by Judith Frank
About ten minutes later Daniel came up and sat next to her on the bed. Her face was turned away; she was curled up in a ball; his weight plunging down the mattress and the intolerable sound of his breathing made her feel like she was about to scream. Go away go away go away, she mouthed to herself. Go away.
“Ready to head out?” he said.
She staggered to her feet, avoiding his gaze. Downstairs, she put on her coat and hugged her backpack to her, and climbed into the car without a word. He dropped off Noam, and she waited in the cold silence of the car as he spoke with Colleen. Then he got back in and started the engine and she felt the heat blast back on. At school, she got out of the car and walked by herself to class before he could follow.
Daniel watched her march away from him, wanting to rush and tighten her backpack straps, but turned toward the principal’s office instead, to let her know about Gal’s changed circumstances.
“Oh, poor Gal,” she said, shoulders sagging. “Not again.”
“Nobody died,” he said.
“Of course not,” she hastened to say.
His friends came over to see if they were okay, flooding in again as they had when they’d first come back to the States after Joel’s death. It was hard not to feel the parallel, to feel that their solicitude made things a little worse. Hard too to explain that he was feeling kind of good, even a little exhilarated by the clean anger hurtling through him. His days were utterly grueling, a chaos of work, child care, endless cooking and chores; the kids were brittle and God only knew how he was going to keep their financial ship afloat without Matt’s income. But when he fell into bed at night, he occupied his light, living body restfully, feeling the tiredness tingle in his arms, his thighs and genitals. His thoughts would drift to Matt, and as rage mounted in him he breathed through it and calmed his own heartbeat.
“Tell me you didn’t bring a casserole,” he said when he opened the door to Adam and Val; Val swept him into her arms and rocked him back and forth, smashing his cheek against her earring. “Geez, Val,” he said, and she released him, took him by the arms and held him at arm’s length to look deeply into his sheepish face.
Gal came downstairs and accosted them in the front hall. “Dani decided he didn’t want to be partners with Matt anymore,” she announced to Adam. “Are you on Dani’s side or Matt’s side?”
“Nobody’s side,” Adam said, taking Lev’s and Val’s coats and reaching into the closet for a hanger. “I’m just sad.”
They went into the kitchen while Lev scuttled into the playroom, where the toys were always more scintillating than his own. Gal barged into the kitchen just as they’d huddled around the table to talk, complaining that Lev was touching one of her bead necklaces. “Lev!” Val called, while Daniel said, “Try to be patient, Gal, he’s littler than you are.” Gal tried to palm off on him a plastic duck instead, but its lameness deeply offended him; his whole idiom and belief system were about bigger/smaller, older/younger, and he cried “That’s for babies!” as his mother took him by the shoulders and gave him a little push out of the kitchen. There was a flurry of complaint from the playroom, then the sound of escalating objections. Daniel groaned, and he and Adam rose.
“Guys!” he said. In the playroom, a vaudeville “Yankee Doodle” was tootling merrily from Noam’s plastic scooting car; he was sitting on it, gripping the handles hard, as Lev tried to pull him off, while Gal was blithely swinging a collapsible rod from her toy tent, pretending to be a ninja. Daniel caught her wrist and said, “Careful!”
She swung it around again, once, experimentally, her eyes on his face. “Seriously?” he said. “I will take that away from you and put you in your room so fast you won’t even know what’s happening.” Adam was prying Lev’s fingers off the car’s handles. “Lev, you gotta take it easy, honey,” he said. “You want to draw?” He went to the bookcase where the art supplies were stacked, Lev flailing on his hip, found crayons and construction paper.
“Look,” Daniel said, “come sit at our new table”—pointing to the bright blue kid-sized plastic table with four chairs—and settled him on one of the chairs.
“I want the green chair,” Lev said stoutly, hopping to his feet.
“No problem,” said Adam.
“I’ma make a card for Mommy.”
“Good thinking,” Daniel said.
“Why am I always stuck playing with babies?” Gal was saying as they returned to the kitchen.
Val was eating a banana and leafing through a New Yorker, and the coffeepot was gurgling. Daniel sat down and she laid her hand on his wrist. He looked down at the silver rings on her fingers. She had been leaving I-just-wanted-to-see-how-you’re-doing messages on his machine for days, and her desire to be there for him and the kids exhausted him. Now she and Adam clearly wanted to feel him out on the juicy details. He’d been avoiding them because he didn’t feel he could tell anyone why he and Matt had broken up. Especially straight people, for whom the information would just confirm their stereotypes of gay men, even if they tried not to let it. He looked into their intense empathic eyes and said, “I really can’t go into it.”
“Whatever it was,” Val ventured, “it must have been something pretty terrible. Because—well, because you’ve been through so much together, and you’ve done it so beautifully, and seemed so rock-solid as a couple.”
Adam was mouthing the patch of beard below his lip and watching Daniel carefully, as if he might at any moment have to apologize for Val.
“Really, Val, I can’t,” Daniel said. Keeping Matt’s secret, being put in that position, was compounding his outrage, he found, and his sense of clarity about having done the right thing. “You know what, though? I’m doing okay. Surprisingly okay.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever known someone as strong as you,” Val said, and he didn’t tell her that it wasn’t really a question of strength.
There was a cry from the playroom, a shocked, breath-snatching cry—Noam. They leapt to their feet. He was sitting on the rug, his eyes wide and shocked and his mouth agape in the silence before a scream, his hand clapped to his face. Gal had poked him in the face with the tent pole, and put a gash under his eye. The scream came. Daniel lifted him and sat him on his knees on the couch while Adam ran for the first-aid kit in the upstairs linen closet. “Jesus, Gal,” Daniel fumed. “I told you again and again. Do you know how close you came to poking him in the eye?”
Adam returned with sterile pads, and Daniel ripped one open and pressed it gently to Noam’s cheek. The gash was about an inch long, and beading with blood; the skin underneath was starting to turn bruise colors. Gal stood on the stand of the floor lamp with her legs and arms twisted around the pole, frozen, watching.
Lev had run into the kitchen and come back with an ice pack, which he was trying to administer to Noam’s face. “Lev, honey, step back a little; you’re crowding them,” Adam said, reaching out and taking him by the elbows.
“But he needs ice!” Lev cried. “And Band-Aids!”
“It’s really nice and helpful for you to bring it, honey,” Adam said as his son struggled in his grasp. Lev started to cry too, big half-fake sobs. “I know, buddy,” Adam said. “It’s hard to see your friend hurt.”
The extra drama was not helping, Daniel thought. He peeled back the gauze to see if it was still bleeding, and when Noam saw his blood on it, he broke into fresh tears. “You could have blinded him, Gal!” Daniel said. “And you would have felt bad about that your whole life!”
“No I wouldn’t,” she shouted. “I wouldn’t care at all!”
“Gal, sweetie, come here,” Val said from the futon couch, patting her lap.
“Why don’t you just mind your own business?” Gal said. “You’re not in our family, we didn’t ask you to come over.”
“Gal!” Daniel barked while Val looked at her, hurt, and said, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Because I think of you as family.”
“It’s a stupid defective family,” Gal said.
“Gal,” Daniel said, his voice deadly. “Get into your room now. Damn,” he said, “this thing is still bleeding. I’m going to take him to the emergency room.”
Gal was on her way up the stairs; she turned and looked down. “We’ll stay here with her,” Val said, while Adam stroked her arm and said, “You know she’s crazy about you.”
Up in her room, the knowledge that she’d done something very bad was clawing at Gal, making her quiver between abjection and defiance. She threw herself on the bed, electric with anticipation for Daniel to come storming in, trying to summon him with the force of her hatred. Oh, he was mad! The thought brought a painful, agitated laugh. She imagined his grip on her arm, the glare of fully awakened eyes into hers.
She heard stomping downstairs, but nothing approaching her bedroom door. She stood and took down one of her two favorite horses, Cochav, whom she sometimes called by his English name, Star. She sat on the edge of her bed and pressed his plastic hoof into her arm, where it made a small, precise indented square. She carefully fit the hoof inside the square and pressed again, till the plastic mashed her skin up against the bone. Then she made another, till there was a satisfying pattern of squares on her throbbing forearm. She’d known even as she said those words to Val that she was being stupid, a baby nobody would listen to.
She put her arm to her nose and smelled but it didn’t smell like anything. She stood and crept into her bed, pulling everything around her: Star, her stuffed dog, her comforter. Her arm still ached from the press of plastic.
Lying there with the covers pulled over her head, her face warmed and moistened by her own breath, she felt something work away at the edges of her memory. She twitched with irritation, as if she were being poked by an obnoxious kid. When the memory broke through, her breath stilled. She was shoulder to shoulder with Abba, kneeling on a chair at the kitchen table, the big calendar before them. Ema was in France, staying for a week with her friend whose mother had died. Gal was drawing a big X with a red marker into the square of the day that had passed, as she did each evening Ema was gone. The memory stunned her. The triumph of drawing that last X, and then Ema picking her up from school the next day, how her shirt smelled and the feel of her hair falling around Gal’s face. Waking up the next morning and the sweet jolt of remembering that Ema was there. Don’t go away again! she’d said, and Ema said, I won’t. But it was just one morning. When she woke up the next day, Ema was gone, and Abba too, and everyone was crying. Did Ema go back to France? she’d asked.
The memory slopped against her; she had to make a conscious effort to draw air into her lungs. The one night when they were all together after Ema returned, she’d melted down and ruined their Shabbat dinner. She didn’t know why—she remembered the sensation of even then not knowing why, just tearing loose in the wind and there being nothing to catch onto as she shuddered and howled, knowing she was ruining everything.
Now, a metallic taste leached into her mouth; she put her finger inside her lip and when she removed it, it had blood on it. When Sabba told her, he’d tried to pull her into his arms, but she’d stiffened, bringing up her elbows to steel herself against the ugly wailing sounds he was making, the explosion of wetness and slime on her face and neck. She’d sensed that she needed to remain very still and dignified in the face of this degrading display of agony. Something of that old sense unfurled over her now. She imagined herself on horseback, sitting tall and stern next to her teacher Shannon, who wanted to go riding with her. She imagined Daniel watching her as she did something amazing. She heard the front door open and then shut hard, then the sound of the car’s reluctant winter sputter before it broke into a roar.
AT THE EMERGENCY ROOM, sitting in an orange plastic chair with Noam on his lap, the irony wasn’t lost on Daniel. He’d kicked Matt out for being impervious to the family’s need for safety, and here he was in the ER for the first time since they’d brought the kids home. He felt stupid and careless for not having taken the pole away from Gal, because she was fragile, and he was feeling bad for her. He just hoped Matt never found out about it. And what would the social worker say? Maybe, he thought, he should have kicked out Gal instead of Matt. If she just mourned like other people—crying, maybe, or moping—it’d be easier to help her. But she was so mean and provocative and obnoxious. A headache pressed at his temples. Telling Val to mind her own business: He knew that if Matt were here, they’d be admiring the perfection of that insult even as they were deploring it.
The nurse called in the only other people in the waiting room, a mom with frazzled hair and a large teenager with patches of acne on his face and neck, who was pressing his elbow and upper arm against his chest and whimpering. It took forty-five minutes for Daniel’s name to be called, and after a nurse finally examined Noam’s cheek and eye, she said, “That’ll need a stitch or two. We’ll need to call down a plastic surgeon, because it’s right there on the face.” She put a Band-Aid on it and escorted them into an interior waiting room, and Daniel sat down with a sigh. He took out his cell phone and called Adam on speed dial, and Adam said they’d made quesadillas with the leftover chicken and cheese in the fridge, and were just sitting down to eat lunch. Gal was fine, he reported; she’d settled down and come out of her room. “I think she feels really bad about what she did,” Adam said.
“Good,” said Daniel.
They waited for another hour before the plastic surgeon showed up. By then Daniel had bought them a lunch of Pop-Tarts, pretzels, and lemonade from the vending machine, and relented and set Noam down on the floor, where he shredded a magazine and the arts section of the free local paper. He had to accost another nurse when the blood started seeping through Noam’s Band-Aid. When they were called back in, the plastic surgeon said it was almost too late to put in stitches, and Daniel refrained from complaining that they’d been waiting forever for him, because there was no reason to anger someone working on his baby’s face. The surgeon put some numbing gel on Noam’s face. After a few minutes, he had Daniel hold Noam on his lap with his arms wrapped around his body, pinning down his arms, and washed it, then gave him a little shot in the cheek that made Noam cry out and Daniel blanch. As he leaned to put in the stitches, Daniel could smell his breath and the latex gloves on his hands, and he turned away, leaning his cheek on Noam’s head.
When he was done, and Daniel, wild with his own relief, was nuzzling Noam and praising him for being a brave boy, the surgeon said, “There. Nobody will ever notice.” He snapped off his gloves and tossed them into the garbage, ruffled Noam’s hair. “You’re good as new, Noah,” he said. “Stay away from your sister.”
“Noam,” Daniel said.
“It will leave a small scar, but it should become imperceptible over time.”
They waited again, this time for the nurse to return with a prescription for antibiotics. Another nurse came and leaned against the doorway, chirped, “Hi, honey! I heard you were super brave!”
Noam was crawling toward the wheels on a stretcher; he turned and sat down, cast her a friendly look. “Not walking yet, huh,” she said in a loud, falsely reassuring voice, like a colonial administrator. “How old is he?”
“Twenty-two months,” Daniel said.
She looked surprised. “Well, you wait till you’re good and ready,” she said to Noam, which sounded in Daniel’s ears like saying that Noam was a spoiled brat just killing time.
“He’s been through a lot,” Daniel said, staunch in the face of this irritant but newly anxious about the baby. “He lost both his parents in a terrorist attack.”
“Goodness!” she said, flinching in a way that was highly gratifying to him. “I’m so sorry to hear that!”
ON SUNDAY, YOSSI CAME over for Gal’s and Matt’s lesson, unaware that Matt wasn’t there anymore. “Oh shoot!” Daniel said, staring at him as he stood on the stoop.
“Dani and Matt broke apart!” Gal announced. “And Dani won’t let Matt live here anymore!” Yossi looked at Daniel in surprise, and then, as Daniel opene
d his mouth to explain, he cut him off with pieties about his own impartiality, as if fearing to be drawn into a catfight. “It’s none of my business,” he said, waving his hand to stop Daniel’s imaginary insistence on spilling all the juicy and inappropriate details. “The main thing is taking good care of the kids, helping them feel safe.”
Daniel sighed, half wishing at that moment that Matt was there to walk into the idiotic slight and throw open the blinds by saying something like “Geez, Yossi, it’s not like I’m about to start talking about the mechanics of sodomy.” He was worried about paying for these lessons now, feeling strapped without Matt’s salary, but he knew he couldn’t cut Yossi’s regular lessons out of Gal’s routine. One day he mentioned to Yossi that he was thinking that he might have to cancel the cleaning lady, and the next time Yossi came, he proposed a barter arrangement: He’d give Gal an hour lesson around noon on Sundays, and then he’d go out for a few hours to paint, leaving Rafi there to play with Gal.
For her part, Gal relished getting Yossi to herself. She sat next to this man whose language felt like home—sure, Daniel could speak Hebrew and even Matt could speak a little, but they didn’t sound Israeli—feeling her sleeves brush against his, smelling his special Yossi-smell, soapy with an undercurrent of body smell. At his house, where they met once in a while, they had little glasses for coffee, an electric kumkum, clementines in a bowl and chocolate spread in the refrigerator, and Yossi’s wife, Anat, and the two older boys came in and out in a burst of Hebrew and a flurry of signing hands. Yossi pressed Gal’s small hand in his large, warm one to encourage the curve or veer of a Hebrew letter, or encouraged her to watch his own hand as he drew, and sometimes she’d reach out with her finger and touch the little sprigs of hair coming from his knuckles and chuckle, “Hairy!” He asked her what happened this week, and she was supposed to tell him in Hebrew. So she told him about a classmate whose mother had died—“of cancer,” she whispered. “Everyone feels terrible for her,” she said. Where she faltered, he wrote down a word, until each week he had five new Hebrew words for her to learn. He called her a yalda chachama, a smart girl, held out his palm so she could give him five, beseeching her for a gentle one, and then howled with mock betrayal when she gave it a hard smack instead.
