by Judith Frank
He went downstairs when Yossi came to pick up Rafi, and Daniel got home from a late meeting as Matt and Shirley were cleaning up from dinner. They ate dinner at five now, which Matt called “gracious living chez Rosen-Greene.” The baby sat on the kitchen floor, and Matt’s father was placing Noam’s favorite toy just out of his reach to encourage him to walk toward him. It was a plastic playhouse where, when you pressed down one of the buttons, a woman’s voice cooed “Hello, Daddy” in a voice so licentious and inappropriate Matt insisted on playing it for everybody who came to visit. John stooped and held Noam’s hands with his own thick freckled ones, their arms extended in a bow, and he was chanting, “C’mon, buddy. That’s the stuff!” while the toy coquetted, “When Daddy comes home, it’s a happy sound. Everyone smiles when Daddy’s around. Daddy!”
“Hello, Daddy,” Matt said suggestively, sidling up and giving Daniel a kiss on the cheek.
“Honey, not in front of the children,” Daniel said with a faint smile. Matt turned away and returned to the sink, where he’d been scraping spaghetti off of plates into the garbage. To him, that comment wasn’t funny, it just sounded like another way to brush him off. “Crap,” he said, noticing a small splash of spaghetti sauce spots on his white T-shirt.
Daniel set his briefcase down on the floor at the doorway to the hall. “Where’s Gal?”
“Off watching TV,” Matt said.
Daniel went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He sat down at a kitchen chair pulled askew from the table.
“Let me heat you up a plate,” Matt’s mother said.
“Thanks, Shirley,” he said. “That’s nice of you.”
“Matt,” Daniel said, “Val called me at work today. Apparently, we’ve been discussed at the Reform shul.”
Matt turned. “You’re kidding.” He wasn’t sure he liked that, although he’d warmed to Val pretty quickly, and God knows she was a big help. She and her husband, Adam, were true children of Northampton: Adam was an acupuncturist, and Val a massage therapist and yoga instructor. They were active members of the synagogue and of the local chapter of MoveOn, and Adam was on the board of the Men’s Resource Center. They were involved in prayer circles and various rituals for life passages. They were both athletic, and took their kids on a lot of camping and cycling trips; you walked into their house, and the mudroom was crammed with hiking shoes caked with dried mud, hiking poles, snowshoes, cross-country skis, soccer balls, baseball gloves, lacrosse sticks, bike helmets. They were so hooked into nature and community they made Matt and Daniel feel like schmucks who hadn’t really made an effort.
“No,” Daniel said. “Val and Adam talked to the rabbi and ‘informally mentioned’—that’s what she said—that we were new friends of theirs, and then the rabbi talked about us in her sermon, or speech . . . what do they call it?”
“Don’t ask me,” Matt said. He was irritated and intrigued by this news. “What did she say about us? She doesn’t even know us.”
Daniel took a swig of beer. “It was just a brief mention, young children from a war-torn nation, something like that. I think the message was that Northampton is a peaceful town people can take refuge in, but that it’s important to have a greater global consciousness. Anyway, it turns out that the features editor from the Daily Hampshire Gazette goes to that shul, and he called shortly after I spoke to Val to ask if he could write a story about us.”
“What did you say?” Matt asked, weighing the prospect in his mind, thinking about the candid shot of him on the front page of Ma’ariv, which had inadvertently placed him in the center of the family while all the articles erased him completely.
“I said I had to think about it,” Daniel said. “Don’t you think it’ll make everybody in this town feel sorry for us?”
Matt’s mother murmured, “No. It’s just compassion, that’s all, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Daniel considered. “Also,” he added, “isn’t it a little annoying the way everybody applauds fathers for simply raising children? If we were women, women raising children, it’d never be regarded as newsworthy.”
“That’s so true,” Matt said. He and Daniel had both been on the receiving end of many a dazzling smile when they were out in public with the kids, and sometimes it pleased them while sometimes it grossed them out a little. People who’d never given them the time of day suddenly had a lot to say to them.
“I think you’re reading too much into it,” Shirley said, looking up from where she was bent over the dishwasher, trying to find space for one more sippy cup.
“Mom,” Matt said, sounding even to his own ear like a whiny adolescent, the old trapped feeling worming its way into his throat.
“Hello, Daddy,” Noam’s toy cooed, and they laughed, and through his pacifier Noam laughed too, a big, phony social laugh, as he practiced how to be in a group laughing.
THEY LET GAL GO to bed in underpants and a T-shirt because all her pajamas were in the laundry, and they let her begin the night in their bed because even though it set a bad precedent, she was exhausted and looked as if she were on the brink of a tantrum. She was stretching out on the sheets of the big bed, cooled by the air conditioner, while Daniel closed the blinds against the summer twilight. She watched him as he tended to her, bringing a glass of water to the night table, switching on the bathroom night-light, fishing the book they’d been reading from under the covers at the foot of the bed, and, reacting to the sweetness and intimacy of being alone with him, the way that if she closed her eyes just a little, or just listened to his voice, she could imagine he was her father, said, “You’re not my abba.”
Daniel crawled onto the bed beside her, a little stung, even though he knew she was just experimenting—with the names for their relationship, with how bad or mean she was allowed to be.
“I don’t think I’ll ever call you Abba,” she said speculatively, glancing sideways at him. In the vivid, shadowy landscape of her mind, something had happened to Daniel since they’d come to America; he’d caved in, like the mouth of an old man she’d once seen who had no teeth. When they came toward each other, she had to go soft, nervously avert her gaze, not knowing whether she’d bump into the solid man or walk right through him as if in a dream. Matt was big and spindly and light, and she could fling herself against him, even though his anger was sometimes blistering, and she might be tickled or stung. Daniel, though, was fringed in darkness. He’d sit with a book, staring vacantly into space; sometimes he walked by her without seeming to see her at all. There were moments when, at rest or at play, a strange fearful pressure built in her chest that made her feel as though there was a balloon trapped in there, bumping against her lungs, trying to break loose and take flight—and she had to struggle not to run, or howl.
“What will you call me?” he asked.
“Dani,” she said.
“Okay.”
The book was Abba Oseh Bushot, My Father Always Embarrasses Me. In Israel, it was a special book that Ema read to her, loudly, so Abba could overhear all the embarrassing things the abba in the book did to his little boy, Ephraim: singing loudly on the way to school, warning that if he didn’t get a kiss when he left Ephraim at school, he’d have to kiss one of the other children, wearing shorts to Aunt Batya’s wedding, sliding down in his seat and hiding behind his fingers at the scary parts in movies. They liked to pretend that her abba was as embarrassing as Ephraim’s dad was.
Daniel read a page, lingered over the last line with his finger under it for Gal to read herself. The witty Hebrew prose pushed a smile behind his eyes and forehead. He loved the portrayal of the dad as a lazy and slovenly writer, the illustrations in which there was always someone looking at him askance, the way the mother was a cool customer, a newspaper reporter in heels and makeup who gave her son a quick kiss on her way out the door and who laughed at the father’s eccentricities. Partly, it was a book about how embarrassing it was to have a stay-at-home dad.
“Good job,” he said to her, and turned the page.
It wasn’t really a good job, Gal thought, because she knew the book by heart already. But Dani didn’t know that because he wasn’t there when her mother read it to her. His oblivion to that made her despair, which converted into peevishness. She snuggled more deeply into her pillows, sliding down from Daniel’s armpit till his elbow hovered awkwardly around her face. She pushed it away with a put-upon sigh.
Daniel looked down at her slouchy demon self. “Gal, don’t push, please; ask if I could please move my arm.”
“You smell bad,” she muttered.
Daniel closed his eyes. It was a refrain, one with curious power, and he and Matt had consulted about it. Breath? Body odor? Matt would sniff him all over and shrug. “You smell good to me.” Recently they’d wondered if she meant simply that he smelled different from Joel.
“Okay, buba, I’m going to give you a kiss good-night, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I want to see my album,” she said quickly.
Daniel rose and brought over the album her class had made for her before she left. It made a sticky sound as she opened it. She went through it and pointed to every child in every picture, naming him or her ritualistically in a mechanical voice, without lingering or musing. When she was finished, she thrust the book at Daniel and pulled the covers up to her chin.
He remembered the advice of her grief counselor, that he should offer words to her, words she could use to name the different shades of her grief. “You must really miss your friends,” he said, aware that this was not his best effort. She’d been wearing on him since they’d gotten home to Northampton, and he was tired, and helping her find words for her feelings was starting to feel overrated. If she’d only let him hold her, as she had in the early days of their loss, he felt sure things would be better. These days when she got upset, her body stiffened and her voice got shrill. “Tell me what you’re feeling,” he’d say, and she’d shriek in his face or stomp out of the room.
When she didn’t respond, he bent down, kissed her cheek, told her he loved her. He left the door ajar. Gal watched his hand slip along the door frame and out of sight, until he’d left her in the cool dark. She swallowed her desire to call after him. She looked toward the bathroom, where the night-light glimmered. Let’s say she had to get there without touching her feet to the bedroom floor. Let’s say that if she didn’t, a terrorist would kill her, too. Could she do it? She could certainly climb onto the bottom slats of the bedside table. But how would she get onto the low dresser next to the bathroom door? Her mind worried it; she gazed at the drawers, which had little bits of clothing sticking out of the cracks, like tongues from the mouths of people concentrating hard. She knew that when Daniel and Matt went to bed, Daniel would go around and tuck all those clothes back into his dresser drawers, because he couldn’t sleep unless all the closet doors and drawers were nicely shut, which made Matt laugh and call him OCD.
Her eyes scanned the floor. Matt’s sandals were lying there, splayed, their buckles open. She could stand on them to get to the dresser; she imagined stepping down on the straps, the ball of her bare foot pressed by the buckle, pulling them out till she stood on the shiny-worn leather soles. She could do that, and then shuffle with them to the dresser, move everything—the coffee mug with spare change in it, the little wood box that held Matt’s bracelets and rings, the bibs and rattles and half-full cups of water—carefully to the side, and get onto the dresser, knee-first. And from there, slide down onto the bathroom’s tile floor, to safety.
CHAPTER 11
THEY CALL IT vanishing twin syndrome. The vanishing twin begins as a twin to another fetus, but disappears during the pregnancy, spontaneously aborting and absorbing into the other twin, the placenta, or the mother. It is believed that a significant number of singletons start out as twins.
Metaphorically speaking, he had always thought of himself as the vanishing twin. He knew that when he and Joel were infants, Joel cried for milk while he was a good baby who waited quietly in his crib to be fed. That, in high school, when Joel ran for president of the student council, he ran for treasurer because Joel wanted to be president so badly.
He was so self-sufficient and contained. He always chose the smaller piece—of cake, or of attention. And somewhere, in some tiny, proud place of his consciousness, he’d imagined that he’d be rewarded for it.
But instead there was this grotesque, vindictive punishment of Joel, a punishment straight out of ancient tragedy meted out by a tantrum-throwing god, in which Joel’s children would be taken from him and given to Daniel to raise. In which Joel would die and Daniel would be featured in the newspaper, raising Joel’s children.
He was in his office with the door ajar, his jacket hung over the back of his chair, his desk a mess of galleys. Looking at the picture of himself and Matt with Gal and Noam on the front of the features section, Yo-yo’s big head resting on Matt’s knee, he had an uneasy feeling that the article was unseemly, almost gloating. The article’s headline read “Children Find Shelter from Terror’s Grip.” In the picture, Gal was on his lap, and his chin rested on her head. Matt sat back with one arm behind him along the back of the couch, his T-shirt riding up; the baby was on his lap and pressed against his other forearm with both hands outstretched, trying to grab something—a rattle, Daniel remembered, a rattle that the photographer, a hassled and stylish woman who had described herself as “running catastrophically behind” that day, had grabbed and shaken to get the kids’ attention. The gesture had mortally offended Gal, who was giving her famous petulant shrug.
Why had he let them write the article at all, if not to gloat just a little? To gloat about how the kids were his responsibility now, and to show what a great and thoughtful job he was doing with them, what a loving home they’d come into? He studied the picture, the intense, propriety expression on his face. He looked like a patriarch in a yellowing photograph with scalloped edges. He had to admit to himself that a secret feeling of exultation came over him whenever he called Gal and Noam “my kids.” At home he walked around in shorts and undershirts, his chest hair curling up through the V of the neck, his upper arms, hairless with long, light muscles, exposed. When he looked at himself in the mirror he saw an image of manhood—strong and sweet—that thrilled him. For a boy who was good at music but bad at sports, a teenager who felt there was a big hole where his sexual cachet should be, this was a tremendous transformation.
How did the idea of dad carry so much marvelous emotional pull? He’d always envied the natural masculine authority Joel accrued simply by virtue of holding his children. So now he had it, too.
His stomach growled from a mix of hunger and nausea. Matt had made him eat two soft-boiled eggs before he left the house. In the days before Matt’s parents had left, Shirley had taken to making him a mash of graham crackers and milk after dinner, into which she slipped a splash of half-and-half. His pants were belted to the last buckle hole now, and his shirts sagged under the armpits. At night, in bed, he ran his fingertips over the prominent jut of his ribs, feeling them rise and fall with his breath, imagining how easily they could be smashed, shards driven into the soft, moist, pulsing organs underneath. He remembered one of the clichés of twinship that people used to pester him with, asking whether when his brother was hurt, he felt his pain. No, he’d scowl; to him, it was a stupid question. But now he could feel his body being ripped out of the world. What happened in your consciousness at that moment? Somehow he imagined it crying out Whoa!—bewildered over this thing that had never happened to it before, managing only the most banal and inadequate of responses.
He turned to the opening of the article:
Daniel Rosen and Matt Greene never expected their elegant Northampton home to be the refuge of two small, grieving children. The life partners of four years were thrown into turmoil four months ago when Rosen’s brother, Joel, and sister-in-law, Ilana, were killed by a terrorist’s bomb in a Jerusalem coffee shop. In their will, they had designated Rosen the guardian of their
children—Gal, six, and Noam, one—should they predecease them.
Rosen admits that he was surprised by that decision, and his eyes fill with tears when he talks about it. “There’s such a powerful stigma against gay men raising children, especially in Israel, where it’s unheard of. So my brother and Ilana were demonstrating an unusual degree of love and trust. That’s how I see it.”
It took the couple three months to get the children to the U.S., because the custody arrangement had to be approved by the Israeli courts. Rosen is grateful to be home, and to live in a community like Northampton, where people are accepting of two men raising children together.
There was a passage about Matt; there was a section about Joel being an English-language talk-show host, and about his and Daniel’s history at Jewish summer camp, and how that got them initially interested in Israel. “When asked about summer camp, the normally reserved Rosen lights up, and he says, ‘I lived for camp!’ It was there that the boys first learned Hebrew, and their love for Israel was cultivated.” The rest of the paragraph covered Daniel’s education at Oberlin, and his gradual transformation on the topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It got several details wrong, such as his major and the year he graduated. He paused for a minute, irritated, then decided it didn’t matter. His eyes skipped ahead:
Rosen admits to having complicated feelings about the suicide bomber who killed his twin. “Look,” he says, “the safety and prosperity of an entire society is based upon shutting the Palestinians up where they can’t be seen. So I can understand trying to violently place yourself within the Israelis’ field of vision, in a way they can’t ignore. I don’t condone it, but I do understand it.”
Reading that, he remembered the reporter sitting back in her chair and contemplating him. “You’re a very understanding man,” she’d said. “A forgiving one. If someone blew my brother up, I wouldn’t be making these fine distinctions, I can tell you that.”