Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  Now he sighed, indulging himself, one sleepy hopeful eye open, the other closed against the pillow. His fingers caressed the back of her neck, his lips roamed from her forehead to her cheek to her chin and lips. She lay on her back and pulled him on top of her and tugged his underwear off. Now he was wide awake and looking at her with amused surprise, and, squirming, she took off her own underwear. She thought he was about to say something, and she touched his lips with her finger to stop him and closed her eyes to let him know she could not be negotiated with, and he entered her and moved inside her with thoughtful slowness, and she could feel the little currents gather in her body and make their way to their usual meeting point. She opened her eyes; pleasure had softened his face and turned it boyish.

  “Devious,” he whispered, and fear flashed between the currents of pleasure. “Waking me up and raping me.”

  She felt relief. “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “You should be, you’re exhausting me. I’m an old man. What about your stomach?”

  “What about it?”

  “You said it hurt.”

  “Not anymore,” she whispered. She felt him starting to disconnect, like a boat untied from its docking post, carried away on wavelets. How could she have once believed, as everyone did, that sex was the ultimate merging, when in fact it was the opposite? She looked at his child face growing distant, at his closed eyes, at the tiny pearls of sweat glistening on his forehead, and she set off alone on the path of electricity charging her body. “Come inside me,” she said. He watched her silently. “Okay?” she whispered. “It’s all right, I’m getting my period.” Before he could refuse, she said, “I want to feel, for once, what it’s like with you.” She tightened her thighs around him, transferring to his hesitant body the currents that continued before she relaxed, the aftermath of her pleasure, and when he started to rouse inside her again, searching for his lost rhythm and finding a new one, extremely determined and private, she suddenly saw him making her a sandwich, and before the picture became words—the man who loves me made me a sandwich—she froze the image: his forehead furled in concentration; his tongue licking the butter knife as it always did; his hands, which now held her breasts, wrapping the sandwich clumsily in a napkin. Here is the love of my life, she thought and tried to rise up onto her elbows.

  “No, I’ve changed my mind,” she whispered, before it was too late. “No, we shouldn’t,” she said, but he went on. “Yonatan, it’s not a good idea.” But he didn’t seem to hear and she shouted, “No!” and her hands pushed his stomach away and he said yes, and his eyes opened as a yell escaped his mouth, the same as that first time, which they now both understood. Yes. The word preceded his shout of pleasure like a colon. Yes. It danced in his velvety brown eyes, in which her own were now drowning, warm and enveloping like the current she felt inside her, responding, building. Yes, why not? Indeed, yes.

  ( 30 )

  Instead of bunk beds, there were eight regular cots arranged in two facing rows. Dana put her backpack on the one next to Tamar’s, took out her toiletries, and walked down the hallway, where the walls were decorated with framed posters of Israeli flora and fauna. The other girls were already huddled in the bathroom to freshen up before getting back on the bus; they were going to have a tour and eat lunch at a goat dairy. It was hard to find any free space at the mirrors. The girls crowded around the sinks, jostled one another, and rummaged through their cosmetic bags, passing around eyeliners and lipstick.

  “Hey,” Tamar called out to Dana; her face was up close to one of the mirrors. “Can I borrow some zit cream?”

  Dana went up to her. “I don’t have any.”

  “You don’t?” Orit exclaimed. She was holding a towel up in front of Lilach, who was undressing by the wall. “You really should get it.”

  “I don’t have any zits.”

  “You will,” Lilach said, from behind the towel.

  “No, I won’t. My parents never had any.”

  “You’re such a retard,” Orit said. “It has nothing to do with parents. It has to do with hormones.”

  “You’re the retard,” Tamar said, sadly examining her nose in the mirror. “Where do you think hormones come from?”

  “I have zits and my mom didn’t,” Lilach said.

  “Then your dad must have had them,” Tamar said. “Ask him. Is he abroad at the moment?”

  “No, he’s in Israel. You have them, don’t you?”

  “A little. I just got a really nasty one.”

  “And did your mother have them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then your dad must have.”

  “Could be,” Tamar said, and walked away from the mirror. Her towel was slung over her shoulder and she held a small transparent zipper bag.

  “It’s too bad you can’t ask him,” Lilach said, and emerged from behind the towel in tight stretch capris and a purple padded bra. “Which one?” she asked Orit, holding up two tank tops.

  “That one, definitely.” Orit pointed to the black top.

  “But won’t it be cold?”

  “No way. It’s boiling today,” Orit replied.

  “But they said we’d only get back in the evening.”

  “Then take a sweater. Didn’t you bring one?”

  “Of course I did, what do you think? I brought two, the peach and the white.”

  “The peach goes better,” Orit said. “Should I get it for you to try on?”

  “Yes. But bring the white one too.”

  Orit went out into the hallway.

  Liat, Lilach’s older sister, had recently started modeling. Her pale face, with its prominent cheekbones, sunken eyes made up in smoky black shades, and lips slightly parted in rehearsed, infantile passion, had appeared in a few issues of youth and fashion magazines. She could be seen on almost every talk show on TV, sitting erect with her legs crossed, rocking the upper one nervously, providing serious answers to questions that were possibly cynical and possibly sycophantic. Something about the way she spoke was sticky and sleepy. Since her sister had become a star, Lilach seemed to have turned uglier. She had never been a pretty girl, but there had been a certain claim to beauty in her face: her eyes, shooting out commands behind an arrogant veneer of indifference; her fair straight hair, tied up in a ponytail that she whipped every time she turned her head to listen to a secret whispered in her ear or to whisper one of her own; her lips, which she had started to leave slightly parted and kept wetting with her tongue, moving exaggeratedly, separate from the words, as if she had no need for them, as if she were a pantomime of royalty.

  She rearranged her bra straps and complained that Orit was taking too long. “I don’t understand what’s so hard about finding a sweater.” She examined her breasts; the padding only emphasized the fact that they were, for now, nipples with potential. Dana watched her tighten the velvet ribbon around her ponytail and pitied her. Her reign was coming to an end. The team was on the verge of collapse, four of the girls having dropped out, leaving in pairs. When the school year started, Tamar also left, taking her defiance as a partner. The remaining girls found themselves abandoned, bored, while Lilach and Orit carried on like a husband and wife who no longer loved each other but were too afraid to part.

  “What is that bag?” Lilach pointed to Dana’s toiletries bag, which was made of plastic in shades of brown and yellow. She giggled. “My grandmother has one like that.”

  “This is my grandmother’s,” Dana lied.

  “She bought you that for the trip?”

  “No,” Dana said, and from the corner of her eye she saw Tamar looking at her, amused. “Of course not, she lent it to me. It’s silly to spend money on something you only use once in a million years.”

  It was actually her father’s and always sat in the bathroom cabinet, covered with a layer of talc, full of scents of aftershave and shaving cream, its inner lining slightly greasy. “It’s my one-night-stand kit,” she heard him explain to Shira when she had cleaned out the cabin
et, not long after moving in, and had asked if he still needed that ugly thing. “Don’t you dare throw it out,” he said. “My whole student life is in that bag.” A few days ago, Dana took it out of the cabinet and cleaned the talc off, but did not touch the inside, afraid to remove an ancient geologic stratum, the person her father was before she was born.

  “So what exactly did you keep in your one-night-stand kit?” Shira had teased him.

  “I’m not telling.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It’s a secret. Can’t I have any secrets?”

  “You can, you baby.”

  “Let me see.” Lilach came up to her, clutching her tank tops to her chest. “It’s cute, actually. Kind of seventies. You probably can’t get these anymore.”

  “Yes, you can,” Tamar said. “They have them at any drugstore.”

  “At the SuperPharm?”

  “No. On King George, though, or on Allenby. Anywhere.”

  “It’s lovely.” Lilach touched the bag, and for a moment Dana felt as if she were touching her father, hovering with her thin nervous fingers, the fingernails bitten and surrounded with red, injured skin. “I might get one of these too.”

  “Are you serious?” Tamar laughed. “It’s an old ladies’ bag. My mom has one too.”

  “So what?” Lilach said, and looked at the bag, mesmerized. “That’s the whole point. That’s what makes it cute.”

  When they crowded into the bus outside, Dana almost asked Lilach and Orit, who sat together on a bench looking gloomy, like two aunts, to join Tamar and her when they ate lunch. The tour guide had told them over the loudspeaker that the restaurant was owned by a lovely family with three daughters. “And please be on your best behavior. I’ve known the owner for years, he’s a good man. A nature lover. And he makes great cheese.”

  She felt Tamar’s elbow digging into her ribs. “Look at the guide,” Tamar whispered to her. “He has a hard-on.”

  Dana peered over the seat in front of her at the guide, a man around her father’s age, short and chubby, with flushed cheeks, wearing cut-off jeans and a Nature Preservation Society sweatshirt. “Idiot. It’s his cell phone.”

  “No, it isn’t! Take a good look, he has a hard-on. How much do you want to bet?”

  “I’ll bet you a million dollars,” Dana said.

  “Chicken.”

  “But how will we know?”

  “I’ll find out,” Tamar said, and she got up and walked to the front of the bus, looking back at Dana and stifling her giggles with her hand. She went up to the guide, who smiled at her, and when she whispered something in his ear, he leaned down, put a big hand on her shoulder, and then nodded and took a cell phone out of his pocket. Tamar turned around and grimaced disappointedly and then she dialed, had a quick conversation, thanked him, and came back to her seat. “You win. If you’d had the guts to make a real bet, you would have won some money.”

  “But who did you talk to?”

  “No one. I said I had to call my mother because she didn’t feel well, and I asked if he had a cell phone.”

  Dana felt an unfamiliar lightness in the air, which still held the memory of yesterday’s storm. She was looking forward to the evening, when they would get back to the hostel and lie in bed and chatter and gossip, like they used to, but it would be even more fun. The bus had turned off the highway onto a narrow road and was going uphill.

  She had woken up that morning long before Tamar and Rona and had dressed quickly so they wouldn’t see her in the old shirt and sweats she slept in, baggy and comfortable but showing up the impossibilities of her body: her breasts, which shook in her shirt without the simple cotton one-size bra she had bought one afternoon, on her own, in the factory seconds store on Allenby; and the two folds of fat on her stomach, which she wasn’t sure were still baby fat or a hint of how she would look when she got old; and her backside, which did not stick out, was not round, not anything, and yet so present—all her contradictions moved freely in those clothes. She changed into the clothes she had brought for the trip—jeans and a T-shirt, with her dad’s old sweatshirt that she had shoved into the backpack at the last minute, his beloved gray sweatshirt, which had been waiting at the bottom of the closet for a new winter to start—and sat in the kitchen at the big table, drinking a glass of water. The sun started rising in the east, beyond King George, the light trapped in the yards between the buildings. A pleasant breeze blew through the window, rustling the notes pinned to the fridge with magnets. She had never seen an urban sunrise, a partial sunrise, which the buildings blotted out, leaving it semi-mysterious. She preferred it to the boastful extreme sunrise she had once seen on a school trip to Masada—and then she heard a door open and bare feet padding down the hallway and Rona’s hoarse voice whispering good morning.

  A different Rona stood before her, not one she had encountered before. The Rona who now leaned on the counter, wearing a short, sleeveless nightgown and waiting impatiently for the kettle to boil, did not look like a psychologist or a hostess or a cook, or like anyone Dana had ever hoped her father would fall in love with. This Rona looked like a forty-eight-year-old woman, the same age as her mother, if she had lived. Large freckles and a reddish rash covered her shoulders and the triangle of skin revealed by the deep V-neck of her nightgown, which hung over heavy, uneven breasts. Rona stretched, poured water into a mug and threw an herbal teabag inside, turned to Dana and gave a big yawn, and then put her hand up to her mouth as if she had just noticed she was not alone. She stretched again, and this time she held the collar of her nightgown up and walked around the kitchen that way, hiding.

  Dana drank her water and kept stealing looks at Rona. The morning snitched on some discomfort she felt; in the white light spilling in from the yard, a light so clean it seemed to have been laundered during the night, Dana saw colorless shoulder-length hair, sometimes brown, sometimes gray, similar to the scrawny hair that peeked out of Rona’s armpits. Her thighs seemed to have been painted with a purple marker, covered with a network of veins whose vivid color looked surprising against her pale skin. This Rona was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor ugly, but something in between. In every movement, Rona’s body expressed its awkward opinion of itself—an opinion that nothing in the world can change. Dana saw its signs in Tamar too, who appeared in the kitchen wearing underwear and a tank top. When had she acquired the habit of sucking in her stomach and her cheeks and distractedly pulling down the hem of her top?

  “Mom.” Tamar clung to her mother, her face turning yellow as if she were about to cry.

  “What is it?” Rona asked indifferently, her voice still sleepy.

  “Mom,” Tamar said again, and wrapped her arms around Rona’s neck.

  “Did you get out of bed on the wrong side?”

  “No.” Tamar’s voice seeped out in an indulgent whimper. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” She rocked against Rona’s back.

  “Make up your mind, because we don’t have all day.”

  “I don’t want to.” Tamar pinched her nose.

  “That’s enough, honey. You’re strangling me.” Rona pulled Tamar’s arms off her neck and stood up. “I’m going to get dressed.”

  Tamar stomped her feet and huffed. She sat down in her mother’s chair.

  “Have something to eat,” Rona said from the hallway. “You too, Dana.”

  “We don’t want to,” Tamar said, and although she was hungry, Dana was glad to be included in this indulgent refusal. “She’s getting on my nerves,” Tamar said and rubbed her eyes.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t need a reason.” She got up and put two bowls and two spoons on the table. Then she took the milk out of the fridge, and gathered up three different cereal boxes from their place on the shelf.

  “That makes you look fat, Mom,” Tamar said, when Rona came in wearing an off-white linen suit.

  “Always a compliment for your mother.” Rona stood by the mirror in the hallway and put lipstick on. �
�This is a new suit and it cost me a fortune and I think it’s lovely. Does it make me look fat, Dana?”

  “No. You look good in it.”

  “Mom, you look like a couch.”

  “And you need to get dressed now,” Rona said, and poured the rest of her tea into the sink.

  Dana washed the dishes and watched Rona walk around the living room, turn off the radio, raise one of the blinds, and gather various documents into her bag. Every so often, she went up to the mirror, turned her back to it, moved her shoulders from side to side, patted herself on the behind, straightened her collar, and opened or closed the jacket button. “It’s really beautiful,” Dana said.

  “Really?” Rona asked doubtfully.

  “Definitely.”

  Tamar came out of her room, dressed, with her big backpack on her shoulders. “Come on, Mom, it’s six-fifteen; we’ll be late.”