by Yael Hedaya
When she got home she found a note from him on the kitchen table. He said he’d gone with Shira to the ER because her father hadn’t felt well. He had tried to get hold of her at Rona’s but she had already left. He hoped she was all right, and there was fruit salad in the fridge. He signed the note Love, Dad, which was strange: he always signed Bye and usually didn’t even bother adding Dad. She sat down on the couch in the living room and thought about watching TV. She went over to the stereo system and took out the Doors CD. She was curious to know if they had listened to it together, and how it sounded when she wasn’t at home. She put her feet up on the coffee table. The ashtray was so full it was overflowing; she took it to the kitchen to empty and then wiped the table thoroughly with a cloth. When she went to wash her hands in the bathroom, the tub was full of water with bits of foam floating in it, little bubbles that made a sound when they burst. She touched the water. It was still warm. She pulled the plug out and suddenly felt scared, wondering if Shira’s father was going to die. She walked toward her room to do her homework, but instead she went into her father’s room and looked around to see if anything had changed in recent weeks. The bed was messy, but no more so than when he had slept in it alone.
A few months after the accident, her nightmares had begun. According to Dad and Nira, they lasted almost a year. She would wake up in the middle of the night crying, but not remember what she had dreamed. Her father would carry her in his arms to their bed, where she would fall asleep immediately. But once she heard Nira reprimanding him, telling him that once she got used to it, it would be hard to stop. Her father replied that he didn’t have much choice.
Nira always knew what was best for them, but lately, even before Shira, Dana thought her father was rebelling. A few weeks ago she had heard him say to her on the phone that there was no point in bringing them Michal’s hand-me-downs, because Michal was thin and tall and they didn’t fit. She heard him pause for a minute, and then he said impatiently that he was grateful, but it was a waste of time and energy for her, and there was no point shortening and widening jeans that would only be good for one season anyway. When he admitted it wasn’t only a question of sizes but of different tastes, she could hear her aunt’s hurt feelings on the other end of the line.
Last week, when Nira came to visit, she sat down in the kitchen and asked what was new, not expecting an answer. Her father said there was some news and told her about Shira. “Someone I’m seeing,” he called her, and said she should be coming over soon and they could meet.
Nira said she’d be happy to, but after a few minutes, even before she’d had her coffee, she said she had to run. Dana heard her say to her dad at the door, “I hope you know what’s good for you, Yonatan. More important, I hope you know what’s good for the girl.” When he said not to worry, she heard Nira whisper, “Because to tell you the truth, I no longer know what’s good or not for anyone.” Her dad was quiet then, and her aunt sighed and said, “Well, ask us over sometime, so we can see who she is,” and he said okay.
She heard the door shut and he came into the kitchen and said, “Your aunt’s getting to be a real kibitzer.” She asked what a kibitzer was and he told her, but she disagreed, because she knew Nira was simply getting older, just as he himself was, although he didn’t realize it, and that he was a kibitzer too, with his hugging and his pretending he was a different father, especially around strangers; especially around Shira.
Now she sprawled on his big bed and was happy to hear its familiar creaks, which hadn’t changed over the years. She curled up under the blanket and dislodged from under her back a rolled-up cotton shirt that Shira slept in. She shut one eye and looked at the sheets. Her grandparents had sent the bed linens from the States and, like all the sets they sent, it was too big for the Israeli-sized bed and the fitted sheet didn’t fit very well. She looked at the dark sheet, following an almost invisible striped pattern, and noticed that it was covered with white stains that looked like moisturizing lotion. On the floor, she saw her father’s underwear in a human position, as if the man wearing them had lain down on the floor and evaporated. She knew she would never be able to fall asleep here again. The bed no longer belonged to her parents or to her dad, but had become undefined, a bed in waiting, hovering, like she was, in no-man’s-land.
She went into her room and sat down at her desk, took her notebooks out of her backpack, and tried to concentrate. Shira’s novel lay on her bed with the bookmark still shoved between the front cover and the first page. Every time she read the first few lines, something prevented her from going on, a superstitious conviction she had developed—she was becoming like Grandma Rachel lately—that the farther through the book she got, the more her dad would fall in love, and eventually his love would become irreversible, like being carried away by the plot of a suspense novel. She knew it was stupid but she couldn’t control it, and she wondered if her old fears were coming back and if she might become addicted to strange bedtime rituals again. She knew that avoiding the book was pointless, because Shira and her father had become a couple regardless of the rate of her reading; and while she was stuck on the first page they had overtaken her, leaving clouds of dust in their wake.
She thought of her father sitting next to Shira on a bench in the ER—although she couldn’t recall if they had benches in the ER—perhaps holding her hand, and Shira resting her head on his shoulder, maybe crying, and perhaps they were kissing; but something was wrong with the picture, because if they were both sitting together, then where was Shira’s father? They wouldn’t leave him alone, after all. So she imagined them standing over the bed of an old man she didn’t know, and then she felt as if she herself were the old man, as if her life had already happened and now she was just recollecting it. She felt extremely tired, and a sour sense of anger rose in her throat, but she didn’t know what she was angry about.
She got up and went into her dad’s room again and picked up his underwear with her fingertips. She took it into the bathroom and tossed it in the laundry hamper. Then she went back to her desk and tried to concentrate again, but she couldn’t. She glanced at the clock, saw it was already after eight, and wondered when they’d be home. She went into the kitchen and took out the fruit salad and ate straight out of the bowl with a spoon. Shira had obviously made it, because her father didn’t have the patience to cut fruit into such small pieces. His fruit salad always got stuck in her throat; he never bothered to peel the bits of pith off the orange segments, and they would lodge themselves in her mouth and almost choke her. She finished half the bowl and put it back in the fridge. She wondered if tonight, when they got back from the hospital, they would make the baby who suddenly seemed so certain and no longer preventable. She sat at her desk again and listened to the noise from Allenby flooding her room through the open window. The street always sounded noisier, more invasive, when she was in a bad mood. She wondered if you could grow old without living through at least half a lifetime, because she felt as if she had already experienced enough, and she asked herself, Why not? If people can die young, what’s to prevent children from growing old? She shut the windows and sat on her bed and picked up the book, but then she got up, went into the bathroom, took her father’s underwear out of the hamper, went into his bedroom, and put it carefully on the floor, exactly as she had found it.
( 6 )
He punched the vending machine, but not a single can came out. He’d already wasted ten shekels trying to get a drink. The first time, he put his money in and pressed the button for mineral water, the light started blinking precisely at that moment to indicate there was no more water. He tried to release the change, but the machine had swallowed it up. He put some more coins in and this time chose apple cider, but the machine was still adamant. He wondered if he should make a third attempt—he now suspected the whole machine was broken—but then he saw Shira coming out through the doors. “I came out to have a cigarette; he’s fallen asleep,” she said. He told her about being robbed by the vending machine,
but she seemed uninterested. She stood with her back to him and smoked, and he kept hitting the buttons and jostling the lever that was supposed to give him back his money.
The doctors had decided to hospitalize her father in the Internal Medicine department, and she said she was relieved. This way, at least she would know he was being cared for, if only for a night or two. As Yonatan had listened to the doctor report that Max’s blood tests were irregular—his potassium levels were very low, or very high, and something about white blood cells—and he had to stay in the hospital for observation, he had also sensed relief. Now, as he kicked the obstinate machine and realized it was not responding, while Shira remained unaware of this struggle, he realized it was selfish relief: She didn’t want to take care of her father; he didn’t want to take care of her.
He touched the back of her neck and she looked at him, gave him a small unfocused smile, and turned back to the ER doors again, as if she feared that taking her eyes off them even for a moment might cause an alteration in her father’s condition. He might deteriorate, or perhaps show sudden improvement and be sent home after all. He looked at her ass and thought about their sex, which over the last few nights had gone from slow and hesitant to extremely wild but soundless, because of Dana sleeping in the next room. He found there was something exciting in that combination of passion and silence. He gave up on the machine and sighed.
“What’s wrong?” Shira asked, as if she had only just noticed that something was going on behind her back.
“Nothing. The machine robbed me.”
She touched his cheek and asked him to put her cigarette out and said she was going in, and he wanted to ask how much longer she thought they’d need to stay. Three hours in the ER was enough for him and he was hungry, but he said nothing.
“You can go,” Shira said. “I’ll stay here until they admit him and then join you. Dana must be waiting at home.”
He said it was all right, he’d stay a little longer, and thought about the bath they were going to take together and how they had fucked on the couch in the living room that afternoon, with the Doors CD that had become their sound track over the last few weeks playing at full volume, swallowing up their silence. He followed her into the ER and stood next to her by her father’s bed. The old man looked calm and angelic as he slept, and Yonatan thought of how his own father, in his final days, had still looked angry and busy even in his sleep.
She sat down on the chair Yonatan had dragged over from a nearby bed and waited for the doctor to arrive with the admittance forms. The chairs seemed different from any other, but she didn’t know why. Perhaps because they were heavier and less comfortable, as if hardened by years of being positioned at this particular angle around patients’ beds. Her whole body ached—the same body that had tensed up as she stood naked in the living room and dialed home to check her messages, one ear listening to the bathtub filling with water, and the other to Mrs. Binder, her father’s neighbor, informing her that her father had fallen down the stairs and was at her place now but she didn’t know what to do; his knee was cut and he seemed confused; and she should please phone as soon as possible. She didn’t say what time it was.
She had dialed the neighbor immediately, as Yonatan came in and announced that the bath was ready and hugged her from behind. The neighbor said they’d taken her father to the ER an hour ago. She apologized over and over again and said she didn’t know what to do, the wound on his knee wasn’t serious but he seemed apathetic. “Such a poor man,” she said, and started sobbing. Shira tried to reassure her and felt Yonatan’s body pressing against her ass, rubbing up against her, and she asked who took him, and Mrs. Binder said, “An ambulance. An ambulance came.” Shira, whose imagination transported her quickly to the ER, parked her car in the lot, ran all the way inside, and found her father sprawled on a bed behind one of the screens or in one of the hallways, suddenly felt as if two women were having the conversation with Mrs. Binder, twin sisters: the devoted daughter who had already positioned herself by her father’s bed and was waiting with him for the doctor, and the one who now, practically paralyzed by guilt, started rubbing her ass against Yonatan’s second, surprising, erection.
Now Yonatan leaned on her chair, looked at her watching her sleeping father, put his hand on her shoulder, and remembered the day of the accident. Zvi had gone to identify the body because he said he couldn’t do it. When the police had called, he phoned Zvi and Nira and waited for them to come, and when they arrived he collapsed, because it was important for him that they see him collapse. He knew there were difficult days ahead, and he wanted to set the bar of his neediness very high. But before that, he took Dana upstairs to Ziv’s parents, who said, “Of course, of course, no need to ask,” when he told them what had happened and asked them to watch her for a few hours. When Nira and Zvi rang the doorbell, he opened the door and, without saying a word, lay down on the hallway floor and started sobbing. He lay in a fetal position and Nira leaned over him, also sobbing and caressing him, while Zvi walked around the apartment with the cordless phone and made the necessary arrangements. Yonatan wasn’t sure how long he lay that way; many things happened around him while his soul was absent. Nira came over to him every so often to tell him, gently at first and then firmly, to get up. People came and went, the phone rang constantly, and once he heard Dana’s childish voice in the stairwell and panicked. But now, when he thought about it, two things stood out in his memory: his warm cheek on the cold tiles and the strange pleasure of collapsing.
They accompanied her father to the Internal Medicine ward, squeezing into the elevator with an orderly, who skillfully maneuvered the bed. “Is this your father?” he asked, looking back and forth at the two of them. Shira said, “Mine.” The orderly asked, “Are you the husband?” Yonatan said, “Boyfriend.” The orderly gave them a knowing grin, and they both smiled politely. Shira pulled the blanket up around her father, and Yonatan took her bag and slung it over his shoulder.
When they transferred him into another bed in one of the ward’s rooms, Shira’s father woke up and looked blankly at Yonatan, who said, “I’m Yonatan, remember?” and her father held his hand out and Yonatan shook it, and that combination of limpness and determination reminded him of his own father again.
“Who is this?” Max asked Shira.
“This is my friend Yonatan.” She explained to him that they were going to do some tests, and in the meantime the doctors had decided to hospitalize him for a few days. Tomorrow, she promised, she would bring him some things from home: his slippers and robe, his toiletries and shaving kit, and the transistor radio. She asked if he needed anything else. He closed his eyes and it was hard to tell if he was snoozing or pondering her question. “Dad?” she asked, and he opened his eyes with a start. “I’ll bring you a newspaper, and I’ll bring your cookies.”
“Glasses,” he mumbled.
“Yes, thanks for reminding me. I’ll bring your reading glasses. Do you want us to rent a phone for you? So you can phone if you need anything else?”
“A phone?” he asked.
“Yes,” Yonatan said. “You can rent a phone for the room here. I think you can also rent a television.”
“Television?” He opened his eyes.
“Should we rent you a TV, Dad?” She hated herself for her tone, that hospital tone that had too much cheerfulness and restrained alarm. But her father didn’t answer. He closed his eyes again and fell asleep, his mouth falling open as a kind of fishlike response to her question, and her heart shrank in pain. “Shall we leave?” she asked.
Yonatan nodded. “Don’t you want to tell him you’re leaving?”
“What good will it do? He keeps falling asleep anyway.” Still, she leaned over and kissed his cheek, and when his eyes opened for a moment, she whispered that she was leaving now and she’d come the next morning, and he should sleep well.
Yonatan said, “I hope you feel better, Mr. Klein,” and put his hand on her shoulder, and they left the room and went d
own in the elevator and quickly crossed the parking lot, almost at a run, and said nothing until they were out of the hospital area, leaving behind a kind of twilight zone or prison, as if fearing that someone might notice them sneaking out and order them back.
( 7 )
With summer in full swing, Shira finally found the courage to go back into the little shop on King George Street and buy her father the onion bread he liked. For five months, since the day they first met there, she had viewed the store as a road sign that signaled the beginning. Every time she walked by, and glanced inside or examined the selection of breads in the window, a thrill went down her spine, which, over time, turned to alarm; if this is where it all began, she thought, as she moved away from the window and the sales clerk’s questioning look, this is also where it all could end.
The past five months had been too good to treat as routine. If she had had any close girlfriends, they would probably have told her she was crazy; it was her fear of losing Yonatan that would eventually drive him away, and five months was plenty of time to determine with certainty that he was her partner now. Yours, they would say emphatically, over and over again, to drill it into her. But she didn’t have that sort of girlfriend, and now of all times, as she experienced this fearful happiness, she wished she had someone to share it with.
A renewed burst of writing had surprised her one morning when she went home to pack up a couple of cardboard boxes, no more, with a few essentials. There were some clothes and cosmetics that she needed, and Yonatan wanted to know why she didn’t bring them over, instead of wearing the same T-shirt almost every night. And their shampoo wasn’t right for her hair. She complained that her hair was dry and wished she had her moisturizer and facial cleanser, and tampons; she always brought only two or three of them in her purse, never bold enough to leave a box in their bathroom. The same fear that prevented her from going into the bread shop warned her not to leave traces in the apartment on Bialik.