Given Name
Unlike many people’s names that are deeply embedded in their ancestral and cultural history, mine has nothing to do with my family. My mother’s choosing process was nail lacquer without its name sticker – a watery color.
There is a gothic mystery novel by my name. And the story goes that Rebecca is a ghost who haunts the mansion of her societal husband, now remarried to a younger woman. The house staff speak obsessively of her unparalleled beauty and perfection. The reader soon learns that Rebecca was a threat, someone from whom her husband had to escape. And so, he murdered her and buried her bones on the estate. Rebecca's ghost doesn’t seem to want much, however. Nothing like revenge. Nothing like that.
A student recently told me that my name means “captivating one” in Hebrew. I liked that. Captivating seems like an excellent adjective to ascribe to a woman. It’s true of the younger me, the old me. (The old me was younger.) That me toppled conversations with a hypnotic cadence, moody as a South Florida sky. That me stormed the bar in sparkly skirts and sneakers, throwing back Jack because it is what writers drank.
I was told once that I was magnetic by a boy – then a man, one ex-husband, two men, a friend, then another friend. That’s a lot of people using the same word. When I was in rehab, we did an exercise: a pair of us would stare into each other’s eyes and speak forth the best compliment we had ever received. I looked at that nameless woman’s coiled shoulders, deep into that prism:
“Your soul is magnetic.”
Like that, I gave it away.
Rebeka Singer is a Language Arts teacher living in South Florida. She received her MFA in creative fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She loves artichokes, her Frenchie, and the color red. Her work has appeared in Corium Magazine, Wigleaf, and Word Riot.