by Judith Frank
He lowered himself onto the floor. Gal’s screaming was becoming hoarse and rhythmic. The minutes passed, and then an hour, and still she cried. Lydia opened the door and peeked in, and Daniel waved her away. He said, “Oof, Gal-Gal, so many tears.” He tried to think of a story to tell her, but it was Matt who was good at that, not he. Finally, he told her a stupid story about how when Yo-yo was a puppy, he chewed all the handles off the cabinets in the kitchen. But that elicited an outraged howl, as though he had mortally insulted her with his frivolity. Hurt clawed up his throat and stung his eyes. It astounded him how badly she could hurt his feelings. And it scared him how long she could cry. He tried to tell himself that his job was simply to be there while she cried, that when she grew up, she would be strong because someone had sat there with her long ago, steadfast, a witness. He remembered her therapist telling him, “Most people think of children’s tears as a bad thing, as something they must make go away.” They’d been sitting in her toy-strewn office, where he supposed she got children to reenact their traumas with puppets and dolls. “But that’s because the tears upset them, not because they’re bad for the child. Your job is to think of her when she cries, not to think about your own distress. She won’t cry forever if you don’t try to get her to stop.”
He clung to that, but Gal cried for longer than he thought a child could cry. Around midnight she began to hyperventilate, and he panicked a little, wondering whether he should rouse his parents, or call the doctor. Before he could do anything, she fell into a coughing fit and vomited all over her bedding. Daniel picked her up and looked for a place to set her down while he stripped the bed; he finally set her in a tiny rocker in the corner of the bedroom. “Oh, it got on your shirt, sweetie,” he said, and pulled gently at the arms, shimmying it over her head. He stood and pulled at the sheets, which gave off the acidic reek of half-digested tomatoes, swearing when they caught on a mattress corner. He took them, and all the soiled clothes, out to the laundry porch and threw them in a corner on the floor. Then he walked softly to Joel and Ilana’s room. His parents were in bed, watching TV with no sound. “Sorry, I’m looking for fresh sheets,” he whispered as they sat up.
“Turn the light on,” his father said.
The light made them blink. Noam was in a diaper, curled against his grandfather’s side, sleeping with his thumb in his mouth and a massive scowl on his face. Lydia was sitting up, drawing her nightgown to her throat. “Let me take over, honey,” she said.
“No,” Daniel said. “Let me see it through.” He found sheets in the closet and eased himself quickly out of the room again.
In the kids’ room, he’d turned off all the lights except for a little lamp on the desk. Gal sat in the chair, hugging herself and rocking and making an unholy keening sound through clenched teeth. Daniel turned on the little boom box to a CD of Israeli songs he knew she liked. He turned it down low and talked to her as he made the bed, making chitchat about how nice the sheets were and what a comfy bed she had and how it was okay to throw up sometimes, even though it was gross. He told her about how once, when he was a kid, he’d thrown up thirteen times, after eating an entire bag of gummy bears. And then he glanced over at her and she was so desolate and so alone on that little chair—her chest naked and skinny, her hair matted around her small face—that his eyes filled with tears.
He lifted her and set her gently on the clean bed, where she crawled weakly onto her pillow. Her chest was still convulsing, the tears still spilling down her face and into the creases of her neck. He lowered himself to the floor again, laid his head back on the wall. He dozed on and off, more or less, a headachy agitation buzzing through his consciousness, and then he awoke. He looked at his watch; it was 1:30 in the morning. Gal was making a racket breathing through her mouth. He got stiffly to his feet. She was curled on her side, her eyes open, shaking and whimpering. He grabbed a box of tissues from near the changing table and crawled clumsily onto the bed, leaning his back against the wall and wrestling her into a seated position between his legs. He wrapped his arms around her, smelling shampoo and vomit. He took a tissue out of the box, held it to her nose, and said, “Blow,” and she did. “Again,” he said, and mopped her up the best he could. He reached for the extra blanket at the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her, then gathered her in tight again. For a while he just sat there breathing against her back, hoping that the swell of his chest and the beat of his heart would calm her with their warm and steady animal rhythm. She was hiccupping now.
“Gal,” he whispered into her ear. “Something terrible happened to us.” He was whispering in Hebrew, and his voice broke. She began crying again, but she was tired now, and limp. “Gali, we’ll stick together, okay? We will. We have to live in this terrible world.” He didn’t know whether that was a horribly wrong thing to say to her, whether it would poison her whole idea of the future. But the night had burned him down to ember and ash. “It’s going to be very hard. We’re going to have to be very brave. But I love you very much and I’m going to take care of you and Noam. Me and Uncle Matt.” It occurred to him that Matt would be home soon, and that they could call him to reassure Gal that he was okay. But then he remembered what his mother had said about indulging her fears and suddenly he understood what she’d meant. Why revive Gal’s fears about Matt’s plane crashing? Maybe it was better to be matter-of-fact about Matt’s arrival, to display a casual confidence in the world’s predictability. He’d have to move through the world performing that confidence, for her and Noam’s sake, from now on.
Gal sighed and shuddered. The desk lamp cast its warm light on the baby’s crib with his stuffed bear crammed between the slats, the random toys that always littered the floor no matter how hard they tried to keep them in their box. Gal was moist and warm inside the blanket. He laid his face against her hair.
Gal turned her face up to him. It was swollen and filthy with dried snot and tears. Her dark lashes were stuck together. “I want choco,” she said.
“Choco!” he breathed. It sounded like the best idea anyone had ever had. He rose stiffly and found her a clean pajama top. His left leg was asleep from the butt down, and he stomped his foot on the floor. “Should we get up and see what the house looks like late at night, when everybody else is asleep?”
She nodded and shuddered again, and he slipped the top over her head and stuffed her arms into the long sleeves. They got up and he extended his hand to her, and they walked down the hall to the kitchen, Daniel’s leg woolly and tingling, Gal wobbling by his side. “Do you smell that?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. It was fresh cigar smoke.
Gal looked up at him. “Grampa,” she said sagely, with a throaty r.
In the kitchen, Sam sat at the table in his pajamas with a glass of milk and the plastic sleeve of a box of plain biscuits with scalloped edges, lined neatly up, one toppled into the empty space he created as he made his methodical way through them. A lit cigar was tipped onto a glass plate at his elbow. He looked up at them and cleared his throat, abashed.
“Rough night, huh,” he said. Gal clambered up onto the chair opposite her grandfather, reported that the cigar was fichsah, and also bad for him.
“I know, honey,” he said gently. “I just have one once in a while.”
“We’re having hot chocolate,” Daniel said, finding the box and spooning generous heaps of powder into two mugs. “Do you want some?” His father shook his head. Daniel opened the refrigerator and took out a plastic pitcher with a bag of milk inside it, poured milk into a pot, and set it on the stove. He stood and turned on the burner and stared at the blue flame. He was so tired he could hardly stand. And yet, there was something curious and light in the feeling. As though he’d been scoured until gleaming, as though he were more soul than body.
His father stood and took his cigar out onto the balcony, and when he returned, it had been carefully put out. He sat down and pushed the plastic sleeve of biscuits toward Gal. She leaned onto the table with her elbows and picked one out, and
bit off the scalloped pieces with tiny bites of her front teeth.
“I like dunking them into milk,” Sam said.
Daniel checked on the milk to make sure it didn’t boil, and looked at his niece. What a wild little creature. One look at her, he thought—in her hodgepodge pajamas and bare feet, crumbs on her mouth, her eyes swollen into slits and her nose red and crusted—and social services would whisk her away. She looked just like the dirty-faced Palestinian refugee children they showed on the news. His mind drifted murkily, like weeds on water. He thought of the bulldozers destroying houses somewhere in the West Bank, possibly at this very moment, and the kids out there who were going through the same thing she was. He hoped they had nice relatives to take them in and hold and rock them. He thought of the news photographs of small coffins swept along on the shoulders of shouting men. It was always men. Sometimes you saw the women. They were always shrieking, which was alienating. They never showed you the quiet daily grief of the Palestinian moms; you never saw a Palestinian adult rocking and cuddling a child. It made you think they weren’t a people who rocked and cuddled.
His mind skipped through some association he couldn’t follow to Matt, to how much he hated those Baby on Board signs on the back windows of American cars. “We don’t have a baby,” he’d snap, “so go ahead and slam right into us, we deserve it!”
Daniel turned off the stove, and poured the sputtering milk into two mugs.
“You know,” Sam said. “I don’t sleep anymore. It’s very curious.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all. I don’t seem to need it anymore.”
“Everybody needs sleep, Dad.”
“So I would have thought.” Sam’s hands were crossed in front of him as he watched his granddaughter.
“Are you scared you’ll dream of Joel?” Daniel ventured the question shyly. It was a new way to talk to his father.
Sam looked at him and considered. His face was heavy, his nose a blunt bulb studded with pores, as though grief had rubbed his patrician veneer down to its coarse male essence.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to know whether dreaming about him is a positive or a negative.”
“I know what you mean,” Daniel said, bringing the mugs to the table. “You wake up destroyed, but at least you got to see him.”
Gal’s eyes were moving between them, in a slow drunken version of their usual sharp darting. Her nose was running, her sniffs a deep, crackling rumble. Daniel looked around for a tissue, but all he found was a roll of paper towels, which he worried would be too painful on her tender nose. “Honey,” he said, “could you get the box of Kleenex from the bedroom?”
She slipped down to the floor and left the room.
Daniel sat down across from his father. He brought the hot mug to his lips and sipped the scalding chocolate.
“You know,” his father said. “When you and Joel started third grade and were separated into different classes for the first time, Joel got massive school anxiety. He woke every morning crying from a stomachache.” He paused, and mused. “It wasn’t what we’d anticipated. You, meanwhile, sailed off to school every morning without looking back.”
He picked up the cigar and ran his fingers along its stem. “It wasn’t what we’d anticipated,” he said again. “Your mother wanted to let him stay home, but I felt that it wasn’t going to get any easier as you boys grew up, and the sooner he got used to it the better. Nowadays, of course, there’s probably some new theory about separating twins into different classrooms.”
Gal came back into the kitchen with the Kleenex box and one of her model horses, which she set carefully on the table.
Daniel helped her blow her nose, wincing when she flinched at the tissue’s rub on the reddened skin around her nostrils. She climbed back onto her chair, dipped her face down to her mug, and stuck her tongue into her hot chocolate. “I a dog,” she said.
“I am a dog,” Sam said, correcting for the millionth time the translation mistake she always made because there was no “to be” verb in Hebrew.
Gal looked at him. “You a dog, too?” she asked her grandfather in a high, comical voice.
“Ha-ha,” Sam said, reaching toward her as though he were going to tickle her.
“Drink your choco like a little girl, Gal-Gal,” Daniel said, “and then we’re going to brush our teeth and go to bed.” They sat and waited as she drank. Daniel rested his cheek on his propped hand and thought of his poor brother, scared to go to school without him. He was surprised his father remembered something about him and Joel that had happened so long ago; Sam hadn’t been particularly involved in the details of raising them. There was a little gleam of pride: his parents had always considered him, Daniel, the fragile one; he’d been smaller at birth, stranger-shy beyond the usual age, prone to hurt feelings. But he’d obviously been hardier than they’d thought.
But then the image came to him of Joel as a little boy in his pajamas, lying about a stomachache and feeling guilty about lying, and it broke his heart. He’d heard somewhere that mourning was like falling in love, and it was, he was—thinking of Joel came with a strange, painful elation. Oh, he loved him.
THE DOG’S TAIL THUMPED madly against Cam’s thigh as Matt held his face in his two hands, scratching his chin, and asking him if he’d been a good doggie. “Were you?” he asked, his teeth clenched in play ferocity. “Were you?” He bent his face down and got a slurp right on the mouth. “You were? Oh, what a good boy.” He scrubbed his mouth with his sleeve and looked at Cam, who stood there with an indulgent look on her face, her own dog, Xena, staring at Yo-yo from between her legs with intense border collie eyes. Xena was an agility champion, and the boss of Yo-yo. “Was he?”
She laughed her grainy guy-laugh. “Except for an incident with a tampon that I won’t go into,” she said.
“Gross,” Matt said, sorry, as he so often was an instant too late, that he’d let Yo-yo kiss him on the lips. It was good to be around dog energy, though; it made him remember walking Yo-yo on the state hospital trails in the late afternoon of September 11, standing around with the other stunned dog owners watching their faithful, goofy dogs wrestling and playing under that gorgeous blue sky.
“You wanna come in?” Cam asked. They were in the tiny hallway of her house, the dog’s bed and bowl, and a bag of his food, stacked in the corner.
“I don’t think so,” Matt said. “I need to unpack and straighten up.” He dreaded going back into that bedroom, but what, he wondered, would he even say to Cam? She was looking at him with big, sad eyes. She was still in work clothes, her black striped oxford shirt tucked into belted pants, a man’s watch gleaming on her wrist. The prospect of putting into words what he’d been through made him feel like a third-grader tossed an ink pen and ordered to write an epic poem. On the way home, he’d imagined telling their story to his friends, and found himself struggling with something inchoate and hard, that Israelis had become somehow real to him; the lawyer, the social worker, Joel and Ilana’s friends, the children. The sound of Hebrew had become at home in his ear. He knew these people would be received sympathetically by anyone who heard his story, and he wanted them to be, he supposed, but he wanted his interlocutors to have to move through the whole deadly political judgment first and then cross over to the other side.
“When’s Danny coming home?”
Matt shrugged. “We don’t know yet. And I’ll probably have to go over there at least once for a parental competency exam. You know, to make sure we’re not the type of parents who will have homosexual orgies when the kids are home.”
Cam laughed. “Bummer,” she said. “No more orgies.”
“How was your month?”
She shrugged. “Oh, you know,” she said. “Same old, same old. I broke up with Diane.”
Matt vaguely remembered, but didn’t have the energy to figure out, which of Cam’s many short-lived relationships she was referring to. “That’s too bad,” he said.
“Nah, wh
atever.” She shook her head dismissively. “Compared to what you guys have been through, c’mon.”
“Well, that’s okay, Cam, it’s still your life. What happened?”
She paused, then gave him an apologetic grin. “Too much drama. When they throw a clock radio at you and scream that they’re sick of your passive-aggressive bullshit after you’ve been together for just two weeks, you know it’s probably not gonna work out.”
Matt laughed, and bent to clip on Yo-yo’s leash.
“Come over if you get lonesome,” Cam said. “We can get takeout or something.”
“I will. And thanks so much, Cam. You’re the best.”
She reached over and clasped his shoulder, and Matt smiled to himself; he and Daniel liked to pantomime being on the receiving end of one of Cam’s alarming handshakes or backslaps, writhing in pain with polite smiles frozen on their faces.
It was getting dark as he led Yo-yo across the tiny lawns, stopping to let him sniff and pee, the cold air encasing his forearms under the sweatshirt he wore. The forsythia and azaleas were in bloom; soon his neighborhood would be fragrant with lilac. He’d left the front door unlocked, and they pushed into the house, which had grown dark in the few minutes he’d been with Cam. He turned on every light he could reach. The answering machine in the kitchen blinked with seventeen messages; just looking at it made him tired. He dreaded going back upstairs, into that bedroom. But he’d have to clean it up sometime, and it might as well be now, while he still had all that weird jet-lag energy. He got out a jumbo-sized garbage bag, found a sprinkle of pot in a sandwich bag and his rolling papers in the stamps-and-matches drawer, and rolled a thin joint. He trudged up the stairs with the lit joint at the corner of his mouth, smoke curling up his face, and at the door of the bedroom, turned on the light. He stood looking at it. The garbage can was brimming with used tissues, the bedclothes were thrown back, the pillowcases still furiously rumpled, the closets open, the cap off the Tylenol bottle on the bedside table. Clothes—discards from his frenetic packing—lay in heaps on the dressers. He took a big drag, held it in, set the joint on the edge of one of the dressers. He sat on the bed. His breath was heavy, his throat scorched.
