by Yael Hedaya
She pulled out a large brown envelope from the bottom of the trunk. It was folded in four and contained a tape, which she now removed. It was the old answering-machine tape with the message her mother had recorded. Even a year after she died, her father didn’t have it in him to record a new message, so everyone who phoned them would hear her mother’s cheerful voice announcing, in a faint American accent, Shalom! You’ve reached the Lurias. We can’t answer the phone right now, but if you leave a message we’ll call you back. She remembered how the word call disclosed the heaviest accent. When her father asked her permission to change the message—she was seven then, and he consulted her about everything; it occurred to her now that the older she got, the less important her opinions became—she agreed, and he suggested recording a message with her own voice. She asked him not to erase the old tape, and he took it out of the machine—she remembered the click the tape made when it popped out and the chill it had given her then, as if they were digging someone out of a grave—and she put it into the brown envelope, folded it in four, and buried it deep in the trunk.
Now she took the tape to the living room, popped the new one out of the machine, put the old one in, and hesitated for a moment, unsure of which button to press, afraid she might erase the message. She thought of going out and calling home from a pay phone but knew it would be strange, even a little perverted, to hear her mother answer. Then she found the right button, pressed it, and immediately heard the Sh in Shalom whistle through the room like a misfired bullet. The message sounded a little blurred; her mother’s voice was vague, half erased, as if time had taped another message over it. She listened over and over, at first trembling at the voice, but from one replay to the next she became indifferent, as if, along with the tape, her emotions had also faded. She took the tape out and put back the current one that had her voice on it, recorded when she was seven, addressing the caller with confident childishness. They should change that message too, she thought. She tried to think of the right wording for their new situation. You’ve reached the Lurias was true but imprecise. You’ve reached Shira and Yonatan and Dana’s house sounded silly. She thought that Hello, we’re not at home; leave a message, would be a reasonable compromise. She went back to her room, put the tape into the envelope, and put it back in the trunk, knowing she would probably never listen to it again. Or perhaps she would play it for her children one day, so they’d know how their grandmother had sounded. She would show them her pictures in an album, point to her face, and ask, “Do Mommy and Grandma look alike?” And the children—she imagined them three or four years old, a boy and girl, maybe twins—would nod eagerly. When she asked if Mommy and Grandpa looked alike, they would hesitate, unsure of the correct answer.
( 11 )
As they stood with the agent outside a low derelict house with a tiled roof, walls coated with yellowing stucco, and two little front windows with torn screens, Shira knew without doubt that they would never leave Tel Aviv. They smiled at the earnest agent as he talked incessantly, perhaps sensing he was about to lose these clients. Like the previous two they had visited, this moshav was too quiet for her; it seemed to be wrapped in boring secrets, even hostile, as if it were making a mockery of her and Yonatan, this urban couple with their bucolic fantasies.
They had followed the agent’s car all morning. He was in his mid-twenties and made a point of driving slowly and using his turn signal often. When they parked behind him outside the first house, he got out of his car quickly, stretched as if he had been driving for hours rather than twenty minutes, looked up at the sky, spread his arms out to the side, and said, “Breathe! Breathe in this air!” They did, still optimistic, and looked at the large sweat stains spreading under his arms. He took a huge bunch of keys out of his pocket and strode quickly down the path, through a disused, fenceless yard that blended into the road. When he leaned over to put the key in the lock, his cell phone dropped out of his pocket and Yonatan hurried to pick it up. “Thanks,” said the agent, embarrassed, “that always happens.”
His name was Ofir; they didn’t know his last name. Shira thought perhaps they should rent a house just to make him happy, because she suddenly felt sorry for him, even though she had made fun of him only a few moments before in the car. She had laughed at his elegant slacks, which were so heavily pleated in front that they looked like a balloon. There was a little sticker on the back of his leg that said ISRAELI APPLES over a picture of a grinning sabra wearing a silly hat. She considered saying something to him, or maybe peeling off the sticker without his knowing, and she wondered if he had kids who had stuck it on his pants as a joke before he left that morning. “Are you married?” she asked, when they walked into the musty house. Yonatan looked at her in surprise. “I was just asking, because you look so young.”
“Yes,” Ofir said, and quickly started to pull up the blinds on the only window in the room.
“Do you have kids?”
“Not yet. But God willing, we will.”
The blinds wouldn’t open and Yonatan said it didn’t matter, but Ofir struggled with the blinds and said the house was flooded with sunlight and it would be a pity for them to miss it. He finally gave in and went over to the light switch. He flipped the switch but the light didn’t come on, and he concluded the owners must have cut off the power.
“They sprayed here too,” Yonatan said, sniffing the air.
“Yes, I think they must have.”
Yonatan kept making polite inquiries, even though they had already agreed, with a quick look, that they hated the place. Ofir answered eagerly, opened and closed cabinets in the bathroom and bedrooms, and promised to find out from the owners if they would put a fence up around the yard, or at least share the cost. He agreed with them that a fence was essential. “Otherwise the dogs will get out,” Yonatan said.
“What kind of dogs do you have?” Ofir asked, when they left and he bent down to lock the door.
“None yet,” Shira said.
“Oh, that’s right, you told me,” he remembered. “But you will.”
Shira nodded and said, “God willing.”
Then they went to the second house, which was on a nearby moshav and looked very much like the first one, and they struck that one down even before going inside. Ofir said he understood and he was only showing it to them because it was so close, but he knew they wouldn’t like it. Then he gave them directions to the third moshav, in case they lost him on the way, and in the car they tried to guess what kind of husband Ofir was and what his wife looked like and what he was like in bed. Yonatan thought, We’ve become a couple of gossips; he enjoyed the feeling. He liked going out for a drive on Saturday with his partner to see houses on moshavim, and he would have been happy to keep doing it every Saturday as a hobby, forever or at least until they grew old.
He wondered what Shira was thinking about—about the houses they’d seen and the moshavim they might live on or about her writing. He said, “He’s probably a lousy lay,” and she said he shouldn’t be so sure, sometimes that type was full of surprises. “Have you ever slept with someone like that?” he asked, and she said when she was a student she had had a few dates with her father’s insurance broker. “Really?” he said, and she nodded. “That’s like sleeping with a cliché,” he said.
She smiled to herself. “Maybe, but this specific cliché happened to be amazing in bed.”
He was flooded with jealousy. She had never said he was amazing in bed, at least not to his face; he doubted that she’d said it to anyone, because she didn’t have any close girlfriends. But he reassured himself with the thought that he’d never told anyone she was amazing in bed either. He did say that when she was gone, when she went to her apartment to write—and obviously if they rented a house on a moshav she would have to give up her apartment—he fantasized about her. He wanted her to ask what happened in his fantasies, but she just said, “Really?” and he nodded, full of secrecy and lechery. He wanted to tell her that in between cooking and doing the laundry and
drinking coffee on the balcony—which he had now tidied up, planting mint and verbena and basil in the old hanging planters—he masturbated while he thought about her: standing, lying, sitting opposite the television, distractedly watching National Geographic. But she didn’t ask, just as she had never told him what she thought about his books, but he knew.
When they stood outside the third house, which was built in what Ofir called “a Mediterranean style,” with elegant arched windows and flecks of stucco on the front like whipped cream, she glanced at Yonatan to exchange another look of rejection. They were not going to leave the city for a rustic joke like this. But he looked as if he had fallen in love with the house and forgotten her. This time, his questions sounded serious, as he fingered the stucco, seeming truly impressed, and disappeared into the house with the agent, leaving her standing outside, worried. How could their tastes be so different? How could this man, who had been lecturing her ever since they’d met about architectural styles in Tel Aviv—high ceilings, Bauhaus, clean lines—how could this Jerusalemite, who had grown up in one of the most beautiful Arab buildings she had ever seen, be considering, even for a moment, living in this Mediterranean monstrosity?
She followed them inside and found them standing in a little room next to the bathroom. Yonatan turned to her, grinning, and said, “Look, it even has a pantry!” She wondered if his vocabulary contained any more of these terms that disclosed the fact that he was nothing more than a little closet bourgeois—that the apartment on Bialik, the furniture, the books, the CDs, the clothes, his relationship with his daughter, were all a kind of ongoing neglect rather than a way of life. Ofir expected enthusiasm from her, and when she didn’t respond, he kept talking to Yonatan and did not address her again during the tour, investing his efforts in the real client, the one whose wife was too picky. Except that she had stopped feeling like his wife. Only once before had she seen Yonatan so cut off, so independent, ignoring her in what seemed not a hostile gesture but an attempt at survival as if she were the one threatening him and not the other way around. It frightened her to discover this new strength of hers, the strength of someone who is wanted, whose loss is feared; it was a strength she could not rejoice in.
They had recently gone to the wedding of her old neighbor, Dalit, which took place in an outdoor venue somewhere between Herzliya and Netanya. As they drove over, she fantasized about their walking up to the reception embraced or holding hands. It was silly, but she had never found such pleasure in so minor a fantasy. But they didn’t hold hands when they walked down the gravel path lit with paper lanterns.
She had sensed he was moody in the car. That afternoon, she had brought up his writing for the first time. She said she was worried about him; he seemed restless. He told her not to patronize him. She said it didn’t make sense for him not to have a problem with the fact that she was writing every day, that she was so prolific and might even finish the novel within a year at this rate. If the situation were reversed, she said, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to be as supportive of him as he was of her. He said that was because she was incapable of being supportive of someone else, someone she loved, and had nothing to do with writing but with personality, and maybe that was why she had never married. She said he was a child, and he said, Apropos children, someone who’s never been a parent doesn’t know what it means to make a sacrifice. She asked what exactly he was sacrificing; he had just claimed that for him, not writing was a choice, a great relief, something brewing in him for years that the relationship with her had finally legitimized. “‘Because I’m happy,’ you said. That’s why you don’t feel like writing.”
He said, “Yes, and you are writing because you’re happy.”
She replied, “So where’s the sacrifice if we’re both happy?”
And he said, “Never mind, forget it.”
“Tell me,” she said. He said there didn’t have to be sacrifice for there to be a feeling of sacrifice, and the feeling didn’t necessarily have to spoil their sense of happiness. She said, “Bullshit, those are just words.” He said if that was how she felt, it didn’t matter. “It does matter,” she insisted.
“Maybe you don’t know what it means to love,” he whispered, and she said maybe, and they kept standing in front of the closet, trying to decide what to wear to the wedding.
He dressed with obvious unwillingness, slowly buttoning the shirt she chose for him when he said he had no idea what to put on. Perhaps she should have told him not to come instead of picking out his clothes, she thought, as they drove the whole way in silence. But she knew she needed him there, even his hostile self, much as she needed his presence—the one that planned their meals and fantasized about her and roamed the streets in the mornings—to write. She felt selfish, but there was also a lightness and absence of guilt in the selfishness. It’s simply a by-product of our love, she thought, a kind of refuse, or bonus. This selfishness—and any child in love knows this, so why shouldn’t she enjoy it too?—is power.
When they arrived at the reception, she introduced Yonatan to Dalit, who came up to them glowing in her wedding gown and makeup and high hairdo, squeezing her groom’s hand. Yonatan nodded politely, and Dalit asked if he was Yonatan Luria, the author. Shira quickly answered for him that yes, he was the writer, and Dalit said she was a fan of his and wanted to know when his next book was coming out. Before Shira could answer, Dalit said, “I’m so happy you came!” but the groom dragged her to another table where his friends were sitting. They looked very drunk and very young, and she flashed them a smile that said, What can I do? My husband is forcing me, waved coquettishly, and disappeared.
On the way home, he was impenetrable. At the beginning of the evening she had tried to placate him; then she got angry; but as they drove home, the silence became even more combative than it had been on the way there. She began to feel scared; he reminded her of herself. She remembered how she used to clam up with Eitan, acting on some indistinct sense of insult, and how he desperately tried to make her happy. Now she tried to soothe Yonatan, who pretended to be focused on driving, as if the traffic were heavy. She reminded him that Rona had invited them for dinner the next evening, and said she would go past the store on King George tomorrow, and asked what kind of wine to get. He said dismissively that it didn’t matter to him. “Chilean, Italian—I really don’t care.”
Now she waited for Ofir and Yonatan outside the Mediterranean house, leaned against the car, and swore she would never live in this moshav. But when they came out and she saw Yonatan’s face shining she decided to relent, to give him this house as compensation for her writing. He came up to her with worry spreading over his brow, as if seeing her leaning against the car with her arms crossed had wakened him from a dream. He asked what she thought, and she shrugged. Although she had decided to give in, she couldn’t do it with words. He said, “You hate the house, don’t you?” She shrugged her shoulders again, and he said, “Forget it, then. Let’s go home, I’m starved.”
She felt tears well up in her eyes and said, “But you like it.”
“So what? We both have to like it.” He put his hand on her shoulder and pulled her to him. He whispered in her ear, “What’s up? What’s this mood?” She said nothing, and he said, “We’ll find something we both like.”
Choked up, she asked, “And what if we don’t?”
“We will,” he said, and she repeated her question. He said, “Then we’ll stay where we are. Is that so bad?” She shook her head. “Then why are you in a bad mood?” he asked, and she said she didn’t know, maybe because she was getting her period. “Do you have cramps?”
“A little,” she said, and he kissed her hair and they both stood and looked at the house.
Ofir looked at them sheepishly and asked if everything was okay. Yonatan said, “She’s not feeling very well.”
The agent said, “I hope you feel better,” and she could tell he hated her, and they promised to think about it and let him know and got into the car. He aske
d when they’d let him know, because there were other clients who were interested, and they said, Today or tomorrow.
As they drove off, Ofir honked at them, and Yonatan put his head out of the window and Ofir asked if they wanted him to ask about the fence. Yonatan said, “What fence?”
“At the other house,” the agent said, and Yonatan said there was no need. When they left, she turned and saw Ofir’s car driving behind them back to Tel Aviv, defeated.
( 12 )
Sometimes, when he woke up first and looked at her curled up on her side with a blanket pulled up to her chin, feet poking out at the bottom—and especially when she slept with her socks on and they slid down and hung limply off her feet like a baby’s pajamas—he would tell himself that he had experienced a miracle and his occasional suffering was simply a natural attempt on the part of his body and mind to adapt to it. Sometimes, when she stirred in her sleep or rolled over, or her foot suddenly kicked out reflexively and he wondered if she was dreaming that she was falling or dreaming about him, or when she opened her eyes for an instant and he wasn’t sure if they registered his look before shutting again, he was afraid he was going to lose her, because he wanted her but didn’t want the things she wanted.
She wanted a child. When she asked what he thought, now or in the future—but not too far in the future, she said; she was already thirty-seven—he answered that the idea seemed scary. He said that if a baby were to suddenly land in the apartment he would probably get used to it, but to be responsible for bringing a baby into the world in a planned, thought-out way—no, he didn’t think he could do that. Dana, he said, was older now and too preoccupied with herself to be happy about a brother or sister. In fact, that was the last thing she needed. But you? she would ask. What about you? He would say he really didn’t know. He loved her, he loved him and her together, even the three of them together—although his daughter had become intolerable lately; had she noticed how much Dana hated him?—but no, he didn’t want a child. Or rather, he would say, trying to soften the blow, he didn’t know what he wanted, and you can’t have a child if you don’t really want to, can you? She would nod, disagreeing, distant, and he would reiterate, feeling condescending and cruel, that he understood her need for this child whom he, personally, did not need, did not want. At least that was how he felt now, although he didn’t know how he’d feel a year or a few years from now; he knew they didn’t have all that time, but still, if she was asking him about now, his answer was no, not now.