by Yael Hedaya
Dana didn’t understand what she was talking about, but she liked the words. They sounded so serious, precise, and Shira asked if she understood again, and Dana nodded and continued to stare into the yard. Shira yawned and said, “Serious stuff, no?” Dana nodded again and kept sitting silently. She wanted to be a serious person, like Shira. “Nothing we can do about it,” Shira said.
Even though Dana still didn’t understand, she said, “Nothing at all.”
Shira said she was tired and yawned again, and said, “Do you really think so?”
Dana said, “Nothing.”
Shira got up and said she was going to sleep. “How about you?”
She said she wasn’t tired yet and would stay up awhile, to think.
“But not too long.” Shira stood behind her and put her hands on the chair’s armrests, and for a moment Dana thought she was going to lean over and kiss her. Her body tensed up, trying to decide if it was interested in a kiss from an almost strange woman. It had been a long time since she had been kissed, she wasn’t sure how long; her father embarrassed her with his hugs, but he rarely kissed her. She didn’t see many relatives, and her grandmother Rachel wasn’t the kissing type. It’s been a long time, she thought, looking straight ahead and feeling Shira’s breath on her neck; it smelled like lemon verbena and cigarettes. If she were a dog she might have also picked up her father’s scent in there, she thought. Yes, she told herself, she wanted this kiss, from this woman, she wanted to be kissed by her so she could become her, and her skin bristled and her breath stopped, and the wicker creaked again, and she closed her eyes, and Shira said, “I’m beat,” and went inside.
She heard Tamar breathing rapidly. She got up slowly and went over to the large window with its multiple panes, which looked out onto the backyard with the strange palm trees—everything was so beautiful in this house that you could sense it like a physical pain. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Tamar yelled from the floor. Dana went over, stood looking at her from above for a moment, and then lay down beside her and joined in.
( 19 )
Without noticing that it had happened, his dying became routine. She spent a few hours by his side every day, feeding him, arranging his things in the little cabinet. The nurses called them personal items, which amused her because, after spending so much time in this place, almost everything he touched became one of his personal items: the pale blue plastic cup he drank coffee from (and recently only a few sips of water here and there), the oxygen mask that hung over him and was occasionally held over his face when he had trouble breathing, the chair next to his bed—all these had become his own, and sometimes they struck her as more personal than the items stored in the cabinet, which no longer had any use: a leather wallet, a transistor radio, a wristwatch, a comb, a few handkerchiefs, a shaving kit, and reading glasses that broke her heart every time she saw them.
She parked the car in the mall’s massive parking lot. Yonatan had gone to Jerusalem for a faculty meeting and she had promised to go grocery shopping, which she was now looking forward to like a night out. She left the hospital, the afternoon sun dazzling her pupils, which had been under flashing fluorescent lights all day, and said goodbye to the guard, who asked after her father. She was impatient to get to the mall, which she usually hated because it made her feel she was in a maze, and every time she went inside she had to take a mental photograph of the exit signs.
That morning, when she and Yonatan had said goodbye next to their adjacent cars—amused by the fact that, for the first time since meeting, they had both found parking spots right outside the building—she told him she loved him.
“Me too,” he said, and looked at the cars’ bumpers kissing. “Maybe we shouldn’t move them?” He held her hand and she waited for him to say something—something momentous, as he always did when he held her hand. But he kept looking at the cars.
Finally she said, “It’s your birthday next month.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“You really are getting old. So what do you want?”
“As a present, you mean?” She nodded, and he said he didn’t know. “Nothing. Don’t get me anything.”
“I’ll get you something anyway, so you might as well tell me what you want; otherwise I’ll get you something you don’t need.”
“Get me something I don’t need,” he said. “That’s what I want.”
Last spring he hadn’t given her anything. They had been together for a year, but she assumed he didn’t consider that long enough to justify buying a present. So she had ignored his birthday several months later. They were both slightly embarrassed to discover that Dana had bought each of them gifts: a Bugs Bunny T-shirt for her, and a CD of Dinu Lipatti playing Chopin for him. “We don’t have this one,” Dana said, and he thanked her. In the morning, after she went to school, he listened to the CD and told Shira he couldn’t stand Chopin.
“How can you not stand Chopin?” she asked.
“That’s just it,” he said smugly. “He’s canonical, that’s why. All the aunties like him.”
She told him he was a snob, he told her she was plebeian. She told him he was a know-it-all; he said she was unsophisticated. She said, “You are so childish,” and he said, Yup. “By the way, what exactly are you rebelling against, at your age?” she asked, as they drank coffee in the kitchen while a mazurka played in the background.
“Old age, of course,” he had said. “And talking about rebellion, she did this to me on purpose, my daughter. She knows I prefer Glenn Gould.”
When she got into her car now and watched him get into his in her rearview mirror, she had thought about what she had just told him, how quickly the words had been removed from the shoulder of the road, as if swept up by the municipal cleaner’s huge brushes, or perhaps they had metamorphosed quickly into a discussion of birthdays.
She went into the mall, inhaling the smell of pizza and air-conditioning. She stood by the escalator and tried to decide if she should go down to the supermarket or sit in one of the awful cafés on the upper floor. Her mother had liked those cafés. She enjoyed the menus, the large portions, the waitresses’ uniforms, the bustle. When Shira would turn her nose up and say the coffee was bad and the prices were outrageous, her mother would say that coffee was coffee, and the cafés had a nice atmosphere.
“Atmosphere?” Shira would hiss. “You call this atmosphere?” She was in her early twenties and mocked her mother for her popular tastes, her lack of criticism, her joie de vivre. She seemed to mock her for everything back then, as if the mockery were both a form of communication and a silent plea.
“Then where do you suggest we sit?” her mother would ask. “Is there somewhere here you’d prefer? We can go wherever you want, I don’t mind.” Shira would say she was missing the point.
Now, as she sat at one of those cafés, beneath a green-and-white-striped umbrella, perusing a huge laminated menu, she could no longer remember what the point was. The disdain had since gone, making way for envy of people who lived from one moment to the next, from one bad café to another. She had fallen in love with Yonatan because he was like her. She had fallen in love with him because she thought he also longed to be a part of the thing he disdained. But their love had given her the strength, or at least the requisite indifference, to rid herself finally of the disdain.
Two young women sat at the table next to her, one rocking an infant in a stroller and the other in an advanced stage of pregnancy. They were drinking lemonade and paging through a catalog of baby furniture, talking very loudly, enthusing over the pictures and trying to choose between two different children’s furniture sets, natural or peach colored. “The peach is more special,” the woman rocking the stroller said.
The other one said, “You think so?”
“Of course. The natural looks ordinary. Everyone gets the natural. You should definitely go with the peach.”
“But it costs twice as much,” said the pregnant woman, who looked a little younger than her
friend.
“Forget the price. What are you worried about? Your parents are buying it, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” the other one said, still hesitant.
“So go for the peach, don’t think twice!”
The younger woman took the catalog, held the picture up to her face, sipped her juice, and said, “I do love this one, but Eli will say it’s for girls; he won’t go for it.”
“What do you mean, for girls?” She took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, lit one, and said, “It’s unisex, can’t you see?”
“I know that. I’m not the problem, I like it. But he’ll say it’s for girls. I’m telling you, I know him.”
“Tell him this is what everyone’s getting now.… I swear to God, this kid is driving me crazy.” She leaned over the baby, whose crying was getting louder. She picked up the baby—he was very large, with strange features. He fell silent and looked at Shira over his mother’s shoulder. “He’s driving me crazy today. So, what do you say? You think Eli will flip out over the peach? Then get the natural. The natural’s nice too.” The strange baby smiled at Shira.
After paying the check, she went down the escalator to the basement floor, but instead of going into the supermarket she turned into a large home-appliance store. She hated these places. They made all the appliances, even fridges, washers, and TVs, seem completely unnecessary. A salesman who was too young and too courteous, wearing black pants and a white shirt that had the chain’s logo embroidered on its pocket, asked if she needed help. “I’m just looking at air conditioners,” she said. The salesman seemed thrilled. He walked her over to the air-conditioning department, lecturing at length about BTU’s, wall units and floor units, and central mini systems, one of which was on sale, but she didn’t listen. “How big is your apartment?” he asked, as they went into a little display room that was separated from the rest of the store and was freezing cold.
“What?” she said.
“Your apartment. How big an apartment do you and your husband have?”
“I have no idea. Medium, I suppose.”
“Okay, never mind the footage, I’ll show you our most popular model. It’s on sale now. You’ve come at a great time, it costs double in summer.”
When she left the store she felt dizzy. She would have gladly sat down at the café upstairs now. She’d paid 5,300 shekels, in eighteen installments, for an air conditioner that would be delivered that weekend. When she told the salesman she’d take it, he looked stunned. She had never spent so much money on an electrical appliance but what astonished her was the fact that it was clear they would still be together next summer and the next. This air conditioner, she thought, as she went into the drugstore instead of the supermarket, was the true meaning of the words of love she had offered that morning. Or perhaps it was a revolt against the apartment’s unbearable heat, against the idle talk of change, against an eternally undecided lover.
She pushed a shopping cart around and had no idea why she’d come in here. Every time she visited these shops she emerged with dozens of products she didn’t need: soap, shampoo, fancy toothbrushes—they all carried some promise of a cleaner life. She put a packet of the soap Yonatan liked in her cart and kept going. She had spent so long in the mall that she had no idea what time it was, or even if it was dark yet. She started to make her way to the checkout, stopping to pick up some fabric softener and passed the pharmacy, coming to a halt by the home pregnancy tests. Her eyes scanned them, one by one, until they rested on a larger oblong box that said Know your fertile days. She touched it but pulled her hand back quickly, as if it burned. Then she reached out, took the box, and started reading the text on the back.
“You can pay here,” the pharmacist said, and pointed to her cart.
“For this too?” Shira asked and waved the box.
“Yes,” the pharmacist said, “for the ovulation kit too.”
( 20 )
The first day of the semester was also the first day of winter. The weather had changed overnight, and he sat on the balcony, unable to fall asleep, watching the sky, which appeared damp and heavy. He couldn’t sleep, but felt no distress or fear; in fact he was excited at the thought of facing a classroom the next day. He enjoyed staring at the sky and drinking his tea with a few leaves of mint from the planter and didn’t mind if Shira did not wake up and join him. They had spent many nights on the balcony, as if it were a transfer station between wakefulness and sleep, chatting, sitting quietly, or trying to solve the remaining crossword clues. Sometimes he hoped they would both have trouble sleeping, so they could sit in the night air on the wicker furniture. But now he wanted to be alone. It felt like the first time he had been alone for years. Completely alone, without missing or craving anything, without thinking about his daughter or his wife or the book he wasn’t writing, without anger; alone out of choice, alone as only someone can be who is loved by the person sleeping in the next room.
Yesterday he took the car to be washed, as if it also were starting a new career. When he got home, he decided to tidy the glove compartment, which had served, ever since he bought the car, as a holdall for little items and documents he was too lazy or afraid to throw out. Each time it was opened, it became more difficult to close. He left the engine and the air-conditioning running and emptied the contents onto the seat beside him. He pulled out a crumpled map of the city that he sometimes used when he had to find an unfamiliar address—though he hadn’t had to do that for a long time—and put it back in the compartment. Then he picked up a flashlight and a cardboard box with a spare bulb. He wasn’t sure if it was burnt out or not, but he put them back too. He found two old plastic lighters, tried to light them, and, discovering they were empty, tossed them into a plastic bag he found on the floor. He had purposely tackled the objects first. He was afraid of the paperwork.
He stuffed a pile of advertising pamphlets and old receipts into the bag. On a piece of ruled paper torn from a notebook, he found some ideas that now seemed ridiculous, yellowing from the sunlight, yellow to begin with.
The male character should be the ideal cross between me and other men. Intellectual and arrogant but also kind of tawdry. Likes music and cars. Childish. Women love him, gossip about him, try to hit on him. He looks unattainable. Loves eating, great lover. Has no children. (In fact, maybe there shouldn’t be any of me in him.)
On the other side of the sheet he had written a big heading—THE FEMALE CHARACTER!!!—and, underneath, I have no idea. These were notes for the novel he had started writing just before Ilana was killed, his abandoned novel. He used to have a notebook where he wrote down his thoughts every day. He liked that notebook—it was one of Dana’s, and the wide rules gave him a sense of freedom, of being uncommitted. But when it disappeared one day, he was relieved. He didn’t know how this single page had ended up in the glove compartment. The sentences sounded foreign and cheap—the thoughts of a relatively young and haughty writer—and the handwriting looked as if it did not belong to him. He had crushed the page in his fist and thrown it in the bag.
Now he sipped his tea and thought about the morning, which was already there, pregnant in the night air. He thought about the drive to Jerusalem, the ascent to Mount Scopus, and his course, which he had been told twelve students had registered for, a number that seemed satisfactory to him: intimate but not too intimate. He thought about his course title: “The Author in Search of His Voice,” and about the writers he had decided to discuss, which included no one living and no Israelis. He turned to the courtyard, to the trees whose leaves rustled in a wind that had grown stronger, and tried to stifle the fear that had been simmering in him all day, that he might be a charlatan.
“If you’re a charlatan, then so is everybody else,” Shira said, when he confessed to her that morning that he didn’t think he had the talent or the guts to talk about other authors. “And do you know how I know you’re not?” she said, standing with her back to him as she fastened her bra—the one that made him feel like a real fami
ly man when he hung it up or took it off the laundry line—more than any other item of clothing, this old bra enchanted him because of its soft tatteredness.
“How?” he asked, desperate for some persuasive comfort.
“Because charlatans have no idea that they’re charlatans. They don’t even entertain the possibility.”
She was completely on his side. She was on his side like parents are on their children’s side, and sometimes he wondered if he were on her side in that same blind and eternal way. She told him dryly that she only had a few chapters left to finish her novel, which was still unnamed and which she wouldn’t let him read, claiming that his criticism, even if enthusiastic, would completely unbalance her. At first he was hurt, then relieved. He didn’t want to find out that this novel was particularly good or bad, he didn’t want to go back to that moment, which now seemed distant, when he had finished reading her first novel and realized she was more talented than he was and yet he still wanted her—a moment of maturation, he thought, and he didn’t want to mature anymore. Sometimes he hoped she would never finish, that she would get stuck, as he had, that she would get lost in her book as in a yellow and infinite desert, and possibly give up and decide one book was enough, one success was enough, and she had no need for yet another triumph in an arena from which he himself had disappeared. Sometimes he hoped she would fail, and when he imagined her failing, he imagined himself consoling her. Then he felt so guilty that he would interrogate her about her work, how it was going, what she had written, if she was sure she didn’t want him to read a few lines—he knew how it went, he remembered the satisfaction, he knew the frustration—because he was afraid that his very thoughts had jinxed her writing and he wanted to remove the jinx. But he didn’t have to ask to know what kind of day she had. Her desk was in their bedroom, next to the window that looked onto the path leading up to the building next door. The window was always closed, but one day he found she had opened it and the room was flooded with light, and instead of the wooden blinds he was used to, he saw a wall covered with yellowing stucco, crisscrossed with sewage pipes, and suddenly their bedroom looked very vulnerable.