Rochelle

Her dad’s parents survived the Holocaust as children; my dad’s dad ditched ophthalmology school at 18 to serve in World War II. He was career Army, and less than thrilled to have a gun-hating son who married a Jew, even though he’d fought a whole war to save us. Among Rosie’s numerous relatives, who all lived in Cincinnati, thrilled was the default mode. Judaism was great! Ohio was great! Rosie was great! I was great! Would I like to do Sukkot at Aunt Connie’s? I would? Great!

I loved celebrating secondary Jewish holidays with the Birnbaums. Rosie loved lazy weekends with us. She tried to get Charlie to teach her ASL so she could sign with us, though she never practiced at home. She made pancakes with my dad and did puzzles with my mom. The whole time, she and I were talking. By middle school, we had bar and bat mitzvah parties to discuss, teachers to condemn, crushes to dissect. Neither of us could ever identify a boy who seemed like good enough company, though various male classmates made our hearts race. It was a broader problem, the company thing, and by high school, a frequent topic of discussion. We would have liked other friends, or so we told each other, but nobody was up to the challenge. No one understood how to slip into the vortex of our conversation, let hours slide by greased by talk. We graduated with solidified opinions about all our classmates. It felt good to have such settled analyses; it was almost like knowing everybody’s future.

We went to the University of Cincinnati, lived first in the dorms and then in a crumbling two-bedroom rental, which we decorated with antique-mall discoveries and the tacky art our parents had relegated to their basements years before. I waded into political science, a field that, it would occur to me only later, invites practitioners to judge and generalize. Rosie signed up for a course cross-listed with the Reform rabbinical college down the street. It was hilarious there, she told me. So much sincerity. A student band with actual tambourines. We kept all our interior doors open so we could talk constantly, shouting from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom to keep the conversation going. I’d sit in the sink painting my toenails while Rosie showered, raising my voice over the streaming water to discuss whether we should go that night to an opening at the student art gallery—free wine, no carding—or a potluck hosted by girls from our freshman hall.

I liked that Rosie kept those girls in our lives. I even liked that she wanted them in our apartment. It was fun to put on the show of our friendship. But I wasn’t sure I actually wanted more friends. Sex, yes; a boyfriend, maybe, but who? Rosie only brought around boys from the rabbinical college and Judaic studies majors who wrote all their term papers about the Holocaust. I met pre-law guys with rashy throats from uncalled-for daily shaving, student-council guys who talked about reforming the vending machines, gun-control guys who lobbied Congress over summer breaks. None appealed to me. I wanted a Rosie who was male.

It was in the slight hope of acquiring a boyfriend that I let Rosie talk me into going to Israel on a sponsored trip the winter of our junior year. I had a vague awareness—embarrassingly vague, looking back—of Israel’s settlements, its brutal treatment of Palestinians. But at the time, I was less worried about politics than I was about the torturous prospect of a group vacation. Rosie made the compelling counterargument that passing up free travel was insane, and so we agreed that we’d let the program fly us across the Atlantic, then tack on some cheap Mediterranean tourism after: four days in Greece, four in Croatia.

Regret kicked in before my jet lag wore off. Not one boy on our trip had potential. All thirty of our fellow travelers reminded me of a person I had grown up with. Nestled beside Rosie in the back of the tour bus with its smell of snacks and feet, I whispered that they came in models: Future Doctor, Wife-in-Training, Mommy Issues. She told me not to be a snob. It shut me up immediately. She’d never said anything like that to me before.

She moved right on, but I couldn’t. I was already feeling bad about myself. I had a nagging sense that it was profoundly spoiled of me to object to Israel. It had been given to me—the vacation and, supposedly, the whole country—and I should be appreciative. But I hated it, and every day my desire to reject it grew.

I could tell that Rosie wasn’t bristling like I was, but I didn’t recognize until the bus ride to Masada that she had, effectively, entered a parallel world. I was slouched deep in my seat, one headphone in and one dangling. Our tour leaders were wrapping up yet another speech explaining that this land was ours. “It’s not,” I said to Rosie.

She twisted her whole head to look at me. “Michaella, why do you think we’re here?”

“Because it’s free.”

“Well, that’s why it’s free.”

I put my second headphone in and pretended to fall asleep, then actually did. When I woke up, she had scooted across the aisle to talk to a Wife-in-Training named Lauren.

In the hostel that night, Rosie said to me, “I don’t understand why you don’t like it here.”

I was lying in my bed, a top bunk dangerously close to the ceiling tiles, which were plastered with aging stickers for drum and bass nights. Supposedly we were getting dressed to meet our trip-mates at a club, but neither of us had progressed very far.

“We’re not here. We’re on a tour.” It was a disingenuous answer, and she didn’t reply. After a moment, I said, “It’s so military. It’s creepy. I mean, we have a soldier on our bus.”

“Lauren’s hooking up with him.” I heard a stifled giggle in Rosie’s voice. Envy shot through me. Sex with a soldier hadn’t even crossed my mind.

“Good for her,” I said sourly.

“You sound mad.”

“A country shouldn’t need so many soldiers!” I sat up, nearly hitting my head. “It bothers me. I don’t like it.”

I didn’t go out that night. I was tired of clubbing. I curled up under the covers and Googled the Israeli military. I felt sick by the time Rosie got back and crawled into my bed, smelling of sweat and shawarma. “Are you awake?” she hissed, sounding pleased with herself. I pretended not to be.

In the morning, I told her, “I want to go home.”

She shrugged. “I don’t.”

“I mean, I want to go to Greece.”

“I don’t,” she said again. “I want to stay.”

I was too upset to try to talk her out of it. She refunded her ticket to Athens that night. I went on our vacation by myself, slept with two Brits in two hostels and a Croatian engineering student I met in a bar. It all felt like nothing. I only had one thought the whole time, which was that surely Rosie would be waiting in our apartment when I got back to Cincinnati. Surely she would be lonely in Israel without me. She would understand that she had to come home.

At first, we pretended our split was temporary. I sublet Rosie’s room to an architecture student who wore platform boots and painted her nails a spooky matte white. I wished Rosie was there to condemn her with me. Instead, I complained to her on Skype. Cincinnati was cold, my classes sucked, and my brother Charlie, who now lived in DC, kept half-inviting me to visit, but claiming he was too busy whenever I tried to nail down dates.

Rosie was busy too, but still, we talked every day, usually while I was eating breakfast and she was en route to her state-sponsored Hebrew class. She was nannying for a rich British couple—religious wife, tech bro husband—and living in the basement of their ugly Bauhaus mansion. When Rosie talked about her employers, our conversation felt like it always had. She enumerated their flaws and oddities, the discoveries she made from snooping. The husband faked an Israeli accent during phone calls. The wife had an iTunes playlist titled “Sex Playlist,” containing exclusively Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Neither parent could fully understand their children, who communicated in a mix of Hebrew and English that Rosie was picking up much faster than actual Hebrew.

I could see Israel settling over Rosie. She was so tan. In Cincinnati, she had dressed like a camp counselor: bright socks, practical cords, a fanny pack. Now, when she got up to refill her water, her hennaed hair and ballooning pants made her look like a stranger. At first, she told me she didn’t hang out with anyone from her Hebrew class—none of them were as fun as me—but over time, that claim softened to not many, not often, not during the week. She didn’t offer more details, and I didn’t ask.

I wasn’t talking much about my social life either. I had joined a pro-Palestine group on campus, my first-ever club. Not long after my first meeting, I had begun hooking up with the group’s sanctimonious leader, Joel, who was making it a personal project to expand my sexual repertoire. With Joel, I discovered that I didn’t like anal, didn’t like to be hit or tied up, and didn’t like vibrators except by myself. Why should sex feel like masturbating? Why should it hurt? I wanted to have nice sex that led to orgasms and, if possible, emotional connection, but I never said so to Joel. In the face of his relentless experimentation, my desires made me feel like the most boring person on Earth.

I’d never had sex with anyone without telling Rosie, but it would have been humiliating for her to know I was subjecting myself to Joel, worse to admit I wasn’t enjoying it, and worst of all to tell her why I kept inviting him over: I needed somebody to talk to me. I was aware that another person in my situation would have tried to make friends. I had thought the pro-Palestine group might lead to that. Instead it led only to Joel, and to a renewed conviction that Rosie was irreplaceable, though I couldn’t seem to tell her so. Our conversations were at once too strange and too ordinary for that. I wouldn’t have launched into an ode to our friendship over a real breakfast together in our apartment, so to do it over Skype or email seemed like too great an admission of change.

I resolved to tell her in London instead. Rosie was joining her employers on their annual visit home that July, and had requested a week off to spend with me. I was overjoyed when she suggested it. By the time she showed up in our teal-walled Airbnb, I was eager as a dog. I howled and threw myself on her. My suitcase was jammed with gifts: books I thought she’d like, a new fanny pack, canned Cincinnati chili—not kosher, but she’d been known to sneak it—to make her miss home. I’d meant to present each item with commentary, but we were talking too much and too quickly for that. She imitated, at length, all four of her bosses’ parents, who were apparently unified in their loathing of air-conditioning and their need to eat a slice of cake at precisely four o’clock every day. I felt luminous with normality.

For three days, our visit was nearly perfect. We walked all over London, talking nonstop. We dissected hip girls’ outfits, ogled men who looked straight out of the cast of The History Boys, drank warmish beer at pub picnic tables every night. Rosie, it turned out, no longer kept kosher, which I found ironic but convenient, since it meant we could eat sausage rolls and meat pies, roti at Shepherd’s Bush Market, Indian food on Brick Lane. I asked her about the change, and she told me that she barely knew anyone in Israel who was kosher. It seemed less important when you were surrounded by Jews.

Soon it dawned on me just how much this question—being surrounded by Jews, or not—now mattered to her. While we were picnicking in London Fields, she looked around the park and wondered aloud if they were the only Jews there.

“Who cares?” I said sleepily. We’d been lying in the sun for an hour.

“It just feels nice when there are.”

On Day Four, we fought. Rosie’s phone had died, and she borrowed mine to check her messages. While she had it, Joel saw fit to send me an unsolicited dick pic. Rosie yelped, then demanded to know who he was. It was late afternoon, and we were drinking G&Ts on the back patio of a mildly steampunk oyster bar in Shoreditch. A plate of abandoned, gritty shells sat before us, melting ice turning pinkish in the waning light. The whole scene felt sophisticated and adult: fancy bivalves, drinks in real glasses, hot British men in Nike Airs, a hottish American man sending me a close-up of his erection. It gave me a sense of the reality—the validity—of my own life that, mixed with gin, told me it was safe to come clean.

Rosie was furious. “I knew it,” she hissed. “I knew you were lying to me.”

“I never lied. I just didn’t tell—”

“That is lying.” She leaned forward, her face in mine. She’d never done that before, but now she was an inch from me, ranting. All year, apparently, she’d sensed me withholding. She was calling me daily, telling me all the details of her life until I’d made it clear that I didn’t want to hear them. Meanwhile, I’d been keeping secrets. “And why? Because you thought I wouldn’t like it?”

I wanted to say no. It wasn’t that simple. I was lonely and ashamed of it; I was rebelling against her, and ashamed of that, too. But I couldn’t force the words out of my mouth, and so she kept going.

“I don’t care who you hang out with or who you fuck. If you want friends who want to push Israel into the sea, great! Go for it! It isn’t like I expect you to agree with me.”

“Really?”

“Why would I? We haven’t agreed for years.”

I shrank back. “We haven’t?”

“No! You never liked any of my friends. I don’t think you like other Jews. When I first brought up the Israel trip, you said being on a bus with a bunch of Jewish frat boys was your idea of hell.”

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. “Are you calling me an antisemite?”

Rosie threw her hands up. “Maybe!”

“Because I think Palestinians should get to live on their own land?” In my peripheral vision, I saw heads turn.

“I never said anything about that.” Her tone softened slightly. I could hear that she was hurt, but I was too wounded myself to care.

“Why would you? You don’t care.”

“You know,” Rosie said, “you’ve never asked me how I feel about the Palestinians. You don’t know what I think. You assume.”

“Of course I know,” I snapped. “You moved to Israel, didn’t you? You bought in.”

Behind her, the sun was setting. Its orange glow caught in her red-brown hair. Her anger seemed to have vanished, or to have been sucked into my own. Very quietly, she said, “What do you buy into, Michaella?”

Our friendship, I thought. It was the ideology of my life.

“Nothing,” I said.

She nearly smiled. “That makes me feel sorry for you.”

Not until the flight home did I consider that maybe wounding me wasn’t her goal. In the moment, I gripped the bench beneath me, clenched my toes in my sweat-damp shoes. I said, “You should feel sorry for me. Do you know how bored I was chatting with your dumb rabbinical students? Being surrounded by all your Jews? Do you know how bored I was talking to you?”

Tears slid down Rosie’s face. I had raised my voice. All the hot Nike Air guys were looking at me.

“Fine,” Rosie said. She stood up. “I won’t bore you any longer. If you want to take back anything you just said, let me know.”

For an hour, I couldn’t move. My whole body was numb and buzzing. I kept thinking that she’d never tasted oysters before that evening.

I took a taxi back to our rental and found the door unlocked. Rosie’s bags were gone. She had left all the gifts I brought her on the coffee table. I didn’t repack them. I waited a day, then flew back to Cincinnati. At the airport, I texted both Joel and the subletter that I never wanted to see them again. Instead of finding a new roommate, I moved into a shitty studio over a chicken carryout on Ludlow Avenue. Within a week, every one of my possessions smelled like grease. I had no real reason to care.

I spent my senior year curled up in that apartment, eating ramen and applying to master’s programs, writing Rosie late-night emails that swung between pleas for her friendship and screeds against Israel. Sometimes I sent link roundups. Once I put together a slideshow of our past, starting with a photo of us on some playground in third grade—I could tell the year because she was missing so many bottom teeth—and ending, ill-advisedly even by my standards, with a cell-phone shot of us in a Jerusalem club. I half-assed some apologies. None of it elicited a reply.

When I got into the public policy school at Georgetown, Charlie insisted that I be his roommate. I remember thinking how nice it would be to have someone to talk to again.

Living with Charlie wasn’t like living with Rosie, but it was good for me. He was a practicing psychologist by then, specializing in treating the hearing parents of deaf children—which our mother and father chose to take as an endorsement of their parenting, not the rebuke it was. He coached me on adult social life. I found fault with my new classmates, like I’d always done, but a year in my own company had made me significantly more likely to see the faults in myself. I always worried that I’d said the wrong thing. Charlie reminded me constantly that, even if I did, no one cared. I improved at the once-alien art of the group chat, the dynamics of the big night out. I became the lone hearing member of his book club and his kickball team, otherwise filled with his fellow Gallaudet graduates. My life happened as much in ASL as in English. Charlie and I got a dog, Cooper, who we trained in both languages.

Israel invaded Gaza the summer I graduated and went to work for the House Democrats. From July to the end of August, I sat and stared at images of rubble, knowing somebody’s parents or children were trapped beneath it. By that time, Rosie and I hadn’t spoken in three years. I had long ago trained myself not to send the emails I wrote her, then, gradually, not even to write them. But I still wanted to know what she was doing, what she thought about what was happening. She wasn’t on social media. Why was that? Did she live on a kibbutz? Was she in the army, or, worst of all, a settler? I was disgusted by her, but also worried. The news made her feel very far away.

By that summer, I had started missing home. I hated the way many of my acquaintances on the Hill talked about the place I’d come from—as if its voters were simple and knowable, as if all of southern Ohio thought and talked and felt one way. After Trump won in 2016 and half of DC started quoting Hillbilly Elegy, I knew my time had come. I told my friends there I wanted to move back to Cincinnati to make a difference. It was true, but I also just wanted to leave.

I trained my old classmates not to mention Rosie. What I did learn from them disappointed me: She never visited, one of her siblings had also moved to Israel, and now her parents had an apartment in Jerusalem, too. I’d half hoped that I’d run into her sometime; now it seemed I might never see her again.

When the pandemic hit, I was glad to be in Ohio. I could walk Cooper through my spread-out neighborhood with minimal fear, or play fetch with him in the yard. But the dog park routine fell apart, everyone being cautious, and I was lonely. I had thought group friendship was a safer, more mature social form, but now, with no best friend, I was nobody’s responsibility.

I tried to take charge of myself. I kept busy with elaborate YouTube exercise routines and political volunteerism. My House member was a corrupt, climate-denying idiot. I threw myself into working for his opponent, Kate Schroder. Her campaign was doomed, but in July, when I signed up to write 100 letters to undecided voters, I truly thought she could win.

In my voter letters, I wrote about loneliness. I described the pandemic’s impact on Ohio’s economy, its working mothers, its citizens’ sense of community and identity. The Schroder campaign said voters reacted well to personal stories, and so I found myself explaining to stranger after stranger that I needed friends, and that Kate Schroder would help me. She was, after all, a public health expert. In Congress, she would fight for a swift, unified, and medically sound coronavirus response. She’d help bring our social lives back.

I signed all my letters Rochelle B. I never considered another name. I started to regret telling my friends not to talk about Rosie. I wanted to know if she was all right. I imagined reuniting, then quarantining with her; I imagined quarantining with her because we were still roommates and had never lived apart. Often I imagined Rosie getting Covid. I saw her in an oxygen tent, swaddled in protective plastic. I saw myself sneaking into her room, crawling under her blankets, and forbidding her to abandon me again.

It had been a long time since I wrote to Rosie, but as the lockdown wore on, I started again. I kept my emails short; I just said I hoped she was okay. The internet was full of stories of people hearing from their bored, quarantined exes and the latter sometimes replying, which Rosie did not. Meanwhile, I finished my first 100 letters and signed up for 100 more. My practice was to write them all first, then address and fill the envelopes, which meant it was a couple weeks before I discovered that a voter halfway down my list lived on Warren Avenue, the two-block street where Rosie grew up. I put the number into Google Maps. Even before the street view image settled into clarity, I knew it was Rosie’s old house.

I was aware that it was ethically dubious to research my voters online. Not forbidden, but weird. Still, I zoomed in on the house, then looked up the voter. Nora Obrador. According to the Schroder campaign’s meager fact sheet, she was 31, party affiliation unknown. According to LinkedIn, she’d studied creative writing at Kenyon and now taught English at the Seven Hills School. Googling yielded little more: no published work, no property records, no wedding website. The avatar on her dormant Twitter was a schnauzer who looked like a lighter-furred Cooper. Her last tweet was a forceful condemnation of Brett Kavanaugh; the one before that solicited clothing donations for trans youth. Both indicated that she didn’t need my urging to vote for Kate Schroder. I removed her letter from my stack.

Nora seemed not to have Facebook, which I admired. She did, however, have Instagram. Her profile was private, but there her avatar was of a black-haired woman in a navy beanie and owlish glasses. I squinted at the image. She had a nose ring. Trees waved yellowing branches behind her. She looked like she could be my friend.

Yom Kippur started at 7:00 on Sunday. I saw Nora three hours before. I was at Clifton Market, picking up wine and salad greens for dinner with my parents. I was hurrying a little, since I’d left Coop in the car. Not till I’d chosen my lettuce did I notice the two women at the cheese cooler. Their backs were to me, which meant I could look with impunity. One wore joggers and had her silvering hair in a disheveled bun; the other wore very tight vintage-looking Levi’s and had black hair flooding nearly to her ribs. As I watched, she tucked her ringless left hand in her girlfriend’s back pocket, then, with the other, selected a small round cheese wrapped in leaves.

I was sure she was Nora. I didn’t need to see the unmasked half of her face. She had the right hair. She was in the right neighborhood. The jeans indicated she was the right age. The cheese indicated she was in the right income bracket. My heart leaped when she turned; her sweatshirt, which was fraying at the cuffs, said kenyon college.

I knew better than to approach her, but I brooded all through dinner. I had been so close. I could have struck up a conversation. Complimented her batik face mask. Asked about the merits of leaves on cheese.

I had promised myself to quit visiting Warren Avenue once Yom Kippur was over, but though the holiday was done at sundown, I still paid a visit that night. Cooper whined when the car went silent. I signed to him to be quiet, then drew my heels up, hugging my knees. Soft light came through Nora’s windows, which, in my childhood, were always covered in gel decals of unicorns, rainbows, menorahs, and six-pointed stars.

I lowered my head to my knees. Cooper rustled behind me. He hated it when I cried. As I turned to reassure him, Nora’s front door swung open. Warm white light fell over her porch. I saw a silhouette emerging. No leashed dog; no trash bags. I dried my face, told Cooper to hush, and sank as low in my seat as I could.

It was Nora’s girlfriend. Up close, she seemed older than I’d thought. She wore a furry fleece, and her hair, now released from its bun, shone in the streetlights’ tangerine glow. Her mask was the blue surgical kind, bent to accommodate a significant nose. She knocked on my passenger door and I felt in the console for a mask, then waved it at her, demonstrating my intent. It was an old one, the ear loops stretched out, and I had to shake crumbs from it before putting it on. The girlfriend knocked again. I rolled the window down.

She didn’t step back, though we were less than six feet apart. Instead, she stooped and put her head almost through the car window. “You’ve been sitting out here a while,” she said. Her tone was pleasant without being friendly. I wondered if she had a job, or a life, that required her to manage unstable personalities. “And this isn’t the first time.”

Tears soaked into my mask. I imagined pulling it below my chin and huffing hot, threatening air in her too-close face. Turning the car on and driving away; if I so much as touched the gas, she’d go flying.