Deja Vu (7 page)

“I could use more money...”

“I don’t lack for anything. We do pretty well for our age. We both have stable jobs, and I think you enjoy your work very much. How many people can say that?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. I didn’t like the logic in Amir’s words. I wanted to wallow in self-pity.

“Not many, I assure you. You do this to yourself all the time, Rose. You compare yourself with others instead of focusing on what you have. Stop imagining others have it better all the time, and start enjoying and appreciating what you do have.”

He was right. But it was hard for me to get off my high horse. I’d been up there for so long. I found it hard to get my feet back on the ground.

Four months after Adi, Inbal and David’s second daughter, was born, Daria and Asi also had a daughter, Shira. According to my calculations, Daria became pregnant immediately after Inbal announced her second pregnancy. Like always, she didn’t want to be left behind.

Daria didn’t miss the chance to flaunt her wealth and the fact that she’d managed to get back in shape in less than two months, so she organized a lavish party to show off the baby and her figure. After Inbal and I finished admiring her remarkable weight loss, her revealing dress and the flashy pink decorations of the venue, she led us to our tables, but not before she had us swear to “try everything” from the buffet, although we had no doubt that she wouldn’t put even one grain of rice in her own mouth. We couldn’t sit quietly for more than two minutes: David and Amir were busy chasing Nofar and little Coral while Inbal and I couldn’t exchange even one sentence without baby Adi bothering us. When Adi began to scream incessantly, our fragmented conversation ended officially, and Inbal took Adi out to calm her down. I sat and played listlessly with my iPhone.

“Didn’t you study accounting at the University of Tel Aviv?” the girl sitting across the table asked me in a cautious tone.

“Yes,” I replied, looking up. She seemed familiar to me.

“I knew I recognized you!” She smiled a satisfied smile. “My husband and I also did accounting in Tel Aviv. Maybe you know my husband? He’s just running around after Guy, our son. When did you graduate?”

“I graduated in 2004, but then I did an extra year. How about you?”

“Lior graduated in 2002, and I finished up in 2003. I think we did a course together… perhaps it was Managerial Accountancy?”

“Maybe. You finished your extra year or your degree in 2003?”

“I didn’t complete the extra year.” She rose from her chair and moved to sit next to me. “I'm not a CPA.”

“Really?”

“I did a degree in law and accounting, and I chose to specialize in law.”

“So you’re a lawyer?”

“Yes, both of us are.”

“Oh. I studied economics and accounting and specialized in accounting.”

“Lior and I debated the matter and in the end we chose to specialize in law, but I don’t regret it.”

“I don’t regret my choice either,” I said.  In truth I wasn’t sure whether I did or not, though I hadn’t had the option to specialize in law.

“We didn’t throw away our accounting studies.” She smiled. “After I finished my internship, we went to New York for a year and got our master’s in management, so it was very helpful.”

“Very nice,” I said, feeling a green cloud of jealousy began to hover over me.

“How do you know Daria?” she inquired.

“We're childhood friends. How about you?”

“My son’s in the same kindergarten as Roy.”

“So you live i
n
Daria and Asi’s neighborhood?”

“Just two buildings over,” she said. She spotted Lior from afar and signaled him over. “Lior, you remember...” She looked at me and she remembered that she’d forgotten to ask my name.

“Rose Yanku. Actually, in school I was still Rose Lerner.”

“Rose Lerner,” she finished the sentence.

Lior approached, a golden-haired boy bundled up in his hands. “Hello,” he smiled at me. He looked at me and smiled sheepishly. “The truth is, I don’t really remember you.”

I didn’t recognize him either.

“Rose studied a year below me and two below you, maybe that's why.”

The blond child didn’t let Lior join the conversation, and we were left alone again.

“How many children do you have?” she asked.

“One daughter.” I pointed out Nofar, who was watching a clown modeling balloons with interest. “Nofar.”

“We also have only one child,” she said sadly. “Excuse me for asking, but do you have problems?”

“What problems?”

“You know...” she stammered, “fertility problems...”

“Why?” I looked at her, stunned, “I’m only thirty, and I have one child already.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “She just seems to be a big girl and you don’t look at all pregnant,” she tried to flatter me.

“I don’t understand,” I said. I was confused by her slightly embarrassing questions.

“Forgive me,” she said, and I saw that she was on the verge of tears. “It’s just that almost everyone I know is having their second child.”

“So?” I asked nonchalantly, as if I never compared myself to others. “Just because everyone has another child, I need to as well?”

“Absolutely not,” she smiled and blew her nose. “If I didn’t really want another baby, it wouldn’t bother me at all.” I looked at her with empathy. I knew how she felt. I’d never longed for another child, but I knew how it felt to not get what you want. In recent years, I always felt like I was chasing happiness and yet always unable to attain it.

“You must forgive me,” she said. “I barely know you, and here I am dumping all my troubles on you.”

“It's okay,” I smiled. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to strangers.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “but you’re not really a stranger.”

We continued to talk and laugh. The conversation flowed, mainly because we began to talk about our professors and classmates. It was hard to say goodbye, and we decided to meet again for a breezy brunch at the weekend.

“I saw you were sitting with Aya Steinfeld the entire time.” Daria called me the next day and proved for the umpteenth time that she never missed anything.

“She’s very nice.”

“They’re a ridiculously successful pair,” Daria hurried to update me.

“Who?”

“She and her husband.”

“Yes… she told me they’re lawyers.”

“Right. What did you talk about for so long?”

“We were at school together.”

“Why would you have been studying together? She studied Law.”

“They studied both law and accounting.”

“Really? You can learn it together?”

“Yes, the two subjects really overlap.”

“Her husband’s a partner in a firm that specializes in tax law, to the best of my knowledge, so it makes sense.”

“He’s a partner?” I asked in amazement. “How old is he?”

“He’s thirty-five and, to my knowledge, she’s thirty-three.” Now I understood why she was so stressed about parenthood - they were a little older than Amir and me.

“He’s still very young to be a partner.”

“Extremely young! I told you they were a successful pair. I don’t know exactly who she works for, but I heard that she’s working for one of the most prestigious firms in the country. She goes off to meetings in the Knesset in Jerusalem.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know… she represents very big companies who probably deal with the Knesset members and give them a hard time.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah, they’re a very impressive couple. I keep trying to have Roy and their son play together, but their son’s too laid back for my son,” she giggled.

“We’ll be seeing them this weekend,” I put in. “We'll see how Nofar gets along with the Crown Prince.”

“They have a fabulous house. You’re sure to be impressed.”

“Good for them.”

“It really is good for them. Most people here in our neighborhood inherited their money, but they really earned theirs. She’s originally from Kiryat Gat, and I think he’s from Netanya.”

I didn’t know if she told me all this to make me jealous, but I was flooded with negative emotions again. My background was much more privileged than those who grew up in a remote, developing town, but I didn’t see how we could possibly buy an apartment in an upscale neighborhood in northern Tel Aviv in the coming years. Aya, Lior and I had started at the same point, educationally. The three of us studied at the same school, I was even an outstanding student, none of us had any connections or a rich daddy and yet they’d been able to steer themselves higher than me. Maybe I’d made a mistake by choosing to be a CPA. Maybe I should have gone to law school. I didn’t feel I was missing anything material in my life. Amir and I made a good living, and we lived in a cute apartment (with a choking mortgage). We lived the Israeli dream. But for me, this dream was too trite and didn’t aim high enough. I felt that I should be achieving more. My mother told me that I’d always been like that, even before the accident. She and my father tried occasionally to moderate my need to be constantly in first place, to no avail. In my childhood and youth, the disappointments were smaller and the successes were easier to reach, but as time passed, it was harder for me to reach that summit, and I had to feel the bitter taste of disappointment again and again. The sense of 'what if’ paralyzed me once again, as it had when I found out I was pregnant with Nofar.

I nearly cried off our invite to Aya and Lior’s house; I didn’t want to see their incredible home and their perfect life. Aya texted me the day before to make sure we hadn’t forgotten our date, because she was looking forward to it and had a really cute surprise for me. I had no excuse, and I was also curious.

When we got there the next day, Amir couldn’t hide his astonishment at the luxury apartment. He embarrassed me a little with his childlike enthusiasm, as if he’d left behind a pauper’s house and this was his first encounter with a decorated apartment.

“What's this surprise you promised me?” I asked Aya as we sat down.

“Oh, yes!” She jumped up and went to the cupboard in the dining area. “I put it here,” she said, scrambling through papers and envelopes. “Here it is!” She looked pleased and returned with a picture in her hand.

“All that talk about school conjured up a sense of nostalgia in me, and I began looking at pictures and look what I found.” She handed me the picture.

The picture was of her and Lior holding their certificates in their hands and smiling to the camera. I strained my eyes, and I realized that it was the Dean’s List certificate given out to students by the accounting faculty. I studied the photo and recognized myself standing a few feet away with my certificate, probably smiling at Amir, who was taking a picture of me at the same time.

“When was this taken?” I inquired.

“The ceremony of 2002. It was the last time we were on the Dean's List.”

“You were on the Dean's List every year?”

“Lior was. I didn’t make it in my last year. I understand that, according to the picture, you were a regular at these ceremonies.”

“I got two,” I said coyly.

“Aya showed you the picture she found?” Lior and Amir returned from their tour of the flat.

“Yes.” I smiled and showed Amir the image.

“So you were also on the Dean's List.” Lior looked at me in a manner I assumed he reserved for people he respected.

“Yes.” I smiled.

“Where do you work?” Lior took interest.

“I’m an accountant at Smart Green.” I exchanged glances with Amir. He didn’t like me lying about my job, but I didn’t want this successful pair to view me as a failure.

“I haven’t heard of it, have you?” Lior asked Aya.

“No.”

“It’s a fairly small company that handles the development of ecological products for industry.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Very.”

“I recently handled a case for a company that deals in wastewater recycling… ACMS. Have you heard of them, by any chance?”

“Actually, yes. I think they had a small project with us.”

Lior smiled, but he couldn’t engage with the conversation beyond what he said himself. We forced our smiles. I found it difficult to open up with Lior as I did with Aya.

“Maybe you guys should go down to the garden with Nofar and Guy?” Aya suggested after a few minutes of meaningless sentences and awkward silences. “The garden’s just had a makeover. It’s really cute now.”

“Great idea!” Amir immediately jumped up. He was bored.

After Lior and Amir went out with the kids, Aya and I could talk calmly and openly.

“You guys met in school?” I was curious. I knew that the more I learned about this amazing couple, the more my jealousy would grow, but I wanted to get to know her, merely for the chance of learning something about her life that would lessen my envy.

“Yes,” she smiled. “We noticed that we kept on meeting both at the law faculty and the business management faculty.”

“Nice, I don’t know many couples who met in the faculty.”

“I don’t either.”

“Then you studied together in New York?”

“Yes, it was an amazing year,” she said, her voice filled with longing.

“You went there after you finished your internship?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I’d been able to do something like that, but I got pregnant right after my internship,” I confessed in a voice full of bitterness.

“Nofar wasn’t planned?” Aya asked, puzzled.

“Not really,” I smiled sheepishly.