by Judith Frank
“But didn’t he mean it as an argument for getting married?” Brent asked him, as Matt enlarged upon his critique with cutting pleasure.
“Oh,” Matt said with comic deflation. “Right.”
The school door opened and the first kids stepped outside, then a few clusters, some lining up for the buses, some taking off and racing for their parents’ cars. And there was Gal, coming out by herself. She was wearing her parka, unzipped, and it looked as if Daniel hadn’t taken her for a haircut since they’d broken up. He watched as she scanned for his car and then found it; he opened his eyes and mouth wide in a happy surprised expression, and she grinned and ran over. She opened the back door and swung her backpack off her shoulders, heaving it into the seat in front of her. “Mordechai, you’re back!” she said. She climbed in and threw her arms around his neck from behind. “Did Uncle Dani let you come back?”
Matt tried to retain his dignity in the midst of the choke hold and the slightly demeaning question. “Uncle Dani and I agreed that you guys should come over for a sleepover,” he said. They’d planned at first to have him reunite with the kids at dinner at Daniel’s, but after a few days’ thought, he’d realized he just wasn’t ready yet to go over there, to resume his role in the family, with all the expectations that would raise in everybody. So they’d settled on telling Gal that they were a couple again, but that Matt was staying in his own house because he’d committed to taking care of the dog.
“Phew,” she said, plopping herself back onto the seat. “TGIF. So you have a dog over there, right?”
He glanced, smiling at the American slang, into the rearview mirror. “I do. I mean, I’m taking care of her for these people.”
He swung by and picked up Noam at Colleen’s, where he was shocked to see him just get up, thank you very much, and run over to him, a faint, rakish scar on his right cheek. He picked him up—he was heavier!—and squeezed him, said “Kiss?” and was rewarded with Noam’s patented air-kiss, a flat-lipped pop. “Do you know you’re coming over to my house?” Matt asked him.
“We’ve been talking about it all day,” Colleen said. “Daniel said he’ll come by with their stuff after work.”
“What happened here?” he asked, smoothing the scar with his thumb.
“There was an incident with a toy tent pole,” she said.
He brought them back to his house and let them explore as he went into the kitchen to find them a snack. Gal ran upstairs and then came back down. “Are we sleeping here?” she asked, leaning against the doorway.
“Yep,” he said, handing her a granola bar. “It’s a sleepover, remember? Just us.” He and Daniel had realized just yesterday that he was assuming that Daniel would sleep over, and Daniel was assuming he wouldn’t; it was only when Daniel said, with slow, comic, burning intensity, “It would be my first night without kids for, like, a year,” that Matt had laughed and agreed to take them by himself.
“What’s that?” Gal said, pointing to a Buddha on a little altar on the fireplace mantel across the living room.
“That’s the Buddha. He’s a religious figure. He’s supposed to be very wise.”
She looked doubtfully at its secret, serene expression. “I think he’s weird,” she said. “There’s one upstairs, too.”
He couldn’t really settle in with them till Daniel had come and gone; for reasons he couldn’t pinpoint, he’d been nervous about it all day. When the doorbell rang, something went off in his chest, like a wind burst sending dust and candy wrappers flying. Daniel was wearing work clothes, a jacket and a loosened tie, and had in his hands and at his feet what seemed like an inordinate number of suitcases and stuffed paper bags. Molly caught sight of him and barked, and hustled to the door looking very in charge to make up for not having heard him ring the bell. She sniffed him with a wheezy harrumph, her stumpy tail quivering in greeting. Gal called from the kitchen door, “Who’s that? You’re not supposed to be here!” Daniel took just a few steps into the house, and stayed just long enough to show Matt the dose of Noam’s antibiotics for his ear infection.
Matt brought the suitcases and paper bags into the house as Daniel kissed the kids good-bye and said have fun and reminded them that he would pick them up tomorrow morning. Matt set bibs and bottles and medicine on the shelf above the kitchen sink, and hauled the Pack ’n Play up to the TV room down the hall from his bedroom. The room was furnished with a futon couch facing a small television, a woven oval rug, and bookcases with novels and biographies and rows of Lonely Planet guides. He popped up the frame’s locking sides and pressed the center down, put the mattress in and pushed in the corners.
He’d planned to have Gal sleep on the futon next to her brother; he’d found some double-bed sheets for it in the linen closet and washed them to get out the dust smell. But she wanted to sleep in the tiny third bedroom with the whitewashed paneled walls and the curtains with a leaf pattern in fall colors. There was a very old bed in it, a relic, sized for a child but so tall Gal had to run across the carpet and leap onto it. Matt scratched his head. “If you fall out of that thing, you know who’s going to get in trouble.”
“You!” she shouted.
“Right you are,” he said.
He’d ordered pizza, and he ran downstairs when the doorbell rang, telling Gal to keep an eye on her brother. Noam was walking, and he wasn’t a baby anymore. It was as though, Matt discovered over the course of the evening, becoming ambulatory had released a whole new personality; the placid chubby baby had become a worker bee, a mover of furniture, a carrier of things back and forth. After feeding the dog, Matt watched Noam squat, diapered butt brushing the floor, and carefully pour the remaining kibbles into a Tupperware container. “Not for eating, Noam,” Matt said, but he realized as Noam poured them carefully back into the dog bowl, that far from eating them, Noam was more likely to perform a Montessori activity with them. He could say my and mine, and had developed a very impressive screech to enforce those categories. He said ee-eye-ee-eye-oh and knew what a cow says and what a bird says, and when Matt sang “The babies on the bus go—” he made obnoxious whining noises. “That’s how he says wah wah wah,” Gal explained.
After dinner, he bathed Noam in the claw-foot tub and brought him into the bedroom, dug his fingers under the flap of the box of diapers he’d bought, and pried it open. Then he opened the suitcase Daniel had brought, and found it entirely filled with diapers. He diapered Noam and set him on the floor as he looked for pajamas, finding them in a different suitcase. “Here ya go, buddy,” he said. Holding the pants at the waist, close to the floor, with his thumbs and forefingers, he waited for Noam to step into them. From down there, a curl of pain winding along his lower back, his view was chubby little legs scuttling back and forth. Finally, he grabbed him. He was sweating when Gal came in the room, asking, “Can we get a dog for this house?”
Matt said, “Honey, we have a dog.”
“I mean a real dog,” she said.
He sat on the futon couch with a child on each side, reading Night-Night, Little Pookie, shouting, in unison with Gal, when little Pookie is asked whether he wants to wear the pajamas with the cars or the ones with the stars: “Stars and cars!” Daniel had also sent over an alphabet book illustrated with animals. Noam pointed to the bird under B and said, “Pitty teet-teet.”
Matt laughed, and looked at Gal, amazed. “What did he say? A pretty tweet-tweet?”
It took Noam a long time to fall asleep; first he sang to himself for a while—if it could be called singing, Matt thought; it was actually more of a drone—and then he cried a vexed, overstimulated cry. Matt kept the hall light on, and after racing upstairs three times, plopped himself down on the hall floor. After a few minutes, he heard the quick, quiet thumping of Gal coming up the stairs in bare feet, saw her peek around the corner at the top. She’d taken off her sweater and socks. He put a finger to his lips and motioned his head toward Noam’s room.
She tiptoed up to him and sat down on the floor beside him, cross-l
egged, and he laid a hand on her knee. “How’s it going?” he whispered.
“Good,” she said.
“Hey, how was Israel?” he murmured.
“That was a long time ago,” she said, twisting and untwisting the fringe of the runner that ran the length of the hall.
“Was it good to see everybody?”
She nodded, and Matt tried to think of a better question, one that would draw her out. When she started school, he’d found that asking “Did anybody cry today?” could sometimes elicit a juicy story.
“What was the best part and what was the worst part?” he asked.
There was a cry from Noam, and they were quiet, ears straining, till they heard him start sucking his passy again. Gal gazed up at the ceiling and frowned. “A real head-scratcher, huh,” Matt said.
“What?”
“A head-scratcher. That’s a hard question you have to think about a lot.”
“The best part,” she said slowly, her voice going thoughtfully high on best, “was definitely playing with Leora. And seeing Sabba and Savta.” She added this last in a rush, nodding and gesturing as if to say that it went without saying, which is why she hadn’t mentioned it first.
“And the worst thing?”
She shrugged. She didn’t have words for the soreness and longing, the feeling of being home-but-not-home, the wild fear of being lost, the fleeting sense of triumph and the loneliness that had overwhelmed her when she crumpled to the sidewalk, her throat opening and closing like the gills of a salmon yanked into the air. Matt peeked down at her without moving his head, saw her hands lying limp in her lap. “Noam’s asleep,” he said quietly. “Should we get into pajamas and read a story?”
After he’d read to her, she lay on the high, narrow, strange bed trying to sleep. She’d asked to sleep in this room, but now she felt that had been a mistake; she felt like a dead child laid out in a coffin. And she couldn’t stop casting her eyes anxiously at the shadows cast by a streetlight into the room, imagining Buddhas emerging from the window, hordes of them marching in with their secret smiles, with beards and jumpsuits; they’d become, in her hectic mind, a mash-up of Buddhas and the Keebler Elves on her cookie packages.
At around four in the morning, she awoke with a cry. Matt awoke, adrenaline coursing through him, and ran into her room, saying, “What? What? What?” He lifted her by the armpits till she was sitting.
“I want to go home,” she said. “This house is weird. I don’t like it.”
“I thought you liked this bedroom,” Matt said.
“I thought we were going to Dani’s,” she said, staring at him vacantly; he wondered if she was fully awake. “Dani said that you were going to bring us to our own house.”
“No, he told you you were coming to my house,” Matt said.
“No,” she insisted. “He didn’t.”
He was totally perplexed. “So why do you think he was dropping off all that stuff ?”
She shrugged with confused misery.
“Why didn’t you say anything? Like when I made you dinner and unpacked your pajamas and put you to bed?”
“I don’t know.”
He thought, This is a bad idea; she doesn’t know if we’re really together or not, and we’d better give her a clearer message soon. They sat there looking at each other in the dim room, a cone of light cast across the floor by the hall light through the half-open door. The old Gal, he knew, would have screamed at him the moment they’d pulled up at his house, refused to get out of the car. She wasn’t a little beast anymore, he realized; she was growing up, and the sharp edges were wearing down as age and grief rubbed at them with patient, chastening hands. Even her crying had a different, less outraged tenor: it seemed to express surprise that the world had even more pain in store for her, when she’d thought she couldn’t be surprised anymore. It saddened him. Maybe it was just developmental, he thought, and this is how she would have turned out anyway. Maybe it was a good thing, a better way of being for the long haul. Maybe she’d turn back into a beast when she hit twelve.
He ran his hands over his arms, chilled in his undershirt and boxer shorts. “Do you think you can go back to sleep?” he asked.
“Can I sleep with you?”
He thought of the knees and elbows that would pound him as she slept her strenuous sleep. “Okay,” he sighed. He helped her down and gathered her pillow and stuffed monkey, ushered her down the hall with his hand on her back. As they got into bed, Gal paused on her knees and peered at the big Japanese painting. “I wonder what that’s a painting of,” she said, fully awake and intrigued.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said sternly, switching off the bedside table lamp. “No chitchat.”
They lay still for a while, till she flounced onto her side with a groan. “Sleep, Gal,” Matt said.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m scared.”
“What could you possibly be scared of? I’m right here, next to you.”
“I’m still scared,” she said in Hebrew.
“What are you scared of? Should we make a list?”
There was a pause. Then she said, “That Dani will be mad at me. That I’ll try to be good but be bad by accident. That robbers or bears will come into the house. That Noam’s scar will never go away. How many is that?”
“Four.” He understood her perfectly, but replied in English, thinking that for this conversation, they might each need their full linguistic capacity.
“That I’ll never see you again,” she said.
He took her arm and gave it a little shake. “I’m right here! And I’m not going anywhere.”
“You know what else I’m scared of?” she asked. She didn’t sound spooked anymore; she was warming to her theme, getting late-night philosophical. This could be a long night, Matt told himself. “That I’ll be at a scary movie and I won’t be able to run out of there before the scary parts happen, and even after I’m in the lobby, I’ll still hear the sounds, and even if I go into the bathroom, I’ll still hear the sounds.”
“Yikes,” said Matt, remembering his similar fears around the time The Shining came out. “What about falling off a horse?”
“Pshh. I’m not scared of that.” He smiled in the darkness at the dismissive pride in her voice. “But I’m scared my body will get ripped up, and it will hurt so bad.”
“That is scary.”
“Don’t tell Dani.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t.”
His mind swirled around this, fighting the fatigue that was thickening it, like cornstarch. Which part was important to keep from Daniel? He wondered whether he should ask, and then he did. “Is he mad at you a lot?”
She thought about it for a while. Actually, he wasn’t anymore; he was different since Israel. He touched her sometimes—her hair, her cheek—and his face would come alive again, like something kissed in a fairy tale. “Not really,” she said.
She was on her side, facing him, fists at her chin, her eyes slowly blinking. “Gal,” Matt said sleepily, “you’re scared that something bad will happen, but what’s really scary is that something bad already happened.”
“But bad things can still happen.”
“They can,” he conceded, as the thought of HIV pushed darkly into his mind. “But I’m pretty sure it’ll never be as bad as that. That’s like a once-in-a-lifetime bad thing.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“Sabba and Savta had two bad things happen to them.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
Gal said, mournfully, “I think they must be the unluckiest people in the whole world.”
He was on the verge of sleep, but through the dim gleam of his consciousness he felt he couldn’t let the conversation end that way. He’d be letting Ilana down if he let her daughter carry the weight of her grandparents’ unfathomable suffering, or, God forbid, compare their suffering to her own, and find herself wanting. But he couldn’t think of anything rea
ssuring to say. So he turned her gently away from him and pulled her by the hips, wrapped his arms around her as she squirmed backward and settled into his chest. Thinking about his own health, trying to reassure himself with the thought that even if he got HIV, people lived for a long time with it these days, kept him awake long after Gal had fallen asleep.
IN THE END, IT was Gal who helped Matt warm to the idea of getting married. “Wow!” she said, her eyes alight, her mouth stretched into a comic rictus of glee, when he and Daniel told her. “Wow! That’s all I have to say: Wow!” She told everybody she knew, “Wow! That’s all I could think of when they told me!” She was so thrilled by the prospect, he decided that if he had the capacity to make her feel safe and happy, he owed it to her. And seeing a wedding through her eyes—the dignity, solemnity, and joy of it, the knitting together of their family—the tendrils of Matt’s imagination began to wind around the idea. He imagined a justice of the peace or a clergyperson saying, “By the authority invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . .” and got a little goose-bumpy. He hadn’t moved back home yet; he was sleeping at Daniel’s but was still responsible for Molly for another few months, so he’d left most of his clothes and his computer at his own place, and spent the days there, the windows open to the May breeze, after the kids went to day care and school. It suited him. He knew he’d have to move all the way back soon, take up his place as a full-time partner and dad. But sometimes, sitting at a desk in the pretty book-lined study, he wished that this was how he’d gotten involved with the Rosens in the first place: enjoying outings with the kids, gaining their confidence and affection over time, urgently making out with Daniel outside the front door before they tore themselves apart and he went home to his own, quiet refuge.
THEY MET FOR LUNCH on a summery Tuesday, at a café halfway between Northampton and Amherst; they sat outside on the same side of the table, crowding into the shade of the umbrella. Daniel was trying to tell Matt about this upsetting thing he’d read in the materials he got from B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, while Matt was examining the inside of his sandwich to make sure they’d put Dijon mustard on it, as he’d requested, instead of honey mustard, which he hated. “Are you listening to me?” Daniel said. He clunked his shoulder against Matt’s.