“Come here, sweetie. Let’s have a cup of coffee. You look so weak.”
“I feel fine,” I replied. “But are you all right?” I asked.
She looked at me in shock, and didn’t know what to say.
“You’re so skinny. You’re always thin, but today you seem . . . well, never mind. I’m sure you’re a responsible person who knows how to take care of herself. You don’t need to hear all this nonsense from me…” She continued mumbling to herself, as though she’d despaired of talking to me, so she moved on to talking to herself. At first I chuckled to myself, but after I’d petted her elderly dog and said goodbye, sadness and helplessness overtook me. I felt sorry for myself, for the state that I had reached, and for a woman like Mrs. Adler feeling sorry for me.
It was afternoon on Sderot Rothschild. I was sitting on a bench with Miko, waiting for Tal. This time, she was the one who was late. She’d insisted on getting together again, and this time I agreed very quickly. Something inside me wanted to continue what had been cut short during our previous session, a few weeks earlier.
“Dani!” A hand waved at me, and light blue eyes smiled. A little calmer, but still tired eyes.
We walked over to the nearest café and sat down on the balcony outside, because of Miko. I ordered black coffee with soy milk on the side, and Tal ordered a cappuccino and an almond croissant.
“I’ve started proper therapy, and I also met with a psychiatrist. Someone private that a friend of mine recommended,” Tal told me after all the usual warm-up chatter, and after she’d made sure to say how skinny I was and that I had to do something about it because it really is awful already and I look sick and I should know by now how unhealthy this is . . . the usual lecture.
Sometimes I’m amazed at how dense she is. She’s studying medicine, and she’s been my sister for 25 years, out of which I’d spent the last 10 years with this crap, with three hospitalizations behind me, and she still thinks that it’s a matter of choice. That if I just realize how ugly and unhealthy this is, then maybe I’ll finally stop it. And the saddest part is that I feel disappointed by it all over again each time it happens.
But here was a new thing: This time she was the one with the problems, and she was the one going to therapy and needing help.
“Great. Do you feel like it’s helping?” I asked. I’d tried to find words that would encourage her to keep talking.
“Yes, I think so. The doctor gave me pills for anxiety, and an emergency pill in case I get another one of those panic attacks. I haven’t needed it yet, thank God. The episodes are less frequent. I managed to take all my exams, but my average has dropped. Never mind. . . As long as Dad doesn’t find out.”
“Why? Why do you care if he knows?”
“Are you crazy? He’ll start with that lecture about how I won’t get to be a surgeon if I’m not the very-very best in the class. I don’t want him to know about anything that I’m going through. He’ll get on my case and then he’ll get Mom involved and she’ll definitely start pressuring me − you know exactly what they’re like. And then they’ll say that it’s just like with Aunt Fania, from Grandma’s side, whose career was utterly demolished because of some mental health problem . . . With Mom, things always end up with some familial catastrophe. So God help me if either of them finds out about even a smidgen of what I’m going through.”
She kept talking and talking, and I wasn’t sure if it really mattered to her whether or not I was listening, but I could definitely feel the anxiety surging inside her. It was scary.
“So you’re basically doing better?” I asked.
“I don’t really know. Recently I’ve had a lot of weird thoughts − well, kind of like dreams. Like strange memories from the past, only I’m not sure whether they’re dreams or reality. Never mind, it may just be from the pills I’m taking. Who knows what they do to your brain?”
I tensed up. I was amazed. It can’t be that Tal and I are going through the exact same thing, I thought to myself. No way! The realization started seeping into me, and I felt a lump of ice in my chest start to spread out and turn into a cluster of flames.
“Dani, is everything all right?” Tal asked. “Come on, how about you tell me what’s up with you? When will you gain some weight already? How about ordering something to eat?”
I didn’t answer her, and just gave half a smile in disgust.
“Come on, you’re doing that silly thing again, aren’t you?” she continued.
I nodded my head.
“Why do you have to keep messing with this thing? Isn’t it time you moved on?”
For a minute, I didn’t really understand what she meant. I looked at her, our eyes met, and then I lowered my head towards the ground. I felt the lump in my chest become a ball of anger.
“I think that you just need to make a decision and tell yourself that’s it, that you’ll start eating like a normal human being and stop playing the poor, self-denying person who thinks that looking like a skeleton is beautiful. Get your act together. Look at how worried Mom and Dad are. You can’t go on like this . . .”
I couldn’t take it anymore and interrupted her. “Why don’t you get your act together, with all these episodes of yours? Can’t you just stop it? You’re going to waste all the money that Mom and Dad put into your education just because of some panic attacks that you’ve made up . . .” I said it all in a mocking, sarcastic tone, in the hope that she’d get the analogy. Still, I couldn’t believe the words that came out of my mouth.
“How can you even compare . . .”
“How can I compare? It’s exactly the same thing. Yes, what I have is a difficult issue. You think that I feel nice about not eating all day long and wanting to vomit every little thing that gets into me, even this coffee? Do you think that it’s fun to live with voices that tell me how fat I am, calling me a huge cow all day long? I can’t escape from them. They’re always there, telling me how disgusting my body is, how worthy it is of destruction, how I’m never good enough. I never fully follow through with this destructive mission, not sufficiently, but only because I can’t.”
I was shaking like a leaf. My eyes were glazed over and my throat felt choked up. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. That’s not me. I looked up and saw her light blue eyes glazed over just like mine, her lips tense and saddened. I saw a different Tal. One who had been touched.
“That really does sound awful. I’d never thought about it that way before.”
“I think I need to be hospitalized again. Just to stabilize my vital signs. Maybe I’ll also find a reason to work hard and want to live. That’s what Rotem says. She’s my therapist.”
“Of course. If that’s what’ll help you.”
“I’ve already fainted twice this week. I can feel my body starting to cave in.”
“Where did you faint? How did it happen? What do you mean?” the doctor within her cried out.
“It happens once in a while. I feel it coming, so I lie down or sit. It’s a kind of drop, and I feel my heart pounding really hard, and then everything becomes black and white and my head gets heavy, and then it’s like a sudden sleep, and I wake up feeling as though I’d slept for hours. Afterwards there’s a kind of heaviness . . .”
“Dani, that’s really bad. It shows that there’s a problem with your heart, like the beginning of heart failure, or something along those lines. You have to go get checked.”
“I don’t want to because I know that they’ll immediately send me to the emergency room, and from there they’ll recommend hospitalization. I want everything to be done at my own pace. I want to be the one making the decisions. I haven’t decided yet if I’m ready for it.”
“I think that you have. Do you want me to go with you?”
I was surprised by her suggestion. I didn’t answer her. I just lowered my eyes. There was a long silence.
“Do Mom and Dad know that the situation
is so bad?”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t been there for three weeks now. Precisely because of this. Last time I went over, Mom lost it and Dad drove me crazy talking about my therapist and why nothing’s happening and said that if it goes on like this he’ll stop paying for her because it isn’t helping. He thinks that a few therapy sessions should have already fixed me.”
I didn’t tell Tal that I love Rotem. That it’s the first time ever that I connected with someone that quickly, and that I’ve opened up to her already, and that still this thing, this disorder, is too stubborn. It’s stuck in my head like a tumor, sitting there and not budging.
“All right. Forget about those two. As it is, the only thing on their minds is their work. You’re better off not being picked on by them. I’ll go with you to get checked. Or we can go straight for hospitalization. Why stretch it out?”
She always was a practical person. No time wasted. Everything straight and to the point. But my pace is different.
“I don’t know. Let me think about it,” I finally said.
I got back home completely exhausted. I got into the shower, filled with thoughts, and I couldn’t get the scalding black lump off my heart. I started fearing that this lump would become actual pain. Pain that would indicate that my heart was in real distress, and that this was the end of me. And maybe I’m not at all ready for the end. Maybe I still have things to discover and witness in this life. There are still many more dogs to get to know, and many more animals to find and save. Maybe I’ll actually want to study something to do with animals or art, even if Dad doesn’t like the idea. Everything is better than a sudden death in the shower. A pathetic and unnecessary death. Without having left anything meaningful behind me in this world, and without Miko having anywhere to go. Who’s going to adopt a huge dog with one scary eye and lots of hair?
Fourteenth Meeting
“I don’t know how to go on from here.”
“Go on where?” I leaned forward a bit.
“I don’t know how to stop being angry at everyone, and mainly at myself, for what I’m putting them through. Tal’s taken a semester off and she’s started therapy. She’s remembering things. I hate to say this, but I think that she’s going to get ahead of me on this too − she’s the brilliant student, as usual. She’ll talk about what happened, and she’ll pull me out against my will.”
“Why are you competing with her?”
“Why? That’s the biggest question of my life. Maybe because that’s what we were taught. That was the only way my parents knew how to educate us. Just one single thing in my life that I started before her, and even in that she’ll get ahead of me. And he had hurt me first.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know for sure, but that’s what I think.”
“That’s probably not the case.”
“Why?” Dani asked.
“Because she’s older than you.”
“So?”
“So pedophiles mostly have a preferred age at which they start. Anyone below that age is considered a perversion, even in their twisted minds. You just didn’t know about it, so you only conceived it as something much later.”
“How do you know? Do you have any pedophile patients?” Dani asked.
“No, but I did treat some in prison. They don’t usually seek therapy willingly.”
I remembered Jonathan, a patient who was so scared of being a pedophile that he had to go through a million ceremonies for every sliver of a thought about a child passing through his mind. But at the prison, I met all of those pretty-eyed men who, in the dark, couldn’t control the wolf and had hurt innocent children. My mentor there told me that she didn’t allow her children to sleep over at friends’ houses. “I don’t care that all the other parents allow it. After seeing what goes on in here, I know that you can never tell anything about anyone,” she once told me.
Dani’s voice brought me back to the room. “But I won’t have her speaking to our parents about it. She’ll drag me along and they’ll be there with those serious expressions of theirs and they’ll ask if it happened to me, too. And then what will I tell them?”
“What do you mean? Tell them whatever you want. Whatever you choose to tell.”
“And what about my grandmother?”
“She doesn’t have to know. I assume that your father will feel the same way. It won’t do anyone any good. Dani, you’re the only one calling the shots here. You determine the pace and everything else − not Tal. No one is going to decide for you how and when you choose to let things out, to yourself and to others.”
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” I read a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye over and over again. You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. Sorrow for what? For myself and for everyone. We are all one soul fighting for its existence.
I left the house, riding my bicycle along the street, making my way between all the other wheels, bicycles, rollerblades, and strollers with kids inside them moving across the boulevard and all the way to the beach, where I sat down to drench the waters with my pain. Continuing to do its own thing, the sea wasn’t impressed with me. My cell phone beeped. Another message from Dani, joining the many preceding it.
“Really want to die.”
“I’m cutting myself.”
“I’m taking pills. The whole pack.”
“I have a plan. I’m in pain and I’ve had enough and I don’t want to feel anything anymore.”
I was overtaken by despair. Not despair. Exhaustion. Fatigue. What would Eyal say, I thought to myself. What advice would he give me? I tried to turn to him without actually calling him on the phone. I tried to hear his advice echo within me. She doesn’t want to die, she’s just having a tough time living, feeling all of these emotions − that’s what he’d say. Then what are our options? We situate ourselves in life, and eventually die − but what about the in-between? If I get sucked in along with her, then I won’t be able to help her, as Eyal keeps reminding me. “You’d just become another noodle in her soup.” She’s knocking on all of my gates, wanting them to open so that she can come in and direct everything towards me, but then how will I help her? I also can’t just remain on the side, cold and distant.
Yochai. Six months after we broke up, he committed suicide. He’d called me over and over again, and I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to anymore, and that was it. That’s it. That’s the story. I don’t have the strength to elaborate any further. That’s the essence of it. I’m ashamed. Ashamed of myself. I know that it’s all connected. I had no more energy left for him. His fragility, his neediness. I didn’t want to be with him anymore, and more than anything, I was scared of having children with him. In a bond made by pain encountering pain, and with such a gene pool on both sides, what chance would a child have?
I thought that I was a monster. I thought everything bad about myself, but I couldn’t handle it anymore. I didn’t want to. It was my prerogative. It wasn’t like he was a child that I’d decided to bring into this world and that I had to stay with him no matter what. That’s how I’d persuaded myself each and every night. After the funeral, I upped and left for New Zealand, as far away as possible, in order to forget. Forget him and forget his mother’s eyes fixed on me, penetrating two pairs of dark sunglasses − mine and hers.
I took El Al to Bangkok. On Khao San Road, the backpackers’ sanctuary, I bought a Malaysia Airlines ticket to Auckland, with a stop at Kuala Lumpur. I spent the night there at an airport hotel which came with the flight ticket, because Israelis can fly with the company but they can’t formally enter Muslim Malaysia. A friendly flight attendant woke me up for a meal. She was excited to find out there was an Israeli on her flight.
“Are all Israeli girls as pretty as you?”
I looked around to see if there were any other Israelis on the
flight, but the seats next to me were unoccupied. She was definitely talking to me. Linor Abargil had just won the Miss World contest, and the flight attendant told me that I looked like her, after noticing my baffled expression. I never thought of myself as pretty.
Once in Auckland, I sat on the edge of a lake for an entire Saturday watching people bungee jump. Reaching the water again and again, the rope going back up freely and connecting to the next jumper. I was scared of jumping myself, and I was still Sabbath-observant at the time, so I just watched them all and thought about Yochai, jumping without a rope and crashing onto the rocks. That night, I dreamt about a totally empty apartment with conjoined rooms. There was a young girl with me, and I was sheltering her on the floor, in a room without curtains, waiting for the noise that would rattle everything. Waiting for death. Knowing full well that afterwards, I’ll no longer feel anything.
Today I woke up from a tiring night. Again. I dreamt about Eyal. I dreamt that I was asleep in the armchair across from him for a few hours until he woke me up and said, “The therapy session’s over.” I walked out with a sour feeling of having missed out.
I got up quickly and dressed in front of the mirror, putting my jeans on, taking them off and trading them for black pants. I gained four pounds, and I don’t wear them well. If I could only transfer those pounds to Dani, who is eating herself from the inside. It’s no wonder she can’t get anything in her mouth. She’s protecting herself from the world. Trying to get validation, trying to appease her father, the world, me. I tried not to worry, but the concern grabbed me tightly from within. Dani was nearing a BMI of 13 at a worrying speed, after having dismissed two dieticians and one psychiatrist. Now it was only the two of us left. She made sure to do it herself, before they dismissed her.
“If you tell me that I have to be hospitalized, then I’ll do it,” she’d said to me.
“You need hospitalization in order for us to continue,” I told her. Then I added in my mind − it’s only a small hurdle on the way, Dani. We’re sticking together for the long run.”
A Room of Their Own Page 14
