Susie, my cousin, sat at the Passover table, scrutinizing the food so intensely that I worried it might get contaminated. All that breathing and staring made me nervous. Then she pressed her nose close to the box of chocolates, a dark and milk assortment my mother had bought for the occasion, and examined each piece before greedily popping one into her mouth.
My mother, Toddy, sat Sue at the long table next to my new husband, Bill, a handsome twenty-three-year-old. It was 1963, and the times were traditional in our kosher house. When Susie started rubbing Bill’s thigh, up and down, under the white damask tablecloth, he looked at me aghast, beseeching me to help him out. I whispered to my mother, shaking her arm, and said, “Sue is rubbing Billy’s thigh. What should he do?”
Mom answered softly, “Tell him to move her hand.”
Bill lifted Susie’s fat hand off his thigh, and she resumed eating flavorful brisket and kugel.
Susie was an unusual woman, and I rarely spoke to her at length when I was young because I felt awkward. Now, in my later years, I have built a telephone relationship withher. Once a month, we spend time discussing the family, her childhood, and my problems, and catching up. The other day, Susie said, “I don’t think people ever liked me.”
Surprised at this honesty, I asked, “Why do you say that?”
“Well, for one thing, I am short. Then, for another, I’m fat. Third, I am nearly blind. Next, I am a woman. Besides, I’m not pretty.”
I didn’t know what to say. The silence on the line was uncomfortable, so I finally sputtered, “Oh, Sue, that’s not a good way to feel.”
“Well, that is the way I feel,” she said.
Susie is considered an odd duck. She never married, but she went to college, worked for the state, lives alone, and complains about having no one to talk to. I wasn’t close to her as a kid, since I was younger and different. I attended college, but I’ve been married twice, had four children, lived with a partner, and had several close friends. Now, I find her interesting. She’s less frightening to me. When I was a naive, younger kid, I thought she was too odd.
“My father tried to marry me off to some guy with a disability when I was young. There would have been money exchanged,” she said during a telephone conversation.
I never knew this part of family history, but I listened. She liked to tell me how her mother treated her poorly, and her father was heartless.
She told me that her father, a doctor, once made her drink blood, which was supposed to give her nutrients.
“I’m surprised my father didn’t make you drink blood when you had an eating disorder,” she said to me.
“No, I never drank blood,” I said, thinking how awful that sounded.
“Well, he should have,” Susie said. In the sound of her voice, I could hear every defeat of her life: the barely missed acceptance to an Ivy League college, the guy who never asked her to the school dance, the social work licensing exam she screwed up because she had the flu. She took these as indications of her defects. Then she told me about her sister, an unattractive woman with a high IQ who lives with her son, who is unable to work due to emotional problems.
“She’s embarrassed to admit that her son lives with her,” Sue said. “I don’t ask about it because she is ashamed.”
The weirdness of this family still surprises me. I’m friends with Susie’s older brother, a senior, unmarried lawyer who once slept with me when I was going through divorces. That whole thing lasted thirty days, and now we’re close. He told me he’s loved me ever since he was nineteen. He says he wrote me a letter confessing his love, but my mother tore it up, and I never got to see it.
We are first cousins. He is a bit uptight for my tastes and a snob, having gone to Yale and Virginia Law School with Teddy Kennedy. I don’t care for the Boston Symphony, as I find it too elitist.I love art museums and travel so that we would have been compatible.
I had little interest in Sue as a child, except for hearing about her from my mother, but now we talk on the phone. She is lonely, and I am lonely for family discussions with someone who has witnessed our mutual yet distinct stories.
She once told me she knew I would get sick. I developed an eating disorder at the age of fifteen. As I became increasingly thinner, I created a growing fear of food, terrified of gaining weight. It felt as if an invader had taken over my mind. I was crazed. Finally, when I was afraid enough of my behavior, I went to a shrink, Dr. Messner, a specialist in adolescence, and asked him, “What is wrong with me?” He knew right away, and I didn’t like the sound of Anorexia Nervosa.
Now I talk to Susie like an old pal and dare not remind her of how she rubbed Billy’s thigh up and down at the Passover Seder. He is deceased, and she does refer to him now and again, saying, “He was very handsome.” She couldn’t have been that blind!
Sometimes, I think about visiting Susie. She lives in a small, one-bedroom apartment. I picture her as a plump, bespectacled old woman with a bent back. She would be happy if I came to her place, and we could talk for hours if we wanted. She’s angry that her parents treated her like a leper, and I’m frustrated that I wrecked my college years with a disease that made me feel out of place. We were both pariahs and have more in common than I imagined.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Striar Rohner has published 12 short stories in literary magazines. Her debut novel, Tzippy the Thief, won first prize in general fiction at the Southeast Book Festival in 2016. Her newest novel, 2 Poppins Lane, will be out in October 2025.
Find her at https://amzn.to/4m2m9uo
About the Author
