When I Replay the Night

“Do you really need that?” my mom asked when I first tossed the tote bag into our cart during a shopping spree at Century 21. It was a plain beige canvas with five bolded words printed on the front:

WE ALL HAVE EXCESS BAGGAGE

The double entendre thrilled me, but my mother was less enthusiastic. She picked up the bag and sighed.

“I think it might give people the wrong message.”

The look on her face said, I love you but I don’t think this is a good idea.

“Mom, I just printed out my syllabus for Comp Lit 101 and the professor listed ten books. Ten! I’m going to need a bag that’s big enough to shlep all of that around plus books for four other classes. That’s, like, the definition of excess baggage.”

My mother’s mouth formed a small, closed-lip smile.

“Come on, you know it’s funny.”

I took the tote out of her hands and put it back in the cart.

I have never successfully written about the night I got engaged. I tried, once, in grad school, for a poetry workshop. But the poem wasn’t very good.

The Answer *

When he lost his balance while getting
down on one knee (“So, will you?”
was how it finally fell from his lips),

When he looked up at me and
I looked down at my finger (afraid
the halo would never come off),

When I replayed the night

I remember the girl on my right clearing her throat. Across from me, someone coughed. Everyone in the workshop looked relieved when Professor Levin interrupted the lengthy silence.

“Well, it’s a start.”

I could tell that she was struggling to find something to say.

“You obviously haven’t finished it,” she concluded, pointing to the last stanza where only one line appeared.

When I replayed the night

The problem, I now realize, was that I had already replayed the night so many times—for myself and for others—that there was no longer anything left for me to say.

Dating, in general, is hard. I think most people would agree. But I’m not just bad at it. I suck at it.

I’ve tried to observe myself, to watch voyeuristically while I’m out on dates, so I can figure out why I have failed, time and again, at something that should be fairly natural. So far, this is what I’ve come up with:

• I tend to talk about Victorian literature when I’m nervous. I talk about George Eliot and the fact that she wasn’t a man but a rather unattractive woman by the name of Maryann Evans. (Note: This does not make for good conversation. Nothing fun or sexy there.)
• I get nervous around guys I’m interested in, which means that Victorian literature only surfaces on the good dates. (Note: Once George Eliot gets mentioned, these good dates almost always take a turn for the worst.)
• I think too much. I analyze each word as it comes out of my mouth, or each word as it comes out of his mouth, or… Oh no, am I staring at his mouth? Shit, look back up at his eyes. And talk! Show him that you’re not a blonde bimbo. Tell him about George Eliot…

Like I said. I suck at dating.

But the thing is, I wasn’t always like this. I didn’t always second-guess myself. I used to move and speak with a quiet confidence. But then I got engaged. And broke it off.

EXCESS BAGGAGE, Kenneth Cole would say.

My Orthodox Jewish community would say the same thing.

According to Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, there are about fifteen million Jews worldwide, just .2% of the global population.[1] Of the hundreds of millions of people living in the United States alone, Brandeis University’s American Jewish Population Project estimated that, in 2016, the U.S. Jewish population hovered at a mere seven million.[2] If we go one step further, fewer than one million of the Jews in the U.S. identify as Orthodox, making the Orthodox Jewish community just .2% of the total U.S. population.[3]

What I’m trying to say is that my religious community is small. Very small. And word travels pretty quickly. So, when good things happen in our circles, people talk. And when bad things happen, they talk even more.

I broke the news to my mother over the phone.

“I called off the engagement last night,” I said while standing in the English department at Queens College, waiting for my class to begin. The hallway was loud and crowded, and I pressed the cell phone against my ear. It was hard to hear my mother’s reaction. I’m not even sure there was one.

“Mom, I have to go. My professor just arrived and I need to grab a seat.”

I hung up and walked into the classroom.

Professor Wang was already writing our lesson plan across the board. I sighed and pulled a pencil from my bag.

“Okay,” he said, turning back to the face the class. “We’re looking at ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ today, a poem inspired by superstition. People once believed that women would dream of their future husbands if they fasted on the eve of St. Agnes, and I want to dive right in to the opening stanzas. Why do we think Keats chose to kick things off with the image of a priest?”

Professor Wang stared at the class, but no one responded. He waited another moment before breaking the silence.

“Come on guys, wake up! Keats is using religion as a frame for this narrative! He’s trying to tell us that regardless of Porphyro and Madeline’s sensual relationship—which will surface in the subsequent stanzas—‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ cannot be stripped of its religious foundation.”

I stopped taking notes and looked down at my left hand. A small imprint of my engagement ring was still visible. I traced my index finger around the oval shape. I knew that I would miss the boy who had become such a large part of my life, who had undoubtedly left a permanent indent—not just on my finger but on my thoughts and beliefs and actions. But I didn’t feel grief or regret. I felt relief.

A light tap on my elbow brought me back to reality. Regina, a friend from class, pointed to my ringless finger. “At the jeweler?” she mouthed.

I evaded the question with a vague head bob, gesturing to Professor Wang who was now pacing excitedly at the front of the room.

“I’m afraid we will be faced with an ambiguous ending here, folks. Porphyro sneaks into Madeline’s room and the two consummate their love before fleeing into a winter storm. You might have noticed that the text doesn’t tell us about the nature of their fate, but the recurrence of cold, stormy weather seems to hint at Porphyro and Madeline’s doomed destiny.”

Professor Wang rattled on about the ambiguous tragedy of young love, and all I could think about, as I sat there, was the fact that perhaps I, too, was doomed.

Several days passed before I worked up the courage to tell my best friend Sara that the wedding was off. I sent her a long email explaining my decision and begged her not to ask questions. Weeks went by before others found out.

When my friend Jill texted me about a month later (“how r the plans goin? haven’t heard from u in 4evr!”), I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and dial her number. She answered my quick text with a sympathetic “OMG I’m so sry,” but I didn’t hear from her again for quite some time. And I was okay with that because I understood her silence. I knew that she thought I was nuts to be giving up a life I had already secured for myself. The boy, the wedding, the marriage, the family—it was all she’d ever wanted. And Jill wasn’t the only one; I knew plenty of girls like her. This dream, this mindset—it wasn’t the typical boy craze that lots of girls experienced. It was something else entirely, something cultivated by our orthodoxy. It was a mentality that had been hammered into us for as long as I could remember.

Marriage was the ultimate goal, and I had just given it away.

We met during our first semester of college.

“Nice bag,” he’d said on the first day we spoke. “Funny.”

We quickly became best friends, absolutely inseparable, and by the end of our second semester, we were in love. But about eight or nine months into the relationship, I started to feel some pressure. I knew that it was unintentional; he didn’t realize how often he talked about marriage or how imminent he made it seem. My friends were no different. They squealed when they saw us together, referred to us as a power couple, asked, all too often, whether he was The One.

Was he?

I thought about this a lot. I knew that I loved him and could picture a future with him. But I was also busy with other things: a double major in English and Psychology; doctor appointments for chronic migraines; family drama involving my brother’s divorce.

The truth is that I should never have gotten engaged—I know this. I wasn’t ready for marriage. I knew it on the night of the proposal as we walked along the beach watching dark waves break against the shore. I knew it when he got down on one knee and I noticed the sand between his toes. I knew it when he pulled me in for a long hug and I could feel him shaking with excitement and all I could think was, I can’t believe this is really happening. I’m really doing this. But I think I succumbed to the pressure because I felt like I owed people an engagement. Different people, for different reasons.

Like my mother. It made me sick to think that one day, down the road, she might approach the women in our community to inquire about their sons or brothers or nephews, desperately trying to set me up because she was worried about my marital prospects. I wanted my mom to be burden-free, to feel joy and pride as her friends called to congratulate her. I thought of this during my engagement party as her friends gathered around.

“Jackie, this is so exciting,” one of them said as she turned to look at me and my fiancé. “This is it, she’s on her way!”

My friends, too, played a big part. It was hard being surrounded by peers who were so marriage-minded. With the exception of Sara, none of my friends were in relationships. They all lived vicariously through me, and I could feel how much they wanted to have what I had—not because they were jealous but because they longed to be at the same place in their own lives. They desired to achieve the same goal.

And then there was my boyfriend, whom I loved, so deeply. I knew people were expecting us to get engaged and I didn’t want to embarrass him. I knew people would talk if we broke up.

So I said yes.

But then, one year later, I broke it off.

Because I couldn’t say yes anymore.

For a while, people were uncomfortable around me. Family members and friends didn’t quite know what to say. “At least you don’t have a divorce on your resume!” my mother’s friend joked in a desperate attempt to fill the silence.

These reactions followed me around: at the pizza store, on college campus, in synagogue. But I knew that my friends and family members were only experiencing this discomfort, this brain freeze, because they cared. They wanted to be sympathetic and simply did not know how to express it. However, when I started dating again, I quickly noticed that men didn’t know how to react either.

In Orthodox Judaism, there are many things that can detract from a single girl’s status and appeal, things that might seem trivial to people outside of our community.

Where did she attend high school?

Are her parents divorced?

Is she currently taking any medication?

These are just a few of the questions that are oftentimes asked—by the man or the matchmaker—before the couple decides to go out. And, has she ever been engaged? comes up too. I’m not sure how else to explain why men might care except to say that having a previous engagement somehow detracts from my virginal status. I’ve gone through the engagement experience and my proposal cherry has already been popped.

So dating has been difficult.

I try to time it just right but I never really know when to tell a guy about the engagement. Do I say something before the date? During? Three dates in? I get so nervous that my stomach squeezes and I find myself rubbing the skin where my ring used to rest.

Jonathan was the first guy I went out with after The Incident, as I’d taken to calling it. And because it had only been eight months—because I still replayed the night—I insisted that a mutual friend tell him about The Incident before setting us up.

He doesn’t seem bothered by it, she reported back. But Jonathan decided to bring it up one night in the midst of a disagreement. We had only been dating for a month.

“I don’t get the whole concept of ‘social smoking,’” I said as he tossed his cigarette butt into the street. “Either you smoke or you don’t.”

“Honestly, I don’t understand why you can’t just let this go. If I was able to get past the fact that you were engaged, why can’t you get past—”

But I was gone, already tuning him out. He was using The Incident as a bargaining chip and I knew I would never win. It was the first time someone had used my life experiences against me. His words, his reproach—it all felt so heavy. I crumbled under the weight.

It made me think about my past and my future and WE ALL HAVE EXCESS BAGAGE. Suddenly, the joke didn’t seem so funny anymore. So as the new semester began, signaling my final year as a college undergrad, I left the bag at the back of my closet and walked across the campus sporting a light gray crossbody.

I told Jacob about The Incident on our fourth date, as the evening drew to a close. The words tumbled from my mouth like a confession, something I was obligated to inform him about so he couldn’t point a finger, couldn’t blame me, later on down the road, for withholding valuable information that might have made him call it quits earlier on, had he known.

“So you were the one who broke it off?” he asked after a minute.

“Yes.”

He paused. And then, “So why did you say yes in the first place?”

He wasn’t trying to be rude. His tone wasn’t cruel or accusatory. But as the moments passed by, I could feel myself not wanting to explain, or justify, or defend my choices. It was exhausting.

“I had a nice time, but I don’t think this is going to work. I’m sorry.” I gave him a smile and walked myself to the door.

I was 25 and halfway through my MFA when a friend introduced me to Charlie. He was tall and worldly and charismatic, the type of guy who turned heads and demanded attention when he walked into a room. He was seven years older than me but the mischief in his eyes said otherwise.

By the time Charlie got around to asking about my relationship history, I was tired of the question. It felt stale, recycled. But I liked Charlie. So I gave him the abridged version.

“We were best friends and I didn’t want to lose him. So I basically had two options: break up or get engaged.” I shrugged. “I was young, and I wasn’t strong enough to put myself first. I worried too much about everyone else’s feelings and not enough about my own.”

I took a deep breath and braced myself for his reaction.

“Wow.” He laughed, loud and deep, until his voice turned raspy and his whole face scrunched into a big smile. “You’re telling me that other guys have actually cared about this?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure you were dating men? Did they have balls?”

His I-don’t-care attitude caught me off guard. It was so different from anything I’d ever experienced. And it was nice, for a while. But when he never cared—when he never wanted to know about my past, or my experiences, or the things that made me me—I found myself thinking that those other guys weren’t so very crazy after all.

“Desire was instantaneous, that species of desire that feels like something rarer than mere lust but that no twenty-first-century grown-up can dare call by its proper name: “love at first sight.” The body stirs, but above the waist. The mind stirs, and insists something significant is happening… My urges were celestial, not yet sexual: I wanted to touch [his] face, to put the tips of my fingers against [his] cheek, to trace the groove between lip and nose…”

-Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur

This is as close as I can get to describing what I felt when I saw Jeremy for the first time as he stepped onto my house porch and smiled at me. It was a longing to find out if he was, in fact, as kind as his face looked. To find out if his cheeks were always rosy, or if they only colored when he was nervous or excited. To find out just how he came to be standing in front of me and every detail of his life that had led him to our meeting at that exact moment.

I was friends with Jeremy’s step-sister, and she had given him some fuzzy version of The Incident before setting us up. But I didn’t know about this until Jeremy confessed, on our third date, that he had already heard about the broken engagement.

I could feel my stomach squeeze as soon as he said it.

“What would you like to know?” I asked. I looked down at my lap.

“Whatever you want to tell me,” he answered. His tone was soft and unassuming, as if he recognized that he didn’t have an implicit right to my memories and experiences.

We sat quietly outside a small café. It was a cold, crisp night, and the air helped me organize my thoughts.

I thought about when he lost his balance while getting down on one knee. And I thought about when he looked up at me and I looked down at my finger. I remembered the feel of his body, shaking, as he hugged me close. I could still hear the dark waves fizzling against the shore.

Jeremy didn’t feel entitled to these memories, didn’t ask for explanations. And this kindness, this compassion, made me want to tell him everything. I just wasn’t sure how—or where—to begin. So I decided to start with the reactions I’d encountered from other men I had dated.

“But none of those reactions are any good,” Jeremy countered when I was done. “The guys who cared too much didn’t give themselves a chance to work through it, and the guys who didn’t care at all didn’t care enough about you.”

I sat there, speechless.

I didn’t quite know how to express my utter relief and gratitude, to explain this profound feeling, this certainty that I had just found someone who understood my past and my perceptions—even if those two things didn’t necessarily align with the community and culture around us.

We walked back to the car and I filled the silence with talk of George Eliot and her Middlemarch masterpiece. But after a few moments, I noticed that Jeremy had gone quiet.

“Are you upset?” I asked. “I can’t really tell what you’re thinking.”

He stared at the steering wheel for a while. Then he turned and looked at me.

“I’m sitting here thinking that I’m glad you didn’t go through with it. That you were brave enough to ignore what people might say or think. Because you’re sitting here next to me tonight instead of next to someone else.”

For the second time that evening, I couldn’t find words.

He smiled. “It’s getting late. Why don’t we head back?” He turned on the car and started to drive off.

“Wait, I think I left my purse at the café.” I looked under my seat and on the floor in the back. I didn’t see it. “Yeah, I think I left it.”

Just then, a waiter came rushing out, waving my purse in the air. I thanked him and looked down at the clutch—metallic green, no-name designer. My mind wandered to Kenneth Cole.

WE ALL HAVE EXCESS BAGGAGE

All I knew was that I felt lighter than I had in a long while, light enough for a small clutch that I clung to tightly as we spent the rest of the night walking around, talking in hushed, reverent tones.

* The completed poem appears in F(r)iction #1

[1] https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/essays/demographics-of-judaism

[2] http://ajpp.brandeis.edu/aboutestimates.php

[3] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/demographic-profile-of-american-jews

________

Mia Herman is a writer and editor living in Queens, NY. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, Barren Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, F(r)iction, Ghost City Review, Literary Mama, Newtown Literary, [PANK], Potomac Review, and Third Coast, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hofstra University and currently serves as the Associate Managing Editor for F(r)iction magazine. When she’s not writing or editing, Mia is most likely a) curating road-trip playlists, b) watching obscene amounts of reality TV, or c) setting her friends up on blind dates. Follow her on Twitter @MiaMHerman.