The UnAmericans: Stories (23 page)

She marched into her room and flung herself on the bed. But wallowing was useless, she knew, so she opened her laptop and emailed all her former office mates from Kiev who had kept their jobs to remind them she was alive and still looking for work, and when she saw that one had immediately responded, she applauded herself for being so proactive. And when it turned out to be a vacation autoreply, she spent the next fifteen minutes obsessively refreshing her email. From there she Googled herself, her bureau chief, Ethan the blogger, who was still in Moscow, tweeting live from Putin’s address to the Duma. She sat there, feeling like the world’s youngest relic, and then pulled the blanket over her head, this ladybug comforter she’d had since elementary school.

She awoke, just before eleven, to her cell phone ringing.

“Talia? It’s Gali.”

Talia sat up. “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m with Dana at the movies. Would you let my dad know I’ll be staying at her house tonight?”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

“He’s asleep.”

“Gali. We’re broken up.”

“Listen,” Gali said, “I texted him. But if he wakes up and wonders where I am, I don’t want him freaking out.”

“Fine,” Talia said, “I’ll let him know.” But after she hung up, she felt ashamed for surrendering so easily: if Tomer was this deep in the dark, didn’t someone need to make sure Gali was okay? She was certain she’d heard a boy’s voice in the background, and even if Gali
was
telling the truth, Talia doubted Tomer would want her staying at a friend’s house in the middle of the week. Plus it must have been an effort to find her number in the first place, as if Gali knew going through Talia was the easy route, that she was too big a pushover to say anything but yes. Most of all she felt manipulated, as if any bonding earlier that night had simply been a calculated act on Gali’s part to get what she wanted.

She called the number back. It rang and rang until voicemail picked up:
This is Nir, you know what to do.
She pressed redial and got the recording again, and finally, the third time, Nir answered.

“Let me talk to Gali,” she said.

“Who is this?”

“You know she’s fourteen.”

“And?”

“And give her the fucking phone!” Who was this guy, Talia thought, out with a little girl on a school night? She heard the muffled sound of a hand over the receiver, then Gali said, “Talia?”

“Tell me where you are.”

“I told you. At Dana’s.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“But I
told
you,” Gali said.

“Gali, I won’t call your dad, but I just need to know where you went. Tell me right now or I’ll—”

“What?”

“I’ll tell him you’re a liar who’s sleeping with a much older boy, and that you’ve got pot stashed in your room.” Talia had no idea about the truth behind any of this, but Gali whispered, “
Fine.
We’re at Alma Beach,” and Talia pulled her parents’ spare keys off the peg near the door. “I’m taking the car,” she called out, and her mother yelled, “Tell him hi!”

She backed out of the driveway and sped through Rehovot’s silent roads. Even the highway was nearly empty, and within twenty-five minutes she was cruising down Hayarkon Street, searching for parking. It was a pleasant, balmy evening, and as she strode down the beach, she saw people huddled around fires or playing matkot. She walked closer and found Gali and her friends by a bonfire closer to the shore. Most of them were coupled off, nuzzled on each other’s laps or making out, and a girl in Bedouin pants and a tank top was playing guitar. Gali’s arms were around this Nir’s neck, and he looked like a nice-enough kid, skinny and small and in civilian clothes, his dark hair buzzed so close Talia had a feeling he’d only recently been drafted. He didn’t even have facial hair, just some optimistic fuzz above his lip, and it occurred to Talia that he probably wasn’t all that older than Gali.

The scene was so much more hippie-ish and earnest than Talia would have imagined for a girl like Gali, and she wondered why she’d gotten so upset over one silly lie when the truth was that she didn’t want to leave the beach herself, that what she really wanted was to crouch by the fire and just relax. So she walked closer, listening to the breeze and the guitar, when she noticed the entire group was staring. They were looking at her like she was such a
grown-up
: still dressed for the office, her cardigan flapping behind her, her sensible leather flats disappearing into the sand—and it was right then that Talia understood she was no longer young.

Talia stood there, waving her keys like the unwanted chaperone she knew she was, until Gali finally got up, clearly humiliated, and followed her back to the car. Gali hunched in the passenger seat, and as Talia drove away from the curb, she said, “I don’t know what your problem is, Talia. This isn’t your business.”

“It is when you lie to me. I was worried.”

Talia pulled onto Tomer’s street and up to his apartment, keeping the engine running. Through the window she saw the television flashing and his bare feet on the coffee table. She couldn’t see anything past his sweatpanted legs, but she knew he was probably asleep on the couch, unaware that his daughter had gone out, let alone that any of this was happening in her life. Watching him through that window, a gloomy fish in a beautiful aquarium, filled her with such a massive rush of sorrow that when Gali whispered, “Please don’t make me go up there—I can’t deal with him right now,” Talia nodded and put the car in reverse.

She’d planned to take Gali to Rehovot, to set her up in the kitchen with a snack before sneaking off to call Tomer. But as she turned off the highway and up the hill, she saw, in the distance, the kibbutz near her house. She hadn’t been there in more than a decade, but when she drove through the gates and parked in the side lot, the familiar sounds swept right in: crickets and owls and the faint chatter of a few kibbutzniks, far away, sitting outside the dining hall.

“I used to come out here all the time,” Talia said. She led Gali down the path she and her sisters had always taken, near the ulpan classrooms where the foreign volunteers lived, people who wouldn’t be surprised by unfamiliar faces. But no one was outside the cottages anyway, and they walked past the irrigation equipment factory, the swimming pool and the avocado orchards, until they were standing at the edge of the date palm groves.

And Gali, who hadn’t uttered a word on the entire drive to Rehovot, who’d been glumly following Talia through the kibbutz as if this were one more punishment she’d have to endure, stopped and said, “Wow. This is beautiful.”

It
was
beautiful. Hundreds of tall palms, planted in perfect grids, surrounded them. Talia hadn’t even known if they’d still be producing dates, but everything looked just as she remembered. The ground was blanketed with fallen fronds, and even the smell of donkey manure wasn’t so bad when mixed with bark and overripe dates. Parked against one of the trees was a forklift, with clippers and an old, dust-beaten radio resting beside one of the tires.

“My sisters and I spent so many hours up in these trees,” she said. “It was like this quiet place where we were safe from whatever was happening.” She couldn’t remember what she’d found so stressful as a teenager—probably just boys, slipping in math, her parents—but Gali nodded solemnly and followed her up the forklift’s ladder. She was quicker and more confident than Talia would have expected, reaching the top of the trunk and testing the fronds until she found one sturdy enough to hold her weight. They sat side by side and gazed out. Until now Talia hadn’t even noticed that the moon was almost full, illuminating the tarped-over farmland and the dairy, a couple leaving the dining hall and walking hand in hand down the narrow brick path to their cottage. Beyond, Rehovot stretched out in its entirety, looking just as Talia imagined architects and contractors like Tomer had planned it in miniature: the terra-cotta roofs, the murky gray line of the highway, the tall white apartment complexes jutting up against the hills, so small they were like plastic pieces she could move around on a game board. “We had this deal,” Talia said, “that up here we could tell each other whatever we wanted and no one would judge. That it would never leave the trees. So if there’s anything—”

“We didn’t sleep together,” Gali blurted. “Like you accused me of. Though we’ve done everything but.”

Talia eyed her sideways, and Gali continued, “It was kind of bad. I mean,
I
was bad at it.”

“Everyone is in the beginning.”

“Really?”

“No one knows what they’re doing. You know with my first boyfriend I took it literally and actually sucked on—his
thing
? Like a lollipop.” She was doing it again, speaking without thinking, but Gali looked so relieved that someone out there had humiliated herself more, that perhaps she would receive the silver medal, rather than the gold, for history’s worst blowjob, that Talia would have recited excruciating story after excruciating story if it made the girl feel any better. She remembered what it was like, all that shame and uncertainty, how the room could never be dark enough.

“I’ve been writing letters,” Gali said then. “To my mom. It was my therapist’s idea. And he’s sort of a tool.”

“Your dad likes him.”

“My
dad’s
a tool,” Gali said, and sighed. “I’m supposed to write what’s going on with me, at school or whatever. Just to feel like she’s still with me,” she said. “And sometimes I’ll write about Nir. Nothing graphic, obviously, but, you know, just who he is and stuff. You know I don’t even know if she had another boyfriend before my dad?”

“Because you were too young to know which questions to ask,” Talia said quietly.

“Sometimes I write other things,” Gali said. “Like how I wish I’d died first, just so I wouldn’t have to miss her this much.”

Right then Gali looked so small and confused and lost in the world, her eyes wide, sugary lipstick smeared across her chin. She was playing with the hem of her satiny sleeve, pulling at the delicate threads with her fingers. “Would it be alright if . . . I stayed over tonight?” she asked, and Talia thought about how good it might be if she just said yes. She could see it all unfolding as clearly as if clicking through a series of digital photos: Tomer on her parents’ kitchen floor, telling goofy jokes while he scraped off their linoleum, already entrenched in a new fix-it project now that the counters were done. Her sisters over on weekends: a house of mothers so ready to dote on Gali, their toddlers worshipping her and following her from room to room. Her parents, relaxed and smiling at the table, grateful to have their family back together again, Tomer and Gali such an intrinsic, immediate part of it. She thought about Tomer asleep on the sofa in his apartment, how any moment he’d awake in that dark, empty room and start calling his daughter. Maybe she should stop this back and forth with him and just accept how easy it could be with a man who already knew how to be a boyfriend, a husband, a father. Maybe her need to travel, to hear other people’s stories, to make a name for herself—maybe it had never been ambition and curiosity that drove her but the plain and simple fear that she wouldn’t know how to face real life.

But even sitting there in the tree, even just entertaining the fantasy, made Talia feel restless and slight. As if the brown hills surrounding her just kept rolling out into nothingness, the great unknowns in Kiev and beyond so distant they no longer belonged to her. As if it were someone else’s future, some girl Talia had always envied from afar who she bumped into now and again, when everyone was home visiting their parents over Chanukah Break.

“My therapist tells me other things,” Gali continued. “I go in and he talks and talks. But I wish he’d stop giving me homework and just tell me how to be happy again,” she said, and Talia wanted nothing more than to give her an answer. For so long, she’d told herself happiness came from finding the thing you loved most and figuring out a way to make it central to your life. But that seemed so unreachable now, some abstract theory, and Talia knew she’d come up here as much for herself as for Gali, hoping everything might look clearer from this vantage, that she’d be able to reach a decision about what to do next.

“When I’m with you, I feel—not alone,” Gali said suddenly.

And then something seemed to kick inside her and before Talia knew it, Gali had scooted so close she could smell the bonfire in her hair. For a moment they sat there awkwardly, breathing silently in the tree, and Talia had a flash of what that night of Everything But must have been like for Nir, graceless and unnatural, Gali’s advances clunky and poorly timed. Then Gali leaned in to hug her. The gesture was so sudden, so jarring, that Talia jerked back—and Gali, arms stretched wide, wobbled on the frond and lost her balance.

“Gali!” Talia yelled, reaching for her. But Gali had already grabbed the trunk to keep from slipping. As the thorns pierced her skin, she let out a cry so loud people might have heard her on the highway. Talia knew she’d be fine—she’d steadied herself in time, was in no danger of falling. But sitting there on the frond, holding tight to the tree, she looked so shocked and afraid that Talia’s heart seized. She gathered the girl carefully in her arms, resting Gali’s head against her chest, wiping her damp, hot face with the back of her hand. Gali winced, and Talia, left with no real words of comfort, no guarantee things would ever get easier, said the only thing she knew for certain: that any moment the poison would kick in, numbing the places that hurt the most.