by Tammar Stein
“No,” I said, trying to control my voice, grabbing awkwardly for his arm. “Don’t! Just get us out of here.” My legs were shaking and I felt panic edging in. I was bleeding. Headlines and news briefs were flashing through my mind. This is how tragedies happen, I kept thinking. We could easily become the evening news if this escalated any further. “They’re just stupid kids. Don’t let them think they mean anything.”
“I’m not running away from some snot-nosed kids.”
When they saw that I’d stopped Dov, they edged closer again, their jeers growing louder and their throws getting closer and closer to the jeep. One landed on the hood with a loud “ping” and I could see the dent and scratch it made.
“Dov!” I shook him. “Let’s go!”
This wasn’t some prank that naughty boys play. They hated us. They were eight, and I was scared of them the way I would be of a pack of wild dogs.
“You want those little assholes to get away with this?”
“You don’t know who’s out there,” I pleaded. “Their dad or uncle could be nearby with a rifle. Please—” my voice cracked. “Let’s leave!”
With a disgusted look at them, he turned around.
They cheered.
Dov started the jeep, gunned it, and we took off, leaving the boys, the remains of our lunch, and the field where we’d just had our first real kiss, in a brown cloud of dust and hate.
Chapter Seven
VIRGINIA
I woke up to the sound of my dog, Kipi, scratching at the door to come in. I groaned and sat up to let her in, but as soon as I opened my eyes, I realized it was only Payton gathering her papers for her eight o’clock class.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I was trying to be quiet. I’ll be out of here in two more seconds.”
“ ’S okay,” I mumbled, and rolled over, burrowing under the covers. My new flannel sheets were warm, and I rubbed my cheek on my pillow. I’d say that much for living in a cold climate—which is what Virginia had become in the last few weeks—it made snuggling in bed even more of a joy. It had been so brutally cold last night at the astronomy observatory. A sudden cold so crisp I thought even the stars would shatter. A preview of what winter must be like here. “Unseasonable chill,” the weatherman called it, and I shuddered to think what it’d be like when it was seasonable for such cold. I was warm now and I planned to stay that way. I wiggled my toes, happy that they seemed to have survived the night intact.
The door clicked shut behind Payton.
It was too bad I couldn’t bring Kipi here, right now—her little body would fit perfectly in the space by my belly. She’d sprawl on her back with her legs spread and I’d scratch her stomach and play with her ears. But university dorms didn’t let you keep dogs, and even if they did, I couldn’t have brought her with me. The flight alone would have traumatized her.
What would she think of the cold? I pictured her playing in the snow Payton kept promising would come. I imagined her jumping into a snowy drift and disappearing with a poof of white flakes.
I must have fallen asleep because I nearly fell out of bed when the phone rang.
“Maya, did I wake you? Your mother said the morning was the best time to call … and it’s almost nine in the morning, right? Or did I get it wrong?”
“Hen,” I said groggily. My eyes were weighted with anvils. I forced them open. My voice sounded like I had a two-pack habit, as smooth as sandpaper. “Yeah, it’s almost nine. I should be up by now.” A lie, since I was planning to skip class and sleep until ten-thirty. But no matter.
I had meant to call Hen before now. I never felt up to it, never had the energy for mental fencing. She produced guilt as a defensive secretion, like a skunk. So now I tried to wake up my fuzzy brain, to make sure I said the right thing.
“So how is school? Do you have any friends yet?”
“Hen,” I protested. “What kind of question is that? Of course I have friends. People here are terrific.” I was mildly surprised to discover as I said it that it was true.
“And are you eating? Can you find any food besides hamburgers?” Hen was not a vegetarian but was still convinced any weight gain came directly from eating meat. Weight gain was a favorite topic of hers. She could make a POW feel uneasy about his daily caloric intake.
“There’s a salad bar in the cafeteria,” I said. “I eat a salad every day.”
“You shouldn’t use a cream-based dressing, it’s just a sneaky way of saying oil and butter. It defeats the whole point of eating a salad.”
“Of course.”
“Americans don’t know how to eat.”
Annoyed, I felt I had to defend American cuisine. “That’s not true, Hen. It’s not as bad as people think. There’s lots of good food.” I tried to think of compelling examples. “The sandwiches here are wonderful, they have good pasta. Even the salad bar is pretty good.”
“But not like in Israel.”
“No.” I was forced to agree. “There’s nothing like the food in Israel.” I sighed, thinking about it. “I miss tomatoes the most. The ones here are almost pink. They have no taste. There’s no hummus, no good olives.” Didn’t I mean to defend American food? Hen always got me to agree with her in the end.
“I miss having you here in my apartment,” she said, as if thinking the same thing.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s very different here.”
“That’ll make it easier for you to come back.” I could hear the satisfied smile over six thousand miles of telephone cables, or whatever they use these days.
“I got another award yesterday,” she said. “A glass pyramid they pretended was crystal.” Hen was the only person I knew who could tell the difference between glass and crystal. Until I met her I didn’t even know there was a difference. “I don’t know where they expect me to store all this nonsense they keep handing out.”
“What did you get it for?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “They give them out too easily. Close a deal, organize a function, blow your nose, and voilà, another glass pyramid to dust.”
I laughed. “Hen, you are one of a kind.” I thought again how amusing it was that in Hebrew Hen’s name meant charm and beauty, while in English it was the word for a female chicken.
“I know. Anyway, I was just calling to check on you for your mother. Make sure that you were still alive.” I knew that wasn’t true, but it was so like Hen to need an excuse to call me. To blame my silly mother for worrying.
“You’re a good sister for doing that,” I said. “Tell her everything is fine. Tell her I’m doing well.”
“And sleeping in until noon,” Hen said. “Obviously someone is having a good time. Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
I gently hung up the phone and sat in bed, blanket around my shoulders like an Indian chief, thinking.
It was a perfectly beautiful day, not too hot or too cold, with an easy, steady breeze that made me want to sigh in pleasure. Restless and feeling like I was wasting a precious day in the cool, dark library, I gathered up my books and notes, jammed them in my bag, and walked out into the sunshine. Students were stretched out on the grass or playing Frisbee. I found an unoccupied bench nearby and sat down.
I exhaled deeply, feeling the sun warm my skin. I suspected I wouldn’t get too many perfect days before it got cold. So I sat on the bench and ignored the piles of books I should have been reviewing, ignored the students around me, closed my eyes, and lounged like a lizard, letting the sun warm my limbs.
I opened my eyes a moment later when a dark shadow spilled over me and cut off the heat and light like a switch.
“Sunbathing, Greenland?”
I squinted at the figure blocking the sun and recognized Justin.
“Move over,” I said. “Or sit down, but don’t block the sun.”
He sat down next to me and stretched out his long legs. It had been almost a month since the kissing incident, and neither he nor I had brought it up or even alluded to it in a
ny way. This was the first time I had seen him outside class since then. He glanced over at me, then slouched down so his head could rest against the back of the bench, like mine. He tilted his head back, sighed, and closed his eyes. When I saw that he seemed content to stay put, I turned my face back to the sun and closed my eyes.
We stayed silent like that for a while and it was very peaceful.
“Nice, isn’t it?” I finally said.
“Yeah. Been a while since I did this.”
“Me too.” He left a comfortable distance between us, but I was still very aware of him, his body so close to me. “We should have discussion outside on days like this.”
“I tried it before,” he said, his eyes still closed. “No one pays attention.”
“No one pays attention anyway.”
It wasn’t true. Most days the discussions were actually interesting. Justin could point to connections and consequences that I never saw on my own. I even found myself reading sources not on the reading list just so I’d have something meaningful and surprising to add.
“You’ve read Thurgood Marshall’s decision on this?” he asked the first time I quoted something different.
“It seemed relevant,” I shrugged, secretly pleased by his tone.
Now on the bench, he just laughed.
“They teach you how to be cruel in Greenland, or does it just come naturally for you?”
“That wasn’t cruel,” I said, smiling. “You haven’t seen cruel. And I’m from Israel, you know. I can’t believe you still think I’m from Greenland.”
I had meant to tell him that for weeks. He seemed to enjoy bringing up Greenland every time we met. It was past time to set him straight. I just didn’t want to do it in front of fifteen other students. I wasn’t as paranoid about letting people know where I was from, but I didn’t want to make a production of it. I didn’t know what I was afraid of—maybe that people would sneer or make assumptions. Would he call me Israel now? Somehow I didn’t think so.
“I hadn’t guessed that,” he said. He opened his eyes and turned to look at me. “I thought maybe Italy or Argentina. I hadn’t thought Israel.”
“Now you know.” He’d thought about me. I was pleased. I was also impressed that he had never asked me.
“So what do you think of our fair country?” he asked.
I was going to give him a flippant answer, but his tone was serious and the sun had worked out the kinks in my neck and the tension from my body.
“It’s peaceful here,” I said. “I hadn’t even known what the word meant until I came here.” I took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out. “It feels like nothing bad could ever happen here.”
And then we were both quiet again.
When Payton noticed me and came over a few minutes later, I introduced her to Justin. From the flare of interest in her eye and the significant looks she kept shooting me, I knew that even if I tried to tell her he was just my TA and not a love interest, she’d never believe me.
I met Chris again that evening in front of the cafeteria. Our running styles fit well together, and we kept up our twice-a-week runs. We were both slow and steady, preferring time and distance to speed. I suspected Chris could have run faster, but he wasn’t complaining and I liked having a running partner.
As we ran, he grumbled about his girlfriend, Tasha. She worked at a bank back in Blacksburg and was very close to her mother. He talked about her every once in a while, usually when he’d just gotten off the phone with her.
“I would love to get stationed in Japan,” Chris told me, his breath coming even and steady. “I went there two years ago and it was awesome. Totally different. I could have spent years there and I still wouldn’t have seen anything.” It always surprised me when Chris mentioned travel or sophisticated interests. There was something very humble and unpretentious about him, and he looked exactly like a dumb marine who should only be capable of shouting out “Yes, sir!” or “No, sir!” When he talked about attending a tea ceremony or going to a Turkish bathhouse, it always threw me.
“Tasha just doesn’t see it,” he said, eyes straight ahead, head up, perfect running form. “We’ve talked about getting married, but she said she’d never move to Japan. Too far away from her mother, can you believe it?” He shook his head and glanced down at me. “I’m in the Marine Corps. There’re no bases in Blacksburg. I don’t know what she’s thinking.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and then concentrated on opening up my stride. He had sped up as he talked. I waited until I could feel that pause between each step, when both legs were far apart, striding out, and I floated for a split second, legs scissoring like pendulums.
As I opened my step, I sped up just past Chris. He increased his pace almost unconsciously, keeping even with me, his breath still coming nice and easy, his running form still perfect. I realized how much faster he could run and I wondered why he kept calling me to jog with him.
“She says I’m more committed to the Marine Corps than I am to her. What’s that supposed to mean?”
I took it as a rhetorical question. We ran for a while in silence. I focused on keeping my breath steady, since I was running faster than usual. The trees and streetlights were flashing by, there and gone, and I was a force of nature. Unstoppable.
“It’s not about her,” he finally said. “It’s not a choice between her and the Marine Corps. It’s about whether she wants safety or adventure in her life.”
It seemed to me that Tasha actually understood things pretty well. If it was about whether she wanted to join him and the military or whether she wanted to stay home without him, if those were her only two choices, that meant the Marine Corps did come first to Chris.
“We’ve dated since high school, and she’s never left our hometown. She went to the community college there, still lives five minutes away from her folks. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but if you have a chance to explore, how can you turn it down?”
It was the most he’d said about himself or Tasha since we’d started running together.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some people aren’t like that. Some people find what they like and they’re happy to stay there.”
“You make it sound like a good thing.”
We exchanged looks, because it was clear neither one of us was like that. I was here in the States instead of home in Israel, and he couldn’t wait to cross an ocean.
Poor Tasha was about to be dumped for the open road and the brotherhood of the Marine Corps. There it was again, personality, force of will, leaving you where you started or moving you along.
“We’d come back,” he said. “I told her that I plan to live in Blacksburg again one day. She’d be away from her mother for a few years, big deal. Everything would still be the same when we’d get back.”
Maybe Tasha had the right idea. If you knew that you were happy someplace, it was a good thing to stay put. I missed the hot beat of Middle Eastern music that always blared from the radio. I missed hanging out with my friends and not having to think about what comes out of my mouth. I missed my family. I fought the urge to glance at my watch. I dropped my arms, shook them to relax them, and thought about my breathing. In, out. Like a heartbeat. Slow and steady.
When we finished, we stretched on the grass.
“Go easy on her,” I said, propping my ankle on the bike stand and stretching my hamstring. “Be patient. She might change her mind.”
“I know,” he said, grunting as he imitated my stretch. “But even if she went, we’d both know I dragged her there and that she’d rather be home, eating at the Golden Corral. We just don’t want the same things.”
“No, I guess you don’t.”
Dov and I wanted the same things. We just didn’t know how to get there. He had finished his military service seven months before I did, and he’d gone to work for his uncle’s computer company, writing software. He still lived with his parents. Even with Hen’s casual attitude and long wo
rkdays, it felt wrong for me to bring Dov over to her place and do anything more than kiss. I always worried she’d pop in, needing to grab some files from her home office. At his place, I could hear his mother watching television in the next room. Even though he swore she’d never walk in on us when the door was closed, I couldn’t relax and I wouldn’t let him take off my shirt. It drove him crazy.
“She won’t care,” he said, nearly grinding his teeth. “She already thinks we have sex. So why not do it?”
We’d been going out for nine months. We made love for the first time four months earlier. We made love again a month after that. But opportunities were few and far between, and we’d fought over this ever since the first time we slept together at his cousin’s place. As far as Dov was concerned, after that first time the floodgates were opened, so to speak, and we should be making love on a regular basis.
“I can’t,” I said. “I just don’t feel right.”
We hardly ever had any privacy. I had a cousin who’d lend us her place when she was away, and there was Dov’s cousin, who had a place. But if they were in town, then—as far as I was concerned—Dov was out of luck.
One Friday night, we’d both drunk more than usual and Dov’s frustration with me had mounted. His fevered brain was plotting, though I didn’t know it. It was three in the morning and we’d stumbled out of a club near the beach. We were in Haifa for once, visiting my parents. We’d had dinner with them and then Dov and I went out.
“I’ve had too much to drink,” he said, taking a deep breath of the salty air. “I shouldn’t drive.”
My ears were ringing slightly from the music in the club and the air around me seemed soothing and quiet. I didn’t want to go home yet. “So let’s walk.”
The club was right on the shore, so we took off our shoes and walked to the water’s edge. After a while, Dov said he was tired. He put his arm around me and rested his cheek on my hair. I thought I felt him kiss my hairline, but it was so soft I couldn’t be sure. We found a dry sand dune and sat down. We looked at the stars for a bit, but there wasn’t much to see; the city lights washed away most of the stars.
