The Others

by Sarah Blau

  Like Dina, Ronit has barely changed, providing further proof that women without children get to keep their youthful appearance. Stop hunting for evidence, it’s a fact and that’s that. The black, unruly shock of hair is still here, in all its former glory, towering above the same thick eyebrows and the deep dimple in her chin. She looks smoother somehow, as if her body has been vigorously plucked. But other than that, it’s the same body, slender and toned, with those same liberated and sensual movements that make whoever’s sitting in front of her cringingly aware of their own body.

  I remember I used to think her extravagant sexuality compensated for some deficiency, maybe even arctic frigidness, but unfortunately, I was proved wrong. Naama was the one who taught me there were no surprises in that area, “Our mind-numbing lecturer won’t suddenly turn out to be an animal in bed, and you won’t catch Meira the librarian at a swingers party. What you see is what you get, and someone who oozes sexuality oozes it for a reason.” Noticing my disappointed expression, she added, “It’s okay, I’m not a big fan of Ronit’s theatrics either. She’ll probably grow out of it in a few years.”

  It’s a shame I can’t tell her that despite the considerable passing of time, she hasn’t grown out of it. As proof, she’s now sticking her finger in the little bowl of honey and licking it, her tongue the same vermilion as her lips.

  She leans closer to me, and I pick up a funny, sweet smell. Gone is the subtle lemony scent of her Blue Lagoon, the perfume she wouldn’t let any of us buy because it was “hers.” Whatever the brand, her new smell is exotic aggression. And maybe every age exudes its own special smell, and what we thought was the scent of her Blue Lagoon, was just the intoxicating fragrance of youth itself.

  A few years ago, one of the Israeli late-night TV shows hosted Eighties’ icon Samantha Fox. She looked fabulous (childless, what else), and the thrilled host told his next guest, who had been blindfolded, that he had to guess the person sitting beside him. I remember the guest being led to the couch where Samantha was sitting. He took one sniff of her neck and promptly announced: “Well, young she ain’t.”

  The fortyish-year-old Samantha gave her polite British smile, and the visibly embarrassed Israeli host refused to translate the guest’s remark for her. I remember wondering what it was about her smell that made him reach his swift conclusion. And now, taking in Ronit’s new smell, I realize it reveals something deep and internal, something inside the bloodstream. It turns out the body has its own bag of tricks to betray its age, no matter how hard you try to hide it.

  A young woman bursting with shopping bags approaches our table and stutters, “Is that you, on the magazine? I wasn’t sure.” She looks surprised and excited, and Ronit smiles, as proud as a puffed-up peacock. Doesn’t even bother hiding it.

  “Good for you, really,” she tells Ronit. “Not every woman has to have kids, I’m a big supporter of your cause. And hats off for the essays, super important.”

  Ronit is still smiling, but her tone is cautious, “Thanks, sister, but it’s important to remember that Dina Kaminer was the driving force and the woman who, hmm… wrote the essays.”

  I stare at her with leery distrust. Modesty has never been her strong suit.

  “And if you’re interested in the subject, you can talk to Sheila over here,” she continues. “She’s actually the one who gave Dina the idea for that groundbreaking essay.”

  Something’s definitely wrong. Ronit doling out credit? Ronit paying me a compliment? Publicly??

  “Oh, you’re into that too?” the young woman enquires in a friendly tone. “So, none of you want kids? What is this, the national childfree women’s conference?” she asks, then gives us a polite, light-hearted giggle and walks away, but doesn’t forget to turn around, raise her hand and part her index and middle fingers in a cheerful V-sign. One day we’ll rule the world. And render humanity extinct.

  Ronit and I don’t dare look at each other.

  “Say, why did you tell that detective that I’m a suspect?” The silence congeals into a sticky goo, and it feels like the right moment to get down to business. “You honestly think I killed Dina?” If I didn’t kill her sixteen years ago, you think I’d do it now?

  She takes her time answering, still fishing the pine nuts out of the ginormous salad she ordered, still sipping her coffee without leaving lipstick traces on the mug, just like she never left any traces on the styrofoam cups back in college. Her traces are of an entirely different variety.

  “That detective,” she parrots me, “who do you think you’re fooling? His name is Micha and you obviously have a crush on him.”

  Ronit might be an actress, but as a mimic, she can’t hold a candle to him. Not that I have any intention of sharing that information with her.

  “I see your man-picker is still off,” she says. “Same old same old.”

  A tall figure flashes before my eyes. Neria. My first and certainly not last mistake. But at twenty you’re allowed to make mistakes. The only problem is that my twenties are so far behind they’re a dot in my rear-view mirror, and I’m still making a twenty-year-old’s mistakes.

  “So did you or did you not tell him I’m a suspect? That Dina was afraid of me?”

  “Look, I remembered how much you love being the centre of attention, so I did you a favour,” she giggles. “It worked, didn’t it?” she asks, and her giant, scarlet pie hole opens wide with laughter.

  No, she isn’t mourning Dina’s death either. I consider her, this laughing, frivolous Ronit, this wicked, evil, whore with her mammoth mouth agape just like it was back then, that night, We’re just messing with you, jeez, you’re so uptight, with that same gaudy lipstick like a bloody stain. With the raised knife, and the scream, so full of anguish, with Ronit doubled over in laughter. Thrump! Thrump! Thrump!

  “I’m messing with you, Sheila, it’s just a joke, jeez,” she says, “where’s your sense of humour?”

  “I never did care for your dumb jokes,” I hiss. “You’re confusing me with Naama. She was the only one who liked them.”

  That shuts her up. Nothing like dredging up a corpse to make someone clam up. Especially when the head count is now two dead and two living. Ronit sticks her fingers back in her salad and starts tweezing out pine nuts again, and I wonder whether she ever talked about Naama over the years. When she met with Dina, her “best friend,” did she allow herself to share certain memories, or did they both just put her behind them, leave her there swaying on her rope, forgotten?

  “Did Dina even talk about her?” I can’t help myself.

  “What do you think? Of course not!” There it is, the faint but familiar note of aggression. “And I already told you, it’s not like Dina and I were close!”

  “Didn’t keep you from giving that interview,” I say.

  “I always said, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” she says calmly. I can’t believe she actually used that stale cliché, but then again, Ronit was never the sharpest lemon on the tree.

  “Besides, I’m about to star in a TV show about four friends, so the interview came just in time. I don’t think Dina would have minded.”

  At least she’s not giving me the whole “that’s what Dina would have wanted” spiel, because we both know nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t get to piggyback off my fame.

  “And there’s a song there that really reminded me of us,” she says and pauses for a second, “I mean, our old us. It goes like this:

  “Four little girls, playing with their dollies,

  Snap! went one – and then there were three.

  Three little girls, playing with their dollies,

  Off came a head – as broken as could be.

  Two little dollies, one disappeared,

  And then there was one – just as she’d feared.”

  Her singing voice is a creaky, low-pitched whine.

  “Sounds like a children’s song,” I say, despite the fierce urge to get up and run far, far away.

  “
I don’t like children’s songs,” she replies.

  “No one does.”

  “And no one likes children,” she says, and we both belt out the rest, “and no one wants kids, and no one needs kids, and we’ll never ever have them, n-e-v-e-r!”

  Our voices, crooning off-key, are the voices of twenty-year-old students.

  I want to go home, now. Never mind that I didn’t get what I wanted out of Ronit, I just want to get out of here.

  I start mumbling the “We should probably get the check” routine, but she, instead of jumping at the opportunity to bolt and make sure she never has to bump into me again, says, “Let’s order another coffee.”

  Is it just my imagination or have the mugs on the table turned into the styrofoam cups from the campus coffee machine? It is your imagination. Now pull yourself together and get what you want out of her.

  “So what about this Micha?” she says casually, as if we’re picking up a conversation where we had left off years ago, on the grass by the campus cafeteria. “He’s just your type.”

  There’s something disturbing about the fact that we haven’t seen each other in sixteen years and she can still nail my taste in men.

  “Maybe I actually did do you a favour,” she says with her smug smile. “I’m guessing he called you with more questions about Dina, and maybe you even met again? You remember I always liked playing matchmaker.”

  She stretches out in her chair and the top button of her blouse opens, revealing the curvature of her breasts, which, like the rest of her, are perfectly preserved. Two firm apples. Nothing like your shrivelled pears that look like they nursed triplets.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” I say, “the last thing you care about is helping me.”

  “You always were ungrateful,” she replies, straightening her blouse but leaving the top button open. “You should be thanking me.”

  “For what exactly?”

  “Maybe for not telling him everything I know?”

  Button up your goddamn blouse. “What could you have told him?”

  “What you did to me back then.”

  “Back then?” There’s only one “back then” she can be talking about. “What did I do to you? I did something to you?”

  “You most certainly did,” she says and pauses in expectation. “Oh, please, don’t pretend you don’t remember, you broke my hand.”

  That night. I look down at her hands. Thrump! Thrump! Dina was the one drumming, Ronit just stood there laughing her head off, even when she heard that agonized scream, even when… I keep staring at her hands, strong and steady, hands that can apply lipstick perfectly, without going outside the lines.

  “Sheila, don’t give me that ‘who, me?’ face. You knocked me backwards and broke my hand.”

  “I only nudged you!”

  “You pushed me, violently, on purpose. I broke a bone. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

  “I remember no such thing.”

  She narrows her eyes at me, the look reflected in them decidedly unpleasant, as is her voice when it emerges from her ruby lips that suddenly seem paler, “Well, if that’s the case, I have to wonder what else you conveniently forgot.”

  9

  I HAPPEN TO HAVE a strikingly good memory, Miss Ronit. As striking as your smudge-proof lipstick, which, as if by magic, leaves not a single mark on your coffee cup.

  And now, as if to taunt me, you’re biting into the Danish you ordered along with your weak Americano. Tell me, where does it all go? I put my hand on the roll of flab spilling over my waistband, nature’s idea of a birthday gift to most women hitting forty, whether they’ve cranked out a baby or not. Maor actually liked my muffin top, or at least that’s what he said when pinching it. But Maor liked saying a lot of things that weren’t necessarily true. I’m telling you, I have absolutely no interest in becoming a father.

  So, my strikingly good memory, Miss Ronit, might not be the killer memory I had twenty years ago (turns out you don’t need the whole post-partum brain fog for that, your memory will eventually start going downhill with age; probably too many memories better left forgotten), but you won’t make me doubt what happened or didn’t happen, what broke or didn’t break that night. I’m not some heroine in a book who finds out halfway into the plot that she has actually murdered her entire family with an axe and repressed the heinous memory. Oh, come on, Miss Ronit, that won’t be my story.

  “So why didn’t they rape her?” Ronit’s voice may be soft but the note of ruthlessness is definitely there, rearing its ugly head. That old ruthlessness.

  “Because it wasn’t about that, it was about motherhood,” I reply very slowly.

  “Yes, but they were going to kill her anyway, right? And whoever did it has to be a complete perv, so why not rape her as well?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to shift the focus from his statement?” I hang my gaze on my empty plate while Ronit continues to chew her Danish. And maybe gluing a doll to someone’s hand and marking her forehead and working up the passion is just too complicated? “Rape Is Not an Expression of Passion, Rape Is an Expression of Violence and Control,” a lecture by Dr Dina Kaminer, 2nd semester.

  But I have to say I thought about it myself.

  “Or maybe they did rape her and they’re just not telling us?” Ronit smacks her blood-red lips as if she’s just thought of something delicious. It was a swift gesture, as quick as a bullet, but I saw it. “That Micha is hiding something, you listen to me.”

  “Even if he is hiding something,” and he is, “I don’t think it’s rape. It just doesn’t add up. They turned her into a mother, a Madonna, a saint.”

  “Well then, classic Madonna–whore complex.”

  “Ronit, I’m telling you, that isn’t the case here; this isn’t Eve and Lilith.” That shuts her up real fast. “Whoever did this knew perfectly well what he wanted to accomplish, and I don’t think rape was one of the objectives.” Or not the only one. To be Dina’s friend was to run the whole gamut of ugly emotions: frustration, jealousy, resentment, to name a few.

  “Fine. Between you and me, I don’t think he would have had much fun anyway.” She bites into her Danish and a tiny glob of jam smears her chin. She doesn’t wipe it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was never a very sexual person.”

  “What are you talking about? Her sexuality has nothing to do with rape.”

  “Don’t play dumb. The woman’s already dead, you can stop being afraid of her. She was practically asexual.”

  Sex is power, and Dina had power, that much is obvious, but where did it come from? I think back on the long, sultry days of summer, when we sprawled on the beach. Dina looked like a giant cat, napping in the sun, but she always kept one eye open. What was it fixed on, that open eye?

  “You remember that Purim party, when her brother put his hand on you?”

  How could I forget that party? It’s where it all started, and it still hasn’t ended.

  “What about it?”

  “Dina didn’t like it. Think why.”

  I look at Ronit as she leans closer with wolfish eye and says, “Think hard.”

  I am thinking hard, but not in the direction Ronit’s hinting at. Young Dina always took an interest in whoever grabbed her shy brother’s attention. But Ronit can’t be implying that Dina was actually… can she?

  “God, no!” she cries out, as if reading my mind. “Way off base. You’re gross.”

  I’m the gross one?

  “She was a control freak, and when sex comes into the picture, a lot of times things get out of control.” She finally finishes her sticky Danish and licks her oily red lips. “That’s what bothered our Dina, and I’m asking myself whether this has something to do with what bothered our killer.”

  Oh, now it’s our killer. Very interesting.

  “What do you make of him writing on her forehead with red lipstick?”

  I stare at her lips, still shimmering with butter, as if she has just devoured
a small animal.

  “Come on,” she laughs and dabs her glistening lips with a napkin, as if leaving an oily kiss for a secret admirer. “You’re not trying to imply it was me, are you?”

  “At least I’m not setting detectives on you,” I say. Nope, I’m keeping them all for myself.

  “You can set as many as you like,” she replies with a smile. “At least that means you’re no longer afraid of me stealing your men.” And once again Neria’s lanky image flits before me, fair curls, brown eyes, and the young Ronit who wasn’t allowed anywhere near him, the Ronit who, only a few weeks into our freshman year, earned herself the reputation of man-eater.

  “I’d watch it if I were you,” I say.

  “But you’re not me,” she retorts with a grin, “although you’d like to be.”

  A young Orthodox couple sits down at a nearby table. I quickly tug my skirt over my knees but then remember that I’m in the more liberal Ramat Gan, and I hike it back up and spread my legs open just a little bit wider. The baby in their stroller won’t stop squealing, but they just keep their indifferent eyes on their menus. I wonder what kind of kid he’ll grow up to be with all that attention.

  Yesterday, while ambling down a side street in Bnei Brak, I walked past two kids sitting on the kerb, one of them mind-blowingly fat. The street was empty and the whale of a kid mumbled in my direction, “kurve.” A whore? Nice. It wasn’t the flattering kind of kurve, but an automatic kurve without so much as a trace of lewdness. I turned around and ripped into him, “You’re a kurve!” He was terror-stricken, as if he couldn’t believe I would answer him. It’s highly possible that if the street hadn’t been empty, I would have swallowed the insult and kept walking. And you can bet none of the passers-by would have told him off. The only thing that mattered to them was that the street loudspeakers came on at the right time to announce the arrival of Shabbat and blare its tune: “Privilege me to raise children and grandchildren.” Who knows, maybe one of those children will grow up to be as lovely a creature as the foul-mouthed blob-fish on the kerb.