by Yael Hedaya
They had special wooden plates for the steaks, and serrated knives, and during those meals she would also have a few sips of very dry red wine. She was in charge of the roast potatoes and green salad; she tore the lettuce leaves with her hands instead of cutting them, because that’s how Tamar’s mother did it and she was an excellent cook. She was also responsible for lighting candles to add to the atmosphere—although they never turned off the fluorescent light in the kitchen—and she felt like part of a team that had been working together seamlessly for years. Since they both liked their steaks done medium, they didn’t have the timing problems of people who liked their steaks done differently—especially parents and kids.
Eating steaks done medium, which came naturally to Yonatan and which Dana learned to like over time, was also part of their secret understanding. Sometimes this understanding was grating, and then Dana wasn’t sure who was more pained: she saw how hard her dad tried, and knew that he saw her trying not to show that she knew, because she sensed the awareness would ruin things for the two of them and even more so for her mother. She wasn’t sure about this last point anymore, but she thought that if her mother still had desires, she would want them both to be happy, although Dana no longer believed what she had just two or three years ago: that her mother saw everything from above.
The notion was fine for a six- or seven-year-old, but at ten it seemed ridiculous. It used to comfort her to hear Nira and Grandma Maxine promising that her mother was somewhere on top of a beautiful mountain, sitting by a huge window through which she could watch Dana’s and her father’s lives. When Dana asked what else you could see through the window, whether you could see sheep, they said no, absolutely not. After the accident she had wanted to know the last thing her mother had seen before dying, the road she was driving on or an image of her dad and herself, because as far as she was concerned, it was the road that had killed her mother, not the other driver. Nira had said, “What kind of a question is that? Of course she saw you and Dad,” and Grandma Maxine confirmed this a few times in transatlantic calls. Lately, the image of her mother sitting on the mountaintop had faded, superseded by the knowledge that there was nothing up there, that her mother did not exist and neither did God.
It was hard to give Him up. Other kids her age were afraid to commit to any one position, and if an argument broke out they never dared proclaim, “There is no God,” because if they were wrong they’d be in big trouble. When she was eight, a few boys wearing yarmulkes came up to her Girl Scout group and asked the girls why they wore pants. Tamar, who was in the same group, whispered to her, “I hate that kind the most, even more than the Black Hats.” Dana said she did too, but she still felt a shiver when one of the boys shouted that because they were immodest and didn’t observe the Sabbath and ate pork and because their parents were Jew-hating lefties, they would all go to hell when they died.
Tamar called out, “Who cares where you go when you’re dead?”
The boys yelled back, “Let’s see you talking when you’re burning in the fires of hell!” Tamar shouted that she’d rather burn in hell than be in the same place as them. Dana was glad that Tamar talked back to them—the fact was, they had nothing to say in reply so they left—and Rona laughed afterward when they told her what happened and said they had nothing to worry about because everyone they knew would be in hell so it would actually be pretty nice. Dana asked if her dad would be there too, and Rona—who was in the middle of baking a pear tart and had asked Dana to wait till it was ready so she could take a few slices home—said, “Your dad will be CEO of the place.” When Dana reported that later to her father—who gobbled down his slice of tart as well as hers because she said she had no appetite—he obviously liked it, and he also said that life here was hell so no one would notice the difference anyway. But despite that, the thought of hell still scared her for several months and she was afraid of ending up there. Since her mother had lit candles on Friday nights and gone to synagogue on Yom Kippur and had been such a positive and happy person, Dana was certain her mother would not be there, and she very much did not want to be in hell alone with her dad.
When she asked Yonatan if he believed in God, he said very determinedly that he didn’t, but then he softened and asked why she was asking. She said, “No reason” and asked if he had believed when he was her age. He said he couldn’t remember but he was almost positive he hadn’t. Then she asked Nira, who said she believed there was a supreme power in the world who saw and heard and knew everything, and that we were not alone. Zvi called out from the balcony, “Oh, come on!” and Nira laughed and said, “See?”
At night, before she fell asleep, Dana would say a secular prayer. She asked the supreme power that Nira believed in—whom she had adopted for herself because it seemed like a good compromise between heresy and faith—to protect her from hell and not send her there, and not to send her dad and the people she loved there either, and also not to send them to heaven, which is where the religious kids would go, but to find them another place, somewhere in the middle, something between heaven and hell, somewhere like where they lived now. She prayed every night, and sometimes found herself praying at daytime too, at school or in the car or in the middle of her piano lessons. And she prayed every time she saw something that reminded her of hell, like cripples or beggars or something particularly sad on TV, and every time she visited Grandma Rachel, who was the closest person to death that she knew and who claimed she already had a place in hell; Grandpa had reserved it for her.
( 7 )
When they got out of the car, he could see that she was shivering. He took her backpack, took off his jacket, and draped it over her shoulders. He suddenly got a whiff of the sour damp smell of the cottage-cheese sandwich she had made herself that morning, and reminded himself to take it out of the backpack when they got home and throw it away, as well as the fruit she hadn’t touched.
“What did you take this morning, an orange?” he asked.
“Persimmon,” she said.
“Did you eat it?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t have time. And I didn’t eat my sandwich either.”
“Did you feel sick when you were at Lilach’s yesterday?” he asked, as he put the key in the door.
“A little. I think I started getting a fever there.”
“But on the whole you had a good time?”
“Yes,” she said. He knew she was lying.
The smell of cigarettes lingered in the apartment. He had promised himself he wouldn’t smoke when she was at home; he had also promised himself he would give it up, but when she was at school in the mornings he chain-smoked. He apologized and said he didn’t expect her home so early and he hadn’t had time to air the place out, and Dana said it didn’t bother her and her nose was stuffed up anyway so she couldn’t smell anything. Then she lay down on the couch and turned on the TV. Unlike other children, his friends’ kids, who got on their parents’ case when they smoked, Dana was never bothered by it, and he oscillated between worrying that she was different—or pretending to be different—and the sense of relief it awarded him.
Ilana had smoked two cigarettes a day. If they went to a party or to dinner with friends, she had three or four and then said she felt ill and didn’t smoke for a few days; he couldn’t understand how you could feel ill after three cigarettes. She smoked Time, and he made fun of her and said they tasted too sweet. But every time he got stuck without any of his Winstons, he smoked hers. Her pack of cigarettes was always on the spice shelf in the kitchen. Twice a day Ilana would walk up to it almost incidentally and pull one cigarette out—once in the afternoon, when she got home from the university, where she had a part-time secretarial job in the English department, and once at night, when they watched the news together.
Months after the accident, the pack still lay on the spice shelf. He couldn’t bring himself to smoke her cigarettes, just as he wasn’t able to eat the leftover curried chicken and tomato soup she’d made, which sat in the frid
ge for several weeks until Nira threw it out. He felt that finishing the leftovers and smoking the twelve remaining cigarettes would practically make him a cannibal. He was relieved to discover, one day, that her herbal shampoo and conditioner, and her moisturizer and leg wax and boxes of tampons and pads, and the unopened purple eye shadow she had received as a gift and the one lipstick she occasionally used had all disappeared. He assumed Nira had taken them but he never asked whether she threw them out or took them for herself, because he felt that his wife’s things, which were so mundane in the bathroom that he never noticed them, had become intimate and embarrassing now that she was no longer alive.
Dana wouldn’t let him throw out Ilana’s pack of Time. Every day she would climb up on a chair, take the pack down off the shelf, open it as if it were a picture album, and count the cigarettes. When he watched her, it occurred to Yonatan that her strange tolerance of smokers was not directed at him and his heavy smoking but rather at her mother and her two daily cigarettes. He felt as if his daughter, although she said nothing, missed not only her mother but also a certain kind of moderation, and it made him want to give up smoking again.
One night, almost a year after the accident, he had been sitting in his study trying to write, chain-smoking until he absentmindedly finished off his stock of cigarettes. He searched through his coat pockets for the extra pack he was sure he’d bought that morning but couldn’t find it. Then he rummaged through the kitchen drawers, where he sometimes kept a spare pack, and his eyes lit upon the Time on the spice shelf, which he hadn’t touched since the accident. He told himself this was his chance to exercise a little self-control: it was two in the morning, his daughter was sleeping in the next room, it would be mad to go out and buy cigarettes now, he should go to sleep too. He didn’t have to smoke.
He went back to sit at the computer, and for a moment was happy that his lack of concentration was not his usual vacant state of mind but a simple and legitimate craving for a cigarette. He looked back and forth from the screen to the full ashtray beside him, got up and went into the living room and lifted the couch cushions to see if there might be a cigarette that had been buried there at some point. He went to the kitchen and poured himself some apple juice, hoping the vitamin-heavy drink would take his mind off the toxins he longed for, but his gaze locked on the Time, and although Dana had given up her habit of counting the cigarettes, he would never dare smoke a single one of them without her permission. Since he knew he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, he went on sitting in the kitchen, drinking juice until he emptied the bottle, and tried to decide what would be less despicable: gently shaking his seven-year-old daughter awake to get her permission to smoke one of her most precious memories of her mother, or taking a cigarette without making a big deal out of it and, if his daughter accused him some day, telling her it was an emergency.
He took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it and took a long ceremonious drag, as Ilana used to do. He tossed the burning match into the sink and slunk back into his study, where he went on staring at the computer and smoking. The cigarette tasted damp and sickly sweet. He turned off the computer and then put the cigarette out, and his heart sank when he emptied the ashtray into the trash and saw the one white-tipped butt lying among all the brown-tipped ones.
He smoked the remaining eleven cigarettes over time, whenever he got stuck without his own, always surprised by their moldy flavor but also delighting in it like a glutton for punishment. He left the empty pack in its place until it suddenly disappeared; one evening when they sat down for dinner Dana saw him looking at the shelf and said, “I threw it away.”
( 8 )
When he went out to the store and the pharmacy, she turned off the TV and snuggled up under the wool blanket they kept on the couch, which had soaked up the smell of a hundred childhood bouts of flu. Even after the slumber party, she wasn’t sure of her chances of getting on the team; she hadn’t yet had time to analyze the weekend with Tamar. But now, with her shivers and her throat that was so swollen she couldn’t even swallow, she didn’t care and was glad they’d given her back the picture of her in the pool.
She thought about the cake she’d asked her dad to buy. She told him it had to be a good bakery, and even gave him the name of one, but the cake he’d brought home on Friday afternoon before he drove her to Lilach, whose parents were architects and lived in Jaffa, wasn’t what she had asked for. She wanted a cake called Mozart, which one of the mothers had once brought to a birthday party. She had overheard Lilach and Orit admiring the cake, and the woman who brought it had declared, “It’s a Mozart,” and told them how much it cost and where you could buy it. Dana fell in love with the cake, even though she didn’t get a taste because they polished it off so quickly—she fell in love with it only because she knew who Mozart was, and she liked his music because her dad did. But her dad bought a different cake that looked like it had been made for a wedding: tall and colorful with little mounds of pink and white icing. It was an embarrassment, but he couldn’t see why and said the bakery she sent him to had already been closed, so he had gone to another one, but they didn’t have Mozart cakes and hadn’t even heard of them, so he asked for the fanciest one they had.
She didn’t make a big deal out of it because she knew he was trying to make her happy, then felt not only disappointed but also guilty as she sat in the car with the cardboard box on her lap, holding it so the cake wouldn’t slide around and get squashed. But she wanted it to get squashed, she wanted them to have an accident, nothing fatal, just enough to flatten the cake and land them in the ER for their cuts and scrapes to be bandaged.
Instead, she said goodbye to her father next to the beautiful Arab-style house in one of Old Jaffa’s alleys, holding the cake box with both hands. She had her backpack with her pajamas, the gifts, and the photo of her in the pool. Suddenly her eyes welled up with tears. She felt sorry for her dad, who was leaning over the wheel and watching through the windshield to make sure someone buzzed her in through the gate; he seemed forlorn. And she felt sorry for herself and for the cake, because she knew her mother would have preferred it to the Mozart because she always liked colorful, cheerful things and she didn’t care what people thought of her. But Dana did care, and so now she felt guilty toward her mother, and toward the embarrassing cake, which she had spent the whole afternoon trying to like, opening the fridge and peeking into the box over and over again, but hadn’t managed to.
* * *
Yonatan drove away and up the promenade and looked out at the water to his left. He didn’t like the sea, but he tried to for Dana, who sometimes asked to go there by herself and he wouldn’t let her. He remembered that he hadn’t asked which possession she had decided to sacrifice for her big evening—they were supposed to bring a prized item from a collection—in fact he didn’t know whether she even collected anything. She didn’t seem the type. It seemed dollish and unlike her, and as his mother always said in her nervous way, Dana was very much like him, and other than papers and lists and old bills he kept out of fear, he didn’t collect anything. Ilana, on the other hand, had left a cruel inheritance of little items that had occupied him and Nira for many months until they were able to sort them out, rearrange them, pack up some of them to send to her parents in New Jersey, and throw the rest away. The question bothered him the whole way home and even later, when he sat down and turned on the computer: Did Dana collect anything? He was almost tempted to go into her room and search her closet and underneath her bed, or in the blue wooden chest where she kept all her discarded dolls and toys. He wasn’t sure what he’d rather discover—little treasures of napkins, scented erasers, postcards with exotic animals and movie stars that would be evidence of a normal childhood, or nothing, which would bring her closer to himself.
He stared at the screen, ran his fingers over the keyboard. If in the past he had wanted Dana to be like him, to like the things he liked and share his dislikes, today he wanted the opposite, but he didn’t know if he had the talen
t and the strength, or at least the lack of selfishness, to give her what he himself did not know—what he hated. The question of her collection distressed him again and he went into the kitchen, put the kettle on for some coffee, even though he didn’t want any, and when the water boiled he poured it over the dishes sitting in the sink, drizzled some soap on the scouring pad, and started distractedly scrubbing a plate. He put it back in the pile, dried his hands, and went into her bedroom.
He turned the light on and scanned the room as if he hadn’t seen it a thousand times before, went in and closed the window because the forecast had said it would rain tonight, and looked at the bed. It was covered with a piece of Indian fabric with an elephant print that Ilana had once sewn herself a skirt from. His eyes came to rest on the blue wooden chest. Its lid had a picture Ilana had drawn with gold paint, of a smiling girl with two pigtails, and under the picture it said DANA’S SECRETS. On the sides, next to peeling stickers of Jungle Book characters, there were now stickers commemorating Yitzhak Rabin—SHALOM, FRIEND and FRIEND, WE MISS YOU—and an SPCA sticker that said LET THE ANIMALS LIVE.
He remembered the day Ilana painted the chest, and the rash she got from the gold paint, which they only later found out was toxic, and the young resident at the ER who gave her a cortisone shot and asked if the gold staining her fingers was stardust. He remembered Dana, who was three then, bursting into tears when the resident jabbed the needle into Ilana’s arm. He took her out to the vending machine, and when he asked what she wanted she told him, hiccuping, her eyelashes soaked with tears, “Stardust.” He said, “Let’s see if they have any,” and pretended to look in the machine. “We’re in luck,” he declared. She eyed him and the machine suspiciously, then he put the money in and lifted her up so she could press the button herself. She kept asking if what they were getting was really stardust, and he told her she’d see soon. They pressed the button together, he pressing down on her fingers, and a pink coconut candy covered with white flakes came down the chute, and she asked him to get one for Mom too.