The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  And then I made out with him anyway.

  Then there was Amos from my unit, on whom I had developed a ridiculous crush. A married officer with a potbelly, Amos was smart, kind, and old enough to be my father. It was the one time in my life when my desire for a father figure had manifested in such an overt way. One day, I found an excuse to stay in the office while he was working late. It was dark out by the time we finished, and he offered me a ride to the bus stop. Before I got out, we sat for a while, chatting, and the longer we stayed, the two of us side by side in that dark, warm, enclosed space, the tenser and weirder things got between us. Then I reached over and kissed him goodbye on his cheek, and he kissed me back on mine, and gently caressed my arm, and suddenly it was real, a moment of no return. This was a good, decent man. What was I doing? I quickly opened the door and left.

  At eighteen, these non-affairs and the boys I kissed on Eilat’s beaches summed up my experience with men.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE SUNSET, THE yellows blushing into deep reds, Shelly’s dad stops the car by the side of the road for a coffee break. He steps out, stretches his arms over his head. Shelly wakes up, rubbing her eyes. She looks out the window. “Where are we?”

  “Close,” I say. I glance at her dad, now crouched by the side of the road, heating water in a small pot over a portable gas stove, then back at Shelly.

  She yawns and sees me looking, breaks into a smile. “What?”

  I shrug and give her a half-smile. This is the first of many chances I will have to speak up. I choose to say nothing.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S AFTER SUNSET by the time we roll into Eilat, and the red mountains bleed onto the sea, their reflections rippled in the waters of the bay. Lights stud the large hotels along the shore, monsters of concrete that are the stepchildren of the desert. The night smells of sunscreen and fish and beer. Red-faced tourists throng the bars on the seawall, stagger along the strip. I inhale the dry desert air with relief.

  We pitch our tent on a deserted rocky beach near the border with Egypt, outside of the city. Sitting around the fire, we look across the gulf at the glimmering lights of Aqaba, Jordan’s Eilat. It’s 1991, three years before Israel and Jordan would sign a peace agreement, before Israelis could visit Aqaba and watch the lit shore of Eilat from the other side. Shelly’s father cooks pasta in tomato sauce and then brews dark Turkish coffee sweetened with heaps of sugar. Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” is emanating from the truck’s tape deck, and Shelly’s father sings along, his face glowing orange from the fire. He glances at me and I stare into the flames.

  When the night grows deeper and stiller, we head into the tent. Inside, it seems smaller than I expected and Shelly’s father insists on sleeping in the middle, “to keep us warm,” he says, half-joking but then not. We lie there for a while chatting, giggling to cover up for the uneasiness. Shelly turns a couple of times, agitated, until finally she flings her blanket off. “I can’t sleep,” she says, crawling outside. “I’m going for a walk.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I COME back from Eilat, I don’t talk about it. I don’t tell anyone, not even Shira, to whom I tell everything, what happened in the tent that night. Even though it’s nothing. Nothing at all. But still, I would rather not speak of it; do my best to forget it. My plan works. The less I talk, the less real it becomes. The silence covers the memory with a blurry screen, a rain-washed windshield in a moving car, so you can’t make out the details, so you can only see the broad strokes. Much later I realize this was how Shelly would have seen us if she happened to look through the fabric of the tent, the silhouettes of two people lying closely together, the undecipherable whispers, an impression of intimacy.

  When I finally tell Shira an abridged version of the story months later, I make it sound as if it was something that had just happened, a careless, casual fling, something I must have wanted too. Because that is a story I can live with. She can’t understand why I would hide it from her for so long, can’t place the source of my shame. Is it because he was older? A friend’s dad? “Do you think I’d love you any less?” she asks, confused.

  My plan worked, because two decades later, my memory—usually exceptionally sharp—fails me, details elude me. When I read my diaries from that time for more clarity, it’s my guilt that strikes me. “I really didn’t want to,” I wrote. “I don’t understand how I let it happen. I feel terrible.” I kept lamenting over it for pages: Why didn’t I leave? Why didn’t I stop it sooner?

  This is what I piece together eventually, from my diary entries and my adult recollections. After Shelly leaves, I turn my back to him, ready to sleep, though the coffee surges through my bloodstream, though I already get the sense that I’m trapped, already wish I had left with Shelly. He starts touching me, stroking my legs. I freeze. “Shocked, frightened” are the words I use in my diary. When he persists, becoming bolder, I ask him to stop. “Why?” he asks, and I consider my response, actually concerned with his feelings. “Because you’re Shelly’s dad,” I say finally.

  He laughs. “Do you think she doesn’t know? Why do you think she left?”

  My heart chills before it breaks. I have known Shelly for only a few months. What if I didn’t know her at all? I always sensed a shadow in her, some cloudiness in her eyes, something wild and unpredictable in her face. It was partly what drew me to her; I thought it made her a deep, tortured soul. But could she be that perverse? Setting me up with her father? Leaving me alone with him when she knew what he was capable of? Was that some twisted agreement they had? He agreed to leave if she got with boys; she agreed to leave if he got with me?

  “Did you mind when I caressed your hand in the car?” he asks. “It’s the same thing. Doesn’t it feel good?”

  Is it? Does it?

  Somehow, I stay there. Where would I go? He keeps touching, cajoling. Maybe I don’t say no loudly enough, clearly enough, often enough. His beard is scratchy, sandy, and reeks of tobacco. A line from “I’m Your Man” keeps playing in my head, something about the moon, a chain, a sleepless beast.

  Things like this happen. They happened to me. There was that time when I walked home in a skirt, feeling pretty. I was just a kid—twelve? thirteen?—and two boys around my age walked by, and in a quick millisecond, no longer than a pulse, one of them lifted my skirt, moved my underwear, and slipped the tip of his finger right in there, so swiftly that neither he nor I could believe it had happened, without seeing, without even stopping. He hollered to his friend, laughing wildly at his brazen violation of my body, while I kept walking, shaking with rage and shame and tears, swearing I’d never wear a skirt again. For a while, I didn’t.

  And there was that guy in the dorm in Eilat, a nice guy, handsome, Ashkenazi, who climbed into my top bunk one night while I was sleeping and patted my legs and my bum, despite me telling him, nicely, that I wasn’t interested, until I had to literally kick him off me, off the bed. The next morning, when I told his friend, a beautiful, blond hippie girl who slept on the bunk beneath me, she hardened and told me that it couldn’t have happened, that I must have imagined it. And what I heard was, Who are you kidding? He would never go for you.

  Or the forty-something photographer from the teen magazine who I thought was my friend, until we went to cover an out-of-town music festival—one of those festivals I wouldn’t have been able to afford if it weren’t for my job—and he drank too much and pinned me against the wall, panting in my ear, hand snaking under my shirt. When I tried to get away, he grabbed me again. Harder. “Come on,” he said. “Won’t you give the photographer a kiss?”

  These things happen. Not just to fatherless girls, although it may have felt that way at times, as though the lack of a protective male figure in my life made me more susceptible to predators. Other women I knew had it worse. Compared to them, what happened with Shelly’
s dad was nothing at all. Nothing but poor judgment. Abuse of power. Maybe I was remembering it wrong. Because when did I ever let people push me around? Why else would I have let it go on? Maybe I was still seeking a father figure. Maybe I begrudged Shelly that relationship, the closeness she shared with her father, the same way I envied little girls on their fathers’ shoulders on the street. Maybe a part of me was drawn to the beast. I had tried to impress him on the drive there, tried to appear mature, sophisticated. I must have sent the wrong signals.

  In the end, tears in my eyes, I say no loudly and firmly enough. In the end, he stops. I fall into a broken, watchful sleep. When I wake up, my mouth tastes foul. My skin feels slimy and foreign. I crawl out of the tent and shuffle along the abandoned beach. The day is hazy as if sand has infiltrated the air. Holding up my dress in a tight fist, I plod into the water. The sea is cold and unwelcoming but I keep treading anyway, staring down at my body underwater, morphed and misshapen. I throw water on my face, salt tingling in my pores.

  I find Shelly sleeping in the truck, curled on the backseat, a frown wedged in her forehead.

  Somehow, we manage to drink coffee together, the three of us quiet. Somehow, we go on with our day, eat, read books, swim, drive to town to promenade along the seawall. It is agony. I want nothing more than to be home, for this to be over. Shelly is grumpy and distant all day. Not like I could have confided in her, anyway. If I learned anything from that girl in the dorm room, it’s that women don’t want to hear these things about the men they love. Throughout the day, whenever Shelly is out of sight, her father grabs me, gropes me. I keep pushing him off. In the tape deck, the Leonard Cohen cassette is on repeat. Whenever “I’m Your Man” plays, he sings it to me, feigning a heartfelt delivery, ruining this beautiful song for me forever.

  We drive back to Tel Aviv that evening. We are back at the base the following day. Shelly doesn’t look at me and I can’t bear to look at her. Something between us has been broken beyond repair.

  * * *

  —

  MORE THAN A decade later, while living in Vancouver, I get a message from Shelly on an Israeli social media site: “I’m sorry about the fight. I realized you were right and I was wrong.”

  I write back. I say I don’t even remember what we fought about, though I vividly recall choppy images from it, the sick, helpless feeling in my gut. It was a few weeks after our trip to Eilat. Things between us had been strained, the unsaid so loud it left no space for other words. Shelly started avoiding me, coming by less often. Sometimes days would pass without us seeing each other. That day, she came by for a file and we went to the archive to search for it. I remember her yelling at me, arms flailing. I remember being surprised at her anger. I remember trying to calm her down with simple words, but it only seemed to fuel her fury.

  A few weeks later she left the base for an officers’ course, after which she was stationed up north. I did not see her again for years.

  * * *

  —

  MONTHS AFTER OUR correspondence, while I’m in Israel for a friend’s wedding, Shelly catches me on Messenger and suggests dinner. I agree.

  When she spots me from across the restaurant and waves, I almost don’t recognize her. It has been more than a decade, so change is to be expected. The first thing I notice is the hair: her spectacular auburn ringlets are gone, cut short. “It’s easier with the kids,” she says, rubbing her head when I comment on it. When we used to know each other, she was willowy and athletic, something I envied while struggling with the extra kilos I had gained during my service. Now, after three pregnancies, the added weight has softened her features, brought a warm glow to her cheeks. Meanwhile, I am the thinnest I’ve been in years, a virtue I attribute to a steady diet of alcohol and cigarettes and long shifts as a waitress at a high-volume restaurant. She used to chain-smoke then; her energy was always nervous, fidgety. Now I am the one asking the waiter for an ashtray and digging for smokes in my purse, fiddling with my lighter, avoiding her eyes.

  It is a nice restaurant on the outskirts of my hometown, Petah Tikva. The tables are illuminated with tea candles, and behind the bar, the liquor bottles are backlit with red and purple. When I grew up, you used to have to drive out to Tel Aviv for this kind of dining experience.

  Shelly leans on the table and gazes warmly into my eyes. She’s still beautiful. Her face seems more open now, without the dramatic framing of her locks, and the hardness in her eyes is gone, mellowed by age and motherhood. Meanwhile I feel stronger than ever. Stronger, partially because of what happened that night. After the shame and self-blame subsided, I vowed to toughen up, harden, become the kind of girl you don’t want to mess with. A rock. My father was gone; my mother was occupied with surviving. No one was watching over me. “We are essentially alone in this world,” I used to tell people dramatically. “Once you accept it, it becomes easier to face life.” And as the years passed, and I left home and began traveling alone, I became fiercer, more resilient. A tough chick. Or so I wanted to believe. Last year, while I was walking on Commercial Drive in Vancouver in midday, an inebriated man grabbed at my breasts, and I swung at him and screamed, “What are you doing?” By a stroke of luck, two policemen were not far from the scene and I reported him immediately. The man spent the night in jail for assault. It has been one of my favorite stories ever since.

  The power balance between Shelly and me has shifted now. I am no longer the insecure girl who admired her. It should offer me some comfort. It doesn’t. For some reason, I find her transformation unnerving. She looks calmer, at peace, like she’s got it together. Next to her, I feel like a child still, stuck in my twenties, with my waitressing job and my refusal to procreate. I flick my lighter on repeatedly, tap my pack of cigarettes, already wanting another.

  Over drinks we reminisce about people we knew from basic training and from the base. “Remember that time we were on patrol duty together?” she says. “And you had the key to your office?”

  I lean back and laugh. “Oh my God, yes! It was freezing that night!”

  “We sat by the heater inside your office for like half the patrol.”

  The waiter places salad bowls in front of us, but now we are so excited that we can hardly eat.

  When Shelly mentions her mom in conversation, I pause. “Your mother? You mean stepmother?”

  She cocks her head, puzzled. “No, my mother.”

  “You told me your mother had died when you were a kid.”

  “I did?” Shelly puts down her fork. “Wow. I’m sorry.”

  I stir the lettuce, stung. I always thought we were both members of the dead parents’ club. I thought it made us honorary sisters.

  “Well, I guess I could see why I said that.” Shelly leans back in her seat, frowning. “My mother and I are estranged. I was raised by my grandmother. When she died, it felt like my mother died.”

  I confess the crush I had on Amos.

  “Amos?” She stops chewing. “Seriously?”

  I bury my face in my palm. “I know.” All these years and I’m still blushing.

  I’m drinking more wine, then coffee. Shelly is ordering tea. Our candle has burnt off. We decide to order dessert, for old times’ sake. We reminisce of the lunches we used to take outside the base, at Tel Aviv cafés, the extravagant chocolate cakes with whipped cream we often ordered for dessert, drowning our sorrows in sugar.

  “I am so sorry about that fight,” she says.

  “Why did we fight anyway?” I ask lightly. The wine has loosened my tongue, let my guard down.

  She looks up, eyebrows raised. “Because of my father,” she says, and my heart stops.

  For a minute, I stare hard into my cup. At once, my façade is collapsing. I realize I still carry the shame with me. I rarely speak about that night. Most of my friends don’t know about it.

  “But you never told me that,” I say finally, my voi
ce catching in my throat. “We never talked about him.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No,” I say. “We were looking for a file in the archive, and you freaked out at me for something trivial. I don’t remember what.” I don’t tell her that she shoved me with both hands, that I staggered backward and landed against the metal shelves. I don’t tell her that I was scared of her.

  “Ha. I always thought we spoke about it,” she says. “I guess I didn’t have the guts to confront you. You know, I should have known he was lying. I should have known it wasn’t your fault.”

  “My fault?” I swallow. “How could it have been my fault?”

  “I’m sorry. That’s what he told me.” She lowers her chin, swirling her tea. “We both know what he’s capable of. Already on the way there, he started saying stuff to me. When you were in the bathroom, he said, ‘Your friend is hitting on me. She changed right in front of me. Your friend is all over me. She couldn’t keep her hands off me while you were sleeping in the backseat.’ ”

  This was planned, I realize. This was the work of a careful predator. He manipulated us, turned us against each other, ruined our friendship. And for what? I light a cigarette instead of talking, grateful for the diversion. I am not angry at her for believing him, for thinking that I could do something like that. After all, at one point, I thought the worst of her too. I choose not to tell her that. I choose, once again, to keep silent.