Persuaded – Chapter XXIX

Zahava

Recap: Mindy goes to Deal to visit Lieba, who has moved temporarily to the Harari home. There she meets the Hararis and Ezra Beyda, who raves so much about Chani that Mindy suspects he might want to date her.

As much as she’d railed about having to abandon her house, Zahava was surprised to find how much she was enjoying her summer away from Brooklyn. Their rental in Toms River, Pinny Friedman’s house, had turned out to be an elegantly appointed, capacious dwelling worthy of a family of their status.

“I’m starting to understand why all our old Brooklyn friends are moving down here,” she commented to Rikki. “It’s so spacious and peaceful! And there’s parking everywhere!” What a pleasure it was to be able to find parking almost instantly when she had an errand to run! The road rage that so often assailed her in Brooklyn, with other drivers whizzing into parking spaces she’d circled half an hour to find, or honking when she hesitated half a second after the light turned green, receded into oblivion. She never realized how much stress the traffic and parking issues had added to her life until she left it all behind.

The house and pool were great, her father reconnected with some old friends, and she and Rikki spent every morning at the gym or the pool (depending on the weather). Then they had the afternoons for shopping. There were ever so many places to shop in Lakewood, including branches of just about every single one of her favorite Brooklyn stores, just larger and glitzier! It seemed that every day she and Rikki discovered yet another spanking-new, elegantly designed mall.

“Retail therapy,” Rikki would say, alluding to her newly divorced status, as the clerks rang up filmy skirts, sporty tops, and brightly patterned dresses. Her divorce settlement had allotted her generous alimony payments, and she wasn’t hesitating to spend freely on making herself look great for the next guy.

It was also therapeutic for Rikki to confide in Zahava during their long hours lying on lounge chairs by the pool, justifying her divorce by laying out the full panoply of her ex’s indiscretions and faults. Having never been married, Zahava took a rather prurient interest in the lurid details of a marriage gone sour. As the days went by, Rikki had ample opportunity to lay out her ex-husband’s every flaw, as if lining up trinkets in a bazaar for display. First he had lost a chunk of their wedding money in an ill-advised stock market purchase, and then he’d burned up their savings investing in a harebrained kosher gym scheme. On the home front, he was equally inadequate in her eyes, from not sharing enough in child care after work to never changing a roll of toilet paper, not if his life depended on it. “I once let the toilet paper run out and left it that way for a week,” Rikki said. “You know what he did? He just used the other bathroom until I finally gave up and changed it!”

Listening to someone else’s problems and doing lots of shopping were therapy for Zahava too.  She was trying very hard not to be completely depressed over the idea that her 30^th birthday was coming up next month. Rikki wanted to organize something to celebrate it, but all Zahava wanted was to crawl under a rock and pretend it wasn’t happening. 30! How did she get to be 30 years old and still not married? The ticking of her biological clock was getting so loud it was deafening, and that “milestone” was just a cruel way of highlighting the fact that she was no longer a young thing with her pick of eligible young bachelors. In fact, the pickings had become few and far between, especially when you were an Elman, and you couldn’t accept any Tom, Dick or Harry (or Tully, Dovid or Heshy) who presumed to postulate for the post. The guys just seemed to get older, balder, and, let’s face it, weirder as the years went by. “Remember that guy I dated who was a vegan?” she asked Rikki one afternoon, as the two of them lay on lounge chairs next to the pool working on their tans.

“Yeah, he was such a fanatic,” Rikki said, taking a pull of her ice coffee. “Can you imagine consigning yourself to a lifetime of eating beans and grass?”

“He was just so…rigid about it,” Zahava said. “His whole life revolved around it. And whenever we went out to eat it had to be in a restaurant where he could get his plant-based foods. I’d be dying for a steak, but I didn’t dare order one around him.”

“At least he was in good shape, no?” Rikki said. “I remember when you dated that guy in finance who only wanted to go to baseball games or soccer matches. Wasn’t he the one who liked sports but never played them, so he had a paunch at age 31?  Even worse, as I remember, you were bored silly.”

“Yeah, he made great money, but I could never be attracted,” Zahava said, reaching for her tube of Clinique sunscreen. “And he seemed to think I was one of his guy friends. Maybe I could’ve handled it if he was interesting to talk to while we went to those games, but he was so fixated on them, it’s like I wasn’t even there! What would he be like after a year of marriage?”

“Probably the same,” Rikki said, yawning. “I actually heard that guy got married, though, if you can believe it.”

“Maybe he found a girl who loves sports,” Zahava said grimly. She finished smearing sunscreen on her arms and legs and capped the tube.

“The guy I was redt two months ago was even weirder,” Rikki said. “His whole basement is covered with a model train set that he spends hours on. He says it’s for his son, but that son is only two years old, so we all know who the real child is in that picture. He has a whole setup that’s probably worth thousands of dollars.”

Zahava sighed. “Are there any normal guys left?” she moaned. “I feel like all the normal ones have been snapped up already. All that’s left are the factory rejects.”

That’s what happens with age, she thought. Maybe she should just pretend to be 29 forever. “Maybe I should lie about my age on my shidduch resume?” she proposed to Rikki.

“Nah, better not to,” Rikki said. “They’ll find out eventually anyway, when they do their research, and then you seem untrustworthy. Not that anyone would blame you… But come to think of it, it’s not so farfetched to find a guy who’s happy to date a woman who’s older than him. I know a couple where the wife is eight years older than her husband!”

“Eight? What guy says yes to a shidduch like that? Who set them up?”

“I think they met at work,” Rikki said. “The wife doesn’t look her age.”

“Maybe I should go get a job,” Zahava mumbled.

If she had to paste that horrid number 30 soon on her resume, she might have to start considering guys who were divorced or widowed, nebach.  But she knew she did NOT want a guy with kids—she was adamant about that. Kids were hard enough when they were your own. Look at Mindy’s two brats! Chani was good about going over to help her with them, but it wasn’t Zahava’s thing to wipe runny noses or—ugh!—change diapers. She had friends who cooed over babies and thought toddlers were just SOOO adorable, but Zahava’s heart remained cold. She imagined that when she had her own she’d feel differently—and if not, it would be 1-800-NANNY—but she couldn’t summon up much enthusiasm for other people’s whiny, grungy, tantrum-prone children.

To be continued.