Balloon Dog by Daniel Paisner

Author:Daniel Paisner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2022-07-09T12:00:11+00:00

Fall

12.

ALL IN ALL IS ALL WE ARE

SHARI BRAVERMAN

“SHABBAT SHALOM, BITCHES!”

Here is Shari Braverman in the B’nai Centerville coat room, greeting her friends Suze Weiden and Allison Dartel with a little too much enthusiasm—for the occasion, for this hour of the morning, and for this small, enclosed space.

“Look at you,” Suze says, stepping back from the mother of the bar mitzvah boy to take in a full view. “That dress.”

Shari does a mock model’s twirl. “It’s from before,” she says—as in, before her life turned to the kind of shit other people step around when they see it on the sidewalk. “Been waiting to wear it.”

What she’s been waiting to wear is a flared circle star dress from Stella McCartney, with a scalloped neck and long sleeves—a flowing, tasteful mix of beige, brown, and off-white. She saw it on a mannequin in a Fifth Avenue boutique about a year ago and it felt to her like she had to have it. Cost almost three thousand dollars, way more than she was used to spending on a dress for no apparent reason, but then the Fred-suck happened, and the dress stayed in the closet and now the apparent reason is Jaxon’s simcha. She guesses the dress is probably not appropriate for synagogue and certainly not for the mother of the bar mitzvah boy, but it’s understated enough, long enough, stylish enough.

“You go, girl,” Allison says, as if in applause. “Bohemian chic!”

“Yep,” Shari says—no longer twirling or feeling quite as amped as just a beat or two before. “I go, girl.”

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, and there are a couple hundred little details jockeying for space in Shari Braverman’s brain, eighty-seven of them calling for her immediate attention. There’s the email she just received from the guy catering the kiddush luncheon to follow this morning’s service, letting her know he has been unable to “source” any gluten-free bagels and wondering if it would be okay to swap out Pepperidge Farms bagel flats instead. (It would not.) There’s her former-but-technically-still mother-in-law, Gwennie, who let it be known through Shari’s former-but-technically-still-sister-in-law, Audrey, that she’s no longer crazy about the idea of sharing an aliyah with Brian, now that she has had a chance to read the mood of the room and determine that almost all of the invited guests have been informed of her son’s “transgression,” as she has taken to calling it, and that she does not wish for her sliver of spotlight as the grandmother of the bar mitzvah boy to be diminished. (Shari’s thinking her mother-in-law can step to the bima with Brian’s siblings instead.) There’s Jaxon’s over-stimulated friends, who seem to think it’s entirely appropriate to drool and titter and point in the direction of poor Alana Seidenfeld, who for her part seems to have sprouted an impressive rack while she was away at summer camp, and who has shown up in the B’nai Centerville lobby in her version of the same size double-zero body-con dress all the other

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