Deja Vu

by Michal Hartstein

  I nearly cried off our invite to Aya and Lior’s house; I didn’t want to see their incredible home and their perfect life. Aya texted me the day before to make sure we hadn’t forgotten our date, because she was looking forward to it and had a really cute surprise for me. I had no excuse, and I was also curious.

  When we got there the next day, Amir couldn’t hide his astonishment at the luxury apartment. He embarrassed me a little with his childlike enthusiasm, as if he’d left behind a pauper’s house and this was his first encounter with a decorated apartment.

  “What's this surprise you promised me?” I asked Aya as we sat down.

  “Oh, yes!” She jumped up and went to the cupboard in the dining area. “I put it here,” she said, scrambling through papers and envelopes. “Here it is!” She looked pleased and returned with a picture in her hand.

  “All that talk about school conjured up a sense of nostalgia in me, and I began looking at pictures and look what I found.” She handed me the picture.

  The picture was of her and Lior holding their certificates in their hands and smiling to the camera. I strained my eyes, and I realized that it was the Dean’s List certificate given out to students by the accounting faculty. I studied the photo and recognized myself standing a few feet away with my certificate, probably smiling at Amir, who was taking a picture of me at the same time.

  “When was this taken?” I inquired.

  “The ceremony of 2002. It was the last time we were on the Dean's List.”

  “You were on the Dean's List every year?”

  “Lior was. I didn’t make it in my last year. I understand that, according to the picture, you were a regular at these ceremonies.”

  “I got two,” I said coyly.

  “Aya showed you the picture she found?” Lior and Amir returned from their tour of the flat.

  “Yes.” I smiled and showed Amir the image.

  “So you were also on the Dean's List.” Lior looked at me in a manner I assumed he reserved for people he respected.

  “Yes.” I smiled.

  “Where do you work?” Lior took interest.

  “I’m an accountant at Smart Green.” I exchanged glances with Amir. He didn’t like me lying about my job, but I didn’t want this successful pair to view me as a failure.

  “I haven’t heard of it, have you?” Lior asked Aya.

  “No.”

  “It’s a fairly small company that handles the development of ecological products for industry.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Very.”

  “I recently handled a case for a company that deals in wastewater recycling… ACMS. Have you heard of them, by any chance?”

  “Actually, yes. I think they had a small project with us.”

  Lior smiled, but he couldn’t engage with the conversation beyond what he said himself. We forced our smiles. I found it difficult to open up with Lior as I did with Aya.

  “Maybe you guys should go down to the garden with Nofar and Guy?” Aya suggested after a few minutes of meaningless sentences and awkward silences. “The garden’s just had a makeover. It’s really cute now.”

  “Great idea!” Amir immediately jumped up. He was bored.

  After Lior and Amir went out with the kids, Aya and I could talk calmly and openly.

  “You guys met in school?” I was curious. I knew that the more I learned about this amazing couple, the more my jealousy would grow, but I wanted to get to know her, merely for the chance of learning something about her life that would lessen my envy.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “We noticed that we kept on meeting both at the law faculty and the business management faculty.”

  “Nice, I don’t know many couples who met in the faculty.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Then you studied together in New York?”

  “Yes, it was an amazing year,” she said, her voice filled with longing.

  “You went there after you finished your internship?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I’d been able to do something like that, but I got pregnant right after my internship,” I confessed in a voice full of bitterness.

  “Nofar wasn’t planned?” Aya asked, puzzled.

  “Not really,” I smiled sheepishly.

  “I wish.”

  “To have an unplanned pregnancy?” I asked in surprise and hope sparked in my heart that maybe Aya was jealous of me.

  “To get pregnant without waiting so long. It took us three years to conceive the first time and now we’ve been trying for a year already.”

  “But Guy’s still young.”

  “He’s two, and I’m nearing thirty-five. It’s not so easy for me to get pregnant as is, and the older I get, the harder it becomes.” She looked at me with sad eyes. “You're not trying to get pregnant again?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t talk about it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  A few weeks ago, when we celebrated Leil Ha-Seder with Amir’s extended family, his aunt had asked him with typical tactlessness if we had fertility problems. Her daughters had bundles of children, one after the other, and the fact that we had a three year old and there were no signs of a second child was sufficient reason to suspect that we suffered from infertility. The seemingly innocent question had released a cork in Amir and, from that moment on, he never stopped bothering me about it. He took the trouble to remind me repeatedly that my fertility would gradually lessen over the years, and that children needed siblings and playmates. Any announcement of a second pregnancy by a friend or relative would result in a long and depressing conversation in which Amir went back over the variety of reasons for extending our family. I vehemently continued to refuse to contribute my womb for the demographic efforts of the Yanku family.

  Aya confessed, “For me, I feel like it’s completely taking over my life. I have no control over it, and there’s so much uncertainty… It’s very difficult for me.”

  I thought the opposite. I had lost control of my life because I gave birth to a child and not because I couldn’t bring a child into the world.

  “Look on the bright side, Aya,” I tried to comfort her. “With two children, it’d be very difficult to advance your career.”

  “Believe me, I’d give up my career. I have no doubt that I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I’d been able to get pregnant when I wanted, but my entire career has been a series of accidental opportunities… nothing was planned.”

  Again, I thought our experiences were completely opposite: she wanted a child and had a career; I wanted a career and had gotten a child. The difference between us was that she would eventually have both - a child and a career - while I didn’t have a career and was far from being Mother of the Year.

  “I envy girls like you, who suddenly discover they’re pregnant,” she said candidly. I envied her, her remarkable career, her magnificent home and all the patience and love she lavished on her son. It was difficult for me to express it in words. Perhaps she could express it because her jealousy was more legitimate.

  After that meeting, we kept in touch. I found it hard to understand why I tolerated this relationship, which I’d recognized as clearly unhealthy for me from the very first moment. Lior and Aya’s success, especially since they’d started exactly where I started, drove me nuts. They were a couple of successful lawyers who lived in a luxury apartment, and I was far behind them with my lousy job and my little apartment with the endless mortgage. Aya was the one making sure our newfound friendship didn’t fade away, but I didn’t make a point of steering clear of her, as I should have. I guess it gave me a perverse pleasure to see Aya’s difficulty conceiving. Despite all her success, she had difficulties in an area that I managed without any effort.

  CHAPTER 8

  Two months after I met Aya, I was pregnant again. I don’t know if it was the constant preoccupation with the subject of Aya’s fertility, or my desire to beat her in something that made me surrender to Amir�
�s incessant requests to try for another child. I felt insecure at work after the difficult conversation with Gideon, and I felt it wasn’t the right time to take a break from my career, but I wanted to feel that, in one aspect at least, I was better than Aya. The last time I got pregnant without even noticing, so I figured that this time wouldn’t be difficult either. Indeed, I got pregnant in our first month.

  The two stripes that graced the test stick indicator made my face light up. Amir was flooded with joy, both because of the upcoming pregnancy and because this time, unlike the last, I seemed to be happy with the pregnancy. I couldn’t admit to anyone the real secret – that the horrible reason for my happiness was that I’d finally succeeded in something that Aya had failed at. I’d won the little contest I’d made up in my overworked mind.

  I knew that Aya hadn’t boasted about her triumphs to make me jealous, but I still waited impatiently for my first ultrasound. Amir thought I wanted to see our little fetus, but the sad truth was that I wanted medical confirmation of the pregnancy so that I could run and tell Aya. I wanted her to be jealous.

  Three days before the long-awaited ultrasound, I was sitting in my office going through bank statements. In the two weeks since I’d found out I was pregnant, my work at Green Smart had become easier on me. Nothing bothered me as it once had, not the salaries of the other employees, not Gideon's angry glances (he hadn’t quite forgotten our meeting), not the dozens of requests from customers and suppliers that came my way every day. I felt I’d won. I was able to get pregnant. And it was so easy! I was a fertile woman. There was something I was good at, very good, in fact. I started to fantasize about taking my maternity leave. I decided to take at least six months. This time, I wanted to experience motherhood. I felt that, this time, the pregnancy was something I wanted and so it would all be different. This time, the child would love me. I wanted to make things right in my life. The first time I got pregnant, the pregnancy came as a surprise ,and I felt that it halted my life. This time, the pregnancy was planned and desired, and so I hoped my motherhood experience would be a better one.

  As I was thinking about it, I noticed a change on some banking documentation and started to look into it. Suddenly, I felt a sharp griping pain in my stomach. When I was pregnant with Nofar, I’d had some abdominal discomfort, sometimes extremely strong, but it was mainly toward the end of pregnancy when Nofar kicked me. I sat there in the office, hoping it was nothing, but when the pain intensified I realized something was very wrong. I ran to the bathroom, took off my panties and let out a terrifying scream. My underwear was soaked in blood.

  I ran to my desk, picked up my bag and simply fled to my car. I didn’t bother even to stamp my timecard on the way out. Rina looked at me with a stunned expression, and I knew my dramatic exit would be reported to all the relevant people within seconds. I called Amir on the way.

  “I'm in a meeting,” he whispered.

  “I'm bleeding!” I yelled. “I’m having terrible pains.”

  “Wait a second,” he said and I realized he’d left the conference room. “What happened?” he said in a worried voice.

  “I felt a strange pain, so I went to the bathroom… I… I’m bleeding badly.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “On my way to the ER.”

  “I'm on my way,” he said and hung up.

  In the ER, they found an amniotic sac without a fetus, but couldn’t find a pulse. They tried to calm me down by saying that it was early in the pregnancy, so it was quite possible not to see anything and it could be a pregnancy hemorrhage, but I knew.

  I’d miscarried.

  The doctors recommended that I wait, let my body get over the trauma, but I went into a frenzy.

  I had to get pregnant again. I didn’t know if I was trying to compensate myself or if I was still in competition with Aya. I didn’t tell her about the miscarriage. No one knew except Amir and my parents. I didn’t want to be seen as a failure. Amir and my mother tried to explain to me that miscarrying at this stage of the pregnancy was common and that I shouldn’t get too shaken up, but their words fell on deaf ears. I couldn’t listen to anyone. I felt that the only easy thing in my life had suddenly become impossible.

  At first, Amir refused to have sex with me. He couldn’t understand my obsession with getting pregnant again, but when he realized how much it meant to me, he gave in. We were never sex addicts; we liked having relaxed and enjoyable sex at times that suited us. Now the sex was mechanical, depressing and sometimes painful and unpleasant. Several times, Amir had trouble reaching his climax. I forgot that sex could even be pleasurable.

  Two months after my miscarriage, Aya sent me a picture of a pregnancy test with two lines on it. She didn’t know I was trying to get pregnant, that I had, and that I’d lost the baby. I'm sure if she’d known, she wouldn’t have sent the picture. Only someone who’s experienced such frustration knows how difficult it is to be happy for others in that situation. She wrote that, since she’d driven me crazy about it, she thought I should know about the pregnancy before she even told her mother. I told her I was happy for her.

  Mostly, I was glad that I didn’t need to speak. Tears choked my throat. The picture of that positive test paralyzed me. That day, I could think of nothing else but Aya’s two lines. I was so distracted that I forgot to go to a meeting with Gideon and an insurance agent. Gideon had to ask Rina to call me in and she obviously relished every moment she spent proving my lack of concentration. I sat in the meeting, but heard nothing. Gideon and the agent laughed, then debated and talked while I sat and stared into the distance. At one point, Gideon asked me to check something the agent mentioned. I nodded, even though I’d no idea what they were talking about. When the agent left, Gideon asked me to stay.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I replied in a voice that lack credibility.

  “You don’t seem very focused. I don’t think you were with us at the meeting at all.”

  “True,” I looked down. “I’m not feeling so good.”

  “I’ll ask again,” he said empathetically. “Is everything all right? Rina told me that a few weeks ago, you stormed out of the office very upset.”

  I considered telling him about the miscarriage. By law, I could have stayed home, sick, for a week, but I didn’t. I thought that could possibly play in my favor. In the end, I decided it would be better not to have everyone know that I was trying to conceive.

  “My daughter wasn’t feeling well,” I lied and felt bad for using my child to lie.

  “And now?”

  “Just a headache.”

  I knew he guessed I was pregnant or that I had miscarried. In recent years, I hadn’t been able to say I was nauseous without everyone congratulating me. I preferred him guessing it rather than knowing it for certain. He was just another person who didn’t know what I was going through, just like Aya, who missed no opportunity to update me on her pregnancy. I was sickened to realize that, whenever she texted or called me, I wished her pregnancy would end in a miscarriage. Before each checkup she had, I prayed that the test would show an abnormality. I wanted us to return to the same starting point.

  But, contrary to all my prayers, Aya's pregnancy developed properly, and she flourished day by day. She blossomed, and I shriveled. I fell apart every month when my period arrived again, and Amir had to be there to pick up the pieces. For half a year, I forced him to have sex that lacked both desire and pleasure, and I scolded him whenever he found it difficult to perform. The worst day was when Aya informed me that her latest ultrasound had picked up the baby’s pulse.

  According to my calculations, I was ovulating that same day. Amir arrived home late, even though I’d asked him not to be late. He had a conference call with New York, and he couldn’t make it home early. He tiptoed into the house. I woke up in spite of his efforts to be quiet and immediately scolded him.

  “I'm ovulating today!” I declared.

  “Hello to you too.” He tr
ied to calm me down.

  “This isn’t the time for a lesson in pleasantry,” I said angrily. “I told you to get here early because I’m ovulating.”

  “I'm sorry, really. I couldn’t get out sooner.”

  “You’ve been driving me crazy about getting pregnant for months and now that I’m on board, you don’t make any serious effort.”

  “You're right,” he said in a whisper, reminding me that Nofar could wake up. “But, in any case, I don’t feel so well. I told you already.”

  “If you had the strength to go to work, then you can also put a little effort in for me,” I whispered in a way that was practically a shout. “I mean, for us,” I corrected myself immediately.

  He exhaled and looked at me in despair. “Okay,” he said. “I just want to eat something small. I’m starved.”

  I went into the shower to freshen up a bit. I saw the messy woman looking back at me in the mirror and nearly cried. No wonder he didn’t want to sleep with me. I looked like a weirdo with messy hair and wrinkled clothes. I undressed and got into the shower. I decided to be pretty for Amir. I scrubbed myself and shampooed my hair. When I finished, I dabbed scented creams on myself and combed my wet hair. When I went back into the bedroom, Amir was already snoring on his side of the bed with his clothes still on. I jumped on him with delight. He woke up in confusion.