Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  I had a happy childhood. If people asked, that’s what I’d say. Because happiness isn’t interesting. You don’t ask about happiness with concern or curiosity. Others’ happiness is a door that can be kept locked. Little by little the door transforms into a wall and the wall blends into the nothingness around it. Just like that. I’d say that and fall silent. And perhaps I truly was happy then, aside from the gloom bound up with it. Maybe happiness prevailed in the past, against all odds. Or at least something very similar to happiness. After all, I was once the older sister. I had responsibilities. I once wrote down the whole world for the two of us.

  If Dori saw me in the street she wouldn’t recognize me. “We changed so much,” I say aloud, vouching only for myself. If Dori saw me in the street she would recognize me. Obviously.

  But there’s no chance we’d walk past each other on the same street.

  Uriel’s mother brought letters from Dori each time she came to visit. She herself met with her, more than once, I found out. I found out all sorts of things, but I learned that they weren’t so important. I didn’t respond to the letters she wrote me, not then anyway. Sometimes I sent blank, folded pages back to her, just so Uriel’s mother wouldn’t be disappointed. They were empty fields of white upon white. Dori could write on them what she wanted. Before her graduation party, when she was about to leave the boarding school for only the god of drama knew where, I asked Dima to see, to check what was going on with Dori. “Tail her?” he asked, with no hard feelings. I was overseas where he couldn’t see me, but I nodded yes. A week after the graduation party, I received a toy bird in the mail. From Dima, obviously from Dima. I placed it on the highest window in my tiny new apartment, to remind me of the rhyme about the woman who lived in a shoe. And I had a reason for all this. Because I told only the facts. But it wasn’t Dori, it was me who died.

  DORI

  Anati and Dori stood in the cafeteria at the zoo. Anati’s hair had grown lighter from the summer sun, stripes upon stripes of luster. Two days before, she’d dyed her bangs apricot orange and pulled them to the side with a Hello Kitty barrette. Anyone else would look retarded, Dori thought, but not her, as everything with Anati seemed like a joke at the onlooker’s expense. And they looked, sure they did. Dori’s hair was always a mousy brown, even when she tried to do something about it. That’s what they were, a jaguar and a rat, that said it all, Dori thought—the same thought she’d had the day before as well, maybe even at the same time. Two orders of fries and three servings of egg salad on flat plates next to pickled vegetables, fizzing from being out for too many days. Anati wore a T-shirt with LASSO MY HEART written on it, and Dori knew that it was a joke, but the youngest kids, those who’d just hit puberty, they always stared at her. Maybe they prayed for a lasso. Anati looked at them without seeing them. She was a northern goddess with orange hair in the burning desert. A dignified goddess stained with ketchup, mayonnaise, and saturated fats.

  Everything in the cafeteria tasted the same. Greasy and burnt. Dori learned this quite quickly. The two of them didn’t eat there. Not that this helped. Dori had already gained a lot of weight since arriving. She no longer felt comfortable in her body, in her clothes. She sometimes dreamt about a plate of fries, but when she was awake she ate only foods that came in a sealed package. Other foods seemed fraught with danger.

  “Prepare yourself, the food today will remind you of dead flamingo,” Anati told Dori on her second day at the cafeteria, because seven flamingos had died in the small pool the day before, and Anati told her, “You’ll see, we’ll be serving all of them for lunch here, cut up into thin slices with parsley. And they’ll pay for it and eat it and ask for more.” Dori nodded.

  “That’s another twenty-seven,” Anati says with a blank face to someone asking for another serving, and Dori learns from her. Not to express emotion and not to get excited. Not to fire a single nerve when a red-faced customer, whose forehead is wet with cold sweat and whose veiny hands show just how sensitive human skin can be, bitches about the exorbitant prices or threatens to complain about her to the management. “Please,” Anati says, “call. Do you need their number?” The woman mutters, “What chutzpah,” and even then Anati doesn’t smile.

  “We don’t get involved, we’re not a part of this whole thing,” she explained when the snack bar emptied out and they were left looking at the pictures of the giraffes hanging opposite them. Anati had researched the matter and concluded that the giraffes looked exactly like the women with face-lifts who impatiently arrived at the snack bar, their diamonds sparkling on their wrinkled fingers, with their big, heavy bags and their well-dressed, snotty grandchildren.

  It’s not what they expected of her, those who had expected anything from her at all. Lili wrote her to get the hell away from there. To come to her. That they’d find her a scholarship to art school. But Dori no longer drew. She didn’t even remember a time when she wanted to draw. She finished boarding school with excellent grades. The best in the history of the place, according to her literature teacher, who tended to exaggerate slightly but had already brought her the university registration forms. Her art teacher was angry and surly, but even he couldn’t deny Dori’s dedication, which obscured very average talent. She excelled even in math, which was rarely true of graduates of the art program. And through it all, nothing but peacefulness, patience, and good intentions emanated from Georgia O’Keeffe, the beautiful face of the establishment—and who would have believed that its face would belong to a well-dressed woman in the prime of her life?

  Uncle Noah, who was already connected then to an innovative mobile dialysis machine, arrived for the graduation and gave her a toy bird rocking on glass crutches. The bird could do an entire flip on the crutch and Dori tried to protect it completely. But by the first evening, in the lousy pub that everyone, absolutely everyone went to (that’s what Anati said, waving her hands with her constant irony in order to sign the general, widespread trend, until Dori thought that they wouldn’t end up going), the bird had disappeared. Dori thought that the noise there was at a level of at least seventy decibels and overall the place needed to be shut down, but Anati didn’t hear her and ran to hug someone she knew. And Anton, whom she had already met then, briefly, or at least someone who very much resembled him in his lazy articulation, his jawline, his eyes that looked ill but were nevertheless beautiful, Anton told her, “Your little bird broke.” And she only drank more. She drank what one drinks, beer from greasy glasses, shots of tequila from glasses with rims dipped in salt, and every cheapish item from what they called “The Children’s Menu.” Cocktails that were doubtless concocted from cough syrup. She hoped that she’d get so drunk she’d need to vomit and someone would hold her hair to the side. She said this to Anati, who told her, “You’ve seen too many movies,” as if they hadn’t seen those movies together.

  * * *

  Georgia O’Keeffe, who was responsible for her by the power of the Ministry of Welfare or something like that (maybe the offices that supervised her had changed, but she remained), wasn’t pleased. Not about the job that Dori had taken on, and even less about Anati. “I’m a functioning citizen,” Dori said to her, sitting on the bright, familiar armchair. “This is more than they ever expected of me.” She spoke and felt her pinky grow red hot. But Georgia wasn’t buying it, even though she smiled pleasantly. For instance, during the final meetings she again asked her to talk about Lili, as if that wasn’t an ancient geological layer. Dori said, “At the zoo there’s cultural diversity and camaraderie among the staff, and health insurance. I was lucky to find work there.” She was echoing the administrator who’d signed the forms, adorned with pictures of animals in seven different colors. Without noticing, she even imitated his stifling tone. “And there are giraffes too,” she added, even though of course she didn’t take care of the giraffes herself. Because of all the zoo’s corners and paths, she’d found herself in “one of the important pulse points,” as the administrator had said. So she stood in the cafeteri
a and arranged piles of bottled mineral water as if she controlled the nerve center. This amused Anati and Dori so much that all it took was for one of them to say “pulse” and they’d be holding their sides with laughter.

  When she relented on the Lili front, Georgia started talking about a scholarship that was possible, very possible, not to mention that her personal story would certainly add weight to her good grades, but Dori didn’t plan on attending any university. It was easy following Anati, whose report cards regularly featured seven or eight failing grades. That was how she wound up at the zoo. They got the jobs thanks to Anati’s uncle, who had seniority there and first claim to any job opening. Despite being the problematic niece, Anati had been given a chance. No one could fire her, though not everyone knew it yet and she’d already been threatened here and there. In Dori’s case the situation was different. She didn’t plan on giving them any pretext for firing her.

  They weren’t allowed to spit in the food, to scatter cigarette ashes on the pickled vegetables, to do all the things that Anati told Dori they used to in the good old days. Not even Dori believed that those were the good old days, though sometimes she was gullible as a goat. In her first month in the place, Lotti and Aharon came to the zoo together, dressed in what Dori assumed was holiday dress. They tapped her shoulder to get her attention, and she looked up at the flickering fluorescent lights. Lotti waved her fat hand opposite her face and Dori gazed at her in amazement, counting the silver and glass rings on her fingers. Lotti and Aharon signed furiously, excitedly, with an emotion that was apparently happiness, but her hands remained silent, crossed in her lap. Perhaps she truly didn’t understand them. Aharon went to stand in the entrance, tugging on a thread in his too-long pants, but Lotti stood firm, refusing to leave until Anati threw them out. Days and then weeks passed and Dori waited, partly with dread, partly with expectation fluttering in her like a fish, for her parents to follow them. He scolding and she crying. Dori knew what she’d say. She knew how all of it would proceed. She just knew that she would turn the tables on them once and for all. But they never came.

  At the cafeteria, Anati and Dori sold odds and ends from the souvenir shop, pencils in the shape of long-necked animals and pins marking fifty years since the zoo’s founding, adorned with the zoo’s symbol, a smiling blue bear. “Fucking Disneyland,” they said, because it really wasn’t clear why and how that bear was selected when there was an abundance of miserable flesh-and-blood animals to choose from. But that’s how it was and each of them stuck a round pin with a smiling bear to her T-shirt. At the front of the zoo hung the grandest bear of all, a huge balloon, blue and smiling. He had been stretched out over the zoo gate since the celebrations that took place back when the two of them were still ordinary boarding school girls. They hated him too.

  The camera above them, a slab of rectangular metal that clung clumsily to the television arm, continued filming. A watching eye. Anati said that when she was taking care of that little brat during last year’s vacation, the girl’s parents hid tiny cameras everywhere. In toys and in the bathroom closet and in the pot of the pomegranate tree. Sometimes she thought about torturing the kid a bit just to provoke those two, who kissed her in the air when she arrived each morning, and “every night watched what the security cameras had filmed that day and screwed. Better than porn.”

  Anati and Dori sometimes saluted the camera, taking care to stand in its blind spot. They almost never made faces because there was a guard who looked at their screen too, in moments of boredom. Anati said that making faces was stupid, and that was the only reason not to do it, not some minimum-wage guard. Dori listened to her and was happy for this excuse even though the two of them earned less than minimum wage themselves and acted stupid day and night.

  In the afternoon the cafeteria was empty. Anati turned up the music and danced. Sounds of a hit from the eighties could be heard, one even Dori could identify despite having meaningful gaps in everything tied to popular (and unpopular) music. But this song, in which a line was repeated over and over until even Dori herself wanted to jump out of her skin, she actually recognized. “This way my classical education doesn’t go to shit,” Anati said, spinning on the floor, and Dori had a hard time understanding if this was a joke; when did Anati have time for a classical education? Sometimes she really was quite slow in these matters. “Everything’s a joke,” Anati told her, “c’mon, like the clown who cries and they ask him what happened, why’s he crying, and he says he’s just relaxing.” Dori looked at her. “Forget it, it’s one of my dad’s jokes, I can’t believe I told it.”

  Despite her natural charm, Anati was an awful dancer. “Plié,” she said, her hands outstretched. “Jeté. Relevé, arabesque.” Dori knew she’d fall in the end, but at that moment she danced and leapt. “You see,” Anati shouted at her as if she were very far away, “they told us not to sit, but they didn’t say anything about dancing.” And yes, around then she fell, one foot tripping up the other and her back banging into the soft-drink cooler. But she stood up relatively fast, five days having passed since the supervisor caught her sitting; the memory of his booming threats still hadn’t faded entirely.

  Dori took care to arrive for each shift by the rear entrance, to breathe in the chlorine vapor from the small artificial lake where nothing swam, to climb the plastic bridge that was coated in a thin veneer of wood, and to slump into the orange uniform with the zoo’s old logo, which was composed of the interwoven silhouettes of a chimpanzee and a pelican. Dori had already run out of pity for the bald lions, the hippopotamus devastated by grief; only the giraffes still seemed too good for this place, like long-legged It Girls sold into slavery, which wasn’t so far from their actual situation.

  The previous year, before either of them worked there, the judge’s daughter had climbed over the fence. She’d rebelled against her father, who was known for holding feasts of scorched meat in his yard. What he did beyond the yard was no less bad, it was said, and it involved other kinds of flesh. Anyway, the judge’s daughter was intent on rebelling. She was in the final moment of youth, just before she would no longer be tried as a minor and deeds like this would transform her from a girl with a conscience into just another crackpot. They knew her—that is, Anati knew her, and said to Dori, “What, you don’t remember that she came to visit me?” But Dori didn’t remember that, and was well aware that Anati had this habit of inserting herself into the middle of every story. The judge’s daughter came to befriend the wild animals, to atone for the deeds of her father. “She deserved it,” Anati said to Dori, forgetting that the moment before, she had declared her a friend. “An idiot she was and an idiot she remains.” The two of them were glad that the depressed animals still had a bit more energy left, even though they themselves no longer visited their cages and even found ways to avoid them. They said that the attack was quick and clean, teeth were bared, jaws, but fortunately there was a guard on duty who quickly turned on the lights and put to sleep the one that needed to be put to sleep. But the one who stayed asleep in the end was the judge’s daughter. She was still hospitalized in a private room somewhere, surrounded by flowers. And the zoo was closed for a month and then opened again. They, like all zoo employees, were required to look out for oddballs. This was the explicit term specified on the purplish form that Dori initialed. In the end, she couldn’t escape from this requirement either.

  Toward noon they popped popcorn in the old machine. Afterward they fried up hot dogs bursting with chemicals, while before them waited, not patiently, fat, heavy families and skinny, unattractive families. Bleached-blonde moms, dads who woke up tired, kids in matching outfits, everyone waiting for fried potatoes, for anything rescued once or twice from the same oil. They were on the correct side of the counter and everyone else stood on the side of the mistakes, shoving their money forward. The two of them competed over who hated the customers more. They even hated those who were kind to them. Who insisted on saying something about how amazing, how fascinating it must be for
someone their age to work at the zoo. But sometimes it seemed to Dori that she envied them. She was even envious of children with a father who pushed them to speak and whose mother was angry and annoyed, pulling out and returning cards to her wallet, certain her membership card was somewhere. She didn’t know the meaning of the damp emotion that seized her in the presence of the father hitting his children, the mother with the eating disorder, the children who looked as if they were at the beginning of a growth spurt that would leave them even bigger idiots. But she always saw the sneering glance from Anati, who was familiar with Dori’s foolish sentiments, and she’d give her an almost identical sneer in return.

  In her first week at the cafeteria, Anati told her that there were dozens of cockroaches in coffee machines like theirs. “I’m not making that up,” she said. “They opened it up here once and the cockroaches ran out.” Dori looked into the depths of her coffee cup. Until then it seemed like a huge bonus to her, free coffee for the cafeteria employees. “Okay, but maybe something changed,” she said, as she wavered over whether she’d keep drinking the coffee. But some things don’t change.

  * * *

  Georgia didn’t say aloud that she was wasting her time, but she expressed it in every indirect way possible. When she spoke, Dori looked for the thousandth time at her fingernails painted white. Georgia O’Keeffe had already learned that Dori called her by that name. It was an improvement on the name that she’d used for her before, which she also knew about. When they met for the first time, in a different bright room where there hung a massive picture by the American painter that depicted a devoured and devouring flower with enormous stamens, Dori thought that she looked like an old mermaid, even though apparently she wasn’t that old. She had since said goodbye to her old affection for mermaids, but the eyes that looked at her with calm concern remained the same eyes. She said, “My mother cried bitterly during my birth, but one star began dancing and under this sign I was born.” Georgia smiled. From her perspective, quoting from the Bard signified substantial progress.