Still on his phone, Ido wanders into the kitchen, leans against the refrigerator. He wants to be close to her, she knows. She becomes the idea of home when she is chopping fragrant rosemary in the kitchen, when she is halving fresh fruits in wool socks. She puts a pale green ceramic bowl in the oven to heat it for the bread dough when it’s time.
“Ido,” she says as she closes the oven, “would you let her tramp?” That’s the word they use for hitchhiking in Israel—tramp—presumably from Yiddish, but who knows. “Mayan, I mean.” She begins placing vegetables in a baking dish, clear juices trickling down her wrists.
Ido looks up. “Of course not.” Looks back down. “You know what can happen to girls.”
“We did it.” A decade ago, when Emily first moved to Israel, it was Ido who taught her how to hitchhike. The trick is that the girl thumbs for the ride while the guy hides in the bushes or behind the bus shelter.
“She won’t.” He gives a grim little laugh. She turns to see a flash of something sharp and possessive in the way his mouth is set. Emily recalls how for weeks after Mayan was born, Ido would lie in bed shirtless with his daughter on his chest as if to make up for the time she lived inside of Emily. Right now, a glint of fear is making itself known to Emily, peeking out from under the folds of cautious thinking where it usually lies hidden. Here, a series of unsettling questions that Ido and Emily have never asked themselves: How possessive is our love? How controlling? How withholding? What will happen as the gap between us widens? Whose body will we stuff in to bridge that gap? Mayan’s? What are we going to do to her? What are we going to do to our baby?
And then the thought is gone.
Emily can’t remember what she was just thinking about. The German girl, maybe. She wipes off her hands on a dish towel and begins slicing avocados for the salad.
Still up against the fridge, Ido says, “Yalla, finally,” which means he’s connected to the Wi-Fi. He looks beefy, leaning up against the refrigerator. Her swarthy man, her old man—frowning into his phone. What pulls her in this time, specifically, is the way he plays with his old brown sweater, gripping the fabric at his stomach such that she’s watching little flashes of his boxers sitting low, the curve of his obliques, yes, and the coarse hair below his belly button leading down.
Did you know, you can change all the energy in the room by pulling on the top button of his jeans? Yes, it’s a fact. Just a little tug and you’re both sinking down to the floor of the kitchen; the frying tomatoes need to be stirred every few minutes, but fuck it—it’s better like this. Let it all fall apart, let the marinated mushrooms—hours in the making, blooming with rosemary and crushed garlic—let them burn, his jeans unzipped and pulled down, don’t even bother to take them off fully, leave them around his knees and go down on him on this stranger’s floor. Ido says a single word, “Baby.”
She’s kneeling over him, balancing her weight on one hand and then another. The floor is hard, and just the faintest bit sticky. He is lying with his head at an awkward angle against the fridge so that he can watch her suck him off, he’s tucking her hair behind her ears, he’s gently touching the back of her head, but not pressing her down onto his dick, not Ido. The first time he came on her face—in that cold, damp Jerusalem apartment he lived in as an art student—he was so sweet and apologetic and she played along, sitting cross-legged on the bed, sitting still, letting him run back and forth to the bathroom for tissues to gingerly blot the stuff off her lips, her nose, as if his tenderness repaired something, created the necessary safety to make what they had done—this filthy thing, apparently—okay, meaning permissible. But it was all okay. So few things actually disgust or scare her. Emily knew this long before her baby threw up in her actual mouth.
He’s at the point where he barely has any words left, just sucking air in at intervals. “Baby.” Then, “Fuck.” His eyes are closed; his head rolls against the fridge. He’s trying to bear it. Every time her head bobs up, she eases a little more to the right, eventually finding a position from which she can catch a glimpse of the frying pan to see if the mushrooms and garlic are burning, if there is smoke. It’s a small kitchen, kind of cramped, but the kitchen island—a butcher’s block on wheels—does give a decent amount of counter space. She puts the weight on her left hand, her breasts sore where her arm presses into her own chest. Her eyes are leaky and nose runny, the slick of them accumulating. She goes far enough to gag on him, and he says, “Please, baby,” and she knows he means about using her hands the way he likes, so she does. It’s a motion not unlike grinding pepper. He taught her to do this.
When he comes, the taste is woody and metallic. A taste she has never minded. The first time she swallowed he asked her if it was bad, if she hated it. “No,” she said, “no, I love it because it’s part of you.” She’s never been sure if that’s true, but she likes the way it sounds.
She kisses his belly. Rises to turn off the burner—mushrooms probably aren’t salvageable, but no matter. Pours herself a glass of tap water in a repurposed jam jar. Ido is behind her now, his hand on her stomach, which she tries to remind herself isn’t meant to make her feel fat. “Boei, mami,” he says, tugging her toward the bedroom, just off the kitchen. White walls and a pale blue bedspread.
She lies beneath a ceiling fan turned off. The curtains are closed. He lies next to her, the bed giving under his weight. Into her shoulder, he says, “Do you want to use the stuff?” Meaning, Do you want to try with me inside you?
She shakes her head no. No stuff, no lube, no attempts at penetration. “Just from the outside,” she says. And he knows what this means. Like her, he knows the formula. He lies on his belly with his head between her knees, and she lifts her hips so he can undress her. And then, the gentle familiar lapping at her, soft circles with his tongue exactly where she wants it. Never too different but always, somehow, always shocking, always a little heartbreaking, always love.
In the weeks before Emily got pregnant, she was aware of a kind of blooming in her. Everything made her wet. Their shoes side by side, the difference in size between them, was enough for her to need him, a need she found impossible to put into words. It’s a shyness at odds with the rest of her, she knows, but what can she do. She’s scared of vulgarity. Instead she would lead his hand wordlessly under her skirt. That’s how she told him what she wanted. And he might laugh, but it was a happy laugh—happy for the burden of fulfilling a hot-bodied wife. What was odd was that other men seemed to be able to tell. They sensed something in her, maybe smelled something. At parties, Ido left her alone when he went to go pee and came back to find her surrounded by Israeli guys, some of them sitting next to her, standing above her, a hand on her shoulder. Surely they know, Emily had thought. They know that I want to be entered again and again. My body is telling them; my body betrays me.
His hands grip her thighs, but not so hard that she couldn’t kick him away. Sometimes, for Emily to reach an orgasm, she needs to tell herself a story. It has to be scary to work. In one of them, she and Ido are killing a girl. In another, he’s killing the girl and Emily is watching. Although probably, if Emily were to guess, she’s both girls in the story. It’s okay. This time, the story is that he’s fucking her. No, wait, he’s fucking Vera the hitchhiker. No, Emily is Vera, Emily is the hitchhiker, and he’s telling her she’s so young and so tight. When she comes, she cries out in the darkened room.
Emily returns to the kitchen, barefoot this time, to throw out the burnt food and start over. Ido sings from the shower, a song with no words. She scrapes the blackened mushrooms and onions out of the pan to wash it under warm water, scrubs away the burnt bits. It feels right, somehow, to attempt the meal again. A reminder that sometimes you really can start over.
When the doorbell rings, it startles Emily. She’d been zoning out while frying a newly crushed segment of garlic in the avocado oil she brought from home, making mental lists of everything she has to do when they get back to Jerusalem. Please, Emily thinks, let’s ignore the doorbell
, let’s hope she goes away. But Ido, hair still wet and shining, goes to answer the door. Emily holds on to a hope that he might turn Vera away, or that it might not be her at all, but a moment later she’s in the kitchen, nervously smiling. She’s carrying that sad-looking white onion, of course she is. “Welcome,” Emily says.
The kitchen is lit only by the weak bulb that hangs over the gas range hood, the living room by the soy wax candles, scented lightly with organic orange blossoms that Emily has placed at the center of the table. Nobody turns the overhead lights on; perhaps the hush is what they crave. The next half hour passes like this: Emily browns garlic, dresses the quinoa salad, adds newly cut mushrooms—meaty king oysters and heady shiitake—into the saucepan, blanches the greens, quickly kneads the twice-proofed dough and shapes it carefully so that the crust will be thick, then places it into the heated green ceramic bowl, which she returns to the oven. All this while Ido and the German girl occupy the kitchen island, him making a big deal out of teaching her the Israeli way to make a salad. “Vera!” Ido towers over the girl, who is hunched over cucumbers, laughing. “You must cut them finer!”
Emily wonders about dessert. Ido looks up to ask her a question across the island: “Dibart im ima sheli?” It takes Emily a full second to process that he’s speaking Hebrew. They so rarely speak Hebrew together. Did you talk to my mom? This is what he asks.
The smell of bread fills the kitchen. Mayan’s smell, comfort and longing. Emily’s back is to the oven. “Ken,” she says. Yes. They are excluding Vera, who can’t understand them and who continues to stupidly cut cucumbers. Good.
“Mayan kvar nirdema?” Ido asks. Did Mayan go down?
Emily answers him that yes: their baby is already sleeping and she drank all of her milk. She waits for Ido to say more, but he just nods. And, oh, she understands now that it’s not to exclude Vera, is it? That’s not why they were speaking in Hebrew. It’s because Ido doesn’t want this beautiful young woman to think of him as a dad, as old, and Emily aided in that dissembling.
When they sit to eat—Emily fixing plates and Ido bringing them to the table, which Vera set—they sit across from the girl, like an interview. Her features are soft, lovely in the near dark. Emily glimpses the story the girl is telling herself about this couple who picked her up. A young father (she knows from the baby toys in the car) who is terrified of his wife’s body, not just because it has changed, and not just because it is the site of his new responsibilities, but because he uses that body to measure himself, and knows he will be found wanting. Emily knows that Vera sees all this, no matter her age.
The bread is cut into thick slices and sits at the center of the table, swaddled in a pretty, faded dish towel patterned with small, blue flowers, forget-me-nots, maybe.
Ido has a mouthful of something when he says, “So, you fall in love with an Israeli yet?”
What is Ido thinking? Or not thinking, not letting himself think but feeling? Does the animal of his body know that this girl—a teenager with her smooth skin and anxious eyebrows—is a body he can fuck? Usually, Emily finds it tiresome when women talk about sex as “fucking”—trying too hard to sound indifferent. But yes, sometimes she likes how the word sounds when she says it to Ido, softly. It’s an old trick: the contrast between what you say and how you say it. The way you’d whisper “I missed you” is how she says, “Fuck me.” Or, anyway, it used to be.
“Actually, I’m running away from someone,” Vera says. She is pushing around mushrooms on her plate, and Emily has to resist the urge to tell her to finish her food. “I’m in love with someone who is ignoring me.”
“An Israeli?” Ido asks, eyebrow up.
Vera nods, picking the cuticle of her thumb, then catching herself and stopping, then doing it again.
“How did you meet?” Ido asks.
Oh, she says, it’s quite a story. “Listen,” Vera starts, “so I was jogging on the beach.”
“You jog?” Emily says, needing to say something.
Yes, she loves to jog, she says. She jogs on the beach in Tel Aviv, up from Jaffa and into the center. What happened was this guy came up to her when she was stretching. He looked not quite Israeli, in her opinion. When she thinks of Israelis, she thinks of guys like Ido, she says, gesturing her fork toward him. But this guy, he was enormous and possibly waxed—hulking, hairless arms covered in these tattoos, like thorns or maybe like claws. At first he didn’t say anything. He watched her for a second as she squatted down on her left leg to stretch out the right hamstring then switched, alternating back and forth. Just as she was about to say, Can I help you? he said, “Our trainers tell us it’s better to rotate your knee upward in that stretch.” All this in English.
And so she says to him, she says, “What?” And looks at him, really looks at him for the first time, and that’s when—at this point in her telling, Vera covers her entire face in her hands, a gesture that Emily finds a bit overwrought but that Ido evidently finds girlishly charming because he says, quietly, almost to himself, “Chamudah,” cutie—that’s when, she repeats, she recognized him from the stupid cereal box.
“But hold on,” Ido says. “What do you mean you recognize him from a cereal box?”
“The place I rent in Tel Aviv,” she says, “my roommate has sugary cereal. I don’t eat it.”
Emily nods in agreement.
Ido is confused now. “Wait, you live here?”
“Well, for the year, yes.”
“I thought you were a tourist.” By “tourist” he means “teenager.”
“I’m a journalist,” she says, and for a moment, Emily wonders about her true age. “Anyway, I recognize him from a cereal box,” Vera continues. “I mean from my roommate’s cereal. It’s got his picture. Him holding a futbal.”
“Like, that’s your job?” Ido is stuck on the journalism thing. “But how old are you?”
She laughs, hands girlishly spread across her face again. No answer.
Ido looks at Emily, then at Vera, then down at his plate, which is clean but for the sauce of marinade.
Emily needs her to go back to the story. “So he’s a professional athlete?”
“A pro futballer,” she says. “You know, your soccer.”
“On a cereal box,” Emily says.
“Yeah.” Vera is picking at her cuticles again. She names the Jerusalem team he plays for.
“Not the Arab!” Ido exclaims, looking up from his plate, where he’s using his fork to doodle with sauce.
Emily feels a wave of embarrassment for her small-minded husband.
“No.” Vera shakes her head. “Amir. The striker. Amir Oved.”
“Let’s see.” Ido is typing the name into his phone. “Wow, look at those tattoos.”
Vera flinches, and Emily intervenes to say, “Forget it. Just keep going. So, you’re stretching.”
“Yeah,” Vera says, she was stretching. And Amir got down in the sand behind her, and very gently, he touched the back of her knee. Emily closes her eyes for a long second. Vera continues, “It really did help to intensify the stretch. Anyway, so we go to get a drink.”
“You’re still in your sweaty clothes,” Emily says.
“Yeah,” Vera says, shrugging. “It’s Tel Aviv, you know, so whatever.” The drinks are what they always are, she says. Him asking her questions and not listening to the answers so much as watching the shape of her mouth, waiting for his turn to tell her what his opinion is on whatever he asked her about. Then back to her place. She doesn’t sound embarrassed by this; she says it in a kind of matter-of-fact way, like they’re all adults and they’ve all been there.
Ido scrunches up his face, looking a little lost. “To your place?”
“Yeah, to fool around,” Vera says, so matter-of-factly. Her face is shadowed by candlelight.
“Oh,” Ido says, sounding taken aback. He goes back to his phone, hunches away from the women.
“So, back at my place,” Vera says, she’d barely closed the door when he pulled dow
n her shorts and her underthings in a single motion. He ate her out on the floor outside the bedroom—roommate could have come home at any minute. Sometimes, Vera says, it takes a while for her to come, you know? Emily nods. So she told him, “It may take a while.”
Ido stands up. Go away, Emily thinks. He begins to clear the table.
Vera makes a motion to help him, but Emily stills her. “Keep going,” she says.
“I was nervous,” Vera continues. “You know, embarrassed. But he looks at me, he’s holding my thighs, and he says, ‘I’m an athlete, mami. We go all night.’”
The women laugh together. Ido, standing, reaches over Emily for her empty plate.
“And he wasn’t lying,” Vera says. “Do you do this? Is this dumb? I keep score.”
“What do you mean?” Emily asks. Ido disappears into the kitchen with a stack of plates.
“Like who gets orgasms. To me it is a score, and the score was one to zero.” She goes on: He carried her to the bedroom. He was bigger than anyone she had ever been with, no, not his cock—“Ha, I wish”—but his body: the mass of him, the muscle. All this for me, she thought, and laughed as she kissed him, climbing into his lap. She watched him evenly while he rolled on a condom, but that’s not the word Vera uses: “evenly.” Instead she says, “I watched him with no expression, like this,” and then she turns to Emily with a flat, even gaze, expectant and uninflected. “I do this when men are with the condom,” she says. “It makes them nervous.”
Emily knows every word this girl is going to say before she says it. Like this story is her own dream. The way they started, Vera says, she was kind of riding him except that he was cradling her, making her move with his enormous, cartoon arms. Absurd arms, with really just the ugliest tattoos. Thorns. Trashy.
“But it was good,” she continues. “It was so good, the fucking.”
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