The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  Until now.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE WAY home, I’m listening to Galei Tzahal, the army radio station, playing its melancholy late-night music. As a soldier, I used to borrow my mother’s car some nights and just drive. As long as they had good songs on the radio, I kept going, savoring the solitude and being on the move, watching the world reveal itself from the windshield in all its heartbreaking beauty and feeling morose and alive.

  Outside my window, the city is painted a wet, diffused streetlight orange, and the music washes over me, elicits a sadness that feels old, misplaced. I miss the exit to my mother’s house and keep driving south on the Number 40, the highway leading to Ben Gurion Airport. I keep driving until the good songs end.

  II.

  LEAVING

  You’re walking on the edge of a very narrow road over a boiling crevice and you might fall in; and, in fact, you will fall in.

  —CYNTHIA OZICK, from an interview in Writers & Company

  MY AMERICAN DREAM

  AN AIR-CONDITIONED BUS takes me and my beat-up backpack from JFK Airport to downtown Manhattan. I am twenty-two and flat broke—in the airport I had no change for a cart or to call my friend and had to use my overdrawn Visa to purchase a ticket for the shuttle bus. I’m also in love with two men, neither of whom is here with me now.

  It is a sweltering July day, so hot that the view outside my window seems to shimmer. These oppressive Tel Aviv–like temperatures are a surprise; having never been to the U.S., I had expected a cool, polite North American summer. That heat, paired with jet lag, culture shock, and travel-induced exhaustion (a seventeen-hour flight from New Delhi via London), makes everything appear a bit surreal, as through a film of fog.

  The American highways are sleek, fast, and so new, unlike back home, where history is everywhere, written on buildings and soaked into the earth; unlike India, where the roads are narrow and potholed and jumbled with vehicles. When the Manhattan skyline appears in the distance, a row of solemn gray buildings like soldiers snapped to attention, I straighten in my seat and search my heart hard for emotion. This is it, I tell myself. Don’t miss it. Hurry. Feel something. But the bus rumbles on through underpasses and over bridges, and the skyline grows and diffuses into individual buildings and streets and traffic. The moment is gone. The only thing I feel is heartache, and it’s been with me for months now, like an exotic, undetected bug, a stowaway riding along with me from Israel, through India, and all the way here.

  At fifteen, I drew the Manhattan skyline across my bedroom wall with teenage fervor and hopefulness. I painted the buildings white and the sky in swirling grays and blacks. I used a dinner plate to shape a milky full moon. On the top right corner of my mural, a small window opened to a square of Israeli skies, sultry and thick, misplaced. At night, I would fall asleep gazing at the stars on my wall and imagine that I lived there. New York. Because of Madonna and Paul Auster and Catcher in the Rye. Because if I’d learned anything from the subtitled Hollywood movies I had watched at Shalom Cinema on Herzl Street, with its ever-creaking wooden seats, its floor littered with peanut skins and sunflower seed shells, it was that New York was where people went to start over, reinvent themselves, and that the American Dream was for everyone, even for a little girl from a Yemeni neighborhood in a tiny, messed-up Middle Eastern country. It was a dream I could adapt, steal, make my own.

  * * *

  —

  OUTSIDE GRAND CENTRAL Station, I sit on my backpack and wait for Shira. I haven’t seen her since the last time she came to visit me at the northern kibbutz where I lived with Gilad, my first love. Shira was the one who inadvertently introduced me to him. I had called the army base where she served, on a sparse hilltop by the border with Lebanon, and he answered: the new guy, fresh out of the officers’ course. He was smart and funny and flirty on the phone, and after a few days, I was no longer asking for Shira.

  Gilad and I lived in a tiny studio apartment crammed with books, a short bike ride from the beach and steps to cornfields and swarming fishponds. In the winter, a pecan tree bloomed outside our window, and every morning, I collected the nuts into a blue bucket and we cracked the soft shells with our teeth. We rode bikes through the fields with our fluffy-eared dog galloping behind us. We woke up in the middle of the night from the sound of rain and made love. We were so in love that some days we felt sick with it, drained by the intensity of emotion, anguished and tormented when we were apart. Did everyone feel this way? They couldn’t possibly. Surely our love was unique and remarkable and beyond any love anyone else had ever experienced.

  Other days I was plagued by anxiety. It had to end somehow, I knew. He was probably going to die. That’s what happened to soldiers and men in this country—men like my father, and my sister’s boyfriend. Men we love. I was twelve when my sister’s boyfriend died in the army: a gentle boy with a shy smile and long bangs that nearly covered his eyes. An early morning phone call. My mother and I both answered the phones by our beds; my sister was bawling on the other end of the line. I went to school that day and silently wept through everything. I sat in the back of the classroom hearing the teacher speak, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Whenever Gilad was late for his weekend leave from the army, he’d find me sobbing in bed; I had already visualized the headlines, his picture, black-framed in the paper, the announcement on the radio, his funeral service. At night, I’d dream of his death, and the loss was so real, so devastating, that I would wake up inconsolable. At times I picked fights for no reason, accused him of not really loving me. Anything to make this unbearable happiness a little less consuming, a little more manageable, so that once it ended, which it must, it wouldn’t destroy me.

  By the time Shira visited, our pecan tree—a biennial—was not blooming, and I was flirting with Avishay, this guy I had met at my job writing for a business magazine in Haifa. I told Shira about Avishay in a lighthearted tone, like it was no big deal. Gilad knew about him; he was fine with it. It was harmless flirting, after all.

  At twenty-two, Avishay wore suit jackets, carried a briefcase, and owned a car. He had longish, wispy blond hair, broad shoulders fetchingly slouched in an apology, and wire-framed glasses. His lips were thin and colorless, and he smelled faintly of milk. He had never dated a Mizrahi girl, he’d said to me with surprise in his voice, as though his attraction to me—my brown skin, my Yemeni heritage—was some kind of fetish. He hadn’t met any Mizrahi girls in his white, affluent neighborhood on top of Mount Carmel, or in the elite, prestigious high school he attended. He was the kind of guy—charming, rich, blond—who never would have given me the time of day in high school, and I was intoxicated by his attention. He wrote me poetry, played me Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell over the phone. “Why aren’t you mine?” he said, sad, wanting, adorable, like a puppy. “Life isn’t fair.”

  On a bench outside the kibbutz, waiting for the bus to take her back to Tel Aviv, Shira searched my eyes. “Gilad loves you so much,” she said. “You know that, right?” Then her bus rolled into the stop and I didn’t have to say anything in response.

  That was only a few months ago.

  Now, Shira’s shadow falls on me, and I stand up, collapse into her arms in a sweaty embrace. She takes a moment to look me over and hugs me again. “Welcome to New York,” she says.

  My home for the next few months (longer, if I choose) is a studio apartment tucked in the back of a four-story redbrick building on Thirty-seventh Street, between Third and Lexington. The rent is miraculously cheap. The air conditioner just broke and the air inside is still and damp like an unstirred cup of tea. The apartment is tiny, one room that slants into a galley kitchen, a single window facing a narrow courtyard. No TV. It will do. Shira and I have shared small spaces before: we slept cuddled on a ferry deck to Greece, in windswept rooms on Mykonos and Ios, in a sinking walk-up overlooking a canal in Amsterdam, on flea-infested mattresses
in Sinai.

  We stay in all day, talking. Outside, it is bright and noisy and humming. She has a new boyfriend. She spends a lot of time in his apartment, so I will have the place to myself often. She doesn’t ask about Gilad or Avishay, and I’m sick of talking about them anyway. In India, stoned, I told everyone who’d listen the convoluted story of my affair with Avishay and its aftermath, entertaining strangers on restaurant rooftops and riverside cafés with overly intimate details, thinking that by turning it into a story, I could gain distance somehow, make it hurt less, free myself from the guilt, stop thinking about Gilad. Then Avishay. Then Gilad again. It didn’t work.

  An image is seared on the insides of my eyelids: the look in Gilad’s eyes—so blue, so disappointed—on the evening it ended. After we took a break, during which I stayed at a friend’s studio apartment in Tel Aviv. After I met Avishay for a drink in the city, let him hold my hand as he walked me back to my friend’s place, and then invited him upstairs for the night. After Gilad took me back despite everything, and I kept answering Avishay’s desperate calls even though I promised Gilad I wouldn’t. That evening, I walked into the room after yet another phone call, and Gilad turned on his swiveling chair, his face wounded and resolute, and said, “Why did you hang up? Might as well call Avishay back and tell him to come get you and your stuff.” That scene has been playing on repeat, just one of many in this unforgiving movie projector in my head.

  Like that one from the morning I left. Gilad lying in bed, tears streaming, while I packed my things, moving through our apartment in slow motion, as though searching for something I’d forgotten. And then Gilad at the window, wrapped in our checkered duvet like some ancient Hebrew king, our dog clawing at the glass beside him, whining, as I pedaled away on my rickety blue bike for the last time, the same bike on which Gilad had taught me to ride.

  The day I called Avishay to tell him I’d broken up with Gilad, he was silent for a moment too long, his panic transmitting like static through the phone line. “I didn’t break up with him because of you,” I said, defensive, trying to reassure him and maintain a semblance of dignity at the same time. Was it true? Later, as the two of us strolled along a pale, wintry beach in Haifa, hugging against a bitter wind that threatened to blow us over, an old man with a dog stopped by and said, oddly, “You take care of her, will you?” and Avishay laughed, eyes shifting. Something stabbed in my chest. How could I have been so stupid? The signs had been there all along. Avishay had told me early on that he was addicted to the ache of unrequited love, that he sometimes wished it were possible to die of a broken heart. I thought he was being a romantic, a poet. I looked at him on that beach in Haifa and knew it was already over—that now that he had me, he was going to leave, which he did, a few miserable weeks later, in the most cowardly way. One day he stopped calling, didn’t answer his phone, vanished from my life as though he was never there.

  And then I left too. Because staying was unthinkable. Because suddenly, through the murkiness of grief and heartache, the choice to leave presented itself in brilliant clarity as the answer to everything. I withdrew my meager savings and flew to India, my heart cracked in two places.

  * * *

  —

  SHIRA AND I sleep together in her queen-size bed, swathed in yolky yellow sheets. When I wake up, she’s gone.

  I open the window, make coffee. It’s Friday morning, Friday night back home; my siblings are gathered at my mother’s for our weekly Shabbat dinner, arguing and laughing and tossing dish towels at each other from across the table. It’s strange how much I miss them and how badly I need to be away from them right now. Maybe it’s because around my family, I can only be who I’ve always been: the angry, tantrum-prone, oversensitive child who fought her way through adolescence. Maybe I need to do my growing up away from them. Or maybe I love them so much, it feels safer to walk away. Because you never know what might happen to the people you love.

  Then I remember. Our dinners are different now. I can no longer rely on my memory to conjure the correct image. On my last week in India, I called home from Ladakh, a moonscape province near the border with Tibet, where Buddhist monasteries cling to the side of tooth-colored cliffs. When my little brother told me that my mom wasn’t there, on a Friday night, my heart began pounding. “Why not?”

  “She has a boyfriend,” he said. “They’re gone for the weekend.”

  The red numbers on the meter were adding up. It was costing me a fortune just to think, to be speechless. My mother had been a widow for twelve years. She had never—not once—dated.

  I called again from New Delhi. Since I’d left, phone conversations with my mother, sporadic and brief, had grown more intimate. There was no time to argue or talk in circles; the urgency made us more honest, more open. Now she sounded younger, buoyant; she giggled. I had missed the sound of her laughter. “My life has changed,” she said, “a hundred and eighty degrees.”

  I had been gone only three months. My mother was back, and I wasn’t there to see it.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DAYS OF traversing the city, traipsing up and down steep subway stairs, my feet begin to ache. It is a peculiar pain, as though the earth is kicking my sole with every step. My feet throb, pulsate, forcing me to pause, out of step with the whirlwind that is New York. While I rest on park benches, the city assaults my senses in all its glamour and grit: giant signs blind me with neon, large screens flicker, department stores glimmer and rattle with escalators, taxis and cars and buses whiz through broad avenues, and subway trains rumble and clang under my sore feet. The city is electric with agency, as though hooked up to an amplifier in the sky. And the people, steady streams of them, slicing through intersections on their rollerblades with purposeful, graceful swipes, dashing by with their shopping bags, flagging taxis with urgent hand gestures. Everyone seems to have a place to go. Everyone belongs here more than I do.

  I have never been to a place where everybody speaks English, and I feel like I am living inside a TV show. I imagine drama in people’s tone, because they couldn’t possibly be chatting about the weather in their television English, with that drawling accent. Communication, one of my strongest suits, has become a handicap. I hate being misunderstood, am frustrated at not being able to tell stories, to string words together in an elegant way. In New York, I am not witty or funny or articulate or a writer. I am that person who struggles to order food at the bagel shop. What on earth are scallions?

  Then other days I feel lifted by the lack of vocabulary, find freedom in the constraint, the same way I sometimes relish being broke. I have said enough, I think, resigning myself to my compulsory silence, enamored with the stoic new me who emerges.

  I check the mailbox every day, empty it of flyers, take-out menus, and bills. I haven’t heard from Gilad since I found a dispassionate letter from him in New Delhi’s poste restante. He was talking about heading to the States with Nadav, his best friend from the kibbutz, buying a cheap car, and traveling from coast to coast before heading south. It is the trip we had planned together.

  Before I left Israel, a friend made me a mixed tape full of songs about home, about leaving and returning: “Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel, “She’s Leaving Home” by the Beatles. I walk through the city listening to it on my Walkman, and I think of the life I had just a few months ago, the little house in the kibbutz, the boyfriend, the dog. I replay how I messed it all up, contemplate the many instances when I could have saved it if I’d tried. And some days it hurts so fucking much I think it might be possible to die of a broken heart after all.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN IT GETS too hot to walk—the air trapped between the buildings, heavy and liquid—I learn that the F train will take me to Coney Island. When the train emerges from its tunnel, it feels like surfacing for air. The sky unfurls like an unclenching fist and is dappled with soft, perfectly shaped clouds. F
amilies amble along the wooden promenade. The day smells like hot dogs and sugar. As I sit on the beach with my back to the amusement park, the roller coaster behind me creaks and rattles; children squeal with joy and terror. I kick off my shoes, fold my flared red corduroys up to my knees, and tread into the water. The cold ocean bites at my feet, choppy and dark, but I don’t mind. Being by the water is a little bit like returning home. The waves hiss and swirl around my feet, and suddenly I am overwhelmed by a pang of loss, a searing sting of longing. As always, it comes out of nowhere. I miss my father. As if it hasn’t been twelve years. Look how far you’ve traveled, I think, and still.

  * * *

  —

  IN AUGUST GILAD arrives from Israel with Nadav. They park their car down the street, a dusty 1969 Buick Century they bought in Queens for seven hundred dollars, no tape deck.

  That first night, Gilad stays over. We lie in bed and I start crying and can’t stop. He holds me. Neither of us speaks.

  We go up the Empire State Building, take the ferry to Staten Island, sit between the Twin Towers and take pictures from the ground up. Sometimes we touch, lean into each other’s bodies because we don’t know how else to be together. Then other times, he hardens, becomes cross with me, irate.

  Gilad has a relative in Brooklyn, an old Jewish lady with the kind of Brooklyn accent I’ve only heard in movies; she lives in a small apartment with floral couches and yellowing photos in frilly frames. She frowns when she sees me at the door with Gilad and Nadav. Inside, she serves us tea in gold-rimmed china. I’m on my best behavior, elbows off tables, pleases and thank-yous, but when I go to the bathroom, she leans over and whispers to Gilad, “Is she your girlfriend?” And when he says, “No…well, not anymore,” she exhales a long sigh of relief and says, “Good.”