by Yael Hedaya
All sorts of thoughts went through her mind, so many that her head started to feel empty: empty of thoughts but full of scenes and fragments of sentences. Size zero, she told herself, over and over again, but this time with no pain or anger; she saw her father and Shira touring a lovely country estate, surrounded with lush greenery, the kind you see on British television shows. Size zero—the words flashed before her like a banner ad trailed by an airplane on the beach, and in fact they did make her angry but in a pleasing way, as if they had come especially to distract her body a little longer from the destination it was seeking on the mattress. Then she started to feel warmth spread through the small of her back and the folds of her stomach. Size zero—she saw herself sitting at the café, looking at the menu, but she couldn’t read what was on it and she knew she had to concentrate now but not think. Disjointed pictures and words blended with the heat waves that turned into chills and a bodily hum. Size zero—she could no longer feel her fist or the mattress, only the lump between her legs, which had become everything, consuming the pictures and words, the country estates, the cafés, the bras and the menus, and her, and the girl she left behind.
( 16 )
They sat embraced in the car, in the hospital parking lot. Her ear was against his chest and she felt his heart beat rapidly and thought, So much strength from such a frightened man! But with the word frightened, she thought of her father, who today, for the first time since being moved from Internal Medicine to the nursing ward, had looked truly alarmed, as if he realized he would not be getting out, that he would never again see the hospital’s lobby, the parking lot, the guard at the hut who always said goodbye to him with a sorrowful nod.
Yesterday she had told the landlord at the apartment in Borochov that she was leaving. “Thank God,” Yonatan had said, with a look of victory. “Now we can find something on a good moshav.” She said yes, knowing they both knew they would never leave the city, that looking for a house in the country was a way to preserve a shared fantasy that would distract them from other things: her father, for example, or the child they wouldn’t have.
Dana still had not joined the search. On Fridays she would emerge from her room after dinner and put the weekend papers down in front of them, where she had circled various classified ads with a purple marker. “This sounds big enough so your dad could come and live with us,” she said once, and pointed to an ad for a rental on a moshav between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They both looked at her with surprise; they had never discussed Max with her. She had met him only once, on Passover, when they took him to Jerusalem for her grandmother’s Seder, a few days before his first hospitalization.
It was a strange drive. Shira’s father was very alert and talkative and tried to make Dana laugh several times. She sat next to him and politely answered his questions about school and her hobbies. Then Max asked if she missed her mother. The car fell silent. Shira didn’t know if she was embarrassed by his question or surprised by the realization that he remembered the things she had told him at various opportunities about Yonatan and Dana. She was unsure how to handle the discovery that, during all these months, when she had been convinced she was having one-way conversations with him for his amusement, to pass the time and dull the pain of spending time with him, her father had been listening and recalled every word, and now he asked Dana if she missed her mother. It occurred to Shira that the question might not be addressed to the girl but to her.
“Yes,” Dana said. Max nodded and asked no more questions, and it wasn’t clear if he was quiet because he had grown tired and had retreated again or because he had obtained all the information he needed. During the meal, when Yonatan’s mother tried to engage him in conversation, he answered with nods and feeble smiles, but his foggy eyes looked very alert, both defensive and longing as they followed Dana.
“You were so nice,” Shira told her later, after they took Max home. Dana said, “Your dad’s a sweetie,” and although she had never thought of him that way, the description seemed apt for his performance that evening—a virtuoso recital never to be repeated. He was not a sick old man or an alien, and not her father either. He was a sweetie.
Dana asked what he had, what exactly his illness was, and Yonatan said, “He’s just old.”
His daughter gave him a look full of teenage disdain and said he wasn’t that old, and Shira said, “He’s seventy-seven.” Dana said, “That may have been considered old once, but not anymore.” Shira felt as if the girl was trying to tell her something, forgive her for something. Whenever they were alone, Dana came up with questions, as if she had prepared a list and was waiting for the chance to ask them, in a businesslike incidental tone, ostensibly uninterested in Shira’s responses. But her movements, the way her body tried to show disinterest, revealed not only curiosity but great urgency. One day she asked if Shira thought about her father’s death, if she thought he would die soon. Shira, who was washing dishes, turned off the faucet—the occasion seemed to demand silence—and looked at Dana—who sat at the table and dipped her finger in a now-cold cup of instant coffee, putting it in and out of the cup, her eyes watching the drops drip on the tablecloth—and said, “Yes.”
“And what do you think? That when he dies things will be harder for you or easier?” Dana asked.
“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
Shira turned the faucet back on and continued washing the dishes, although she no longer saw the plate she was holding under the water but rather the question that hovered in the air. They were both quiet until the noise of the water and the cutlery clanging became unbearable to her, and she turned the faucet off again, wiped her hands and sat down across the table from Dana and lit a cigarette and said, “I’m dead scared, Dana. I’m absolutely terrified.”
“But your mom’s already dead. So it’s like you’ve experienced it, isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” Shira said. “It’s not something you gain experience in. And anyway my mother wasn’t ill; it was different.”
“Mine wasn’t either. My dad told me she died on the spot.” She looked up, smiling, and said, “Give me a drag, okay?”
“A drag? Are you crazy?”
“I want to try it.”
Shira said it wasn’t a good idea to start smoking, at her age or ever, and Dana asked when she had started. She said, “In high school, when I was fifteen.”
“I’m twelve.”
“But what do you need it for? You’ll just gag and cough.”
“That’s better then, isn’t it? I’ll hate it now, and I’ll never want to smoke. Think about it as something educational.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Seriously,” Dana said. “You’d be doing me a favor.”
“Okay, but don’t tell your dad, promise?”
“Of course.” Dana reached eagerly to take the cigarette Shira offered her, and said, “You neither.”
“Of course not. Are you crazy? I’m not going to snitch on myself.”
“Not about this,” Dana said, and held the cigarette gingerly between her fingers. “About what we talk about.”
“What about?”
“Death and all that.”
Death and all that, she thought, as she watched Dana hold the edge of the cigarette up to her lips, take a short puff, and try not to cough. With her mouth full of smoke and her cheeks puffed up, she waved her hand as if asking what the next step was. “Blow it out already!” Shira said, but Dana seemed to be stuck with the smoke. “Blow it out!”
Dana started to cough and Shira got up to get her a glass of water, and when she gave her the glass she took the cigarette and put it back between her own lips. When Dana kept coughing, squirting water out of her mouth all over the tablecloth, she slapped her back until she heard the choking turn to laughter, and she also started laughing and kept slapping Dana’s back, gently this time, until her fingers ran into a bra strap, and almost stopped there. The kitchen was quiet again, with only the sounds of Dana’s b
reathing and the soft rubbing of Shira’s fingers on her T-shirt. Dana was no longer a girl but not yet a young woman, and when Shira looked at her hunched back, her head drooping between her shoulders, and her hair, which was neither straight nor curly and reminded her of her own, as tangled as her inner being, she thought Dana was like a chrysalis.
She tried to remember herself at that age but could not. She could only remember what came before and after, and she thought about her father in the nursing ward—he was also a kind of chrysalis, but the kind from which nothing would hatch. She could only recall the time when she worshiped him and the time when she hated him, but not what came in between. Yesterday she fed him with a teaspoon. She had managed to avoid doing it, trying not to visit him at mealtimes, not to imagine him opening his mouth for the spoon proferred by a nurse’s hasty, expert hand, convincing herself that if there was still any space where she could permit herself not to be the daughter of someone terminally ill, meals, and bathing, and visits to the toilet were that space—visits she made with a wheelchair that had a big circle cut out of the seat, which the orderly would position over the toilet bowl and then encourage her father, with a firm voice, to do his business. At those moments she would go out to the hallway, to smoke or make a call from the cell phone she had purchased. She would talk to Dana, ask how she was and what she was doing, trying to prolong their chat, or have practical conversations with Yonatan, mainly about what they would have for dinner, what needed to be bought, what should be thrown away. When they finished talking and she turned the phone off and went back into her father’s room, she would tell herself bitterly, but also with a certain degree of relief, that she had become one of those people who sit on hallway benches and have loud conversations with their relatives right under signs prohibiting the use of cell phones.
One morning, she came back to her father’s room after a cigarette and phone break and heard him shouting from the bathroom. Unable to find the orderly, she went in and found him lying on the floor with his pajama bottoms down at his knees, clasping the cord attached to the buzzer, the wheelchair tipped on its side with two wheels in the air, like a car in an accident. With an efficiency that surprised and saddened her, because she knew she would go back to it again and again, she lifted her father up, pulled up his pants, sat him carefully in the chair, and wheeled him back to his bed. Then she went to the nurses’ station and said, “My father fell in the bathroom. The orderly left him there and he fell. I want the doctor to come and see him right away.” Then she returned to the bathroom and flushed the toilet. As they waited for the doctor, she stroked her father’s hand as he stared at her with foreign eyes that welled up constantly. After the doctor had examined him and found no injuries, she went out for a cigarette and sat down on the bench. The images had acquired a sound track: some shouting from the bathroom, one long complaining “Aaaagh,” a soft and grateful “Shiraleh” when she picked him up off the floor, and the sniffles that followed his tears.
( 17 )
Alon the handyman, who came to give a quote, had read Yonatan’s books. “It’s a shame, no?” he said, as they stood in the study. “Where will you write?” He was a philosophy student; Rona said he had good hands and was honest and reliable. “It’s a shame, no?” he repeated, and looked at Yonatan and ran his hand over the condemned wall.
“It used to be a balcony anyway,” Yonatan said, as if that were a worthy excuse, and Alon said he understood. “And I understand the wife also writes?” Yonatan nodded and the handyman persisted and asked where she would write now, and where would he write? “Have you thought of that?” he asked, as if he were not the builder but a concerned publisher.
“We’ll figure something out,” Yonatan said, and rushed him out to the living room and the kitchen. Alon soon started scribbling sketches in his pad, pacing back and forth between the rooms, rapping on the walls with his knuckles, until he gave an estimate and immediately lowered it, even before Yonatan had time to haggle. “A special discount for artists,” he said, and told Yonatan he also did some writing. “Not for public consumption,” he added, and they agreed he would start work next week and shook hands.
Yonatan liked the man’s name and thought if he ever had a son he would name him Alon. Dana and Alon, he said, and liked the combination, but he would have preferred another daughter, although he couldn’t think of a name for a girl, and reminded himself that he would prefer not to have any more children at all. He wondered whether thinking about another child was evidence that he was sick of his life, or if in fact he was so content that he was ready to include another person.
Yesterday he took Shira with him to a parent-teacher meeting. It was the first of the new school year—the first he had ever gone to willingly, not just to participate in by expressing his opinion about matters concerning his daughter but to share his affairs with the world. No one would dare pity him now or hit on him. He knew he was thereby giving up his two favorite aspects of widowhood, and doing so happily. He was so caught up in excitement over the launching of his new life that he forgot they would probably run into Esti. When he saw her in the gym, sitting with her back to them in the first row, he felt a brief chill and quickly put his hand on Shira’s shoulder, protecting her from a danger of which she was unaware, but then he removed his hand and shoved it in his pants pocket. He led her to the last row and they sat down. He searched the gym, habitually looking for Rona and praying Esti would not turn around and see him. Shira asked what was going on. “You look tense,” she said; he denied it and hoped Esti would turn around now, so he could give her a little smile, with lips as tight they had been when he had kissed her—he couldn’t now imagine kissing her, and in fact he hadn’t really kissed her, not like he knew how to kiss, he reassured himself—so he could get it over with now instead of suffering all evening.
Esti turned around and saw him. Then she saw Shira. He smiled and waved and felt relieved, but then Esti started walking toward him and he chided himself for sitting at the edge of the row. A mole and a bee, he remembered thinking of her once, but when he looked at her making her way toward them—her hair was longer, tied back in a playful ponytail—he thought for some reason of a boomerang and didn’t know what he would say or how to introduce Shira, and whether Esti’s “nice to meet you” would give away their one-night stand, the one that hadn’t happened.
She said, “Hello, Yonatan,” and he remembered her whispering “Yonatan, Yonatan” on the floor and how it had annoyed him until it started turning him on and he came, and he remembered his bare back against the fridge and Esti huddled on her side and the dish of cookies, and he suddenly felt humiliated. He was already planning to ask how she was, but Esti now smiled at Shira and said, “You’re Shira Klein, right?” Shira nodded, and the nurse said she was a big fan, her number-one fan, and Shira said she was very flattered.
Esti said, “Honestly, I’ve never met an author I like face-to-face.” Yonatan remembered that woman from the mall, he couldn’t recall her name or what she looked like, but he saw himself pushing a shopping cart, aware of her presence behind him, excited by the possibility of late-morning meaningless sex. Shira said, “Thanks so much, really, that’s so nice to hear.” She asked for the nurse’s name and her fan told her, Esti, and Yonatan was suddenly alarmed by the idea that he might still find himself wandering around a DIY store alone one day, with a huge cart and a small erection, and he grabbed Shira’s hand and demonstratively put it on his thigh.
Esti asked, “Are you working on something else now? Please say yes!” Shira said she was, and he felt her fingers squirming uncomfortably between his own, which gripped them like a vise.
Esti said she couldn’t wait, that she would be her first customer, and he suddenly heard himself say, “You don’t need to buy it, we’ll send you a copy.”
The word send sounded violent to him, and the we’ll even more so, and Esti smiled at him—it was suddenly inconceivable that those lips had once sucked him—and said, “Thanks, Yonatan, th
at’s really nice.”
As usual, it was Rona who came to the rescue. She walked up to them and squeezed into a vacant chair next to Shira, smelling of perfume and haste, and asked what had happened and if they’d already started. Esti said goodbye and went back to her seat. Later, when the three of them went out to a café, with Shira and Rona sitting facing him, exchanging gossip, he wondered whether Rona had ever been interested in him, if she had tried to hit on him and he hadn’t noticed, and he asked himself, if he could fall in love with her, or sleep with her, and he didn’t have an answer, and then he watched them share a pasta dish and asked himself, Why Shira, why not Rona? and again he had no answer. “Give me a bite,” he said, and they both handed him their forks. Even if there was an answer, it didn’t really interest him, and he took Shira’s fork and put it in his mouth. He had never enjoyed such bad pasta so much. It was strange, he thought, as he asked the waitress for another fork and ate off their plate, that it didn’t annoy him, and that this café, which until not long ago he had looked down on, now seemed fine—as if it had gone through some major renovation, although nothing about it had changed—and it was all because of the Pettuccine Alfredo.