Madagascar by Steven Schwartz

Author:Steven Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938126444
Publisher: Engine Books
Published: 2016-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Seeing Miles

Noah stared at Mimi’s picture, taken at his bar mitzvah twenty-five years ago. She was his cousin, a second cousin, and she and her family had come out to Milwaukee from Brooklyn for the occasion. He remembered being smitten at the ceremony. She had dark silky hair and large brown eyes flecked with gold. Slender and tall, her face had an oval shape like a prized portrait, and her hair was tucked behind her small, well-articulated ears—carved as if from soap. Her throat had a long white curve, and she sat very still in the second row of the synagogue as he read from the Torah and led the congregation in blessings. At the end of giving his bar mitzvah speech, he’d thanked his parents for being so supportive and then thanked all his relatives and friends for coming. He looked at Mimi and said, “And thank you.” It was a bizarre and spontaneous moment for him in a life so far of calm, reasoned, and practiced application. Nevertheless, she just continued to stare unwaveringly at him on the bema. But he was a goner. It was his first experience of painful desire, a fervor that threatened to swallow his flesh. Nor did it hurt that he was just entering puberty, and Mimi, fifteen, was obviously there already.

She had hung back at the reception while he danced the box step with skinny and mostly undeveloped girls from his seventh-grade class, and Mimi’s remove and mystery gave her a kind of regal aloofness that only worked him into more of a frenzy. She had declined to dance with him, explaining, “I’m not a good partner. I like to lead.”

“That would be fine.”

“Thanks, but no.”

At one point, he saw her standing alone by the presents and went over to her. “Pick one,” he said.

“What?”

“You can have one.”

She smiled at him, straight white teeth, free of braces. “You’re silly.”

“I’m serious.” He felt desperate to give her something.

“I can’t take your presents.”

“Just one.”

“You are serious.”

And then her father, Uncle Irv, had come up and congratulated Noah on his excellent reading of his haftorah, and that was the end of the exchange. He’d been ready to give up his newly gotten gains to her, the tower of gifts and gelt for becoming a man. My kingdom for your hand. I’ll marry you someday, he thought.

He’d seen her a couple times afterward, at a wedding and then an anniversary party for her parents where she wore a wool plaid cap, like a cabbie, and baggy corduroy pants, and seemed inappropriately dressed for the occasion. Still, he couldn’t deny that every time he saw her the same feelings flared up, though evidently not on Mimi’s part. Her eyes, almond shaped and impenetrable as to her own thoughts, remained curiously distant. And soon he lost touch with her.

Now he was driving to the Denver Hyatt. Mimi was coming in from New York for a social workers conference. Noah himself was a psychologist with a practice in Denver, which would give them something in common after all these years.

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