by Yael Hedaya
Her father suddenly opened his eyes, confused. “Did I sleep?” he asked.
“A little.” She resumed stroking his hand. “Sleep some more, until the doctor comes.”
He nodded obediently and fell asleep again.
She moved back and forth between her sleeping father and the exit from the ER, where she went to smoke or buy a can of soda from the vending machine. People sat there with cell phones, delivering their reports, and when she sat next to them on the bench and listened to their conversations, she imagined the phone call she would have with Yonatan from the ER, what she would tell him—what he would ask, how he would comfort her, what they would arrange for later—and the ordinariness of the dialogue covered the glare of the fluorescent lights like a soft rain cloud.
Three hours later he was discharged without diagnosis. “Exhaustion,” the doctor called her father’s illness, the illness that wasn’t a real illness, for a patient who wasn’t a real patient, just elderly, a kind of chronic fainter, a permanent ER nuisance, and she thought he seemed a little disappointed and had wanted to be in hospital because he felt protected there.
She thought about the word exhaustion the whole way home, while her father, who had recovered somewhat, sat beside her and listened to Channel One on the radio. When she climbed the seventeen steps to his apartment, supporting his arm and simulating great patience, she grasped that what she felt for Yonatan was more complicated than a longing for shared banality and more dangerous than falling in love.
Her father would sleep alone that night. She thought about him getting up to go to the bathroom. She thought about him falling down. If only they could pad the floor of his apartment with something soft, the kind of material they used in children’s play areas; if only they could upholster the entire floor with some absorbent and comforting material.
Exhaustion, she thought, dependency and exhaustion. Strange how easy it was to develop a dependency on a person you had only met twice. She had never needed someone so badly. She had never needed someone this way before she had even slept with him. As she helped her father up the last flight of steps, she decided to call Yonatan that night or the next day—she would find an excuse—and the sexual encounter suddenly became urgent, because although she had wanted him the previous day and the day before, today she wanted him differently, and, holding her father’s arm and reaching into her bag for his keys, she thought, My father will never have sex again. The thought was chilling, both because she had never thought about him as a man—with lightning speed he had turned from a man with a little girl to an old man—and also because it occurred to her that a man always recognizes the first time but never the last.
( 13 )
The book was amazing. All afternoon, until Dana came back from her piano lesson, he lounged on the couch unable to stop reading. He loved her. He hated her. Each time he turned a page he loved and hated her. When Dana walked in and saw him reading Shira’s book—he heard the key in the door but was too exhausted, too riveted, to hide it—she put her music case on the piano bench and sat quietly at his feet on the rug, waiting for a response.
“I’m reading Shira’s book,” he confessed immediately.
“What’s it like?”
“Very good. Really good.”
“Can I read it when you’re done?”
“Yeah, sure.” He asked how the lesson was, and she said it was all right.
He hadn’t made time yet to talk to her about the piano lessons, and now he felt guilty. When she had come home from school he had heated up the falafel he’d bought her in the toaster oven, taken out the tahini and pickles and salads from the fridge, which he had asked them to wrap separately, and arranged them in the pita.
He sat across from her while she ate and told her Esti had called to tell him she looked well. Dana said, “She’s such a drag,” and told him how the nurse kept following her around. She mimicked Esti’s sugary voice. “How are you? How do you feel today? Has your temperature gone down?” Dana said she was sick of the way she kept touching her forehead and looking at her with motherly eyes.
“Motherly?” he asked, somewhat amused.
“Yes,” Dana said, and sank her teeth into the pita, which tore and spilled its contents onto the table. “Who does she think she is?” She picked up tiny squares of cucumber and tomato and stuffed them in her mouth.
“She’s just concerned about you. There’s no need to get worked up about it.”
“I’m not getting worked up, I’m annoyed. She isn’t worth my getting worked up.”
“You’re covered with tahini,” he said, looking at her face. He was feeling elated—a mood to be viewed with suspicion, he thought. Only that morning he had sworn he wouldn’t get involved with her if she was talented, but for several hours now he had been turning pages, hating her and loving her and mostly fantasizing about the sex they would have: a sexual encounter between two great writers.
Later, when he sent his daughter to her piano lesson and went back to sprawl on the couch, reading, a small cloud of fear entered the living room, casting a shadow over the plans he wasn’t making but keenly sensed in his every limb: at dinner, the day before yesterday, she said she had read his books but hadn’t said what she thought of them. He comforted himself with the thought that if she said she had read them she must have liked them but had been embarrassed to comment, because if she hadn’t liked them, she probably wouldn’t have confessed to reading them, out of fear that she would have to say what she thought. That was how he behaved in such situations; he had often told authors that he hadn’t had time to read their books, so he wouldn’t have to admit to not liking them.
But the comfort soon evaporated. To say she had read his books and not say anything more, he thought, was tantamount to saying with cruel politeness that she hadn’t liked them, and he suddenly wanted to come up with an excuse to phone her—something about the steak dinner—and mention in passing that he was reading her novel and enjoying it very much, hoping she would say something in return. But then he would be taking a double risk: if she said she liked his books, he would never know if she was only saying it to return the compliment, while she would know with certainty that he was interested in her.
He tormented himself awhile longer, until he got up and chose a CD; he suddenly had a strange urge to listen to Arik Einstein, whom he had stopped liking after Ilana died. He looked for Drive Slowly, which was their favorite album, and couldn’t find it. He put on The High Windows instead, and when he heard the voice of the lead singer, whom Ilana had resembled a little, he closed his eyes, laid the novel on his chest, and thought about Shira’s apartment and how comfortable he had felt there, the way the rain had sounded through her window, the awkwardness, the quiet, the conversation, the yellow light, and he suddenly remembered he hadn’t taken the diskettes out of his coat pocket and they could get damaged there. Then he fell asleep, and when he woke ten minutes later he picked up the book and went on reading from where he had left off, asking no more questions, allowing himself to be carried away into the sweeping love story.
( 14 )
Irma Gutt was a bit like Grandma Maxine. She also used to be American, but a different kind. In her apartment, which was much smaller than Dana’s grandparents’ house in New Jersey, there was furniture that looked a lot like theirs: heavy, with thick upholstery. Dana especially liked the cups and plates, which were white with blue prints of flowers and birds. Her teacher always served her milk and homemade chocolate-chip cookies.
She was sixty-five and had white hair tied up in a way that looked like cotton candy and smelled of hair spray. She spoke softly, with a heavy accent that wasn’t entirely American; it was, as Irma herself said, a Polish Jewish accent. Dana liked watching her hands, which were dotted with brown marks, as she demonstrated a piece that always sounded much better when Irma played it, better even than all the pianists her father played for her. She liked the apartment and the cookies, which had a distinctly American flavor, she liked Irma
Gutt and the pieces she played, but she hated the piano: She had no talent, that much was clear to her. She was not musical, and this presented a double-edged sword. To hate the piano was to betray her mother; to be untalented, unmusical, was to betray her father. And she couldn’t betray him now, of all times, when he was in such a good mood. Nor could she betray her mother, now that a sort of collusion was being formed around her, around the place she had left, and Dana felt that if she had to betray someone, it should at least be gradual.
She herself had fallen in love with Shira in a crushing and desperate way. Her day at school had gone by quickly because she was lost in daydreams—not the usual ones, which were drawn out like bubble gum and grew tiresome quickly, but new dreams, in which she saw her father and Shira sitting together on the couch watching television, and her lying between them with her head on his chest and her feet on Shira’s lap. Or she saw Shira and herself standing together in the bathroom brushing their teeth, in the morning or the evening, it didn’t matter; what mattered was that Shira’s full body, her stomach and her butt and her chest, which was bigger than Dana’s mother’s had been, now gave her new hope. She hated her own body. She had gained some weight recently; she could tell by the way her cousin’s hand-me-downs didn’t fit her, because Michal was taller and more slender, like Tamar. Shira seemed accepting of her body, and relaxed, and Dana knew that if she stood beside her long enough, absorbing her and her movements, rubbing up against her here and there, she would be able to become like her.
In these daydreams they stood by the sink and brushed their teeth and laughed as if they were on a school trip together, and Dana looked at the little fold of fat that emerged from beneath Shira’s shirt when she leaned over to rinse her mouth, and also stole a guilty but extremely thirsty glance at her thighs, hoping there was no space between them, like there was between Tamar’s long thin legs and her mother’s, and when Shira straightened up she noticed that they stuck to each other like a girl’s thighs, just like her own.
Now she sat on the chair next to Irma Gutt, who wanted to demonstrate a little section. They sat so close that she thought she could feel her teacher’s birdlike ribs tickling her right side, and her rhythmic breath fluttering over Dana’s cheek, dry and cold like a demon’s kisses. She watched the keys being caressed by skilled fingers, unlike her own, which pinched the keys hurtfully, vengefully. She watched the droopy bags of skin on Irma’s arms, and for a moment she wanted to confess: I hate the piano.
But instead of confessing, she nodded when Irma asked if she understood now, finally, how the piece should be played, and she tried very hard when her teacher went back to her chair and listened to her, tense and hopeful but routinely disappointed. Then Irma glanced at the clock and pretended, as usual, to be surprised the lesson was over. She went to the bathroom to get Dana’s umbrella, which she had put there earlier to dry, and walked her to the door, and on the steps Dana met the girl who always came after her. She didn’t know her name or who she was, but she thought she was Russian, and once she had stood behind the door after leaving and heard wonderful, sweeping playing, which went on without being interrupted by Irma’s rhythmical cries of “No! No no no!” She wondered if the Russian girl also got milk and cookies, or whether that was a consolation prize.
( 15 )
Shira went down to the corner store to buy her father some groceries, and on the way she passed the deli, which was still open, a sickly white light spilling out onto the sidewalk, but she didn’t go in. She hated the food he bought there, hated it without having tasted it. She sensed a chill—her usual aversion was now intensified by what had happened there that morning. She knew that from now on she would find it hard to enter the place, because she would always see an imaginary chalk line on the floor marking her father’s fall, the people crowding around him with their whispers and their clucking, and the panic, the Hungarian’s anger, the ambulance double-parked outside—all these joined into a small and not particularly complicated puzzle: An old man faints in the morning hours in a North Tel Aviv delicatessen.
Exhaustion. What was the young doctor trying to tell her when he discharged them from the ER? Her father had low blood pressure, which might explain the fainting, but only when the patient was young would the condition be given a medical name. With Max Klein it was exhaustion. She took the doctor aside and tried to explain that her father’s nutrition was deficient, and he nodded understandingly, recommended they see a dietitian, and said she could get a referral from the nurse at the desk. Then she snitched on her father that he was depressed, and for a moment this piece of information seemed to make an impression on the doctor, and her hope was restored.
“Is this new?” he asked.
“The depression?”
“Yes.”
She briefly contemplated whether she should lie. “No,” she said. “It’s been that way for years, but recently it’s gotten worse.”
The doctor asked her to wait a few moments, and she said she would and thanked him warmly, not knowing exactly for what, perhaps for the solution he was about to return with. She went back to sit with her father, and with her eyes she kept monitoring the doctor, who stopped by another bed and listened with the same nods to the complaints of an elderly lady whose Filipina caretaker sat next to her, also nodding. Then he disappeared and came back half an hour later with her father’s discharge sheet. He signed it, gave it to her, and asked her to go to the reception desk. She looked at him questioningly and he smiled and said, “Okay?” She said yes and wanted to ask, But what about the depression? What about the solution? but she said nothing. “Feel better, sir,” the doctor told her father heartily, and her father mumbled his thanks and looked defeated.
Now, as she filled the basket with healthy, comforting groceries, she realized what the doctor had been telling her: you’re alone. Completely alone in this dubious business of exhaustion. She bought eggs, milk, cottage cheese, whole-wheat bread, and chicken breasts to make him some schnitzels, as she sometimes did when she wanted to spoil him, and also to prove to him that there was nothing like home-cooked food. But today she didn’t wish to prove anything.
When she got back she found him sitting in the armchair opposite the TV, drinking coffee, dipping a sesame biscuit in the cup, watching cartoons. “Are you hungry?” she asked.
“So-so,” he said.
“I’m making schnitzel,” she said, and he thanked her, and she took his empty cup and asked if he minded if she opened a window because it was stifling, and he said he didn’t mind and stared at the screen. When they finished eating, she washed the dishes, put the leftovers in the fridge, which suddenly looked bare without its plastic containers, sat with him a little longer, and got up to go. She promised to call first thing in the morning to find out how he was.
“Promise me you’ll call if you don’t feel well, at any time, even in the middle of the night, okay?” He nodded and said he promised and asked her to lock the door behind her; he was going to bed now.
“Aren’t you going to brush your teeth?”
“Not today. I’m tired.”
“Okay, we’ll let it go today, then,” she said, hating herself for the patronizing nurselike plural, “but it’s not a good habit.”
“I know. I know, Shiraleh.” He got up from his armchair and went into his bedroom and crawled under the covers and pulled them up to his chin, and she kissed his cheek and felt his stubble scratching her lips.
“And you didn’t shave today,” she said, and he said he hadn’t had time.
“Close the window, it’s getting a little cold,” he said, and she shut the window and drew the blinds, then looked around and said they should get a phone extension next to his bed. He murmured, “Someday,” and she went out and locked the door behind her, and knew that all this talk about tooth-brushing and shaving and phone extensions was an attempt to turn the huge monster, his approaching death—and, worse, the days that would pass before it arrived—into a few harmless pets, domestic and w
ell trained.
On the way home, she drove down Bialik Street, slowing as she passed Yonatan’s building. It was old and neglected, covered with yellowish plaster, far less attractive than the other buildings on the street. Its entryway was dark, and she could easily guess at the smell that lingered in the stairwell, that same smell that stood in her stairwell and in all the old buildings in town: a damp odor that in summer was mixed with the stench of cockroach spray and in winter had traces of rain and frying. All the front windows were dark, and she wondered which side of the building he lived on and whether he was at home. She had conducted so many imaginary conversations with him throughout the day that it seemed natural to go up and continue where they had left off. She would call him tomorrow, she assured herself, when she got home and started looking for parking. She would ask about the steak meal, which he’d probably long forgotten. It was too late today and she might sound desperate.
( 16 )
Yonatan was surprised to hear her voice on the answering machine when he got back from the grocery store, inviting him to go with her that evening to a gallery opening in the south end of town. As long as he had been reading her book, which he had finished that morning, despairing at how much he liked it, Shira had been an entity that hovered between the pages, a possibility with which he amused himself in his mind, a talent, a lay, a threat, or a promise but not a human voice.
She sounded hesitant, as if she was sure he wouldn’t be free, that night or ever. She sounded as if she regretted even making the call, and in her voice he heard himself. He felt none the stronger at the discovery of these power relations but, rather, just as vulnerable as she was—vulnerable together with her. He listened to the message several times. Hi, it’s Shira Klein, she said, as if she were afraid he wouldn’t remember who she was if she didn’t give her full name. It’s Monday morning, and I was calling to ask if you felt like going to a gallery opening tonight—if you’re not busy. I mean, if you feel like it. Then she paused. So call me, she said, and hesitated again. If you want to. She left a number and said Bye, and the bye sounded sad.