Jennifer, I said, and when I pressed my hand on her arm she shivered (and I thought, Does no one touch you?), Jennifer, I know I don't know you very well, but believe me, they will have peaked in three years and you will be sexy and good-looking and a pleasure to talk to forever.
............................................................................................................................................................................................................


Jennifer, their daughter, came into Naomi's kitchen to nibble. I smiled and put a dozen hot kugel tarts, dense rounds of potato and salt and oil, to drain on a paper towel near her. Jack was fond, and blind, with Jennifer. She was tall and would be lovely, smart, and softhearted, and I think that he could not stand to know her any other way I don't underst, to have her suffer not only his life, but hers. Naomi admired her extravagantly and put humiliating tidbits in the synagogue newsletter about Jennifer's near miss with the Westinghouse Prize or her stratospheric PSATs; when Jennifer failed as a girl, Naomi narrowed her eyes venomously. Fiddling with her bra strap, eating too many cookies, Jennifer tormented Naomi, without meaning to. She sweated through her skimpy, badly chosen rayon jumper, built to show off lithe, tennis-playing fourteen-year-olds, not to flatter a solid young woman who looked as if in a previous world she would have been married by spring and pregnant by summer. And Naomi watched her and pinched her and hissed at her, fear and shame across her heavy, worried face.
I loved Jennifer's affection for me; that it was fueled by her sensible dislike of her mother made it better, but that wasn't the heart of it. The person who was loved by Jennifer and Jack was the best person I have ever been. My mother's daughter was caustic and cautious and furiously polite; my lovers' lover was adaptable, imaginative, and impenetrably cheerful.
Jennifer, I said to her at her bat mitzvah, surrounded by Sapirstein cousins, all with prime-time haircuts, wearing thin-strapped slip dresses that fluttered prettily around their narrow thighs while Jennifer's clung damply to her full back and puckered around the waistband of her panty hose, Jennifer, your Hebrew was gorgeous, your speech was witty, and you are a really, really interesting young woman. She watched her second cousin toss long, shiny red hair and sighed. Jennifer, I said, and when I pressed my hand on her arm she shivered (and I thought, Does no one touch you?), Jennifer, I know I don't know you very well, but believe me, they will have peaked in three years and you will be sexy and good-looking and a pleasure to talk to forever. She blushed, that deep, mottled raspberry stain fair-skinned girls show, and I left her alone.
Now, when I dropped by as a helpful friend of the family, she brought me small gifts of herself and her attention, and I even passed up some deep kisses with Jack in the garage, "getting firewood," to give enough, and get enough, with Jennifer.

.. "You know, about what Daddy eats. She read that he should eat a lot of raw vegetables and not a lot of fat. Like no more quesadillas. Like no more of these amazing cookies. You are now in Fat-Free Country, folks, leave your taste buds at the door." She grabbed four chocolate lace cookies and went into the backyard.
I had read the same article in Newsweek, about alternative treatments, and I dropped gingko powder into Jack's coffee when I couldn't steer him completely away from caffeine, and sometimes, instead of making love, I would say, I would chirp, Let's go for a swim! Let's do some yoga! and Jack would look at me and shake his head. "I already have a wife, sweetheart. Andrea, light of my life. Darling Mistress. I don't need another one. ..I do listen and I take good care of myself. It's not a cold."
I wanted it to be a cold, or even something worse, something for which you might have to have unpleasant treatments with disturbing, disfiguring side effects before you got better, or something that would leave scars like train tracks or leave you with one leg shorter than the other or even leave you in a wheelchair. Treatments that would leave you still you, just the worse for wear.


Amy Bloom (collected in A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You) story 'The Gates are Closing' in Zoetrope: All-Story: Back Issue

I srchd for this bcs recalling re Jennifer, the other girls skinny in little dresses, "you will be sexy & good-looking (beautiful!) & a pleasure to talk to forever."
I did not remember that the narrator's lover, who is Jennifer's father, is dying. Parkinsons.
she wishes it was sth that wld leave you still you, disfigured, with scars, in a wheelchair, but you.