made it into the dance that night. My girlfriends and I ran into Danny and his friends on our way in, and decided that we were all way too cool for a junior high school dance. We instead ended up in Danny’s basement, drinking wine coolers. Come to think of it, the majority of my junior high and high school memories took place in that very basement, Danny’s parents never being home. Within minutes of the wine coolers being passed