by Judith Frank
He did have to admit that he’d been jealous; he had never cared about money until he found he wasn’t making very much, at least by New York standards. But he felt that he and Jay had managed that well, through the high-level aggressive irony in which they told each other truths they couldn’t say more straightforwardly. Apparently he was wrong. And Jay had complained to Kendrick, not him. Of everything, that was the thing that sickened him most. He’d always thought of himself as closer in than Kendrick was, even though Kendrick was Jay’s partner. They’d seen lovers come and go, and dished about them all, even to Jay’s dying day, when they’d rolled their eyes together over some antic or other of Kendrick’s. It was unbearable to think that Jay and Kendrick rolled their eyes about him. Unbearable. And he couldn’t even conjure Jay to be furious at him, because most of his memories were of Jay after he was already sick, emaciated, with Kaposi’s lesions on his neck and face.
THE NEXT MORNING WAS gray and cold; Matt, wearing only a sweatshirt over his pajamas, shivered as he yelled at Yo-yo to poop, knowing that if someone was yelling at him to poop, he’d never give them the satisfaction. Inside there was a squall of panic, yelling, and frenzied phone calls, because it turned out that Gal didn’t know if they were supposed to wear their costumes on the bus to school, or bring them and put them on there. “What if I’m the only one on the school bus wearing a costume?” she’d asked, eyes wide in panic.
He hoped it was solved before he went back inside, and it was—at least the kids whose parents they’d reached would be wearing their costumes on the bus. Matt got busy working on her face. He waited with her in front of the house, said “Look, see?” when the bus pulled up, populated by kids in masks, capes, armored suits. “Just be careful not to step on the gauze,” he reminded her for the tenth time. He watched her stomp up the big stairs and felt a pang, knowing he was sending her off to a world with so many land mines, knowing how hard she thought about every step she took, every word she spoke.
Daniel was waiting for him inside. “PHEW!” he bellowed, and they laughed. Matt followed him up the stairs as Daniel went to shave and dress for work.
Gal sat on the bus, adjusting the gauze around her, carefully checking out the other kids’ costumes. Emma was dressed as Hermione! And James as Spider-Man. Ava, who brought tofu for lunch, was a kitty cat in a wool striped bodysuit, whiskers painted on her face. What a baby, Gal thought.
Did they know what she was supposed to be? She dreaded someone coming up to her and loudly asking, “What are you supposed to be?” A bigger boy, a third-grader dressed as a knight, stomped up to her row, examined her through his visor, and sat down without a word.
Ms. Wheeler was waiting for the bus, and when Gal stepped off, she said, “Oh, Gal, what a great, scary ghost you are!” and Gal watched carefully to see if she gave similar compliments to the other kids, which would mean she just said that to everybody. She turned at the doors and looked for Hannah but couldn’t find her. She noticed that she was the only ghost, which first pleased her, because it might mean she was original, and then scared her, because it might mean that everybody else thought it was stupid. She went in and sat down at her desk, pulling at the gauze where it caught in the chair’s joints, listening to the chatter of kids, holding herself in readiness to be addressed.
Ms. Wheeler was clapping her hands to get them to quiet down, and soon her tablemates jostled around. She peered around them, looking for Hannah, but couldn’t find her. Hannah was absent today! She knew because Miles and Jake were both on Hannah’s bus, and they were there. Maybe, she thought, Hannah had missed the bus, and her mom would come rushing in with her soon, a harried expression on her face.
Jake was a lion with whiskers drawn on his cheeks. “Gali pacholly,” he said to her with a look of complacency. “You’re the most ghost.”
She looked at him with an uncertain smile, trying to figure out if he was teasing her in a nice way or a mean way. A minute later she thought that she should have made up some singsong nonsense, too. She mouthed to herself, Jakie pachakie. But by then they were lining up for a parade through the school, and Hannah wasn’t there, and Alexis, who was dressed as a princess, was crowding in front of her. Gal felt herself jostled backward, felt a jolt of irritation. Alexis’s princess gown trailed on the floor; Gal surreptitiously stepped on the hem. And when they began to walk, there was a rip, and then a howl.
“It was an accident!” Gal said.
Ms. Wheeler came hustling over to examine the ripped and dirty hem. “I’m sure Gal didn’t mean to,” she said, crouching in front of Alexis like she did when a kid was upset so she could look her in the face.
She hadn’t meant to. She told herself that she’d meant just to pull it a little. But seeing Alexis glower tearfully in her direction, Gal decided that it didn’t matter, because she was dead anyway, she was invisible, floating through the classroom and through the wall to the hallway, where she drifted, trailing a finger along the bulletin boards and the banks of lockers, looking down on them because they belonged to little kids, while she was so big and so old she was dead.
CHAPTER 15
IN THE DAYS leading up to her grandparents’ arrival, Gal grew increasingly excited. Everywhere they went, she wondered aloud whether they’d like it there. A visit to a sushi restaurant gave loose to a torrent of speculation. “Do you think Sabba and Savta have ever eaten sushi?” she asked. She spoke in Hebrew now that Matt could understand most of what she said, although sometimes, when he missed a word but clung to the narrative for dear life, hoping the context would explain it, and then realized he couldn’t do without the word after all and was forced to stop her, she heaved a mighty sigh and let out a long-suffering Oof! Matt relished the Hebrew he was learning, because it gave him an excuse to be rude. His favorite expression was “Ma pitom!”—which meant a combination of “No way!” and “What are you talking about!”—which he loved to exaggerate by uttering it with the loudest, most obnoxious heap of scorn. Or “Nu?”—uttered like an elbow to the ribs. He loved that, and he loved the difference in pronunciation between chet and chaf, the Sephardic chet being throatier, gaggier, as ayin was to aleph.
“I think Savta will love edamame, don’t you?” Gal said now. “Because she loves little tasty things like that. Sabba, though, not so much. He likes chicken, and he likes cake. I really can’t think of anything else he likes to eat. Oh! Watermelon seeds. I personally”—Matt’s and Daniel’s eyebrows rose: I personally?—“don’t like those as much as sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds, and when I eat them I just eat the whole thing, because they’re so tiny it’s not really worth it to get off the skin.”
She paused, stabbed a piece of maki with a chopstick, stirred it in the cloudy soy sauce, and nibbled a tiny piece off the edge. “But to get back to Savta and Sabba,” she said. “I thought I wouldn’t remember them because I didn’t see them for such a long time, but as you can see, I remember a lot! Hoo! Spicy!” She reached for her glass of water, gulped it down. “I like spicy foods even though I’m Ashkenazi, and Ashkenazim don’t usually like spicy food. Sabba and Savta definitely don’t like spicy food.” She cast Matt a warning look.
“Then we shan’t cook spicy food,” he said, responding as he normally did, in English. “Any other instructions?”
Gal furrowed her brow and pondered. “You have to be nice to them,” she said, her voice lowered. “They had a very hard life.”
They looked at her and nodded. Daniel said, “We’ll be very nice to them and make them feel very welcome, Gal, okay?”
“I really will make them feel as welcome as I can,” Matt later said to Daniel. They were sweeping through the house as they did every night after the kids were asleep, tossing toys into the wooden blanket chest that had become a toy chest, picking up stray socks and jackets, putting the plastic keyboard with the mirror and rattle karaoke microphone, and the toy vacuum cleaner with the popping balls, and the musical phone on wheels with the popping eyes—rotary style, bells ringing as
the rotary jiggered and the handset clunked along, a weird anachronistic appendage—into the corners.
Daniel had dug up his old copy of Survival in Auschwitz, and over the past week had been reading, flinching now and then at the marginal comments he’d written as a college freshman. “Here’s the thing,” he told Matt now, his hands and elbows crammed with toy pieces that had to be distributed to their proper toy. “People who survived didn’t survive by putting down their heads and being invisible. They schemed, they bartered, they used—or often faked—certain skills, like metalworking or sewing, in order to get in with the SS. They walked away from the edges of a camp or a death march. They jumped into the latrine and hid in the shit.
“But there are also a ton of split-second decisions, sudden premonitions—get into this line, not that line! Or arbitrary events like being marched with a group up to the very door of the gas chamber, and a commander comes in yelling that it’s the wrong group. Can you imagine the fucked-up messages you’d take from this? You have control over your own survival, and your survival is totally arbitrary. How are you supposed to go on after that, put one foot in front of the other? No wonder Malka loses her mind.” He paused. “So you can imagine,” he said, “what Israel meant to them.”
“Totally,” Matt said. “Israel was awesome because it nurtured the delusion that they had control over their own survival.”
Daniel laughed. “I wouldn’t have put it that way,” he said, “but—yeah.”
Matt stood and leaned back groaning, hands at his lower back, as Daniel put the plastic cake pieces onto the plastic cake dish, and two crayons into the big plastic bag of crayons, most of whose wrappers Gal had peeled off, in the art supply basket. “I’ll be super nice and welcoming. But Jesus Christ, more parents? I’m dying here, Daniel.”
“It’s written into the custody agreement,” Daniel said. He’d danced a tortuous and delicate dance with them over the course of several phone conversations, in which he invited them to stay with him and Matt and the kids, certain they couldn’t afford two weeks in a hotel, but trying not to mention that fact, knowing that staying with him and Matt was a deeply unpleasant prospect for them. Because he felt that visiting their grandkids shouldn’t be a huge financial drain. But he hadn’t told Matt that; he’d told him that staying with them was written into the custody agreement. It was easier that way; he just didn’t want to have to negotiate everything.
“I know! Stop saying that,” Matt said from the playroom doorway. “It doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”
“I’m very aware of your feelings, Matt. I’m not exactly thrilled either, and it doesn’t help for you to keep bitching about it.”
“I’m not bitching, Daniel. I’m trying to say something serious.” He stared at Daniel till Daniel turned and looked at him. “You know, I never expected to have kids, and that’s turned out to be fine. It’s having three sets of very present parents that’s destroying my soul.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows. “Destroying your soul?”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
Daniel shrugged. “I think the more people around, the less I dwell on things.”
His honesty softened and disarmed Matt, who said, “Honey.”
“But, hey!” Daniel said with a sudden bright idea. “Your Hebrew has gotten really good, so you can talk to them now.”
“What am I supposed to talk to them about?”
They were quiet for a second, then Matt said, his spirits lifted because they seemed not to be fighting anymore, “How ’bout that Holocaust! That sure sucked, didn’t it.”
Daniel cut his eyes at him.
“Oh, is that one of those things I’m not allowed to joke about because I’m not Jewish?”
“Yeah, this might be one of those things,” Daniel said drily. “Ask them about fighting for independence, that makes more sense.”
“Hmm. So, how ’bout that Nakba!” he said, using the Arabic word for “disaster.” “It sure sucked for those Palestinians to be driven from their homes, didn’t it!”
Daniel shot him an irritated look. “Do you have to do that?”
“What?”
“You always take it a step too far.”
“Please! It’s not like you believe they were such cowards they just fled.”
Daniel sighed. He had just one thing left in his hands, a plastic spotted dog that went with the Legos, and he tossed it into the plastic bin that held them. “It’s one thing not to believe that, and another thing to drive the point home, over and over, all the time.”
“You mean like the way gay people have to rub it in the faces of straight people over and over, all the time?”
Daniel groaned. “Oh God. That too! That drives me crazy!”
Matt stared at him. “Remind me why we’re together again?”
“I don’t know!” Daniel said. “Because you keep a lovely home.”
“That’s true,” Matt said complacently.
“And because you deal with the other parents.”
Matt thought about those conversations he had with some of the moms during drop-off or pickup from school, where they shrieked with laughter as though everything that came out of his mouth was a camp classic, and called him darling in affected theatrical voices. “Well, I’m their gay pet,” he said.
He was finding that the why-are-we-together jokes were helpful, that if it was spoken aloud, the idea didn’t frighten him so much. When they went upstairs to look at their closets and figure out how to make space for Malka’s and Yaakov’s clothes, and Daniel emptied his own closet because it was less full than Matt’s, and because he knew how much it pained Matt to have his clothes mashed together in the downstairs hall closet, Matt thought: Ha! Another reason. Then he was depressed that he was thinking of reasons at all.
His new strategy was to stop acting as though he wanted sex, to hold himself proudly aloof. Brent had laughed when he told him that. “Aloof?! That’s not really your thing.”
A SNOWSTORM WAS FORECASTED for that night, but it looked as though Malka and Yaakov’s flight would just squeak in before it arrived. Daniel took Gal down to pick them up in Hartford, while Matt stayed home and put Noam to bed. Gal was pensive in the car, and Daniel peeked back at her periodically in the rearview mirror to see her gazing out the window, where she’d wiped a clear circle into the fog. It was late, past her bedtime, and her eyes were puffy. A cold sleet was falling; the dusk traffic was heavy; the wipers left a streak across the center of Daniel’s vision. The billboards imparted messages from grocery stores, from jewelers and ophthalmologists, of holiday faith and goodwill, the kind of messages that always made him grateful he was Jewish, and therefore not implicated. Gal was relieved to be on vacation; she continued to find school a strain, which pained him. He suspected that as a bilingual kid whose English was still developing, she wasn’t considered one of the smartest kids in the class, which was probably excruciating for a superquick and competitive kid like her. What was happening socially, he didn’t know; he just knew that she didn’t bring friends home, or ask to go over to kids’ houses.
He made the perilous merge into Springfield traffic. An enormous Santa and reindeer in lights lit up the office buildings and parking garage to his left. He glanced back again in the rearview mirror and saw Gal drawing imaginary letters on her pants, spelling something out.
The flight from Newark was half an hour late, and they had to wait in a stretch of airport with two rows of four chairs set against the wall, and no shops or restaurants except for the ancient cafeteria, which was already barred shut. Daniel cursed the fact that he hadn’t brought anything for them to read or do. He took a stray section of the Valley Advocate from the sole empty seat and sat on the floor, facing a monitor, his back against a wall. Gal scuffed her boots along the airport’s carpet and watched the people emerging from the gates. “They’re not on this flight,” he told her. “They haven’t landed yet.”
“Oof!” She wheeled around and scuffed away,
and he watched her take a very long drink from the water fountain. She came and asked if she could ride the escalators, and he said he’d rather she didn’t because he wouldn’t be able to see her when she was downstairs. “You will if you stand at the top,” she said. He sighed and stood, and she rode down and back up, down and back up again, solemnly. The thought of seeing Sabba and Savta made her shiver, as if she were under a billowing silk cloak, dark and dangerous and beautiful, waiting for it to drape over her. She tried to conjure their faces. She remembered the constellation of pocks on Sabba’s cheeks, and the way she could see his thick tongue resting behind his bottom teeth when he laughed. She remembered the soft feel of Savta’s shoulder under a cardigan and her baby powder smell, and then a very clear memory popped out, Savta looking at her with a strange expression, saying, “You are a miracle, you and your brother both. You were not supposed to be born.” That had made Gal uneasy even though she didn’t know what it meant exactly, and she’d somehow known that it wasn’t something she should ask Ema about, because Ema would be mad. She pondered this for a moment, and then her mind moved deftly away from it, concentrating on stepping on and off the escalator at the right moment.
When the flight from Newark finally landed, it seemed to take ages for the passengers to deboard, and by the time people began trickling through the exits, first one or two and then bigger groups, Gal was grinding her fists into her eyes with peevish exhaustion, and Daniel was suddenly finding things wrong with the way she looked—her face white with exhaustion, her hair ratty, a shoelace untied. He actually had a comb in his coat pocket, but he didn’t dare bring it to her hair. He detested himself for his worry about her appearance, but he never forgot that his guardianship of her and Noam was provisional.
Then she squirted out from under his arm and ran toward the elderly couple in enormous coats that was coming through the door. They bent over and caught her in a hug that made the people around them smile, exclaiming, “You came!” and “You’re still awake? You must be so tired!” The duty-free shopping bag looped over Malka’s arm slipped to the floor, along with her purse, and Yaakov stooped to pick them up, then took his beaming granddaughter into an awkward hug, the bags banging on Gal’s back.
