Housebroken (39 page)

I took off his pants and underpants and rolled them up, trying not to get anything on the sofa, and with my other hand I pulled a bunch of wipes from the teddy bear and wiped him quickly and threw them on the floor, and spread the diaper underneath him and it was too small, and I could hardly close the stickers, and the whole time he did his best not to let himself drop to the sofa and his thighs trembled, and the whole time I didn't see a thing, nothing, not even what he had in front, which wasn't like a baby's but like an old man's.

31

I began to feel suffocated that night. I tried to find a position to sleep in, to escape the big arm that lifted up like a crane to pull me to his side. It was hot in the room, and it was still early, outside I could still hear TVs and bits of conversation and the horn of a passing car and a child or two who were still awake. I missed my bed with its hard mattress, and my mother's cross-examinations, not really wanting to know but afraid not to ask, and my desk with the crowded drawers, and my secrets, and the window that was always open in summer, not like this window with the shutter that didn't let in a bit of light or air.

I got up to go to the kitchen, and on the way I pulled his T-shirt off the closet door and put it on, and I took my bag too, and my panties which I found rolled into a ball on the floor, and the cigarettes and matches and ashtray, as if I were going on a trip, and in the ugly fluorescent light I tried to work on the poems I'd started in the morning, which seemed like such a long time ago, as if this would turn the wheel back, to the time when I thought I was the seducer, but nothing came, not a word, and the buzz of the fluorescent reminded me of the bees in the morning, but it was much scarier.

And at one o'clock in the morning he woke up to go to the bathroom and said: “Alona? Where are you? Why did you get up?” and he came into the kitchen with his hair rumpled, stroking his chest which was damp with perspiration, blinking and smiling a drowsy, sensual smile, took a drink of water from the bottle, and asked: “Is everything all right? You can't sleep? What's happening?”

He sat down opposite me and yawned and stretched his legs, and his toes, still warm from bed, touched mine and his toenails pricked me. He looked out through the balcony door into the neighbors' kitchen and said: “I hope they weren't spying on us, those perverts. They're always spying.” He got up and stood behind me, to look at what I was writing, and when I hid the paper napkins with my hand he laughed: “You have secrets from me? From me?” And I thought: Yes. You.

What was the meaning of that hatred I felt, and the fear, and the desire to be alone so I could digest my new maturity like a python digesting a mouse, whose shape you can see clearly in its stomach, and Matti's shape was on me too—all kinds of red marks and little scratches. I know I should have been happy, but I was sad.

“I taught you everything you know,” he yelled at me through his tears a year later, when for the first time he dared to call me at home, because I was always the one who called him: he wasn't allowed to call me. He cried and said: “You can't just leave like that, at least come over and we'll talk.” But I said: “No.” “You think you can leave me a lousy lighter and walk away? Is that what you think?” And I said: “No.” “We'll just talk,” he said. “No,” I said. “I taught you everything you know!” he said, and I heard him light a cigarette and take a deep drag. “Everything! You knew nothing when we met, nothing! Nothing, Alona, not even how to fuck!” I kept quiet, and he saw this as an encouraging sign and said: “Come on, Alona, please. We'll just talk,” and I said, quietly: “No, Matti, no,” and he shouted: “So that's it? Is that all you have to say?” And I hung up.

Sometime during spring I started not to want him, because the winter passed quickly and it was very cold and rainy, and allowed for cuddling and playing hooky from school and stealing into his bed early in the morning and I had my own key, and maybe I mistook all this for love.

He tried to repair the damage and seduce me all over again, and sometimes he begged. But I came over less and less, and I didn't call him from pay phones anymore to chat, and he sat in his apartment and went out of his mind worrying where I was and who I was with, and if I was suddenly growing up behind his back. And when I came over I would take the little gifts he started buying me—earrings, bright plastic rings, pens and pencils and notebooks, and socks—and put them in my bag and ask: “You want to have sex?” And he would look at me suspiciously and say: “But you don't want to.” But I said that I did, and from the minute I lay down on the bed, it made no difference.

But that night there were only the beginnings of love and suffocation, and suddenly he was hungry and said: “There's nothing in the house,” and he opened the fridge and looked inside. “Not a thing,” he said. “The house is totally empty,” and he opened the bread box, and then searched the cupboards. “And there's nothing open around here. All the stores are closed. I'm dying! What are we going to do?”

32

On New Year's Eve they called to say there was a bed. They asked if we could get there on our own and I said no. Not with all the stairs. They said they would send an ambulance in the afternoon and that we should be ready. “Yes,” I said, “thank you very much,” and when I put the phone down I went into the living room and saw him sleeping like a baby, covered with a floral sheet, the TV flickering, the pictures lighting and darkening his face. The children went downtown with my mother, and I could sense the holiday in the building, the tension, the hysteria, and I thought: How can we be ready?

Because except for his left eye it looked like he was just finally sleeping quietly after so many nights of agony, long sweltering nights when he didn't shout anymore, just lay groaning on the sofa, because there was no longer any point in moving him to the bed, and I would lie awake and listen the way you listen to a baby, to catch the crying before it really starts, I would go to him and try to make him more comfortable with all kinds of nonsense like raising his pillow, or lowering it, or adding another one, or taking them both away, and removing the sheet, or bringing him a blanket if he was cold, or moving the fan closer if he was perspiring, and making all kinds of suggestions in a voice I tried to keep as calm as possible, and hear him whispering all the time: “No, no, no.”

The children had gotten used to sleeping with their door closed. They preferred waking up in the dark to hearing him groan or seeing me walking up and down the hallway not knowing what to do. And all the time I was waiting for this call, for them to tell me there was a bed, and only when the woman with the pleasant, practiced voice called did I really understand what it meant, and that when Matti died the same woman would call another woman and say the exact same thing to her.

I opened the closet and took out the duffel bag, which was still full of the dank smell of
Lake Kinneret,
and I shook it out the window, and stood it on the bed and I didn't know what to pack. There was no need for clothes, or for books, so I took a few pairs of socks and underwear from the shelf and put them into the bag, which only made it look larger and emptier.

I went into the living room to check on him. He was still sleeping, and his breathing was quiet and peaceful, and I don't know if it was because he didn't know what was going on, or because he knew that I was in the other room, packing his last bag.

I felt like a traitor and I couldn't go on. I sat in an armchair and looked at him and at the weekend papers strewn over the table, and at a few pieces of the children's jigsaw puzzles that they forgot to put back in the box, and at the banana-flavored yogurt I had tried to feed him this morning with the spoon still in it, and at the layer of dust on everything—I hadn't dusted there in ages because I was afraid to disturb him. The sofa and the table and the carpet underneath were now part of his illness and they looked contagious, and I asked myself if I would have the courage to exchange them for new ones, because I couldn't imagine myself and the kids sitting on this sofa of Matti's, which looked like a stretcher now. I heard the children running up the stairs, followed by my mother's slow steps, and the door opened and suddenly the house filled with the holiday atmosphere, and the children ran straight to their room, even Uri, who was finally learning how to ignore the situation, and my mother remained standing outside and I heard her saying to a neighbor who asked if we needed anything: “No, thank you very much.” “Then Happy New Year,” said the neighbor, “and wish Matti and Mira a Happy New Year too.”

33

He called it “pigging out,” the cheese omelette and the canned soup and the radish salad and the one yogurt he found in the fridge, which looked spoiled anyway.

He cooked cheerfully. He stood at the gas stove and stirred the soup with the impatient movements of a hungry man, and broke two eggs into the pan, and stood on tiptoe to take down a rusty grater from the shelf and grated a little piece of cheese he found in the fridge door, wrapped in plastic, after peeling off the green parts, and he looked at me and said: “Sure you don't want any?” and I said no, and tried to smile and look just tired.

“Are you in a bad mood?” he asked and shoved a forkful of radishes into his mouth. “You look sad. Don't you want to eat? It's delicious!”

“I'm not hungry,” I said.

“But you should eat something,” he said. “It's really good.”

“But I'm not hungry,” I said.

“You are.”

“I'm not.”

“Start eating and you'll get an appetite. Here,” he said, and put some yogurt on a spoon. “Open wide!”

So I ate, unwillingly, with a sour face, spoonful after spoonful, and suddenly, with an appetite, the radish salad too and the cold remains of the omelette. “See?” he said. “You were hungry. Now you'll sleep like a baby.”

And I really did fall asleep, under his arm, and because I was so young it took me a year to realize that what seemed to me like giant steps into a wonderful adulthood were actually steps backward, into a new childhood even worse than the old one.

And when I came home in the morning, my mother didn't have to ask to know that I hadn't been on a trip with the invented Matilda, because I had nothing with me except for my bag with the paper napkins she found later in the garbage and said to me quietly: “Alona, these are your poems. Why throw them away?” and some change, and cigarettes, and in the inside pocket the key he gave me.

All day long I lay in bed and thought about him, and my room which I missed all night suddenly seemed to be mocking me, and the thought about his room, with its darkness and the closed shutters and the life conducted on the floor, seemed like home, not the kind you live in but the kind you take refuge in, like a shelter, and in the evening I lied again and went to him again and at the door my mother grabbed my arm and said: “Do what you want, just be careful.” “And you won't say anything to Dad,” I said. “You promise?” “I won't say anything,” she said, and pressed her finger to her lips, as a gesture of discretion or maybe to hold back a sigh of anxiety—and I ran all the way to his house.

34

Our daily life was so banal that our nights were almost macabre. We both dreaded the moment when darkness would fall signaling the end of all the chores and tasks and small things that kept us busy during the day separating us, and we'd end up sitting together in the same living room, on the same sofa, staring at the same TV set and sharing the same silence.

And I wonder now whether it was really her fault, because you can't lay so much guilt on the shoulders of one little girl, and only now, when he's almost gone, do I dare to think that Alona was my excuse.

He didn't court me. He simply appeared at my door—one time drunk, one time sober, and the third time he showed up one night without warning, and I thought that I was tired of the whole thing and I should just throw him out, but then I noticed that instead of the silver lighter he had a disposable one, and when I asked if he lost the other one, he said: “No. But I know it bothers you, so I bought this one on the way here.”

I knew that this couldn't mean a turning point, or that he's falling in love with me, but it touched me, even though I knew that the silver lighter wasn't really out of our lives, but safely stashed away in his house, or maybe in his pocket.

And at that moment it also didn't bother me that I was caught wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants and socks, not wearing any makeup, because I realized that my role here was not to be an object of desire—that was hopeless—but to be a refuge, something that I know how to do. He said: “I prefer you like this.”

“Like how?” I said.

“Like this. Sloppy. Not all dressed up.”

“Sloppy? This is what I wear around the house.”

“It suits you. And you look good without makeup too.”

“Really?” I said. “You think so? But I would never dare leave the house like this.”

“So maybe you should start daring,” he said.

And I asked: “Dare to do what?”

“Things,” he said. “All sorts of things you wouldn't do if you had too much time to think about them.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Would you like to take a shower with me?”

“I just took one,” I said.

“That's not the point, Mira. But never mind. Forget I said it.”

“What's going on?” I asked. “Are you testing me?”

“No,” he said, “I'm not,” and he stood up to go, forgetting the plastic lighter on the table, and I knew that I had to do something, fast, so I said: “But if you like, you can take a shower. There's plenty of hot water left.”

“And will you keep me company?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I'll keep you company.”