The UnAmericans: Stories (7 page)

“She makes everybody feel guilty,” I said. “That’s her thing. She’s just good under pressure.”

“I guess she did raise you two alone.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet she was always that way. When a bunch of our neighbors got jobs outside the moshav, she just took on more farmwork,” I said. “And you know she used to work folding chutes? If she messed up even once, some soldier could have died.” I regretted the words before they’d left my mouth. There was no point in reminding Yael that I was the only one doing immigrant work in a family of commanders—starting with my grandfather, who’d escaped Vilna, fought in the Givati Brigade back in ’48 and helped found the moshav, back when it was four families dredging a swamp. No point reminding her that I’d failed my placements while my brother was out collecting medals. The physical part hadn’t been so tough, but ever since I was little I’d frozen during exams—and during the interview, I’d stared at the officer’s boots tapping the linoleum floor to a quick, steady beat and gone completely blank. Then my army assignment came in the mail and I had to hand that letter over to my mother—and the worst part was the nonchalance she’d feigned, saying, “Everyone’s good at different things,” and I’d had to pretend to believe her bullshit answer.

Yael and I had forty minutes to kill at the mall before Asaaf’s prescription was filled, so we flipped through magazines at the newsstand, then rode the escalator up to Ozen HaShlishi and listened to music. I bought chips and we shared them on a bench. A guy I knew from high school walked out of McDonald’s and was halfway down the escalator when he turned and saw me. I waved, grateful someone noticed us.

“So you’re really just going home when you’re discharged?” she said, and I stared at her: she talked this way with my brother, sharing random bits of conversations that must have been running in her head and assuming he’d understand. It had always made them seem so close, as if every sentence were some intimate, privileged thing. Of course I wanted to go traveling. But the other drivers in my unit couldn’t afford vacations like the U.S.—Amare had already lined up a job with Nesher Cabs at the airport, and Stas was saving up to visit his family in Odessa.

“Who told you that?” I said.

“Asaaf. He was worried you didn’t have anything going on.”

“When did he say that?”

“I don’t know. A month ago?”

I hated thinking about them pitying me—as if my life could be sketched out so easily, going straight from finishing the army next month to tilling the same fields for sixty years to being one of those old moshavniks who was too arthritic to milk the goats but still hung out by the dairy, just to have a place to spend his days. “Maybe I
like
the moshav.” I was filled with a sudden need to let her know I’d be missed if I left. “I help put on the harvest fest in September, and it’s nice how quiet it gets during the winter.”

“Asaaf can’t stand the winter there,” she said. “He goes crazy during the rain.”

“Asaaf doesn’t do shit during the rainy season. He just likes to complain.”

She smiled. “He
does
like to complain, doesn’t he?”

“You have no idea,” I said, getting excited. “The moment he’s back in civilian clothes he’s a fucking baby. I still don’t know how you got him to agree to another farm.”

“Oh, he whined,” she said. “But it’s totally worth it—the woman who runs it does biodynamic everything on land twice the size of yours. Everybody pitches tents and sleeps out there too, not like here where the moment the sun’s down we’re all in front of the TV.” It was just like her to have found this place, some secret part of America I never would have known to look for myself, beautiful and forested and calm, where people slept in the middle of a field, unafraid of anyone or anything coming after you. Suddenly she looked like the Yael I’d always known, so enthusiastic that on any other girl her earnestness might have embarrassed me, and before I could stop myself I said, “What’s with California now?”

“I’m not going without him.”

“What does he say?”

“That I should, of course. But there’s no way he means it.”

“He does,” I said, and knew it. I wondered what it was like to love someone so deeply their happiness overpowered your own. I had no idea—I only knew that right then, sitting beside her, I was seized by a genuine moment of boldness and wanted to use it, before it disappeared.

“I’ll be discharged in a month,” I said. “Let me come with you.”

“You?” she said. And then she didn’t say anything else. She wasn’t even looking at me. I followed her eyes, but all I saw was the never-ending line of people outside the mall entrance, waiting for the guards to scan them through. We were so close I could see all these things that should have made her less beautiful: the faint fuzz above her lip, the constellation of acne scars on her jawline. It was requiring a lot of effort to breathe, and I hadn’t realized I was flicking at a hangnail until my thumb started to bleed.

“This is all so crazy,” she said finally. Her voice was flat and small, and I didn’t even know which part of the craziness she was referring to.

Then she turned to me. “Just promise,” she said, swallowing, “that when we’re out on the farm, you’ll let me win at cards at least a couple times.”

She smiled, and I saw something pass over her face, a flash of recognition—and the thought that all this time she’d remembered those rides gave me such a jolt that I stood up. I took her hand and led her to the escalator, as though we were about to navigate a dangerous intersection. Then I let go, stepped onto the moving stairs and she followed right behind. I could feel her gaze on me the whole ride down to the pharmacy but knew not to turn around, not even once—a move I’d seen my brother make on a hundred occasions but was only now, for the first time, pulling off perfectly myself.

T
HE MORPHINE
worked for Asaaf’s pain but made him nauseated. He threw up his breakfast, then his lunch. The three of us hovered over him, fluffing his pillows, feeling his forehead, offering dry toast and seltzer, which he threw up as well. His shades were down, blocking out the sun and everything else, and even in the dim, cool room with the AC on high, Asaaf was visibly sweating. When he rolled onto his back, his penis slid out of his boxers. All three of us saw it, all three of us said nothing, and I wondered if Asaaf was too drugged to even know. Finally my mother pulled the sheet to his chest and she and Yael stepped back into the hall, but I couldn’t stop watching him. It was horrible, seeing a guy once so in control of his body rolling and squirming and dry-heaving now that everything he’d ingested was in the wastebasket beside him.

“Would you get the fuck out of here, Oren?” he said finally, opening one eye. He’d never talked that way to me before and it stung more than I wanted to admit, and when his new crutches arrived in the mail later that day, I devoted myself to putting them together, grateful to have a project that kept me out of his room. My mother had ordered them from Jerusalem, and they were about a thousand times nicer than the junky pair the hospital had given us, with aluminum legs and removable handgrips. I’d always liked these kinds of tasks—when I was little I used to take apart our answering machine to see how it worked, then screw it back together—but it was distracting having Yael next to me, reading the instruction manual aloud, and I kept putting the underarm pads on backwards.

By late afternoon, Asaaf’s food was staying down and Yael went to check on him. She didn’t have to say anything: as she walked slowly down the hall, I knew she was going to tell him. She stepped into his room and closed the door behind her. I stared at the instructions and told myself the least I could do was give them privacy. Outside the window, my mother paced up the driveway, talking on the cordless. I took a deep breath, let it out quick. Then I tiptoed down the hall and pressed my ear to the door.

“I’ll be here when you’re back—it’s not like
I’m
going anywhere,” Asaaf said. He laughed, but it sounded breathless and raw, like he was blowing out a match.

“And Oren?”

“Why would I give a shit? You can nerd out on the farm together.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Asaaf said, and when Yael didn’t respond he said it again, and again, until they fell into silence. I pictured them on the bed, neither of them knowing what to say next. Maybe they were holding hands. Or maybe Yael had tucked her head under his armpit, the way they used to lie together, as if her body were an extension of his. Finally the television flicked on; I heard the false ring of a laugh track. Amid its buzz was the rustle of sheets, a few muffled breaths, and then it got quiet. I heard Yael apologize.

“It’s okay,” Asaaf mumbled. “Let’s try again.”

“Like this?”

“Maybe this way. Be patient?”

And she was, until they were hushed for so long I assumed my brother had fallen asleep. I imagined him taking up the entire bed, Yael sequestered to the side, sweaty and anxious and wondering how long she had to stay in that vomitus room—and then I imagined her walking out and finding me at the door, so I went into the kitchen, where our neighbors Uri and Hadas were coming in with dinner platters.

“Tonight we’ve got salad, beets and a kibbeh,” Uri said. “Your mom says that’s your favorite, right, Oren?”

I nodded, genuinely touched.

Yael walked in and gave everyone a halfhearted wave. She rubbed her eyes, as if she’d just stopped crying or was trying to keep the tears from coming out at all.

“How’s the morphine working?” my mother asked.

“Better,” Yael said, “but he was complaining about itching.”

“I’ll go check on him,” my mother said, but Hadas stopped her and said, “Let me. Why don’t you all relax a minute?”

I did what I was told. I sat on the couch and Hadas handed me a soda. Uri turned on the oven and set the tray of kibbeh inside, and as the smell of onions and cinnamon filled the room, I circled an arm around my mother, the other around Yael and waited for my dinner.

T
HE NEIGHBORS
’ visits lasted two more days, through Shabbat. Then another week began, and Uri hosed the blood off the tractor and worked the fields himself. My mother went back to the vines, and that evening, when no one came by with a hot meal, we cooked the same hurried dinner we always had. Once again we ate with the radio on, this time tuned to the weather as temperatures climbed into the forties and there was talk of the heat wave not letting up for weeks. Now that Yael had decided to go to America she was around less: driving around buying gear or seeing her parents in Yoqneam. And with only a week to prepare for the trip before I was back in the army, I was busier than I’d been in years. It was as if we were all desperate for a reason to escape the house—but Asaaf, who needed fresh air more than any of us, refused to leave his bed. His TV was always on, like a never-ending soundtrack, and though he should have been on crutches by now, they were still leaning against his dresser, unused. Every time my mother peeked into his room and tried to get him to start doing exercises, warning about blood clots, he’d say he wasn’t ready. And when I suggested we take a walk, even up the driveway and back, he snapped that his room was off-limits and to get out. The sound of the TV, and his smell, began to stop bothering me—and even seeing him in bed started to feel normal, as if he had become as much a part of it as the mattress and box springs.

It cost too much to pay a nurse for more than Sunday home visits, so now that my mother and Yael were running around all day and I still had another week of leave, it was my job to check on Asaaf and to cook for everyone. But on Asaaf’s ninth day back from the hospital, my mother didn’t come home to eat at noon, or at one, and finally at two I went out in the fields to look for her. I found her hunched over the tomato vines. She was in her work clothes, cutoffs and sneakers and a ratty green t-shirt, and when I knelt beside her I saw the blackened bottoms on the tomatoes. I walked through the rows of vines and checked every piece of fruit—just to do something, really, since I knew she’d already inspected the entire crop, probably twice. Only about half the fruit was black, but blossom end rot spread quickly enough that it would be on every tomato by the morning.