by Judith Frank
Matt’s own paper sat in front of him with neatly printed letters. Gal leaned over to look at it and said, “Yofi, Matt.” Nice.
“Thanks.” He and Yossi were working on the names for familial relationships, and starting to get esoteric as they pushed their way into the varieties of queer kinship. Matt had told him a story one of their friends from the shul, Rebecca, had told him about the nurse who’d checked her partner Jen into the hospital the night their son was about to be born. The nurse was visibly peeved about having to do the paperwork five minutes before her shift was supposed to end, and said to Rebecca as she was setting up Jen in bed, “So what will you be called? Mee-maw? Moo-maw?” honking the names with gleeful scorn.
“How do I say ‘I’m your guardian,’ although not legally, in kind of a pretend way?” he asked Yossi.
“Pretend is c’ilu,” Gal said.
Yossi tapped his pen on Gal’s paper in a command for her to do her own work. His hand was speckled with tiny flecks of paint.
“When are you going to let me see your studio?” Matt asked.
Gal looked up. Yossi had a trying-to-be-patient expression on his face, the way he looked when Rafi rejected a food before he’d even tasted it. “The law, it’s ha-chok,” he said. “Against the law: neged ha-chok. According to the law: l’fee ha-chok.”
“Ha-chok,” Matt said, with a juicy guttural chet. “Do you, like, incorporate political themes or violence in your work?”
“Why,” Yossi said sharply, “because I’m Israeli I must incorporate politics?”
“Sheesh,” Matt said. “I was just expressing an interest.”
Gal wrote down, in Hebrew, April May June. She thought about Judge Judy, who yelled at people who were too stupid to get a written contract or talked when it wasn’t their turn, and she gazed at the calendar with narrowed eyes. Something had been working away at the edges of her memory since they’d sat down, and that, together with the combative tone coming from Yossi and Matt, set her on edge. It was a warm and cloudy afternoon, the kitchen almost dark enough to turn on the lights; a bee batted noisily against the screen door. “You know,” Matt was saying, “some people would say that not incorporating politics is actually a political act.”
Yossi gave him a cool look.
“I’m just saying,” Matt said.
“Don’t grip the pencil so hard, Gal,” she heard Yossi say. “See, your knuckles are white!”
It worked at the edges of her memory and then moved away. She looked down at her hand and let go of the pencil; it rolled off the table and dropped to the floor.
THE STORY ABOUT THEIR family in the local paper was picked up by the AP wires and published by a Springfield paper, and soon after in the Boston Globe, as part of a larger story about gay and lesbian foster families; they found out about it from April, who scanned the papers daily. They got a call from a Boston TV station that wanted to feature them on a news program, but they turned it down, agreeing that a local story was one thing, but being a news sensation—and putting the kids in front of television cameras—was another. Gal was about to start school, and they didn’t need her to be the object of this kind of attention as she was trying to integrate herself into a class of American first-graders.
At work, Daniel had gotten to a phase where sitting in his office concentrating on editing a story was the only thing that honed and quieted his mind. He reveled in his own expertise as he cut, rearranged, smoothed, corrected emphases, feeling like a carpenter doing fine finish work. They were increasing the magazine’s Web presence, and he found that having lived with a graphic designer for four years had rubbed off on him and given him a broad sense of design possibility, so that together with his office’s own Web person, he was helping create a fresher and hipper look for the magazine. He felt as though he had answered in the affirmative the unspoken question of whether he would return—really return—to the job they had held for him. Then one day in late August, April called him into her office and handed him a printed email, addressed to her and cc’d to the president. The first paragraph read:
My deepest condolences to Daniel Rosen on the tragic loss of his brother and sister-in-law. I commend him for taking into his home the youngest victims of a terrorist’s bomb, and for raising them in what appears to be a sensitive and caring way. But he appears not to understand that while he has the same right as any citizen to free speech, he holds a high-profile position at the College, and therefore has an obligation to represent it in a way befitting the enlightened values of the liberal arts. To say that he “understands” an act of terror is to defy those values absolutely. His position as College Editor cannot, must not, be used as a platform for what I can only call extremism.
HE LOOKED UP AT April, his heart sinking. “They read the story in the Globe,” she said, handing it to him with the pages folded back to the article. Terrifyingly prepared, she had highlighted in yellow the paragraph where he talked about the terrorist.
“I wasn’t speaking as college editor,” he said, scanning it again for signs of extremism, or of having misspoken.
“That’s what I told the president.”
The president: he absorbed the fact that they had discussed him. “Am I in trouble?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know that this is happening. This isn’t the only letter; it’s the most judicious of the lot.” She pulled out another letter. “This one basically says the same thing, but it adds, ‘I pity Mr. Rosen, who will realize soon enough that when one has children, one cannot always afford the politically correct position.’ ” She looked up at him and he wondered why she’d felt compelled to read that to him. “And then there’s the one that says, ‘What’s next? Inviting terrorists to speak on campus?’ ” The corners of her mouth rose in a wan attempt at wryness.
“What do you want me to do, April?” he asked.
“What’s done is done,” she said. “I just wanted to alert you to it.”
“I didn’t go to the Boston Globe,” he said, provoked by the long-suffering quality he heard in her voice. “It was a local human interest story, for God’s sake. I never imagined it would get picked up by the wires.” He felt his throat catching with righteous intensity. “I turned down a request to be on a Boston TV news program, did you know that?”
“I didn’t know that,” April said.
“Are these people who wrote in important donors?” he asked.
She paused, then answered, “Not important ones.”
How, he wondered, had he become this person—a needy liability at work, blamed for the bad things that happened to him? He was good at what he did, great at it even, he knew that. But now he felt like one of those single moms who’s chronically late for her shitty, low-paying job because she has to take two buses to get there, and one is always late or packed to the gills with passengers and sailing past her as she frantically tries to wave it down.
“They weren’t even big donors!” he raged to Matt when he got home. “So why did she feel it necessary to call me out? Did it hurt the college in any way? No. Did it affect my ability to do my job in any way? No. Did it have anything whatsoever to do with the fucking alumni magazine? No.”
He was getting into the tight, hyperlogical argumentative mode he got in when he was truly furious. Matt, sitting at his desk, trying to get a little more work done before Michelle brought the kids home, knew that at any moment he might need to duck for cover. “She’s an asshole,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Daniel said. “I didn’t have any control over it getting picked up by the AP wires—it didn’t occur to me for one second that that would happen.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Daniel glared at him. “Don’t just say that because you think it’s what you’re supposed to say. Listen to what I’m saying,” he said.
“I am listening! You didn’t do anything wrong, Dan. I truly believe that, and I truly believe that April was just taking out some shit on you. She prob
ably got called in by the president or something.”
Daniel looked at him, scrutinized him down to his soul, to see if there was any part of him that worried about his competence, because that, truly, would be the last straw. But Matt mostly looked eager to return to his work. Daniel sighed with the petulance of a man who’s tried to project his shame out into the world, but failed.
“Baby, I got to finish this,” Matt said.
AND THEN IT WAS the end of the summer; Val sang Dar Williams: “It’s the end of the summer, when you send your children to the moon.” On the recommendation of a friend of Adam and Val’s, they’d found a home day care for Noam, run by a woman with a three-year-old, who was only going to take in Noam and one other kid. Her name was Colleen, and Matt and Daniel were immediately taken by her sweet, watchful daughter and by Colleen’s gentle energy, and by how, as they sat cross-legged on her living room floor talking to her about Noam’s special circumstances, she listened quietly and thoughtfully, without any big reactions, and stroked his hair softly when he came and climbed in her lap.
But after all this time of being a trouper above and beyond what anyone could have expected with his new parents, Noam found day care to be the last straw. In the first week, when they left him for just an hour or two at a time, he cried inconsolably, almost the entire time. Once or twice, gone rigid in the grip of a meltdown, he actually foamed at the mouth, which, when they talked about it, made them laugh uncomfortably. It was the first time he’d been even remotely difficult. Daniel tried to project a sense of calm when he dropped him off in the mornings, and he couldn’t have asked more from Colleen, who crooned to Noam as he writhed in her arms and never lost her cool or her compassion, but he had to pry Noam’s hands off of his legs; and when he picked him up during his lunch break to bring him home where Matt would take over, Noam fell asleep almost the moment he was in Daniel’s arms, which made Daniel want to die thinking of the effort he must have put out to hang in there alone. He lugged the baby’s deadweight out to the car seat, where his head lolled as Daniel worked the buckles, and as he drove him home his mind buzzed unpleasantly with possible alternatives; he calculated what the family income would be if he quit his job and stayed home with Noam, and had to keep telling himself that Noam would have been in full-time day care in Israel, too.
They had enrolled Gal in Jackson Street School, where almost a quarter of the kids who attended were being raised by queer couples, and which was adored by everyone they talked to for its sense of community. Daniel had brought Gal in to meet her new teacher, Ms. Wheeler, and to see the classroom Gal would be spending the day in. There were five tables around the room, each with a plastic container full of markers and scissors set in the middle, surrounded by chairs with tennis balls stuck onto the bottom of their legs. At one end of the room there was an alcove with a colorful rug on the floor, for morning meeting. Paper chains and cardboard birds and butterflies hung from the ceiling, and the walls were covered with signs, pictures, charts, and a list of playground rules: You can’t say, you can’t play, Go down the slide, Kissing is for your family. Ms. Wheeler bent down to Gal when she spoke to her, and had her say her name several times so she could get the pronunciation just right.
The next day, Matt took her to buy school supplies at Target, where she stared irritably at the ugly Hello Kitty and Dora the Explorer and Pretty Pony lunch boxes. “These ones must be for babies,” she said.
“I don’t think they are. Babies don’t really use lunch boxes,” Matt said tactfully. “But I get your point.”
“Everything is ugly!” she said, kicking at the display and storming away from Matt, who clearly didn’t know where the nice things were, who was going to make her go to her first day of school carrying a Hello Kitty lunch box. He watched her run around the corner, and sighed, bent to pick up the lunch boxes that had clattered onto the floor. The truth was, he didn’t know the first thing about what kind of lunch box first-grade girls brought to school, and neither did she, which he knew must feel awful. He went after her and caught up to her, laid his hand on her shoulder to turn her around and talk it through, but she whirled, her face twisted, and dug her fingernails into his arm.
“Ow!” he yelped as she ran off again.
He followed her; each time he approached her she screamed “No!” and struck out at him. He walked out past the cashiers and sat in a chair at the Pizza Hut near the front doors, breathing hard, figuring that she’d be safe as long as she didn’t leave the store. A few minutes passed, and then ten, and then he felt that he should look for her. But he was afraid to let the front doors out of his sight.
The pizza and popcorn smell was so intense he felt it must have been concocted in a laboratory somewhere. People were emerging from the cashiers, dazed and stately behind baskets full of bags, diaper boxes, lamps, tall boxes set on the diagonal. He ventured into the long aisle on the store side of the cashiers and began to walk it, his eyes raking over each aisle. He walked all the way to the electronics section, whipping around from time to time to make sure Gal wasn’t behind him, then turned and walked back.
He found her standing near the front, gazing into a cooler of sodas and drawing a swirl on the door with her finger. He laid his palm gently on her head. “We’ll find you something nice,” he said. “I won’t make you bring something ugly or babyish to school.”
A tremor went through her. She was dreading starting school, where you couldn’t kiss people or go up the slide. It seemed to her that once she started, it would mean she was never going back to Israel. And yet the sense of waiting was intolerable, too.
She let Matt lead her into the shimmering parking lot and take her home. They hadn’t bought anything, and she hoped, fervently and futilely, that without supplies, there was no way she could go to school.
CHAPTER 12
DANIEL DROVE GAL to school the first few days and walked her into her classroom, but he soon realized that she was becoming anxious waiting for him to go, and he put her on the bus on the third day. The evening after her fourth day, during dinner, Matt and Daniel got a call from Ms. Wheeler. “Do you have a moment?” she asked Daniel.
“Sure,” he said, and took the phone into the other room.
During yesterday’s morning meeting, Ms. Wheeler told him, Gal had told the child she was partnered with that her parents were killed when a terrorist put a bomb in a café, and it blew off their heads. So when they were buried in the ground, she said, they didn’t have heads. Then, apparently, the boy reported that to the class when it was his turn to show how well he’d listened. “It’s not so much that the other children were disconcerted,” Ms. Wheeler said, “although I did get a call from a few parents. I’m calling for Gal, to make sure that she’s all right. And, actually, to find out if she was fabricating. Just so we can know what we’re dealing with.”
“Whew,” Daniel said, his mind blank. “I don’t know what to tell you. I am so in over my head here,” he said, wincing at the inadvertent pun. “Can I talk to Gal and get back to you?”
He hung up, numb, and went back into the kitchen.
“What?” Matt asked.
Later, he mouthed.
Honestly, he didn’t even have it in him to say; he felt dragged down by a lead weight. When, after Gal left the table, Matt finally got him to speak, what came out was sludgy.
“Wow,” Matt said. “Why would Gal say that?”
Daniel shrugged. “To get attention? To aggress the other kids?”
They went up to her bedroom and knocked. “Don’t be mad at her,” Matt said.
“I’m not!” Daniel said, insulted.
She was sitting on her bed with a book, surrounded by all her horses and stuffed animals, which formed a neat ring around her. “Hey, Boo,” Matt said.
“Hey,” she said.
“Gal,” Daniel said, easing himself down onto the corner of the bed. “Your teacher called. She said you told the other kids that your parents were buried without heads?”
Gal blushed furiously.
“Why would you say that?” Daniel asked, sitting on the bed.
“We’re not angry, just curious,” Matt said.
She looked at him, drawn into his curiosity. She could see Daniel’s face in her peripheral vision, and even that glance made her grow hot, made her feel as if there were something wrong with her. She didn’t know how to say why. Kids were sharing, and she had had this sudden powerful impulse to take her place among them. It had come from a glistening place in her, the cold water in a lake’s deepest spot. Now, though, it seemed so wrong she could hardly look at them. “I wanted to share, too,” she said, her voice wavering.
They exchanged glances.
“Gal,” Daniel said gently, “your parents did have heads when they were buried.”
She looked at him, and her expression was so full of shock and yearning and doubt that tears sprang to his eyes. “I’m not just saying that to make you feel better. You just misremembered. They were buried with heads.”
She threw herself facedown onto her pillow. Daniel stroked her back; Matt, who’d been crouching by the bed, sat down heavily on the floor, remembering with a sickening feeling his own avid, terrified scans of their bodies under the sheets they were buried in. She cried something unintelligible into the pillow.
“What?” Daniel asked, lifting her by the shoulders. “I can’t hear you, buba.”
