Housebroken

by Yael Hedaya

“I’ll find out for you,” I said.

  “And find out when they’re open and what we have to bring, maybe we need photographs, and how much it costs. Maybe we need witnesses, we needed witnesses when we got married didn’t we, Jack? Remember? I hope it isn’t going to be too complicated. And ask if you can testify for us too.”

  “She can’t,” said my father.

  “Why not? Why can’t Maya testify? Because she’s our daughter? She knows us better than anybody. Her testimony will be the best. Nobody else can testify as well as Maya.”

  “Because she’s a woman,” said my father, standing up to put his plate in the sink. “Women can’t testify.”

  “Ah,” said my mother and lit her cigarette. “I didn’t think of that.”

  My mother suffered from high blood pressure and she was thirty pounds overweight, but according to her she had a calm and optimistic personality, which was in itself a kind of health, and Tali always said: “I’m not worried about Mother.” And in fact she had no reason to worry, because most of the time Mom worried about her. She was surprisingly mature in everything concerning my sister. They were similar, although Tali inherited her thin build and short, almost dwarfish, stature from our father. They had the same wavy, auburn hair before Mother’s went gray, and the same round, brown eyes. There were times when they wore the same clothes and shopped together in the mall and sat in cafés, and smoked cigarettes together and Tali consulted her freely about boys, although there wasn’t much to consult about, because she married her first boyfriend.

  Mom was sorry when Tali went to Florida with her husband, because she lost her best friend. I felt sorry for her and tried to fill the gap, but it didn’t work out. She made faces when we stood in front of the display windows in the mall, shuffled her feet when she was tired, turned down my suggestions to sit down to have a cup of coffee and rest, and if I did succeed in persuading her, she would agonize for ages over which cake to choose, pacing back and forth in front of the display case, until I was forced to order for her, to put her out of her misery. She let me pay for her when I offered, she always agreed graciously, without protesting, and I always offered, because something about her screamed, in addition to everything else, economic helplessness.

  “You’ll forgive your mother,” she said to me on one of those exhausting shopping expeditions when we didn’t buy anything. “You’ll forgive your mother for being so spoiled, won’t you?” I hugged her when she said that.

  “One day, I hope, you’ll also have a good man, to pamper you the way you deserve,” she said when we stood on the escalator in the mall. She always sank into a reflective mood on the escalator. “But you’ll be careful who you choose,” she said, her fingers gripping the moving rail, “and find yourself someone strong. He doesn’t have to be too brainy, Maya—you don’t need an intellectual. You need someone to take care of you and love you. A guy with a big heart. And make sure he’s faithful. He shouldn’t be a womanizer, and he shouldn’t be thin, Maya!” she said and tripped, as usual, on the last step. “You listening?” she said as I helped her up, supporting her arm. “Stay away from thin men!”

  “But Tali’s husband’s thin,” I said. “Yes,” she said, “but Tali is a different story, and Yossi’s not so thin anymore, anyway. Tali says he’s got a belly on him like a pregnant woman.” “And Dad’s thin,” I reminded her. “Yes,” she said, “your father is really very thin, and lately he’s been losing weight too and I’m a little worried about him.” I never imagined that one year later, one spring day after Independence Day, on the very same escalator, she would tell me, a second before missing the last, sly, step again, that she decided to get a divorce.

  I took her to a café and sat her down opposite me and refused to let her hesitate over the cakes. I ordered a Danish for her, although I knew she didn’t like them, and I said to her: “You won’t last one minute without Daddy.” She took a little bite of the pastry and said: “You don’t understand.” I said: “What, Mother, what don’t I understand?” And she said: “It’s my last chance.” “Your last chance for what?” I whispered, and my mother, her eyes welling up with tears and her mouth spitting crumbs, shouted: “To be happy!”

  I was silent, and she sniffed and tried to wipe away her tears with the paper napkin, one of those flimsy napkins you pull out of a metal container that are incapable of absorbing anything. Her lipstick shone with confectioners’ sugar. I asked: “But what about Dad?” And she said: “Dad is Dad. You know he doesn’t like changes, but he’ll manage.” She took a little mirror out of her bag and looked at herself, and then she pushed the plate aside and said: “Why did you order me a Danish, Maya? You know I hate them.”

  * * *

  We sat in the kitchen. My father washed the frying pan and put it on the rack. My mother began to ask him to get her a pack of cigarettes from the drawer, but she changed her mind at the last minute. Obviously she realized that she couldn’t bring a lawyer into our lives and in the same breath, in the stifling air of four eggs fried in pairs, ask my father to do her a favor and bring her cigarettes. She didn’t exactly know what she was doing, but she had a sense of timing.

  She stood up heavily and sighed, went to the top left drawer next to the stove, and took out a new pack. My father dried his hands on a towel and replaced it on its hook, and looked at my mother struggling with the drawer, which refused to close. There were always problems with this drawer, because it had too many things in it. He waited in silence for her to say “Enough, Jack, I can’t take it anymore,” and when she said “Enough, Jack, I can’t take it anymore,” and resumed her seat at the table, peeling the cellophane off the new pack, he went up to the drawer and closed it quietly, with one deft little push.

  My father bought her the cigarettes. Every Friday he brought home two cartons from the market. He knew a shop where they sold them at a reduced price. When my mother asked him for the address—she had prepared a notebook with essential phone numbers and addresses for after the divorce; it was a child’s exercise book with pictures of Barbie dolls on the cover that she bought in a stationery shop—he didn’t know how to give her directions. “It’s complicated,” he said. “You won’t find it. I’ll get them for you.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I’ll get them for you. Every Friday I’ll bring you your two cartons, as usual. You’re not going to quit smoking after we’re divorced, right, Deborah?”

  “Right,” she said. “Actually, maybe I will. After the divorce I’ll quit smoking.”

  “So write that down in your notebook too,” he said. “So you won’t forget.”

  She gave him a bitter smile, and he said: “But in the meantime, can I get you your cartons? Would that be a problem?”

  “No,” my mother said, confused and defeated, and suddenly her eyes lit up and she said: “But how will you get into the house, Jack?”

  “With my key,” he said.

  “But I might change the locks,” she said. “I think you’d better give me the address of that place anyway. Just in case. Because maybe I’ll change all the locks in the apartment.”

  There was only one lock in our house, which she started referring to as “the apartment” after announcing the divorce. I think she got that from some movie too. Lately she had been watching a lot of American melodramas about women who escaped from their husbands who beat them, or who were alcoholics, taking their little blond children with them, wearing sunglasses and racing over the continent in old cars, realizing their true strength on the way. My mother had never been to the States, and she didn’t have a driver’s license either. My father had never hit her, and the only time he drank was wine at the Passover Seder. And nevertheless, last summer, with a sad, romantic determination, she began calling our house “the apartment.”

  Ever since then the house started behaving accordingly, and turned into a three-room apartment with a long narrow kitchen and a rectangular living room with a closed-in balcony, separate toilet and b
athroom, and two bedrooms: my parents’ room with its huge built-in closet, and mine and Tali’s old room, where over the past few weeks all my father’s things were piling up on the two single beds.

  4

  I was disappointed when I dropped Nathan off in front of his building and he didn’t invite me in or ask for my phone number. I watched him go inside, pushing his cap into one coat pocket and taking his keys out of the other.

  A friend once told me that I frightened men. “You frighten men,” Noga said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke away from her. She was one of those smokers who hated cigarettes but liked the habit. “It’s a kind of pattern,” she went on analyzing my problem, her left hand, with big silver rings on each finger, absentmindedly touching her neck, looking for the huge hickey she showed me when we met. “You see?” she said. “At first they think you’re really sweet, and then they freak out.”

  “So maybe it’s their pattern,” I said.

  “No,” said Noga. “I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen you in action. I’ve seen you at school. I’ve seen you at parties. I’ve known you for a long time. You just don’t know how to play the game.”

  “What game?” I asked.

  “There are a lot of them,” she said and tapped her cigarette nervously on the edge of the ashtray, “but in your case I mean the happiness game.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You have to act as if you’re happy, okay with your life, even though we both know you’re not. And then, at the right moment, and there are no rules about this, so don’t ask me how you know when that moment arrives, only then, you start unloading your unhappiness, but in small doses. Not too much at once.”

  We were sitting in a new café that had just opened next to her house. She liked inaugurating new cafés and then abandoning them. She was hyperactive, and beautiful. Not beautiful in the usual sense; she was short and plump and she had dry, frizzy hair that she had struggled with all her life, wasting money and hope on treatments that only made her hair rebel and frizz all the more, but Noga loved herself, and she did it so wholeheartedly and enviably that the world apparently had no choice but to love her back. I always argued that she loved herself because men had always loved her, but Noga said that it was the other way around. We agreed that it was a classic case of the chicken and the egg.

  “This is a nice place,” she said and looked around with a bored expression. “Let’s make it our hangout.” I said, “Okay,” even though I knew that the next time we met she would suggest we go somewhere else. “You see?” she went on. “They run away from you because they realize that you’re very smart and very sad. For men, brains and sadness are a lethal combination.” And in the same breath, impatiently grinding out the half-smoked cigarette, clutching my hand in hers—I felt both the warmth of the hand and the coolness of the rings—she said: “Maya, I promise you that one day you’ll see how wonderful it is to come home after a lousy day, the lousiest day in your life, to someone who’s waiting for you with a big hug and dinner.” And of all her sentences, this was the one that saddened me the most, because for me it was a cliché but not for Noga, and she squeezed my hand in hers and said: “I promise you.”

  Noga was always involved with men who asked her to come live with them after they’d known each other for a month or two, maybe because she seemed needy to them, as if every day of her life was the lousiest day of her life, or maybe because she was a wonderful cook. For the last year Noga had been alone, because she was in love with someone who had a girlfriend. She was very calm for someone in love with somebody who was in love with somebody else. She was sure that everything would be all right, and she waited patiently.

  It was my friend Noga who was supposed to dress up as a fairy. She never made it to that party. What happened, she told me a few days later, was that she was just about to leave home, dressed in a white satin dress she had sewn herself, with layers of tulle and ruffles, and white shoes she had once bought for the wedding of some childhood friend of ours, shoes that were useless except for weddings and costume parties, and she even had a pair of little wings she had worked on for a week, bending wires and attaching transparent parachute silk to them, and a wand she got at a toy shop.

  She was just about to put on her coat over her costume and leave, when Amir arrived. He stood in the doorway and announced that he had broken up with his girlfriend. He was on the verge of tears. Noga stood in the kitchen in her fairy costume, with her wand in her hand, and made him tea. The next morning he suggested that they move in together.

  She said to me: “You see? You have to be softer, a little more helpless. I know it’s not really you, but try. Don’t be sad. I already told you, sadness is no good. It frightens them. Too much strength isn’t good either. A little strength is okay, it’s even sexy, but not too much. You have to find the balance. Try to be a little pathetic, if you can, and you’ll see how it works. Like a charm.”

  I said: “But Amir came to cry on your shoulder. He was the pathetic one. What exactly is the charm here?” And she smiled mysteriously and said: “You don’t understand how it works.” I said to her: “No. How does it work? A minute ago you told me I had to act happy.”

  “Sure,” she said, “but you shouldn’t overdo that either, because then they think that you don’t need them. Sure I let him cry on my shoulder. I made him tea and stroked him, gently, nothing sexy or anything, I put my hand on his, and I listened to him talking about his disgusting ex, he talked for about three-quarters of an hour without stopping, and then you’re not going to believe what I did.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I burst into tears!” said Noga and burst out laughing.

  “You burst into tears?”

  “Yes,” she said, “you know me, I can turn the faucets on and off whenever I feel like it. So all of a sudden, when we’re sitting there in the living room, and he’s telling me how miserable he is and what’s going to happen to him now, the tears started pouring out of my eyes. At first he didn’t even notice, he was so busy feeling sorry for himself, and then he suddenly looked at me and said: ‘What’s wrong?’ He panicked, you should have seen him. I said: ‘It’s nothing. I’m sad for you. It hurts to see you like this. I’m sad that in the end we’re all so alone in the world.’”

  “You said that?” I asked. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Something like that.”

  “But that’s such a horrible cliché!” I said.

  “Clichés are good,” she said. “Horrible clichés are excellent. And you have to learn not only how to say them but also to live them.”

  She said this and signaled the waitress. She said that she was in a rush. She had to meet Amir at his place. They had made plans to meet at noon and redecorate the kitchen together.

  5

  The last man I slept with was tall and thin and better-looking than Nathan. Micky also had blue eyes but had thick black hair, and he wrote bad poems. We sat in my place, on the couch, and he showed them to me, poem after poem, holding the pages with the tips of his fingers as if they were fragile or wet. I felt sorry for him when I read his poems. I met Micky at the university. I was working on my Ph.D. in comparative literature and I shared an office with a teaching assistant who would use the room to take naps or fight with his girlfriend on the phone. Micky studied economics and business administration. I found him wandering the corridors of the arts faculty one evening, looking for a pay phone. His battery was dead, he said, and he had to call a tow truck. I told him he could call from my room. We sat in the room for two hours waiting for the tow truck. We talked about cars and poetry. With the same anger that he spoke about the battery that betrayed him, Micky spoke about a woman he had once been in love with. He said it was infuriating because it was a new car. Then he asked if I would like to read his poems sometime.

  I told him that they were touching. I even dwelled here and there on an image, and when I saw how flattered he was, I felt even sorrier f
or him. He sat sunk into the sofa, the pages piled on his knees, and I noticed that he had drawn little pictures on some of them, mainly birds and musical notes. He wrote about rainy streets and unrequited love. Rinat appeared in every line, surrounded by birds and musical notes and fingerprints. She was his girlfriend in high school, his first girlfriend, and she was the inspiration for all this crude sorrow.

  My parents’ divorce was finalized that morning, and I was glad when Micky called that afternoon and asked if I remembered him, “the guy with the dead battery,” and I said: “Yes, of course I do. How are you? How’s the car?” “Okay,” he said. “Got a new battery,” and he asked if he could come over in the evening with his poems.

  We sat shoulder to shoulder with the terrible poems between us. When we finished analyzing them he laid them in a pile on the floor and sighed. For a moment longer he went on staring at them, leaning forward, his head bowed over, reading them upside down even though he knew them by heart, and then he put his hand on my shoulder. Even through my sweater I could feel his cold fingers and their feeble weight. I was disappointed that his fingers were so light.

  “I still miss her,” he said. “Funny, I haven’t seen her for fifteen years, but I still have feelings for her.”

  “What kind?” I asked.

  “Sadness,” he said, “and a sense of a missed opportunity.”

  “But you were seventeen,” I said. “It was your first love.”

  “And I guess my last too,” he simpered, and his thin fingers tickled my neck. “I’ve had girlfriends since,” he said. “I even lived with someone for a year. I don’t know, maybe one day something will happen.”

  “What will happen?” I asked.

  “You’ll probably think it’s childish.”

  “No,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “I’m waiting for someone who’ll be so different from her, so much the opposite, so much Rinat’s antithesis, that maybe because of that I’ll manage to fall in love with her. Do you understand?”