She was not aware on that day that what she asked to be was impossible. She asked her older sister what she should tell the sorting officer she wanted to do, and her older sister laughed. Her older sister knew that the sorting officer would not care what she had to say. Then her older sister wanted to laugh some more. She was not actually the type who laughs. She was a secretary in the army. She advised Mom to say she wanted to be an air traffic controller.
In those days air force bases were known for having built-in theaters and bowling alleys. Places Mom had never seen before in her life. Female air force soldiers were daughters of politicians and military men. Air traffic controllers were the daughters of combat pilots who later became politicians. My mom’s father bought a lottery ticket every week and promised to make my grandmother a queen, but meanwhile worked for forty years as a dispatcher of Israel’s only bus company. He was just an expected man who aspired in the most expected of ways. He died the year I was born, after he read in the paper that he had lost all the money he had ever saved in the market. He either did it himself or had a heart attack; either way it was something expected that killed him off.
The sorting officer’s response to Mom’s request was anything but expected. He laughed once. He laughed twice. She asked him why he was laughing and he laughed again.
“You want to be an air traffic controller?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mom said. She was not the brightest lightbulb. “This is what I want.”
I have heard too many versions of how the conversation rolled on from there, and I don’t want to tell you any of them. Sometimes when you tell a story you’ve heard too many times, you remember all the times you’ve heard it before, and you think that maybe it is not very real, and then you think that maybe you are not very real. Maybe you are another woman’s daughter. What’s important is that Mom became an air traffic controller. No one could believe it, but she did. The air force base she was placed on did not have a theater or a bowling alley or a swimming pool. It was located on a beach. She thought the beach was the most beautiful beach in the world. She said, not just Israel. The world. One time we saw a magazine picture of an abandoned beach in Zanzibar. She said the beach in Sinai where she served looked like that, but that it was also more. I asked what she meant by more, but she just said that it was more of everything.
When she took the bus from the sorting base to the Tel Aviv airport, the driver of the bus knew her. He knew her father. That was the price of having a father who worked for the bus company. You couldn’t go anywhere without the help of those who knew the man who raised you. You could never pretend to be a tourist. The country and its roads owned you.
The bus driver asked her how her dad was doing and where she was serving. He asked her that but then immediately started cursing a passenger who told him to hurry the fuck up. The passenger was also a girl soldier, but she looked like she had been serving for much longer than Mom. Her uniform was tailored to her size.
Mom did not want to be rude. She sat behind the driver as he threatened the girl soldier that if she cursed at him one more time he would make her get off the bus. Mom felt good, so good, showing her new army ID and being allowed onto the bus because of it, and not because of her other ID, the one she had been using all of her life. The orange ID that said she was the daughter of a company employee. Mom only paid to ride the bus one time in her life, the day she took me to the army and didn’t want to take the car because she was afraid of driving back home alone. By the time her dad retired, she was already married to a man who owned a company car, so she didn’t need to take the bus any other time, because of that company car. Not a bus-company car. A car from a company that made parts that went into machines that made airplanes.
She thought the driver had forgotten about her, but as soon as he started the bus he was ha-ha angry with her. Up until that point, the only jokes Mom had ever heard from men and boys were ha-ha-angry jokes. The seller at the market was ha-ha angry with her that she bought his best fish for the Sabbath dinner. “You trickster, you! You took my best fish. What will my other customers say? Ha-ha, I am angry.” The milkman whose wagon she fell off when she broke her nose. “You trickster, you! What were you doing climbing on my wagon anyway? Now every time someone asks you how you broke your nose you’ll tell them you fell off my wagon, and they’ll think I am a bad driver! Ha-ha, I am angry.” She had four sisters, no brothers, and she went to a religious allgirls’ school. Not because she was religious but because her sister had refused to go back to the public school after a boy told her a ha-ha-angry joke and then spat on her hair. So after that, all the sisters were sent to a religious school, because the oldest sister is always the strongest. Mom’s dad didn’t tell any jokes, not even ha-ha-I-am-angry jokes, because he truly was angry all of his life.
“So what? Now that you are a soldier you are too good to answer a question from an uncle?” the bus driver asked. He was ha-ha angry. He was not her uncle, but he knew her father so he called himself her uncle. “How’s Dad? Where are you serving?”
The collar of the green uniform chafed Mom under her jaw. What she wanted to do more than anything was make the chafing stop, but no matter how she straightened her collar it didn’t help.
“Dad is happy. I am serving as an air traffic controller in Sharm el-Sheikh,” she said. When she said it out loud it sounded so correct. This was who she was. This was where she was going. She needed to take the bus to get there. The bus company was there to serve her. So was the driver.
The driver was angry, angry actually, at her answer. At how confident she had become. This was, at least, what she thought, because it sounded like he was no longer joking, so all that was left was anger.
“Tell Dad that if he keeps on drinking and missing work, we won’t cover for him for much longer, you hear me?” the driver told Mom.
She heard him. She thought that by now the skin under her jaw must be pink. But she didn’t touch it.
“A house full of women, and you can’t take care of one slow man,” the driver said.
Mom leaned her head against the window. A lady with too many chins looked ahead with her neck stretched as if she were driving the bus herself. Mom looked at the lady as though if she only looked hard enough, she might never have to become her.
Mom had never flown before, and she was so eager to see the streets of Tel Aviv from above and to watch the crowded beaches and hotels becoming smaller beneath her that she thought she would stare out the window the whole flight, but instead she fell asleep. She dreamed of her father. He was chasing her like he did in real life, after she cut her oldest sister’s shoulder with a razor so deep there was no choice but to take her to the doctor because she bled through all the fabrics they used to stop her blood. Mom and her sisters often cut each other when they were little. This was because they didn’t have a pencil sharpener, so they used rusty razors to sharpen their pencils for school. They would stand around the trash can and sharpen, and then they would bicker over the same things all sisters do. Over the ways their faces and smells had turned excruciating to each other because they were so near, because they were so much like their own. The only difference was that they had razors in hand when they bickered.
In her dream her father had chased her just as he did in real life, and he was drunk, just as he was in real life. The difference was that in the dream he was slow. He kept trying to reach her, and although she did not want him to reach her, she also did not want to be one of five women who could not take care of one slow man, and so she ran slowly herself.
She woke up when the wheels thumped onto the asphalt and bobbed her head sideways. When she looked out the window, she saw sands that stretched as if untouched yet keen and an ocean so quiet she thought it had stopped stirring just for her.
MOM CALLED my most chronic problems sulas. Over the course of those three years at the beach, Mom once had to practice compassion so well so that it accidentally became a habit, so that she was able to live for the rest
of her life without ever desiring half a thing for herself. I could tell her problems that didn’t even have words, problems I could never tell my friends about, not even Emuna or Avishag, and she would give them words just so she could do something about them. She noticed my first sula herself. I didn’t even have to explain it to her. It was she who explained my problem to me. She explained that a sula was a bad habit, like knocking on wood or biting your nails. That it was a type of habit that only you knew what you were hoping to gain by preserving but that you didn’t have words to explain to others. Her explanation sounded perfect. She said it was the worst thing in the world.
What you have to realize is that every sula was a serious problem. A problem that you didn’t remember what it was like not having and could not even imagine your life without. Almost like being pregnant when you don’t want the baby or being infected with a deadly disease, but worse, because no one knew about it and because you suffered from it every second.
My first sula had to do with my neck. Or rather, that area under my jaw. One day when I was five I made a funny face that stretched it out. From then on, it felt as though I was doing it accidentally all the time, and when I looked in the mirror I started worrying that by making that funny face I would give myself a double chin. I was ten and worried about looking fatter in the face, because I had heard Mom say that once you gain weight it doesn’t matter if you lose it; your face will stay fat until the day you die. It got worse. I somehow started believing that snapping my fingers three times when they were under my chin, so that I could feel the snap smacking the skin, would cancel out the influence of the funny face. I had no reason to believe that, but I believed it so much I couldn’t stop. My fingers hurt so much I couldn’t hold a pencil. I would swallow my mayo-mustard-tomato sandwiches so fast at school because I couldn’t wait to have them out of my hands so I would be able to snap my fingers again. It was only when Mom tried to take a picture of me on the eve of the first snow that she noticed and screamed: “Sula!” Then she let me stay home from school the next day and watch my Argentinean soaps as she fed me pita and yogurt and clementines.
I would like to tell you that just knowing that there was someone out there who understood fixed the problem, but this was not true. After the problem with my neck there was that time Mom said that standing next to the microwave would make your eyes run away from each other. She said it to my sister, but I heard. This led to almost half a year of the eyes sula. I would roll them in their sockets till they screeched, then again. I couldn’t watch TV. My head hurt so bad I would sometimes have to sit down as soon as I stood up. In the darkness of my bedroom I worried that I had rolled my eyes so much the darkness was my own blindness.
The teeth were the last of it, and also the worst. Teeth are worse than eyes. I had a whole summer vacation of freedom from sulas until I bit into a corncob and accidentally ground my front bottom tooth with my front upper tooth. I managed to get the bottom tooth above the upper tooth, and this hurt like nothing I had ever felt before, so much so that soon I kept on trying to create the same exact pain just because waiting for it to accidentally happen again was worse than feeling it. And I would do it again. And again. Chills would run down my moves and steps. I had to wear sweaters in the middle of that Israeli August. When September came, I would wait for class to end because I could not bear the grinding, then for lunch at home to end because I could not bear the grinding, then for the day to end, then for sleep. I was waiting, waiting, waiting for a relief that never came.
“I have to make it stop. I can’t go on like this anymore,” I told Mom.
I was paralyzed by a problem that wasn’t even real. I couldn’t even tell Avishag, let alone Lea.
Mom said: “Yael, I understand, I understand, I understand.” She said it again, then again. She looked me in the eyes when she said it. Dad spent months sleeping with his legs folded in my bed. She understood me through the night. Had it not been for someone who understood a problem for which I had no words, I might have gone mad. Minutes chased hours that chased my sleep.
I don’t remember when or how or why it went away. I remember that there came a point where I could only breathe when I fantasized about the moment in which I would no longer think about teeth and that there came a point where I was unable to even remember or imagine what a moment like that would be like.
But it went away. This much I know, because when the neck sula came back when I was eighteen, right after Dan died, all I could do was wait for the teeth to start.
THE BASE on the beach was small. This is the same beach where the president of Egypt would flee, years later, at the finish of a thirty-year rule, when the streets forced him to see they could not love him any longer. Today it costs over five hundred dollars to get a hotel room by that beach in Sinai, and it is so crowded that tourists who visit Egypt waste a lot of time finding a place to lay their towels, but back then twenty or so soldiers possessed that strip of land all by themselves, because it was declared to be a closed military area.
There were only two other girls on the base on the day that Mom arrived. She said that they were both blonde, with short hair. The blondes both grew to have many children, but only sons, and Mom said she could not have imagined it any other way, starting from the day she met them. She could never imagine them having daughters. Mom’s black, sensitive hair reached down to her bony ass, and her nose was still broken. The girls were also air traffic controllers. They were the daughters of pilots. They were even dimmer bulbs than Mom was. The base was not a popular posting for air traffic controllers because it was far away and soldiers only got to go home once a month because the army could not spend much on internal flights for soldiers. Mom didn’t mind. She had wanted to stay on that beach forever since the moment she got there.
The work in the air traffic control tower was simple. Back in those days planes landed there only once in a while, as part of the training of new pilots. All Mom had to do was look at the lane and make sure no other planes were on it, and she had to make sure she didn’t give two planes permission to land at once. If the red phone rang she had to answer it, but it never did. Aside from that, all she had to do was wait. She showed up one hour early for her first shift and then one hour early for every eight-hour shift after that. She picked up smoking and spent all of her pocket money on cigarettes and always made sure she gave more cigarettes to the other two air traffic controllers than she smoked in a day.
Aside from the two blonde girls, there were about twenty other soldiers in the base. Most of them were fuel fillers and ground technicians for the air force. There was one cook, the oldest of all the soldiers, a twenty-seven-year-old man from a kibbutz in the desert who used to make ha-ha-angry jokes at Mom all the time and say her skin was dark as an old chocolate cake or shit, and that she should not be allowed in his dining room because it was a health risk either way, and who gave her kisses on her neck and hard-boiled eggs he had left over.
THE FIRST time Mom ever told me about that beach was after I explained to her about the problem I had with my neck, about how it all started when I began to worry that I might have a fat neck. She reached for what she could say because it was she who had told me that once you get fat you will forever be fat in your face.
“You know, you don’t have a fat neck, but even if you did, and you never will, know that that’s not going to kill you. You know, if you are nice, boys can’t even see you are ugly. Being a good sport and a laugh is much more important than being pretty. Boys and girls don’t like a sour girl. When I was in the army, there were two beautiful, sour girls at my base, and even though I was ugly all the boys loved me because I always smiled.”
“You weren’t ugly! Are you saying that I am ugly?” This was before I knew about Mom having broken her nose.
“No! You are the most beautiful girl in the world. But it is important to laugh a lot. We need to get you laughing more. How come Avishag and Lea never come by anymore? We need to think what we can do.”
&n
bsp; Later I started dating Moshe and believed one person didn’t think I was ugly. Later, in the army one day, after Hagar did my hair, I even became convinced the whole world could find me beautiful.
At some point during her service, Mom got plastic surgery on her nose. It sounds terrible to say, but it is the truth. It was broken and then it was not. I am not sure where she got the money, how she got it done, but she did. The first picture I ever saw of her is her in a full-length yellow bathing suit. Two shirtless boys are lifting her by the arm from either side, and she is laughing so hard the back of her throat shows. Her nose is perfect and long. The beach where Mom swam in a full-length yellow bathing suit, the beach where boys loved Mom, is not the border anymore. On the new border, the closer border, there are today, ten years after my service, torture camps for Eritreans run by Egyptian Bedouins. They promise the Eritreans they will help them get to Israel through Egypt. For money. Then they chase them, keep them, and send an ear or a finger to their families and ask for some more money. But when the end of the beach was still the border, boys chased Mom on it until the skin under her feet grew firm.
My cousin called, whispering and giggling, one time to ask if it was true what she heard, if it was true that Mom’s nose wasn’t real. I was always jealous of Mom’s nose because of how noble it was, and as I looked at her washing the dishes in a torn T-shirt and head scarf, a woman who spent hundreds of shekels on the right acne wash for her daughters but hadn’t changed her own toothbrush in years, I could not believe she had ever been a woman who would get plastic surgery.
“Well, my mom did say it was because your mom’s nose was broken or something, but still, isn’t it funny?” my cousin whispered through the phone. When they were little, my mother had cut her mother so deep, she bled through all the fabrics in the house.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 26