Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  “I’d like some,” Tamar said.

  “Wine?” Yonatan asked, and the girl nodded eagerly.

  “May she?” He looked at Rona.

  “Give her a little.”

  “I want some too,” Dana said.

  “What’s going on with you two?” He poured a little wine for his daughter as well. “Little alcoholics.”

  “What’s the big deal? I’ve been drinking wine for ages. Don’t you remember?”

  “When exactly do you drink wine?”

  “When we eat steak. Have you forgotten?”

  “That’s true. Wow, it’s been so long since we’ve had steak.”

  “I’ve been walking around with a hankering for a steak for weeks,” Shira said. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  “Maybe you have an iron deficiency,” Tamar said, and took a huge gulp of wine.

  “Well, then, we can grill some,” Yonatan said.

  “Yes, Dad, let’s do it, we haven’t made steaks for ages!”

  “Do you all want to come over to our place for steaks?” he asked, without looking at Shira.

  “Yes!” the girls shouted in unison.

  “But we’ll make something too,” Rona said.

  “Yes,” Shira agreed. “I’ll also make something.”

  “So when?” Dana asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, sensing familiar panic creep into his voice.

  “Next Friday, Dad?”

  “Yes, next Friday,” said Tamar. “We’re free. Right, Mom?”

  “Let Yonatan decide when it’s convenient for him,” Rona said.

  “No, no, Friday sounds good. I think. Well, we’ll talk about it during the week.”

  They came as a couple and ate as a family, and then they sat Rona down in the living room and ordered her to rest. They would clear the table, wash the dishes, and make coffee, because they felt bad about being her guests for two days running. “Oh, come on,” Rona protested from the couch.

  “No, really,” Shira said, and handed a pile of dishes to Yonatan, who stood by the sink.

  “Then at least put an apron on,” Rona shouted out to him, “so you won’t get dirty.”

  “Yes, yes, put on my mom’s apron,” Tamar said and gave him the apron Dana had worn yesterday, which had reached her ankles but looked like a miniskirt on him. The girls stood behind him and giggled, trying to untie the apron, and he turned back and gently snapped his wet hands on their busy little fingers.

  Shira finished clearing the table, emptied the scraps into the trash, and piled the plates and bowls in a neat stack next to Yonatan on the counter. “Can you manage?” she asked, looking for a towel, and when she couldn’t find one, she grinned and wiped her hands on his apron. Then she sat on the couch next to Rona, who was watching National Geographic on TV with the dish towel in her hands, and the girls joined them.

  “Dad!” Dana called out, “come quickly, there’s a program about penguins!”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “It’s his favorite animal,” she told Rona and Shira.

  “Really?” Rona asked.

  “What?” Yonatan shouted, almost dropping a large glass bowl. “I can’t hear you.”

  “You like penguins?” Shira asked.

  “Says who?”

  “Your daughter,” Rona said.

  “Yes, sort of. They’re cute.”

  He did like penguins. He liked them and felt sorry for them. Every time he saw them on TV he couldn’t help smiling, but at the same time his heart shrank with pity. They always seemed so lonely, especially in the way they walked, eternally waddling toward nowhere.

  He came into the living room, the apron still tied around his waist, and stood between the two girls on the rug and the two women on the couch. Shira looked at the SUPER MOM printed across his loins and smiled to herself.

  “What?” he asked, embarrassed.

  “Nothing. It’s funny that you like penguins.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. I like penguins too.”

  “Did you know they’re much smaller in real life?” he said, and reached for Shira’s pack of cigarettes.

  “Yes,” she said, “like us.”

  They watched the program, making comments and joking around; the girls compared the penguins’ walk to the way one of their teachers walked. Shira and Rona gossiped about a common acquaintance and told Yonatan about her when he took an interest. He listened and contributed his own biting comments here and there, his eyes constantly glued to the screen, watching the penguins disappear into the distance in a row as they migrated across a vast glacier. He listened to the narrator talk about their community life, about complex social structures, about mutual dependency on each other’s body heat on this exhausting voyage they made every year before winter, a voyage that seemed suicidal but was apparently essential for their existence, and he took his eyes off the screen and looked at the girls as they sat whispering at his feet and then at Rona and Shira, who chatted on the couch and asked him what he thought about the woman they were discussing. He threw out a particularly nasty comment and they both burst out laughing, the girls too, although they didn’t know the woman in question, and he smiled, pleased with himself, and put out his cigarette in the ashtray and looked back at the screen, at the penguins migrating on the ice; although the way they walked still prompted a certain sadness in him, they did not look so lonely.

  ( 11 )

  The next day, he bought her book. Without knowing exactly how it happened, he found himself going into a bookstore just before noon and quickly scanning the shelves until he found the only copy in the K’s. Her name on the cover moved him briefly because it seemed strange without her, as if it belonged to another woman, in whom he had no interest. Then he searched the L’s for his own books, but they weren’t there and he hoped they had sold out, that they still had buyers. When the sales clerk came over and asked if he needed assistance he replied firmly, almost chidingly, that he didn’t.

  He lingered awhile longer by the shelves and then went to the checkout and placed the novel on the counter. The clerk asked if she should gift-wrap the book and he said he would like that and thanked her with exaggerated friendliness, to compensate for his earlier aggression and perhaps in order to pretend that he was purchasing it for someone else and that he, personally, had no interest in a book whose dust jacket read A sweeping love story. Then he went out to the street, into the rain that had started drizzling hesitantly again, after the blazing spring weekend, and hurried home.

  He hoped the book would be bad. He hoped she had no talent. Then, he thought, it would be easier to sleep with her. Yesterday, after dinner, Dana and he had walked her halfway home, even though she said they didn’t need to. They said goodbye to her at the King George exit from Meir Park, the three diskettes in his coat pocket and Dana’s drawing rolled up in her bag, like souvenirs from a short trip overseas. They shook hands curtly, and she said Rona would probably update her about the steak meal, and he said, “Yes, I’ll be in touch with Rona, sometime this week, I hope; we’ll see how the week goes for me,” and knew he was wasting too many words on a totally empty time. She said, “Okay, so Rona and I will coordinate what we’ll make and all that.” He said, “Excellent,” and when he turned with his daughter to walk back through the park, he glanced at Shira as she crossed the street and disappeared down Borochov and knew he wanted to sleep with her.

  When he walked up the steps holding the new book, he heard the phone ringing in his apartment. He went in quickly and picked it up, out of breath. It was Esti, the school nurse, and he was alarmed for a minute. She said she was calling to report that Dana had looked much better on Friday, as if he hadn’t seen her all weekend, as if they didn’t live in the same house. “So what did she have in the end?” she asked, and he said it was probably the flu, but whatever it was had gone away. He tried to steady his breathing.

  “So you didn’t go to the doctor?” />
  “No,” he said, slightly embarrassed, as if he had neglected his daughter. “It didn’t seem to be anything serious. She’s fine now, just a runny nose; she hasn’t had a fever for a few days; since Tuesday, I think.”

  “Yes. She really looks well.”

  “Yes, she’s fine.” It occurred to him that the nurse never called to report to him about his daughter’s health once she was well.

  “Did I wake you? You sound as if I woke you.”

  “No, not at all. At this time of day?”

  “Well, I don’t know, one can never tell with you artist types.”

  He tried to laugh politely but started coughing instead.

  “It sounds like you’re sick now!”

  He said he was perfectly healthy, and asked how she was.

  “Me? Great.”

  He walked into the kitchen with the phone, put the kettle on for coffee, and sat by the table and put the plastic bag from the bookstore on it. He lit a cigarette and found he could not remember what Esti looked like. He had seen her dozens of times, and even her voice, which he knew well from all the mornings she had summoned him to school, sounded normal and natural, as if he talked with her every day, but he couldn’t reconstruct her image.

  “I’m doing really great,” she repeated, perhaps because he was silent.

  “Good. I hope you’re not working too hard.”

  “No. How about you? Are you working? Writing?”

  “Yes,” he lied. “Doing my best.”

  “Great. I’m happy to hear it.”

  He heard the school bell ring in the background and imagined kids bursting into the hallways with near-violent elation, and teachers walking toward the staff room with relief. “Bell ringing?” he said, and she said it was the bell for the long recess, and he thought about how the bell hadn’t changed since he was a kid.

  “So I guess I’ll see you at the meeting?” she said.

  “Meeting?”

  “The parent-teacher meeting. On Tuesday.”

  “Oh, yes. Sure. You’ll be there too?”

  “Yes. They asked me to talk to you about the equipment fee.”

  “Oh, right.” He had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Some of the parents are pretty worked up about it.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “They claim the Ministry of Education should finance it, and in principle I agree with them, but what choice is there? We can’t wait until the ministry deigns to hand over the money. Do you know that we haven’t replaced the equipment in the nurse’s office since the sixties?”

  “Really?” He couldn’t even remember what equipment there was in the nurse’s office.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Well, I don’t want to bore you. I’m sure you want to get back to work.”

  “Yes. No, you’re not boring me.”

  “So I’ll see you Tuesday.”

  “Yes. When exactly is it?”

  “Eight.”

  “Okay. So I’ll see you then. And thanks for calling.”

  He took his coffee and the plastic bag and sprawled out on the couch. He slowly removed the gift wrapping, being careful not to rip it and sabotage the gift he had bought himself; then he held the book up to his face and sniffed it. He didn’t know which he liked more, the rich mildewy smell of an old book or the neutral chemical scent of new paper, untouched by human hands. He read the blurb on the back again and hoped once more that as soon as he read the first lines it would become irrefutably clear that she hadn’t an ounce of talent.

  He started reading and suddenly remembered what Esti looked like. She appeared before him, clear and sharp like the energetic voice that still echoed in his ears: her fair, freckled skin; her spiky cropped hair of a color somewhere between blond and red; her chubby, slightly squashed body; her eyes, always framed by round glasses—she reminded him of a little bee.

  He closed the book and looked once more at the back cover and held it up to his nose again and thought she was actually quite attractive, Esti, if you liked the kind of women who were entirely—their body and their smile, their tone of voice and their words—a busy hum whose only concern was you.

  Chauvinist, he told himself; he sipped his coffee and opened the book again to the first page, but he still couldn’t concentrate. After all, there was always the possibility that she was talented, more talented than he was, even, and then what would he do? He had never slept with anyone more talented than he was. If she was more talented, he decided, he wouldn’t sleep with her. He wouldn’t even try because he’d never get it up, of that he was sure.

  He put the book down on the couch, took the plastic bag and the gift wrapping, went into the kitchen and stuffed them into the trash, and decided he would go down to get some falafel because he was suddenly very hungry. He took his keys from the table, put his coat on, glanced outside through the window, and saw that the drizzle had turned to a downpour. This made him happy, and he wondered if it was making her happy now too. He took the umbrella off its hook but lingered by the door, unsure. He felt like a kid avoiding his homework. He wanted to read the book and get it over with, but he was unfocused and hungry. He would go downstairs, eat some falafel, come back full and energized, and still have two hours before Dana came home; she had a piano lesson in the afternoon.

  She hadn’t practiced all week, or the week before. In fact, he hadn’t heard her play for a long time, although it had seemed to him that she was making progress during the last few months. She had even started playing Bach’s Inventions, and her teacher, Irma Gutt, said that if she continued that way she’d be playing preludes and fugues within a year. It pleased him to think that his daughter would play such complex pieces, and in order to infect her with his enthusiasm, he played her “The Well-Tempered Clavier” in different renditions, explaining to her lovingly about the differences between Glenn Gould and Dinu Lipatti in his final recording at Carnegie Hall, after which he collapsed and died, and about the recording where you could hear Lipatti dying and his fingers sliding off the keys, trying so hard, so lost.

  He liked sitting in his room or in the kitchen listening to Dana as she strained to learn a new piece in the living room, tackling a short section that Irma had marked for her in pencil, playing each hand separately. He would hear the pedals tapping, and every so often there would be long pauses, and he wondered what she was thinking in those silent moments. Sometimes he would hear her turn the pages restlessly or sigh and then attack the keys again with all her might, even if it was a piece that should be played softly; Irma said she lacked tenderness, that she was too stormy. Dana preferred composers like Brahms and Chopin, who were still too difficult for her—perhaps in a year or two, Irma promised; “First we’ll make a lady out of her.” In the meantime, she made her play lightweight pieces by Haydn and Mozart to learn restraint.

  The piano was Ilana’s idea. She grew up in an unmusical house, even antimusical, she said, and she wanted Dana to be more like her father, who had absorbed classical music from both sides: from his father, who was obsessive about his album collection with its rare recordings that made dim, scratchy sounds, and his explanations that always struck Yonatan as threatening, and from his mother, for whom classical music was a background for everything she did at home, and who didn’t really care what or whom she was listening to.

  Gerry and Maxine Fisher sent a check and Yonatan chose the piano—a beautiful old Russian one—at the used piano store. It arrived a few weeks before the accident. Now he stood at the door, trying to decide whether to go out and eat or stay at home, and he thought about that November evening when the movers had arrived with the piano and carried it up the three floors, quietly cursing and grumbling about invisible bends in the stairwell, claiming that in such an old building, with such high ceilings, this apartment was actually on the fourth floor.

  It arrived like a newborn baby, wrapped in blankets, and received the same attention. Dana was so little at the time that for one frightening second he co
uldn’t remember what she had looked like, until the image came back. She had her hair cropped short like her mother’s, because she used to imitate her mother in every way back then. She came out of the bathroom with her hair wet and combed, wearing pajamas with baby-blue feet that her grandparents had sent from America.

  The sound of her padded feet running across the floor came back to him now. She watched the movers strip the piano of its robes, clutching Ilana’s hand as she walked back and forth across the room, trying to decide where to put it—the piano turned out to have a presence that was greater than its actual dimensions—until she finally instructed the movers, who were making their anger very clear and giving Yonatan looks intended to double their tip, to put it by the wall, right in the entrance to the living room, by the door, across from the couch, perpendicular to the balcony doors.

  He had stood in the stairwell fighting with the movers for a long time, not over the tip but about the fee they demanded for delivery, which was far higher than he had negotiated with the piano store owner. As they yelled their way through the argument, which concluded with the movers’ indifferent victory, but not before they had filled the stairwell with a stench of cigarettes and well-staged insult, he heard the first hesitant notes produced by four inexperienced hands, and when he finally sent the movers on their way and shut the door, he went into the living room and stood behind them, watching. The image of their backs, their one merged back—Ilana’s slender, with birdlike shoulder blades that rose and fell like the keys she played, and Dana’s, furry and playful as she sat erect like her mother and looked alternately at the keys and at Ilana’s profile with great admiration—that picture, their shared back, which had become one in his memory, as if it were his wife who had been wearing the baby-blue pajamas, was so alive but so silent, like the picture on a muted TV, that it gave him the chills.

  He zipped up his coat, hooked the umbrella over his arm, went out, and locked the door behind him. He was no longer hungry so much as in need of distraction. The last time they had sat together in the living room and he had played her Gould and Lipatti, consecutively, playing one of his favorite preludes and fugues, Dana said she’d never be able to play like that.