The Real Choices Women Make

A version of this essay appeared on Alternet.

I leaned across the small cafe table and asked, inappropriately, “So, what brings you here?” I knew better, but the laughter, clinking of glasses, lit votives and mellow trip-hop made it feel like a real party.

Memory Keeper

A version of this piece was published on HerStry.com.

Noah and I were walking the other day when we heard a baby crying. Like really crying. Like drowning out the traffic and the birds and the kids playing in the schoolyard across the street.

“Mom, did I cry when I was a baby?”

Wasabi Was the Bitter Herb

A version of this essay appeared in Expat: Women’s True Tales of  Life Abroad

For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has stockpiled cans of tuna. She’d run down to Waldbaum’s every time the price of Bumble Bee Chunk White fell below 69 cents a can. There’d be a limit—four or six per visit—and she’d shuttle between her apartment in Astoria, Queens to the store in Forest Hills. She’d load my dad up with a leaning tower

The Seventeen Year Twitch

A version of this essay appears in Sex and Single Girls.  

Sandy asked the three of us to drip the grease from our pizza onto hers–she liked it extra-greasy. As I pointed my slice over hers (at just the right angle so as not to lose the cheese), Erica said, “it was incredible. Fantastic. Incredible. I don’t know what to say.” Erica rubbed her fingers under her eyes to smudge her teal eyeliner just so, then checked her work in a small mirror.