Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  “Molly, you’ve been happily married for twenty-five years. You and Noam just work so well together. You don’t know the frustrations I’ve lived with.” Isabel sat on the swing despite the chill night air. Woody jumped up beside her.

  “We all have frustrations. Life is about balance and compromise.”

  The gloves came off. “I know monogamy very well, Molly. Remember, I spent nearly twenty years living it.” Isabel went back inside the house. Woody followed on her heels. She slammed the door behind her. “I’m more than capable of living that way. I’m just not willing to.”

  “Even Alon’s built himself a new life with someone.”

  “Great example.”

  “And if you’re saying no because of Zakhi then you’re totally setting yourself up for heartache. Zakhi’s bound to fall in love with someone his own age, Isabel. He’ll want children and leave you. Don’t be naïve.”

  “Okay, Molly. Got it.” She was angry at being judged. Angry at being unsupported. Angry that Molly’s words echoed her fears. Isabel called Suri.

  “I don’t understand what you’re fighting, Isabel.” Suri tried to be understanding. She was clearly exasperated as well. Not for the first time, probably not for the last, Isabel explained that their different marriages affected everything.

  “You became a widow in your fifties, Suri. I divorced at forty.”

  “So? We’re talking about moving on, rebuilding.”

  “We’re from different generations,” she demurred.

  “I don’t hear you mention the word love.” Suri challenged her. “And for whatever it’s worth, Lola and Zizi agree with me. They came back from Israel last summer so impressed with Emanuel. You’re not behaving rationally. A solid man is not so easy to find. A solid man that loves you like Emanuel, even rarer. Hold on to him, Issie.”

  “I can’t bring another man into the house and then separate. Too traumatic for the children.”

  “Who says separate? Why separate? The children love Emanuel. He’s a good father to them.”

  “They already have a father. They don’t need another,” Isabel snapped, surprising herself. Any tension when she spoke to Suri made her uncomfortable. She softened her voice. “This is not about their needs. It’s about mine. Maybe I just don’t love Emanuel enough, if that’s how you want to put it.”

  “You love Emanuel, honey, and you know he loves you very much. You’re being stubborn and silly. Relationships are not simple affairs. And no relationship is perfect. Far from it. But it’s the way the world is structured.”

  When Isabel hung up the phone she took Woody’s leash out of the closet. Time for a walk. Time to think. For Suri the terms of a relationship were different. After decades of marriage to Dave, a volatile, moody, and profoundly dissatisfied man, she sought out one man to rebuild, for a second time, the life she lost in 1941. She didn’t care if Hal read different books than her. She didn’t care if he read books at all. It was not relevant to her that he didn’t understand the European films she took them to. Or that he watched sports on TV most evenings. Hal knew how to take her arm on the street. He held her hand at the movies. He made sure she drank enough water and had her afternoon nap. Suri was content with a man who just accepted her the way she was, foibles, strengths, and all. A man with no hidden agenda, who didn’t demand she change for him.

  Isabel was different. Ever since her divorce, she sought out a variety of men. Sometimes for exploration and diversion. Sometimes, yes, Molly, she spoke to her good friend in her mind, sometimes just for pleasure. For the experience of it. And to escape pain.

  “I can’t risk being dissatisfied now,” Isabel said to Woody when they hit the street.

  Woody looked around briefly to see who Isabel was talking to before he understood it was him. He wasn’t impressed and ran ahead to the neighbor’s dog. Isabel rejected Suri’s claim that the couple was the structure to hang on to. Yet this helped explain the censored stresses that lay under their family’s surface, that continued even after Dave moved to California. These were the stresses that cackled along the cross-continental phone lines and appeared in sharp relief on those high school mornings when Isabel awoke to find Dave seated at the kitchen table with Suri, drinking black coffee and reading The New York Times. As if this were their usual routine.

  Isabel called Woody and they crossed the dark playground filled with swings, slides, jungle gyms, rolling barrels. All still. Lonely round midnight. A group of teenagers filled a bench in a shadowed corner. They drank beer and smoked hookahs. She heard them laughing and assumed they were involved in their own private world. But just in case she moved from the tall dark bushes to the lit path to widen the arc between them. New York in her. Woody ran towards them. He knew a party when he heard one.

  “Woody, here, now.” Isabel meant business.

  He rushed back, reluctant but obedient.

  “Don’t you do that again.” She hissed at him, unnecessarily harsh, taking out her upset on him. He knew this too and his look withered her. She wanted to erase Molly’s antagonism and Suri’s insistence from her mind. The former reaction was unexpected. The latter so numbingly familiar it threatened deeper love.

  ✶

  As they made the last turn that looped them back to their street, Woody stopped at a tall ominous gate. A friend waited for him there. The nightly routine. The dogs wagged their tails and touched noses. The dog behind the gate whined loudly. He wanted out. Woody lifted his leg and peed against the cold metal then was off to the next dog friend a few houses down.

  In high school Isabel didn’t know how to explain to her friends that her parents were married and yet not really. In those days plenty of kids had divorced parents. Fathers with second families. Mothers with live-in boyfriends. But this did not jive with her parents’ choices. They remained married but lived in two different homes. On two separate coasts. Suri’s high cultured Manhattan life style. Dave’s fast-tracked easy moneyed West Coast one. Yet when Dave was around, they went out to dinners and plays and never neglected expensive vacations together. They’d laugh and drink wine. Enjoyed each other’s company. Maybe even had sex. All this upset Isabel because it confused her. In tenth grade she blurted out that their charade of harmony sickened her.

  “Charade?” Suri asked.

  “If you get along so well, then why only once in a while?”

  “When you’re older, you’ll understand, Isabel.”

  So here she was, decades older, walking the dog at midnight under a star-filled sky, the somnolent streets dimly illuminated, small lights spilling from homes where people like her were still awake, and still she didn’t understand. And she remained angry and confused. After that one time, she never again asked Suri to explain the strange goings on between her and Dave. Isabel’s need to protect her fragile mother overrode her own need for clarity. When Isabel finished high school she also knew that Suri would never supply her with answers to these questions or any others. Suri and Dave lived within shadows and shielded themselves behind paradigms—wife, husband, family—and refused to talk about any of it. Not the problems. Not the complications. Not anyone’s needs. Nothing that suggested emotion. Just form and structure maintained with great attention to detail.

  Isabel never adjusted to Dave’s erratic incursions into their lives and they contributed to her decision to move to Israel right after college. To get far away from the tricks. Dave blamed Suri for this decision, because he couldn’t take any responsibility for it himself. But Isabel wanted authenticity. She wanted concrete realities, the lava flow of words that made up discussions, arguments, even tears. Alon and life on kibbutz answered this need for many years.

  A year after Isabel left New York Dave died in a car crash on California’s Highway One. Then there was nothing left to wonder about. Suri, no longer a quasi-abandoned woman, was now officially a widow. Isabel was pregnant with Lia at the time and immersed in
the promise of her young life. The move across the globe, to kibbutz, to two small rooms, to Alon, to their baby, provided her with a simple and precise canvas. Here were clear and definable borders to know and thrive within. Until of course they suffocated her years later.

  When they reached the house Woody ran to his water bowl in the yard. Isabel went into the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of wine. She took it and the newspaper and headed to the couch. Uri came crashing in.

  “Ugh,” she moaned when he landed on her.

  He burrowed in. He both wanted her attention and to delay going back to bed. Isabel put a hand on his head. The other on his thigh. Her baby was quickly outgrowing her lap. She soaked in the bed’s heat he’d brought with him.

  “How come you woke up? It’s time to sleep,” she whispered.

  “Don’t want to.”

  She didn’t have the fight in her and so closed her eyes and leaned into the weight of him. She couldn’t contain the love she felt for this boy it was so enormous. Eight years ago, Alon convinced her to have Uri. He hoped a baby would shore up the flimsy banks of their marriage. He pointed to plenty of couples who spawned a second set of children as the first readied itself to leave the nest. Like Molly and Noam. An Israeli thing. Isabel’s American friends, even Suri, asked why, when she stood on the precipice of freedom with teenage girls, did she agree to be restricted once again to the house, to sleepless nights, to short trips abroad, to grammar school?

  And within months of his birth Isabel realized they were right. It had been a mistake. Not the child himself. Not for one second did she regret bringing forth this son whom she adored more than life itself. But she lamented not thinking enough for herself. A baby couldn’t heal the rift between her and Alon, and meeting the constant demands of a newborn child only made this more obvious. Within the first year of Uri’s life, Alon packed his bags and went back to kibbutz. The place where he had lived contentedly with the rest of his clan until Isabel forced them to move away.

  To some extent Uri was lost in these seismic shifts. Fortunately for him, his sisters, Lia at sixteen and Yael at twelve, did not lose focus. Totally delighted, they dove into motherhood zealously. They bathed, dressed, cuddled, and played with him. In the early mornings they brought Uri to Isabel’s bed to nurse.

  “Got to go to bed.” Isabel roused herself and carried Uri to his room. Woody jumped into the bed and nestled against the boy. Isabel sat beside them and watched Uri’s beautiful face soften into sleep. She wanted to kiss his eyes, his cheeks, his sweet mouth but wouldn’t risk waking him. Instead she rubbed Woody’s grateful head and speculated about Dave’s extroverted difficult nature. And Suri’s understated rigidity. Dave left Suri. Simple as that. But this Isabel had always known. What occurred to her now was Suri’s part in the equation. Something pushed Dave out and west. Possibly the same something that pushed Isabel out and east. Not just Dave’s ornery stubbornness, but also Suri’s impenetrable veneer that didn’t allow for life’s messes, nor for the intimacy that comes with working through them. Suri’s almost bellicose joie de vivre kept those closest to her at arm’s length. Once Dave. Isabel still.

  ✶

  “I don’t know how you tolerate Mati,” Molly burst out the next afternoon as she planted a large metal can of olive oil in the middle of Isabel’s kitchen. The olive harvest in the Galilee was in full swing. This year’s crop was bountiful and the oil was good and inexpensive. Noam always knew which olive press to go to.

  Uri was at a friend’s. Lia was studying in her room. The weight of the day rolled off Isabel’s shoulders. She made them a pot of lemongrass tea and cut slices of poppy seed cake. The two women sat at the kitchen table.

  “Let it be.” Isabel pushed honey in Molly’s direction.

  “I know we have different standards of behavior when it comes to men,” Molly didn’t let it be. “But still.”

  “I don’t need to hear this. Ok?” Isabel pulled her plate closer. “You think I’m screwing up with Emanuel. That I screw too many other men. Which basically means more than one. Now Mati?”

  “Mati’s massages are unconscionable, even abnormal. Practically illegal.”

  “What are you talking about? Sounds like some research control group.”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Molly didn’t look Isabel in the face. “The way he touches. Where he touches.” She mixed honey in her tea. “But, yes, men in general. I could never fool around like you.”

  “Fabulous then that you don’t have to. I like my little gifts from the cosmos.” Isabel’s fork dropped loudly on the plate.

  “I’m not judging you, Isabel. I’m saying I’m different.”

  “Well it sure sounds like judgment. And of course you’re different. You’re married. When I was married I was also different. I’ve already stated that many times for the record. You’re comparing apples and cars.”

  “I think I’d be different even single.”

  “Maybe. To each her own.” Isabel would not apologize. She would not let her sexual appetite and storylines be bowdlerized.

  “I went to Mati once.” Molly squinted her eyes. “No twice, and that was enough for me. Most women I know won’t go back to him after the first time. He’s lecherous with those grober fingers of his.”

  “No, he’s not.” Isabel laughed.

  “Yes, he is. He touches improperly.”

  “Mati likes touching. He gets into the muscles. And I like being touched. No big deal.”

  “Working muscles so close to the vagina is sexual harassment. That’s a big deal.”

  “It’s only harassment if you see it that way.” Isabel’s finger pressed down on sticky-sweet poppy seeds and she licked it clean. Woody loved poppy seed cake and sat patiently by her feet, waiting. “Problem with women is that they’ve internalized the view of their bodies as objects of male desire. If they took possession of their sexuality, like men do, then a man touching them close to their pleasure centers would only give them greater pleasure, not a sense of trespass.”

  “Lovely,” Molly sniggered. “The ultimate feminism. Calling sexual harassment sexual liberation. Mati giving women favors. I love that.”

  “Molly, think of this for a second, will you?” A large jay crossed the patio window. “Imagine a female masseuse, top in the field, who happened to concentrate some of her time on the inner thigh muscles. Maybe sometimes, unintentionally, her hand brushed against the penis. Imagine if she spent time working the muscles around the balls since that’s an important center of energy, often blocked . . .”

  “. . . first chakra, mula banda, blahblahblah, heard all this before . . .” Woody suddenly jumped into Molly’s lap. Her piece of cake remained intact on her plate. “Oohh . . .” Molly was not a great fan of dogs.

  “Down, Woody.” Isabel held a small piece of cake in her hand by the floor. The dog was on it immediately. “And usually ignored for precisely the reason that it’s too close to the genitals. But the line outside this woman’s door would stretch all the way from our town past the stinking oil refineries in the Bay.”

  “So? Men always want their dicks touched.”

  Woody watched closely from the floor. Isabel could tell he wanted to jump back on Molly’s lap. Not because of her. Because of the untouched cake.

  “That’s not the point. Men don’t see their bodies as an object trespassed by women. They see themselves as possessors of their bodies, of their sexuality. If someone’s willing to pleasure them a little, so be it. No big deal. And kind of wonderful.”

  Molly looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get home. Noam’s probably on his way back from the airport. Short business trip.”

  “You know, Mati just doesn’t offend me. He’s my friend. And if I didn’t like it, I would tell him to move his hands and he would.”

  Molly stood up brusquely. “I’m not sure you know what you’re talking abou
t. Sex is also about power. It punishes. It can be used as a weapon. There’s a whole history of male abuse of the female body. Patriarchy 101. Speak to you later, love.” Molly laid a gentle hand on Isabel’s shoulder and dashed out. Her cake remained untouched. Isabel put the plate on the floor. Woody vacuumed it up in seconds.

  The Waters

  1

  Isabel parked her car near Uri’s school. How was she going to work sentences into life, prune and bolster them, animate and subdue words? Her nerves were shot this morning. She had stopped by the construction site after dropping Uri off at school to say a quick hello to Zakhi who was in a full blown rage.

  She walked into the cavernous house and heard Zakhi yelling. “If you’re not here by eleven, don’t bother coming back, you hear. You’re off the job.” Silence. “I’m going to fry that jerk.” Isabel watched Zakhi smack his hand against the wall. He turned and saw Isabel. “I’m going to fire his sorry ass.” He looked untethered. “I’ve lost all patience for truant contractors and their tales.” No smile, no morning peck on the cheek. He was too busy, too anxious. Isabel understood and felt bad for him, and knew there was nothing she could do. “Catch-22 of construction. At this stage where can I find another stone contractor with time available, exactly now when I need him most? And if I could find him, by the time he comes to take measurements, cuts and polishes the stone, by the time he completes the stairs, another month’ll pass. And then I’ll be screwed entirely. Sticking with Sucrat there’s a good chance, even with his bullshit and delays, that the ground floor’ll be completed within ten days.”

  “Cut his check,” Isabel said. “That bombshell at the end is your ultimate comfort.”