The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (14 page)

“So then I asked him what he liked about me, why he wanted to be my boyfriend, and you know what he said?” Dana asked Tamara. They were talking about Dana’s twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend. The two of them were yapping away in the two-seater in front of us. The van had picked them up at the gasoline fountain next to the weapons warehouse, where they had just finished cleaning their own personal M-4 guns. They cleaned them there every week. Like they anticipated being shipped to Iran or some shit. Any day now.

We picked Ari and Gil up near a large metal container the size of a classroom. It was an emergency storage container. The word “greens” was graffitied on its front. The rumor was that it was only half full of green bullets, that there was some room inside of it, and that Gil once snuck his girlfriend to the base and got with her inside that container.

I couldn’t see Hagar’s face, because she was still working on my hair, but I knew she was rolling her eyes at Dana. There were only sixteen females in our training base, all of us infantry weaponry instructors. The caravan in the female residency lot had four rooms, so each four-person clique got
its own. But Hagar hated it that we still had to listen to the others on the van rides.

“He said he liked me because I was normal! What does that even mean?” Dana asked.

Dana and Tamara lived in my old room, room 2, the room Hagar called the “family: the future” room, because all the girls in it could talk about was their boyfriends and their future families. Room 4 was called the “family: the past” room, because the girls who lived in it chatted only about their parents and siblings. Room 1 was “the dead” room, because they talked about the dead, even though there had been no action since we were drafted. These were dead they knew from, like, high school, but they still talked about them.

This was the way the army worked. We were all killing time, and at the end of the day every person liked to talk about just one thing. For my new room, it was sex.

“He explained that before he met me, all the girls he knew from Haifa were weird, so I guess that’s a compliment, but still! I mean you tell me, Tamara—isn’t it shocking that ‘normal’ would be the adjective he would choose? I mean, is this why he loves me?” Dana went on.

In life, Hagar said, only three things made her happy: the smell of gas stations, Marlboro Lights, and sex, and her only regret was that she could never delight in all three at the same time because gasoline was flammable.

She finished with my hair, and she tied it quick and tight. Then she pulled on Dana’s ponytail, and when Dana turned, Hagar asked with a voice loud enough so that Ari and Gil in the front of the van could hear, “Hey, Dana, how good are your blowjobs?”

Dana’s face turned red. Neta was moving the lollipop in
her mouth in and out. She wasn’t the brightest lightbulb, but she was my friend, and I joined her, and it was so summer, and we made Amit laugh.

“Hey, I’m just trying to help,” Hagar said. “I just wanted to save you time and let you know that that’s why he loves you—you must give pretty good head.”

That was when he turned. Ari. “Hey, play nice,” he said.

His eyes were green, just like those of Dan, a boy I loved when I was a mousy middle schooler. But now Ari looked at me like I was anything but mousy.

I swear he did!

I looked down.

This is what he said next: “Hey, you are beautiful.”

And I didn’t see, but Hagar, Amit, and Neta swore he was still looking at me.

B
ACK IN
our caravan, my face was burning. It was noon. I was sure one of the girls had put him up to it.

Hagar, Amit, and Neta didn’t speak to me at all the first two weeks after I was placed in their room. I used to think that Lea knew how to control a flock of girls like no other, but that was before I met Hagar. During those first two weeks, the number of guys they each mentioned sleeping with was double-digit, while I had had a boyfriend for seven years and only cheated on him once, with a short Russian soldier. They hated the idea of me, or anyone, having a boyfriend. But I hated Moshe, the real boyfriend I had.

When I started hating him, it was not his fault. It was my first Passover at his house. I was sixteen. I was passionate. Ok,
I was passionate. I was passionate about work immigrants, Ok, about immigration rights and all. I was young. I was talking very fast. It was past midnight. We had finished eating, said our last prayers. The white tablecloth was stained red, yellow. Empty wine bottles, dirty napkins, toothpicks, chicken bones. His cousin was twelve. She had a lisp. She was listening to me. “I can’t believe this is how we treat the people who build our homes!” she said. She really didn’t know how our country treated work immigrants, and she wanted to know more. I talked faster. I talked more. I was sixteen. I don’t even know if it was how much I spoke or the simple way I looked. I wasn’t a pretty girl, and I knew it.

I remember the weight of his father’s fingers on my shoulders. The parch of the wine as he opened his mouth. He caught me midsentence. “Let me tell you, son, I just hope for you that she’s at least a good lay.”

They pretended not to hear. He was drunk; it is what you do. I didn’t blame my boyfriend. I hated him. I wasn’t trying to prove his father wrong. It was how it happened. When we slept together, I did quadratic equations in my head.

During our last time in bed before the war, I asked him, “How come your mom always puts tahini in her eggplant salad?” He kept at it. There was a sticker I had peeled off an orange on his ceiling’s fan. I had put it there on my break the month before so I would have something to look for when I came back.

“I hate tahini,” I said. “Eggplants are so much better with mayo.”

“What?” he said. He was breathing fast. It was a Friday night. We had just finished the Sabbath dinner. Eggplants were my favorite vegetable. His mom knew that. I hated tahini.
She knew that too. He was too heavy on top of me, the room too hot; I grew angry fast.

“She is cheap, that’s why,” I said. “She knows tahini will last longer than mayo.”

“Shh,” he said. “Someone could hear us.”

Hear us talking about eggplants? I went back to tracking the orange’s sticker, around and around and—

And when Hagar finally addressed me, late, in the dark, when the four of us were on our field beds, answering her question was too easy.

“Of course I think about sleeping with guys who aren’t my boyfriend. I even did it once with a soldier I trained. And I think about Ari the American. All the time. I am thinking about him right now.”

Answering the rest of the girls’ questions wasn’t any harder.

“Of course Ari and I would do it outside!”

“I think, just from his height, it has to be at least that big.”

Soon the three girls were the nightly audience for my fantasies. I had friends. Finally. Hours and hours went by, and I never ran out of things to say. Hagar always asked for more about Ari. Dirtier, larger, in colors. Like the movies. Like America. I didn’t know where Ari was from, but he had that accent people referred to as Anglo-Saxon.

T
HE GIRLS
swore they didn’t tell Ari to say I was beautiful in the van. So I said the only other option was that he was trying to kiss up to me, so I wouldn’t work him hard the next day during his Bedouin soldiers’ M-16 week. “Have you thought
about the other other option?” Hagar asked, and she handed me her hand mirror. “You look hot,” she said.

On the van, Hagar had braided my hair in two braids and wrapped them around my head so that the skin around my eyes was tighter. My nose looked long but noble, my cheeks were sunken inside, my eyes glistened. It must have been more than the hair—I had lost weight since I joined room 3, the sex room, because all the girls did was smoke and drink Diet Coke. My yearslong acne had cleared up, but it was only that day, through Hagar’s mirror, that I noticed it. In the mornings, Hagar would sometimes get bored and wake me by plucking my black eyebrows, and it was only then that I noticed how gentle my gaze had turned because of it. I had spent years trying, but that day I turned beautiful, accidentally, and it shocked me.

I think I loved Hagar the most in that second, when I turned to look from the mirror to her and realized that she and the world must see what I saw in the mirror just then—me, beautiful.

“W
E NEED
to cool ourselves down,” Hagar said. “Let’s put ice water in our veins already.” Back then, that month, putting ice water in our veins was her favorite pastime after guns. It was one of her stranger ideas. She said putting ice water in our veins would probably feel like winter inside of summer, and that we should probably try it.

Getting the frozen IV bags we put in our veins was this whole production. The kitchen sergeant let the four of us use the industrial freezer for our frozen IV bags because he was
in love with Neta. One of the medics from the clinic gave us new IV bags and all the rest from the emergency supply room because he thought he was in love with Neta, until he began sleeping with Hagar and then thought he was in love with her more.

We were invincible.

Hagar pinched the vein on the flip side of my elbow hard. “Ouch,” I said, but I was smiling.

“Can it be my turn to stick the needle in you this time?” Hagar asked.

“I love what you did with my hair,” I said. “You can stick whatever you want in me, hon.”

“Aw, baby,” Hagar said.

The four of us went outside the caravan in our bras and underwear, ignoring the stares of the girls who were smoking.

Using her teeth, Hagar tied green elastic above my elbow, and I started opening and closing my fist. Then she stuck the needle, swift. She got up and clipped the IV bag to a cedar branch above us.

After she finished with the veins of Neta and Amit, Hagar did herself and lay down on the cement, smiling. “Refresh me, God!” she shouted.

We were lying on the cement in our underwear. Amit let me borrow a pair of her fake Prada sunglasses. It was noon and I could taste the heat.

I thought of Ari. The cold was swimming close to my head. The ice water in my veins was a ghost licking me from the inside. I changed the speed of the drip to faster, and it made my eyes buzz. It was one of Hagar’s stranger ideas, but not her strangest. She had so many ideas. She wondered what would happen if we put Diet Coke in our IV bags, and I had to tell
her that would mean putting oxygen in our circulatory systems. That it would kill us. I don’t know why I knew that. Neta and Amit said they hadn’t thought of that. Hagar said she hadn’t either. Then she said, “But think about it, what a way to go!”

On the cement, Hagar said, “So. You. Ari. Bedouins’ basic training. Exciting. Exciting.”

I didn’t say anything. I let the girls wait.

“So I heard an interesting rumor,” Amit said. “I heard they might start giving the Bedouins M-4s now, instead of M-16s.” I knew she was trying to throw us off the topic of Ari, because they all liked to pretend they were not interested in my fantasy talk, particularly at moments when they were most eager.

“Like they would ever waste green bullets on those retards,” Hagar said slowly.