by Yael Hedaya
( 18 )
She hated school trips. At first she was going to get out of it, ask her dad to send a note saying she couldn’t go—he liked drafting these notes, enjoyed hating school for her—but a week before the trip she changed her mind. She decided to join in, and moreover she decided to enjoy herself, a decision that filled her with new anxiety.
She sat on the floor in Tamar’s room and watched her pack a duffel bag, although it was too early to pack. Tamar stood in front of her closet wondering what to take, even though she knew, as always, what she wanted. Dana looked at her thin legs, her thighs that didn’t stick to each other, her round little bottom, which boys would love, of course, unlike her own, which was big and shapeless and—when she dared study it, standing on a chair opposite the bathroom mirror—looked like unbaked dough. Recently, she was more cautious when getting down off chairs, and did so slowly, holding on to the edge of something, because jumping shook her breasts, which were swelling rapidly despite her prayers—she hated these lumps of flesh with all her heart and thought they hated her too, they had picked the wrong girl to grow on.
Perhaps that was what had made her become a vegetarian. She hadn’t touched meat since the beginning of summer, and as if to spite her it turned out to be a very carnivorous time; her father cooked meat for himself and Shira almost every day. They no longer tried to convince her to join them, did not protest when she helped herself to some fruit or yogurt and withdrew into her room. They accepted the fact that she was living as their lodger and were perhaps even relieved.
She looked at the small of Tamar’s back, at her prominent shoulder blades, her hair tied up in a ponytail, so smooth and well-defined—simple hair, she thought, and dreamy—and at the back of her neck with its soft, feathery down. She watched Tamar open and close the doors of the beautiful closet her mother had specially ordered for her from a carpenter, as a bat mitzvah present, and when she thought about the party they had had in the spring, she felt as if the event belonged to the distant past, to the days when she could still conceive of something making her happy in the future. Next spring she would be thirteen. Now, in October, that seemed far away, but she was hoping that by then something would happen to change everything: she would turn into a different person, or die.
But she didn’t want to die. That was the problem. She wanted to live, but differently, without the transparent filth she felt clinging to her with every movement, every breath and thought—awake, sitting in class or walking down the street; asleep, rubbing up against the mattress, guilty and addicted. To be her was to be a downer, flawed; the blemish, she thought, had spread from inside and was seeping out. She would have given anything to be smaller and cleaner, to go back to that winter night of the accident, when her father came to get her from the neighbors and she went downstairs with him to their empty apartment, which suddenly belonged only to the two of them. She would have given anything to be the girl who knew nothing and who could be lied to, who should be lied to because she was only a girl.
Ziv and his parents had taken her on an outing. They went to a little amusement park inside a mall on the outskirts of town and were very patient when she asked to ride the bumper cars over and over again. Then they went to a movie, and although it seemed strange that both Ziv and his parents were taking care of her, she happily dedicated herself to having fun. When they came back in the early evening, Ziv carried her up the steps on his shoulders, and as they passed her apartment door she banged on it with her fists, but Ziv’s mother quickly held her little hands and said, “Shhhh, Mommy and Daddy are sleeping.” Dana knew she was lying because they never went to sleep before she did, and she burst out laughing. Ziv’s father, who looked distracted and had not said a word all afternoon, hushed her, putting his finger to his lips and then to hers, and when they sat her down in the kitchen and gave her dinner—orzo and salad—Ziv’s mother suddenly burst into tears. Dana asked, “Ziv’s Mommy, why are you crying?” She said she wasn’t crying, that it was because she had been chopping onions, and Dana told them that her mother also cried when she chopped onions. Ziv’s mother said, “Does she? Really?” and started crying again, and Ziv’s father put his finger on his lips again, but this time it wasn’t her he was hushing. She laughed, and Ziv’s parents also laughed, but their laughter sounded exaggerated, like when evil cartoon characters laugh, and she got scared because she suddenly realized there had been something strange about this whole day. She asked where her parents were, and they looked at each other. Ziv’s father said they were busy right now and had asked them to take care of her. “So you’re taking care of me now?” she asked, and the three of them nodded. “Until Daddy comes,” Ziv’s father said. Their names were Alice and Reuven, but at the time she only knew their titles. “Is Daddy going to come?” she asked, and Reuven and Alice said he would, soon, and through the kitchen window she saw it was already dark. “But why not Mommy?” she asked and pushed her plate away. “Because Mommy is very busy,” the man said, and the woman stood with her back to them and sniffled. “More than Daddy?” she asked, and Reuven said yes, much more, and she was proud of her mom for being busier than her dad for a change. She heaped more orzo onto her spoon—it was the tastiest orzo she had ever had, better than the kind her mom made. She ate and watched Ziv’s parents watching her, and thought she was lucky that her parents were so young, because Ziv’s parents were very old and not as pretty as hers. “Ziv’s Daddy,” she asked the old man who sat across from her eating orzo, “when will my daddy come?”
Her father showed up looking old. There was something gray in his face, and his eyes were large. He didn’t say anything when he saw her, and the other grown-ups were also quiet. Ziv went to his room. Dana got off her chair, went to her father, and wrapped her arms around his thigh. He leaned down and picked her up. “She ate well,” Alice said, and her dad thanked them. When they left and started going down the steps, she tightened her grip around his neck and leaned her head on his cheek, because she suddenly knew with certainty that this day, which had been wonderful, was actually not wonderful but terrible, and the stubble on her father’s face was not the kind she liked to rub her cheek against, and the cigarette smell coming from his skin was not the usual smell but something sour and unpleasant. They went down step by step, only one floor but a very steep one, and in her heart she wished they could keep going down, that the steps would go on forever, because as long as they hadn’t reached home, it was still possible that nothing had happened and she was just tired. After all, while she was eating dinner in Ziv’s kitchen, she had heard the weather report jingle from the TV in the living room—the same jingle that followed her and her mother on their way to the bathroom at night—so she realized it was very late and something had gone wrong with this day. Although her eyes were closed and her head was buried in his neck, she knew they had reached the door, because behind her she heard her aunt and uncle’s voices. But she didn’t hear her mother, and she suddenly opened her eyes and turned her head, and with one fleeting look she immortalized all they had left behind: the stairwell and the hope that the nice day would end with a normal evening—a normal bath, a story, and two kisses. When her father put his hand on the door handle, she asked, “Is Mommy home?” He shook his head and pushed the handle down, but before opening the door, he let go, pressed her head to him and kissed her cheek hard, and she thought she could hear a strange animal sound coming from his mouth. “Is she busy?” she asked, and he shook his head again and opened the door. It was not her mother she missed, but the hope she had during those terrible minutes in the stairwell.
Tamar asked if she thought two sweaters, three T-shirts, and four pairs of jeans were too much. Maybe she didn’t need a sweater because it might not be cold, but it was better to have one, although maybe two was too many. She would just take the one that some boy had complimented her on last year, a boy she sneered at now but whose compliment was still valid. “So what do you think?” she asked, and turned to Dana. Dana said she didn’t
know and looked at Tamar’s tanned knees, her stomach that peeked out under her tight tank top, and her perfect flat chest, and then she looked at her face. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but at least she was still a girl. She must have looked like her father, the dark young man who may have been a medical student, Tamar said, or maybe a law student, who had donated his sperm. Even though it wasn’t really a donation because the women paid for it, Tamar said, with the same matter-of-factness with which she talked about the man whose identity was concealed from her, as it was from her mother. Perhaps, Dana thought, that was what made Tamar and her mother so close, such good friends: they were equals because neither of them had the key to the door behind which that man was hiding. Dana envied her for that. All these years of their friendship, she had wanted everything Tamar had: her home, her mother, her body. She suddenly also envied her for not having a father.
She tried to imagine her father without an identity but could not. She tried to give him the qualities of a different man, a made-up stranger, but he shed them like baggy clothing. She couldn’t peel away who he was from him. She couldn’t peel him away from her. She tried to imagine what it was like to grow up knowing that one of your parents was neither living nor dead, and that was the way it would always be for you, one less parent to grieve over. She envied Tamar’s freedom, the genes that someone had given her for money without being there himself to love her, to fight with her, to pick her up out of bed when she had a bad dream, a sliver of his identity shed from his skin like paint that stuck to her each time he carried her in his arms.
“It’s really too bad you’re not coming,” Tamar said, and sat on her duffel bag. “You’re missing out.” Then she added softly, “It’s really too bad you won’t lighten up a bit. It’s too hard for you.”
They had hardly seen each other all summer. There was tension between them, which along with the heat and humidity had made their meetings especially oppressive. Sometimes they hung around Dizengoff Center together and went into clothing and CD stores or to a movie, and a couple of times they met at Tamar’s, where there was air-conditioning and it was more pleasant, in every way, and there was no smell of meatballs and cigarettes and sex.
“I am coming,” she said.
Tamar leaped up and said, “Yes!”
“I think I am. I’m not sure.” She tried to imagine herself having fun, sitting in the bus all the way to the Galilee with her classmates. She saw herself sitting next to Tamar, almost stuck to her, so Tamar would infect her with her laughter, her ease, the darkness of her skin, her boniness and suppleness. And she would stay close to her for the remaining five days of the trip and would insist on sleeping near her in the bunk beds they had been promised the hostel would have—either above or below her, as long as she was close enough to her.
Tamar said, “It’s so awesome that you’re coming!”
Dana wondered how someone could even want to be with her, and she mumbled, “Yes, I really hope it will be fun.”
“I’m on top!” Tamar declared, and Dana asked what she meant.
“In the bed!” Tamar slid off her duffel bag onto the floor, leaned her back on it, put her legs up, and started cycling in thin air. “Let’s work out! I have a tape.” Dana said she didn’t want to. “Oh, lighten up.” Tamar sighed and spread her legs in the air, opening and closing them while she supported her hips with her hands. She said it was an excellent exercise for the thighs and stomach. She said it made your stomach flat. “So is it settled?” Dana didn’t know what she meant. “That I’ll be on top?”
“Yes, I don’t care.” She looked at the little slit Tamar’s leggings made between her legs.
“Come on, do it too!” Tamar encouraged her, but she couldn’t imagine lying on the floor in these clothes, which were purposely too large, and she couldn’t take her eyes off that innocent slit, which opened and closed like an eye every time Tamar scissored her legs. “Come on!” Tamar said breathlessly, but Dana’s eyes still refused to part with the blind eye that winked at her, and she suddenly understood something Shira had once told her about the danger of observation.
It was long ago, it seemed now, although she knew that a year and a few months were not enough to be considered long ago. Still, that late-night conversation seemed very distant, as if it belonged—like her bat mitzvah party, like the hope of growing up—to another era. It was just after Shira moved in with them, when there still was a them, when she and her father were the impenetrable, crowded entity they had been. Although perhaps they never were, she now thought. Perhaps she had deluded herself about their joint gloominess, just as she had deluded herself that Shira’s arrival would banish it. They both had insomnia that night. They met at 1 A.M. in the kitchen, and Shira suggested they have some herbal tea. Dana hated herbal tea, but she agreed because Shira said it was calming and would help them fall asleep. They went out to the balcony and sat in the wicker chairs, resting their feet on the railing. Shira asked why she couldn’t sleep and Dana said she didn’t know. “You?”
“Thoughts,” Shira said and lit a cigarette.
“About what?” Dana asked, and hoped she would talk about her dad, about love.
But Shira sighed and said, “About nothing. I’m just like that.” It wasn’t clear if she was addressing Dana or the darkness surrounding them. “I’m screwed up. My head is like a computer out of control, spewing out needless files, and I can’t make it stop.”
“I’m like that too.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Dana sipped her tea, waiting for the calm.
“Yes, you look a bit like the suffering type.”
That flattered her. “You too,” she said, because she wanted to return the compliment.
“Oh, you have no idea. But I’m trying to change.”
“Why?” Dana asked.
“Because it comes with a price. Cumulative damage, like smoking. How many years can you spend in constant suffering, without becoming worn down, without getting sick of it?”
She looked at Shira and tried to find signs of wear on her face, on her body, but she couldn’t. She wondered if she was talking about the same kind of suffering—a constant longing to be someone else, someone other people would want to be. She glanced at Shira again and took another sip of tea, which was neither helping nor calming her, and knew their suffering wasn’t the same. Shira looked so complacent, so serene in her plump body, beneath her smooth skin, in her T-shirt and underwear. Dana wanted to be her. Then she noticed Shira quickly wiping her eyes.
“Sorry,” she said and put her cigarette out. “It just came out.” She got up and went inside and came back with a roll of toilet paper and blew her nose. Dana saw that her cheeks were damp with tears and she had a small apologetic smile on her lips. Shira sat down again, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke out toward the trees in the yard, the ones nobody took care of and yet they kept growing, satisfied with the rain that came or not in winter. Shira said she smoked too much. She was crying because she suddenly remembered her mother’s funeral. It was one of the hottest days they’d ever had, she said, worse than a khamsin; they even talked about it on the news. She walked next to her father down the long path through the cemetery. Relatives and a cluster of her mother’s good friends walked behind them. In front the Chevra Kadisha people carried the stretcher on which her mother’s body lay, wrapped in a white sheet.
“One of them had a limp,” she said. “He was in the back, right in front of me, holding one of the stretcher handles. They were walking too quickly for him. He was wearing a black suit and a black hat with a black yarmulke underneath, and he was sweating terribly. I remember walking next to my father, with my mother on the stretcher, and behind me I could hear crying and whispering, but all I could see was that undertaker, or whatever he was, hobbling along like a madman, almost running, and my heart ached for him.” She quietly blew out her smoke. “Do you understand?”
Dana tried to imagine the breathless undertaker’s limp. She wondered if it was the
same as one of her teachers, who had polio as a child, or maybe he was like the beggar on Allenby, whose pants were always rolled up to his knees, exposing one healthy leg and one that was swollen, reddish-purple, and covered with blisters. Or maybe it was like the slight limp she herself once had, when she was three and stepped on a nail. She knew many kinds of limps, and she suddenly saw herself there with Shira at her mother’s funeral, in the merciless heat, on the path in the cemetery where her own mother was also buried.
“Do you understand?” Shira asked again. “The saddest moment of my life—my mother was dead—and what was I doing? Feeling sorry for the undertaker. But that’s not what bothers me, the fact that I felt sorry for him, because he really was pitiful. But it’s that I somehow always find myself outside, observing rather than participating, as if I’m above life and death, even though I know I’m not. Sometimes I remember my mother’s funeral and feel as if I wasn’t even there.”
Dana looked at her and said she hadn’t been at her mother’s funeral.
“You were little. They wanted to protect you from it.” She wiped her eyes and said she was sorry. “I don’t know where this outburst came from. It’s hardly your fault.”
“It’s okay. You don’t need a reason. Life is a horrible thing, isn’t it?”
Shira smiled at her and said, “Not life. Observing it.”
They both looked into the dark, at the survivor trees, which stood quiet and alert, and Shira leaned back and the wicker creaked, and she said that the world, in her opinion, was divided into two groups: those who observe and those who are observed, and she didn’t know which group she wanted to belong to, or whether it was even up to her or was something you had at birth.