Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  Yonatan’s mother heard them walking down the path and came out to greet them. Yonatan turned to Shira and said, “I already told her you were coming and she’s very happy, so don’t feel uncomfortable.”

  The old lady hugged her granddaughter first, then went up to Shira to shake her hand, and finally looked at Yonatan with a look that contained both hesitation and affection. “How nice that you came,” she said to Shira. “I’m Rachel, Yonatan’s mother.”

  Shira apologized for coming empty-handed.

  “Nonsense! I would have been very angry if you’d brought something.”

  “Very?” Yonatan asked cynically. “You’d have been very angry?”

  “Maybe only a little,” she said apologetically. “But I would have been angry.”

  “She has nothing better to be angry about in life,” Yonatan said. “If only.”

  The living room was the exact opposite of the garden. It was warm and colorful and overflowing with artifacts and Persian rugs and afghans, and it had a smell of fuel from the large stove that stood up against a wall. “I didn’t turn the heat on today,” his mother said, when she saw Shira looking at the stove. “It’s warm, isn’t it? Would you like me to turn it on?”

  “No way,” Yonatan said. “We’re already sweating.”

  “If you want the heat on, just tell me,” the old lady said to Shira, and she nodded and smiled. “Sit down in the meantime, I’ll bring you something cold to drink.”

  The three of them sat on the couch in a row. They listened silently to the rustles coming from the kitchen—the fridge was opened and closed, a cabinet door slammed, glass chinked—and it occurred to Yonatan that he wouldn’t have heard these noises if not for Shira, if he were not starting to take in his childhood house, and his mother, through Shira’s eyes and ears, if he did not feel that each of these meaningless sounds said something about him. “Maybe you’d like to go and help?” he asked, and Dana got up quickly and went into the kitchen.

  “She’s a good kid, your daughter,” Shira said.

  “Yeah? And how’s my mother?” he asked. When he turned to her, she saw weariness and worry in his eyes, and the embarrassment boys feel when they introduce their aging parents to a stranger.

  “Your mother’s great too.”

  “Grandma wants to know if grapefruit juice is okay for everyone,” Dana asked.

  “That’s all she ever has, so why is she asking?”

  “She says there’s Coke too,” Dana said.

  Yonatan turned to Shira questioningly. “Apparently, we have a choice today,” he said. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into a little copper ashtray with ornate Arabic script on it, on a low table.

  “Grapefruit is fine,” Shira said. “Is it all right to smoke here?”

  “Yes, of course it is,” he said, and gave her a different ashtray, a larger one, made of colorful glass. “As you can see, here there are more kinds of ashtrays than drinks.”

  “Does your mother smoke?”

  “She used to, occasionally, but not anymore.” He got up and went over to touch the stove. “Sometimes she doesn’t turn this off properly and it just keeps running on low, and then she complains that she’s hot.” He rapped the chimney with his knuckles, and she felt the need to protect the old lady slaving in the kitchen—the one who had bought Coke for them, which would probably remain in the fridge until their next visit—from her son’s attempts to minimize her like a document on the computer.

  But she found herself joining in. “My dad’s been forgetting things too, lately. It’s a good thing he doesn’t cook. Otherwise I’d be in a constant panic about him leaving the gas on.”

  Yonatan appeared not to be listening. He blew rings of smoke and looked around nervously, examining the room with a surveyor’s look. “She’s a hoarder. Look how much junk she has here. It’s unbelievable.”

  “It doesn’t look like junk to me. There are lovely things here. Your mother has good taste.”

  “It’s junk. Believe me, most of it’s junk.”

  Dana came in and sat opposite them on a large leather beanbag.

  “Tell me, how long does it take to pour a glass of juice?” Yonatan asked.

  “She’s looking for the good glasses,” Dana said.

  “Oh, come on. Mom! Will you come back already?”

  His mother came in carrying a tray with tall glasses full of juice. As she served them, Yonatan noticed her hands shaking a little.

  “You have a lovely house,” Shira said.

  “You think so?” Rachel asked. “There are things from all over the world here.”

  “Grandma was an anthropologist,” Dana said.

  “Really?” Shira asked, as if Yonatan hadn’t lovingly told her about his mother a week ago, when they were sitting on her balcony, when she still saw him as a different man, a different son, not the one sitting tightly on the couch projecting teenage hostility, crushing out his cigarette forcefully as if to announce to everyone that, as far as he was concerned, this visit was over.

  “I used to be,” Rachel said, “but that was a long time ago. Before Yonatan was born.”

  Shira wondered what her own mother would have looked like had she still been alive. Would she also try so hard to satisfy some vague but constant desire of her daughter’s? Before she died, Shira had always thought of her as an unhappy woman, but she lacked the franticness and grandeur of her father’s misery. She was not happy, but she also was not miserable. There was something gray and steady about her condition, something that neither blamed nor demanded, that did not deteriorate or develop in any direction. And this was how she died: not very old and not very happy. Shira wondered if she herself was like that now, or if she ever would be.

  “The food will be ready soon,” Rachel said.

  “Great, we’re starved,” Yonatan said.

  “I hope you like brisket,” she said to Shira.

  “I love brisket,” Shira replied.

  “What kind of soup did you make?” Yonatan asked skeptically.

  “Chicken. Today I made chicken soup.”

  “Thank God. I was afraid you’d experiment.”

  His mother looked at him forgivingly and then smiled at Shira. “Yonatan tells me you’re also a writer.”

  “Yes, it turns out I am,” Shira said.

  “Lovely. It’s good to be creative.”

  “Is it?” Yonatan asked. “What exactly is it good for?”

  “The soup is hot,” his mother said, and invited them to sit at the table, which was already set. Shira asked if she could help.

  “Sit down,” Yonatan ordered, in a voice she didn’t recognize. “Dana will help.”

  They sat beside each other at the large oblong table, which stood by an arched window that looked out onto the garden.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” Shira said.

  Yonatan scratched an invisible stain off the edge of his plate with his fingernail. “She’s getting sloppy with the cleaning.” He held his plate up and looked at it in the light.

  “Mine’s clean,” Shira said, and put her hand on his arm.

  Dana came in slowly, carrying a bowl of soup in both hands. She gave it to Shira. Then she went back to the kitchen and reemerged with another bowl for Yonatan.

  “Sit down, Danaleh,” her grandmother said from the kitchen. “I’ll bring ours.”

  Dana sat down opposite them, with her back to the window. She thought they looked strange, almost childish, as they sat there, close to each other, as if everything she had wanted to happen between them had already happened—that thing she did not want to name, because a name would necessarily be accompanied by embarrassing pictures—and now they were pretending nothing had changed. She wondered if Shira had purposely worn the same skirt she wore last Saturday at Rona’s. From Tamar’s room, where she had sat drawing, she had heard her dad complimenting Shira on the skirt. She tried to remember if he used to compliment her mother on her clothes too, but she couldn’t. She told herself i
t would be better to think about her mother as little as possible now and was surprised to discover how easy it was.

  Yesterday, as they sat on her bed together and waited for the steaks to be ready, Tamar had asked if she thought her dad and Shira would be a couple. She said she was almost positive they would, and Tamar said, “I think so too. It’s pretty obvious.” Yes, Dana had said, it was really obvious. “And if they get married,” Tamar said, and ran her fingers along the row of elephants, “then you’ll have two mothers. A biological one and a stepmother.”

  “No,” Dana said, and went back to flipping through Shira’s book, “I still won’t have a mom at all.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Tamar said, without looking up from the bedspread.

  “But you know, it’s not for me that I want them to be a couple. Not at all,” Dana said.

  “No, obviously, it’s for your dad,” Tamar said.

  “Yes,” Dana said, “only for him,” and she held the book up to her nose. “Do you like the smell of new books?”

  “I love it,” Tamar said and looked up from the bed. “Let me smell.”

  They passed the book back and forth, touched it, turned its pages, and smelled it, and during those quiet moments, with the smell of steak spreading through the apartment and mingling with the scent of paper, which somehow fixed itself in her mind as the scent of Shira, Dana realized that whether or not her father found love, her mother was fading like the golden letters on her trunk, becoming more and more absent from her post by the window in that house on the hilltop, the one overlooking the road, which Dana now understood was not what had killed her because a contractor had killed her. And she realized that the familiar pain of missing her constantly was becoming smaller than the pain of missing her less.

  When she thought about Shira, when she tried to imagine her living with them, she knew it was complicated, because although there was enough space in the apartment—they would make space; she was even willing to swap rooms with them because her room was larger—it was complicated. Where would Shira put her computer? How could two writers live together? What if one of them wrote and the other didn’t? What if one of them closed him- or herself up all day in the little study and came out with glowing eyes and a distracted smile, as her father used to come out years ago after a good day’s work—what would the other one do then?

  She ate the brisket, which had mushrooms in it today, and heard her father asking, “What’s with the mushrooms? You never put mushrooms in the brisket.”

  “I wanted some variety,” Grandma said. He asked if they were from a can, and she said they were, and he looked at his plate suspiciously. Shira complimented Grandma on the brisket and took a second helping and asked how she made it. Grandma said it was very simple and gave a lengthy explanation. Her father ate quietly and looked dejected.

  Last night, after they had said goodbye to everyone and washed the dishes and taken the table apart and put it back in its place, he had been in a good mood. She had never seen him like that. From her bed she heard him pacing around the house, humming something to himself; she thought it was a song from that CD by The Doors. He turned the TV on and watched an old American comedy, and she heard him laugh every so often. He didn’t go to sleep until 2 A.M. and neither did she, because she didn’t want to sleep away these rare moments when his happiness had a physical presence, like another person in the house.

  But in the morning he was back to his old self. Before leaving they spent almost half an hour searching for the car keys. “What do I need this for?” he asked himself, as he turned over cushions and felt beneath piles of paper on the living room table and under a California cookbook, where they had looked for an artichoke recipe. Although only a few hours had passed since yesterday, she already missed him. She missed the mess that was different from the one the two of them made; she missed the piles of dishes and the table setting, which had seemed crucial to her, as if the placement of the knives and forks or the way the napkins were folded would have a lasting effect on the future of the evening, which was, judging by the happy noises her father had spread through the apartment, a huge success.

  Shira was chatting merrily with her grandmother, who had brought a pen and paper to write down the recipe. Her father suddenly got up and went to open the window and said you could die of heat in this house. But the window wouldn’t budge and Grandma told him to leave it, it had been stuck for years, and she felt him push her chair forward without noticing because he was trying so hard to open the window, and then he jabbed her back with his elbow and didn’t apologize because he was so focused on the stuck window.

  “Yonatan, leave it,” his mother said. “It’s stuck.”

  And he said, “I don’t want to.”

  She and Grandma and Shira exchanged maternal smiles, and Shira asked if he wanted help, and he said no and rocked the handle in his hand for another minute, and then finally gave up and sat down again. Shira took out her cigarettes and offered him one, and with a sour face he took a cigarette, and she lit it for him, then lit one for herself, and Grandma stunned everyone by asking for a cigarette too, and Dana could already tell that her father was going to say something insulting, but Shira silenced him with an infectious smile, and he smoked and smiled to himself and glanced with amusement at his mother, who smoked her cigarette with the utmost gravity. Dana saw that Shira’s shoulder was touching her father’s and her free hand was resting on his arm, and suddenly he started laughing, quietly at first, and Grandma asked what had happened, and then the giggle turned into wild laughter and then a coughing attack, and Shira slapped his back until it subsided and he took the hand that had slapped his back and placed it on his thigh, under the table, and his mother kept asking what was so funny and blew rings of smoke into the air, and Dana looked at her father, whose eyes were watering from laughing so much, and she knew she didn’t need another mother, she needed another father: this one.

  ( 24 )

  “Are you crazy?” he said, when they’d finished eating the compote and cleared the dishes, and his mother was boiling water for coffee. “Why would you sleep over here?”

  “Because I feel like it.”

  “But you have school tomorrow.”

  “So what? What’s going to happen if I don’t go for one day? I’m not missing anything. Believe me.”

  “And how will you get home?”

  “I’ll take a bus.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. What’s the big deal? I’m not five years old.”

  “But you don’t have a change of clothes here, you don’t have pajamas.”

  “Grandma will lend me something. It’s not a problem.”

  “And what does Grandma say about this? Have you even asked her?”

  “Yes! And I’d love to have her,” his mother shouted from the kitchen.

  He turned to Shira, as if she were the one who had to give her approval. “I don’t know your rules,” she said, “so I’m not interfering. It doesn’t seem like a problem to me for her to come back on the bus. But again, I don’t know what rules you have at home.”

  “We don’t,” Yonatan said. “That’s exactly the problem. We have no rules. She does exactly what she wants.”

  “Oh, really? When exactly have I done whatever I wanted? Give me an example.”

  “I don’t remember. But forget that. Do you really want to stay over at Grandma’s? Fine, then! Have fun, the two of you, but tomorrow Grandma’s taking you to the Central Bus Station. Mom, do you hear me? You’re taking her to the bus station.”

  “All right,” his mother said, and suddenly she sounded younger and stronger than she had when she was just his mother and worried only about him. She sometimes used to employ the same tone of voice when she answered his father as he barked requests from his study or reminded her to do things she’d already done.

  “Okay?” he asked, just to hear her answer him again that way.

  “Okay,” his mother said loudly, from the kitchen. Od
dly, when he left, reminding her again to take Dana to the bus station and make sure she got on the right bus, she didn’t equip him with plastic boxes of leftovers this time.

  When they got in the car, Shira suggested that he give her a tour of the neighborhood, and he agreed happily. It was twilight, and the old streets looked inviting, almost empty and still slightly wintry despite the weather. They drove slowly, looking at buildings and yards and the walls that surrounded them, at iron shutters that let yellowish light drip out, and Shira said she envied him for having grown up in this neighborhood, in this city. He shook his head sadly, but also proudly, and said, “Don’t be jealous. You, at least, still live in the town where you grew up.”

  “You can come back here.”

  “Sure I can. Did you know that this neighborhood has become an Orthodox stronghold? It’s almost entirely Orthodox Americans. My dad hated them. He hated them more than he hated the Me’a She’arim Orthodox.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I hate them all equally.” He slowed down and stopped outside a two-story stone building.

  “Beautiful,” Shira said.

  “Not only beautiful but historic too.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Here, in my friend Moshe Rubin’s house, we used to have parties.”

  “Here?”

  “Here.” He leaned over to the window on her side and pointed to the tiled roof. “He had an attic room. You wouldn’t believe what went on in that attic.”

  He remembered walking down the street to the parties and back home, his clothes smelling chilly. He remembered those Friday nights as an era unto itself, as if all those Fridays had been gathered into one great mysterious proclamation about his youth. He remembered how proud he felt, arrogant and self-assured, when he left home after dinner on his way to Moshe Rubin’s house—Moshe was a cardiologist now—and saw the usual crowd coming out of Friday-night prayers at the little Sephardic synagogue on Emek Refa’im Street. He would think to himself, They go out to pray and I go out to get laid. Although he was a virgin until he went into the army, he felt as if on those Fridays, as he walked determinedly from his parents’ house to his friend’s house, as he climbed the steep spiral staircase up to one long erection, he was fighting that handful of religious people, whom he now missed because there were so few of them, a rare landscape in his neighborhood and yet a part of it. He even missed their little synagogue, where today there was a pizzeria; on Passover, they sold pizza made with matzo meal.