The UnAmericans: Stories

by Antopol, Molly

  “Gali!” Tomer yelled, and when his daughter emerged from her bedroom, the telltale sign of too much air freshener wafted out with her. “Seriously?” he said, flicking off the music.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gali said.

  “I thought you were sleeping at Dana’s.”

  “I thought you were on a date.”

  “So you threw a party?”

  “It wasn’t a party. No one’s here.”

  Tomer looked at Talia—for alliance, support, she didn’t know what. Gali, for her part, seemed to have had the foresight to use eyedrops before they came home, but the way she kept tugging on her ponytail let Talia know she was high. She was pretty, Talia thought, with full cheeks and brown eyes and thick blond curls, but obviously still learning to apply makeup: her concealer a shade off, her black eyeliner heavy and frightening. Plus she had on so many plastic necklaces and bangles that the whole effect was dizzying and distracting, and Talia wondered why no one had told her she was overdoing it. Certainly not her father, whose idea of fashion seemed to be to pull the top shirt and pair of pants from his dresser, which meant that one day Tomer could look haphazardly artsy, like that first time in Café Noah, and another, like tonight, as if he’d gotten dressed in the dark.

  “Yes?” Gali said then, and Talia realized she’d been staring.

  “I’m Talia,” she stammered. Gali nodded, then put her hands on her hips and shot a look that sent her straight back to junior high, and Talia wondered why she was still standing there. She took a step back and Tomer whispered, “Please don’t leave,” so she slipped into what looked like his room and closed the door behind her. It was tidy and small, with turquoise walls and furniture Tomer and Efrat must have hauled in off the street and stripped and repainted themselves. This was exactly the kind of place Talia would have picked out—not just the apartment but the way they’d decorated it, everything mismatched but so carefully chosen. Tucked into the dresser mirror were photos of the three of them through the years: on the tiled apartment steps Talia had just walked up; in a restaurant; in a park at what looked like Gali’s first birthday, sitting on Efrat’s lap. Efrat was attractive in the sort of way women noticed as much as men: laughing at whoever was holding the camera, her long blond hair in a frazzled knot, holding her daughter by the shoulders as if they were both about to tip over. Tomer was squatted beside them, his mouth open and eyes wide, as though he were making silly faces to get baby Gali to coo.

  Talia sat on the bed and listened. She knew she should leave—it seemed only sensible—but couldn’t find the will. Gali’s story was growing increasingly elaborate and Tomer was caving, and Talia could see when he walked in now, wearing the tired and gentle look of defeat, that his daughter had won this round.

  “Didn’t she know you’d be back tonight?” Talia said.

  Tomer took off his glasses and nodded. “And now,” he said, lowering his voice, as if Gali could hear anything above the music she’d flung back on, “I look like a pushover.”

  “True.” Talia regretted the word even before it had left her mouth—it couldn’t be fun bringing a date home to witness this. But Tomer just flopped beside her on his stomach and said, “I can’t believe I got caught with a woman. I guess we’ll have to get married now.”

  He had to be joking. But something in his voice, low and tender, made Talia wonder if a nugget of truth existed within those words—if he just might not be wired for a one-night thing. She stood up.

  “I was kidding,” Tomer said. He reached for her, but she intercepted his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He looked hurt, in a puppyish and confused way, as if he didn’t completely get it. He rolled onto his back. “Okay,” he said, sighing. “I’ll call you.”

  On her way out, she passed his daughter’s door, cracked halfway open. “Nice to meet you too,” Gali called out, as if Talia were the rude one, so she poked her head in. Papers and makeup littered the carpet in messy but distinct piles, as if a complex order existed that only Gali understood, and the entire room smelled of burnt hair and nail polish. She was lying on her unmade bed with her hands behind her head. “You’re leaving?” she said.

  “It’s late,” Talia said, though she had no idea what time it was. “I work early.”

  Gali squinted at her suspiciously. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a reporter,” Talia said, and when Gali said, “That’s cool,” Talia felt as if she were letting them both down when she admitted, “I’m actually between jobs. Right now I’m fact-checking for Boker Yisraeli, the free paper? I kind of hate it.”

  “Sucks.”

  “It does suck.” The music was so loud that Talia’s cheeks throbbed, but at least she felt a little hipper for recognizing the song that came on. “I love Kaveret,” she said. “They were my first concert.”

  “My dad likes them, too,” Gali said. “My mom was kind of a music snob and this was one of the things we could all agree on, in the car and stuff.” She said it so matter-of-factly, and Talia wondered if this was casual conversation or if Gali, for whatever reason—the pot, perhaps?—was opening up.

  “I’ve got a bunch of Yitzhak Klepter’s solo stuff on vinyl you can borrow. Come over sometime,” Talia said, immediately wishing she could retract it. She had a habit of over-offering when she was nervous and wanted people to like her, but why did it matter what this fourteen-year-old thought?

  “Thanks.” Then Gali lay against her pillows and looked up at the ceiling, and Talia stood there, not knowing whether the girl wanted her to leave or stay, or why she even cared. “See you,” Gali said finally, and when Talia backed into the hall, Gali lifted her leg, and with one bare, red toenailed foot, kicked the door shut.

  “I ADMIT THAT didn’t go perfectly,” Tomer said when he called her at work the following morning, so early Talia was still blowing on her to-go cup of coffee. “We just need to try again.”

  “It’s a bad idea,” Talia said, clicking through her email. She was determined not to give him her full attention. “And,” she said, emboldened, suddenly, by the distance between her office and wherever Tomer was calling from, “maybe think twice before bringing someone else home to your daughter.”

  “I made a mistake,” he said. “I’m a human being.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s gone this weekend. On a class trip to the Golan.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Let me make you dinner this weekend. My famous baked chicken.”

  “Tomer,” Talia said, “this is nonnegotiable.” There was no point in making her life this cluttered. Not when she was leaving, not when these weren’t her problems. Not when the last thing his daughter needed was a new woman around. (Or was it what she needed most, and wasn’t that an even bigger reason to stay away?) That was what she told herself after she hung up and immersed herself in the details of a story so dull she wanted to bang her head against the desk, calling the kosher certification board to hear their latest verdict on swordfish, and whether a restaurant open on Shabbat could even claim the fish was kosher if the board deemed it so, and at lunchtime she went around the corner to the falafel place on the off chance that Tomer was at Café Noah. That was what she told herself all through dinner with her family and the following day at work, and even as she passed her bus stop home and strode into a market in Neve Tzedek, where she walked right up to the grocer and asked which wine he thought went best with baked chicken.

  She’d imagined sex with Tomer would be primitive and charged, that they’d have ripped off each other’s skin if they could. But he was slow and nervous and kept his eyes open the whole time. At one point, he stroked her cheek in a way that felt so stagey and cinematic she wondered if he was going through the moves Efrat had liked, if she was a stand-in for his wife. But then he turned to her, and the expression on his face seemed to be only for Talia: filled with desire and gratitude and something close to joy.

  Afterward they lay around f
or hours. Talia had forgotten how much she liked that time, when everything—the rough folds of Tomer’s elbows, the coin-sized scar on the back of his thigh, from when he’d fallen off his bike as a kid—was new and interesting and had a story. She liked how purely herself she could be around him, initiating sex when she wanted it, clicking on the stereo without asking, sifting through his dresser for an undershirt. She liked how, when she woke the following morning in that tiny turquoise room, the kettle was hissing and milk was on the counter, and when they walked out to the terrace off the kitchen, the rest of the city was going about their day. She’d forgotten about them. About everyone—and yet there they were, still functioning as though nothing had changed: a line of people outside Tazza d’Oro, a woman leaning against a Vespa and laughing into her cell phone, a black dog barking on a roof.

  She couldn’t remember falling for someone so quickly and kept waiting for a gust of reality to swoop in and slap her out of her daze. For an awkward silence in which they realized how little they actually knew each other, or a moment when she’d step unwittingly onto some emotional land mine. Or simply for boredom to settle in, because as much as Talia liked hearing other people’s stories, the excitement of sharing her own, of pulling down the sheet to reveal her own scar from falling off her bike as a girl, then the one, higher up her thigh, where she’d sat on a rusty nail, felt, with every new relationship, more and more perfunctory. It was like a monologue she’d developed sometime between the army and college, which she updated periodically with new noteworthy events, putting less and less effort into every subsequent performance. But it was easier with Tomer. His questions were so thoughtful, so careful, that they immediately pulled her out of her routine, wanting to know names, places, unpacking even the tiniest anecdotes, as if learning about her was a serious task that demanded his concentration. She couldn’t tell if he’d always been this way with women, or if it had to do with being married so long—that perhaps dating a man who had so fully loved and admired and accepted another person allowed Talia to cross a threshold so effortlessly she hadn’t even realized she’d done it until she was safely on the other side.

  On the second morning, she dressed and found Tomer in the living room with a tray of omelets and toast and coffee on the rug beside him. Talia was touched that while she was sleeping, he’d been quietly setting this up. He kissed her and handed her the paper, and she reflexively scanned the international pages for the bylines. There in Moscow, covering Medvedev’s swearing-in ceremony, was Ethan, that American blogger. Talia’s chest ached, wondering how she’d ended up fact-checking the swordfish kosher debate while this guy got to break one of the biggest stories of the year, for an international wire no less. He’d barely even known enough Russian or Ukrainian to order a beer—something Talia had discovered that night she’d first met him at Baraban, that night she’d ordered a few too many herself before taking him home. But now there he was, parachuting around Europe, building up clips. That night at the bar, he’d struck her as overconfident and young, one of those reporters whose interest in Ukraine only sparked once the protests began, and who expressed no qualms about leaving the country the moment a hotter story appeared. But he was cute and she was drunk and figured she was abroad so why not. The sex had been clumsy and fast and had sobered her up immediately, and afterward she’d looked at his hairless arm, flung across his eyes, at his cargo pants and suede Adidas sneakers strewn on her apartment floor, and told herself to ignore the regret that was already swelling into her throat—it was nothing but a silly, onetime mistake with a guy she’d eventually never have to see, or even think about, again.

  But there he was, in Tomer’s living room, his byline taunting her about all the things she was missing. Then she felt ashamed—what kind of journalist had she become, so jealous she hadn’t written the article that she wasn’t the least bit interested the inauguration was even happening?—especially when the story was admittedly pretty good. That was when Tomer looked up from the food section, alarmed, and said, “Gali said she’d call from the Golan. She said she would and she hasn’t.”

  “Call her,” Talia said, and Tomer said, “You’re right. Of course you’re right.” But when his daughter picked up, he shushed Talia, though she hadn’t said a word. “How’s it going?” he said, his voice suddenly a full octave higher. He sprang from the carpet and began to nervously pace the room, as if he were on a conference call with the prime minister and the national security advisor and the entire defense cabinet. It bothered Talia that he was so afraid of his daughter, though she’d herself felt too timid to open Gali’s door all weekend, as if there were a hidden camera lurking in that den of makeup and curling irons and stashed bags of marijuana. Plus hearing Tomer on the phone was nagging Talia to call her own parents, whom she hadn’t spoken to since she’d checked in to say she’d be gone all weekend. And though they were easygoing about it, the fact that they didn’t grill her just made Talia certain the third degree would be waiting when she got home. Which was just so frustrating, she told Tomer after he hung up, when she was almost thirty years old.

  “Why do they get to you so much?” he said, and she was about to say they didn’t, that she was just being dramatic, when it occurred to her he genuinely wanted to know. So she told him she loved her parents, that they were warm and dependable and unbelievably generous to let her come crawling back home, but that they were just so judgmental and involved. Even thinking about them now made Talia feel tired: everyone gathered together in the loud, messy house on a hill not far from the airport, where her father and brothers-in-law all worked as mechanics.

  “It doesn’t sound bad,” Tomer said. “Having so many people around.”

  “It wasn’t bad,” she said. “Growing up.” In fact, there were parts she had loved. Living in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other, her summers a blurry series of days sprinting through the backyards of all her friends. She loved the sea, the heat, sleeping with her windows open much of the year. She loved the expansiveness of her parents’ property, hills on one side, a kibbutz on the other. When she and her sisters were younger, they used to sneak onto the kibbutz at night and hang out in the date palms, careful to avoid the toxic thorns that covered the trunks. Talia had been spiked dozens of times, but even then she had wanted to be close to dangerous, exciting things. The pricklers would pierce her skin—a strange, numbing wound that always made her sisters cry but that Talia would give herself over to. They had a pact: whatever was said up there wouldn’t leave the kibbutz, and there was something so simple, so clarifying, about those nights—everything in her life seemed solvable among those trees. She even loved the walk back home, the highway desolate, the road so dark she couldn’t distinguish where the hills ended and the sky began.

  She could go on, she told Tomer—there were a million things she’d missed about home. But there was no denying how painful it was to be in a family that had always seemed so confused by her for stubbornly studying the languages of all the places they’d never go, as if it were some geeky form of rebellion, rather than what learning them had always been to her, a shield against loneliness. They’d never said outright that they didn’t respect her work, but they never read her stories either—whereas at even the hint of a boyfriend they couldn’t stop talking.

  “I think in their hearts they won’t think I’m safe until I’m married with kids,” she said. “And living down the street from them.”

  “Well, I’m glad I met you,” Tomer said. “Even if you hate being back.”

  Talia looked at him. “It’s not that simple.”

  “I get it. You went to bed a journalist and woke up a fact-checker.”

  “It’s more than that,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like—to have invested your whole life in something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “I do know,” he said, with such emphasis that it came to her all at once. Of course he knew.

  She wasn’t sure whether she should lean over and kiss him, or simp
ly hold him close, or something else entirely. Then Talia saw his blank, distant gaze and knew she wasn’t expected to do anything. She wasn’t even sure Tomer was aware she was still in the room. It was as if he’d opened his mouth and tumbled directly into some dark, private tunnel whose entrance Talia couldn’t see. He couldn’t even sit through a moment like this, reading the paper on the floor while long rectangles of light came in through the window, Talia thought, because it was still incomprehensible that this was now his life. She looked around this adult apartment, with its coffee-table books and actual art on the walls, at the care Tomer and Efrat must have put into every detail, following their own private manual of what a beautiful marriage should look like. And now here was Tomer, hunched on the floor, pain shooting past his eyes. This was all so scarily mature, Talia thought. She knew she was doing nothing good for him by being there. She was still sipping her juice and flipping through the paper, but all the while her mind churned for a way out of this. She’d never been good at breakups—and in fact had ended things with a boyfriend in Kiev in such a passive, roundabout way that he’d sat around Baraban telling all their friends he’d broken up with her. Here she knew to do it quickly, a needle in the arm before the nurse counted to three. She scooted beside him, conjuring up the least hurtful way to phrase it, when Tomer said, “This is happening too fast, isn’t it?”