Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  Apart from the moments when he was entirely engrossed in his food—and perhaps that was why she had fallen in love with him precisely then, because he belonged to no one, not even to himself—it seemed that his daughter was constantly within his field of vision, even when he wasn’t looking at her, when he was talking to the others or listening or smoking or being quiet, and she could not help being slightly afraid for the girl. But she also envied her for having a constant spotlight shining on her, even if its heat singed her wings a little. She asked herself if that thing could also exist between men and women, that the thing should exist: that each possess a copy of the other, a backup of their being.

  Everyone had looked so backed up this evening—Arik and Ruti, Rona and Tamar, Yonatan and Dana, Rona and the girls, Rona and the girls and Yonatan—until at a certain point it seemed that her bothersome attraction to him was not passion or compassion or a combination of the two but a longing to join the group, any group, even Arik and Ruti’s, who didn’t stop arguing the whole evening even when they were watching TV, leaving Yonatan and her to sit by the table.

  They sat that way for almost an hour, exchanging a few words that she now could not recall, until Yonatan suddenly got up and told Dana it was time to go, and the girl protested a little but he said he would still like to try and get some work done tonight, and Dana took their coats off the hooks and he said goodbye to everyone else, including her, in the same tone. After he left, she wanted to go too. Arik and Ruti said they were also leaving, and the three of them went downstairs together. When they walked out onto the street, they asked if they could give her a ride. She said no, she lived nearby, and Arik asked if she was sure, it was late, the streets were unsafe. She refused again and said goodbye and started walking, quickly this time because she needed this walk to digest everything that had not happened this evening, and everything that had.

  She went into her bedroom and started to undress, purposely standing far away from the large mirror in the corner, because she knew that her body’s appearance would sadden her now more than usual; bodies, like children, can never hide their disappointment. Still, she found herself passing by the mirror in her underwear and stopping there, smoothing her stomach, examining her thighs, which clung to each other; they looked like the thighs of a big chicken—and her breasts, which now looked very heavy and sad.

  ( 3 )

  The whole evening, especially when she watched him gobbling his food, Dana had thought that she would have had more fun if he hadn’t come. She was sorry for the thought and was flooded with guilt as they walked home together along Bialik Street. But she persuaded herself that she was entitled to be angry at him because he had invaded territory that didn’t belong to him; it didn’t belong to her either, but at least she worked hard to be part of it. His last-minute arrival meant she could no longer behave as a different girl—someone else’s daughter—as if she too, like Tamar, belonged to this kitchen, to the center of the world. As soon as he walked in, so embarrassed and embarrassing, she sensed the way everyone attached her to him with their gaze, even though she stood far away, by the counter, and she felt how her father was a magnet that drew her to him, into the margins.

  She knew that if they didn’t feel sorry for her for not having a mother, the other girls would have been jealous of her. They had often said, on various occasions, “Your dad is cute” or “Your dad is lovely.” They asked what it was like to have a dad who was a writer, and she said, “It’s really fun.” At Lilach’s party that night, when they were lying in their sleeping bags, the girls started talking about their fathers: how they looked and how they dressed and which of them was cute. Tamar, who was lying next to Dana, had something bad to say about all of them. Dana kept quiet, listening to the girls as they agreed that her dad was all right. When Tamar said, “Yes, he really is okay,” Dana felt proud for a minute but thought that it wasn’t true, and that in fact the cutest dad was Amos, Lilach’s father, who was very tall and broad and went to a gym and always looked so calm. When Orit said, “Dana’s dad does look good, but he’s not perfect,” Tamar had propped herself up on her elbows and said, “As if your dad is.” Orit, who was a little insulted, said obviously her dad wasn’t perfect, no one was, but at least he dressed better than Dana’s dad. “Maybe he’s not your type,” Tamar said. “He’s my type. I mean, he’s not my type now, but when I’m into men he’ll definitely be my type.” Lilach said her mother said Yonatan was a bohemian type, and there were women who liked that. Tamar said she did. Lilach said her mother said Yonatan’s scruffiness was part of his sex appeal, and Orit asked what sex appeal was. Hila said it was physical appearance. Another girl, Naomi, said, “No, it’s not. Sex appeal is if you’re attractive or not. It’s a characteristic, like intelligence or a sense of humor.” No one argued with her, because Naomi was born in England.

  The girls kept on talking about Yonatan and whether he would be their type when they had a type, and Tamar leaned in and whispered to Dana, “They’re such retards.” She nodded, and Tamar said, “You should be happy they didn’t accept you.” Her heart sank and she asked Tamar how she knew. Tamar said, “Before, when you were in the bathroom, they said you didn’t fit in.” She asked why, and Tamar said, “What difference does it make? You should be happy and that’s that. I’m leaving this horrible team anyway.” But Dana still wanted to know what they said. With one ear she heard Orit whispering, “Are they finally asleep?” She saw Tamar shut her eyes tightly, and she closed her own. Lilach whispered, “Naomi, go and see if they’re awake.” Dana felt Naomi’s breath as she leaned over them and then turned around and said, “They’re asleep.”

  “Did you see what she brought?” She heard Orit’s voice.

  Lilach answered, “I can’t believe it!”

  “Me neither!” Naomi whispered, and Dana felt the skinny English girl’s back against her legs. She dared to open her eyes for a second, searching for Tamar’s eyes in the dark, but Tamar was really asleep and her breath was rhythmical and serene.

  “But you saw how I didn’t say anything,” Lilach said.

  “Me either,” Orit said.

  “Me either,” Naomi said.

  Dana heard Hila yawn and ask, “What didn’t you say?”

  “Shhhh!” Orit hissed at her. “Don’t wake them up.”

  “What didn’t you say anything about?”

  “About what Dana brought.”

  “Oh,” said Hila. “It was really awful. She has some nerve, don’t you think?”

  “But what are we going to do with it? Do we keep it?” Orit asked.

  “No way! Are you crazy? We’ll give it back to her,” Lilach replied.

  “Yeah, we’ll give it back to her,” Orit said.

  “When?” asked Naomi.

  “Tomorrow morning?” Orit asked.

  “No,” said Lilach. “We’ll wait a week or two, after we tell her she doesn’t fit in.”

  “You’re right,” said Orit.

  “Even though we’re the ones who should be insulted,” Lilach said.

  “That’s true,” said Orit. “That’s absolutely true.”

  Dana heard another few sleepy whispers of consent in the room.

  All week she had been bothered by the request for “an item from a collection,” because she didn’t collect anything. She wondered whether she should ask Orit to ask Lilach if they would agree to drop the item and let her bring something else instead, but she was afraid that if they found out she didn’t have any collections, they wouldn’t accept her. She didn’t tell Tamar either, because Tamar collected everything. In the desk drawers in her room, and in her closet, were shoe boxes full of dried leaves, smooth stones, lighters, greeting cards, feathers, sugar packets from different cafés, pens, and broken watches, all mixed up in one mess. When she was considered for the team a few months ago and they had invited her to a slumber party like this one, she took a bag full of different items, as well as two cakes her mother had baked.

  Dana had sat in
the kitchen two days before the party and looked at the list. The only thing missing was the item taken from a collection, and now, in retrospect, as she lay in her sleeping bag, she realized she could have gone down to the kiosk and bought a pretty lighter or two; she had enough money in her pocket. Or she could have called Tamar, confessed, and asked to borrow something of hers. But the worry had paralyzed her. Finally, she remembered her mother’s cigarette pack. The Time package was pressed between the pages of an Encyclopaedia Britannica volume, where she had hidden it three years ago after her father had smoked all the cigarettes and it was empty.

  Like a dried flower, the pack was waiting between the encyclopedia’s pages, and it still had a distant scent of tobacco. When she placed it carefully between the pages of a notebook and wrapped the notebook in her gray sweatpants so it wouldn’t get crumpled, something told her she was making a mistake, not by parting with a precious souvenir, because she had long ago parted with it, but by taking to the group this thing she had parted with, the addiction itself.

  She noticed the first indications of her unfitness early on in the evening, when everyone sat on the rug in Lilach’s room around two large pizzas they had ordered, and she gave them their little gifts. They all looked disappointed, apart from Tamar, who loved her banana magnet. But they all thanked her politely and smiled at her and smiled at each other knowingly. Then they put the gifts on the rug and devoured the pizzas. Every so often they each looked at one another’s gifts and said, with their mouths full, “It’s so cute,” or “How sweet.” Tamar picked up Lilach’s key chain, which was attached to a fake fur tail of some animal that looked like a raccoon, stroked it, and said, “It’s so nice. It feels really soft; touch it.” The girls reached out and stroked the tail, and Lilach pulled the slice of pizza away from her mouth and stretched out a string of melted cheese in the air, and said, “It’s too bad I don’t have any keys.”

  Then they asked Dana to show them her photograph she had brought. Dana wiped her hands on a napkin and took the photo out of her backpack and they passed it around and said, “You were so cute,” and no one noticed her mother’s foot.

  They got carried away with talking about their childhoods, as if they had been left long behind, and there was another half hour of tension until Orit asked her to show them the collection item. Tamar looked at her expectantly as she took out the cigarette pack from her notebook. The girls were quiet, but their eyes darted from one to another, then to Lilach, and back to the piece of cardboard, which sat on the rug between the two empty boxes full of crumbs and bits of congealed cheese, until Tamar said, “Wow! That’s so original! A collection of cigarette packs!”

  “Yes, it’s really original,” Lilach said, and looked askance at Orit, who was stifling a giggle.

  “I would never think to collect something like that,” Orit said.

  “I have them from all kinds of countries,” Dana lied. “But they’re rare, so I didn’t bring any others.”

  “Your dad smokes, doesn’t he?” Lilach asked, in a medical tone of voice.

  “Yes. But this was an old pack that belonged to my mom.”

  “Oh, it was?” she asked, and they all looked down sorrowfully.

  “Yes. But she didn’t smoke much.”

  “And does your dad smoke a lot?” Naomi asked with her British accent.

  “Kind of.”

  “Not that much,” Tamar said. “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “How much does he smoke?” Hila asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dana said.

  “More or less,” Lilach said.

  “Maybe five cigarettes a day. Maybe four.”

  “That’s really not a lot,” Lilach said. “We’re not allowed to smoke in my house.”

  “Us either,” Orit said.

  “Us either,” Naomi said. “My big brother has asthma.”

  “My parents really hate smokers,” Hila said. “They really hate them.”

  “We’re allowed,” Tamar said.

  “Your mom smokes?” Orit asked.

  “No way!” Tamar said. “But she doesn’t mind if other people do.”

  For a minute Dana hoped the conversation would distract the girls’ attention from the flattened square of cardboard that was making her miss her mother. It also made Dana angry, because for the first year or two after she died, her mother had still seemed to be making an effort to protect her daughter, as if she were a road sign pointing the way. But lately she had become more and more of a memory—a living memory, but with limited abilities. Sometimes it was a relief, because in return for her mom’s protection Dana had felt she had to be like her, and since she didn’t always like the things her mother liked, there was a certain freedom in not always knowing what those things were. So her mother went from being someone who continued to maneuver her to a memory that could be maneuvered, from a road sign to a gravestone. Although Dana liked this freedom, the most painful freedom she had ever known, she didn’t want it now. Now she wanted her dad. She had started feeling unwell that morning, but she didn’t know if the chills and the burning throat and the weakness in her limbs were because of the flu or because of the trap she had fallen into. The idea that she still had to spend a whole night and day with the team scared her, reminding her of a time when she was four, when she had begged to spend a weekend alone with her grandmother in Jerusalem and then began aching for her mother and father even before they had left Tel Aviv.

  She lay awake in her sleeping bag and listened to the girls chattering. They had changed subjects long ago and forgotten about the cigarette pack, but even so she felt they were still talking about her. She wondered what time it was, how many hours were still left until the next day, and then the door opened and Lilach’s mother whispered, “Aren’t you asleep yet?”

  Lilach hushed her and said, “Soon, Mom.”

  “It’s almost two,” Rika whispered.

  “So what?”

  “So nothing. I thought you’d want to know what time it was. Do you want something to drink? Do you want some juice? Or something hot? Should I make you some hot chocolate?”

  “No!” Lilach whispered for everyone. “We don’t want anything. We want to be left alone.”

  Dana was sorry that because of Tamar she had to pretend to be asleep, because she was suddenly very thirsty and her throat was burning. But there was nothing to be done until morning. Nothing to be done, she told herself, and wondered if her dad was still awake.

  ( 4 )

  He looked at her now as she walked beside him, struggling to keep up, and only when he saw how hard she had to try, and that she was still short of breath due to her recent flu, did he realize his pace was too fast. It was a getaway pace, but what was he escaping? He knew the answer, and it flooded his body with warmth and anxiety: something had happened to him this evening, and he felt his skin stretched out like a crispy crust of dry earth, slightly cracked, both outside and in.

  Women were always hitting on him. Even when they weren’t, he felt they were treating him as if they would like to hit on him if he would let them, if he would only signal his approval. But he always made sure to signal the opposite, even when he was no longer sure that he wanted them to keep their distance. He was reminded of those drivers who forget to switch off their turn signals long after passing; he hated them. He always wondered, as he drove behind them, what they were thinking—those daydreaming, irresponsible drivers who didn’t hear their turn signals ticking away. Perhaps they had the quiet kind, unlike his, which you couldn’t ignore even if you wanted to. Then one day, two or three years ago, a little after Latrun junction, when he was taking Dana to visit his mother in Jerusalem, his daughter told him he’d been signaling for fifteen minutes. “It’s really annoying,” she said. I must have been day-dreaming, he told her, but ever since then Latrun had become a junction of insult.

  Shira intrigued him but, more than that, she made him curious about himself. He had not felt that way for a long time, that old sensation of arrog
ance and fear tied up together in a pleasant emotional tickle: How do I look, how do I sound, what do they think of me, who am I winning over now, who’s winning me over, who wants to sleep with me, where is all this leading?

  Maybe it was her relentless gaze. When he got up to go to the bathroom, he suspected she was staring at him, sending X-rays that prowled his body, radioactive and nosy. All evening he felt trapped and flattered by her gaze, and while he ate he felt she was devouring him with her restlessness, her sadness, and even though during those moments a voice told him he should eat slower, calm down, not finish off the asparagus in front of everyone, there was also another voice that urged him to wolf it all down, because he wanted her to see him that way, not any other way, so hungry, always, so she would know what she was getting into, if he ever let her in. And since that was not an option—after all, he would never ask Rona for Shira’s phone number, much as he had never called her for a referral to a therapist—he began to amuse himself with the idea of letting her in and stood waiting for Dana as she stopped to tie her shoelaces, sitting tiredly on the sidewalk. He turned back and said, “We have to get you some new shoes.”

  “I don’t need any,” she replied.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “You’re such a pain!”

  What would it be like if a new woman entered his life? The idea that not only the woman would be new but his life, too, seemed enchanting. There was fear though, because she would have to come into his bedroom. It had been more than four years since he’d slept with a woman, and even the memory of the last time he had sex with Ilana, just a week before she was killed, was becoming dull, like the sex itself. It had been an uncharacteristic morning encounter. Neither of them had enjoyed it, and later, during the day, they gave each other apologetic looks. It occurred to him that perhaps he should have read into it some essence of separation.