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from the pipes
to have another drink.
#
    drink 3
    “I just don’t like the name,” Ally says to me. She grabs my hand
from across the table and squeezes it a little. She has a solid
hold of me, and she looks me straight in the eyes.
    “It’s been a year now,” she says. “And I still don’t like it.”
    I don’t know what she is talking about, but I enjoy her
touch too much to ask.
    Shmendrik starts massaging her neck. It makes them
both seem so sweet. “The woman doesn’t like the name
you christened me,” he says. “She thinks Shmendrik isn’t
appropriate.”
    “But it’s perfect,” I say.
    “The word means fool,” she says. “I looked it up. And it’s
a Yiddish word,” she says. “Joel isn’t a fool and he’s got blonde
hair and blue eyes.”
    “I know,” I say. “That’s why I love it.”
    Shmen smiles without talking, which is a rare sight, because
he’s always got something to say. Even when he has nothing to
say, he’s got something to say, and so I realize that this subject,
for whatever reason, is a touchy one between them. Every
relationship has an area that is tricky even if it has no right
to be tricky—one of those arguments that seems ridiculous
when you recount it to someone later, but somehow, at the
time, it taps into something nasty. So I decide to keep my
mouth shut and let Ally and Joel work it out, even though Joel
totally doesn’t look like a Joel—his own sister admits that.
    “When Yuvi gets stuck on a name,” Julia says, “there’s
nothing you can do about it.” And then she lists off some
of the people in our world that I’ve permanently named:
our friend, Jason Shiffer, now known as Shiffer Brains; my
disturbingly flirtatious aunt, known posthumously as Nafkeh;
our postman, the Nazi.
    Ally lets go of my hand and she looks seriously at Julia and
me. Me and my wife, sitting there next to each other in the
Righteous Room. Ally tries to size us up. I know from Shmen
that she’s an expert sizer-upper. This woman knows firsthand
what a disaster a marriage can be and she’s probably trying
to understand where Julia and I fit into this spectrum. If we
tease each other because we love each other or because we’re
hiding something.
    And then Ally says to Julia, “Why hasn’t he given you a name?”
#
    last call
    It’s late into the night and Shmen is two to four drinks ahead
of everyone else when he orders a gin and tonic to try and
sober up.
    The good-looking waiter with the gentile blue eyes keeps
glancing over at my wife and I re-remember about that little
note I found in her pocket. I had forgotten about it for hours,
but the dread inside of me has returned. The contractions are
getting more frequent and I wonder how much longer I can
carry this napkin inside of me.
    Julia says, “How you feeling, Shmen?”
    I’ve seen Julia’s pretty freckly face get more serious the
more drinks Shmen orders. Between Shmen’s little digestive
disease and the way their mother drank when she was alive, it
isn’t easy for Julia to watch him drink like that.
    “Great,” Shmen says. “I feel like a million dollars’ worth of
intestinal surgery.”
    I press my hand on Julia’s thigh. I squeeze it and feel the
tightness in her muscles.
    “Let’s quit drinking,” she suggests. “I think it’s enough.”
    “For you or for me?” he asks and doesn’t look her in the eyes.
    It’s about ten seconds of silence at the table until Ally says,
“Actually, I think I’m ready to go home myself. We still have to
take the babysitter home.”
    And that’s how tension inflates and deflates with a
Protestant family. Not that I’m the prototype for direct
communication, with all my secrets and fears and worries, my
inability to write even the first page of a novel, all the ways I
have of joking around any problem, how I can turn a concern
about the stability of my marriage into a discussion about
whether I should wear the beige pants to dinner, how I can
suggest that we hold