All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

  When she went back inside, Matt’s mother would give her lemonade. Gal liked her plump hands and pillowy stomach, and the food she cooked, pancakes and bacon. The skin of her upper chest was blotchy and freckled, and Noam was quiet on her capable shoulder. In the colors Gal’s mind formed, these new grandparents didn’t stand out with the stark light of her other grandparents; they were paler, plumper, slower. Being around their stolid, warm shapes was like settling back in a beanbag chair. She didn’t have to show them that she loved them because otherwise they’d be sad. They didn’t pin her down with laser-beam looks and pepper her with questions to make her demonstrate her knowledge or show that she was okay, because even though Matt told them she spoke English, they didn’t really believe she spoke it well. Instead, they patted her and said, “There, there.” Matt laughed when she asked about this, said that it means “Everything is okay, don’t worry.”

  She heard the clink of Yo-yo’s collar and his big snuffling nose at the door of the shed. Fear blossomed in her heart; she hadn’t thought of the dog, who would find her, and then the boy would follow him. He would find her and shout “Boo!” in his scary foghorn voice, and the prospect of that made her tremble. But what if he didn’t, what if he came to the door and then walked away, leaving her alone in this dirty heap of crushed boxes? A gnawing mix of foreboding and shame filled her up till she sighed and closed her eyes. It was stupid, this hiding place, stupid. When he saw her there, he would know that she was just like the boxes, dirty and crushed.

  She heard the clank of the latch as Rafi opened it, felt light arch over her, and then a shadow. She peeked up, heart pounding. He was standing over her, grinning, tapping his chest with two fingers. “Matzati otach,” he said. I found you.

  HE HAD A FEW hours to work while his mother tended to the kids and his father was at the hardware store investigating childproofing gadgets, so Matt was sitting at his computer in shorts and an undershirt, a fan stirring the papers beside him each time it rotated in that direction. To his surprise, his bid had won the design work for the new engineering school at Smith College, and he was both grateful for the regular income and panicky about whether he’d have the time to do the work well. He was trying to design a logo that would convey the idea of empowered women engaged in scientific pursuit, but, as he did whenever he had a moment to himself, he was thinking about Daniel, who, since they’d gotten home, had lost it, slowly but surely, like a tire with a tack in it. It was as though he’d realized that after expending a superhuman effort to get the kids in the first place, it wasn’t going to stop, he had to continue working even harder to actually raise them.

  Daniel’s arms were thin and bony, and he was letting his beard grow; together with the weight he’d lost, it made him look older and more ascetic, a touch too rabbinical for even a matzo queen like Matt. Once, there had been a lusciousness about him, an offering of lips and belly and nipples, but it had burned off, leaving pure wire. He could hardly stand to be cared for or even looked at; where he used to lower his lashes shyly under Matt’s gaze, he now turned away, evasive. When Matt reached out to touch him, he pulled away with a look of being vaguely put-upon.

  In the mornings, Matt had to pull him out of bed and lead him to the shower while the kids dug into their heavy morning sleep. He had to keep him going for the family health care benefits; he knew that after a long absence, Daniel had to show up for work in a big way, and sometimes he was frightened because Daniel was forgetful and carried himself a little like a drunk.

  His own emotions were in abeyance; he was just moving forward, helping Daniel function. When you were with someone for a long time, he reasoned, you didn’t feel in love all the time; your love waxed and waned. He’d been attracted to other guys before, but their monogamy agreement was meant to deal with that, to provide an outlet and to acknowledge that, hey, it was likely to happen and it was okay. On days when Daniel was away and he was alone in the brisk air of his friendships and his work, enjoying the quiet in the house, Matt could imagine that if Daniel were to stay this way, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

  And still, he tried to remember, to conjure out of thin air, the things he’d loved about Daniel in the first place. He remembered being with Daniel at a Northampton bar a few years ago, for their friend Mark’s birthday, and being introduced to Mark’s neighbor, a young guy, a kid, really, named Toby. Shy, long-haired, and husky-voiced, he worked with homeless people in Holyoke and was involved in the recent fracas over their tent shantytown. Mark, by way of introduction, had told them that Toby was a “sneaker freaker” and was working on a documentary about sneaker freakers. They had nodded sagely when he told them that, but when Toby turned away for a second, Daniel had leaned in and whispered, his lips touching Matt’s ear, “We’ll Google it later,” making Matt quake with silent laughter. There were about twenty people at a long table littered with bar appetizers, drinking margaritas and beer and gin and tonics, leather jackets and Windbreakers flung on the backs of their chairs. Matt and Daniel had talked to Toby for a while, and found him not only smart and sweet but so beautiful he gave Matt a headache. Toby slipped out early, saying he had to get to another birthday party, and they left shortly afterward. Out on the warmly lit downtown street, Daniel had turned to Matt and said, “Oh my God. Oh my God! Was that the yummiest boy you’ve ever seen, or what?!” And Matt had hopped up and down and yelled, “I know!”

  In bed that night they were having sex in their tried-and-true mode, using the shorthand of lovers who have been together for years, and whose bag of tricks no longer has the capacity to shock and awe. Then Matt had sung “Hello, Toby!” which made Daniel laugh. “Toby’s on top of you,” Matt whispered, fondling Daniel lazily and feeling his hard-on become urgent, “and I’m there, touching his ass—”

  “Too fast!” Daniel panted, swatting away his hand.

  “Oh.” Matt backed up, and his mind moved quickly over the narrative requirements of this fantasy. Getting them seated in an advantageous arrangement at the bar. Getting everyone else who had been there out of the way. “Mark’s gone off to the bathroom,” he said. “Toby’s feet are up on a chair. Dan, you’re admiring his sneakers. ‘What great sneakers these are!’ ” Or whatever the hell way you’re supposed to admire a sneaker freaker’s sneakers, he thought. “You’re pulling gently on the laces—”

  “Too slow!” Daniel yelped. “Enough with the sneakers!”

  An indignant look came over Matt’s face. “But it’s his fetish!”

  Daniel’s head popped up from the pillow, his face no longer rapt, just red. “Yeah, but it’s not mine!”

  They had giggled till they were weak, and made love with the remnants of excitement combined with affectionate goofiness. That’s what Matt had thought would carry them into the future when the initial passion settled and waned: their affection and gameness, their ingenuity at making fire out of the sparks created by other people. He’d been proud of his willingness to be that way, proud of his own maturity.

  From the window he caught a flash of Yossi’s kid darting around, peering behind the trellis and looking up into the trees. He wondered whether it was okay in the year 2003 to let the kids out by themselves to roam the neighborhood backyards, but knew that if he called them in, the house would be louder. Plus, it had to be good that they weren’t sitting glassy-eyed in front of a PlayStation. He himself had spent entire summers outside. He supposed that if he’d had a different kind of mother, he might have spent his time at her dressing table, in a room where the shades had been drawn against the heat, smelling her various potions, maybe daring to draw her rouge brush lightly across his cheeks. But his mother didn’t even possess a dressing table, so instead he’d meandered on his bike around the neighborhood, past the driveways where groups of small boys debated the rules of their games in shrill voices. He remembered the heat shimmering off of the blacktop, feeling superior to them and left out, with equal keenness.

  THE FIRST WEEKS HOME, it seemed he went daily to Ta
rget with the kids to solve some urgent child-gear need while Daniel was at work. Noam whimpered in the shopping cart basket and Gal staggered alongside them, ashen, red-eyed, lips and nose chapped, blinking against the assaultive lights. The other shoppers looked sharply at them and asked if they were okay, and considered him doubtfully—a blond man with two dark-haired children—when he said that they were. Gal asked him anxiously if he’d brought money with him. He thought he should probably buy them clothes, but he was shocked at what he found: the pitiless rigor with which they were divided into girls’ clothes, which were all pink and covered with flowers and butterflies and sparkles, and boys’ clothes, which were all camouflage or said things like Future MVP or Born to Build. And the toys too, every one of them sporting a logo or design of a Disney character. He went in wanting to buy the kids something and leaving without one single toy.

  And then at home, whirling with chores. He’d known that once the kids came, the house would be chaotic, but somehow that hadn’t prepared him for the crap all over the floor, the clothes strewn on beds and over chairs, dishes piled up in the sink. Lydia and Sam had come only a week after their arrival, against both his and Daniel’s wishes; they simply hadn’t been able to keep them away. And while they meant to help, and were thoughtful enough to stay in a hotel, Matt’s experience was constant grocery shopping, making dinners for six people, fleeing into his study to escape the many forms—irritability, exhaustion, compulsiveness—taken by long-term grief, feeling as if he and Daniel were still waiting to begin their real lives with the kids.

  Quickly, pausing only briefly for regret, he and Daniel had decided to transform the dining room into a playroom, and moved the long pine table and its mix of chairs into the basement, bought a large area rug from Home Depot, a futon couch, and a wicker toy box, from which random tinkling music emanated at night when they walked by, making them stop in their tracks and put their hands on their lurching hearts. Everywhere he walked, Matt picked something up or washed something. He turned to pick up some shoes, and while he was in the front hall, he charged the cell phones and picked up a cup that’d been left on the hall table. He brought the cup into the kitchen and while he was there, whirled around, emptying the dishwasher and getting the dog water, and finding a piece of a toy Gal had been looking for. He took that into her room and plugged it into the toy, then turned in circles in her room, hanging her pajamas on a hook, making her bed. He took the garbage into the garage, where he noticed a dead mouse in one of the traps; opened up the trash, gloved his hand with a plastic bag, and lifted the trap with the rigid mouse inside it, dumped it into the garbage, wondering, What the hell will we tell the kids when they start discovering all the dead mice? And tied up the trash again.

  At night, the upstairs hallway was lit up like an airport runway with night-lights. They brought Noam to their bed because it was easier than getting up several times a night and going to him when he awoke to find that his pacifier had dropped from his mouth. In bed they could watch TV and just stick it back in. By morning, everybody was in his and Daniel’s bed, including the dog. Their sleep was strenuous, cutting from one demanding dream to another to the rhythm of the air-conditioning unit, which hitched on and off from the whir of the fan to the rumbling vibration of the cooler. The sheets were pulled and wrung into rope. When his eyes opened to the early morning, the first thing Matt took in was a clutter of empty cups and bottles and balls of used tissues on the bedside table, left from the middle of the night when the kids awoke in tears and he fetched them things to drink, set Gal up on a bunch of pillows, and had her relate her complicated and nonsensical dreams to him and Daniel while they sleepily stroked her hair and vowed their undying protection during the scary parts, the parts with the witch or the monster. Matt would get out of bed and lower himself to the floor, his bony knees aching as they pressed on the hard wood, peer underneath the bed with a flashlight for her, and come back up with an all-clear, wiping dust off his feet before getting back under the covers.

  Now, looking out the window down to the street, Matt saw two women walking slowly with a toddler swinging between them, and turning up their front path. The house was always full of people come to help—their friends, and now his parents, and the congregation of Beit Ahavah! Their neighbor Val, who lived three doors down on the other side from Cam, and whom they hadn’t known at all till now, came over most days of the week with her four-year-old Lev in tow, and brought what seemed like half the Reform shul with her. He wasn’t sure which ones these were. The lesbians from the shul all had dark hair, dramatic eyebrows, children adopted from China and Vietnam and Guatemala, or hard-won through various fertility techniques. They brought over coffee cakes, clothes their kids had outgrown, parenting guides as thick as metropolitan phone books. Twice now the house had grown so full it was like an impromptu lesbian party, women on the couch and floor with toys between their hairy legs, Noam catching their eyes and holding out toys to them in a quest for their bewitching Thank yous! They dispensed advice to Matt and joked self-deprecatingly about their own initial forays into parenthood, when their own nice houses had become pigsties and they’d become incapable of conducting the most rudimentary adult conversation, so busy were they being locked into power struggles with their two-year-olds, who threw screaming fits because their moms had cut their toast into rectangular halves instead of on the diagonal.

  Matt heard the doorbell, a swell of voices downstairs, his mother’s polite greeting voice. He should go down and mediate, he thought, but then changed his mind: his mother would just shoo him back upstairs. She’d developed a kind of flair for being around Jewish lesbians, whom she called “the gals.” She’d tell him and Daniel about so-and-so’s struggle to get pregnant and the strain it had placed on her relationship, and explain the intricacies of in vitro fertilization, which she familiarly called IVF, an explanation that necessitated an air drawing of the cervix and ovaries, which made Daniel and Matt and Matt’s father exchange alarmed glances.

  He was stunned by this new life, the mess of it, the people—some of whom he knew, some of whom were complete strangers—letting themselves in and out of the house, the front door wide open all day long, people swiping mosquitoes off the open margarine tub in the kitchen, his bare feet sticky from dirt and humidity on the wood floors. Stunned. Home had always been where he went to get away from his family. Now his house was blown apart, the wind and the grief blowing through it. But a small part of him felt like a flower. He reveled in the sensuality of the kids’ baby skin and their hair and the breath sifting raggedly from their mouths. He wasn’t getting laid, but he was finding in himself a new kind of desire, milder and wider and sweeter than libido, that spread out onto all the living creatures under his care.

  IT WAS RAFI’S TURN to hide. Gal rested her forehead on her arms, which rested against a tree, shut her eyes, and began counting to forty in Hebrew. The air was still and the shrill buzz of crickets elicited a semiconscious memory of the electric station down the street from her apartment in Jerusalem. Her mind glanced off of this and that till she lost count. An impulse of strict conscientiousness made her decide that the rule was, if you lost count, you had to go back to the beginning. She began again.

  When she was done, she stood back and surveyed the yard with a raised head and narrowed eyes. She felt as if she were in a movie about a little girl searching for a hiding little boy.

  It wasn’t a good yard for hide-and-seek; it was small and neat, the grass trimmed yesterday by Matt’s father, who said she could call him Grampa or Grampa John or just John. Its only ornaments were the flowers that grew along the fence and the feeders and stone birdbath that Matt let her fill with the hose, showing her how to hold her finger over the nozzle to direct and intensify the stream. You had to go into the neighbors’ yards, the ones that drew closer to the woods, to find the sheds and dense bushes and raised decks you could shimmy under on your stomach, startling the cats sleeping under them. And of course the agility obstacles in Cam’s ya
rd, which was the first place Gal headed, ducking into the small opening in the shrubs that divided the two lawns.

  There was a lump in the middle of the cloth tunnel. Where was his head? She thought her parents may have been buried without heads. That was a secret thought she had, something that nobody was telling her.

  She walked up to Rafi and stopped, her heart pounding. He was lying down, trying to make himself as flat as possible in the space between the round opening of the tunnel and where it trailed on the ground. She knew he couldn’t hear her approach. She wondered whether if she tapped him, she could make him jump. She stuck out her finger and held it hovering over his body. Would the little girl be mean and scare the little boy? Then she withdrew it, and instead tugged a little at the cloth, to warn him of her approach. The lump stirred, and she laughed as he thrashed his way out, red-faced.

  STARING AT THE COMPUTER screen, his mind going through the motions, Matt heard his father come home and the exchange of voices with his mother. He felt a surge of guilty gratitude for their unhurried, unflappable presences in the house. When he’d called to say the kids had arrived, Shirley made him repeat the foreign names several times (“Let me put your father on. How do you spell that? Wait, let me write it down”). She’d said, “Those poor babies,” and “Well, I know you have a lot of tenderness in you, Matt, for all you don’t always want people to see it.” This shocked him, that she’d seen something about him. And they’d immediately made plans to come out to meet the “little Jewish grandbabies,” as his mother referred to them. They slept on an air mattress on the living room floor, and the kids lounged on it during the day, watching Oprah or Judge Judy with Matt’s mother, and dragged the blankets around. He had to acknowledge that his parents were helpful with the kids, but their presence made something catch and strain in his throat. Did this mean that they could now come anytime they wanted to? Did it mean that they were a genuine part of one another’s lives now?