A Remarkable Kindness (5 page)

“Why aren't you eating?” Boaz touched her arm.

Another welcome change: Rob would have given Emily a look that implied,
Why are you eating so much?

“What's wrong?” Boaz asked.

“Nothing at all.” Emily smiled.

They ate the rest of the meal in comfortable silence, as if, she supposed, they had been together for years and didn't have to make small talk. With Hebrew and Arabic conversations going on at the tables all around them, Emily thought that she could get to know Boaz over time, gradually, not all at once. She wondered what his house looked like, which side of the bed he liked to sleep on, and how it would feel to snuggle with him, cuddling up in the crook of his body. After Turkish coffee and baklava, she teased, “Isn't this way past a farmer's bedtime?”

“It is late,” he said sheepishly. “For me, anyway.”

Emily waited while he paid, and they left the restaurant, retracing their steps through the city. The moon was sliced in half and silvery bright and the sea slapped against the rocks. The air was lukewarm and tender, a salty breeze lifting off the water. As Emily walked, the heel of her shoe caught in between the cobblestones.

“You okay?” Boaz asked, catching her as she tripped.

“I'm going to be fashionable even if it kills me,” Emily joked, and she allowed herself to rest against him, aware of how he kept his arm around her until they reached his truck. They headed out of Akko, and were driving down the ruler-straight road into Peleg when his beeper went off.

“An irrigation pipe burst in the groves,” he said. “Sorry, I have to go check.”

The truck jerked along a bumpy dirt lane and then into Boaz's groves. The headlights slid over the trees, illuminating the circular faces of the oranges.

“I've computerized the irrigation pipes in these groves.” Boaz stopped the car by a wooden shed. “In my father and grandfather's time, they worked like dogs hauling the pipes on their backs.” He reached over Emily's legs, opened the glove compartment, took out a flashlight, and left the truck. The circle of light Boaz held in his hand shrank to the size of a firefly and then disappeared altogether. Having nothing to do, Emily grew tired of sitting there alone, so she opened the door and stepped down onto the soft earth, raising her arms. An owl hooted.

“I heard your ex-husband was a very good chef,” Boaz said, reappearing from out of nowhere, and she pictured Rob right then, almost half Boaz's height and weight.

“I heard you were a very good soldier and a very good farmer.” Emily spoke with conviction. “And you look like you belong right here.”

“I love watching things I plant grow.”

Emily stood still. She knew what was about to happen—finally—and she waited while Boaz took a step toward her, and then another. She could see the outline of his rugged face in the moonlight. He kissed her hard, wrapping his arms around her, and guided her back to his truck.

“Are you sure?” he asked, taking off her blouse and burying his face between her breasts, unwrapping her skirt like a gift, and
unzipping his pants, and then sliding himself inside her as if he'd been lost and wandering his whole life and had finally reached his destination. She'd thought she'd end up at his place or hers, anyway, and making love with him in the cramped front seat of his truck with the door opened onto the trees, the earth, and the darkness was the exact opposite of anything she'd ever done with Rob. She was thrilled that Boaz wanted her. And she knew that if she was the journey's end for him, then unlike Rob, Boaz would never betray her.

“I found them!” Boaz called afterward. He'd been kneeling on all fours by the truck, looking for her shoes. He handed them back to her. “How do you walk in these things?”

“A lot of practice.”

They both laughed. “Will you come have dinner with me on Friday night?” he asked.

“Oh my God, please don't cook for me.” As Emily dressed, she remembered how Rob had made roasted leg of lamb, her favorite dish, and wild rice with shallots and pine nuts that day he said good-bye. (“Of course he cooked that for you, like Brutus or somebody
,”
Lauren had told her. “To soften the blow.”)

“I'll order in,” Boaz said.

“Now you're talking.”

“My ex-wife said I never talked.”

“And Rob talked too much.” Emily was suddenly aware that the ache in her heart was gone. She felt calm, at peace, thankful that she was no longer a lonely transplant in the village.

She settled back in Boaz's truck. He drove deliberately along the path imprinted into the earth. The road wasn't an accident and
her life wasn't an accident, and even though she'd been through so much, as Lauren had said, she'd find her way out, as her father had promised. Emily smiled at the idea of doing something so spontaneous and reckless (making love in the middle of an orange grove!) and then remembered Lauren's words.
Never say never.

She'd never thought she'd get over Rob. And she'd never thought she'd try to fall in love again. But now she stared at the truck's headlights lighting up silver patches of the velvety night.

“Had we not been in the darkness,” her father used to say, quoting from one holy book or another, “we could not have seen the light.”

“
Tov,
” Boaz said. Good. He set his hands on the steering wheel. They had felt calloused going over her skin, durable and resilient. Emily rolled down the window and stuck out her head, feeling the air roll over her skin the way Boaz's hands roved over her face, her neck, her hair.

L
auren always dreamed she'd settle down in a house by the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. If not there, then she could have named a dozen other places she hoped she'd live other than where she was: in Peleg. She thought about that as she rode her bicycle from the village into Nahariya, two miles away. Then she remembered her mother's suggestion: when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Lauren pedaled through the streets of the awakening seaside town, reminding herself to appreciate the beauty of the sea, the sidewalk cafés and the rows of colossal eucalyptus trees with leaves rustling in the breeze. Coasting along, riding fast, she felt better and almost carefree. Even her hair swished back and forth against her back like a horse's tail.

The morning was bright and hot. They called
this
autumn, she thought, and her mood abruptly changed again. The only signs of the fall season were the brittle, brown leaves of the pecan
and carob trees. No stunning red maples, no fiery colors like in Boston. She locked her bicycle on Hannah Senesh Street, thinking that David would have said, “But in Boston, there's no street named after Hannah Senesh.”

Lauren walked past a street cleaner sweeping the curb and a store lined with a sidewalk display of household necessities: plastic pails, toilet brushes, fly swatters. The next store had an outdoor rack of conical brassieres so massive that Lauren wanted to laugh—she could have fit her whole head into one cup. Everything reminded her of Boston and nothing reminded her of Boston.

Running along both sides of the street were squat apartment buildings that resembled old freight trains abandoned and left to disintegrate in the sun. David had explained that the buildings were put up in a hurry to house new immigrants back in the 1960s. The front yards were yellowed, scattered with stones and weeds. The windows had no screens, and they were wide open, blankets and mattresses airing out and hanging over the sills like giant tongues.

Lauren spotted a
sukkah
hut with white cloth walls and palm fronds stretched across its roof in one of the side yards. Through the doorway she noticed a few chairs and some overturned plastic cups on the table. She lingered, thinking of the
sukkah
that David had put up in their backyard, which she'd decorated with tinsel lanterns and twinkling colored lights. “People eat all their meals in the
sukkah
to commemorate the Israelites' forty-year trek in the desert with Moses,” David had explained, because Lauren had known nothing about the holiday. “The hut is supposed to look
simple
.”

“But I miss seeing Christmas lights,” Lauren said. “And if they sell blinking lights in Israel for people's
sukkah
s, then I'm buying them.”

David hadn't argued, and she decided not to mention to him the year her parents had put up a Christmas tree in their living room. “Just for the fun of it,” her mother had said, until her father put his foot down. “I have to consider my reputation,” he said. “What will my Orthodox patients think?”

Lauren reached David's clinic, with its sign on the door in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and English.
DR
.
DAVID UZIEL
,
FAMILY MEDICINE
.
PLEASE KEEP QUIET AND WAIT YOUR TURN PATIENTLY
.
THANK YOU
.

She stood in the doorway for a moment. Too many people were seated on chairs lined against all four walls of the waiting room. A painting that Emily had made for David—a colorful rendition of Boston Common—hung next to a
NO SMOKING
sign. The air-conditioning unit mounted on the far wall blew out slightly cool puffs of stale air.

“Look how they sit here with all the diseases they've brought from Africa,” a doughy-faced woman with frizzy orange hair and a black chiffon blouse suddenly said to nobody in particular. She lifted her chin at an Ethiopian woman and her son sitting in the far corner of the room. “Are they even Jewish?
Nu,
just look at them.”

“You Russians think you've got culture because you came here with a couple of violins,” said a silver-haired woman with a hoarse smoker's voice.

“Who brought us the Mafia?” An olive-skinned man jumped
into the conversation. “Who brought us whores and entire stores filled with pork sausages?” He drew his long pinkie fingernail through the air like a saber. “You Russians! You pretend to be Jewish, but you'd sell your own mothers for visas to America.”

The Russian woman scowled.

“Who's last in line?” Lauren asked in the silence that followed.

“We are,” said the Ethiopian boy, a white yarmulke floating on top of his soft brown hair.

“Then I'm after you.” But the only seat available was next to the Russian woman, and Lauren vehemently did not want to sit next to her, so she stepped outside to wait her turn. She plopped down on the cement step under the overhang and opened the worn copy of
Everything That Rises Must Converge
that she'd brought along in her backpack, but, as usual, she was too tired to read. She sighed and closed the book, watching people enter and leave the clinic. After a while, the olive-skinned man stepped out, followed by the Russian woman, so Lauren went back inside and sat across from the Ethiopian woman and her son. Lauren could see blue circles tattooed along the woman's gaunt jaw.

The wait was long. Lauren leaned her head against the wall, closed her eyes, and tried to appreciate this moment, drowsy and undisturbed. Maya, her older daughter, was two, and she now had a six-month-old daughter named Yael. Lauren had named Maya after David's mother, Miriam; Yael was named for his father, Yossi, who had died a year ago. Lauren liked the name—it sounded glamorous—but her mother still pronounced it as Yale.

“At least it's Ivy League,” Ethel said whenever Lauren tried to correct her.

Lauren dozed off until a swirl of fabric brushed across her shoulder and she blinked. It was the Ethiopian woman stepping out of David's office. Lauren stood, pushed open the door, and found David sitting at his desk in the examining room, his head bowed (as usual) over his papers, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration, his tousled hair dark against his white doctor's jacket. He looked up distractedly through his glasses, about to greet his next patient, and then a puzzled look crossed his usually serene face.

“Sweetie!” He took off his glasses, raising his hands in disbelief. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to surprise you,” Lauren said. “Maya is at the gan, and Aviva is taking Yael from the nursery until four today as a special treat. Until four! When I start work at the hospital again, I'll almost never get to see you, so I came today. Carpe diem, as they say. Seize the day.”

“I'd love to hang out with you now, but did you see how crazy it is out there?”

“I can't believe how many people fit into your waiting room.” Lauren sat down. “Like a trick car in the circus.”

“It's been nonstop all morning.” He shuffled the papers on his desk.

The shades were pulled up to let in the morning sun. Lauren looked around at the Detecto scale, the wastebasket, the sink in the corner with a pink bead about to drip from the soap dispenser. On the medical cot covered with creased thin paper was
the stethoscope she had bought as a birthday present for David, his name engraved in the silver. Lauren joked, “Who would have thunk that eight years of medical school gets you this?”

David's expression soured. “What did you expect? Your father's cardiology practice with a secretary and a coffee table piled high with magazines?”

Lauren had hoped to have some quality time alone with David and immediately wished she hadn't said that. She almost wished that she hadn't even come to his office.

“That Ethiopian woman and her son walked for hundreds of miles to get to Addis Ababa, and one of his sisters died along the way,” David said.

“That is awful.” Then Lauren couldn't help herself and blazed on, “But honestly, I wanted to have a minivacation from all of life's problems for just a little while.” She fiddled with the wedding band around her finger. Three interlocking bands, three types of gold. David had paid a pretty sum for the ring at Cartier. Lauren knew it was an extravagance, but wasn't she allowed to spoil herself even if other people were suffering? Or was it her obligation to suffer, too? The gold flashed in the dull light. David's cell phone rang. He let it ring and ring.

“I'm sorry.” His voice sounded sad.

“No, I'm sorry.” Lauren offered David a genuine smile from her heart. She loved him and her daughters. She liked her work at the maternity ward. She liked the different pieces of her life, but they somehow could not complete the puzzle. Was she happy
some
of the time?

She thought of her father. “Which percent of the time?” he
would have asked, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses over the bridge of his hooked nose to study his only child. Then he would have continued in the same academic tone, “How would you measure happiness?”

“The same way you measure suffering,” Lauren might have said. And wasn't her suffering still bad to
her,
even if it wasn't as terrible as someone else's? Maybe Lauren was feeling a wave of homesickness, something that came over her on a regular basis, as David knew. Like her downhearted mood before her period each month. “Everything here is still so different.” Lauren paused. “Even at the post office, with Gabriel standing at the counter licking people's stamps because they don't have adhesives yet.”

“I hope Gabriel won't come in here to show me his worn-out tongue.”

“Very funny.” Lauren smiled. “David, I admire your dedication, I really do. It's just that when I see you with all these patients, and you hardly get paid, and in Boston you'd be—”

“I know what I'd be.” He stood up to tilt up the blinds tight against the sun. To obscure things, Lauren couldn't help thinking. To hide—how could she put it diplomatically?—the aesthetically challenged landscape outside the window. “Nobody in America can even afford to get sick,” he added.

“I also believe in socialized medicine,” Lauren said earnestly. “I guess I believe in it more as a patient and less as a doctor's wife . . . Anyway, what was wrong with that Ethiopian boy?”

“It was his mother who was sick. I sent her to the E.R. for tests. She doesn't even know how old she is.”

“Beth Israel was bad, but this seems worse.”

“Because they're our people.”

Lauren paused. She was a fourth-generation American. One of her great-grandfathers, Abraham Harding, had founded a temple in Boston that held services on Sunday instead of Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Lauren knew she was a Jew, she never pretended otherwise, but who were her people? Her funny, smart, easygoing Jewish friends at college who ate cheeseburgers, fasted until two o'clock on Yom Kippur, and made jokes throughout abridged Passover seders. Not the ragtag group of patients out in the waiting room.

“You're still not giving it a chance,” David said. “Your mother spent her last visit here pointing out each man picking his nose at stoplights.”

“There
were
so many of them.”

Now it was David's turn to hold the silence.

Lauren said, “My mother told me the other day that when a fund-raiser called her and asked for a donation to the UJA, she said she wasn't going to donate any more money to Israel because she'd already donated a
daughter
.”

That didn't bring the laugh she'd hoped for. “I'd love it if we could do something fun, just the two of us, for even an hour or two,” she tried.

“You know what we'll do? As soon as I close the clinic, I'll take you for a motorcycle ride. We haven't done that for a long time.”

“That would be so nice,” Lauren said. When was the last time they'd taken off and done something impromptu like that? That was one reason why she'd fallen in love with David. When he was in Boston, he made everything seem new and exciting. “Let's go
to the North End and eat Italian. Let's go to Secret Squantum Park. Let's go . . .” Now they were so caught up in their daughters and their jobs that they rarely had time together—alone—anymore.

“Why don't you go home and wait for me and I'll be back as soon as I can.” David rose and walked around the desk. “Come here.” He pulled her off the chair and kissed her.

“Is this what you do with your other patients?”

“Lauren,” he whispered, his arms around her, “I just want you to be happy with me.”

“I am happy with you.”

“Here.”

“
Here?
” She glanced around the office and he gave her such a look of exasperation that she apologized.

“I didn't mean right here in this room,” he said.

A
FEW MINUTES
after leaving David's office, Lauren was back on her bicycle, riding on the old army patrol road that ran along the shore. She looked down and saw sea foam throw itself over a ledge of flat rocks, glittering sunlight on turquoise-blue water, and farther out, the line of the horizon dissolving between the sea and cloudless sky. The heat was solid against her skin. When she reached the hill at the edge of Peleg, she stopped for a moment to watch the surfers riding the waves. She'd never been tempted to surf—the thundering waves of Cape Cod always intimidated her—but she used to enjoy sailing, harnessing the energy of the wind. She and David had gone sailing a few times before they'd moved to Peleg, before their kids were born. Then she reminded
herself not to keep thinking about her life as a swath of before cut short and an endless after.

She crossed the parking lot and turned down the road to her house. First came the matching farmhouses that belonged to Idan Cohen and his brother, Udi. They had identical orange-tiled roofs, identical signs (
DON
'
T PANIC
!
IT
'
S ORGANIC
!) and almost identical-looking wives, Ora and Efrat, the four of them like matching bookends.