Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  When he couldn’t find anything to do and it was too hot to walk the streets, he would sit in the living room or the kitchen, quietly listening to music or preparing his course, which gave him an excuse to reread his favorite authors: Faulkner, Joyce, and García Márquez. He would guess by her movements around the house, by the number of times she went to the bathroom, her trips to the kitchen, the distracted smiles she gave him when he smiled at her too warmly from the couch, whether she was having a good day or a bad day. Since her father had been moved to the nursing ward, she had hardly written. She spent mornings in the hospital, and in the afternoons she was too tired and depressed to write. She only had a few chapters left, she said, perhaps three or four, but she felt very far from finished. When he asked if he could help in any way—anything, he said, hoping she would want physical comfort, something that would distract her from her father and her unfinished book and remind her of him, the person who could make her forget these pains—she would smile politely and say, “No, but thanks.”

  At the bottom of the glove compartment he found an old drawing of Dana’s that she had brought home from school when she was six: a three-legged green dog standing under a black tree and a red sky. He remembered her getting into the car, which still smelled new, and putting the drawing on his lap, not proud but rather businesslike, but he couldn’t remember what he had told her or what he thought of it then. He knew the dog symbolized something, death probably, but he wasn’t sure, because the sky didn’t look optimistic either. He looked at the drawing now, shuddering in memory of the period when it was drawn and missing the child who had drawn it. For a moment he thought of giving it to her as a souvenir: perhaps she would have an explanation now. But since he didn’t know how she would react, if at all, he gave up on the idea, folded the paper carefully, and put it back in the glove compartment.

  He was afraid of her, he realized. During the past year he had searched for the words that would best describe their relationship: a father with his adolescent daughter, a widower and a child who had lost her mother, an aging man and a young woman. He tried soft and curvy words like complex, ambivalent, and claustrophobic. But now, as he leaned back in his seat, the Voice of Music and the air conditioner working together in harmony, he realized it was fear. He had never been so afraid of someone he loved so much. It was clear to him that Dana was revolted by him, and he understood. Through her eyes, the ones that were so like his own but that had avoided meeting his for so long, he saw his old age: the current one, which everyone could see, but also the one ahead of him, a pot simmering quietly on a low flame. Sometimes, when he was busy and caught her looking at him, he saw himself lying in a bed in some ward, like his father, like Shira’s father, like all parents not fortunate enough to die elegantly in their sleep or in an accident, and he imagined his skin could feel her shivering in a way his flesh recalled easily, when she saw the person she had never truly known becoming someone she did not want to know.

  He sat in the car and thought about the morning she was born. He had been certain it was going to be a boy and that he would be born at night; he constantly envisioned the crazy nighttime drive to the hospital. But his daughter came into the world at eight-thirty on a spring morning, and he wasn’t there. He was meeting a TV director in a café on Sheinkin, where they discussed the possibility of Passion being made into a movie. He had met with interested directors before, all very young and excited, and he had never heard from any of them again. They all said Passion was a very cinematic book. They even said—and hoped he wouldn’t be insulted—that it read like a screenplay. He said he was flattered, but he was hurt: Truly great authors, he thought, not only do not write books that read like screenplays but there is something in their work that despises the cinema. The director he met with that morning was the youngest and most enthusiastic of all, and had flattered him so much on the phone that when Yonatan arranged their meeting he forgot that Ilana had an ultrasound appointment. She was in the thirty-eighth week of her pregnancy, and it was a routine exam. When she heard he was to meet with a director, she insisted that he not cancel the meeting. “What do you want to schlep to the doctor’s with me for?” she said. “It will only take two seconds, and anyway there’s no parking. I’m better off taking a cab.” And since he had accompanied her loyally to all her exams during the pregnancy, and had even sat waiting with her at the clinic for a whole morning when she had a glucose-loading test, he felt entitled, this one time, to miss it.

  In retrospect, it amazed him that, contrary to what the books and movies depicted, he had no premonition that morning. In fact, he was very relaxed when, toward noon, the director glanced at his watch, apologized and said he had to run, and thanked Yonatan, who said the coffee was on him. He stayed outside, enjoying the clear air that reminded him of a foreign country. He knew he would never hear from the young man, who had lectured him, before leaving, about how difficult it was to get funding for these projects. Yonatan didn’t much care whether or not Passion became a movie; he met with directors primarily to bask in the glory of their praise. In a week or two he was having a baby, and he had been warned by everyone who had children that his perspectives and priorities would completely change. But he wasn’t afraid of that. On the contrary, he was counting on it. He was impatiently awaiting the day when he could wear his new identity. He fantasized about the moment when he would look into his child’s eyes and manage to catch in them something new and encouraging about himself, a scoop that would be both amazing and obvious.

  He felt somewhat betrayed when he came home, expecting to find Ilana sprawled on the couch with her swollen feet up on the table, reading one of the baby books her parents had sent, and instead found a message on the machine from a nurse at the maternity ward, who said Ilana was hospitalized after having an emergency C-section, and that everything was all right. An hour later, he was sitting by her bed, wetting her lips with a damp cotton swab. When she opened her eyes and saw him coming in, she had uttered such a dry, hoarse “Hi” that for a second he thought she was dying. During the ultrasound, the doctor had discovered that the baby’s pulse was weak. “You did say you hadn’t felt it very strongly the last couple of days,” Yonatan said, and she said yes and, in the same hoarse voice, alarming and pitiful, said it hadn’t seemed like a big deal; Nira had the same thing with Evyatar, remember?

  He didn’t but said he did, of course he did, anything to make up for not having been with her.

  So the doctor, Ilana told him, had sent her to the ER. “And what a stroke of luck,” she whispered, “because when I got there, there was no pulse at all, and then it came back, but very weak. It was scary, Yonatan.” She sucked on the swab. “And then they took me into surgery. I asked them to phone; did they phone you?”

  He nodded. “I was at that stupid meeting.”

  “How was it?” she asked, as if they hadn’t just had a daughter four hours before.

  He watched her catheter bag filling up and said, “Never mind, that doesn’t matter now.” He asked if she was in pain, and she said she wasn’t but she probably would be later.

  “Have you seen her?” she asked, and he said not yet; he had come to see Ilana first. “They said they’d bring her to me this afternoon, but I have to see her now,” and she burst out crying. He wiped her eyes and kissed her forehead, and said he’d be right back with their daughter. She turned aside and started sobbing that she was so thirsty, and he didn’t know if she was crying from thirst or because she missed the baby she hadn’t yet seen.

  He rushed to the nurses’ station and told them firmly that he had to take the baby to her mother. He expected a battle, but there was none; one of the nurses called the newborn room and announced that the father was on his way. He ran over and followed another nurse to his daughter’s bassinet. “Congratulations,” she said, and left him there. He stood over the baby and looked at her: She was lying on her stomach with her face turned sideways and her eyes closed. Her hair looked reddish and wet, one of her fists was
near her mouth, and she was wiggling her little pinky finger, which was also red. The father is on his way: He repeated the nurse’s announcement and his heart shrank. Since getting married, and perhaps even before that, he had been trying to prepare himself mentally for becoming a parent but unsuccessfully, like someone packing a suitcase but not knowing what to put in it. And now, a few simple words uttered matter-of-factly into a phone had turned him instantly and without complication into a father. Maybe, he thought, the change does not occur within but from outside, when in the eyes of the world you become a parent. Because now he was the father of this redheaded baby, who had barely come into the world and did not yet have a name, and he hadn’t even asked Ilana how much she weighed. He looked at the little note stuck to the edge of her bassinet: 7.91 pounds. His eyes strayed to the notes on nearby bassinets: 5.95 and 6.83. His heart filled with pride, as if his daughter’s impressive weight was his first accomplishment as a father. He looked at the wiggling pinky again, which seemed to be trying to tell him something. Daddy’s here, he told her silently and wiped his eyes, which had started to tear, and swallowed his saliva, which still tasted like the two double espressos he had drunk at the café.

  Cleaning out the glove compartment in the car, he had no sense of time passing. Then he suddenly felt restless, as if the project he had undertaken was infinite and unnecessary. He quickly gathered some shreds of paper and tobacco into the bag and a few puzzling screws left on the seat, turned off the engine, and got out of the car. He threw the bag into the trash can on the sidewalk and started walking home, but then he turned around, went back to the car, opened the door, took out the drawing from the glove compartment, and put it in his back pocket.

  ( 21 )

  She didn’t like any of the backpacks. They had looked at several dozen, all of which were too big or too small, too childish or too old-fashioned, and all, in general, not right. After the fourth store, Shira suggested they go and rest at a café before continuing the search. Dana agreed and thought maybe it would be better if she didn’t go on this trip; perhaps the fact that she couldn’t find a bag was a sign from above. But Shira, who had read her thoughts or perhaps knew them from her own past, said, “We’re not going home without a backpack!” and sat down with a sigh at a table outside the little café on Allenby, their café.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  Dana’s heart skipped a beat because she thought Shira was going to say something important.

  “You’re going on this trip even if you have to carry everything in plastic bags like a bag lady.” She asked the waitress for iced coffee. “And not only are you going,” she said, lighting a cigarette as she squeezed the words out of her pursed lips, “but you’re going to have fun. You’re going to love it. That’s what’s going to happen.” Dana looked at the sidewalk and smiled one of her cynical smiles, and Shira said, “Do you hear me? It’s going to be an awesome trip, and you’re going to have an awesome time, with or without the stupid backpack. Wait a minute, why didn’t you order anything?”

  “I did,” Dana said quietly. “I ordered lemonade.”

  “I didn’t hear you.” Shira sighed again and told her about one of her own high school trips, and how she had broken down the first day and called her father in tears to come and take her home. “And just so you know, unlike you and your dad, we were enemies.”

  It was strange to picture Shira’s father driving along the southern Arava highway on a Saturday morning, in a big car with a long name. “Would you like to be that age again?” she asked.

  Shira looked at her and said, “Fourteen, fifteen?”

  Dana nodded.

  “No. Not if you paid me.” After a few moments of silence, while they looked at the people passing by, she said, “Well, maybe.” She told Dana her mother always used to say, “If only I could be sixteen again, but with the experience I have now.” She said she used to belittle her and say that was something only an old person would say. “But now I know she was right. So right! And I know that if I tell you that now, you’ll think the exact same thing about me, that I’m a withered old lady and I don’t know the first thing about life, especially not your life.”

  But that’s not what Dana thought. On the contrary. Shira seemed young, younger than her, because even without the plastic bags she felt like a homeless bag lady, and when she looked at Shira she wanted to be her age and to be full, like her, of the confidence and serenity of someone who already has half her life behind her. She watched her put her cigarette out in the ashtray and dig through her handbag for her purse, and she felt guilty at having rejected all the backpacks they’d seen, even the khaki canvas one that she had liked. “It’s gorgeous,” Shira had said, fingering the bag and feeling all its compartments. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it myself, even though I don’t really need it. So what do you say? Do you want it? This is my treat, so don’t even look at the price.” But Dana had twisted her face and said it was horrible, it was for old people. Now, as they got up to leave, she was filled with regret.

  They walked toward Ben Yehuda Street, where Shira said there were some more stores. They walked side by side, examining the shop windows, and Shira pointed to various clothes and asked Dana’s opinion. Dana said she had no opinion about anything and felt she was having trouble breathing. On the radio they said the heat wave would end that night and it would rain the next day, but it wasn’t the heat that bothered her but the image of the canvas backpack dangling in front of her eyes reproachfully, and her heart that suddenly wanted to confess.

  Shira stopped outside a shoe store. “Look at those sandals,” she said and pointed to a pair of colorful flat thongs that looked Indian. “They’d probably make me look really short. But look at the price! It’s a steal. Let’s go in for a minute.”

  Dana rambled in behind her. They sat on the low bench and Shira tried on the sandals. “I have wide flat feet,” she complained to the saleswoman.

  The woman said, “What nonsense! They look lovely on you.” She offered to bring her some other styles to try on.

  “Do you mind?” Shira asked Dana, who shook her head. “At least there’s good air-conditioning in here,” she said, and sat down again, stretched her foot out, and wiggled her toes in the sandal. “Look how horrible my toes are. I’d put on nail polish, but your dad hates it.”

  Dana said they weren’t horrible at all but hers were.

  “Oh, please!” Shira said. “Show me your toes.” Dana held her foot out; she was wearing Teva sandals. “What are you talking about? They’re really cute, I wish I had toes like that. Mine look like sausages.”

  “Well, mine look like Cheetos.” The saleswoman brought new boxes, and Dana took one pair of sandals out and handed them to Shira.

  “Better Cheetos than sausages,” Shira said, and put the sandals on.

  “Does my dad really hate nail polish?”

  Shira nodded. “On toes, yeah. He says it’s vulgar.”

  Dana remembered the old bottles of nail polish with the congealed tops and wondered if they were still in the medicine cabinet.

  Shira walked back and forth from the bench to the mirror, and Dana noticed that when she walked, Shira pulled her shirt down just like she did herself, to cover her behind. “I hate trying on shoes,” she said, and sat down again. “Not as much as I hate trying on clothes, but even with shoes you have to look in the mirror, which is extremely depressing.”

  They walked out into the heat and Shira lit a cigarette. “I need to go on a diet. Even my feet are fat.”

  As they quickly crossed the street to the luggage store, Dana heard her breathing heavily and wanted to ask if her dad minded her being chubby and if he was the reason she wanted to lose weight. But instead she asked why she didn’t stop smoking.

  “Why?” Shira said, and put her face against the window of another shoe store. “That’s a smart question with a stupid answer: self-destruction. It’s simple. It’s simple and disgusting and pathetic.” She p
ointed to a pair of platform sandals and asked what Dana thought.

  “Aren’t they too high?”

  “Yes, but they’ll make me tall.”

  “But you’re not short.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m a midget! I’m not even five-three.”

  Dana looked at her; Shira was a couple of inches taller than she. “You’re average, then.”

  “Thanks for the compliment. That’s all I need now: average.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Dana said quickly.

  “I know, I’m just kidding. Don’t take me seriously. I’m really messed up.”

  Dana didn’t believe her, but she wanted to. Shira was perfect, even more perfect than Tamar, who was enviable only because she was still a child. She stood behind Shira as she peered into the window to examine another pair of sandals and looked at her big behind, and thought, Maybe she really does hate herself—and the thought made her envy seem more manageable, hopeful.

  Shira turned to her. “Do you mind going in so I can try them on for a second? Just that pair, I promise.”

  “No problem,” Dana said, and they went in.

  “We set off to buy a backpack and look what it’s turned into,” Shira said, when they left the second store with no sandals. She pointed north and said she thought there was a nice store near Bograshov, but Dana said there was no need and maybe they should buy that other bag after all.

  “The khaki one?” Shira asked happily.

  “Yes. It was the best one.”