The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom

by Beth Miller

  ‘Leah, don’t talk to me like that, and will you please stop shouting.’ The couple next to us are openly staring, and I’m sure the man on my other side is texting Leah’s comments to a friend; he keeps glancing, smirking, then tapping his phone.

  ‘Oh, are people looking? I’m SORRY.’ She raises her voice still louder. ‘I’m sorry I have a mother who SCREWED AROUND.’

  Everyone who was looking turns away and becomes very busy with their plates. The couple next to her finally start speaking to each other. About us, I imagine.

  I put my hand on Leah’s arm. ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she says, her voice, thank god, at a normal volume. ‘Tell me honestly, OK? Is it true that someone else is my father?’

  ‘Wow, I seem to have arrived at an exciting moment,’ says Alex, appearing behind Leah. ‘Was that you shouting just now?’

  I gape at him. ‘How are you here?’

  ‘I drove here on the way home from work.’

  ‘You know what I mean, Alex.’

  With a flash of his famous smile, Alex gets the first-date couple to move along so he can sit next to us. Everything seems to calm down several notches.

  ‘I texted him in the car,’ Leah said. ‘Thought it would be nice if we all met up.’

  ‘Yes, great,’ I say, trying to ungrit my teeth.

  Alex takes a dish of sushi from the conveyor belt and grins at Leah’s massive pile of empty plates. ‘You full yet, Sugar?’

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘So, Liza, what did you think of Leah’s question?’ Alex says. He’s smiling at me, but there’s something odd about his expression. ‘Is it true someone else is her father?’

  ‘You know it isn’t, Alex.’

  ‘According to Gidon,’ Leah says, all confiding now Alex is here, ‘when Mum went back to Nathan she wasn’t pregnant. Then when she went back to Dad, she was.’

  ‘QED, clearly,’ I say, ‘except for two things, Leah. One, I was actually pregnant when I left Dad, I just didn’t know it. And two, how could I “go back” to Nathan when I was never with him in the first place?’

  ‘I’m not impressed with young Gossiping Gidon,’ Alex says. ‘Where’s he been getting his information from?’

  ‘So for definite, Gidon’s wrong?’ Leah piles her last few empty bowls on top of the others, making a colourful and teetering mountain. ‘You’re saying Nathan is totally not my father?’

  ‘That is exactly what I’m saying.’ I pour Alex a glass of water from the little tap next to the conveyor belt. ‘I’m sorry if it’s been worrying you.’

  ‘So can we do a DNA test?’

  ‘Leah, for heaven’s sake!’ Alex says, finally dropping his super-reasonable tone. ‘You can’t go shopping for a new father. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.’

  ‘There’s no point doing a DNA test,’ I say. ‘You’re Alex’s, all right. The dates were completely wrong for you to be Nathan’s.’

  Oh my god.

  I am an utter moronic idiot of the highest order.

  Alex puts down his chopsticks. ‘Pardon?’

  If I could pay a million pounds to cram those words back in my mouth unsaid, I would do it in a blink.

  Leah sits up straight.

  Ten million.

  ‘Eliza,’ Alex says, measuring his words. ‘Why would dates have anything to do with it?’

  It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. I think of a hundred possible things to say to deflect the impact, but nothing comes. I just sit there, dumb, a stupid, useless bystander to an accident, my mouth opening and closing. Is it too late to lie?

  ‘Al,’ I say quietly, ‘let’s discuss this at home.’ I try to indicate with my eyes our small but rapt audience of Leah, the first-date couple, and Texting Man. But Alex doesn’t care. He stares at me.

  ‘Dates would only be relevant if you and Nathan had… done anything,’ he says slowly, ‘But you didn’t. Did you?’

  Leah looks from Alex to me, as though she’s at a tennis match. ‘Did you, Mum?’

  ‘We’ll talk about this at home,’ I say again.

  ‘We’ll talk about it now,’ Alex says, and slaps his hand on the table for emphasis, bringing down Leah’s multi-coloured pile of plates. Several fall on to the floor – one actually bounces – and a waitress scurries over and picks them up. The couple and Texting Man both look away; they no longer want to run the risk of catching our eyes.

  ‘Leah, would you mind popping to the loo?’ I ask.

  ‘Seriously? Dad?’ Leah appeals to Alex.

  He says, ‘Why should she go? She has a right to know, don’t you think?’

  ‘You sound like you have both already decided that there’s something to know.’ I lean towards him, not quite brave enough to touch his arm, but he leans away.

  ‘Come on, Eliza, you’re obfuscating now.’

  ‘The dates don’t matter, Alex,’ I whisper. ‘Leah is yours.’

  He takes my hand and looks into my eyes. For a moment, I think everything is OK. Then he says, ‘Liza, did you go to bed with Nathan?’

  No! Not really. Possibly. Only a little bit.

  Yes.

  I open my mouth, almost intrigued to see what answer will come out.

  Eighteen

  August 2000

  ‘Beautiful,’ Zaida said, holding the photo in both hands. ‘You look so beautiful.’

  I rested my hand on his shoulder and looked at the picture with him, though I had stared at it a hundred times already. I was standing in front of a spreading pink cherry tree heavy with blossoms, a white veil floating dreamily behind my head, my face turned upwards, smiling beatifically. It was my face and head, all right, but it was someone else’s body. Whoever she was, she was shorter and curvier than me, with a considerably more impressive chest. The slim man in the dark suit standing by my side, holding my hand, was a good three inches taller than me. I pointed this out to Dov when I first saw the photo.

  ‘Nathan is almost exactly the same height as me,’ I insisted.

  Dov shrugged. ‘Zaida won’t notice,’ he said, and he was right. It wasn’t like Zaida would ever actually see us together in real life, after all. This doctored, Photoshopped picture, put together by some computer-savvy friend of Dov’s, was all that there would ever be of Nathan and me.

  More of a worry was if Zaida remembered we’d been due to marry in December, and questioned the presence of the cherry tree in full bloom. But he didn’t mention it.

  Zaida carefully replaced the photo in its cardboard wallet, and I took it from him, telling him I’d put it in his room. I went into the house, leaving Zaida and Dov in the garden, and once out of sight, I slipped the photo into my bag. We couldn’t risk leaving it with Zaida. Imagine if Dad visited and saw it, or worse, Zaida produced it proudly. Oy, the hell that would break loose! It was bad enough that Nathan’s image, taken from one of our engagement photos, was being used without his knowledge.

  My father would consider lying to Zaida to be the ultimate act of duplicity, top of the pyramid of all my many betrayals. But curiously, the care staff had a different take on lying to their patients. They’d explained to Dov and me that they didn’t always tell the truth, if the truth would needlessly hurt or upset the resident. The truth is, your wife is dead. The truth is, your favourite granddaughter ran off with a shegetz. The truth is, your son-in-law publicly announced her death.

  ‘What’s the point?’ the care home manager, Bridie, said to us. ‘It only upsets them, then five minutes later they’ve forgotten the sad news, and you upset them all over again.’

  Zaida was convinced that Nathan and I got married, because he remembered that we were engaged and he remembered the run-up to the wedding. He just didn’t – thank Ha-Shem – remember what actually happened next. So instead of trying to explain the truth over and over, devastating him each time, Dov and I simply pretended that I did marry Nathan after all.

  There were a lot of lies to keep track of, though. For instance, wh
en Zaida asked when he was going to see Nathan, I’d have to say something like, ‘Don’t you remember, he was here last week?’ Zaida would say, ‘Oh yes, I think I do remember,’ which made me feel awful, except that he looked so happy.

  I mentioned to Paulina, Zaida’s keyworker, that it would be better if the home didn’t let the rest of my family know that I’d been visiting. I didn’t go into details, just said that my dad was a bit cross with me at the moment, and she nodded.

  ‘Sure,’ Paulina said. ‘We all have tsouris with our families.’

  I went back into the garden and Dov and I got ready to go. When I kissed Zaida goodbye, he held my hand against his cheek and asked his much-repeated question, ‘When will your lovely fellow come?’

  As usual, I said, ‘He came last week.’

  But this time Zaida went off script. ‘I wanted to ask him something about his dear grandfather.’

  Dov and I glanced at each other. Zaida was having one of his rare moments of clarity.

  ‘You know, my memory is so bad. I don’t remember seeing Nathan recently at all,’ he said.

  The look he gave me would have broken my heart, had my heart still been the vulnerable vessel it once was, rather than the tough old boot it had become.

  ‘Zaida’s been asking about Nathan a lot,’ Dov said thoughtfully, as we walked to the station together.

  ‘Yes, I think the wedding photo has made him even more keen to see him.’

  ‘It’s interesting, actually, because Nathan often asks after Zaida,’ Dov said, faux-casually, presumably well aware that it was complete news to me that he was in touch with Nathan. ‘I bet I could persuade him to come.’

  We were taking a shortcut across Hendon Park, past laughing girls in revealing summer dresses, and men in light-coloured trousers and T-shirts. A few young people had taken off some of their clothes and were spread-eagled on the ground, worshipping the sun. How buttoned up and out-of-place Dov and I looked, in our thick wintry clothing. A girl of about twenty strolled past us with her boyfriend, his arm round her shoulder. She was wearing a white dress with yellow flowers on it, the straps no more than thin yellow laces. She was eating a choc-ice, and all at once, I wanted a choc-ice more than anything. I could bring Alex here and we could walk like that, his arm round me, eating ice-creams. These thoughts made me feel disloyal to Dov, who would never be able to casually embrace anyone, even his future wife, in public. Nor eat un-kosher ice-cream, bought from a stand.

  We sat on a bench and I said, trying to match Dov’s casual tone, ‘So, how come you see Nathan? I thought he was at the yeshiva in Gateshead.’

  ‘He was there for a while.’ Dov frowned. ‘But, well, it didn’t work out. He’s back home now.’

  Nathan was almost five years older than me, so he’d be twenty-nine now. Almost thirty, unmarried, living with his parents. I guessed he probably felt that things hadn’t worked out too well. When we got engaged he was already quite old to marry, even for a man. He told me when we were courting that he’d said no to eleven women. This impressed me, as I was considered the wildest rebel in town because I’d turned down six men.

  ‘Why did you say yes to me, then?’ I once asked him. I assumed his reasons were similar to why I said yes to him:

  1. My father was running out of patience (not that he had much to start with).

  2. I was tired of saying no.

  3. Nathan seemed decent enough, with a pleasant face (and hair that curled on his collar, till he got it cut a few days before our wedding day).

  4. I was ready to move on to the next phase of my life.

  But Nathan just smiled and said, ‘When you know, you know.’

  ‘Why would Nathan come, though? He can’t feel that he owes our family anything, surely?’ I asked Dov.

  ‘Well, he is very fond of Zaida,’ Dov said. ‘And he always asks after you, you know.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Dov nodded.

  ‘But, why? After all, I…’ I couldn’t say out loud the dramatic words, I ruined his life. Instead, I said, ‘I assume he hates me.’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t hate you,’ Dov said, which just showed how young and uninformed he was in the ways of relationships.

  On the tube home, I took the fake wedding photo out of my bag. I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at it. How happy I looked! It wasn’t the first time I’d ever thought about what that other marriage would have been like. But it was the first time those thoughts didn’t make me shudder.

  Yes, I said. Yes, I will marry Nathan. Then immediately I was frightened. I woke with a start that same night, heart racing. I woke with a start every night, from the moment I said yes until the day before the wedding. Every night I woke with a gasp: What have I done?

  Then I said yes to Alex instead. And for a while, the night anxieties stopped.

  But the more time went by, the more the thoughts of my family crowded in, the people I had left behind. My mum, Gila, the boys. Dov. And Zaida.

  What have I done to them?

  My mum was seventeen when she married my dad. He was a little older, nineteen. She began having babies straight away. My father was always a difficult man. Quick to anger, slow to forgive. Us girls always whispered together that the husbands we chose would be the other way round. Everything that happened in the house, every decision, every conversation, every meal, every anything, was always through the lens of: Will Daddy hate it? Will he disapprove? Will he be angry? If the answer to any of these questions was yes, the decision was made and there was no point arguing.

  So, it was no to lighter tights for summer, and no to a smart red duvet cover for Jonny which an aunt once sent, because my father had an aversion to the colour red. He called it ‘the Soviet colour’. Seriously. The duvet cover was given to charity, still in its plastic packaging.

  It was no to talking about a wide variety of subjects including, but not limited to: British politics, American politics, American anything, literature, any books except Jewish books, any foreign countries except Israel, any criticism of Israeli policies, religions other than Judaism, any criticism of Judaism other than Reform Judaism (criticism of which was very much on the table), art, celebrity, film, theatre, sex, women’s rights, fashion and beauty, and a whole host of other topics that we only discovered were not permitted when we raised them.

  Despite this, we learned a reasonable amount about the world, thanks to school, and thanks to Mum (when Dad wasn’t there), and incredibly, we children carried on raising our voices and insisting on our opinions even when we knew we were going to get a thump for it. We’d clearly inherited Dad’s fearlessness and sense of self-righteousness. Sadly, he didn’t admire us for it. The only person who got permanently crushed by Dad was Mum.

  So it was no, unless he was away, to what later became my favourite meal: roast lamb and roast potatoes. Because he didn’t like lamb and roast potatoes.

  ‘Are we Christian?’ he roared, the evening my mother discovered this dish was verboten. I would have been about six years old. ‘Will we have a nice Yorkshire pudding to go with it, eh, Miriam? Made with milk so we can be properly Christian with our fleischich all mixed in with our milchich.’ Meat and milk.

  My fork was clutched tightly in my hand; to avoid putting it down with even a little sound and perhaps drawing his attention to me, I moved my arm down to my side and began to silently scratch a tiny incision in the side of my chair, in the soft wood next to the seat – the apron, I believe it’s called. Over the next few years I added hundreds of cuts to it, and to a matching one on the other side, until there were thick grooves for me to put my fingers into. It was comforting, somehow, when there was the potential for volatility at every meal, to place my forefingers in those grooves. Grounding.

  Dad picked up the serving dish of lamb, which had the most delicious smell I think I’d ever smelled in my six years. Mum ducked her head, as if she thought he was going to throw it at her. Instead, he tipped the whole thing into the bin, plate and all
.

  ‘You know how I hate to waste food,’ he shouted, which was hard to fathom when he had just wasted a massive amount of it. He slammed the door and went out and the rest of us ate bread and cream cheese salted with our tears.

  Is it any wonder both Joel and I said no to so many possible marriages? Uri, the eldest, was more in Dad’s authoritarian mould, and he married young. But Joel and I held off for a long time. Sure, on the one hand, I knew marriage didn’t have to be like that. After all, I saw plenty of happy ones. Right on the doorstep there was Zaida, whose long marriage to Booba was widely agreed to have been an idyll. Admittedly, by the time I was old enough to ask any questions about it, Booba wasn’t around to give her side of the story. But of course, Zaida was the loveliest man who ever walked the earth. And then there was Uri, whose wife Esther managed the neat trick of being a proper Jewish wife in my father’s eyes, despite being confident and fiery, and still holding down a demanding job as a speech therapist. My best friend Deborah fell madly in love with only the second man she was introduced to, and they Lived Happily Ever After.

  But on the other hand, there was the dark part of my brain. The part that woke me every night after I said yes to Nathan, with a stuttered cry of What have I done?

  And then, while I was wrestling with my daytime self (it’s going to be fine! Nathan is lovely!) and my night-time self (it’s going to be my parents mark two! I’m going to lose my mind! What have I done?), I met Alex. And the decision was taken out of my hands.

  Nineteen

  September 2000

  I saw Nathan before he saw me. Dov intercepted him in the corridor, to pass on some last-minute instructions, giving me a few precious moments to observe him as they stood together. His head was bowed and he nodded as he listened to Dov. His face looked grave. He’d lost weight. He was wearing a blue kippah and a grey suit. That was all I had time to take in before he and Dov were in the room and he was smiling at Zaida and moving towards him. He was very much not smiling at me.