Housebroken

by Yael Hedaya

  2

  He smiled at me. It was August 1979, a hot, disgusting day, I was wearing black jeans and a boring white tank top, I was sitting in the inner courtyard of the Café Milano practicing being a woman. I must have looked ridiculous with my elbows leaning on the table, drinking one espresso after the other, smoking Nelson cigarettes and writing poems with feigned feverishness, ’cause I thought then that inspiration was sexy, absorbed in myself and the paper napkins full of horny, rhymed reflections piled up under the glass I set on top to prevent them from flying away, not that they could have flown anywhere in the dead heat of eleven o’clock in the morning, but not too absorbed in myself and my serious, childish poems to notice that a sad-looking man was sitting next to the wall smiling at me.

  Which encouraged me to go on writing and order another double espresso and emphasize to the waiter and for the benefit of the stranger, whom I hoped was listening, the words “without milk”—because the woman I planned to be was a dangerous and mysterious woman, with caffeine and nicotine and promise flowing in her veins—and to light another cigarette with the end of the old one, and to wipe away the perspiration from my upper lip from the heat, or as I believed then, from the heat of creation, because I thought that maybe I was finally being discovered by a talent scout, or at least some other kind of hunter.

  I was fifteen, and I was sorry I wasn’t wearing something more poetic in honor of the unexpected encounter with the stranger, a long black dress, maybe earrings, or dark glasses hiding adventurous sadness.

  The stranger was dressed like someone who had nothing to say in particular: jeans and a belt with a big, shiny buckle, like Superman, and an ordinary white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looked, at first sight, like some kind of clerk.

  There was nobody else sitting in the courtyard of the Café Milano that morning, because the umbrellas didn’t provide much relief and the regular customers preferred the ceiling fans inside which moved as laboriously as the waiter, and like him were more symbolic than efficient. We were alone, myself and the man with the clerk’s appearance, sitting with his back to the stone wall which was covered with dusty ivy and swarming with insects, smoking a cigarette and smiling at me.

  I put down my pen and opened two packets of sugar, one of which tore, spilling its contents on the table, immediately inviting two bees to start buzzing aggressively around the mug, the ashtray, and the sticky poems. The man stood up, put his cigarettes and matches into his shirt pocket, and I thought he was going to pay and leave me alone with vague plans that could no longer materialize, but he stopped next to my table, scratched his head, and said: “It’s impossible to sit over there. It’s full of chiggers.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but this place is more dangerous, because of the bees.”

  He sat down on the chair opposite me and began sweeping up the spilled sugar with his hand, blowing the grains away and lifting the paper napkins with the poems and waving them gently in the air. “They’ll be gone in a minute,” he said and watched the bees hesitating and bumping into the umbrella until they took off, buzzing angrily, and flew over the ivy-covered wall in search of some other sweet location.

  He called the waiter and asked him to transfer his things to my table, which was apparently ours now: a glass of water, a cup of café au lait, and a half-eaten cheese sandwich.

  Within ten minutes I learned that he despised insects, that he hates the summer, that he dreams of making movies, that he spoke in a bored, lazy tone that matched his apologetic smile, that his car was parked right around the corner and that he didn’t know why he had mentioned it at all, he didn’t mean anything by it, and that his name was Matti Rosen. What it was possible to learn about me in ten minutes, even though I didn’t say anything, not even my name, could be seen in the reproaching eyes of the waiter, who suddenly began hovering around us, like the bees, like some strict father, both intruding and chasing away intruders.

  He emptied the ashtray before the stubs went out and brought it back wet. He took Matti’s glass of water away and asked him if he was going to eat his sandwich and Matti put his hand over the half-eaten roll and said yes he was, and the disapproving waiter disappeared into the café with a look on his old face that said: I did what I could.

  3

  Twice a week I drive him half alive to the hospital and half dead back, for the radiation treatments, and the awful medication he gets, and lately the car has been giving me trouble but there’s nobody to take it to the garage, and I don’t understand why they don’t give him chemotherapy, and maybe it’s better this way, because he throws up all the time anyway, and the doctors say that it’s because the tumor’s pressing down on something, and I have to restrain myself from not bursting out and screaming: “Yes, on me!”

  My mother comes every day to help with the children who walk around him suspiciously, like little animals, sometimes retreating and sometimes jumping on him as if they already miss him. They hug him and climb all over him and insist that he play with them, as if they want to put him to some kind of test, and maybe, from their point of view, the whole thing may seem like a temporary nightmare and they’re waiting around impatiently hoping for it to end. And as if in spite, this summer is particularly hot, one heat wave after another, and I have to see to it that he gets enough to drink, because that’s what I was told by the doctors whom I hate, whom I couldn’t stand from the moment I saw them because of their cruelty and because of their lies.

  And the radiation, that’s a joke too, they didn’t say so but I know very well, it’s just to show that they’re doing something, “giving it a chance” as they said with the little smile that covers up big lies. “We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. Rosen,” they say with the nonchalance of plumbers and with that phony smile of theirs, because they have to say something, you can’t diagnose a huge malignant tumor in somebody’s brain one fine day and send him home to die without an explanation.

  How I cried in their office that day, when they told us, but they must be used to this by now. Matti heard the news and said he was going to the cafeteria, and he left me alone as usual with all the responsibility. And the truth is that I too, at that moment, wanted to go downstairs with him, stand on line with him, take a tray and get something to make me forget everything, to bring us both back to where we were before the pains began, and the dizziness, and the nausea, and the blurred vision—something healthy, a big salad—but someone had to stay and hear what else the doctors had to say, because as much as you despise them, you find yourself believing them all the time.

  But what is enough to drink? I ask myself as I stand in front of the fridge—it’s kind of pleasant standing like this in the heat, I wish I could go on standing here until it’s all over—and I think: So what am I going to make the kids for dinner? And what difference does it make how much he drinks when he throws it all up anyway?

  My mother takes them downtown and buys them expensive toys as if they’re the ones who are going to die, and I don’t have any strength left to tell her that she shouldn’t do it. When they come back, beside themselves with excitement, and begin unpacking their gifts, she sees the look on my face and says: “Leave them alone, Mira, they’re fatherless children.” “But they’re not fatherless yet, Mom!” I say, because who does she think she is, that she buried him already? And she clutches my hand with her nails and says: “Shhhh … Mira … shhhh … don’t let them hear.”

  From the first moment, I knew that something was wrong. “You have to go and get yourself a checkup,” I said to him, because I thought it was a virus, but Matti looked at me as if to say, What do you want from me? You go get yourself a checkup. Three months, until one night he woke the whole house with his screaming: “Mira, my head hurts! Mira, I’m dying!” He held his head, and kicked savagely, even though I know he didn’t mean it, at the children who came running from their beds frightened.

  My mother brings Uri and Shahar back from their shopping expedition and I ask them: “So wha
t do you want for dinner?” And maybe because I asked a little too enthusiastically—their little dinners have been my salvation lately—they ignore me. Uri shuts himself in his room with a new computer game and Shahar runs to the kitchen, climbs on a chair, and without asking permission, taking advantage of the fact that all the boundaries in the house have been breached, opens the cupboard, takes a chocolate bar, sits down in front of the television, and asks: “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Daddy’s sleeping,” my mother says with that forced nonchalance of hers that drives me up the wall, and Shahar hears the toilet flushing over and over again and takes the chocolate milk she brings him—he’s been eating too many sweets lately but I don’t have the energy to say no—and without taking his eyes off the screen he asks: “Grandma, is Daddy sick?” And in the middle of the noise of the cartoons and the computer-game beeps I hear Uri shouting from his room: “Daddy’s dying!”

  And suddenly I feel like crushing the eggs I took from the fridge in my hands, and throwing them at the wall, or throwing them from the balcony on the heads of anyone passing by, like the children used to do with their toys, just to let someone down there know there’s a woman up here on the verge of a breakdown.

  My mother runs into the kitchen horrified and says: “He said ‘dying’! What should we do?” And I say: “Nothing, ignore it. He doesn’t know what it means anyway,” even though he knows very well, because in addition to everything else he inherited his father’s brains and pessimism, and he looks exactly like him too, his hair and his eyes, and the bitter smile that doesn’t look good on a child his age, and our friends always say: “You can see that Uri is Matti’s boy and Shahar is Mira’s,” and it terrifies me to think that soon both of them will be mine.

  4

  “Alona,” I said, “my name is Alona,” and he called the waiter and paid for both of us, and I didn’t object because I thought that this was the way these things were supposed to happen, that he was the man and I was his adventure, so he should pay, and we got up, and I followed him to his car, and sat next to him and looked straight ahead, and we didn’t talk the whole way, but whenever we stopped at a light he looked at me and asked: “How old are you?” And at the first light I said: “Seventeen,” and at the second light he asked: “So how old are you?” and I said: “Sixteen,” and at the last light, so that he should know that he was my adventure too, I said: “Fifteen, and I swear that’s the truth.”

  5

  He lies to the doctors like a child. As if that’s what will save his life. But he was never good at it, he always told the truth, even when I didn’t ask him to, even when I asked him not to, to spare myself pain.

  At first, days would go by without us exchanging a word, till Uri was born and provided us with a topic that may not have been fascinating, but which we at least had in common. And in spite of the anxieties and fears he always had about various disasters that could strike the child every minute of the day, even when he was sleeping, he was a model father.

  He was the one who got up at night and stood by the crib long after Uri had fallen asleep. I would find him there at all kinds of strange hours of the night, leaning against the wall, or sitting on a little plastic stool, looking at the baby in the darkness and counting his breaths. When he diapered him I wasn’t allowed to come near, as if I was disturbing some mysterious ritual. But the really bizarre thing was to see Matti feeding him: pushing the spoon into his mouth and immediately pressing his lips to the baby’s face to lick up anything that dribbled out, even if it was Gerber’s baby food or a soft-boiled egg, until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore and I said: “Why don’t you use a towel?” He looked at me and said: “My method’s better.” It was an intimacy that embarrassed me. Everything that didn’t exist between us existed between them, between Matti and this baby who looked exactly like him.

  One night, when Uri was two—a child with a full head of black hair and the smile of someone who wasn’t sure if it was okay to smile, I was at the end of my pregnancy with Shahar—Matti was playing with him in the living room, throwing him up in the air and catching him, and singing a song, and suddenly he missed and Uri fell on the floor and cut his head open. He screamed and he was bleeding, but Matti pushed me aside with his elbow and picked him up, grabbed the keys from the kitchen table, and ran barefoot with him to the car, and before I had time to catch up with him he had already started the car and driven off, as if I didn’t exist, as if it wasn’t my child he had almost killed, and I didn’t know what hospital he took him to, but I took a cab and searched emergency rooms before I found him in the third one, sitting on a bench by the pay phones with Uri in his arms, a big bandage on his head and one eyelid swollen, orange iodine stains all over his face, and Matti was hugging him and rocking him, and when he saw me he put his finger to his lips and whispered: “Five stitches. They gave him five stitches! Can you imagine?” And the truth is that I didn’t know then if five stitches was a lot or a little and I didn’t say a thing, and on the way home I drove because he said his legs were trembling.

  6

  And afterward, the instant coffee he gave me in a mug he quickly rinsed, and for himself Turkish coffee with milk, and the memory of the two mugs standing on the counter when I went into his room with him following me, scratching his head all the time as if something was bothering him, and neither of us came out again until dark.

  There was an old stereo system on the floor, a plastic box from the supermarket holding records, a bookcase made of red bricks and wooden planks, a small TV with a twisted coat hanger for an antenna, an ashtray full of stubs, a mattress covered with an Indian cloth, and a glass lying on its side next to a dry stain of coffee residues. He wasn’t expecting guests.

  Next to the wall was a closet with a yellow T-shirt and a towel hanging from the door. It was one of those rooms where life takes place on the floor, and which give you the feeling that you’re too tall, and so I sat down on the mattress, put my bag down beside me, and looked at him. He remained standing next to the door for a moment, and then he went into the kitchen and brought a chair whose seat and backrest were made of sky blue Formica, stood it in the middle of the room, sat down, and lit a cigarette as if he was about to interview me for a job, or remain silent for the rest of the afternoon. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out my cigarettes.

  “You smoke a lot?” he asked, picking up the glass from the floor and dropping his ash into it.

  “Yes,” I exaggerated, “a pack and a half a day.”

  “You started early,” he said in a reproachful voice and stroked the rim of the glass.

  “When did you?”

  “Me?” he said. “A long time ago. But I’m a lost cause.”

  He said “lost” as if it were true and as if he enjoyed saying it, and I felt pleasant tingles of danger running up my back, even though it was obvious that this man wasn’t dangerous, and then I noticed that his shirt collar was too big and looked like the wings of a plane, and that under his armpits there were perspiration stains, which may have started before, in the café, or this morning, when he left the house, before he got into trouble, before we got into the car which was parked in a no-parking zone, and which had a ticket stuck on the windshield that he didn’t even look at before he shoved it into the glove compartment which was already full of tickets, and then his skillful parking outside the house, the parking of a bank robber, with the nervous clicks of the steering wheel, and the way he ran up the stairs, leaving me a few steps behind, and opened the door with two turns of the key that shook the silence of the staircase, and waited for me, and closed the door behind me, and locked it twice, and immediately asked if I wanted coffee, and I immediately said yes, and only when I looked at his back as he stood at the sink and washed the mugs and I smelled his sweat did I begin to be afraid. But it wasn’t exactly fear.

  “Nice place,” I said, because it seemed a grown-up thing to say, and went into the room. “It’s a little small,” he said and I felt his breath on my neck as
he stood behind me and examined the room with me, as if he too was seeing it for the first time. The shutters were closed, and the room smelled of shade and dust and there was a silence about to be disturbed, and the premonition of a crime that was about to be committed.

  I wasn’t afraid of the man sitting on the chair and smoking, or of the room that was as crammed as an old suitcase. But maybe I don’t really remember the room. I’m pretty sure about the darkness, and the T-shirt and towel hanging from the closet door, because the towel became mine and I wore the shirt sometimes at night, but maybe the TV with the coat hanger, and the bookcase, and the spilled coffee are borrowed from other, later rooms, which it saddens me to remember, as if the memory itself is a betrayal of Matti, which is a betrayal of a chance to find out something about myself, something innocent and far and forgotten, and maybe a little boring.

  But I remember the two mugs standing and getting cold on the counter, brown mugs with a pattern of yellow and orange splashes, and the chair he sat on, and how he smoked and talked quietly and suddenly got up in the middle of a sentence and went to wash his face, and came back, and dried his face and hands with the thoroughness of a surgeon, and threw the towel back onto the closet door and said: “It’s hot as hell today.”

  7

  At the end of June they called me into their office and said that the tumor had grown to the size of a tennis ball, or a Ping-Pong ball, I don’t remember which, but it was definitely a ball. Matti stayed home, and when I got back from the hospital he didn’t even bother to ask. Only at night, before we went to sleep and he lay with his back to me, his fingers drawing circles on the wall, did he mumble: “Did they say anything?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I was glad that I couldn’t see his face, “they want to stop the radiation. They don’t think there’s any point continuing.”

  “That’s what they said?” he asked.