The UnAmericans: Stories

by Antopol, Molly

  The scene was so much more hippie-ish and earnest than Talia would have imagined for a girl like Gali, and she wondered why she’d gotten so upset over one silly lie when the truth was that she didn’t want to leave the beach herself, that what she really wanted was to crouch by the fire and just relax. So she walked closer, listening to the breeze and the guitar, when she noticed the entire group was staring. They were looking at her like she was such a grown-up: still dressed for the office, her cardigan flapping behind her, her sensible leather flats disappearing into the sand—and it was right then that Talia understood she was no longer young.

  Talia stood there, waving her keys like the unwanted chaperone she knew she was, until Gali finally got up, clearly humiliated, and followed her back to the car. Gali hunched in the passenger seat, and as Talia drove away from the curb, she said, “I don’t know what your problem is, Talia. This isn’t your business.”

  “It is when you lie to me. I was worried.”

  Talia pulled onto Tomer’s street and up to his apartment, keeping the engine running. Through the window she saw the television flashing and his bare feet on the coffee table. She couldn’t see anything past his sweatpanted legs, but she knew he was probably asleep on the couch, unaware that his daughter had gone out, let alone that any of this was happening in her life. Watching him through that window, a gloomy fish in a beautiful aquarium, filled her with such a massive rush of sorrow that when Gali whispered, “Please don’t make me go up there—I can’t deal with him right now,” Talia nodded and put the car in reverse.

  She’d planned to take Gali to Rehovot, to set her up in the kitchen with a snack before sneaking off to call Tomer. But as she turned off the highway and up the hill, she saw, in the distance, the kibbutz near her house. She hadn’t been there in more than a decade, but when she drove through the gates and parked in the side lot, the familiar sounds swept right in: crickets and owls and the faint chatter of a few kibbutzniks, far away, sitting outside the dining hall.

  “I used to come out here all the time,” Talia said. She led Gali down the path she and her sisters had always taken, near the ulpan classrooms where the foreign volunteers lived, people who wouldn’t be surprised by unfamiliar faces. But no one was outside the cottages anyway, and they walked past the irrigation equipment factory, the swimming pool and the avocado orchards, until they were standing at the edge of the date palm groves.

  And Gali, who hadn’t uttered a word on the entire drive to Rehovot, who’d been glumly following Talia through the kibbutz as if this were one more punishment she’d have to endure, stopped and said, “Wow. This is beautiful.”

  It was beautiful. Hundreds of tall palms, planted in perfect grids, surrounded them. Talia hadn’t even known if they’d still be producing dates, but everything looked just as she remembered. The ground was blanketed with fallen fronds, and even the smell of donkey manure wasn’t so bad when mixed with bark and overripe dates. Parked against one of the trees was a forklift, with clippers and an old, dust-beaten radio resting beside one of the tires.

  “My sisters and I spent so many hours up in these trees,” she said. “It was like this quiet place where we were safe from whatever was happening.” She couldn’t remember what she’d found so stressful as a teenager—probably just boys, slipping in math, her parents—but Gali nodded solemnly and followed her up the forklift’s ladder. She was quicker and more confident than Talia would have expected, reaching the top of the trunk and testing the fronds until she found one sturdy enough to hold her weight. They sat side by side and gazed out. Until now Talia hadn’t even noticed that the moon was almost full, illuminating the tarped-over farmland and the dairy, a couple leaving the dining hall and walking hand in hand down the narrow brick path to their cottage. Beyond, Rehovot stretched out in its entirety, looking just as Talia imagined architects and contractors like Tomer had planned it in miniature: the terra-cotta roofs, the murky gray line of the highway, the tall white apartment complexes jutting up against the hills, so small they were like plastic pieces she could move around on a game board. “We had this deal,” Talia said, “that up here we could tell each other whatever we wanted and no one would judge. That it would never leave the trees. So if there’s anything—”

  “We didn’t sleep together,” Gali blurted. “Like you accused me of. Though we’ve done everything but.”

  Talia eyed her sideways, and Gali continued, “It was kind of bad. I mean, I was bad at it.”

  “Everyone is in the beginning.”

  “Really?”

  “No one knows what they’re doing. You know with my first boyfriend I took it literally and actually sucked on—his thing? Like a lollipop.” She was doing it again, speaking without thinking, but Gali looked so relieved that someone out there had humiliated herself more, that perhaps she would receive the silver medal, rather than the gold, for history’s worst blowjob, that Talia would have recited excruciating story after excruciating story if it made the girl feel any better. She remembered what it was like, all that shame and uncertainty, how the room could never be dark enough.

  “I’ve been writing letters,” Gali said then. “To my mom. It was my therapist’s idea. And he’s sort of a tool.”

  “Your dad likes him.”

  “My dad’s a tool,” Gali said, and sighed. “I’m supposed to write what’s going on with me, at school or whatever. Just to feel like she’s still with me,” she said. “And sometimes I’ll write about Nir. Nothing graphic, obviously, but, you know, just who he is and stuff. You know I don’t even know if she had another boyfriend before my dad?”

  “Because you were too young to know which questions to ask,” Talia said quietly.

  “Sometimes I write other things,” Gali said. “Like how I wish I’d died first, just so I wouldn’t have to miss her this much.”

  Right then Gali looked so small and confused and lost in the world, her eyes wide, sugary lipstick smeared across her chin. She was playing with the hem of her satiny sleeve, pulling at the delicate threads with her fingers. “Would it be alright if . . . I stayed over tonight?” she asked, and Talia thought about how good it might be if she just said yes. She could see it all unfolding as clearly as if clicking through a series of digital photos: Tomer on her parents’ kitchen floor, telling goofy jokes while he scraped off their linoleum, already entrenched in a new fix-it project now that the counters were done. Her sisters over on weekends: a house of mothers so ready to dote on Gali, their toddlers worshipping her and following her from room to room. Her parents, relaxed and smiling at the table, grateful to have their family back together again, Tomer and Gali such an intrinsic, immediate part of it. She thought about Tomer asleep on the sofa in his apartment, how any moment he’d awake in that dark, empty room and start calling his daughter. Maybe she should stop this back and forth with him and just accept how easy it could be with a man who already knew how to be a boyfriend, a husband, a father. Maybe her need to travel, to hear other people’s stories, to make a name for herself—maybe it had never been ambition and curiosity that drove her but the plain and simple fear that she wouldn’t know how to face real life.

  But even sitting there in the tree, even just entertaining the fantasy, made Talia feel restless and slight. As if the brown hills surrounding her just kept rolling out into nothingness, the great unknowns in Kiev and beyond so distant they no longer belonged to her. As if it were someone else’s future, some girl Talia had always envied from afar who she bumped into now and again, when everyone was home visiting their parents over Chanukah Break.

  “My therapist tells me other things,” Gali continued. “I go in and he talks and talks. But I wish he’d stop giving me homework and just tell me how to be happy again,” she said, and Talia wanted nothing more than to give her an answer. For so long, she’d told herself happiness came from finding the thing you loved most and figuring out a way to make it central to your life. But that seemed so unreachable now, some abstract theory, and Talia knew she’d
come up here as much for herself as for Gali, hoping everything might look clearer from this vantage, that she’d be able to reach a decision about what to do next.

  “When I’m with you, I feel—not alone,” Gali said suddenly.

  And then something seemed to kick inside her and before Talia knew it, Gali had scooted so close she could smell the bonfire in her hair. For a moment they sat there awkwardly, breathing silently in the tree, and Talia had a flash of what that night of Everything But must have been like for Nir, graceless and unnatural, Gali’s advances clunky and poorly timed. Then Gali leaned in to hug her. The gesture was so sudden, so jarring, that Talia jerked back—and Gali, arms stretched wide, wobbled on the frond and lost her balance.

  “Gali!” Talia yelled, reaching for her. But Gali had already grabbed the trunk to keep from slipping. As the thorns pierced her skin, she let out a cry so loud people might have heard her on the highway. Talia knew she’d be fine—she’d steadied herself in time, was in no danger of falling. But sitting there on the frond, holding tight to the tree, she looked so shocked and afraid that Talia’s heart seized. She gathered the girl carefully in her arms, resting Gali’s head against her chest, wiping her damp, hot face with the back of her hand. Gali winced, and Talia, left with no real words of comfort, no guarantee things would ever get easier, said the only thing she knew for certain: that any moment the poison would kick in, numbing the places that hurt the most.

  The Unknown Soldier

  Fridays were busy outside Alameda Point. Women shouldered past Alexi, coiffed and perfumed and in pumps and pearls and fuzzy sweaters, calling for their children to hurry up and take their places in the inspection line. For the past twelve months, Alexi had only known the other side to these afternoons, the men’s collective anticipation of those sacred hours in the cramped visiting room or, on sunny days, at the picnic tables in the yard—men who had stopped, at a certain point, asking Alexi about his own family once it was painfully clear they were never coming to see him.

  Standing at the entrance now, watching his ex-wife and son pull up to the correctional facility, Alexi felt jumpy and nervous and a little out of breath. And not just about his release, or the fact that Katherine was giving him their son for the weekend, but because she’d agreed to come to begin with. He wondered what it meant—a move toward forgiveness, maybe nothing at all. He couldn’t even tell if, after a year inside, he looked any different. Maybe a few pounds thinner but wearing the same slacks and button-down they’d known him in last, clutching, in a flimsy plastic bag, all his remaining possessions: his wallet, containing a mere twenty-two dollars; house keys that would no longer work; the sports section from the morning he was brought in, August 12, 1950, which felt like a cruel joke, as if flaunting that on top of everything else, he had missed the Yankees’ repeat as world champions.

  “Benny!” he said, peering into the car. Then, turning to the driver’s seat, “Katherine!”

  But she wouldn’t look at him. She just sat there, checking her watch as if frustrated that she’d never get these seconds of her life back, while Benny crawled into the backseat for his suitcase. It was technically Alexi’s suitcase, and he had a sudden image of everything else he’d once owned in Los Angeles, before the house was seized earlier that year and Katherine had dragged all of his belongings, his books and clothes and excellent record collection, out to the street on garbage day and moved with Benny to a tiny studio in Palms.

  “Drop him at Ellen’s Sunday’s morning,” Katherine said, staring at the dashboard, and Alexi found, with a pang, that she still had a disorienting effect on him: her high cheekbones and light brown eyes and delicate hands gripping the wheel, so small they always made his own in comparison feel massive and clumsy. But he noticed, too, the lines that had begun to deepen across her forehead and how pale she was for summer, as if she’d barely had a chance to go outside.

  And then, finally, she met his gaze. All at once everything he’d been planning to tell her, the carefully crafted apologies he’d been working on so much of the year—suddenly all of that was moot, seeing from her such a look of disdain it was clear she wanted him erased from her life. “She’s on 28th and Church,” she said flatly, scribbling down her sister’s address, all their road trips to visit Ellen in San Francisco apparently cast away and forgotten, some other couple’s history.

  Benny climbed out of the car and ran to him. Alexi stroked his soft hair and breathed in everything at once, gum and sleep and cheese on his breath, wondering, if just through smell and touch, he could determine whether his nine-year-old was okay. “I missed you,” Alexi said, and right then something seemed to kick inside Katherine and she bolted out of the driver’s seat. She pulled their son toward her, pressing his face to her blouse, and whispered, “Call me at Aunt Ellen’s if you need anything.” And when Benny said, “Jeez, Mom, it’s just two days,” she reached through the open car window, pulled a five-dollar bill from her pocketbook and thrust it into his hand. “In case of emergency,” she said, as if Alexi weren’t standing right there, as if Benny weren’t going away with his own father but a derelict stranger, hurtling her boy into the wild.

  She kissed Benny’s head, then got back in the car without even a wave goodbye to Alexi, and he led his son across the lot to the Plymouth he’d arranged to borrow for the weekend, rusty and dilapidated with candy wrappers and cola bottles cluttering the backseat. He slid in beside Benny and drove out of the gates and onto the bridge, where all at once the San Francisco skyline came into view. Flawless, if it weren’t for Katherine in the rearview mirror, as if signaling that the three of them would never be together in a car again, the windows down, her cheek on his shoulder, his hand on her calf.

  He sank his foot onto the gas and the cluster of cars surrounding him, Katherine’s included, quickly disappeared. Then he glanced sideways at his son. As a baby, Benny had looked so much like him that even the sight of his child, sitting in his high chair or napping in his crib, used to startle Alexi so intensely he’d forget why he entered the room in the first place. He’d read somewhere that there was a biological reason for it, that it afforded fathers the kind of closeness and recognition mothers inherently felt after pregnancy. But over the past year Benny had begun to resemble him less, his curly black hair now wavy and light like Katherine’s, his once-olive skin so pale it was like the whole veiny map of his interior was open for public viewing. He’d shot up maybe four inches since they’d seen each other last but hadn’t put on any weight—though maybe, Alexi thought, his son could work the gangliness in his favor if he played the smart, serious card with girls. He knew from Katherine that once again Benny had gotten all A’s, about which Alexi was deeply proud and had been bragging to everyone inside.

  “What’s your favorite subject?” he asked his son.

  “Science, and probably history.”

  Alexi nodded. These seemed like solid answers. “Who’s your best teacher?”

  “It’s August,” the boy said, looking at him curiously. “I’m on summer vacation.”

  “Ah,” Alexi said. He pulled off at 19th and drove along the park. He’d never liked San Francisco. Its beauty had always felt so showy, with its choppy blue water and steep, craggy hills and all those frilly houses painted candy-egg colors. Alexi was an actor and it had always felt to him, visiting the city, that he was on the set of San Francisco even when in the middle of it, even drinking coffee or eating a sandwich or waiting outside the ferry terminal. His closest friend from inside, Karl Mueller, had set him up with the car, along with a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment for the weekend. But the directions were complex and confusing, and as Alexi backed out of a one-way street, then headed down a dead end, he found himself pining for the wide, no-nonsense boulevards of Los Angeles.

  “I have it all planned out,” Alexi said. “I’ve got us a great place for the weekend”—if he ever found it, he thought, silently cursing yet another one-way street to nowhere—“and we’ll do it up, a steak dinner tonigh
t, pancakes for breakfast.”

  “Is that what you want?” his son said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your first weekend out.”

  How grown-up of Benny to consider his needs, Alexi thought. He’d always been that way. Alexi remembered picking him up from nursery school years ago, and the teacher telling him that when they were playing musical chairs and the girl left without a seat began to cry, Benny immediately stood up and offered his. He’d relished seeing his son through the teacher’s admiring eyes, though lately Alexi had been worrying about the line between generosity and patsiness growing murkier now that Benny had been alone with his mother. He’d sensed, in his calls to Katherine from Alameda Point, the weight that had been thrust on the boy. Usually she’d pass the phone off to Benny the moment she heard Alexi’s voice. But the few times she relented, her responses seemed as predictable as the clicking sounds they always heard five minutes in, saying things like “It’s been rough, but we’re getting through it,” or “We’re finding ways to brighten up the place in Palms,” as if it were perfectly acceptable that their nine-year-old was shouldering half of that “we.” And though he was out now, though he’d been offered his friend’s pool house in L.A. for a month while he, supposedly, figured out what was next in his life, Alexi knew that having a weekend dad wouldn’t save Benny from the year he’d been left without one.