by Judith Frank
She wandered into the living room; there were the blue couch and the leather lounge chair around the pocked octagonal wood coffee table that she had jumped off of thousands of times—first, as a little kid, onto the couch, landing on her knees, and then, later, with a big thud onto the floor, making her parents scold her about disturbing the downstairs neighbors. There, on a shelf under the TV, were the DVDs: The Sound of Music, Uzi Chitman, The Little Mermaid. The TV had a light film of dust over its face. She put her finger to it to draw her name, and was nipped by an electric shock. Her heartbeat sped up, then slowed down. An unnatural quiet saturated the house; she wanted to speak into the silence but couldn’t coax the sound out of her throat.
She walked down the hall to her room, studiously avoiding looking into her parents’ room ahead of her. Her room was dim and stripped: just her bed and Noam’s crib, no sheets or pillowcases, comforters uncovered and folded; no toys. With only its thin mattress, the crib looked like a tiny jail cell. The pictures were up, though, and in the middle of the floor, the rug with the frog. Sunlight bled through the blinds’ closed slats. She sat down on her bed, then curled up around the cold, bare pillow and put her thumb in her mouth. She was chilled. She thought she could fall asleep.
She heard Daniel’s footsteps and felt his shadow come over her. “Your grandparents are on their way,” he said. “When they get here I’ll go to the makolet and get some food into this house.” He stood there for a few more moments; she could hear him breathing and then scratching his cheek stubble. “Okay,” he said.
A minute later there was a knock on the door, light and peppy. Gal sat up, and from Daniel’s delighted greeting she registered that it wasn’t her grandparents. She came out of her bedroom to see who was there, slowed shyly. There stood Leora, wearing glasses!, and holding a plastic-wrapped plate with cookies and candy. And her mother, Gabrielle, in flowing bell-bottoms, a flowered blouse, and silver trinkets at her neck and wrists. “Welcome back!” Gabrielle cried as she and Daniel embraced. She caught sight of Gal over his shoulder. “Kookie, are you shy?” she said, her voice suffused with amused tenderness.
Gal blushed and trotted over, let herself be lifted and squeezed, her face tickled by Gabrielle’s hair, her nostrils by her scent, which was like cucumbers. Gabrielle set her down and beamed at her. “You’ve gotten so big! How many teeth have you lost?” She peered into Gal’s mouth, which was opened for inspection, and said “Psssh!” with an impressed expression. She caught sight of Noam sitting on the living room rug and crouched beside him. “Do you remember me? Oy vey, what happened to your poor cheek?” He reached out his hand and touched her face. “Num-num,” she growled, pretending to gnaw on his hand. “Where’s Matt? What, he didn’t come?”
“Hi,” Gal was saying to Leora, a little shy because Leora looked older and more serious with glasses on.
“Here’s a Purim mana,” Leora said, and thrust it at her with a smile.
IT WAS PURIM, AND the little-girl Queen Esthers in their pretty dresses were out in force. As were the teenagers with their faces minimally, wittily painted, and the men in drag, one of whom waited on Daniel in the coffee shop the next morning when the kids were at their grandparents’—a miniskirt encasing his slender hips, his breasts askew, his Adam’s apple a-bobbing. That evening, Malka and Yaakov took the kids to shul for the reading of the book of Esther, and Daniel spent that time at home unpacking and cleaning up, then pouring himself a scotch and looking all over the house, fruitlessly, for a Bible, so he could reread Esther himself. He finally gave up and turned on his computer to check for wireless coverage, not very hopeful, although as the chord and the white apple greeted him, he marveled at how the sight of his own computer booting up could help him feel just a little more at home. And the wireless was working! Either his father had continued paying for Internet, or Netvision had forgotten to turn it off.
He read, sipping scotch. Vashti, the first queen, a feminist hero, who refused to dance for the king and his court. Then Esther, and her shadowy, ambiguous uncle/counselor/friend Mordechai. And at the end of the story, massacre. That surprised him, even though he’d read it before. Skimming along a chain of Google pages, he found a commentary from Elie Wiesel:
I confess I never did understand this part of the Book of Esther. After all, the catastrophe was averted; the massacre did not take place. Why then this call for bloodshed? Five hundred men were slain in Shushan in one day and three hundred the next. Seventy-five thousand persons lost their lives elsewhere. . . . Is this why we are told to get drunk and forget? To erase the boundaries between reality and fantasy—and think that it all happened only in a dream?
Daniel wondered how much of the story Gal was understanding, and he wished Matt was there to appreciate and deplore with him the way things hadn’t changed in this latest version of Jewish nationhood, where disproportionate revenge remained such a central tactic. The scotch was beginning to warm him and soften the edges of his vigilant consciousness, and for a minute or two he allowed himself to miss Matt, to feel how much he picked up the slack, both parentally and emotionally. Who else would understand by a mere glance how Daniel felt reading the book of Esther? Without Matt to carry the indignation over the Occupation for the two of them, he now had to carry it himself. Along with ironic, queeny commentary about all aesthetic affronts. It was exhausting. Sure, Matt might snort a little too vociferously, jump to judgment a little too quickly and without sufficient nuance, but if he was being fair about it, shouldn’t Daniel acknowledge that you really couldn’t ask anybody always to have the most exact and perfect moral touch?
That thought came and then receded, too complex to hold on to in the vague glow of his buzz, but it left him feeling lonely. His eyes skirted the kitchen where he sat, the essential foods—coffee, crackers, cereal, two cans of cracked Syrian olives, two ripening avocados, the crunchy oily treat called “eastern cookies” that Gal loved, a few bars of Elite chocolate—that he’d lined neatly on the counter instead of actually putting into a cabinet, and the apartment’s cold provisional half-emptiness made him feel provisional and half-empty, too. He thought he might write Derrick an email, and got up to pour himself another scotch beforehand. He sat and logged on, and found emails from work, from the producer of Joel’s old show asking when the memorial would be and inviting him to the studio to look at the new editing room they’d dedicated to Joel’s memory, and from an old friend of Daniel’s from Oberlin who had married an Israeli man and moved to Jerusalem. Debra Frankel had been a smart, spiky presence around the edges of his social circle at college, and he had seen her at his ten-year reunion, where they’d ended up in line together at a sandwich shop, joking about her impression of him back then as an aloof aesthete and his impression of her as someone who might eat him alive. It turned out that since the Peace Train bombing she’d been keeping track of him, which kind of touched him but also made him think, You couldn’t send a card? He wrote to Joel’s producer to set up a time, and left Debra’s email for another day when he was less tired and vulnerable, more sober.
He heard the moan of the elevator door and a bustle and a knock. When he opened the door Gal burst in, excitedly spinning her noisemaker, which made a hideous noise indeed. “I saw a person throwing up on the sidewalk, and Savta said he was drunk!” she said. “And every time they said the word Haman, everybody made all this noise!”
“Awesome,” Daniel said mildly, smiling at Malka, who’d come in with her as Yaakov wrestled the stroller, with a sleeping Noam, out of the elevator.
Gal pirouetted on the point of her sneaker, and Malka shushed her as Daniel stooped to unbuckle Noam’s straps, picked him up and put him on his shoulder, and took him to his crib, where he dumped him as gracefully as he could, then leaned over to take off his shoes with stealthy fingers. Malka came in and looked over his shoulder. “Did you change him?” Daniel whispered.
“Yes, right before we put him in the car.” She kissed her fingers and touched them softly to the baby’s
cheek.
They went back into the hallway, where Yaakov was standing with his hands in his pocket, watching Gal twirl. “Because that’s what happens when you drink too much,” she was saying. “Does beer make you throw up? Does wine make you throw up? Does . . . whiskey make you throw up?”
“Everything can make you throw up if you drink too much of it,” Yaakov said.
“Even Coke?”
“No, no, just alcohol.”
“Oh.” She stopped moving and staggered over to her grandfather, collapsed against his legs. “Dizzy!” She laughed.
The three adults stood with indulgent smiles in the austere hallway, patches and holes here and there in the white walls where they’d taken down pictures to bring to Daniel’s house or to the grandparents’. They were more relaxed on their home turf, Daniel thought, and Matt’s absence probably helped as well.
Gal was still chirping when he helped her get into pajamas and brush her teeth. The women had had to sit separately from the men, she told him, but when you thought about it, on Purim, how would you even know? “Maybe a woman would dress up as a man so she could sit in the front of the bet knesset!” she said with a spray of toothpaste. “Maybe there was a man sitting back there with us, and we just couldn’t tell! Wouldn’t that be funny, Dani?”
“Funny,” he said. He hadn’t seen her so cheerful and relaxed in ages.
She spat into the sink and studied the string of saliva and toothpaste with interest, then swiped her mouth hard with her pajama sleeve. What a little savage, Daniel thought. He could just see her whirling that noisemaker in shul, eyes bright and teeth bared.
DURING THE DAYS WHEN the children were at their grandparents’, Daniel spent the mornings working from home, corresponding with his staff via email. In the afternoons he took long walks, out from their neighborhood, past the playgrounds and the newer, smoother-hewn buildings of Yefe Nof. The almond trees were just starting to blossom, and from hillside lots he caught the scents of sage and rosemary just as they vanished. Above him, from apartment balconies, came the sounds of swishing mops and the thuds of women beating carpets. In the Jerusalem Forest, the paths were knobby and spongy from pine needles, and the treetops shifted against the swift-moving clouds.
He took Gal and Noam to dinner at Gabrielle and Moti’s house, staying past the kids’ bedtimes as they played Hearts, the adults sipping a sweet aperitif, Leora and Gal solemn with importance to be playing with the grown-ups, growling and slapping Moti away as he tried to coach them. He went to the Israel Today studio, where editors and soundpeople racing from one room to another with headphones on and clipboards in their hands lurched to a stop, clutched their hearts, and grasped his hand, asked him about the children before looking at their watches with alarm and rushing off. Rotem, Joel’s old producer, ushered him into the new editing room with its state-of-the-art console, its plush, ergonomic chairs, and a small gleaming plaque on the door, dedicating it to Joel’s memory. He was introduced to Joel’s replacement, Mark Weitzman, a broad-faced, telegenic fellow who’d been a reporter for the Hartford Courant before making aliyah, who gripped Daniel’s shoulder and said rather theatrically that he could only hope to live up to Joel’s example as a journalist and as a human being.
He contacted Debra Frankel and she invited him over to her Gilo apartment for coffee. Her study was lined with titles in English, Hebrew, and Arabic; policy papers were heaped and scattered chaotically across her desk. She gave him thick Turkish coffee with cardamom whose grounds he tongued off his palate, and they were interrupted several times by excitable, brown-skinned sons wearing soccer clothes. Debra worked for a nonprofit that worked on fair labor rights for the large migrant population that had come to Israel in recent years. When Daniel told her he worked as the editor of a college alumni magazine, she said, “Huh!” And then: “You know, I always imagined you’d do something bigger than that. You were such a good writer. Remember Rags and Bones?” That had been the name of a campus literary magazine, not the official one, but the more edgy one he and some of his friends had launched. “I always went straight to your stories first. Remember the one where the grandfather is buying a boy his first expensive violin?” Debra was smiling and musing, coffee glass suspended in her hand. “They’re all on display in cases in this shop where you have to have an appointment to get in, and the boy is trying them out. Your description of the differences in tone quality was so amazing. I’ve never looked at violins the same way since. And I remember thinking I’d kill to be able to write like that.”
“Thanks,” Daniel said, remembering that story, remembering how in the fiction-writing workshop he was taking, the professor had loved that part too, but pressed him to create a stronger conflict. She’d told the class that being conflict-averse might be a workable life strategy for some of them, but that it would not help them in fiction; and he’d sat there for the rest of the class wondering if he was conflict-averse. He was shocked and flattered that Debra remembered the story all these years later. And at the same time, a little irritated: Who was she to comment on his life?
As he was leaving, Debra said, “If you wanted to come work for us, I could probably make that happen.” The editor of their newsletter and promotional materials had just left for another job. He thought about that on the bus ride home as he wedged past women with babushkas and men with briefcases and soldiers with traces of acne, whose weapons were propped against their thighs, and dropped hard into a seat in the back. When a pregnant woman approached, the handles of her straining shopping bag digging into white, puffy fingers, he stood to offer her his seat and leaned against a pole. He didn’t know whether the job offer was serious, or just impulsive: he thought their Oberlin connection might have made Debra assume she knew more about him than she really did, and want to help him more than she was actually able. Surely there were people who worked in the nonprofit world who were more qualified than he was.
One chilly afternoon, when the sun started to glint through after a rainy morning, he walked into town to see the Peace Train Café. He’d been putting it off for days, but had decided by this point that he’d regret not going more than he dreaded going. It was rebuilt now, a slender Ethiopian guard with a rifle and a yellow vest at the door, the memorial plaque screwed into the stone facing. He stepped around a man in a white oxford, tzitziot dangling from his pants and a cell phone plastered to his ear, and suddenly remembered a moment with Joel from his last visit before Joel died: They’d gone to the hospital to visit a friend of Joel’s who’d just had a baby, and because it was after hours—Joel had had to work late—they exited through the emergency room. There they saw a man, bloodied, clothes shredded, being rushed into the ER on a stretcher by the EMTs, one trotting alongside him holding his wrapped arm and an IV bag, another leaning over him pumping his chest, the doors sliding open with pneumatic alacrity, the ambulance light whirling in the dark. And the patient was talking on his cell phone. They’d marched out into the parking lot, turned toward each other, and died laughing.
He approached the plaque, found Joel’s and Ilana’s names on the white, dappled marble, ran his fingers over the elegant etched Hebrew letters. He didn’t go inside; he didn’t want to see the reconstructed, bustling space, the shiny state-of-the-art espresso machines. Instead he walked over to the café he’d gone to with Matt the time they visited the bombed-out site a year ago. He ordered a cappuccino and took it outside onto the flagstone terrace, wiped the wetness off an iron chair with a fistful of napkins, and sat in that viny, cultivated space, chilly and a little weepy and thinking the whole time that he ought to go sit inside. The coffee’s warm foam brushed his lips, and he thought about how they’d sat at that table over there, Matt gazing moistly into his face. He remembered the clench in his stomach and shoulders, the cramp in his very soul. For some reason, it was so much easier to feel now. This whole crappy, horrific year, his insides had felt like a carnival, all garish lights and noise, whirling, grotesquery, nausea. Now the carnival had left town,
the sawdust had been wetted and raked, and the wind blew clean and sharp through the abandoned stables and arenas.
It made him wonder whether he should just take the kids and move to Israel. He was surprised at how much he felt okay about being here, around Joel’s friends and even Ilana’s parents. The sheer beauty of the city was a source of constant pleasure. Matt had been the major impediment before now. A flood of memory came rushing at him—the two of them sitting on the floor, Matt convincing him to go back to the States to honor Ilana’s wishes. The rawness of his eyes and nostrils from crying, the chasm that had broken open in him at the prospect of leaving Joel behind, Matt’s panicky face and his fingers brushing Daniel’s cheek, their hands clutching. It had seemed at that moment that he was being forced to choose between Joel and Matt.
He noticed that the sweat had dried on his back, and that he was shivering. He drained his coffee and brought the cup inside, and when he went back onto the street, he felt too tired to walk home and hailed a cab instead.
That night, the kids sleeping and the house quiet, he lay in bed, warm under the covers, his nose cold from the night air coming through the cracked-open window. He heard a car door shut and an engine sputter to life. The idea of moving the kids back to Israel was taking root in him. He thought of Noam, drowsy on Gabrielle’s shoulder as she absently brushed her cheek against his hair. He was picking up some Hebrew—sheli, mine; od pa’am, again. Was it Daniel’s imagination that he was learning it more quickly than English? And he thought about Gal hopping up and down with plans and ideas like a regular kid. Why couldn’t he just stay here, where they clearly thrived, and where he could magically make an elderly couple happy? If four people—four devastated people—could be made happier by his moving to Israel, wasn’t it his obligation to do so?
