Husbands appeared occasionally for performances or events, or to pick up their children, once in a blue moon. They wore open-necked button-down shirts, pressed khakis, an aura of business-like competence. Their wives spoke of them with pity and disdain. Sure, they knew a lot about embassy policy in the Middle East, and their new boss was Hillary Clinton. But they were remarkably obtuse about the simplest things, did not remember which day their child had swimming lessons (Wednesday, Wednesday all year long), would not pick up their socks, and, like Simon, could never find their keys.
There was a conspiracy of wives who silently ironed shirts and washed underpants and pressed keys into their husbands’ hands as they rushed out the door to meet the foreign minister by nine o’clock. The wives shared the secret among themselves: it was important that the world saw their husbands as men of industry and men of power, important too that they alone knew how quickly it would all collapse without their own tireless behind-the-scenes engineering, their weary, resentful housewifery. They spoke with affectionate superiority of the women they had once been, the way you might speak of a younger sister who travelled the world, fell recklessly in love, believed in radical change, had not yet been disciplined by her life.
When I came home and told Simon about the women from the daycare, he seemed indifferent. “It doesn’t sound like you have much in common with them,” he said. He was full of news about the infighting in his department, the colleagues who hadn’t spoken to one another for years, and the ones who spoke only to exchange barely veiled insults.
“You know,” he told me, “I said something at a meeting, and my colleague said, ‘I completely disagree with everything you just said.’ Everything! Can you imagine that!”
I shook my head. His shirt was rumpled and he had dark sweat stains under his arms. He was starting to look like one of those academic men who wanted to project that they were more mind than body. As the years passed, the university seemed more and more of a petty place to me, a game played where nothing was at stake. I couldn’t bring myself to care. “I should iron that shirt,” I said, knowing that I would not.
7.
I was feeling more than disciplined by my life. I was feeling beaten. I had never expected to be derailed by having children. Simon and I had started our degrees at the same time; he was already on sabbatical, and I was floundering. Of the two of us, I had been the more promising.
We had waited a long time before having children, or at least, it had seemed a long time in a community where baby announcements followed wedding announcements with only just enough time in between to ensure the appearance of decency. I am certain that people believed something was wrong, and that when they didn’t ask about our plans to have children it was out of their strained, fastidious attempts to protect us. We had met young, had married young, and the path of least resistance would have been to join those instant families, three or four years out of high school, baby-faced parents promenading their new strollers and responsibilities. No. Not us. We said we would find ourselves first, and would have some time for only each other. If only we’d known it wouldn’t matter in the end, all of those years of establishing
our coupledom, once the children arrived and made our romance just the prelude for their arrival.
Two months after Gabriel was born, I was so desperate for solitude that I started to take long walks in the evening, after he’d gone to bed and before he woke up for his first feeding. It was my only opportunity to be alone since the baby was so needy and the nights so interrupted. I would walk for an hour, quickly, as if I were being followed, through the alleys and streets of my neighbourhood, looking into the lit windows of the houses. Because the streets were dark, if the curtains were open I could see right into the living rooms of strangers. I could see the colour of the paint, I could look at the art on the walls, I could even see the television programs on the new flat screens that dominated the rooms, though the sound was muted. I imagined other lives in other houses as I walked the tight circle that always brought me home.
The nightly walk became a kind of compulsion. It was as though I were driven outdoors as soon as the sun went down, and when I couldn’t go, I’d be uneasy and restless all the next day. Almost none of my friends in the city had children, and the tribe of new mothers was frightening to me. I did have one friend with a new baby, and when we called each other, we were like prisoners whispering through a crack in the wall between their cells.
Simon and I talked about the old days with wonder, as though they’d happened to other people: “Can you imagine,” we would say, “we used to stay in bed until noon on a Sunday, we used to wander out in the evening without
a destination?” As if staying in bed for three or four extra hours was the unlikeliest, the most exotic thing in the world. Only other new parents understood that degree of incredulous nostalgia for something so ordinary. Our friends without children thought our new limitations were pathetic—“Can’t the baby amuse himself for a while in the morning while you sleep in?” they would say, in their awe-inspiring obliviousness, not realizing that it would be like asking a tornado to rest for just a little while, or a tidal wave to stand still. Friends with older children assured us that this overwhelming period of early parenthood lasted only a little while, forgetting that while we were inside of it, it felt like it would last forever.
But it was right that the children should become the centre of our lives. Parents who stayed too flagrantly in love with each other always had children who seemed a little famished, outside the grand feast of the parental romance. Those children surely could never feel truly loved. Our children, on the other hand, had slid right into the spotlight, bawling and squinting, from the moment of their arrival in the delivery room; it was our marriage that had been left in shadow. I had never forgotten the words of a character in a film who described having children as running a small daycare with someone you used to date. But at least we were equally besotted with our children, and besides, there was this new kind of love, the love for a person who is essential for your child’s care and happiness. Simon was definitely not my boyfriend anymore, or my new husband, but he was the father of my children, and that was the least transient category of them all.
At least, that was what I told myself.
Routine is the prison and the refuge of raising small children; we obsessed about it, tried endlessly to implement it, and then felt constrained by its demands. Sometimes it felt like we spoke to one another only to make or correct household arrangements; who would drop off or pick up or buy milk or fill out the form or make plans or remember every single thing. I think of those now as the scarcity years; not enough time or money or sleep, especially sleep. I think a low-grade anger, like a low-grade fever, ran under the skin of the relationship.
All the women I knew in Israel hated their husbands. Aden was having affairs. Andrew was just clueless. Roger had just come back from Iraq and was angry all the time. There was this women’s chorus, this consensus of complaints, this combination of pity and disdain for men who could not, after all, be expected to behave better.
“And you, Hannah,” Jenna said, “you shouldn’t think Simon is so great either.” It felt like she had punched me in the gut.
Truth be told, I was worried about Simon. Since we had arrived, he was restless in his skin, moody, quick to take offence, quick to disappear. The first day he went to work he came back in a foul mood. It was a rainy day, and when he walked in it was as if the bad weather came with him. He threw his jacket on the bookcase, and it slipped off onto the floor; he left his bag in the middle of the hallway. Without saying hello, he walked into the bathroom and closed the door, and he stayed in there for a long time. That coat on the floor was a slap.
The boys had worn me down that day. I was tired from walking them to and from school in the rain and keeping them inside all afternoon. But these were my days: I woke up early and put out breakfast. I cleaned breakfast up and w
alked them to school. I shopped for groceries and picked them up. I made a snack and wiped down the counter. I picked up their shoes and did the dishes. I put the television on and started supper. I picked up their toys, I picked up their shoes, I wiped down the toilet. I did it again and again. I couldn’t figure it out, how this had become my life. I wasn’t even good at it; the house was sloppy, our meals were dull. Only the children were happy, and how long could they stay happy, with a mother like me?
Simon remained full of complaints about the university. They hadn’t set him up with an office, his colleagues were cold, his students indifferent. How quickly he became withdrawn and I became shrewish; the response was so automatic it seemed almost a chemical reaction. After all this time it shocked me that we could become strangers to each other, but it was, after all, the easiest thing in the world.
We had been so young and promising, and now we were getting to an age at which nobody called you promising. We’d buried our heads in the sandbox of raising the children, and now that we were able to take a breath, to reach back up and look around, we found we had arrived, astonishingly, at the middle of our lives. There was no reason for it to astonish us; all that had happened was we had settled down into the bedrock of cliché, which, because we were people who hated clichés, we imagined would never apply to us. But there we were, and both a little stranded, facing a horizon of diminished possibilities and fighting the temptation to blame each other.
But I wasn’t about to talk about it, not with them. It was as if their betrayal made me more loyal, their loquacity made me more tight-lipped. I didn’t want him to become just another piece in this conversation we were having about men. No.
The families we met outside the daycare also seemed unhappy. One friend couldn’t help but make a face when her husband spoke. It was entirely unconscious and flickered across her features like a wind, this deep grimace of discontent. He did the same thing when she was speaking. And then there was an array of sounds, sighs, audible breaths, skeptical mews, so that speaking to them was almost intolerable, because the nearly silent theatre under the conversation we were having was so distracting and in its way so very loud.
And many of the children we met ran wild, hit, bit, talked back. Their parents were all American and had moved to Israel as adults; they were naturalized, to some degree, but they would never be natives. Their children had already surpassed them, already disdained them, their stupid grammatical mistakes, their poor pronunciation, their intolerable helplessness. Some of these children were already deciphering contracts for their parents, filling out forms, dealing with the plumber on the phone. When you were an immigrant you had to abdicate the mastery that was the birthright of the native-born; you had to be willing to appear a little ridiculous to your children, who were born swimming in this culture not your own. And perhaps the discord that ran under the surface of everything had gotten under the skin of these families, too.
There was one family, with three beautiful children. We often had dinner with them on Friday nights. They were meticulous cooks and set a beautiful table and spoke softly and carefully to one another and to their children. As we walked home we said, “How lovely they are to each other! How well behaved their children are! How restful to spend time with a peaceful family!”
Eventually, we learned that she had told him to move out and was filing for divorce. It hadn’t been peace after all—everyone had just been holding their breath.
I had a pregnancy scare, a brief one, or less a scare than the brief flicker of paranoia that always came over me when I thought I was overdue. I was standing with Yumiko in the park across the street from the daycare, and our children were climbing a sculpture made out of pink stone with warm, involuted curves that looked like a cross between an ear and a vulva. Snapdragons bloomed in bright clashing rows, standing like soldiers, and massive cacti grew along the path. Someone had scratched a heart into the long, spiny leaves of a giant aloe and had added up two sets of initials to equal love. The heart and letters were ridged in white, scar tissue against the deep green.
“I am a little worried,” I said to Yumiko.
I was terrified. I still hadn’t recovered from the infancy of the boys, when the sleepless nights and constant need undid me. For a little while, I stopped sleeping entirely, lying tensed in bed and waiting for the next hungry cry.
Yumiko’s dark glasses covered half of her narrow face. She’d recently cut her hair, and it lay like a smooth black wing against her cheek.
“That would be impossible with me and Andrew,” she said.
“Impossible? You’re awfully confident.”
“Impossible,” she repeated, and if she looked at me in disdain because I was so slow I couldn’t tell because of the dark glasses masking her face. “I think it’s been a year, almost. His last birthday. And I had to get drunk. Now, if he’s horny, he knows what to do.” Her long, pale, elegant fingers mimed an obscene gesture so quickly that I almost wasn’t sure it had actually occurred.
The afternoons were open with a heavy freedom. Jenna, Yumiko, Katie, once she stopped working for the consulate midway through the year. And me.
8.
When I last visited Jerusalem, I was still a teenager. Now everything shocked me: the separate buses, the way the city divided along invisible lines. North was a sea of black and white, wrists and ankles covered, eyes down, women at the back of the bus. East felt like an entirely different country—all of the signs were in Arabic, the sidewalks disappeared, buildings were crammed too close to one another, and piles of garbage bordered the streets. And West Jerusalem was glistening stones and fancy cafes, a Gucci on the rich new promenade into the Old City. People from the three Jerusalems crossed there, on the street corners and at the bus stops, but they didn’t look at each other. It was as if only their own people were solid flesh: they looked through everyone else, as if the other Jerusalems didn’t exist.
Getting used to the people was no less jarring. Israelis were an odd mix of hospitable and hostile. Any interaction could jump in emotional temperature in an instant; at any moment you might be either slapped or embraced. The country ran a constant fever. Traffic was a war zone, and in the grocery store people cut in line with naked aggression. When a car backfired, everyone jumped, and nobody smiled at anyone else while walking down the street. But they liked to talk, liked to tell you exactly what you were doing wrong.
An Israeli reality show had staged an encounter in a grocery store. An actress, dressed as a Muslim, walked in and asked for a cappuccino, and another actor behind the counter refused to serve her. One after another, Israeli passersby intervened with great passion and eloquence. Several friends posted the clip on Facebook; to them it was evidence of an absence of racism in the culture. But to me it was further proof that Israelis would take every possible opportunity to contradict you, to grandstand, to prove you wrong, to tell you how you ought to have behaved. It was a culture of busybodies and grandmothers, and the warmer and more intrusive the people around me became, the more I shrunk into myself, cold and reserved, though in America I thought of myself as warm, open, artless.
One day, I took Sam to the park. People called it “The Grove” because it was sheltered in a circle of eucalyptus trees. A man on a bench struck up a conversation. He had a kind smile; he sat with his arm around his daughter, and as he spoke he played with her long brown hair. He had come from Morocco, he said, “Which is how I know, for an absolute fact, that the Arabs want to push us all into the sea.”
He placed his palms up benevolently, letting go of his daughter’s braid. He said, “What choice do we have but to expel them?”
The swings at the park hung in a circle, so each child swung towards the others’ feet. The late afternoon sun caught and tore on the upper branches of the eucalyptus trees. My boys took turns surfing down the green slide, their arms outstretched for balance, holding open handfuls of light. The man sent his daughter to
buy a popsicle, turned back towards me, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
This kind of encounter was not uncommon. Strangers were so very eager to tell you whom to hate. A taxi driver honked at a man in a long black coat and luxuriant peyos slowly crossing the street.
He said, “They’re a cancer on the country.”
He wore the crocheted dark blue kippa of the modern orthodox Zionist. It covered most of the bald spot on the back of his head, but a ring of scalp showed around it. I didn’t know how the kippa stayed attached; it wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask, really.
“A cancer?” I said, and he said, “Trust me.”
He told me his son had been killed during the Lebanon war. Soon after the death, he was driving his cab on Remembrance Day. When the memorial siren sounded, he stopped the car, as was customary, and sat in silence, thinking of his son and of the dead. His customer, a Chasidic man, leaned forward impatiently in the back seat and cuffed him on the shoulder. “Nu,” he said, “let’s go! What am I paying you for?”
Arabic for Beginners Page 4