by Zhanna Slor
“Get down, Bingo,” Liam barks at him. The dog whines and resettles on the floor.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” I ask, sliding farther down the couch. “What’s her name—Melanie?”
Liam shrugs. “In Chicago. On a date, I think,” he says.
“Oh. You’re still doing that open relationship thing?” I ask.
“I am...”
“But?”
“Lately, Mel’s been...questioning the whole concept,” he complains. “It’s frustrating. We broke up for a while, and I was seeing someone else, but now we’re trying again.”
“What’s the point of open relationships, again?” I really can’t remember, though I was the same when I’d first moved to Israel. David wouldn’t have any of my wishy-washy stances on commitment. He wears a kippah and works in a top-secret unit of the IDF, I don’t even know what country he is in half the time, but the hardest thing about our relationship was agreeing to be monogamous. Now, I am no longer sure exactly what I spent so much energy fighting him over. Riverwest has a way of seeping into all the crooks and nannies of your brain. But what works in one place, doesn’t work in others.
“You’ve been living in the holy land for too long, girl,” Liam says, shaking his head, amused. “You’re no fun anymore.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about things,” I shrug.
Liam moves his hand slightly, so it’s touching my shoulder. “What’s going on with you? You seem...emotional,” he says, watching me, as if genuinely concerned. “It’s so not like you,” he adds, with a nervous laugh, then takes his hand back.
I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry. His focused attention is unsettling. Not just because he isn’t David. But because he’s Liam. “Have you ever considered maybe you don’t know me as well as you think?” I ask. “I mean, you always did most of the talking between the two of us.”
Liam laughs, his whole body shaking with amusement. “Of course I did. Are you kidding me? You would never tell me anything.” He hands me his cigarette, and I take a drag without even thinking about it, an intimacy that confuses me more than his close presence. It’s a shock to the lungs and I try hard not to cough. Sometimes I forget how much I once loved mindaltering substances. I want to slap that version of myself in the face, and tell her to get it together. There are better ways to learn to live with yourself, and most don’t leave you feeling worse the next day.
And all of them involve staying far, far away from Liam Knox.
“Masha?” he is asking me. “Hello?”
“Sorry.” I shake my head. “That’s not how I remember it,” I mumble, handing back the cigarette. My head starts buzzing from it, and I stand up; I haven’t had one in years, not since we were together. Sober and tired, all it does is give me a headache, turn things fuzzy at the edges.
“Oh yeah? How do you remember it?” Liam leans against the couch, arms wide, letting out a puff of smoke while half-smiling, something I’ve seen very few people pull off without looking foolish. But Liam never looks foolish. Every gesture he makes is confident yet relaxed, like he came out of the womb knowing exactly where to place his hands, stack his legs.
“Um...” I lean back against the wall for a moment. The dogs, the smoke, the trash, it’s all getting to me. I am possibly even getting a contact high from his bong hits. My head feels fuzzy and disoriented, like when you’re in a faraway place in a dream but don’t remember how you got there.
Liam stands up and touches my shoulder again. “Hey. Are you okay?”
I nod. “Just a head rush.” What am I still doing here? I ask myself. It’s getting dark, and he already told me he doesn’t know anything. I make a quick judgment, and even though it’s rude, walk out of there without another word.
If I thought this hasty exit would in any way work, I clearly forgot who Liam is. Outside, he has already followed me out. “Take my number,” he says, producing his phone out of his pocket, still looking concerned, which makes me concerned. “If you need help or something.”
“I remember it,” I say, so he puts the phone away. Then he stands there and grins, watching me, and I remember why I’d liked him so much to begin with: those eyes. No one had ever looked at me like that before. With such intensity, such focus. Now, I recognize it as a total player move, but then? I’d only ever dated one person before him, my high school boyfriend Nick, an older, melancholy musician that I’d met freshman year when I lived in Hartland, the third and most repulsive of the four suburbs my parents dragged us to post-immigration. He’d had a difficult childhood and I felt more friendship and empathy towards him than attraction. Not Liam. The second I met Liam I was a goner.
He moves forward on the steps, interrupting my thoughts. “I’ve missed you, you know.”
I clear my throat. “You don’t know how to miss someone, Liam,” I mumble. “You just find someone to replace them.”
Liam giggles again. “That’s a good one, Masha. That’s really good,” he says. “You should have been a writer. I always thought that.”
I relax a little, realizing maybe he’s right, that I am remembering things wrong. When had I become so...serious? I used to be fun. I could still be fun, right? “Sorry,” I say. “That was harsh. I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did. But it’s cool, man. I can be your punching bag for the day,” he says. “I probably deserve it.”
“Oh, you definitely deserve it,” I say, smiling too, and feeling a little better about being such a grump. I put my coat back on, barely feel warmer. Then I gaze around Pierce Street, thinking about which direction I should go, what my next stop should be. It’s nearly dark outside now, or the sky is so overcast it only feels like night. Automatically my body tenses with nerves, because I’m on the exact corner where my former best friend Emily and I once got mugged. We were lucky to get away unharmed, having lost only two flip phones and Emily’s fifty-dollar bill, a Christmas gift from her grandma, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. Because worse things happen in this neighborhood every day. Beatings, robberies, murders; all of it inevitable from living in one of the top five most segregated cities in America, just behind Detroit. It’s the downfall of affordable rent, of cheap old buildings with creaking stairs and windows that breathe in every storm, of carpets molding under leaking radiators. That’s the price of living between the cracks of the world.
That, and never being able to get out of them.
I hear Liam’s voice again and turn around. He’s standing right next to me now. “By the way, what are you doing over there in Israel?” he is asking. “Are you in school or something?”
“No, I’m not,” I say. No one has asked me this since I arrived, and for a second it throws me off. But then I remember how much I love my life, when I’m not in Milwaukee, and I am suddenly very chatty. “It took a while to get settled because when I made Aliyah I had to learn Hebrew—”
“What the hell is making Aliyah? Isn’t that a singer?”
“Oh, sorry. It means to immigrate to Israel. Anyway then I had to go into the army for a year, but now, I do a bit of translating, and I tutor people in English, mostly Russian immigrants…” I trail off when I notice Liam’s eyes have grown wide.
“You? In the army?”
“I only worked in an office. I wasn’t, like, shooting anyone.” I did learn how to shoot in training, but I don’t mention this part. Nor do I mention how surprisingly good I am at it. Everything in Israel came so naturally to me, as if I was always meant to be there. The language, the culture, the repetitive customs and rules of religion, all of it. All anxiety gone. And then David had come along, and I never wanted to leave again.
“What kind of…office?” he asks.
“Just a small base in the north, near the Golan Heights. It was for one of the secret units, so I can’t really talk about anything I did there.”
“What? Was it—” Liam says, then stops himself. “No, never mind. I mean, I definitely want to kn
ow, but I’m a pacifist...”
“Like I said, it doesn’t matter if you want to know or not. I can’t talk about it. Literally can’t. I would be breaking the law. And not one of those dumb ones like don’t hang out at the beach after ten PM, that America has so much of. As if that stops teenagers from having parties and sleeping with each other.”
Liam doesn’t go along with my segue, and continues talking as if I hadn’t very recognizably changed the subject. “There’s a lot of bullshit going on that country, Masha. The way—”
“Don’t start with me, Liam. It’s easy to be a pacifist when you’re at peace,” I interject. “You might feel differently if everyone in Canada and Mexico wanted you dead just because of your nose.” Liam starts to say something in response, but I cut him off. “Or if everywhere you went people started ranting at you about how terrible America is, like it’s your fault what the government is doing.”
He deflates a little, because Liam may be many things, but he is not stupid. “Okay, I guess you’re right.”
“I know I am.” I knew before coming back here that the mere fact that I’d gone to Israel would be like carrying around a neon sign attracting political arguments; something about the place makes people aggressively reactionary, and unlike other countries with less-than-ideal ways of governing, people also don’t feel conflicted about being loud about their distaste. Growing up, it was always underneath the surface of things, that to be a Jew in Milwaukee you had to condemn Israel also. Part of why I’d been so reluctant to see the place when I was younger was because my peers spent a lot of time repeating anti-Israel talking points they’d read from headlines, and since my family was not part of the local Jewish community, I’d received no counter-education on the matter. This quiet anti-Semitism was so persistent and so fanatical that by the time I left college I didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone I was a Jew. This is likely part of why friends from Riverwest were so surprised when I moved there.
I can tell Liam really wants to continue this conversation in that exact direction, so I try to change the subject again. Now that I’ve lived in Israel, I understand fully the biases and blind spots of the American media when it comes to the Middle East. But I didn’t come here to be an ambassador for the Jewish homeland; I came here to find my sister.
“Look,” I say to Liam. “You really didn’t know she was my sister?”
Liam’s thick black eyebrows knit together. He’s thrown back, I can tell. “And what would you have me do? If I had known?”
I take a long breath. “I don’t know. Look out for her, I guess.”
“Come on, Masha. Don’t you remember yourself at that age?” he asks, a wicked grin overcoming his face. “Because I do.”
“I was such a mess. I don’t even know why.”
“It’s pretty obvious. Your parents were so strict with you. And, well, moderation is a learned skill. Pretty cliché stuff, actually.”
“Great. Now I’m a cliché.”
Liam smiles again, like he made a great joke. “Well, whatever you were, I liked you,” he says.
I pause, thinking. It isn’t like Liam to be so evasive, or to give compliments. “Did you like Anna too?” I ask. In truth, I don’t think there’s any way Liam would go for my sister. Liam has a thing for lost girls, and Anastasia had always been so determined, so sure of what she wanted. Nothing at all like me. She’d been winning art contests since she was in grade school, and I was a year into college before I decided on my major, a double in Russian and Linguistics, which I didn’t even finish. But his answers strike me as strange. Like he’s leaving out an essential piece of information.
Or maybe I’m reading into things too much because all he does is smile again, cool as a cucumber. In fact, he even reaches over my shoulder, pulling on a strand of hair that has fallen loose from my ponytail and placing it behind my ear. “You know me, Masha. I like everyone.”
Then, before I know it, he’s kissing me.
MASHA
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CHAPTER FOUR
Riverwest hasn’t always been so rundown. It started off with high hopes, at least. In the early nineteenth century, it sprouted up as a summertime playground for wealthy Germans, before becoming a haven for working-class Polish immigrants, as mills, factories, and tanneries were built along the Milwaukee River in the 1890s. Polish immigrants referred to it then as Zagora—roughly translated as “land beyond the hill.” Later, in the 1960s, it was home to Milwaukee’s counterculture movement, around which time it also became more racially and economically diverse. Now it is more known for its crime than anything. If you tell someone you live in Riverwest, a look of concern is generally the first response.
And sure there is danger, and a shadow you can’t name, but there is wonder too. Japanese has a word for this, Wabi-Sabi: finding beauty in imperfections.
In Riverwest, the sidewalks crash into each other like broken teeth. Homeless people wander the streets aimlessly, begging for change. There is a lot of trash—broken bottles thrown from roofs of drunken house parties, cigarette butts, sometimes even used condoms. But it’s also surrounded by an immensity of color that could almost hurt to look at: an endless array of trees, multi-colored Polish flats, teal and pink and blue with wrap-around wooden porches.
In Riverwest, even the quiet is boiling over with danger, tension. It’s nothing like the quiet of early morning in Tel Aviv, reading a book at a café on Sheinkin Boulevard, tourists still asleep in their hotel beds. Or even the quiet of the nearly empty cul-de-sac where my parents live, thirty miles north of here. You could cut it with a knife, and your hand would come out bloody. That’s Riverwest quiet.
It’s that quiet that I notice when Liam is kissing me. And it’s the quiet that reminds me to push him away. It doesn’t belong to me. None of it does. Not anymore.
I push myself backward, nearly falling against an iron railing. Liam sees my face and steps away with his hands raised.
“I’m with someone now,” I tell him, when I finally can form words. It takes a second for me to process it; the kiss was so unexpected. Nothing unexpected had happened to me in a long time. Years ago, I’d have anticipated this sort of behavior, but now? People don’t kiss you in the street in Israel. Well, maybe they do, but not where I live, not the people I know. There are synagogues where men and women don’t even sit in the same room. Areas of Jerusalem where people will yell at a woman for walking there unescorted, or not wearing enough clothes. My first week there I got screamed at so much for accidentally walking in a tank top and shorts into Meah Sharim, an Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood off Jaffa Rd., that I never attempted to find the market again. I don’t agree with this practice—if it’s a hundred degrees out women should be allowed to wear shorts—but it’s a normal occurrence in the holy land, something I’ve now gotten used to. It’s easy to avoid these areas.
“Shit, Masha,” Liam says. “Sorry. You didn’t say anything.”
I close my eyes for a second, thinking about David, and what he would say if he were ever to find out. I’d come here to atone, not create more things to atone for. And Liam was right, I hadn’t said anything. Why hadn’t I?
No, no, no, wait, I remind myself. I’d stopped it. I did nothing wrong. “I have to get out of here.”
Liam looks at me incredulously. “This was always your problem, Masha. No matter where you go, you can only think about leaving. Have you ever tried to just...I don’t know, relax?”
“I have a life in Israel,” I explain. “I like it there.”
“Do you?” Liam asks. “Or are you confusing boredom for contentment? You used to do that too, but the other way around.”
“What?”
Before I can process his question, the slam of a door makes us both jump. A dreadlocked Native American man in black Carhartt overalls wanders out to the porch, shoeless and coatless and smoking a joint the size of a cigar. He’s wearing a torn beige Anti-Flag shirt, and his overalls a
re more hole than pants. One of Liam’s revolving door of train-hoppers, I imagine. They’d been staying on his couches for a month or two at a time for as long as I could remember.
“Hey, Tao,” Liam says with a nod, leaning against the railing. “Sup?”
Tao stops mid-toke, his forehead scrunched in recognition, like we know each other, which of course is impossible. And yet there is something familiar about him. It takes me a moment to realize what it is: his hat. It’s black with a jagged red stripe across it; I recognize it from somewhere. “Whoa. Déjà-vu,” he says, his voice slow and meandering. He is very high. Is he drunk, too? I can’t help but wonder how this is possible. Train-hoppers don’t have jobs, unless you count sitting outside Fuel Cafe playing the banjo or hitting a plastic bucket like a drum a job. Which some people around here genuinely do count, by the way.
I straighten up, trying to remember where I’ve seen that hat.
“This is Masha,” Liam says to Tao, winking at me. “We’re...old friends.”
“Have we met before?” Tao asks.
“Definitely not,” I say, backing away a little. Something about his energy makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been around train-hoppers in a while, or maybe I’m not good with strangers sober. Tao seems perfectly relaxed though. He’s probably very used to encountering strangers. Not sure what attracts them to Milwaukee, but every summer, these modern-day faux-gypsies flood into Riverwest, a sea of dreadlocks, homemade tattoos, patched-up overalls, tattered black or beige shirts. They play homemade instruments on the sidewalks, sneak in cans of beer to punk shows, dumpster-dive for food outside grocery stores. At first, they are interesting; their lives seem beautiful and free, they make you wish you weren’t tied down with jobs, schools, lovers. But come September, you’re sick of them. Sick of the smell and self-importance and mediocre singing, sick of tripping over the empty guitar cases littered with coins. You become glad it’s getting cold soon, when, like the birds, they go south for winter, live in the parks of New Orleans or scatter across California, Georgia, Florida, and you can have your sidewalks back.
