Even if I could have, I wouldn’t have: telling only made things worse. Reassurance, the erasure of worry, the absorption of anxiety—for the most understandable and saddest reasons, those were not part of my parents’ skill sets. They were barely part of mine, though I’m working on them. I will always be the survivor of survivors, of catastrophizers; always the one to say the darkest, bleakest thing at a moment when a shred of levity could save the day. Just ask Gary.
“Oh, Judy Hope Vogel, the irony of your middle name,” he always says, when my negativity bleeds unexpectedly into a conversation or an exchange, a permanent marker through paper. But for me it’s never been irony. It’s always been the weight of that middle name, the burden of being the one to carry a positive life force for the three of us. Which is why my Bird on Your Head success had been so sweet, and why my now-descending star is that much harder to bear. I’m letting my whole family down, not just myself.
Today, I inch away from the rock-hard avocados toward the organic pitted fruit, already out of season and just out of reach, and the berries, to try to get a better look at Michael, to confirm that it’s actually him. It is. I’d know his teeth anywhere. I watch him while he looks intently at his phone—maybe at a text, maybe at a shopping list—maybe at an email from his wife—until his shopping cart finally starts to move.
“Excuse me,” he says, staring at me like I have a bird on my head. It takes me a few seconds to realize that my cart is blocking his way past me.
“I’m so sorry!” I smile expectantly but don’t move. I’m waiting for him to recognize me, to say something awkward and adorable and perfect, something we will brag about in the retelling of this moment at the small but intimate rehearsal dinner before our small but intimate wedding exactly a year or two from now. But when my fantasy scenario doesn’t materialize, I realize suddenly what I must look like to him: just another middle-aged female warehouse shopper, oblivious to everyone around her because she feels like she’s invisible anyway. I clear my throat, then force myself to break through the scrim of intense discomfort. “I’m sure you don’t remember me”—I clear my throat again—“but are you Michael Wasserman? From Temple Shalom Hebrew School?” And then, before he can answer that no, he doesn’t remember me, I preempt the possibility of disappointment by blurting: “I’m Judy Vogel. I broke your Ten Commandments diorama. By accident.”
He smiles slowly, cautiously. It’s all coming back to him now, I’m sure of it, and we will each live better, less burdened lives once this painful memory is cleared up and we each get the closure we so deserve. Such is the magic of living where you grew up, I think: the opportunities for soul-cleansing do-overs are endless. “I am Michael Wasserman,” he says, “but I have no memory of a Passover diorama.”
“Oh wow. Okay. Great. What a relief!” I lie. I feel oddly disappointed. How is it possible for that incident to have meant more to me as the destroyer than it had to him as the destroyed? That’s not how it’s supposed to work, is it? “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of that day and felt terrible about it. I had this whole awful scenario in my head about how a neighbor had helped you with the project because your mother had just died and your father was too busy being in mourning.”
When my mouth finally stops moving I reach down into the sling for self-comfort. But I remember that, for once, I’ve left the dog at home. Which must be why I’m saying things I shouldn’t be saying. And why I’ve insisted on reintroducing myself to someone I used to know, even though Gary’s been advising me against that kind of thing for years: They’re strangers, he’d say after each humiliating episode in a restaurant, a mall, or a movie theater, when someone either didn’t recognize me, didn’t remember me after I’d explained our connection, or didn’t care.
Michael Wasserman, a virtual stranger, is still staring at me, but he hasn’t walked away yet. I take this as a good sign, or at least as a sign that all is not lost. Yet. He nods his head slowly. “Mrs. Shapiro.” He edges our carts out of the line of rabid shoppers desperately foraging for dinner at the nearby whole-roasted-chicken counter, then speaks slowly, a memory gelling with each word he adds: “She lived next door, with two girls, so her house was full of arts and crafts stuff. We sat at her dining room table the night before the diorama was due and she helped me do the whole thing.” He pauses, then smiles, all teeth. “Actually, she did the whole thing while I just watched.”
I’m as sad now for him as I was years earlier. “I didn’t mean to bring up a painful memory.”
“I’d completely forgotten about the diorama until now. Clearly I’d blocked it.”
As a crowd at a frozen pizza sample counter continues to gather, we move our carts out of the way again.
“So what did you do after I destroyed your diorama?”
“I became an orthodontist.”
“No way.”
“I know. So boring.”
“Are you kidding? When you’re a writer there’s nothing boring about a normal career with a steady income.” I haven’t self-identified as a writer in ages and I have no idea why I did just now.
“That’s right,” he says, smiling again. “Congratulations on all your success!”
I wave him away. “That was such a long time ago.”
“Was it really?”
“It feels like it. It feels like a million years ago!”
“Well, my kids loved the book. And the show. I used to tell them that I knew the girl who created them, that I sat next to her in Hebrew school.”
I roll my eyes. “The girl with the bird on her head.”
“That’s not how I remember it. I remember you being the supercool girl that I was too scared to talk to.”
“Shut. Up.”
“Remember what you used to say to the principal when he told you to smile? You’d say, ‘It’s my face.’” He laughs. “It’s my face. That was really something.”
“Smiling was not part of my skill set back then.”
“Well, you’re smiling now.”
I blush, then look in his cart: cereal, organic macaroni and cheese, peanut butter. “Tell me about your kids.”
He taps his phone and then shows me—three adorable dark-haired children in various stages of toothlessness, against a backdrop of epic foliage. “This was a few years ago. They don’t like to be photographed now. They’re in their tweens now.”
“They look just like her,” I say, with a wry smile, remembering Janie Levy. She was the prettiest girl at the temple, and she and her twin brother, David, were the bat mitzvah circuit heartthrobs. I remember Michael and Janie dating around the time of all those awful parties, her perfect hair and his perfect teeth, neither of them needing braces, and how awkward and unsightly the rest of us seemed by comparison. “I can’t believe people actually marry their Hebrew school sweethearts and live happily ever after.”
He looks at me like I have a bird on my head. “I didn’t marry Janie.”
“Then who did you marry?”
But before he can answer, Teddy materializes as if out of thin air from the video game aisle. I reach for his arm. “Teddy, this is Michael, an old friend of mine from when I was your age.” I prod him to shake hands, then whisper into his ear: “Now smile. With teeth.”