The Girl on the Fridge: Stories (4 page)

Alone

He told her that he once had a girlfriend who liked to be alone. And that was very sad, because they were a couple, and
couple
, by definition, means “together.” But mostly she preferred to be alone. So once he asked her, “Why? Is it me?”

And she said, “No, it has nothing to do with you, it’s me, it has to do with my childhood.”

He really didn’t get it, the childhood thing, so he tried to find an analogy in his own childhood, but he came up empty. The more he thought about it, the more his childhood seemed like a cavity in somebody else’s tooth—unhealthy, but no big deal, at least not to him. And that girl, who liked to be alone, kept hiding from him, and all because of her childhood. It pissed him off. Finally, he told her, “Either you explain it to me or we stop being a couple.” She said okay, and they stopped being a couple.

Ogette is Sympathetic

“That’s very sad,” Ogette said. “Sad and, at the same time, moving.”

“Thanks,” Nahum said and took a sip of his juice.

Ogette saw there were tears in his eyes, and she didn’t want to upset him, but in the end she couldn’t resist. “So to this day,” she asked, “you don’t know what it was in her childhood that made her leave you?”

“She didn’t leave me,” Nahum corrected her. “We broke up.”

“Broke up, whatever,” Ogette said.

“It’s not ‘whatever,’” Nahum insisted, “it’s my life. For me, at least, those are significant distinctions.”

“And to this day, you don’t know what event in her childhood started all this?” Ogette continued.

“It wasn’t any event,” Nahum corrected her again. “No one started anything—no one but you here now.” And after a short silence, he added, “Yeah, it had something to do with the refrigerator.”

Not Nahum’s

When Nahum’s girlfriend was little, her parents had no patience for her because she was little and full of energy, and they were already old and worn-out. Nahum’s girlfriend tried to play with them, to talk to them, but that only annoyed them more. They didn’t have the strength. They didn’t even have enough strength to tell her to shut her mouth. So instead, they used to hoist her up, sit her on the refrigerator, and go to work. Or wherever they had to go. The refrigerator was very high, and Nahum’s girlfriend couldn’t get down. And so it happened that she spent most of her childhood on top of the refrigerator. It was a very happy childhood. While other people got the crap beaten out of them by their big brothers, Nahum’s girlfriend sat on the edge of the fridge, sang to herself, and drew little pictures in the layer of dust around her. The view from up there was very beautiful, and her bottom was nice and warm. Now that she was older, she missed that time, that alone time, very much. Nahum understood how sad it made her, and once he even tried to fuck her on top of the refrigerator, but that didn’t work.

“That’s an awfully beautiful story,” Ogette whispered, brushing Nahum’s hand with hers.

“Yes,” Nahum mumbled, pulling his arm back. “An awfully beautiful story, but it isn’t mine.”

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I brought him a gold-plated navel cleaner with
FOR THE MAN WHO HAS EVERYTHING
inscribed across the handle. It was a toss-up between that and
Axis of Evil—Axis of Hope
. I spent a long time going back and forth. My dad was in a good mood all evening. He was the life of the party. He showed everyone how he brushed his navel clean, and he trumpeted like a happy elephant. My mom kept telling him, “Come on, Menachem, give it a rest.” But he didn’t.

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, the tenant who lives in the upstairs apartment decided he wasn’t leaving, even though his lease was up. “Look, Mr. Fullman,” he said, hunched over a dismantled Marantz amp, like a butcher. “In February I’m off to New York to open a stereo lab with my brother-in-law, and I’m not about to move all my shit out just to move it again in two months.” And when my dad told him the lease was up in December, Electronics Man went right on working as if nothing had happened and said in the tone you use to shake off one of those door-to-door guys asking for donations to a worthy cause, “Lease-shmease, I’m staying. You don’t like it? Then sue me,” and stabbed his screwdriver all the way through the amplifier’s guts.

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I went with him to see his lawyer, and the lawyer said our hands were tied. “Settle,” he suggested, rummaging through his drawer in a desperate search for something. “Try to get another three, four hundred out of him, and leave it at that. A lawsuit, you’ll get an ulcer, and after two years of running around that may be all you get.”

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I asked him why we don’t just go into Electronics Man’s apartment at night and change the lock and dump all his stuff in the front yard. And my dad said that was illegal, and I shouldn’t even think about it. I asked if it was because he was afraid, and he said no, just realistic. “What’s the point?” he asked and rubbed his bald spot. “You tell me, what is the point? Over a couple of months? Forget it, it’s not worth the effort.”

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I thought back about what he’d been like when I was a kid. A towering man who worked for the city. He took me places. He’d carry me piggyback. I’d yell “Giddyup,” and he’d run up and down the stairs, with me on his back like a lunatic. Back then he wasn’t realistic. He was world champion.

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I stood on the landing and took a good look. He was bald, he had a little potbelly, he hated his wife, who was my mom. People kept stepping on him and he’d tell himself it wasn’t worth the effort. I thought of the asshole tenant stabbing amplifiers up there in the apartment that had belonged to my grandfather who was dead, and just knowing that my dad won’t do a thing, because he’s tired, because he hasn’t got the balls. Because even his son, who’s only twenty-three, won’t do a thing.

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I thought about life for a second. About how it spits in your face. About how you’re always letting assholes have their way because they’re not worth the effort. I thought about myself, about my girlfriend, Tali, who I don’t really love, about the bald spot hiding under my hairline, about the inertia that somehow always keeps me from telling a girl I don’t know on the bus that she’s really pretty, from getting off when she does and buying her flowers. My dad had gone back inside, and I was left on the landing by myself. The light clicked off and I didn’t even go turn it back on. I felt as if I was choking. I felt like a Coke that’s gone flat. I thought about my kids, who’d go scurrying like mice through an underground mall just to bring me back a copy of
Axis of Evil—Axis of Hope
.

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I whacked his tenant across the face with a wrench. “You broke my nose,” Shlomi whimpered, writhing on the floor. “You broke my nose.”

“Nose-shnose.” I lifted the Phillips screwdriver off his workbench. “You don’t like it? Then sue me.” I thought about my dad, who must be sitting in the bedroom now, cleaning his navel with a brush with a gold-plated handle. It pissed me off. It enraged me. I put the screwdriver down and gave him a kick in the head for good measure.

In the corner of the balcony next to the stained picture of Demis Roussos sat a scary bald guy no one knew, eating olives and trying to hit the garbage cans in the yard with the pits. “In my café, you can talk about anything but politics,” the Romanian reminded the table near the door. “Gossip, talk about sports, even sex if you want to, just no politics. It ruins everyone’s appetite.” They say that once, when the café had just opened—the British were still here—some Revisionist called Ben-Gurion a “midget” and there was such a brawl that not a single table was left standing.

“Pussy kills my appetite, too,” Davidoff muttered under his breath. “Besides, it’s not as if anyone comes here to eat.” But everyone respected the Romanian, so they started talking about the mosquitoes, which bit everyone but Mitzenmacher’s wife; even they were afraid to get close to her. The bald guy in the corner coughed once, dramatically. And when they all looked over, he started to speak:

“All the parties are swindlers and cowards, believe me,” he said in a booming voice. “Take the religious parties, for instance. They turn the country upside down, then laugh in our faces.” The café was suddenly silent, and from behind the espresso machine came the sound of breaking glass.

Davidoff chuckled with pleasure and said, “The Romanian broke another glass.”

“Wait a minute. Am I right or not?” the bald guy continued in a provocative voice, waving the newspaper he’d been hiding under his napkin as proof. “There’s a story in today’s paper about a million dollars they gave to some yeshiva that didn’t even exist—it was, you know, ‘fictitious’—while other people break their asses out in the sticks and go to live in tents—”

“Sir, it is one of the unwritten laws of this institution that there will be no discussion of—” Mitzenmacher said, in the style he’d developed back when he worked at the Ministry of the Interior.

“Calm down, Mitzi,” said Davidoff. “Let the man express himself.” Davidoff put a hand on Mitzi’s shoulder, hiding a malicious smile.

The bald guy waved a thank-you to Davidoff, ate another olive, threw the pit from the balcony, and went on talking. “And it’s not just the religious ones, it’s all of them. A corrupt government, that’s what we have…” The Romanian appeared from behind the counter and starting walking toward the bald guy, gripping the tables as he moved, his forehead red and sweaty, his scrawny arms looking hairier than usual. “…Believe me, if it was up to me, I’d kill all hundred and sixty Knesset members,” the bald guy continued in his aggressive voice.

“But there’s only a hundred and twenty,” Davidoff said, egging him on.

“First we’ll kill forty,” the bald guy said and snickered, “and when they put new ones in their place, we knock off all hundred and twenty at once.”

“I am asking you to leave the café right now,” the Romanian ordered in a broken voice, his long face covered with dark stubble.

“Hey, what’s with you, old man?” the bald guy hissed and popped another olive in his mouth. “We’re talking a little politics here, so what? We live in this country, right? So we’re not allowed to say a word?”

“I demand that you leave right now,” the Romanian rasped, leaning on a chair, the beads of sweat dripping from his bushy eyebrows into his thick beard.

“Would it be such a tragedy…,” Mitzenmacher muttered, trying to get up from his chair again.

“Come on, Mitzi, sit down and eat your ice-cream cake before it turns into milk-shake cake,” Davidoff ordered, and Mitzenmacher fell back into his seat.

“The problem with this country is that we have people like you,” the bald guy continued, shoving the olive pit into the Romanian’s apron pocket, “who got used to keeping quiet and eating the shit. Believe me, if you’d opened your traps thirty years ago, those gangsters wouldn’t be sitting in the Knesset today.” The back of the chair broke under the Romanian’s weight, but he remained standing, a quiet growl issuing from his drooling mouth. “All that stealing started a long time ago. Anyone who knows a little history will tell you that Ben-Gurion…”

“Uh-oh,” Davidoff said. This was, ostensibly, a warning.

The Romanian gave a bloodcurdling roar, jumped through the air, and ripped out a piece of the bald guy’s shoulder with his canines. It was over in seconds.

“Believe me,” said Davidoff with a chuckle, “I haven’t seen the Romanian this worked up since Passover, two years ago, when a guy started talking about the embargo.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.” Mitzenmacher rebuked him and went to help the Romanian, who was sitting on the floor, hiding his face in his blood-soaked apron and whimpering.

“I don’t know what came over me, I turned into a real animal,” he wailed. “It’s from Transylvania. Back there they never stopped with the politics…” He started to cry.

“There, there,” said Mitzenmacher, stroking his head, trying to console him. “And you,” he called to Davidoff, who was sharing his thoughts with the others at his table, “bury this poor bastard in the yard.”

“But I haven’t finished my coffee,” said Davidoff, trying to weasel out of it. “Let someone else do it.”

Mitzenmacher glared and handed him a shovel.

“Okay, okay,” Davidoff said, rising. “But I better not get any blood on my Lacoste shirt. I only just got it last week.” And with that he rolled up his sleeves.

To Eyal

They used to talk a lot about life, about this and that: yes I’m happy, no I’m not happy, I miss that girl, I want that job, I’m looking for a challenge. Most of the time, they lied. Not on purpose, it just happened, and after a while they both started getting tired of it. So they stopped that, and moved on to other things, like the stock market, or sports. Then Uzi came up with the idea of the four-beer test. It was simple: every three weeks they’d go into a bar and they’d each drink four pints. The first they’d polish off without a word. After the second one they’d talk about how they felt, the same after numbers three and four. They always left a big tip. Sometimes they’d throw up, but the owners got used to it. Then Eitan went off to reserve duty for a month, and after that Uzi had this big project at work, so they wound up not meeting for six weeks. In those six weeks, Eitan grew a really cool little hippie-style beard and Uzi quit smoking three different times.

“Today we’ll have to order eight beers,” Uzi said as they went into the bar, “to make up for lost time.”

Eitan smiled. They weren’t big drinkers, and even four pints was much too much. The TV was on over the bar, but without the sound. They were showing the highlights from the first heats in the Commonwealth Games.

“Check out the British dude, how happy he looks.” Uzi laughed and pointed at a scrawny figure jumping up and down on the screen. “What’s he getting so worked up about? All he did was come in first in his heat in the pre-prelims of some godforsaken race. It’s like the pre-Eurovision of track and field. The way he’s jumping around you’d think he’d won three Olympic medals—platinum.”

“When it comes to long distance, the Europeans don’t stand a chance, not in the Olympics,” Eitan said. “The Africans are destroying them. The Commonwealth’s all they’ve got.”

“No shit,” Uzi persisted, “but just because he hasn’t got a chance of placing at the Olympics, is that any reason to be jumping for joy? Besides, he hasn’t actually won anything yet, it’s only the heats.”

They downed the first beer, then the second. Uzi asked Eitan about his stint in the reserves. Eitan said it had been okay. Eitan asked him how the project had gone.

“Okay,” Uzi said. “Really. Okay. But for the past couple of months I’ve been feeling, I don’t know, kind of down. The spark just isn’t there. Not when I go in, not while I’m working, not when I go home at night. No spark. You know?”

They drank their third and Eitan said that was how it was, everyone feels that way sometimes. He could hold his liquor much better than Uzi. Whenever anyone threw up, it tended to be Uzi. According to the rules, Uzi was supposed to say something too, but he didn’t. He just bummed a cigarette off the waitress, lit up, and stared at the screen. It was some variety show with Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. Eitan kidded him about how he could ask the barman to turn up the volume. Uzi didn’t even answer.

“I thought you said the acupuncture did you some good,” Eitan said, looking at Uzi, who’d smoked his cigarette all the way down and was trying not to burn his fingers on the butt.

“That Dr. Weiss is a charlatan,” said Uzi. “Acupuncture doesn’t do shit.”

The waitress smoked filterless. Uzi took one long final drag and it vanished like magic. He didn’t even have to put it out or anything, there was simply nothing left. They drank the fourth pint. Eitan barely managed to finish, he was feeling sick as hell. Uzi was actually looking cool and asked the waitress for another cigarette.

“Tell you something,” Uzi said once that cigarette had vanished too, “I’ve had it.”

“With the cigarettes?”

“With everything.” Uzi pushed down hard on the ashtray, like he was trying to extinguish his finger too. “With everything. None of it means anything, none of it. You know how it feels when you’re someplace and you ask yourself, Why am I here? That’s how it is with me all the time. I can’t wait to leave. To go from wherever I am to some other place. It never ends. I swear, I’d have killed myself a long time ago if I wasn’t such a pussy.”

“Cut it out,” Eitan tried. “That isn’t you talking, it’s the beer. Tomorrow you’re going to wake up feeling like hell and you’ll tell yourself you were talking some serious bullshit. Then you’ll decide to quit smoking.”

Uzi didn’t laugh. “I know,” he muttered. “I know it’s the beer. Tomorrow I’ll sound different. I thought that was the whole point.”

They took a cab home. The first stop was Uzi’s.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” Eitan said and gave him a hug before he got out of the cab. “Don’t do anything retarded.”

“Don’t worry.” Uzi smiled. “I’m not going to kill myself or anything. I don’t have the balls. If I did, I’d have done it a long time ago.”

Next, the cab dropped Eitan at his place, and he went upstairs. He had a gun in the drawer. He’d bought it with sporting-goods coupons he’d received when he was an officer. Not that he was trigger-happy or anything, but it was either that or signing for an M16 every time he went on leave. Eitan took the gun out of his underwear drawer and cocked it. He held it up to his chin. Someone had told him once that if you shoot from underneath, it wipes out your brain stem. When you shoot at the temple, the slug could go right through and you’d wind up a vegetable. He released the safety.

“If I want to, I can shoot,” he said out loud. He ordered his brain to pull the trigger. His finger obeyed, but stopped halfway. He could do it, he wasn’t scared. He just had to make sure he wanted to. He thought about it for a few seconds. Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn’t find any meaning to life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time. He wanted to live, he really did. That’s all there was to it. Eitan gave his finger another order to make sure he wasn’t kidding himself. It still seemed prepared to do whatever he wanted. He put the gun on half cock and pushed the safety back in. If not for those four beers, he’d never even have tried it. He would have made up an excuse, said it was just a dumb test, that it didn’t mean anything. But like Uzi said, that was the whole point. He put the gun back in the drawer and went into the bathroom to puke. Then he washed his face and soaked his head in the sink. Before drying himself, he took a look in the mirror. A skinny guy, wet hair, a little pale, like that runner on TV. He wasn’t jumping or yelling or anything, but he’d never felt this good.