“Bathroom’s all yours, Mom.” Sharon strides silk-aswish into her favorite room. She makes music water on water, and lovely in the mirror. She takes a hundred moments to appreciate herself. Then she thinks again about Saul’s prose.

He writes well. She smiles as she imagines for an instant how she’d read him personally. But all that Judaism on Ashkenazim ad nauseam: how does a Jewess tell a Jew, in Jewish Berkeley, to get off it already? enough is enough …

She dabs the China Musk on carefully. From the old Body Shop, before it sold its name. The stuff’s a light oil – lovely scent like old Jade East from the cheeks of junior high boys – and will stain clothes. She puts it behind her ears but high up, away from any scarf, where a nose will have to seek it. She strokes it deep in her cleavage; she hesitates and then, deciding to go without panties, she feathers it at the creases of her thighs.

She leaves the bathroom and has just opened her closet door when the phone rings. Sam answers. Her mother. Sam announces the call to her from downstairs, before leaving the house. He doesn’t let her begin her conversation until he has notified her about where he’s going and when he’ll be back.

“Fine,” she calls down to him cupping the phone in her right hand. “Have fun. I’ll probably be back before you; I’ll certainly be home by ten.” She pulls a black skirt from its hanger clips. “Hi Ma,” she says into the phone.

Her mother as usual calls her Sadie; Sharon has never been able to learn why. She wants to tell Sharon about Aunt Ruth’s elevated blood sedimentation (sediment of what? Sharon wonders, but her mother doesn’t have an answer). Also about returning some sweater set already worn for a year, but Sharon is used to that. Her mother is a master of retail return, and Sharon tends to tune her out when she talks about shopping.

Sharon is wrapping the black skirt around her and thinking about Saul A’s posture and prose. She pulls a cropped cashmere sweater off a shelf, sets it on a chair for when her head is free of the phone. She has nothing to say about Saul’s stream-of-consciousness excursion into Jewish guilt and circumcision, let alone about Aunt Ruth and merchandise returns.

Saul A on the penis. Spear shape. Gear shift knob. Acorn. Circumcision as evidence of the great sociological experiment. If dogs consent to surrender their wildness in exchange for our control of fire (warm hearth, cooked food), then it is not strange that men agree to surrender their wildness for the benefits of our community …

Ah but there’s an edge. There’s the rub. Sharon giggles. “What?” her mother asks.

“Oh. Nothing,” she says but with a smile her mother can hear.

“What’s with you?”

“I have to go, Ma. I have to meet an author for a drink.” She turns the phone off but stands with it in her hand, absentmindedly rubbing the black plastic with the edge of her thumb. She contemplates her little black sweater and concludes of a sudden that she’d be better blonde. She reaches up to her closet shelf for the tousled wig.

Sharon pulls on her sweater and fits it to her upper arms and bra before she settles the wig over her dark hair. “A modern sheitel,” she thinks. Let Mr. A think me orthodox … an orthodoxy.”

One way or the other Sharon hopes to attract him. Just because. It’s that or talk about his writing. And some writers don’t go far enough.