by Yael Hedaya
2
I met Nathan at a Purim costume party last year. He was wearing a clown’s hat on his head. It wasn’t one of the cardboard cones you can buy in a toy shop, but a real jester’s cap made of different-colored pieces of cloth, crowned by horns stuffed with some soft material with silver bells sewn onto their tips. It was touching and childish.
I wasn’t wearing a costume, because I couldn’t imagine anything I really wanted to be that evening, except happier. I was thirty and I wanted to be in love and I wanted self-confidence and peace of mind, and I wanted a home. I assumed that the perfect costume for a woman who had all these things was to go as she was, so in a way you could say that I was wearing a costume.
My last one was a failure. I was five years old and I dressed up as Queen Esther. There were characters I liked better than Queen Esther, who always seemed too biblical and boring to me, but on the other hand I wanted to be like everybody else.
The dress was okay, layers of rustling white satin which I wore over white woolen tights, but there was a problem with the royal shoes. I wanted glass slippers, but my mother, who like a veteran traffic policeman knew how to direct my fantasies into roads that were clear that morning, explained that I had mixed things up. Glass slippers belonged to the story of Cinderella, she said. Queen Esther wore ordinary queen’s shoes. I said: “But why can’t we buy two bottles of soda and break them in half and I’ll go to kindergarten in them?” And she said: “Because it’s dangerous and impossible.” I said: “But nobody else will have shoes like them.” She said: “You don’t need what nobody else has. You need what everybody has.” I said: “But I’ll be the most beautiful.” And she said: “Queen Esther wasn’t beautiful. Cinderella was beautiful,” and relying on my short memory she promised: “Next year you can go as Cinderella.”
This sounded logical to me, and since I was the last child in the world who would want to get her fairy tales confused, I proudly put on my sandals, whose straps my mother had covered with silver foil. But that morning it rained cats and dogs—one of the usual disasters that strike children on Purim—and on the way to kindergarten, while my mother held my hand and assured me that everything would be all right and said that it was a pity that at my tender age I should be so sad and sulky, like my father, I stepped in a puddle and the silver foil came off my left sandal. I have a black-and-white photo in my album in which I’m standing and holding up the hem of my dress with my fingers, one sandal regal and the other not, and accordingly, a half smile on my face.
It didn’t rain on Purim last year. It was a clear, cold night and I drove to the party in my car. I was wearing a black sweater and jeans and boots. I liked the confident tapping sound they made on the floor. A friend who knew the hosts was supposed to meet me there. I walked into the noisy apartment and looked for her. She said that she’d be dressed as a fairy. I saw a lot of fairies there, but my friend wasn’t among them. I went into the kitchen and looked at the rows of beer bottles perspiring on the counter. In the music playing in the living room I heard the soft, intermittent tinkling of bells. I took a bottle and opened it with the bottle opener tied to the handle of the door of the fridge with a long pink ribbon of the kind used to decorate gifts. The bottle opener was disguised too. Someone had covered it with shiny stickers shaped like stars and crescent moons.
The kitchen was crowded with two fairies, a Superman, a Queen Esther, and a tall bald man wearing a cat’s mask. I said to myself that if my fairy didn’t show up in fifteen minutes, I was going home. I hated parties. They intensified all the feelings that parties are supposed to expel. I thought of pouring the rest of my beer down the sink and leaving, but then I heard the tinkling of the bells coming closer. The clown came into the kitchen looking for the bottle opener.
He was very tall and he had blue eyes, and whenever he moved his head there was a soft tinkling sound. He opened himself a beer, leaned against the counter next to me, and took big gulps from the bottle, staring at the dark living room with a bored expression on his face. I looked at his cap, at the horns bending over his forehead and his ears and tinkling softly. He looked as if he had put the cap on years ago and felt so comfortable in it that he forgot it was there.
The loud music was suddenly replaced by a children’s song. The hosts were playing “Little clown, full of glee, you dance with everybody,” and the dancers were adjusting their steps to the simple tune and words. They hopped up and down and made questioning gestures with their hands, and cocked their heads from side to side at the “Won’t you” of “Won’t you dance with me?”
“Would you like to dance?” asked the clown.
I nodded and put my beer down on the counter and followed him into the living room, to a little clearing in the crowd. I found it difficult to perform childish steps in front of a stranger, but the clown skipped and hopped opposite me with a naturalness that seemed almost cynical. He twirled his hands and cocked his big head from side to side, and at the “Won’t you” shrugged his shoulders stubbornly. The other dancers looked at us—at the clown shrugging his shoulders and ringing his bells, and at me, treading on the spot and smiling a half smile. He wasn’t pretending to dance like a child. That was the way he danced.
I was attracted to him immediately. I was attracted to him even before I saw him. At first I was attracted to the sound of the bells and then I was attracted to the dance which took me back twenty-five years, to that rainy Purim, to the big roomful of children, steeped in the smell of mud and damp poppy-seed cakes and urine, and the strains of this same song, reverberating an awful disappointment. “She cried all morning,” the kindergarten teacher told my mother when she came to pick me up at noon. “I didn’t know what to do with her, Mrs. Lieberman,” she said. “She took off her sandals and sat in the corner. I begged her to put them on and come and dance with the other children, but she only pouted and shrugged her shoulders. I wouldn’t let her walk around in her stockings. It’s cold today, Mrs. Lieberman. What could I do?”
The song ended and we stood facing each other for a moment and I didn’t know what to do. The clown looked abandoned and betrayed; even his cap looked as if it had suddenly wilted. Without a word, he turned his back to me and walked heavily back to the kitchen.
Again we stood leaning against the counter. He introduced himself and said: “Nathan.” I said: “Maya,” and he said it was a pretty name. “So is Nathan,” I said. And he said: “You think so? Actually, I don’t like my name.” I asked him why, but he only shrugged his shoulders. My eyes were still looking for my friend the fairy, but I didn’t care anymore if she came or not. Another Queen Esther arrived instead, and a tiger with red hair, which matched the color of the stripes on her costume, with a long tail bouncing behind her. They embraced Nathan, and he opened beers for them with the costumed bottle opener and then left to dance with them. He didn’t say excuse me, or I’ll be right back, or see you later.
I watched him dancing with the tiger and the Queen Esther, and thought that it was time to go home. I thought of my bed and the weekend papers strewn over it. I thought of my apartment, of the bathroom, of its moldy smell in winter when the windows are closed, and the damp towels, I thought of my toothbrush, which was old and needed replacing, and I thought of the stained mirror above the sink, and the way from the bathroom to the bedroom, feet shuffling in socks and hand groping along the wall to turn off the lights: the toilet, the light in the bathroom, the fluorescent light in the kitchen, and last the light in the hallway, until only one light remained on—the reading lamp next to the bed which cast a yellow spotlight on my pillow.
I went downstairs and got into my car. I warmed up the engine and melted the vapors on the windshield. When I drove out of the parking space, I looked in the mirror and saw him coming out of the building. I waited for the huge figure in the blue parka to get into a car, but the clown passed my car and the other cars and went on walking with broad strides toward the main road. He stood there for a minute, my headlights illuminating him, the j
ester’s cap on his head and his hands in his pockets. I honked my horn, a short, hoarse honk, and he turned around, surprised. Despite the closed windows, and the humming of the engine in neutral, and my heart beating in anticipation and self-reproach, I could hear the bells coming closer.
He came up to the car, bent down, and stared inside, looking for the faceless honker. I opened the window and asked him if he didn’t have a car. “No,” he said. “Are you going to get a cab?” “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you want a ride?” I asked. This was the first time in my life I had offered a strange man a ride, but I thought that someone dressed as a clown couldn’t be dangerous. He didn’t say a word, went around to the door on the passenger’s side, opened it, and squeezed into the seat next to me. The cap got squashed against the ceiling of the car and he took it off and held it rolled up between his hands. I noticed he was going bald. As if he too had only just noticed it, he touched his head apologetically.
My car was too small for him. His long legs were spread out, one knee touching the door and the other pressed against the glove compartment, his body was thrust against the back of the seat which he pushed back as far as it would go, his bare head touched the ceiling. He mumbled his address and the whole way there we didn’t say a word. He smelled of wet fur and crushed leaves and the smell flooded the car, drowning out its usual smell of fake leather and plastic and a horrible smell called “Evergreen” dispersed by the air freshener in the shape of a fir tree that hung over the mirror. I got it as a freebie at the gas station, and though I couldn’t stand the overpowering chemical smell, I was too lazy to get rid of it and waited for the odor to eventually evaporate. Now the car filled with a different odor, perhaps the one the air freshener was trying to imitate.
I looked at Nathan out of the corner of my eye. He was staring out the window. His enormous hands were resting on the crumpled cap, and I saw that there was dirt under his fingernails, reddish brown dirt that looked like soil. There was something touching about his appearance, something big and slow, with a kind of hostile indifference, and that smell and the little wisps of hair on the nape of his neck. He looked out the window with the same unselfconscious childishness with which he had danced, examining the empty streets and the buildings and the bus stations and the street signs, absentmindedly crushing the cap between his hands and breathing heavily. I drove slowly, with deliberate care, like a forest ranger driving a lost bear back to its lair.
3
A month before I met Nathan my parents got divorced. Since they were already old, my father seventy and my mother sixty-seven, they couldn’t do it alone. I had a married sister who lived in Florida. Tali was three years younger than I and she had a one-and-a-half-year-old baby. When I told her on the phone that they were getting a divorce she said: “But I’m pregnant.” A few weeks later she really did get pregnant, perhaps to make it clear that she couldn’t help us get divorced, because she had a family of her own. Today she has a boy and a girl and we all have pictures of them on our fridge. Two American children smiling on the doors of three refrigerators.
My parents weren’t healthy, and I wondered where they got the courage, or the innocence, to separate, with the decade ahead of them likely to be difficult and ridden with illness, and probably their last. I asked my mother if she wasn’t afraid of being alone, if it didn’t frighten her that there would be nobody to take care of her when she needed something, a cup of tea in the middle of the night, or if she slipped in the bathtub, and she said no, she wasn’t frightened at all. “What’s there to be afraid of? I’m independent,” she said, “and I have got you.”
One scorching Saturday at the end of last summer, we were sitting in the kitchen and she suddenly asked me if I knew a good lawyer. “Maya,” she said, “do you know a good lawyer?” My father was standing next to the stove frying an omelette. From the minute she decided on the divorce, a few weeks earlier, she had stopped cooking for him. This was a form of protest she got from a movie she saw on TV, and because of it they now had to take turns frying their eggs.
She offered to make me breakfast but I said I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want her to get up and take an egg out of the fridge for me and stand next to the marble counter with one hand on her hip and the other holding the egg waiting for my father to finish with the frying pan. It was ridiculous, this business with the private omelettes. I said that I wasn’t hungry, and she asked if I knew a good lawyer and I saw my father’s shoulders stiffen, prick up like ears, with the spatula waving and trembling in his hand.
“What do you need a lawyer for?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t you need a lawyer when you get divorced, Jack?”
My father shook his omelette in the pan in order to disguise the trembling that began to spread through his body. He stood there frying and shaking, his shoulders talking to us, the spatula scratching the bottom of the pan. When he was angry he trembled, when he was sad he trembled, when he was afraid he trembled, and sometimes he trembled when he was happy, although it was a long time since I’d seen him trembling with happiness. Not even when my sister called from Florida one Saturday a year and a half ago and said: “Congratulations, Daddy, you’re a grandfather now.” And he didn’t look happy a week ago either, when she called to say that there was another baby on the way, and that they hoped that this time it would be a girl.
“So what’s this I hear, Daddy?” her voice echoed over the transatlantic line. “You’re getting a divorce? What’s come over you all of a sudden? Have you gone mad?” “We’ll see,” my father said. “We’ll see. The main thing is that you should take care of yourself.” Then my mother snatched the phone from him and asked Tali if she was feeling nauseated. When she was pregnant with the first child, she vomited for nine months. But Tali had been a born vomiter, so it was hard to know with her.
When we were kids, we had to take plastic bags with us everywhere. My mother was relaxed about her throwing up, Tali was a little martyr, but my father couldn’t stand to see her suffer. He would hold her forehead and tremble when she threw up. When we were driving in the car and Tali began to wail “Daddy, stop the car!” he would hit the brakes and jump out and open the back door, grab Tali by the arm and drag her to some corner or traffic island, and when she felt better and they returned to the car and she sat down beside me on the backseat, with a content expression full of suffering and satisfaction, I would lean forward and look at my father’s feet dancing on the pedals. Tali would press up against me and she too would look at our father’s trembling legs, stifling giggles that smelled of puke and a healthy sense of humor, but I was worried. I was afraid that he would lose control of the car and kill us all.
I sat in the kitchen and looked at him standing at the stove and trembling and ruining his omelette.
“I don’t think you need a lawyer,” I said. “Tali and I aren’t minors anymore, you don’t own the apartment, you don’t have a car or any property to fight over. What do you need a lawyer for?”
She put out her cigarette in her favorite round tin ashtray and sighed. She seemed a little disappointed that she didn’t need a lawyer. She was disappointed that her divorce, like her marriage, wasn’t particularly dramatic. My father transferred the torn omelette to a plate and sat down across from her. Her cigarette continued to send up spirals of smoke from the depths of the ashtray. They had an annoying tendency, my mother’s cigarettes, never to go out completely, especially when my father was sitting opposite her, reading secret messages in the smoke signals like an old Indian chief. “Those cigarettes,” he muttered to himself, “twenty-four hours a day,” and a drop of oil trickled down his chin.
“You see!” my mother shouted and pointed at my father stooping over his plate. “That’s what I need a lawyer for! So he won’t nag me all the time!”
“That’s why you’re getting a divorce,” I said. “He won’t nag you anymore about your smoking after you’re divorced. You don’t need a lawyer for Dad to stop nagging you about
the cigarettes.”
It seemed to me that my mother didn’t understand the real nature of her divorce. She thought that the divorce would be a remedial stage in her marriage—a transition from a dull marriage to a thrilling one. She didn’t take into account the fact that she would have to separate from my father. She assumed that he would still be there even after he gave her the divorce, that the divorce would hang, framed like a diploma, in the little kitchen, where my father would also be, sulkily frying himself an omelette and trembling, or maybe she thought that she would begin to cook for him again after they got divorced.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked gloomily, staring at my father sitting opposite her and eating without appetite. “How do you get divorced without a lawyer?”
“You go to the Rabbinate,” I said.
“The Rabbinate? Where’s the Rabbinate? I don’t even know where it is.”
“The same place you got married,” I said.
“Didn’t they move?” she asked. “They must have moved by now.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Can you find out for us?” she asked. She pulled another cigarette out of the pack and held it between her fingers, but when she saw my father’s gray eyes looking at her over his plate she didn’t light it. Maybe she didn’t light it because his look no longer begged her not to smoke while he was eating. It was a look that said that he had given up all hope of enjoying his food or anything else long ago, and that he knows where the Rabbinate is. “Jack,” she said quietly, “wipe your chin.”