by Yael Hedaya
The depression of the first morning at camp turned to panic by lunchtime. She knew it was irrational, but she couldn’t control it. In the afternoon she went to the clinic, and when the doctor asked what the matter was, she burst out in bitter tears. “The tears were real, by the way. I wish I could cry like that today.”
“What do you mean?”
“No, nothing. I find it a bit hard to cry now.”
“Don’t you cry?”
“I do sometimes, but not that kind of sweeping, crazed, purifying weeping.”
“Ilana was a crier,” he said, and immediately regretted having summoned his dead wife to this conversation.
“Really?”
“Yes. But tell me what happened with the doctor.” He quickly banished Ilana’s shadow from the balcony.
The doctor was worried. She asked if Shira didn’t feel well, and through her unrelenting sobbing she said she felt awful. When the doctor asked if she wanted to go home, she said she did. The doctor said, “Okay, sweetie, but how are you going to get there? It’s almost Shabbat.”
Suddenly there was a new enemy, Shabbat, formidable but not invincible. She wanted to hug the doctor, who sat staring out the window as it grew dark, as Shabbat came in, and she said, “My dad will come and get me.”
“It’s nighttime already. Do you think he’ll drive now for four hours?”
“No, not tonight, tomorrow morning,” she said quickly.
“And will you make it to tomorrow if you feel so bad?”
Shira could tell that the doctor knew the truth, so she said she’d make it; she’d call her father now and go to bed early.
The doctor asked if she wanted to use the office phone, and Shira said she didn’t; she had tokens and would use the pay phone. She didn’t know what she was going to tell her father and didn’t want any witnesses.
He picked up the phone with his mouth full of Friday-night dinner, which was probably more enjoyable without her, without her constant agitation and complaining. She heard him say, “Hello,” still chewing, and suddenly she missed him so much that the tears came again, and her voice broke as she said, “Dad?”
He asked what had happened and she heard him swallow quickly. In the background, her mother asked what was wrong; on TV, Rabbi Shlomo Avidor HaCohen was reading the weekly Torah portion. She said she was miserable. Her father asked if she was sick—she heard her mother say, “Shira’s sick?”—and she said she wasn’t, she just hated it here; she was crying the whole time and she wanted to come home. She wondered if she should also apologize for what she had said to him the night before leaving, but her father said, “Just a minute.” She heard him ask her mother to bring him a paper and pen, and she stopped one of the counselors who was passing by and asked him to give her father directions. He did so gladly, and when he handed her back the phone, she said, “Dad?” He asked if she could hold on til tomorrow; he asked matter-of-factly, the way, as a child, she had often heard him asking clients if they would prefer windows of this kind or that. She sniffled and said she would, and he said he’d leave early and get there before lunchtime. She knew how he hated to drive, and said, “Are you sure?” He said, “What choice do I have?” and she couldn’t tell if there was true anger in his voice, because they weren’t accustomed to having these normal businesslike conversations, the conversations of people simply making arrangements.
She slept like a baby that night, she told Yonatan, and in the morning she ate breakfast and repacked the few things she had unpacked, and watched her friends sitting in a circle in the tent, planning the evening activity, which no longer concerned her, and at exactly eleven she saw their car on the road leading to the mess hall, like a fata morgana.
“What kind of car?”
“A Studebaker.” The word hurt her mouth because she hadn’t pronounced it for so many years—the car was long ago sold to a junkyard—and saying it was to remember the man who now fell asleep in his clothes in his armchair, after eating stuffed cabbage or peppers from the delicatessen; that man had once owned a Studebaker.
“My dad had a Volvo,” said Yonatan, as if they were two kids boasting about their parents’ cars.
“Do you like old cars?”
“Yes. I had a Citroën DS when I was a student.”
“Really? That’s a lovely car. You see them in old French movies.”
He thought about his old Citroën and how he had to sell it, shortly after getting married, to a student who collected old cars, because it was too expensive to maintain. He looked for the car on the streets for years afterward, growing excited every time he saw one like it, looking carefully to see if it was his. But he never saw the car again, and over time its look-alikes also disappeared.
The Studebaker had glided slowly down the dirt road looking foreign and snobbish, until it stopped by the mess hall. She saw him from afar getting out of the car, dressed like someone going on safari: a beige shirt with sleeves rolled up over his elbows, and white shorts, the same ones he used to wear when they went to the beach. He had on his oxford shoes with black stretchy socks pulled up over his ankles, but this time she wasn’t ashamed of the way he looked: He had come to rescue her, and you couldn’t be ashamed of your savior.
On the contrary, she recounted, she remembers enjoying the curious, gossipy looks her friends gave her as she shouted “Dad!” and ran to him, listening to the backpack rattling on her back and her heartbeat mingling with the deadened sound her work shoes made on the dirt path.
He didn’t open his arms to embrace her, and she stopped a yard or two away from him and looked at him, then looked down. But today, she said, it was clear to her that there, in that dusty moment, they shared an embrace, “the greatest hug we ever had.”
He helped her put her backpack in the trunk, and when they sat down in the car he pointed to a plastic bag in which, he said, there were sandwiches Mom had made for the journey and washed fruit. The checkered thermos she hadn’t seen for years was propped in the gap between the two seats, smaller than she remembered it, funny and touching in its sudden comeback. They didn’t talk about what had happened. As they drove, her father pointed out places they passed and told her about them, stories linked with his childhood. Then they turned the radio on and listened to the Saturday sketch comedy. There was a series of Shaike Ofir sketches that her father loved, and she began to love them too that morning. To this day, when they played him on the radio or showed an old movie of his on TV, “especially the one with Abu el-Banaat,” she said, she became flooded with nostalgia for her father driving his American car, the look of his profile, his lips moving with the words he knew by heart, his thin freckled leg stretched forward on the gas pedal, both hands clasping the wheel; every so often he would reach one arm out over the back of her seat, barely touching her shoulder.
In some ways, she said, it was an enchanted Shabbat. Not only because it had the presence of a father she did not know, or was not capable of knowing then, but because she was also a different girl on that Shabbat, one who from one moment to the next, as they approached Tel Aviv, longed to get home—not so she could leave it to wander around town but so she could stay there.
And indeed, when they got home, it seemed to her as if her mother also loved her father more. From her room she listened to her mother phoning her girlfriends to tell them about his heroic act, how he drove all the way to rescue Shira from the camp. What happened to her over there? they asked. And her mother said, “How would I know? Just a mood.” Shira listened to her describe, amused but also completely serious, how Friday night, before they had gone to sleep, he had meticulously planned his route, pored over an old road map he kept in the glove compartment, and marked the roads with a red pen as if it were a complicated rescue mission. She described how they both got up at five and she made food, and then she walked him to the car and stood next to him while he checked the oil and water by the light of the streetlamp and kicked each tire to check the air; before saying goodbye she gave him a supply of phone
tokens, in case he got lost or, as her father used to tell Shira when he handed her a stash of tokens before she went off to a party, “so you can let us know if there’s a delay.”
The drive was uneventful, and they arrived in the afternoon, both starved, even though they had eaten the sandwiches and fruit and drunk the coffee, passing the thermos cup back and forth. At home a festive dinner awaited them, as if her mother had sensed that this event, the heroic father going to claim his unhappy adolescent daughter, as ordinary as it might be in other families, was no trivial occurrence in this one.
“Of course, the next day we went back to our usual routine and found something to fight about.”
“Obviously,” he said, and wondered what she was like in bed.
“It’s seven. I’ve talked for so long. We should get going, shouldn’t we?”
“Yes.” But he didn’t want to get up. He felt so calm, sleepy even, that he was alarmed. As he had listened to her, impressed by the way she managed to interweave so much compassion into such great anger, he wondered if she was like that in her writing too. He thought about himself, about the fact that his father had been dead for more than ten years and he didn’t miss him, whereas her father was still alive and she was missing him to distraction.
She asked him about his parents. “So tell me what you wanted to say before, about your father.” But he felt like talking about his mother. And he felt like seeing her too, driving to Jerusalem to visit her. He never felt such an urge, and almost asked if he could use the phone just so he could hear his mother saying, “Yonatan!” when she heard his voice—Yonatan! with an exclamation point.
He said he couldn’t remember what he had wanted to say, and Shira kept quiet. She held her mug, smiled at Yonatan, and then looked at the floor. She seemed disappointed, even cheated, as if she had kept her end of some bargain of intimacy and he had chickened out. But what could he tell her? he thought. What could he say about his father that wouldn’t be said with injury, with the teenage rebellion of a middle-aged man? He had become very aware of his anger, of his continual desire to settle accounts even when it was too late, even when there were no accounts left to settle—or perhaps, with his father, just some general amorphous account. Whenever he tried to define the essence of the conflict, he knew that as the years went by the conflict itself—which was in fact no different from any other between father and son and was essentially both the fear of becoming his father and the fear of not doing so—was losing force, but he was still addicted to the anger.
Shira got up, took his mug, and said she was going to change and they should leave soon because she was starved; what about him? He said he was too, even though he had pigged out at lunchtime.
“What did you have?”
“Fettuccine Alfredo, referred to by our waitress as pettuccine.” Shira smiled and stood leaning against the balcony wall, both mugs in one hand. “And listen to what Dana had,” he said, and hated himself for testing her. “Veal masala.” Shira burst out laughing and raised her arm to scratch her nose, and her sweatshirt, the one that was identical to his, lifted briefly. He saw her stomach for an instant, white and full, and the elastic band of her black cotton underwear, and he felt more affection than attraction—friendly affection, like he felt toward Rona, toward women who didn’t want anything in particular from him.
( 10 )
They took their time walking to Rona’s. They crossed the park, then walked up the steps to the square on Bialik and admired the old buildings there, as if seeing them for the first time. “So where do you live?” Shira asked. He pointed toward Allenby. “You mean in that incredible building?”
“No, the one behind it.”
They turned onto Idelson Street, and when they reached the intersection with Hess he motioned to the left with the sweeping gesture of a tour guide and let her walk ahead of him; she smiled shyly, consenting to be a tourist with him on a route she had taken alone hundreds of times.
“We were getting worried,” Tamar scolded when they arrived. “We thought something had happened to you.”
Shira said they had got carried away in a conversation and hadn’t noticed what time it was. “Yes,” Yonatan said, “we got completely carried away.” He waited for her to take her coat off and took it and hung both their coats on the hook in the entrance. Rona came out of the bathroom, drying her hair with a towel, and kissed Yonatan on the cheek—a practice she had acquired since last night’s dinner. Then she kissed Shira and said, “What a lovely skirt!”
Yonatan looked down for a moment at the skirt’s hem and said, “Yes, it really is lovely.”
Rona said, “I’ve never seen you wear a long skirt,” and Shira said she hardly wore it because she thought it made her look religious.
“No, not at all,” Yonatan said. “Not religious at all.” He found himself closely examining the skirt as if this debate had entitled him to stare at Shira’s belly, and at her backside, and her ankles, and it was suddenly important to him that the skirt not look religious—not for Shira, who stood motionless as if awaiting the pronouncement of a top fashion designer, but for himself, because once, years ago, before Ilana, it had mattered to him how his girlfriends dressed. Later, with Ilana, he had at first regarded her merry circuslike wardrobe with amusement and forgiveness, then stopped noticing it, and then missed it, and now—this scared him but also gave him pleasure—it was important to him that this woman, whom only fifteen minutes ago he had cataloged in his mind as a friend, should dress according to his taste. He gave a final glance at her behind, which was curvy like her stomach, and said, “Absolutely, definitely not religious. On the contrary!”
“What do you mean on the contrary? Secular?” She giggled.
“No. Yes.” He wanted to say sexy, but instead he said, “You know what I mean.”
She said she did and let her eyes linger on his for one long moment, almost too long, because he saw its length reflect like the glare of a dagger’s blade in Rona’s eyes as she stared at them both, and from the corner of his eye he imagined he also saw a little smile spread over her lips, the satisfied smile of the successful matchmaker, and perhaps a smile of jealousy, and perhaps both. The modest excitation he had felt a moment ago at the sight of Shira’s full behind suddenly intensified; he liked those eyes. Even yesterday he had observed that she had sad relentless eyes and that he enjoyed their roaming over his body. He liked the eyes and the curves and the stomach, he liked what she had been wearing before, like his twin, but he also liked the skirt, and he especially liked the idea of liking things, including Rona’s look, the look of a person on the outside—except this time it wasn’t him.
“I’m starved,” Shira said.
Yonatan said, “Me too. Where’s my daughter?”
“In my room,” Tamar replied. “She’s making something for Shira.”
“For me? What is she making for me?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s a surprise.”
“Dana! What’s up?” Yonatan called.
The girl came out of the room holding a large sheet of paper.
“What’s that? I heard you were making a surprise for Shira.”
“It’s not a surprise. It’s nothing.” She was embarrassed. “I drew something for you.” She came closer to Shira, who was sitting at the table.
“For me?”
“I drew my dad’s wardrobe for you,” she said, and presented Shira with the paper.
Along a laundry line hung a pair of blue jeans, a gray sweatshirt, two white T-shirts, a pair of green Chuck Taylors, and at the edge a pair of clumsily drawn, shapeless underpants.
“Do you draw?” Shira asked, because she didn’t know what else to say.
“No,” Yonatan answered. “I think she just started today.”
“You draw wonderfully,” Shira said, and Dana pointed to each of the items and needlessly explained what it was. Shira felt the congested breathing against her cheek, the girl’s body touching her, and asked, “Can I give you a thank-yo
u kiss?” Dana shrugged and looked embarrassed, and Shira kissed her on the cheek. “It’s a lovely picture. I’ll put it on my fridge.”
“That makes me worried,” Yonatan said, and smiled at her. Shira wanted to hug Dana, who had already moved away and joined Tamar as she took a stack of plates out of the cabinet, because it touched her to think that all these hours since they had left the café, while Yonatan sat on her balcony and became, for a short while, a family man without a family, his daughter had continued the waning afternoon for them, preserved it, given it new life as she sat on the floor with paper and colored pens and tried to promote their interests.
Yonatan found the leftovers even tastier than the food had been the day before, perhaps because he ate slowly this time, perhaps because the sweet potato soup and the veal had been supplemented by a few new things: pasta salad, green beans, cheeses, and sliced challah, which seemed like the most homemade, delicious thing he had ever eaten.
Rona asked how things went with the software, and he talked about Shira’s speedy computer as if it were an accomplished child he was proud of.
“And then he played Solitaire for two hours,” Shira said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
But Shira smiled. “It’s okay, I enjoyed watching you.”
“We used to have that at home,” Dana said, “and he took it off the computer because he kept playing it.”
“I’m the only one without a computer,” said Tamar.
“I offered to buy you one, but you didn’t want it,” her mother said.
“I don’t.”
“You’re a very strange child,” Yonatan said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“I don’t want a computer either,” Dana said.
“You’re strange too.” He poured some more wine into his glass and Shira’s and motioned to Rona with the bottle.
“No, thanks,” Rona said.