Rebecca Păpucaru
Excerpt from "Yentas"

What’s the difference between a J.A.P. and a bowl of spaghetti?
The spaghetti moves when you eat it.

Just as the lights dim, I see her. I’ve assumed half-lotus pose when I see her directly opposite me, her eyes closed and in full lotus.

Brandy Morgenbesser.

At least I think it’s Brandy Morgenbesser. Since moving back home last month, I’ve been seeing Brandy everywhere. Her ghost haunts the shopping mall where nearly two decades ago our ears were pierced, our hair permed, and our nails painted to match our lips. Now the ear-piercing kiosk is gone and the beauty salon sells wigs. The brand-name clothing stores where once we begged our mothers for designer jeans and sweaters have been replaced by boutiques offering the latest in fashions for the Hasidic woman, an unvarying, seasonless line of dark skirts and dresses, heavy stockings, and flat shoes. On my way to the grocery store (Sternberg’s is long gone, and this IGA has a whole aisle of kosher foods), I pass the food court where Brandy once gave me two gold-plated charms for my charm bracelet, a K for Karen and a C for Cohen, but no M because she knew how much I hated my middle name. Then there was the giddy afternoon we spent coating egg rolls in sticky plum sauce, taking turns stealing extra packets until the teenaged boy behind the wok threatened to call security, all because Brandy’s older brother Josh had said that, in both shape and lustre, it was the closest approximation to a penis in mid-coitus.

The Screaming Mimis, my mother called us. In those days, everything and everyone was ripe for mockery: French-Canadians, Orthodox Jews, egg rolls with plum sauce. Everything seemed absurd if considered long enough, even Kenny Rosenzweig, who’d once stopped me in the school corridor on my way to the bathroom and forced me up against the wall. The best-looking boy in our school, he was sixteen to my thirteen.

“What’s your plan?” he asked me, both hands on the wall above my head.

I’d heard that boys could tell when you had your period. There was a smell, like sweaty coins in your pocket. I pressed my inner thighs together. They were as damp as my palms.

“After you graduate,” Kenny Rosenzweig said.

I mumbled something about becoming an actress. Kenny Rosenzweig snorted. He leaned in so close I could smell him. He smelled like my knapsack that time I’d spilled a yogurt in it.

“If you go to Hollywood they’ll make you lose weight,” he said. His sneering face eclipsed everything in my view.

“What will happen to those nice fat boobies?”

Was this an insult or a compliment, or maybe his idea of a conversation starter? I never found out. As easily as he’d pinned me to the wall he released me, walking away as if nothing had happened. That’s how I met Brandy. She’d been watching us the whole time, and after Kenny Rosenzweig had released me, she rushed up to tell me that her brother had warned her about him. He was a creep who sat at the back of the class and moved his lips when he wrote. He belonged in the Douglas, the mental hospital in Verdun, she said, and we both laughed. So began four years of the most intense female friendship I would ever know. That is, until Brandy Morgenbesser turned on me.

The bell rings three times. After the final peal we’re instructed to close our eyes and begin counting our exhalations in sets of four. I sneak one last look at Brandy. Her tank top is cut low and her bra is visible beneath the white fabric.

It has to be her. There’s no other reason for me to be sitting dry-mouthed and trembling on this borrowed yoga mat.

I listen to the breathing of those around me, trying to single out Brandy’s exhalations. The dark nothingness I usually see when I close my eyes is now another kind of darkness, that of an unenlightened era. Nineteen eighty-five, to be precise. The year Brandy Morgenbesser and her girlfriends stalked me through the corridors of Herzeliah High School until I fled the parochial school system and went mad. Since then every choice I’ve made has stemmed from a desire to prove that I’m nothing like Brandy Morgenbesser and her kind. Those choices, and a referral from Dr. Adler, have brought me here, to this dim room in the psychiatric wing of the Jewish General Hospital.

I’d like to know what brought Brandy here. I’m hoping it’s me.

I open my eyes. Brandy Morgenbesser is staring right at me. Her thin lips are pressed together and she looks as if she’s wandered into the wrong movie and can’t find the exit. I raise my hand, intending to wave hello, but my hand freezes and my palm faces outwards, as if to show Brandy that I’ve returned unarmed.