Girl Unwrapped (24 page)

“She’s such a snoop,” Toni declares to her friends as they sit beneath the fig tree. “She’s not even embarrassed about being a snoop. She says, ‘A mother needs to know.’”

Late afternoon sunlight slants into the garden. Deep shadows pool. One of David’s creations—a tin can head with glass bead eyes and a ragged smile—peers out of thick foliage.

“Can’t let go of her baby,” David says.

The table is covered with his cigarette-rolling apparatus: tobacco tin, grass pouch, papers. He deftly strews, rolls, licks, seals, makes a supply of tobacco-laced-with-pot joints for the three of them. He raises a knowing eyebrow. “She needs to live out her life through you. Needs to suck your blood.” He makes a slurping, vampirish sound.

Toni is struck dumb by the ghoulish image, a harsher assessment of her mother than she actually meant. But maybe he’s right. Lisa’s expectations have been driven by reaction to old wounds and losses, deprivations and failures. And she’s not unique. That whole generation tries to hitch a ride on its children’s wings, and must be shaken off or no one will fly.

“My mother couldn’t wait to get rid of me,” Janet says. She flicks ash toward her plate and misses, and it scatters onto the table instead. “I’m the black sheep because I don’t make nice. She told me to shape up or ship out. The cold bitch.”

Toni stares, amazed. Her own mother could never be called cold. She remembers being clutched and sobbed over at the airport before leaving for Israel—embarrassing at the time, but not without its comfort. Poor Janet. And broke too. The lovers live on what? Some meagre savings. David’s occasional sales of hash. Life is cheap in Israel, but still. An expansive wave of tenderness washes over Toni’s heart. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a wad of Israeli lira notes, and places it in a crumpled wad on the wicker table between Janet’s and David’s plates.

“For the food,” she says. “I’ve been eating here every day.”

The lovers exchange glances. The lavish pile of money far exceeds the value of the simple fare Toni has consumed with her pals.

“For the dope too,” Toni adds, lest her offer be rejected. “Don’t forget the dope.”

She’s ready to get down on her knees and beg them to accept. David tips back his stool, folds his hands behind his head, and closes his eyes in contemplation. His black hair, bound in a pony tail, gives him a sleek, canny look, like a wolf. Janet studies the purple bougainvillea that cascades over the back wall. At last David speaks.

“It’s the nuclear family that screws people up. And the western obsession with individuality. Communes are the way to go. Everyone equal.”

His big paw reaches out and pockets the money. Janet remains in her faraway trance, as if this transaction has nothing to do with her.

“So move in with us already,” David says. “There’s plenty of space.”

For a moment, Toni thinks he wants her to move with them into the shed. She sees herself curled up at the foot of their mattress bed like a pet, like another piece of flotsam and jetsam in their room. But no, he means for her to rent a nook in the main house where Mrs Katz, a widow, lives alone. If she agrees, as David is sure she will, Toni would no longer have to schlep back home in the evenings to the dorms in Kiryat Hayovel on the western edge of town. After all, they have become a kind of family. An alternative family. The more David talks, the more inspired he appears, eyes burning, hands chopping the air. Janet’s eyes are downcast. She lifts her head to peer at David, and a funny laugh falls from her lips, expressing something between incredulity and affection.

“You beautiful lunatic,” she says.

Although she would have preferred a stronger endorsement, Toni allows herself a whoop of joy.

I’ll make her see it was a good idea. I’ll make her see.

At first, Mrs Katz drives an impossibly hard bargain for allowing Toni the privilege of sleeping on her living room couch and the use of a couple of shelves of a linen closet. But when David lets drop that Toni’s parents are from cultivated German-speaking Europe, the old woman’s bushy eyebrows shoot up in appreciation and her price drops. She herself hails from Frankfurt. She approves of Toni’s short, sensible haircut, easily maintained through a cold-water wash over the bathroom sink. A well-bred, serious-minded person, Mrs Katz decides. Not the type to squander hot water with absurdly long showers. Not like a certain someone. The wizened face scowls at the curtains of hair that tumble down Janet’s shoulders. Janet rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. A deal is struck. Toni’s signature joins the others on the rental agreement.

The first night in her new abode, Toni lies stiffly on the narrow couch, acutely aware of strangeness—the heavy, dark-wood furniture looming around her, its dull gleams, the snore of her landlady in the adjoining room, the erratic tick of a dying clock. A portrait of one of Mrs Katz’s relatives reminds Toni of Grandma Antonia. Toni vividly envisions the stern face, though it has been years since Grandma’s picture was anything more to her than a brown shape on her parents’ bedroom dresser. Now, once again, Grandma stares through the darkness, tight-lipped and inscrutable. Now she glides out of the picture frame and down the hall. She flies across the garden, cackling as she goes, to stand before the shed where the lovers lie enfolded together. Her claw-like hands grasp the handles of the metal doors. She rattles and rattles until Toni’s eyes fly open to behold a shaft of dawn light penetrating the shutters of the living room window above her couch. An early bird peeps plaintively as if it wants to come in.

Pulling on a sweatshirt, Toni creeps into the garden, which is misty and grey, cool and slightly damp with dew. She lowers herself onto a wicker stool and watches as shapes gradually reveal themselves: the long spiny spears of an agave plant, the lobed leaves of the fig tree, the gentle outline of the garden wall, the latched metal doors of the shed. She sits and waits and sometimes she paces. At last the doors of the shed scrape open. Janet staggers out, pale and squinty-eyed, holding her hands up against the blinding light of day. “Gotta pee,” she growls as she lurches past Toni across the yard. Janet is not a morning person. David emerges soon afterwards, bare-chested, flinging back his arms in a luxurious stretch, and then cocks his head quizzically at Toni, at the flush creeping up her cheeks.

“I wanted to see the sunrise,” Toni says.

“Hm,” David muses, rubbing his thumb up and down in the cleft of his chin, while in his eyes there’s an intelligent gleam.

chapter 18

Kotz,
Michal scrawls on the blackboard and stabs her finger against her palm to indicate a thorn. “
Ketz
,” she says with hand-wiping gestures that cause Toni’s classmates to murmur knowingly: “the end.” “
Kayitz
,” the teacher declares as she points through the window at the white-hot sky of summer. Toni listlessly copies the three words that share a common root and are bound in a web of connotations. Summer means the end of the growing season in the arid Middle East, the time of scorched earth and the rule of thorns. Her classmates call out other words related to the root letters that Michal has underlined, but Toni’s gaze drifts to the window that looks toward the wadi and the beckoning treetops of Beit HaKerem in the distance. Yes, thorns pierce the flesh like summer’s heat pierces the body as the end of love would pierce the heart, she muses. When her attention returns to the moment, she finds the class has gone on to discuss other subjects. She’s behind in all the lessons but can’t make herself care. Time creeps so slowly in
ulpan
. At last she is free to dash out the door.

Janet barely looks up when Toni arrives. She’s seated on the mattress amid a chaos of bedding and sheet music, coaxing notes from her guitar.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she moans when her fingers slip and a bass string squawks. She’s trying something difficult, a Spanish-sounding melody with complicated rhythms and arpeggios. Her left hand splays awkwardly over the frets. As quietly as she can, Toni lowers herself onto the battered leather hassock to listen. David’s off somewhere in the hills on his own, so she and Janet are alone.
Sing
, Toni wants to say, but restrains herself. It’s been a while since Janet made any effort with her music. Of late, she’s been sleeping away half the day and spending the other in a trance of dope. “I’m so lazy,” she said one evening when David proposed a hike into town. She leaned way back on his arm so he had to hold her up or she would have fallen over. She was like a rag doll, with her head upside down, her hair dangling.

Now, Toni hunches forward to lose herself in the lovely ripple of guitar notes, in the warm tones of Janet’s hair, the dance of freckles on her face. Six on Janet’s forehead, three on her chin, that one in the bow of her lip, dozens on her cheeks. Counting seems almost like touching.

A squeak. A buzz. The music stops.

“Why can’t I play? Why can’t I play?”

Janet rubs her sweaty hands against her shorts. She thunks her head backward against the wall, causing Toni to feel the “ow” in her own skull.

“You need a break,” Toni urges.

Janet flings the guitar away from herself onto the bed, where it falls with a groaning hum. She stomps over to the record player in the corner, clicks it on, drops the needle onto the groove of a spinning LP. Judy Collins’ pure soprano singing “Both Sides Now” pours into the room.

“Listen to that,” Janet says miserably. “She’s so good, she’s not even human.”

“But you’re just as good. Better!” Toni cries out, though Janet frowns, as if the overblown compliment distresses her. How could Janet, golden-throated Janet, doubt herself? “I love your voice.”

Janet picks up a hand mirror from the clutter on the bed and studies her own face.

“Maybe I should get that chemical peel my mother always wanted me to have.”

“What!”

“I look like a bowl of cornflakes. Especially in this climate.”

“I love your freckles.”

Janet barks out a laugh. Her knuckle grazes the spot on her lip in an unconscious erasing gesture.

“I’m glad someone does. Ah, shit.” The mirror skids across the floor. Janet’s shoulders slump. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just wish I could … I just wish …”

“What do you wish? Tell me. Tell me.”

Janet seems on the verge of pained revelations. Toni moves to the edge of the bed, trembling with eagerness to hear, to know, to console. She reaches out her hand despite the acid voice inside that tells her to stop. Too late. When Janet raises her head, a guarded look has come into her eyes, a wariness that chills.

“Let’s go find David,” Janet says crisply and jumps to her feet.

He is not hard to find. He’s seated upon the low wall of a lookout in the nearby Jerusalem forest, engrossed in a book. The lookout is on a summit, affording splendid views of tree-covered slopes, the soldiers’ cemetery below, and brown, uncultivated hills in the distance. Every tree around them was planted in recent decades by the young state of Israel—part of the pioneering effort to transform barren lands into a sea of green. It is a beautiful, if unnatural-looking, forest of wind-sculpted pines and pointy cedars, all much the same size. The trails are dotted with plaques to Zionist notables and donors. David has mocked the bloated dedications: “The Leonard and Mintzy Sugerman Grove. In appreciation of their generosity, blah, blah.” Yet it is here, at this popular lookout, he often positions himself. A shaft of late-afternoon sunlight penetrates the branches above to gild his bowed head. You’d think he’d planned for them to find him thus.

When he looks up, his glittering eyes still hold that other world of the spirit he’s been immersed in: Hasidic tales, mystical teachings.

“These guys blow my mind.”

David waves his book aloft and giggles with nervous energy. “Their stories shake you, wake you. I might join a Hasidic sect. I could get into that. The Conservative Judaism I grew up with is pablum. But this stuff is
real
.”

“David,” Janet says, looking him straight in the eye, “I’m going back to Tel Aviv.”

She’s breathless from her quick tramp uphill, and the words have tumbled out, more abruptly than she meant them to, perhaps. Now she stands, feet apart, arms across her chest, and waits. Toni stands stricken. Janet’s news is a blow to the gut. But after lowering the book to his lap, David just cocks his head and gazes back evenly. The excitement has vanished from his eyes, replaced by something dull and hard.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

“If that’s what you want.”

His mouth smiles.

“Will you come too?”

“No,” he answers. He draws the word out, the tone reproving, like a parent telling a child it can’t have that toy and ought to know better. His face continues to smile in that bland, distancing way. When Janet remains silent he adds: “This is where I’ve got to be.” He inhales deeply, as if to indicate the nourishing, soul-expanding quality of the air of Jerusalem. “This is where I can breathe.”

“Well, I can’t. I’m suffocating. I’m stagnating.”

“If that’s how you see it.” He shrugs.

Janet’s stance wilts. Gazing bleakly at the hills, she looks like someone who has painted herself into a corner. Neither of them pays any attention to Toni, whose nails dig deeply into her agitated palms. They don’t consult Toni because, after all, this doesn’t concern her. It’s between the two of them. None of her business.

And just like that—through a word, a look—their tribe of three is blown apart, all these weeks of togetherness, chaff in the wind.

She attempts to give them space, so they can spend their last days together, so they can’t blame her for interfering. She hears urgent murmurings, long silences. She knows it makes no sense, but at some level she blames herself for driving Janet away. Was it not that moment when her craving for closeness came to the surface—
What do you wish? Tell
me—
that tipped Janet over the edge? Despair whispers that this is so, every waking moment. Now, she slips away early to
ulpan
and returns late. She passes like a ghost through the kitchen and avoids their communal place beneath the fig tree. She hopes that Janet is just a little bit aware of her sacrifices.