Soap Opera by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
Associate editor Julia Kooi Talen on today’s bonus flash: Every sentence in Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo’s flash electrifies me. Her fresh and sharp voice pulls you right in to these curious scenes, and her deft wit is absolutely unmatched. I laughed out loud. I sighed out loud. I hung onto every brilliant moment of this soapy funeral-wedding.
Soap Opera
B came over and told me about the origin of soap operas. They were like, well you probably already know this, and I was like no, I don’t. They explained how soap operas were invented literally to sell soap. It was basically just piles of spon con and product placement, like Transformers, but targeted at women, specifically housewives, they said. They were telling me how they’d started taking T and now they were going through puberty again. Their skin was all oily and they were hormonal all the time.
Then we were in a soap opera. I was lathering cream on my arms while I told B about my relationship in an ironic way that skimmed over the really felt emotions and played everything up for laughs.
Then we were in a more serious soap opera. I was diluting Dr. Bronner’s six to one while B told me about avoiding the person they lived a couple blocks away from because they didn’t enjoy making out with them and they couldn’t bring themselves to do the obvious thing of talking about it to make it better. Someone fell out a window. I squeezed dish soap from the plastic bottle under the sink into the soap tray with a spring that was more aesthetically pleasing for doing dishes with. B got a text from their girlfriend and had to dash home to take a shower. Everything was urgent!
We were sliding by everything that wasn’t dramatic except for the soap. My skin was dry from touching soap all day so I applied Aveda hand relief moisturizing crème. Now my skin was oily. I told B about a TikTok hack I had tried that involved peeling a cucumber and leaving it in the freezer and lubing your face up with cucumber goop twice a day. It really worked, I said. I turned toward the camera when I said that. The camera zoomed in on my face, which was really smooth and shining, in a glowing way. Then we got a call that someone had died and we had to go to a funeral, only the funeral was really just a chance to gossip. We knew that no one was really dead, because we were just there to sell soap. It was actually an excuse to cut that person out of the narrative, because really they were annoying.
It was the person B was hooking up with, and they weren’t annoying, but B couldn’t bring themselves to break up with them or not, so they’d just ghosted, and now things would be easier because B wouldn’t have to avoid walking past their house anymore. At the funeral we all washed our hands and our new piercings with yellow doctor’s office soap. We all applied sunscreen atop our new tats. It was West Philly so everyone had a new stick and poke and we went around and shared like show and tell. Someone got engaged at the funeral.
The podium was already set up and the space rented, so we decided we might as well just have the wedding. The bride and bride got naked and lathered themselves and each other with soap from the farmer’s market. Everyone in the audience was crying because of allergies. I was applying chapstick really slowly and in a sultry way, but no one cared because the brides were saying their vows, which were just the notes people had written for the deceased that they were inverting into expressions of love and eternal devotion. We hit an hour in and things ended on a cliffhanger, and then the credits rolled and we all lovingly applied soap and lotion to our arms over the names of make up artists and camera assistants, grinning cleanly and lovingly, even those of us who hated each other. We just gritted our teeth and lovingly applied sunscreen to our enemy’s back in the part that is particularly hard to reach.
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she has recently written about deer, mediums, and trees. She is the author of the chapbook DUH (Bullshit Lit 2022), and her work appears or is forthcoming in HAD, Peach Mag, Afternoon Visitor, Yalobusha Review, and Bedfellows Magazine, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy (Instagram) and @tall__spy (Twitter) but she can never be caught.
