Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  Perhaps this could have continued for eternity. One eternity after another. But of course it didn’t. Time seemed endless only to Dori. She didn’t connect the dots: the many days they spent unsupervised. Not to mention the weeks that piled up into months and years. The neighbors’ complaints. Their parents ignoring the letters that arrived from the city and the school. Pink and yellow pages fell from them, carrying the names of the students Lilith Ackerman and Dora Ackerman. But most of the envelopes remained closed. Dori built them into a tower and then forgot about them. Their mother exhaled. Their father chuckled and Lili waited. In the end they announced, in a letter tacked to the door, that they were coming. “Like the theses of Martin Luther,” their father said, and Dori laughed, as was expected of her, even though she didn’t understand, and their mother frowned, and a lone tear slid down to hang from the end of her nose. As beautiful as a diamond.

  But when the test came, Dori believed that from that moment on, everything would only get better and better. It’s true, she was only looking at the scenery, but it would be hard to blame her for that; after all, they had finally transformed into magnificent versions of themselves. The house was cleaned down to its foundation. They tied butterfly ribbons into Dori’s and Lili’s hair, put them in plaid dresses that, their mother announced, were sewn in London and flown to Israel by plane (the plane didn’t fly for them alone, but what did that matter). If you didn’t know them you might believe that the two of them were almost sweet, except for Dori’s concerned expression and Lili’s sneer, which absolutely could not be erased. Try, their mother commanded them, and stuck strawberry-flavored sucking candies under their tongues, where they last longer. And that helped. Sugar helps. Maybe because deaf people have highly developed senses as a compensation for what’s absent. Maybe because it’s always easy to comfort children with candy.

  Their father wore an ironed shirt (Dori couldn’t believe they’d had an iron this whole time) and trimmed his tangled beard with nail clippers. But without a doubt this was their mother’s show. She removed the old hearing aid from the secretary, which was the only nice piece of furniture in their home, and placed it on her right ear. It was the color of vomit. Like a witch’s ear, a prosthetic ear. Hide it, Dori thought, come on. But, in fact, she gathered up her hair so that the device would remain visible to the eye. Dori sat and saw how in an instant their mother transformed into Anna Ackerman-Cohen, as they called her once, who smeared her lips with colored lipstick and sewed dresses with collars and hems on the sewing machine, dresses that she never wore. She looked like another woman, put together, happy. Perhaps she too buried a strawberry candy under her tongue—who knows.

  Workbooks were piled up on the girls’ table, which was usually loaded with Dori’s finger puppets. The dried leaves that served as dresses for the dolls were tossed into the yard—show’s over. And everything was waiting. Even the cake in the oven opened its smiling mouth and waited. Tap tap tap, tapped a seagull who mistakenly arrived at the window. Who heard him? They didn’t open up. His crooked beak met only glass. His round eye stared at its own reflection. Tick tock tick tock, tocked the clock urgently. The legs of the table moved and squeaked. Furniture was dragged aside. Drapes were laundered. The house waited.

  * * *

  The night before the visit, a storm of thunder and lightning raged and Dori woke up in the middle of the night and opened the window in their room, above the low bookcase, and saw a sky full of light. The wind blew incessantly and slammed against the blinds that Dori had opened with some effort, and Dori tried to wake Lili by shaking her, but Lili grabbed the blankets that were too thin for weather like this and wouldn’t wake up, and Dori crawled in with Lili, who hated when she did that, but she who can sleep through anything has no right to object. And in the morning Lili quickly told how she’d found her in her narrow bed, covered in the somewhat dusty covers, and Dori said that the light of the lightning was definitely what woke her, and Lili agreed. A soft light flooded the street and the two of them went down to see the tree, two branches of which had broken off and lay in the yard like two broken hands, and the leaves blew in their multitudes, but nevertheless it had withstood that nocturnal storm, and the two of them rushed upstairs to get ready because there was no time to lose, and besides, the soft light that flooded the washed-out street was a good omen, so their parents said, as if they suddenly believed in omens, and the four of them knocked on anything in their house made of wood.

  If they had knocked on the door, who would have heard? When they rang the bell and a red lamp flickered, the dresses were straightened, the backs were tensed on the tall chairs without touching the backrest. As much as they tried, they did not look especially cheerful, but what could be done? The reference and diagnosis team passed through the door. Two people entered the living room. The supervisor was sent from the neighborhood school with a social worker who called himself Arad (strange, they were sure that it would be a woman, and suddenly: a man). Each of the girls held a slice of cake in her hand and nibbled on it fastidiously. Dori tried to smile like Lili, whose smile spread out over her teeth. She squeezed Lili’s hand; finally, they had their chance to be exemplary little girls. Their mother was prepared to present the advantages of homeschooling. Dori waited to see the admiration spread over the supervisor’s face, her mother reflected in the pupils of the social worker. But Lili was pale and blood dripped from her nose onto the napkin, the chin, the dress, the smile. Dori looked at her and their mother apologized aloud; she really spoke their language and said that this was because of the changing seasons, even though no season was changing, and the night’s rain couldn’t explain a thing, and she took Lili to wash her face. Now there was no one to speak. The social worker and supervisor, who were very friendly, had papers and pens. Folders and files that rested on their knees. The social worker took a slice of cake and didn’t eat. Dori liked him. But time was passing. The blood apparently continued to gush. Perhaps not only from the nose. Perhaps from every hole. Time ground to a halt. But the crumbs continued to pile up.

  Dori ate the cake in her hand in two quick bites and ran to bring the finger puppets from their room. She bowed and waved her arms forward. In the bathroom their mother kept cleaning Lili, the water flowing like the blood. Dori spread out her hands and performed for them the show of the little mermaid whose legs hurt like pins. The index finger on her right hand was the mermaid. The left hand’s middle finger was the prince. Arad, the social worker, smiled. The supervisor smiled as well. The puppets danced on Dori’s hands and she continued dancing with them, whirling around the room, not touching anything, her feet no longer clumsy, until the palm came to rest on her shoulder, and Dori was like a light unplugged (or perhaps it’s better to say: like a finger puppet that no longer has a finger in it. Entirely emptied). But despite her mother’s hand signaling to her, Enough with that now, grasping Dori’s face and turning it to her, and despite Father’s anger, which was placed around her in heavy straps, she knew, she simply knew, that she had impressed them. That this time she was at the heart of things—she, and not Lili. And thanks to her, all was saved. They needed to thank her, even if they never would. There you have it: you’re welcome.

  * * *

  So you saved your family? Anton asked with appreciation. You think? Dori laughed. I was awful. From my mother’s perspective, I ruined everything. She trained us to behave nicely and smile, and I came in with my act. And my dad completely refused to look at me after that. But they looked at me and saw exactly what they’d been told I was, a little autistic girl. Environmentally delayed. So yes, that saved them. I saved them not because I continued my mother’s act, but because I proved to them what they already knew—that I was completely cut off.

  And how did that help? Anton looked at her, confused, and what was there to say? Dori enjoyed this confusion, the power in the old story that could finally be precisely that, just a story. When the old shame crept in, strangling her like a hot scarf, Dori ignored it. She also took of
f her socks and got under the blanket. You’re right, she told him. Clearly, it wasn’t supposed to help. But you never know what will happen next and what you’re afraid of is never the right thing.

  She closed her eyes, as she always did when she told him these stories, which made her feel as if she truly had something to give him. Like a girl from a broken home who shows her iron-burned back to the prime minister’s son. Dori remembered herself as if she had crawled into the body of the girl she had been back then. As if she truly had the chance to go back to being who she had been, to see, from the slits of those eyes, as through peepholes opened wide in an old painting, the world of then.

  3

  And perhaps there is just one way for things to happen. Like water that’s always diverted into the same channel. Like dolls cut from a single sheet, so only simple features need be added: A strict father following his own rules. A beautiful, exhausted mother. An opinionated sister. An absentminded sister. One who will write and one who will read. One who sticks to the facts and another who will ask, And what if? A family. A quiet family.

  And perhaps because of this, and perhaps for other reasons, they left everything. That visit from the reference and diagnosis staff ended well, but nevertheless, it was decided that they would leave. At once. They traveled to a village in the south, a hot, dry place with exposed roots and broken glass worn down by the sun; small, low houses, stems clinging to and hanging from their walls, and wild, scruffy animals that came out only at night, their eyes gleaming in the dark. A village of immigrants who were themselves the last of the immigrants to get there, even if they hadn’t crossed a desert in order to arrive.

  In the village, so it was decided, they would have a place. Life would be simpler. And their decisions, or rather his decisions, would have force. The force of words you couldn’t just dismiss. “The force of Alex Ackerman,” as they would say—not the family, but others. “We move and life moves with us,” they announced to the two girls before they left, and they gave their parents a look and an hour later scratched the door in the old house like cats. For the most part they scratched surreptitiously, at the door of the room and their pillows, but they scratched until they caused real damage to their room, the cost of the repair for which would come out of their allowance, if only they were entitled to an allowance. They saw that Mother couldn’t believe those two scratchers were hers. Dori saw her tightly closed lips, the stone-faced expression, and understood that if she could, she’d get rid of them at once and go through the world a childless woman. But not without Alex; with him around, she’d stay.

  Their father delivered a brief report on their future life in the village, a life that was supposed to fit their hand like a glove, or at least one finger of a glove. The village was like a blurry slide stuck in the projector. Beautiful at first, then frightening. Because what was in a village? Lili asked with the adolescent scorn she had already acquired by the age of eleven. “Sheep and cows, fields, cousins getting married.” And, Dori would be able to add later: bread in the oven, sex behind the chicken coop, stray dogs, impoverished workers brought in shipping containers to pick whatever needed picking at the time, and babbling tongues. “We should get a gun,” Lili announced, but Dori could tell that she was kidding. No gun would be fired there. Dori was Lili’s permanent audience. She was her only audience, long before Lili started talking to sheets and pillowcases in that hotel in Austin or New York.

  Lili’s sharpened senses caused her to recoil, while Dori felt that the village was drawing her toward it. In contrast with her regular cowardice, she wasn’t frightened of the village, and in fact fell in love with it, her hands wrapped around an invisible orange that signaled the orchards of their new destination. In the beginning she was afraid, yes—like Lili, or as a result of Lili, if the order of things matters at all. But bit by bit the love nestled inside her, sleepy and content. Love for the village raised its head in her like a mole coming up through the earth.

  Their parents took them there in the peeling blue truck on the back of which the letters THE DEAF stood out like they were written in fire. All their possessions were loaded inside, hidden in crates or tied in bundles, and whatever was left behind deserved to be forgotten. The two of them were tucked in among artfully bent iron. An ornamental metal coat hanger poked into Dori’s back. She could feel each and every hand-forged spring, but she didn’t complain. You can’t complain about everything.

  Weeks passed in the village. The nights were black and the days almost too bright to bear, and their father still treated it like the perfect solution. As if each thing that fell onto them from the sky had been designed in detail. “Village life called to us,” Father announced as he sat them down in an abandoned cotton field to watch the twilight approach. The field belonged to someone, as did the adjacent orchard. Nothing was in fact abandoned, but to Alex Ackerman this didn’t matter. They’d come there, he explained with restraint to an angry Lili, because there were places where, when you’re different, you stick out like a dislocated bone no one can put back in place. Their mother bit her bottom lip with her teeth until it looked as if she had no lips at all. The few freckles that had survived over the years suddenly stuck out. Dori was shocked by how ugly she appeared, their beautiful mother, and Lili, who knew what her sister was thinking, pinched her on the arm to make her stop. But this was what they were supposed to do, not blend in but stick out. Not to be two more girls on bikes. And the prominent freckles were a good start. They would make the villagers think the most awful, terrible things about them. They’d dress them in their own nightmares. They’ll see yet, their father explained, and they looked at the low houses. In a village they’ll have use for nightmare makers like the Ackerman family. If they don’t throw us down a well, they’ll let us live in peace.

  Their mother announced that from now on she would grow vegetables herself. The two of them giggled to each other. Their father could continue his metal-collecting business there too. Four senses told him that success awaited him there, of all places. And not much more was demanded of the girls than coming down from the apple tree.

  Lili found a pile of jute sacks in one of the sheds teeming with mice. They couldn’t decide if they should wear them or if it was enough to sew patches out of them, because they had already learned to sew and the sewing machine stood unused anyway. When their mother caught them with a pile of sacks in their arms, she burst into tears, but they were no longer moved. This time the crying stopped quickly and she gave them a concrete task: to take apart two crates and straighten up the room that was supposed to be theirs, because the visitor was on his way.

  Arad, the social worker they met in the previous home, was supposed to arrive for a first visit in the village. He was the foot that the establishment insisted on wedging in the door. They knew that their parents had decided that he was the lesser of two evils. Dori thought that he had a nice smile; Lili didn’t say anything, but Dori was quite certain that she thought the same thing. Before he came they baked a cinnamon cake. Lili said, “Turns out that cake is the solution to everything,” but their mother managed to ignore her. And when he came and stood in the door and then sat down on the least damaged chair in the house, just as before, their mother was the primary spokesperson; a smile stretched out across her beautiful lips, as if she hadn’t spent her days drenched in tears. The ugly, repulsive prosthetic device, which gave off a diseased smell, was again placed in her ear, and Lili and Dori tried not to stare. She sliced the cake and served him, warning the girls with a single glance to behave as they should. This time Dori observed the details: he had a mane of black hair that was combed back; he had thick glasses and a diamond-patterned sweater, with an ironed white shirt peeking out. He told them he had studied film before switching to social work. Their mother moved the coiled space heater toward him and said something about Buster Keaton. When Arad protested that the heater was pointing only at him, but nevertheless spread his hands out in front of the red-hot coils, she explained that they barely f
elt the cold. “We are hot-blooded,” she said, as if Arad the social worker was a cold lizard warming himself on a rock.

  Lili and Dori looked at him so they wouldn’t miss a single word. They were required to sit and solve problems when he came. They had pages of homework that were prepared in advance. Nevertheless Dori couldn’t control herself and smiled at him the wide smile of an exemplary girl. Lili signed to her that she looked like an idiot, but she didn’t care. Let them say what they would say; she knew that he came for her.