What to Do About the Solomons

by Bethany Ball

  In the bathroom, the door shut and locked behind her, Carolyn opens the medicine cabinet. Inside is an old bottle of Secret. She removes the cap and inhales. It brings back her mother, dead now two years. There is a prescription bottle of antibiotics, a bottle of aspirin. An ancient box of Alka-Seltzer.

  Carolyn shuts the medicine cabinet and flushes the toilet. She washes her hands and brings a limp, gray bar of soap to her armpits. She swipes the bar under her arms.

  Shall I watch the children when they come home? Grace asks her.

  No, Carolyn says. Thank you.

  They sit together until her tea is finished. Carolyn uses Grace’s phone to call Marc’s cell phone. Every call goes straight to voice mail. She knows no one else’s number by heart. She thinks about calling her father. She thinks about calling Marc’s father, Yakov, and decides against it. Marc will be furious if she tells his father.

  Carolyn stands up. Thank you, she says, and heads toward the front door. As Carolyn turns to say goodbye, Grace takes hold of both Carolyn’s hands, opening her palms. Grace’s hands are soft and warm.

  What is not in your hands, she says, you don’t have. She unlocks the dead bolt and the chain. Everything will be all right, she says. Remember. There are no bad people in the world. Only dark and stupid forces. You’re a good person, Carolyn Solomon.

  Carolyn wanders through the rooms of her house. For the most part everything is unharmed. Only the clothing in the closets is askew. Boxes of outgrown clothing have been upended. Toys strewn through the children’s rooms. DVDs scattered.

  They’d searched in the old iron baseboard heaters, tearing off the pieces on the ends and reaching in. Their fingers inched toward the cash, guns, and drugs they knew they’d find. If only they searched hard enough. In fact, in the end, none of it will matter and they could care less what was really found, or even if the allegations they’d made were true. What they wanted they had already: the contents of the bank accounts, some jewelry. A Rolex. The business accounts. Guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter. They had their money.

  They’d found condoms and scattered them across the floor of Marc’s office.

  While the police were there, nothing worse could happen to her. There was something paternal in their bullying tone. Now she sat with thoughts that were hard. She would have to sit alone until the children came.

  They would come home on the bus and expect dinner to be made and require help with their homework. Carolyn would listen with cheerful impartiality to all their stories of friends and teachers, malevolent, benevolent, and otherwise. By bedtime they would wonder where their father had gone. He was always home by bedtime.

  Chapter 4

  Imaleh

  Joseph climbs the crumbling cement stairs to the apartment building on Hatsfira Street in the Moshava Germanit, the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem. His bag is heavy with homework, his soccer cleats and ball. He is not supposed to be staying there. He is supposed to be at his father’s house, only his father is not really his father. Or so his older cousins tell him. He has spent the afternoon with his best friend, Mattan, but Mattan’s mother is serving dinner now and he probably should be running along home.

  Joseph unlocks the door and opens it. The smell of his mother fills his head. She left that morning to go to America on vacation. Imaleh, he says, to the silent rooms. Joseph shuts the door and locks it fast.

  He is not afraid.

  Joseph switches on the desktop in the kitchen. He watches YouTube videos, checks email, and launches Minecraft. In Minecraft, Joseph builds a pyramid and then destroys it. Zombies come and eat his pigs. Mattan’s avatar pops up on the screen. Together they build a farm. His crops are destroyed. It rains. They build a shelter and a bed. In the world of Minecraft, night comes and eight minutes later the sun rises. He tries survival mode but it’s too difficult to survive for more than a few minutes. Zombies kill him. He drowns in lava. A pig mauls him. He prefers creator mode. In creator mode anything can happen. You can teleport. You can fly. Mattan signs out. It should be bath time for him. But Joseph can do whatever he likes.

  Joseph shuts down Minecraft and sends his ima an email and also one to his cousin Izaac in America. In the emails he asks them not to forget to send the Lego. Please, he writes in English, don’t forget. Tell my mom.

  Joseph is eleven years old. Almost twelve.

  There is a Minecraft Lego he wants very much.

  He finishes his homework. He works especially hard in English.

  Joseph would like to go to the US and live in his cousin Izaac’s house. Izaac has a real, almost-American father, Dod Marc, who lives in the same house with them. Marc plays basketball with Izaac, swims with Izaac, goes on bike rides with Izaac. Izaac also has two proper younger brothers. Not half-siblings. Real siblings. Their house in America is enormous. It is right on the beach. A mansion somewhere close to Hollywood. They have two dogs. Dod Marc drives a tiny sports car to his office in downtown Los Angeles. His cousins have never ridden on a bus or train in their whole lives. Once when Dod Marc came to Israel, Izaac and Joseph watched him play cadoor regel with all the other dads. In America, they call this soccer. Marc had once been the best cadoor regel player in all of the Jordan Valley. If he had not been in Shayetet 13 he would have joined Beitar Jerusalem or maybe even Manchester United. Everyone in the kibbutz says Joseph looks and acts just like his Dod Marc. He looks more like Marc than Izaac does. He has the same ball-handling skills. Now, Marc is slow and out of shape. His belly is a little heavy. The older men had stood around and laughed at Marc when he played in the kibbutz. He has too much money in his pockets, the men said. It weighs him down, all those American dollars.

  Math is hard. Joseph knows if he fudges the numbers, his teacher will never check closely. He writes the answers in faintly with pencil so that he may erase them and fill in the correct answers when the class goes over their work. He has read all of Harry Potter. His mother even had a small part in the fourth Harry Potter movie.

  Joseph is a good student. He reads constantly. I was not a good student, his mother says. I always hated to read. He must be like his father, she says.

  Joseph is not sure which father she means. Is it Abba who lives in the Old City with his new wife and baby? Or the fat man on the Internet his cousins show him when they want to tease.

  Which is it, Ima?

  His best friend, Mattan, says, Don’t be an idiot. Your father is your father. Don’t listen to your cousins’ stupid stories. You look just like Lior, Mattan says. Lior is his cousin on his father’s side and he goes to school with Mattan and Joseph.

  This is true, Joseph agrees. In some photos he looks just like Lior.

  By eight p.m. he is starving. He calls the Italian restaurant down the street and orders pasta Bolognese and fries and a can of Coca-Cola. He uses his Saba Yakov’s credit card to pay. It is to be used only in emergencies but this is an emergency as Joseph is very hungry. There is no one to cook for him. His father’s house is not an option. He doesn’t really seem to want Joseph around and it’s only for a week and Joseph figures he can go it alone. He is very independent.

  But he is not used to being alone. When his mother works, she usually hires the nice student who lives down the street to watch him. The student is a beautiful yoga teacher studying at Hebrew University and Joseph is a little bit in love with her. Joseph should be staying with his father, only it seems his father has forgotten. He was not there to pick Joseph up from school as he should have been. Anyway, at Abba’s house, there is no cable television, the new baby cries every second, the twin toddlers get into his things, and the new wife hates him. There are too many people crammed into the small apartment so Joseph has to sleep on the couch. Plus his stepmother never lets Joseph on her computer. He would die of boredom.

  Also, he has heard from his cousins in the kibbutz that the Old City where his father lives is full of Arabs and that
Arabs eat Jewish children, and cats.

  The food arrives. Mohammed, the deliveryman, high-fives Joseph. Joseph gives him a five-shekel coin for a tip. This is too much, the deliveryman says. The deliveryman gives Joseph one shekel back.

  You are one of the good ones, Mohammed says.

  Ayelet and Shira are both actors but Ayelet earns most of her living the old-fashioned way: a wealthy husband. They met in their early twenties when they starred together in an Israeli sitcom based on the British show Coupling. Shira invested most of her earnings, which at the time were substantial, with her brother Marc’s help, and has been living off the investments ever since. Ayelet married a rich tech guy and is the host of the Israeli Survivor. The Moshava where they live is packed with wealthy hipsters. New restaurants open weekly. Rents and housing costs have skyrocketed. Residents have banded together to stop incoming hotels and high-rises. Shira was lucky enough to secure her apartment when prices were low and now pays two hundred shekels a month, or about fifty dollars in a setup similar to rent control. She can never sell it. She can never pass it on to her children, but she can live there forever for about the price of one cappuccino a day. One day, when she makes it big, she’ll buy a place in Tel Aviv, in Yaffo or Shenkin, but for now she stays and travels to Tel Aviv for work. Cats in Jerusalem slink and shit and mate around mansions that are now worth millions of shekels and are being snapped up by Russian billionaires and French millionaires. Shira’s friends are socialists and communists and peaceniks. They send their children to bilingual schools with Arab children and schools that practice progressive education curricula. They pick olives with Palestinians and smuggle Palestinian women to Tel Aviv beaches by dressing them in trendy Israeli clothing. They eat bio, that is, organic food and wear pants with crotches that reach down to their knees.

  On Shabbat afternoons, they ride on old-fashioned bicycles to their Pilates studios and cafés. They practice the Alexander Technique. They do Feldenkrais. They do Avi Grinberg. They are shipwrecked on the coast of the Israeli left.

  Shira is Joseph’s mother.

  Shira was once the sort of tiny, thirty-something-year-old woman who looked prepubescent. But lately, Shira has grown quite fat. She has been eating far too much pitot and falafelim, tststot ve burekasim. She has not had enough regular work to justify the starvation necessary to maintain “camera weight.” She’d had her breasts done recently with the money she received from a movie she did for the HOT cable network. All the soldiers in her brother Ziv’s special forces unit had once salivated over her. She’d blown them all, one by one by one, during a period of her life her therapist describes as giving all her power away.

  Shira’s trip to Los Angeles is a vacation from the summer movement protesting high rents in Israel. She had traveled especially to Tel Aviv with her boyfriend Asaf Boulboulim. The movement was founded by him, and is supported by Shira and Ayelet and their actor and producer friends. Asaf has been living with Shira in the Moshava to save money for his movement.

  Asaf Boulboulim is a Zen Buddhist peace activist. He is a dropout of Bezalel Academy where he had studied sculpture. He stands on street corners and passes out flyers that say, The world is an illusion. No separation between culture and race and religion. We are all one. We are cousins. We are our brothers’ keepers. Asaf tells Shira that the next industrial revolution will be robots acting as worker bees and we will all be queens. There will be no need for money so there will be no wars. There will be true equality between Jews and Arabs.

  Asaf and Shira have tried all the new restaurants in Jerusalem together. They order food in from the Italian restaurant and have it delivered. They regularly take the train to Tel Aviv when Joseph is with his father for protests, parties, film premieres, and restaurant openings. Shira has nearly drained her bank account. He tells her that this is all right. Soon money will be obsolete anyway. She is an actor who enjoys the work she does. It is okay for her to keep working. In fact, when she returns from LA, he thinks she should find another job. Asaf thinks Shira should perhaps look for work during the week she’s in LA. They will need more money than just her investments for his movement. Perhaps he will also be an actor. He wonders if maybe Shira can help him find acting jobs.

  Shira’s father, Yakov Solomon, refuses to meet him. Asaf is too young for Shira. He is not a good influence. He is not serious. She should find a working man, a businessman, a laborer. Any man but this man who lives in Shira’s house and pays for nothing. Asaf Boulboulim is useless, a parasite.

  Yakov Solomon, according to Asaf Boulboulim, is immoral for making so much money in construction when construction creates separation between people, when Yakov—a communist in the kibbutz!—had once believed in the ideals of the common man. Asaf’s highest aspiration is to be an anarchist. A Buddhist anarchist like Milarepa, a trickster, a jackal.

  It is difficult for Shira to explain to her father that an anarchist is more chic than a nihilist, a capitalist, or the communists of the kibbutz where Shira Solomon was raised. But in truth, Shira doesn’t care at all for politics. All she cares for is love and art.

  When Shira and Ayelet are not working, they like to sit in cafés and smoke cigarettes. They order endless cups of milky café hafuch. Their hair is long and dyed black as night and hangs nearly to their waists. In certain clothing, from certain angles, Shira still looks thin. She wears low-cut shirts to show off her breasts. She never wears a bra. She enjoys the way her nipples poke out of the shirt fabric, high and firm. She always wears Spanx in public. When she wears Spanx, she eats less.

  Shira and Ayelet fly into the shithole that is LAX airport. Shira’s brother Marc picks them up in his sporty BMW. It takes two hours to maneuver the highways. He drives them into West Hollywood where they will stay at the Standard Hotel on Sunset. They were able to find a room there for one hundred fifty dollars a night.

  Shira sits in front next to Marc. Ayelet sits crammed in the back and rattles off the names of stores they’d like to see: Uniqlo, J. Crew, Madewell, Lululemon, and Barneys. Most stores are in the Grove off Fairfax. Everything is so much cheaper in America, Shira says. And better quality, says Ayelet. Shira tells Marc she would love to come visit Carolyn and the kids in Santa Monica. When is a good time? Her rapid speech is fueled by exhaustion, by adrenaline, by excitement. She turns in her seat and addresses Ayelet, who blinks sleepily at her. Ayelet’s head falls against the seat and she exhales loudly. Ayelet is still so small, like a doll in the tiny backseat of the car. She opens her eyes. Beseder, Ayelet sighs. When will we be there?

  Marc drives the car expertly through the traffic. There’s nothing to light the eyes on but the occasional palm tree and the cement walls of the expressway. Graffiti. Until they get close to the Standard on Sunset, there will be nothing, thinks Shira, just pretty Ayelet in the back and her handsome brother Marc beside her. He still has all his hair and barely a gray one. He looks fit and young.

  Shira thinks of Joseph, how he would like to be here in LA with her. His eyes would shine with excitement and he would chatter nonstop. They would go to Disneyland and Universal Studios. He loves to visit America, to visit his cousins and his Dod Marc. Her chest constricts. But she’d wanted a girl’s vacation. A break, a treat, something just for Shira. She hopes he is happy at his father’s house. He is an optimistic child, and adaptable. He will be all right.

  Marc Solomon pulls into the Standard. Shira had stayed there twelve years ago when she appeared in her first American film. She’d fucked an entire band from Liverpool on the blue AstroTurf around the pool. She wonders if there is still AstroTurf around the pool. Marc shows them the Uber app and promises to visit and take them out to lunch. He carries their nearly empty suitcases through the door to the lobby. He’s got to go. He’s got work to do.

  I’ll come visit you and Carolyn and the kids, Shira says, as Marc walks to the door.

  Don’t trouble yourself, Marc says. We’ll see you in haaretz in a f
ew months, for the holidays. Enjoy yourself.

  Ayelet has a friend who sells hash in Silver Lake. This friend brings them a small bag and Ayelet pays. The friend is an Israeli savta, quite round, with flowing skirts, a friend of Ayelet’s mother, who was also a folk singer from the sixties. Rumor had it the savta had an affair with Bob Dylan back in the old days. She annoys Shira when she sits down on the sofa to smoke with Ayelet. The Standard room is nonsmoking. Shira wishes they would go out to the terrace, or maybe to the savta’s house in Silver Lake. Ayelet says she plans to smoke just a little bit of the marijuana. A little bit each and every day. Perhaps once when they first wake up, once in the afternoon, and maybe just a little at night before a bath. It is so pleasurable—Ayelet exhales a fragrant cloud—to smoke pot in the bathtub. Shira smokes too although she’s never liked it much. It makes her paranoid.

  An hour after the savta leaves, Marc’s wife, annoying, American, comes to greet them and say hello. I was taking a yoga class, Carolyn says, right off Sunset. A great studio. Shira tries to smile but she hates yoga. Carolyn hands Shira a present, a small bag of See’s chocolate, and smiles in that American way where gratitude is expected. Carolyn has also gained weight and she’s too blond. Almost platinum. She’s straightened her naturally curly hair into a curtain of white-blond.

  Carolyn asks Shira if it isn’t difficult leaving her son for so many days. Carolyn herself has never left her children for that many days in a row.

  It is good for him to be with his father, Shira says. It is good for him to bond with his new baby brother and the twins.

  Carolyn shows them which direction the Grove is. She offers them a ride. She tells them no one in LA walks anywhere. Are they sure they wouldn’t like a ride? Carolyn points out the no-smoking sign in the room. You’ll get fined if you smoke, Carolyn says, pointing at the American Spirits they’ve tossed onto the dresser. And anyway, it’s not very healthy. Do people still smoke so much in Israel?