On SVU, they would all add up to: rich, WASP. There were three cars in the driveway, all sparkling. He’s Jewish, like her, and it proves confusing: She does some amateur sleuthing as she tracks down the family of the killer who took her work colleague’s life.
#Bitter and sweet j pop tv#
Yael works at an online magazine for Jewish women, and she thinks about how her favorite TV show seems to portray her people. She and her roommate Sophie are obsessed with Law And Order: SVU, and that factors into the news that a woman who worked with her has been murdered. Yael is a thoughtful little girl, perhaps too thoughtful: “She is grateful that her parents are divorcing now, while she is still in second grade…” The next time we see Yael it’s in “A Girl of a Certain Age”. She’s a precocious child of divorce processing her new living situations, a home with Mom and a separate home with Dad. Sometimes, if I looked at just my sister’s eyes, I could imagine her as delicate instead of ugly…Sometimes, I saw Amelia wrap her hand around the string of her bicep, forefinger to thumb.Ĭohen manages a careful balancing act between such stark images and seemingly mundane moments with Yael, the second of the four major characters whom we meet in “Bad Words”. Karin, Amelia’s younger sister, narrates the story: Karin is regularly having to come to terms with her sister’s emaciated appearance: Amelia is regularly hospitalized for her eating disorder. In “Care”, the situation becomes more complicated. Perry tries to explain her condition, “…her words tumbling over each other like kindergartners on their way to recess.” Later, as the lie becomes something she can’t take back, the pregnancy becomes “… like a pimple: she was aware of it, it worried her, but for now she was going to let it sit.”
It wasn’t fair to view a student as a nemesis…Amelia was more virus than girl, contaminating the rest of the class, who crowded around her at lunchtime, their bodies humming like cars about to start…Ĭohen’s similes are perfectly attuned to the essence of her characters.
She considers her relationship with her student Amelia as they’re both purging in the bathroom: Perry conceals her alcoholism from her superiors by claiming her symptoms are morning sickness, prelude to an unplanned pregnancy. While Cohen expertly weaves her four main characters through these stories, it’s not just about them. This time, she’s purging in a girl’s room sink, signs of an eating disorder that will appear later. “Her eyelashes are thread for their buttons her teeth are the pearls they twist between their knuckles on the days they are sad.”Īmelia appears next in “Expecting”. It’s “…as soft as rose petals.” It’s strange and at times horrifying as Amelia converses with this imaginary and lethal nanny and other witches at a dinner party. Amelia pokes at her little sister’s skin. In “Naughty”, Amelia has been told (by an imaginary nanny) that her baby sister is a changeling, and the father of the boys next door is a werewolf. Sometimes they’re very young, sometimes they’re older and experienced, always they’re trying to keep their heads above water. We follow them from childhood through adulthood as they wander through difficult terrain. Miriam Cohen’s Adults and Other Children is a sharp collection of short stories that introduces and follows the lives of four women: Amelia, Yael, Amelia’s little sister Karin, and Sophia.
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