Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  She darted around the apartment, opening blinds and windows, and then went into the kitchen and washed the dishes. When she finished she looked for the dish towel and couldn’t find it, and remembered she’d seen it on the bathroom floor; her father must have taken it in there at some point during the night. She wiped her hands on her pants and thought about the life he lived here when she was gone: What happened to him? What did he do? What were his nights like? It occurred to her that the dish towel that followed him around from room to room knew more about him than she did.

  She went out onto the living room balcony, lit a cigarette, and wondered what to do. Last time she had phoned their family doctor, Dr. Rimon, three months ago, when her father had flu that lasted for weeks, she had detected impatience in his voice, even hostility. What did she want him to do? he had asked. Her father was an old man and couldn’t manage on his own anymore. He needed a suitable framework. When she had put the phone down and looked at her father, who was lying in his bed in the same pajamas he wore now, with the coil heater lit at his feet, reminding her of elderly people who burned to death in their sleep because of those heaters, she had rolled the words suitable framework through her mind and pictured him sitting inside a wooden square, as if the old man lying on his side were a hyperrealistic picture, not her father.

  She stood on the balcony and stared at the street and put her cigarette out in a planter that used to house a miniature orange tree, which Emmanuel Herman had brought as a gift on one of the holidays. She tried to reconstruct her sex with Yonatan. All day she had avoided it, satisfied with the fleeting touch of her fingers on her stomach, because she was afraid of the replay, of the emotions it would awaken. There was something heart-wrenching, something injured about the sex, she thought, and wondered briefly if she had enjoyed it. She knew she hadn’t. Even when she came, giving in to his fingers but shutting her eyes as his look followed her facial expressions, intense and worried, she knew they were not making love or fucking but contending with a state of emergency, administering first aid to themselves and to each other, like two medics who find themselves on the same battlefield, hit by the same shrapnel.

  She heard her father sigh. When she went into his room she found him sitting on the edge of the bed, feeling around for his slippers with his feet. “Where are you going?” she asked, and he gestured with his chin toward the bathroom. He got up slowly, stood on his feet, and left the room, holding his hands out to the wall to guide him. She followed him, ready to catch him if he fell, until they reached the toilet, and in each of those steps, his and hers, she felt as if she were accompanying him to a place where he was someone else, someone she didn’t know and had never met, who would never again be her father.

  * * *

  Dana asked what her father’s name was. “Max,” she said, and felt a lump in her throat.

  “That’s a nice name,” Dana said.

  “You think so?” Shira asked, and sopped up the rest of her soup with some bread.

  “Yes. I really like that name. If I ever have a son, I might name him Max.”

  ( 4 )

  They sat in old wicker armchairs on the balcony. Through the open kitchen window, they heard water run down the sink as Dana washed the dishes, humming a Doors song to herself. There was a sudden sound of glass shattering. “What happened?” Yonatan shouted, and Dana said a glass broke.

  “Are you okay?” Shira asked.

  Yonatan thought, So this is how a relationship begins: with soup, idle talk on the balcony, a girl dropping a glass, and two adults. It was as if last night was a fiery prologue to all this serenity.

  “She inherited my clumsiness,” he said.

  “You’re that way too?”

  “Are you?”

  “I break things all the time.” She raised one leg and put her foot on the railing, exposing a small scar beneath her knee. “That’s from the first glass I ever broke, at the age of four, I think. When I bent down to pick up the pieces, my mother yelled for me to be careful, so I slipped and fell on the glass.”

  He looked at the scar and smiled and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it last night. He wanted to say he was falling in love with her, but instead he asked what the last thing she broke was.

  “A jar of sun-dried tomatoes at the supermarket, on Friday. Imported ones! It was really embarrassing.”

  “Were they angry?”

  “No. Not at all, actually. They didn’t even want me to pay for it. But I felt bad for whoever had to mop up all the oil from the floor afterward.”

  He had several big things to say to her. That she was the first woman who had sat on this balcony with him since Ilana died. That he thought his daughter was already very attached to her. That at night, when he came, he felt as if he were emptying out and filling up at the same time, which was why, perhaps, he had walked around all day with an almost physical feeling that he hadn’t actually come. He wondered how he would tell her these big things without scaring her, and how he would keep saying the little things he had said all evening without boring her, and whether, when they went to sleep—and he suddenly had the alarming thought that she might not stay—his body would know how to calm itself.

  Dana came out and said she was going to bed.

  “So early?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, early? It’s eleven.”

  “So you’re leaving us?” Shira asked.

  “Yes. Leaving you in the lurch.”

  “In the lurch? Who taught you these phrases?”

  “You did. Good night.”

  “Give me a kiss then,” he said, and when Dana told him to stop putting on an act for the guest, he said, “Come on, don’t be that way. Give your old man a good-night kiss.”

  Dana conceded and put her lips to his cheek. “At least you shaved.” She looked at Shira. “It was for your benefit; you should appreciate it. Are you staying?”

  “I don’t know.” Shira tried to fake disinterest.

  “You’re invited,” said Yonatan.

  “Just be careful, he snores,” Dana said.

  “That’s enough out of you, snitch. Go to bed.”

  Dana retreated with backward steps into the living room, waving goodbye and blowing kisses.

  “So, are you staying?” he asked, after a few moments of silence, and she said she would. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. The bed sags a bit in the middle.”

  “I sag a bit in the middle too,” she said, yawning.

  “Are you tired?”

  She nodded and put her hand on his, and he squeezed it and asked what side of the bed she liked, because he personally didn’t care.

  She said, “Your side,” and they got up and took their empty cups and the ashtray into the kitchen, and in the kitchen they stood and kissed, and he lifted her shirt and kissed her belly button. “I missed this,” he said, and for the first time since they met she did not feel passion and sadness but simply happiness; and as they walked down the hallway to the bedroom together and he turned off lights as they went, he suddenly realized that the tension that had spread through his limbs after sleeping with her, and had stayed with him all day, was merely the result of an internal misunderstanding: his body thought the sex was the decisive final cord of almost half a decade, but his heart knew that what had happened between them was the first quiet sound of the decade just beginning.

  ( 5 )

  Tamar wanted to know if they walked around the apartment naked, if Shira cooked for them, and if Dana thought they were doing it. She said her mother said that the second she saw them together she knew they’d be a couple, a blind man could see it, and she was happy for both of them that something good was finally happening because they both deserved it. They were sitting at the round table, eating leftover onion quiche heated up in the microwave. Tamar said it had too much onion and picked at her plate and said sometimes she wished her mother had a boyfriend and sometimes she was glad she didn’t, because who needs a stranger walking around the apartment naked, with his th
ing out.

  “That’s not the way it is,” Dana said. “My dad doesn’t walk around naked with me.”

  “Of course not, because he’s your dad. But if he wasn’t your dad it would be a different story.”

  Dana said she didn’t know about that.

  After a few thoughtful moments, during which she might have still been roaming her and her mother’s apartment with the naked intruder, Tamar asked again, “So what do you think? Are they doing it?”

  Dana said they were.

  “You mean you heard them?”

  “No way! They do it quietly.”

  “You mean no moaning and shouting, ‘Yes, yes; more, more; rip me open’?” Tamar asked and took a tub of ice cream out of the freezer.

  “No,” Dana said, and blushed, because she didn’t know what Tamar meant but she was embarrassed for Shira.

  “Then how do you know they’re doing it? Maybe she’s just sleeping over.”

  “Are you a moron? She has her own place, doesn’t she?”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Tamar said grudgingly. “But don’t be so sure. There is such a thing as a platonic relationship. Have you heard of that?”

  Dana hadn’t, but she didn’t want to give Tamar the satisfaction of explaining it to her, and anyway she knew her father’s relationship with Shira was not platonic. Shira didn’t sleep over every night. She had counted only sixteen nights out of the twenty-one since the first night, and there were times when she wondered what Shira did when she wasn’t with them, and whether her dad was sad on those nights or if, like herself, he was a little glad to be back in their old routine, even though it was a routine she didn’t like.

  She had expected that immediately following Shira’s first night at their place, her father would go with her and pack her things up and bring her over. She thought there would be immediate changes at home—that instead of the drapes made of Indian fabric that her mother had sewn for the living room, which were faded and fraying at the edges and looked like an old theater set, there would be new ones, like the ones Rona bought on Herzl Street, made with off-white jute and hung on wooden rods—and she expected they would have a talk with her. But none of those things happened. Shira didn’t even bring a change of clothes, just a toothbrush, which she took back every morning, wrapped in a plastic bag from the big roll they kept in the kitchen. She put it back again every night—not in the glass by the other two toothbrushes but on the sink, face up.

  They were careful when Dana was around, permitting themselves only small touches and pretending they were accidental, especially in the kitchen, where she sometimes caught them giggling and tickling each other and kissing when they thought she wasn’t there. And facing the TV—where the programs she was used to watching now seemed different, and she found it hard to concentrate on them—her father’s arm would hang over Shira’s shoulder, or Shira’s hand would encircle his thigh when she leaned over him for something, cigarettes or a bottle of beer or the TV guide. On Friday afternoons they took the Ha’aretz supplement into the bedroom and did the crossword together, and it was during those moments, which involved no touching or tickling or kissing, just the folded newspaper and a pen and a closed door, that Dana felt betrayed.

  “Would you like them to get married?” Tamar asked, and heaped another portion of chocolate-chip ice cream in their bowls.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Would you like to have brothers or sisters?”

  The idea of a baby squeezing into their three-and-a-half-room apartment seemed so implausible that she didn’t know what to say. “Would you?” she asked Tamar, who seemed to want to be asked, judging by her taut expression.

  “So badly. But my mom’s too old to have a baby. She says she wishes she’d had another one when she still could have. Did you know we’re thinking about adopting?”

  “Adopting?”

  “Yes. Maybe a Chinese girl.”

  “So you’ll have a Chinese sister?”

  “That would be so cool! I hope I get a Chinese sister. I’ll teach her everything I know. It will be fun. She’ll be half my sister and half my daughter.”

  “But don’t you like being alone with your mom?”

  “I do, of course I do, but there’s something screwed up about being an only child, don’t you think? I once read about it in the paper. I read that only children get screwed up.”

  Dana had never thought about it. Her father told her that when she was three or four she had begged for a brother or sister. Her mother had promised that they’d start working on it and that within a year or two there’d be a baby in the house, but after the accident she couldn’t remember ever wanting a brother or sister. It was as if her mother was the only woman in the world who could have brought that baby home and, when she died, not only the potential sibling went with her but the idea itself. Now she tried to imagine what a half brother or sister would look like. She licked her teaspoon and looked at the palm trees in the yard and pictured the baby; she gave him her father’s eyes because they were her eyes too, and Shira’s nose and her skin tone and smoothness, but when she tried to give it her own mouth and chin, which were exactly like her mom’s, she realized that was impossible, and she suddenly wanted a baby of her own, the kind that would have a chance to inherit some of those lost features.

  “I look like my dad,” Tamar said suddenly, as if she had read her thoughts.

  “How do you know?” she said, slightly embarrassed. Tamar’s father was a subject they spoke of freely, but there wasn’t much to say about him.

  “Because I don’t look anything like my mom, so who else could I look like?”

  Rona came home and said she’d had a horrible day. “How’s the quiche?”

  “Yummy,” Dana said.

  “Gross,” Tamar said, and her mother kissed her hair. “Mom, when are we going to adopt a Chinese baby?”

  Rona threw the empty ice-cream tub into the trash and said, “I see you’ve already taken care of dessert.”

  “Well, when?”

  “Why does she have to be Chinese? What’s wrong with a Romanian baby?”

  “Come on, Mom,” Tamar said, and Rona said it wasn’t the right time to talk about it. Then she asked if they had homework and Tamar nodded and made a sour face.

  “Go and do it together, then,” she suggested, but Dana said she had to go home. Rona asked how her dad was and she said he was fine. “And Shira?”

  “She’s fine too.”

  “It’s about time we had a meal together,” Rona said.

  “Yes.” Dana headed to the door.

  “I’ll call,” Rona said. “Say hi to Dad and Shira.”

  Dad and Shira, Dana thought, as she went down the steps. As if they were two first names. On the way home she became agitated about her future brother or sister, as if Shira were already in the delivery room with her dad. She turned toward Allenby and stopped at the pedestrian crossing, and tried to decide whether to cross the street or turn back and go home. It was late afternoon, not yet dark, and although it was early April, it felt like summer. She wondered if she really hated summer so much, or if it was another of her father’s pet peeves that she had adopted so as not to hurt him.

  She crossed the street, but before the light changed she turned around and ran back the way she had come. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she knew it was something urgent. She hoped that walking down the bustling street, which, unlike her father, she was fond of, would clarify her desires or at least distract her from the longing that now filled her eyes with tears. She went into a clothing outlet and rummaged through piles of T-shirts. They were soft, as if they had been worn and laundered thousands of times, but they had the chemical scent of fabric dye. Then she went through the women’s lingerie and stacks of men’s underwear, and had a sudden impulse to buy underwear for the three of them. The store clerk asked what she wanted. She said she was just looking and the clerk said this wasn’t a place to look, this was a place to buy. She left
the store and walked toward the market. Her father always warned her about terrorist attacks, but now she squeezed her way through the shoppers and thought not about bombs but about herself and about the sadness that had overcome her, which was unlike any other kind of sadness she had known. It was nice to walk through the crowded market. The crowds carried her along in all sorts of directions, as if she were in the ocean. What was he so afraid of? she wondered. Of Allenby and bombs and drowning. He was always trying to protect her, not realizing that he could not shield her from the internal catastrophes she lived through at every moment, especially recently, because some of them were his own fault. She hated the way he hugged her. She hated feeling her chest crush against his and the way he pretended not to notice that something was growing there, like a partition between them. Above all, she hated what was growing there. At night in bed, she would examine the two protruding breasts under her reading lamp, afraid to touch them so as not to encourage their growth, not to feel from the outside what growing up was, because feeling it on the inside was enough.

  That morning, in the kitchen, as she watched Shira stretch, she saw her large breasts beneath her shirt, rising and sagging heavily, her nipples not dark and erect, like the ones she saw on models, but pointed toward the floor. She tried to imagine how her father felt when he touched them, how a baby would feel when it suckled on them, and how her own would look, because her mother had small ones; she could tell from the pictures. One thing was clear: She didn’t want breasts. The feeling was so strong she wasn’t capable of even uttering the word.

  Tamar had no problem with it, and at school she was always whispering to Dana and pointing at girls who were more developed. She would say things like, “Look at that one,” or “How did she suddenly get breasts?” and she liked to guess who was already wearing a bra. Dana cooperated and always added her own comments, but she wished she were as flat as Tamar was. She hated the feeling of not knowing so many things—like what a platonic relationship was—and yet living with the sense that she knew too much. Lately, she hated so many things that now she wondered if she hated her father too.