Housebroken (20 page)

My car was too small for him. His long legs were spread out, one knee touching the door and the other pressed against the glove compartment, his body was thrust against the back of the seat which he pushed back as far as it would go, his bare head touched the ceiling. He mumbled his address and the whole way there we didn't say a word. He smelled of wet fur and crushed leaves and the smell flooded the car, drowning out its usual smell of fake leather and plastic and a horrible smell called “Evergreen” dispersed by the air freshener in the shape of a fir tree that hung over the mirror. I got it as a freebie at the gas station, and though I couldn't stand the overpowering chemical smell, I was too lazy to get rid of it and waited for the odor to eventually evaporate. Now the car filled with a different odor, perhaps the one the air freshener was trying to imitate.

I looked at Nathan out of the corner of my eye. He was staring out the window. His enormous hands were resting on the crumpled cap, and I saw that there was dirt under his fingernails, reddish brown dirt that looked like soil. There was something touching about his appearance, something big and slow, with a kind of hostile indifference, and that smell and the little wisps of hair on the nape of his neck. He looked out the window with the same unselfconscious childishness with which he had danced, examining the empty streets and the buildings and the bus stations and the street signs, absentmindedly crushing the cap between his hands and breathing heavily. I drove slowly, with deliberate care, like a forest ranger driving a lost bear back to its lair.

3

A month before I met Nathan my parents got divorced. Since they were already old, my father seventy and my mother sixty-seven, they couldn't do it alone. I had a married sister who lived in Florida. Tali was three years younger than I and she had a one-and-a-half-year-old baby. When I told her on the phone that they were getting a divorce she said: “But I'm pregnant.” A few weeks later she really did get pregnant, perhaps to make it clear that she couldn't help us get divorced, because she had a family of her own. Today she has a boy and a girl and we all have pictures of them on our fridge. Two American children smiling on the doors of three refrigerators.

My parents weren't healthy, and I wondered where they got the courage, or the innocence, to separate, with the decade ahead of them likely to be difficult and ridden with illness, and probably their last. I asked my mother if she wasn't afraid of being alone, if it didn't frighten her that there would be nobody to take care of her when she needed something, a cup of tea in the middle of the night, or if she slipped in the bathtub, and she said no, she wasn't frightened at all. “What's there to be afraid of? I'm independent,” she said, “and I have got you.”

One scorching Saturday at the end of last summer, we were sitting in the kitchen and she suddenly asked me if I knew a good lawyer. “Maya,” she said, “do you know a good lawyer?” My father was standing next to the stove frying an omelette. From the minute she decided on the divorce, a few weeks earlier, she had stopped cooking for him. This was a form of protest she got from a movie she saw on TV, and because of it they now had to take turns frying their eggs.

She offered to make me breakfast but I said I wasn't hungry. I didn't want her to get up and take an egg out of the fridge for me and stand next to the marble counter with one hand on her hip and the other holding the egg waiting for my father to finish with the frying pan. It was ridiculous, this business with the private omelettes. I said that I wasn't hungry, and she asked if I knew a good lawyer and I saw my father's shoulders stiffen, prick up like ears, with the spatula waving and trembling in his hand.

“What do you need a lawyer for?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “Don't you need a lawyer when you get divorced, Jack?”

My father shook his omelette in the pan in order to disguise the trembling that began to spread through his body. He stood there frying and shaking, his shoulders talking to us, the spatula scratching the bottom of the pan. When he was angry he trembled, when he was sad he trembled, when he was afraid he trembled, and sometimes he trembled when he was happy, although it was a long time since I'd seen him trembling with happiness. Not even when my sister called from Florida one Saturday a year and a half ago and said: “Congratulations, Daddy, you're a grandfather now.” And he didn't look happy a week ago either, when she called to say that there was another baby on the way, and that they hoped that this time it would be a girl.

“So what's this I hear, Daddy?” her voice echoed over the transatlantic line. “You're getting a divorce? What's come over you all of a sudden? Have you gone mad?” “We'll see,” my father said. “We'll see. The main thing is that you should take care of yourself.” Then my mother snatched the phone from him and asked Tali if she was feeling nauseated. When she was pregnant with the first child, she vomited for nine months. But Tali had been a born vomiter, so it was hard to know with her.

When we were kids, we had to take plastic bags with us everywhere. My mother was relaxed about her throwing up, Tali was a little martyr, but my father couldn't stand to see her suffer. He would hold her forehead and tremble when she threw up. When we were driving in the car and Tali began to wail “Daddy, stop the car!” he would hit the brakes and jump out and open the back door, grab Tali by the arm and drag her to some corner or traffic island, and when she felt better and they returned to the car and she sat down beside me on the backseat, with a content expression full of suffering and satisfaction, I would lean forward and look at my father's feet dancing on the pedals. Tali would press up against me and she too would look at our father's trembling legs, stifling giggles that smelled of puke and a healthy sense of humor, but I was worried. I was afraid that he would lose control of the car and kill us all.

I sat in the kitchen and looked at him standing at the stove and trembling and ruining his omelette.

“I don't think you need a lawyer,” I said. “Tali and I aren't minors anymore, you don't own the apartment, you don't have a car or any property to fight over. What do you need a lawyer for?”

She put out her cigarette in her favorite round tin ashtray and sighed. She seemed a little disappointed that she didn't need a lawyer. She was disappointed that her divorce, like her marriage, wasn't particularly dramatic. My father transferred the torn omelette to a plate and sat down across from her. Her cigarette continued to send up spirals of smoke from the depths of the ashtray. They had an annoying tendency, my mother's cigarettes, never to go out completely, especially when my father was sitting opposite her, reading secret messages in the smoke signals like an old Indian chief. “Those cigarettes,” he muttered to himself, “twenty-four hours a day,” and a drop of oil trickled down his chin.

“You see!” my mother shouted and pointed at my father stooping over his plate. “That's what I need a lawyer for! So he won't nag me all the time!”

“That's why you're getting a divorce,” I said. “He won't nag you anymore about your smoking after you're divorced. You don't need a lawyer for Dad to stop nagging you about the cigarettes.”

It seemed to me that my mother didn't understand the real nature of her divorce. She thought that the divorce would be a remedial stage in her marriage—a transition from a dull marriage to a thrilling one. She didn't take into account the fact that she would have to separate from my father. She assumed that he would still be there even after he gave her the divorce, that the divorce would hang, framed like a diploma, in the little kitchen, where my father would also be, sulkily frying himself an omelette and trembling, or maybe she thought that she would begin to cook for him again after they got divorced.

“So what are we going to do?” she asked gloomily, staring at my father sitting opposite her and eating without appetite. “How do you get divorced without a lawyer?”

“You go to the Rabbinate,” I said.

“The Rabbinate? Where's the Rabbinate? I don't even know where it is.”

“The same place you got married,” I said.

“Didn't they move?” she asked. “They must have moved by now.”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Can you find out for us?” she asked. She pulled another cigarette out of the pack and held it between her fingers, but when she saw my father's gray eyes looking at her over his plate she didn't light it. Maybe she didn't light it because his look no longer begged her not to smoke while he was eating. It was a look that said that he had given up all hope of enjoying his food or anything else long ago, and that he knows where the Rabbinate is. “Jack,” she said quietly, “wipe your chin.”

“I'll find out for you,” I said.

“And find out when they're open and what we have to bring, maybe we need photographs, and how much it costs. Maybe we need witnesses, we needed witnesses when we got married didn't we, Jack? Remember? I hope it isn't going to be too complicated. And ask if you can testify for us too.”

“She can't,” said my father.

“Why not? Why can't Maya testify? Because she's our daughter? She knows us better than anybody. Her testimony will be the best. Nobody else can testify as well as Maya.”

“Because she's a woman,” said my father, standing up to put his plate in the sink. “Women can't testify.”

“Ah,” said my mother and lit her cigarette. “I didn't think of that.”

My mother suffered from high blood pressure and she was thirty pounds overweight, but according to her she had a calm and optimistic personality, which was in itself a kind of health, and Tali always said: “I'm not worried about Mother.” And in fact she had no reason to worry, because most of the time Mom worried about her. She was surprisingly mature in everything concerning my sister. They were similar, although Tali inherited her thin build and short, almost dwarfish, stature from our father. They had the same wavy, auburn hair before Mother's went gray, and the same round, brown eyes. There were times when they wore the same clothes and shopped together in the mall and sat in cafés, and smoked cigarettes together and Tali consulted her freely about boys, although there wasn't much to consult about, because she married her first boyfriend.

Mom was sorry when Tali went to Florida with her husband, because she lost her best friend. I felt sorry for her and tried to fill the gap, but it didn't work out. She made faces when we stood in front of the display windows in the mall, shuffled her feet when she was tired, turned down my suggestions to sit down to have a cup of coffee and rest, and if I did succeed in persuading her, she would agonize for ages over which cake to choose, pacing back and forth in front of the display case, until I was forced to order for her, to put her out of her misery. She let me pay for her when I offered, she always agreed graciously, without protesting, and I always offered, because something about her screamed, in addition to everything else, economic helplessness.

“You'll forgive your mother,” she said to me on one of those exhausting shopping expeditions when we didn't buy anything. “You'll forgive your mother for being so spoiled, won't you?” I hugged her when she said that.

“One day, I hope, you'll also have a good man, to pamper you the way you deserve,” she said when we stood on the escalator in the mall. She always sank into a reflective mood on the escalator. “But you'll be careful who you choose,” she said, her fingers gripping the moving rail, “and find yourself someone strong. He doesn't have to be too brainy, Maya—you don't need an intellectual. You need someone to take care of you and love you. A guy with a big heart. And make sure he's faithful. He shouldn't be a womanizer, and he shouldn't be thin, Maya!” she said and tripped, as usual, on the last step. “You listening?” she said as I helped her up, supporting her arm. “Stay away from thin men!”

“But Tali's husband's thin,” I said. “Yes,” she said, “but Tali is a different story, and Yossi's not so thin anymore, anyway. Tali says he's got a belly on him like a pregnant woman.” “And Dad's thin,” I reminded her. “Yes,” she said, “your father is really very thin, and lately he's been losing weight too and I'm a little worried about him.” I never imagined that one year later, one spring day after Independence Day, on the very same escalator, she would tell me, a second before missing the last, sly, step again, that she decided to get a divorce.

I took her to a café and sat her down opposite me and refused to let her hesitate over the cakes. I ordered a Danish for her, although I knew she didn't like them, and I said to her: “You won't last one minute without Daddy.” She took a little bite of the pastry and said: “You don't understand.” I said: “What, Mother, what don't I understand?” And she said: “It's my last chance.” “Your last chance for what?” I whispered, and my mother, her eyes welling up with tears and her mouth spitting crumbs, shouted: “To be happy!”

I was silent, and she sniffed and tried to wipe away her tears with the paper napkin, one of those flimsy napkins you pull out of a metal container that are incapable of absorbing anything. Her lipstick shone with confectioners' sugar. I asked: “But what about Dad?” And she said: “Dad is Dad. You know he doesn't like changes, but he'll manage.” She took a little mirror out of her bag and looked at herself, and then she pushed the plate aside and said: “Why did you order me a Danish, Maya? You know I hate them.”

*   *   *

We sat in the kitchen. My father washed the frying pan and put it on the rack. My mother began to ask him to get her a pack of cigarettes from the drawer, but she changed her mind at the last minute. Obviously she realized that she couldn't bring a lawyer into our lives and in the same breath, in the stifling air of four eggs fried in pairs, ask my father to do her a favor and bring her cigarettes. She didn't exactly know what she was doing, but she had a sense of timing.