by Yael Hedaya
( 9 )
On the first rainy day of the season, which had finally arrived in November, she was stuck in a traffic jam, listening to the windshield wipers squeak and the radio announcer report faulty stoplights, slippery roads, and accidents in a cheerful and forgiving tone, because it could all be blamed on the first rain that everyone had been hoping for. That afternoon, she had stood with her father on the balcony, watching the sky grow dark and the clouds roll in from the west, and had wondered what he thought about when he stood there like that, in his flannel robe, leaning his elbows on the railing. He looked full of thoughts—about clouds, about the beginnings of other winters. And yet he also seemed utterly vacant.
For months she had been trying to persuade him to let a foreign worker into the house to help out. She made inquiries, talked to some agencies, and told him about a Filipina candidate who sounded suitable. When he said there was no space for anyone else in the apartment, she said she would empty her old room, which had become a storeroom; it was about time she sorted it out and threw away whatever he didn’t need. When she saw how the idea horrified him, she suggested that they just pack everything in boxes and store them, perhaps in paid storage. Would he like her to find somewhere? He shook his head. He no longer claimed—as he used to when she suggested they clean up the room—that these were important documents and maps whose fate only he could decide and he didn’t have the strength right now. He simply shook his head slowly, thoughtfully, as if he knew something no one else knew and wouldn’t disclose it. Only later, when she said goodbye and went down to her car, feeling the first heavy drops of rain on her head and hands, did she understand his refusal, and it scared her. She tried to imagine what it was like to pack up your things, knowing you would never see them again.
The radio announcer’s exuberance annoyed her. Even the first rain, which she always looked forward to, seemed like a nuisance; maybe she was getting old. She also wondered if her father would remember, before he went to bed, to draw the blinds and close the windows she had opened. For the first time in her life, she was glad to live in a city where there was so little rain, where there was no need to worry that a forgetful old man might drown in his bed at night because of an open window. She asked herself if she loved her father and knew she did, but she also knew it was sometimes hard to differentiate her love for him from her fear of not loving him.
She and Yonatan had been talking about moving to a different apartment for weeks now: somewhere larger, maybe even in the countryside. Not because the apartment on Bialik was too small for three people—it had housed three people before—but because it seemed too small for these particular three people: her and her writing, which had taken on a physical dimension, like a sublettor; Dana, whose seclusion and attempts to diminish herself, perhaps even to disappear completely, took up a vast amount of space; and Yonatan, who looked lost in the small area the two of them left him.
A few days ago, when she went down to buy cigarettes, she saw him on King George Street. He was standing near her street corner, on the opposite sidewalk, looking in the window of a toy store. She knew he went out walking in the mornings and did his shopping and errands, but when she saw him standing with his back to her, his hands in the pockets of his corduroys, his gaze fixed on the display window, he did not look like someone running errands or shopping but like someone killing time. He was staring at the old globe in the window—she knew the shop and its permanent displays well—or at the inflatable beach balls, or perhaps what drew his attention was what always attracted her own: an inflatable yellow duck that had been hanging there for years. Its underinflated neck looked broken. She stood hidden by a bus that had stopped at the corner and wondered if Yonatan had discovered the handicapped duck. She wanted to cross the street, run over to him, and surprise him from behind, wrap her arms around his waist, kiss him deeply in front of the store, as if they were lovers taking a stroll down the street together, but she knew that right now there was much distance between them.
When the bus drove on, she saw that Yonatan had broken away from the window and had stopped at the nearby kiosk, where she had planned to buy cigarettes. He bought a pack for himself. He went on toward Allenby, and as he walked he unwrapped the pack and threw the cellophane into a trash can, took out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. Then he stopped for a minute to dig through his pocket for a lighter, one that used to belong to her and which, incredibly, was still working. He shielded the cigarette with his hand, tilted his head, and lit it. She wanted to turn herself in again, to call him from the other side of the street, wave innocently, happily, as if she had not been standing there watching him for five minutes. She pictured herself coming home in the afternoon, showering, taking clean clothes out of the closet, knocking on Dana’s door and peeking in to ask how she was, then going up to him in the kitchen as he stood at the stove or washed the dishes or leafed through a cookbook, wrapping her arms around his waist and kissing him as if nothing had happened. But she kept standing there, and she no longer cared if he turned around and saw her, because she knew he wouldn’t, he was so immersed in his morning. He tossed his cigarette on the ground, crushed it with the sole of his shoe, and went into the wine store that had opened recently next to the kiosk. She could already savor the red Chilean wine they would drink with dinner, as well as the sour taste left by secretly observing her lover, and she crossed the street, bought her cigarettes, and hurried back to what used to be her home and had now become what you might call a writing studio but was in fact an excuse.
She had promised him she would give up the apartment soon. “You can work in my study,” he offered generously. “I’m not using it.” But she said she wouldn’t feel comfortable. “All right then,” he said, and she thought he was slightly relieved, “we’ll find you a corner somewhere. Besides, we’re moving to the country, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. The thought of life in the country filled her with happiness but also a certain degree of fear.
“We’ll find something with enough space for you to have a whole studio.”
They were planning to drive out that weekend to look at rental houses on a few moshavim in the area. The real estate agent had addressed them as a married couple and referred to Dana as the daughter. “There’s a separate unit for the daughter,” he said, praising one of the houses. When they asked him about schools in the area, he asked what grade the daughter was in. Then he asked if they had a dog and Shira said they didn’t, they had no room for a dog in the apartment. The agent said they could raise as many dogs as they liked on the moshav and asked if the daughter liked dogs. Shira said she did and was suddenly excited at the idea of finally having a dog and being treated like someone who already had a daughter.
When she reached Bialik and started looking for parking, the rain stopped. She circled the block and the nearby ones over and over again, as if her car were some sort of urban shark. She knew it was a matter of timing and patience. Eventually someone would have to move. She drove slowly, her eyes scanning the parked cars, looking for signs of life. The radio played a jingle advertising an old-age home. Two singers, male and female, mimicked children’s voices and sang a rhymed verse about Golden Meadows Residence, an assisted-living center only ten minutes from Tel Aviv, as if they were grandchildren back from visiting a grandparent and were thrilled about the place. Their voices sounded familiar; they also advertised cereal. She changed the station but kept hearing the commercial, which had scared her, and she was impatient to get home. She circled Bialik several more times, driving with the window rolled down, inhaling the postrainfall air, until she quickly slid into a spot that opened up on Hess Street, silently thanking the old man who had vacated the spot in a large old Volvo, leaving her so much room she didn’t even need to maneuver.
( 10 )
On Saturday, when they went to look at houses with the agent, Dana said she didn’t feel like going.
“But what will we do if we see something we like?” Yonatan asked
.
“We can’t take something without your approval,” Shira said; Dana said she trusted their judgment.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come? Don’t you feel like getting some fresh air?” Yonatan asked. She said she didn’t, she had homework to do.
“We can always go back and see the house again,” Shira said, “if you feel like it.” Her father said that was true, and asked what she thought. She shrugged her shoulders.
“First find something you like. You’ll probably hate everything anyway.” He pretended to be insulted and asked why she said that, if she really thought they were so picky. “Because you’re not serious,” she said.
Shira had been living with them for nine months, during which time Dana had monitored her movements, her clothes, her makeup, and her moods. But despite her hopes that if she observed Shira thoroughly enough, she would become like her, she remained who she was. Yet at the same time she changed rapidly, with near-violent speed, and was convinced that there was no woman in the world—not her mother, not even the perfect woman—who could save her, who could arbitrate between the person she was now and would be in a moment and the girl left behind, even perhaps reconcile them. Lately she felt like she did in gym class, which started with a jog around the playground. Her body got in her way and felt heavy inside, leaden. She always straggled behind, trying to catch up with the other girls, who looked so light and feathery; it amazed her that they could chat with one another as they ran.
Tamar was starting to bore her. Not because anything had changed about her—on the contrary, it seemed as if nothing had—and just as her body had remained the way it was a year ago, thin and supple and lacking the threatening hint of breasts, she also still had the same cheerful, bouncy mood she had always had. And even though she had started showing an interest in boys—they would spend hours talking about this boy or that who had invited her to a party, danced with her, given her a French kiss that was gross—there was something about her that rejected heaviness, as if she were coated with a layer of Teflon. Tamar said sex was disgusting. She said she would never do it, except maybe once or twice just to have children, if she ever wanted children, and she wasn’t so sure she did. But Tamar didn’t know anything about sex, and Dana did. The whole apartment reeked of it, and even though it wasn’t a smell but an atmosphere, it had the force of a smell, the kind they tried to remove from the air before she came home from school.
It embarrassed her to see her father come out of his bedroom on Friday afternoons, their time for resting and doing the crossword. He never had his shirt on, and his chest, with its curly graying hairs sticking damply to his skin, the chest she knew so well and which had comforted her so many times, looked suddenly indecent. Shira always wore her shirt but she walked around without her pants on, and her long T-shirt covered her underwear but not her thighs. When she sat down you could see hairs, also curly and sticky-looking, as fascinating and scary as her father’s. The more they exposed themselves, the more Dana was careful to cover herself up. Her dad called her a nun when he saw her walking around with a sweatshirt zipped up to her throat, even though it was warm outside and she was really hot walking around like that. But she removed her layers only in her room. “Have you gotten religion?” he teased her, and every so often he grabbed her arm and tried to pull her in for a hug or a tickle, but the idea of him touching her, pulling her against his bare chest, shocked her so much she couldn’t even smile or dismiss him with a cynical remark. “You used to have a sense of humor,” he said, and then not only her body but also her sense of humor felt raped. She couldn’t stand to see him sprawled on the couch or sitting in the kitchen with his shirt off, his damp skin glowing dangerously. He would look at her briefly, amused and worried, unaware of his new monstrousness, and say, “Come here for second. Why are you always in such a hurry? Sit with us for a minute.” Shira would say, “Stop it, Yonatan. Leave her alone,” and smile at her understandingly. Dana would strain to smile back and her eyes would stray to Shira’s thighs. She wondered if some of those curly hairs might have stuck to her father’s chest, and if that was the reason he was stroking himself so affectionately.
One night, when she had a cold and got up to get a tissue from the bathroom, she heard Shira sigh heavily. She wanted to go back to her room, but kept standing by their door, listening but not knowing what she hoped for: to hear something or not to hear anything. Her knees felt weak and her thighs ached with a fluey chill, and then she heard that sound again, like a call for help, as if Shira were ill. Then another sigh came, louder this time, and her father whispered shhhh, but Shira couldn’t stop, as if she was in so much pain she couldn’t hold back. She sighed again, firmly this time, as if angry at being ignored, and she heard him whisper shhhh! again. It annoyed Dana, but she didn’t know if she was annoyed for Shira’s sake or for her own, as if he were trying to prevent her from hearing more and more of these sighs in case she might finally decipher them. Reading her mind, Shira sighed again, but this time she sounded slightly relieved, and Dana stood by the door and was reminded of the scales Irma Gutt used to make her do on the piano. She classified the last sigh as a descending scale and it suddenly sounded like a game: her father’s shhhh, accompanied by laughter, and those sighs. She stood close to the door and tilted her head and swallowed, and her throat hurt, but suddenly it was quiet and she was disappointed: it was over without her knowing what had happened, whether it was something good or bad, and for a few moments all she could hear was her own heavy, congested breathing. When she was about to turn back to her room, she heard an ascending crescendo scale, but instead of her father saying shhh he also sighed a descending scale, and their duet of sighs went on like that, with increasing frequency, as if they were competing. She felt her entire body tensing up expectantly, but it wasn’t clear what she was expecting. She felt that even if the door suddenly flew open and they discovered her standing there, she wouldn’t be able to escape. The sighs were coming quickly now, scales going up and down, chasing each other, and she felt that she too was part of the chase. She was so tense she didn’t feel her nose running, snot stinging her upper lip, and then she heard Shira give one long sigh, decisive but also surprised. Her father replied with his own sigh, neither decisive nor surprised, not even musical, but brutish, something that sounded like a bellow—a sound she hadn’t thought her father capable of producing. But after all, her father was no longer really her father; he was a stranger who walked around the house half naked and stroked his chest.
Now she sat at her desk and tried to do her homework. She hated that desk. She hated the room, the rug from the Old City, the bureau that Nira said was worth a lot of money, the bed, even the elephant cover her mother had sewn for her. Everything looked so childish, belonging to a different world, but when she tried to imagine what she would prefer instead of these things, she couldn’t think of anything. She went into the living room, lay down on the couch, and turned the TV on, but she switched it off after staring for a few minutes, without even noticing what channel she was watching. She hated watching TV in the mornings—it reminded her of sick days—so she took some leftover cauliflower quiche out of the fridge and warmed it up in the microwave Shira had brought from her apartment. Her father had protested at first, claiming microwaves were a needless invention and emitted dangerous rays. But he soon fell in love with the machine and would heat up the half-full cups of coffee he found all over the apartment, and she thought, How quickly he falls in love! How different from her he was! She scraped the leftovers into the trash, washed her plate, and went back to her room. She remembered their conversation last night at dinner—she had agreed to join them because it was Friday—about the houses they were going to see today. She had eaten in silence and listened to them enthuse. Her dad talked about all the things he would plant in their garden, listing names of plants and herbs as if he were a gardener, and Shira looked at him lovingly, as you look at a child excited by some nonsense. They asked her what kind of dog she wanted,
and she said she didn’t care and was flooded with guilt because she hated the dog before it even existed.
In the spring, she would turn twelve, and the idea of going to the beach on her own, as her father had promised she could when she was twelve, no longer seemed like an accomplishment. The joint bat mitzvah party Rona was planning for her and Tamar—they had set a date in May, exactly halfway between their two birthdays—seemed superfluous now. She wondered if this was how depressed people felt: so angry that nothing interested them, as redundant as the things they thought about, as redundant as the thoughts themselves. She got up off the bed and went to the trunk under the window. She hadn’t opened it for years. She sat on the floor and ran her finger over the gilded letters that had almost completely faded: DANA’S SECRETS. How innocent they all used to be, she thought, and missed the days when the trunk was big enough to contain all her secrets. Her finger was covered with dust, and she wiped it on her pants and thought, We need a cleaner, but we’ll never have one, just like we’ll never move. Then she opened the lid and glanced inside. There were some stuffed animals that she touched and felt nothing for and old children’s books in Hebrew and English. She stared indifferently at them, as she had stared at the TV before, and then she knew what she was looking for.