Light Years

by Tammar Stein

  He leaned over and kissed me. My heart thumped pleasantly as it always did when I felt those firm warm lips and his hand cupped the back of my head. I was buzzed pretty good, and soon his clever hands were under my shirt, plucking at my bra.

  “Wait,” I mumbled, feeling half-drugged. “There’re people around.”

  I could faintly hear people laughing. An open-air bar not far from us was doing brisk business, and people sat on the sand drinking beer.

  “Who cares,” Dov said, his voice rumbling in my ear. My hands tightened involuntary on his shirt. He kissed my ear, bit lightly on my earlobe. “Even if they notice, they’ll just see two people making out on the beach. Happens all the time.” He rained tiny kisses on my face, the line of my jaw, my neck, and then returned to my lips, kissing me deeply, making love to my mouth.

  I barely heard him. The ringing in my ears had grown.

  “Okay,” I whispered as his hand slipped under the waistband of my pants. “Yes.”

  I showered after we crept back home. I studied myself in the bathroom mirror, satisfied little smirk and all. My hair was a tangled mess, full of sand and salt from the damp wind. The sand had gotten everywhere, and Dov, with a grin, asked if I needed any help getting it out.

  “No,” I said, and kicked him out of the bathroom.

  I was embarrassed but also slightly proud. Sex on the beach. Not bad for a nice girl from Haifa. Next thing, I’d join the mile-high club.

  I still had energy after the run with Chris, so I walked to the gym and worked out in the weight room for forty minutes. I wanted my muscles to quiver with fatigue. I wanted to push out all the memories, sweat them right out of my skin.

  I passed Brook Maxwell, ex-flame of Justin Case. She was wearing black spandex tights and a lilac sports bra, climbing and climbing on the Stairmaster but getting nowhere. I was wearing ratty sweatpants and a faded shirt, stained dark with sweat. Her eyes shifted from the fashion magazine in front of her to me and then shifted back without acknowledgment. I flicked her the middle finger but she didn’t see.

  * * *

  For the next two weeks, Payton was consumed by sorority rush. Eight hours a day in her high heels and making conversation with perfect strangers was trying even for Payton. I was surprised how disappointed I was when I’d find our room empty at the end of the day. We hardly met for dinner anymore, and when I did see her during the day, she was too busy to say more than a quick hello, always surrounded by her group of fellow rushees. Like a string of little Goldilockses, they went from sorority house to sorority house trying to find the perfect fit. I’d never seen Payton fuss so much with her hair, her makeup, or her clothes.

  I shrugged to myself in the empty room, quiet after Payton’s frantic search for a hair clip and her quick good-bye. I was thinking that it shouldn’t matter that we never did anything together anymore. But it did.

  Two weeks later, Payton was accepted into the sorority of her choice and was giddy with the knowledge that another Walker woman would be a Kappa Delta. Having passed from prospective rushee to first-year pledge, Payton was consumed with secret rituals, Big Sister Week, and elaborate functions. I was constantly taking down messages, accepting little gifts—plastic cups full of candy decorated with Greek letters, framed photos of Kappa Deltas having fun, T-shirts with the sorority’s Greek letters—and leaving them on her bed, like offerings for a benevolent goddess.

  Payton would be out until past midnight on weeknights and not back until dawn on the weekends. She started skipping her morning classes, unable to get up before ten.

  “I don’t know how much more I can take,” she croaked to me one night. “They say in a week things’ll settle down, but I’m behind in all my classes. God, I’m so tired.” She flopped into bed and was asleep with all her clothes on by the time I turned out the lights.

  Then the onslaught was over and we were back to having dinner together two or three nights a week.

  Payton’s mother took us out to their country club to celebrate her daughter’s brilliant success.

  We lunched on chicken salad on croissants, fruit salad, and sweet iced tea. Several women wearing Chanel suits in pastel colors stopped by our table to say hello. Payton and I pasted on polite smiles that stayed in place for nearly an hour.

  Her mother was very chatty and hardly let Payton get a word in, waving gladly anytime someone she knew walked by. She’d ask a question and not give Payton a chance to answer. After being cut off mid-sentence for the fourth or fifth time, Payton caught the look I shot her and grimaced.

  While the plates were cleared away, both Payton and I excused ourselves to the restroom.

  “She’s my mom,” Payton said before I could say anything, sadness and frustration warring in her tone. “That’s just who she is.”

  “Is it her medication?” I knew I probably wasn’t supposed to ask, but I did.

  “I don’t know. It might be. Sometimes she just gets this way.” Payton entered a stall and closed the door. I leaned against the counter, waiting for her to finish, trying to think of something to say.

  Payton came out and briskly washed her hands.

  “The desserts here are unbelievable. Have you ever had pecan pie?”

  I admitted that I had not.

  “Then today is your lucky day,” Payton said. “They have the most amazing pecan pie here.”

  I understood that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  After her mother dropped us off in her dark-green Jaguar, Payton plopped on her bed. “I hope the club wasn’t too rough for you,” she said, pretending that was why we were both slightly subdued. “But my family pretty much has to go there. My great-grandfather helped found the club.”

  I followed her lead.

  “Tough,” I nodded sympathetically.

  “You know what I mean.” She threw her pillow at me.

  I ducked and it hit my shoulder.

  “It must be hard,” I said. “Going to a fancy club, day after day, pecan after pecan.”

  “We try to be brave about it.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  She laughed. “Now that you’ve mocked my family and our proud heritage, are you going to help me with this calculus nonsense?”

  “Calculus is many things,” I sniffed. “But nonsense isn’t one of them.” I scooted over to her bed, and we spread out her notes and worked on figuring out proofs, theorems, and the value of the unknown.

  * * *

  That afternoon I met the major’s Israeli wife, Yael, for coffee. She lived in a nice house not far from the university. The directions she gave me over the phone were impeccable, and I found the house ten minutes before I was supposed to arrive. I strolled down her street, admiring the different houses with their long windows and lush gardens until it was time, and then I rang the bell.

  A slim blond woman wearing blue cotton pants and a snug white shirt opened the door.

  “Maya,” she said warmly in English. “Come in. You found the place okay?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  The house was decorated in a strange mix of Israeli and American styles. There were several prints of Jerusalem, an embroidered blessing of the house in Hebrew—clearly her contributions. The tan recliner in front of the television and the military prints of historic uniforms must have belonged to her American husband.

  She had set out plates with cookies and fruit, and a little pitcher of cream and sugar in a matching silver set. I was officially a Real Guest.

  We settled down, poured ourselves a cup of coffee, and added the necessary adjustments of cream and sugar. I helped myself to a cookie, knowing nothing would get said until I did so.

  “We can talk in Hebrew, right?” she asked me. Her accent in English was very soft, nothing like the harsh tones most people in Israel carry when speaking English.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ve been looking forward to speaking Hebrew again. Apart from my parent
s on the phone, I never get to speak it.”

  She nodded sympathetically.

  “I only speak Hebrew with my mother and sister these days,” she said, switching to Hebrew. “I tried to teach my kids Hebrew—I’ve got a son and a daughter—but it’s too hard.” She shrugged. “They didn’t want to learn it as kids. Their father doesn’t speak it and their friends don’t speak it and they thought it was embarrassing that their mother did. Now they’re grown up and they want to know why I never taught it to them.” She gave a little laugh and sipped her coffee.

  “Does your family in Israel speak English?” I asked.

  “Some, but not well.”

  “That’s hard. I mean, they’re your family but they can hardly communicate with your kids.”

  Yael waved away my concern. “They can understand the important things. Besides, seventy percent of communication is body language. When you have that and you love each other, you understand just about everything.”

  I blinked at her blithe explanation. It sounded like she must say it a lot. I had this vivid mental image of little kids pantomiming licking an ice cream and their grandmother pantomiming back looking for her wallet and keys. I was sure my professors would be interested to know that the grammar mistakes I made in my papers weren’t important and were irrelevant to getting my point across.

  “That’s … good.” At least my parents spoke Hebrew and English well. No matter where I chose to live and have kids, they’d be able to talk with them using more than just hand signs and foot taps. It was something I’d already thought about if I stayed here.

  “You make a place for yourself, no matter where you end up,” she said, as if reading my mind. I had to be careful not to let my thoughts show on my face. “I never imagined myself as an American, living all over the world on military bases. But that’s how things worked out, and now I can’t imagine it any other way.”

  “It must have been hard.”

  She shrugged and made a face.

  “I can see that being here now might be hard for you. But it’s hard for me when I go back to Israel now. I’m not fully Israeli anymore. I know I’m not really American either. But you learn not to define yourself that way.”

  I was taken aback and didn’t have an easy comment to return. I suddenly realized that I’d found a person who might help me figure out what to do, how to make the choice of picking my country, my homeland. The afternoon switched from being a tedious chore to being something that might truly help me.

  “Okay,” I said, scooting forward in my seat, carefully setting down my cup. “How does this work? How do you learn to be comfortable here? Or do you?”

  She put down her mug as well. We had both figuratively rolled up our sleeves. “You have to choose,” she said softly. “You need to decide what team you play for. I’m not saying you need to do it now; you don’t know yet. But give it two years and then decide one way or the other. And this doesn’t mean there aren’t days when you’re homesick. And it doesn’t mean you don’t pay close attention to the news every time they mention Israel. You’re still connected. But in your heart, you need to decide that if push came to shove, whose side you’re on, and then stay there. Don’t second-guess yourself.”

  I must have looked uneasy because she smiled. “Don’t worry about it so much. I think in the end it’s not a decision your head makes. It’s an instinct you develop. A gut feeling that you follow. It doesn’t signify love or a lack of it—” she stopped herself, thought for a moment. “You’ll know when you decide because you’ll talk about something and you’ll say ‘we’ about one country and ‘they’ about the other country. I know right now you think that the only people who love you are in Israel, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And that no one can love you like that here. So how can you leave the people who love you so much, who understand who you are. Am I right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, here’s my story. I met my husband when he was stationed in Israel. We started dating and we got married three months later.”

  “Wow.”

  She smiled. “It makes sense when you’re nineteen, let me tell you. Anyway, the first year we were married he was still stationed in Israel, so things were really easy. Ian’s not Jewish, but he didn’t care about religion. We went to my parents’ house for the holiday. Ian wore a kipa. I had everything the way I was used to it. But after a year, we got assigned to this place called Parris Island, which has nothing to do with Paris, France. And I’m not talking some nice fun island. It’s the headquarters for Marine Corps recruiting. I’m talking about mosquitoes and some godforsaken swamps in the middle of nowhere.” She paused, took a sip of her drink, smiled as I winced in sympathy. “Two days before we’re supposed to leave Israel for South Carolina, Ian gets a three-month assignment to Haiti that he can’t talk about. On his way out the door he tells me there’s no housing available for us in Parris Island but that some chaplain priest, hearing about our plight, has agreed to share his house with us.” She was a good storyteller, pausing at the right places, building up her tale.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. I nearly had a nervous breakdown.”

  “Why didn’t you just stay in Israel until he came back?”

  “Well, I said I wouldn’t go. I said he couldn’t abandon me and send me to a priest’s house. Apart from one trip to visit his family in Michigan, I’d never spent time in the States. I’d never met a priest.”

  I nodded my head. I’d never met a priest either.

  “But,” she lifted a finger. “I was six months pregnant, and the one thing Ian asked of me when we got married is that the kids be born in the States. He didn’t care if I raised them Jewish, he didn’t care if I kept a kosher house, but he wanted the kids born on American soil. So I went.”

  “Unbelievable.” I shook my head. “That’s incredible.”

  She smiled. “I ranted and raved for two hours and then my parents drove us to the airport. I got on one plane, he got on another.” She set down her cup, clearly enjoying my reactions to her story. “I flew by myself—another first—with my belly already out to here.” She held a hand two feet away from her stomach. “When I landed, the priest was waiting for me with my name on a sign. I was so upset to be in this new country, I nearly cried when I saw him. I’d been wondering what I would do if I landed and there was no one waiting for me. I was ready to throw myself into his arms.

  “I grew up in a religious home. We kept kosher and my father went to synagogue every morning. And here I was, going to live with a man who wasn’t my husband, alone in his house, and he was a priest. It nearly killed me. I didn’t even tell my parents, I was so ashamed and worried about their reaction.”

  “They were okay with the fact that you didn’t marry a Jew?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not at all, but for once in my life I didn’t care what they thought. Sometimes you only listen to yourself, and my parents realized they couldn’t change my mind. They could keep me as their daughter who married a goy, or they could lose a daughter who married a goy.” She shrugged. “They decided to keep me.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wait until you fall in love,” she said. “The strangest things can happen.”

  It took a physical effort for me not to flinch at the blow. I swallowed back the rush of memories that suddenly crowded the edge of my mind and forced myself to focus on the rest of her story.

  “By the time we arrived at the priest’s house, I was nearly shaking. He showed me where he’d put up a mezuzah on the doorframe. He showed me the kitchen. He had turned it into a kosher kitchen. He’d gone out and bought two sets of dishes, forks, spoons, everything you need. He had taken down all the crucifixes from the walls. Then he took me to one small bedroom and he said, ‘This is my bedroom.’ There was a bed and a dresser and a crucifix over the bed. That was the only place in the whole house with one. Then he showed me the master bedroom. ‘This is where you’re going to sleep.�
� It was a beautiful room. ‘This is your house now,’ he said. ‘I won’t be in your way.’ ”

  Goose bumps raced up my arms. “He really put up a mezuzah and koshered the kitchen?”

  “He did. He got some man from a synagogue in Savannah to come in and help him do it right. I started crying, and he got very worried. This was twenty years ago and everyone thought it wasn’t healthy for a pregnant woman to be upset. So he starts saying, ‘Did I do something wrong? I’m sorry, it’ll be fixed, please don’t worry. We can make it right.’ Then I started crying even harder because he had done everything perfectly, so thoughtfully. I’d expected him to try to convert me, and instead he gave up his house to Judaism.” I noticed her eyes had welled up. She looked away. “Even today I can’t get over it. We became very good friends. When David was born, he was there with Ian in the hospital waiting room.”

  I sipped my coffee. It was almost cold and tasted like wood.

  “Maya, what I’m trying to tell you is that no matter where you end up making your home, people make room for you. People who you never thought would accept you. You don’t have to hide who you are or try to conform.” She looked at me sharply, as if she could see my walls. “You couldn’t blend in even if you tried. So you shouldn’t bother.”

  I thanked her for the coffee and said it was time for me to go. We shook hands.

  “You’ll have to come here for Rosh Hashanah,” she said.

  On my way out the door I turned and asked her, “Are you still friends, you and the priest?”

  She looked down for a moment. “No,” she said. “We kept in touch for almost ten years, and then he got out of the military and we lost touch.”

  I said good-bye and walked away.

  I didn’t want to think about Yael or her hybrid house or her American husband and their nomadic military existence. So I walked through the quiet neighborhood, taking the long way back to the library, trying to keep my mind clear. But I couldn’t help thinking about friendships and respect and making space in your life for people different than you are. As always when I met someone new, I wondered if Dov would have liked her. I tried to remember if I thought about him this much when he was alive, but by now it was all tied up together and I couldn’t remember. It seemed like there was never a time when he wasn’t in my thoughts.