All I Love and Know (27 page)

Matt heard the doorbell, a swell of voices downstairs, his mother's polite greeting voice. He should go down and mediate, he thought, but then changed his mind: his mother would just shoo him back upstairs. She'd developed a kind of flair for being around Jewish lesbians, whom she called “the gals.” She'd tell him and Daniel about so-and-so's struggle to get pregnant and the strain it had placed on her relationship, and explain the intricacies of in vitro fertilization, which she familiarly called IVF, an explanation that necessitated an air drawing of the cervix and ovaries, which made Daniel and Matt and Matt's father exchange alarmed glances.

He was stunned by this new life, the mess of it, the people—some of whom he knew, some of whom were complete strangers—letting themselves in and out of the house, the front door wide open all day long, people swiping mosquitoes off the open margarine tub in the kitchen, his bare feet sticky from dirt and humidity on the wood floors. Stunned. Home had always been where he went to get
away
from his family. Now his house was blown apart, the wind and the grief blowing through it. But a small part of him felt like a flower. He reveled in the sensuality of the kids' baby skin and their hair and the breath sifting raggedly from their mouths. He wasn't getting laid, but he was finding in himself a new kind of desire, milder and wider and sweeter than libido, that spread out onto all the living creatures under his care.

IT WAS RAFI'S TURN
to hide. Gal rested her forehead on her arms, which rested against a tree, shut her eyes, and began counting to forty in Hebrew. The air was still and the shrill buzz of crickets elicited a semiconscious memory of the electric station down the street from her apartment in Jerusalem. Her mind glanced off of this and that till she lost count. An impulse of strict conscientiousness made her decide that the rule was, if you lost count, you had to go back to the beginning. She began again.

When she was done, she stood back and surveyed the yard with a raised head and narrowed eyes. She felt as if she were in a movie about a little girl searching for a hiding little boy.

It wasn't a good yard for hide-and-seek; it was small and neat, the grass trimmed yesterday by Matt's father, who said she could call him Grampa or Grampa John or just John. Its only ornaments were the flowers that grew along the fence and the feeders and stone birdbath that Matt let her fill with the hose, showing her how to hold her finger over the nozzle to direct and intensify the stream. You had to go into the neighbors' yards, the ones that drew closer to the woods, to find the sheds and dense bushes and raised decks you could shimmy under on your stomach, startling the cats sleeping under them. And of course the agility obstacles in Cam's yard, which was the first place Gal headed, ducking into the small opening in the shrubs that divided the two lawns.

There was a lump in the middle of the cloth tunnel. Where was his head? She thought her parents may have been buried without heads. That was a secret thought she had, something that nobody was telling her.

She walked up to Rafi and stopped, her heart pounding. He was lying down, trying to make himself as flat as possible in the space between the round opening of the tunnel and where it trailed on the ground. She knew he couldn't hear her approach. She wondered whether if she tapped him, she could make him jump. She stuck out her finger and held it hovering over his body. Would the little girl be mean and scare the little boy? Then she withdrew it, and instead tugged a little at the cloth, to warn him of her approach. The lump stirred, and she laughed as he thrashed his way out, red-faced.

STARING AT THE COMPUTER
screen, his mind going through the motions, Matt heard his father come home and the exchange of voices with his mother. He felt a surge of guilty gratitude for their unhurried, unflappable presences in the house. When he'd called to say the kids had arrived, Shirley made him repeat the foreign names several times (“Let me put your father on. How do you spell that? Wait, let me write it down”). She'd said, “Those poor babies,” and “Well, I know you have a lot of tenderness in you, Matt, for all you don't always want people to see it.” This shocked him, that she'd seen something about him. And they'd immediately made plans to come out to meet the “little Jewish grandbabies,” as his mother referred to them. They slept on an air mattress on the living room floor, and the kids lounged on it during the day, watching
Oprah
or
Judge Judy
with Matt's mother, and dragged the blankets around. He had to acknowledge that his parents were helpful with the kids, but their presence made something catch and strain in his throat. Did this mean that they could now come anytime they wanted to? Did it mean that they were a genuine part of one another's lives now?

He went downstairs when Yossi came to pick up Rafi, and Daniel got home from a late meeting as Matt and Shirley were cleaning up from dinner. They ate dinner at five now, which Matt called “gracious living chez Rosen-Greene.” The baby sat on the kitchen floor, and Matt's father was placing Noam's favorite toy just out of his reach to encourage him to walk toward him. It was a plastic playhouse where, when you pressed down one of the buttons, a woman's voice cooed “Hello, Daddy” in a voice so licentious and inappropriate Matt insisted on playing it for everybody who came to visit. John stooped and held Noam's hands with his own thick freckled ones, their arms extended in a bow, and he was chanting, “C'mon, buddy. That's the stuff!” while the toy coquetted, “When Daddy comes home, it's a happy sound. Everyone smiles when Daddy's around. Daddy!”

“Hello, Daddy,” Matt said suggestively, sidling up and giving Daniel a kiss on the cheek.

“Honey, not in front of the children,” Daniel said with a faint smile. Matt turned away and returned to the sink, where he'd been scraping spaghetti off of plates into the garbage. To him, that comment wasn't funny, it just sounded like another way to brush him off. “Crap,” he said, noticing a small splash of spaghetti sauce spots on his white T-shirt.

Daniel set his briefcase down on the floor at the doorway to the hall. “Where's Gal?”

“Off watching TV,” Matt said.

Daniel went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He sat down at a kitchen chair pulled askew from the table.

“Let me heat you up a plate,” Matt's mother said.

“Thanks, Shirley,” he said. “That's nice of you.”

“Matt,” Daniel said, “Val called me at work today. Apparently, we've been discussed at the Reform shul.”

Matt turned. “You're kidding.” He wasn't sure he liked that, although he'd warmed to Val pretty quickly, and God knows she was a big help. She and her husband, Adam, were true children of Northampton: Adam was an acupuncturist, and Val a massage therapist and yoga instructor. They were active members of the synagogue and of the local chapter of MoveOn, and Adam was on the board of the Men's Resource Center. They were involved in prayer circles and various rituals for life passages. They were both athletic, and took their kids on a lot of camping and cycling trips; you walked into their house, and the mudroom was crammed with hiking shoes caked with dried mud, hiking poles, snowshoes, cross-country skis, soccer balls, baseball gloves, lacrosse sticks, bike helmets. They were so hooked into nature and community they made Matt and Daniel feel like schmucks who hadn't really made an effort.

“No,” Daniel said. “Val and Adam talked to the rabbi and ‘informally mentioned'—that's what she said—that we were new friends of theirs, and then the rabbi talked about us in her sermon, or speech . . . what do they call it?”

“Don't ask me,” Matt said. He was irritated and intrigued by this news. “What did she say about us? She doesn't even know us.”

Daniel took a swig of beer. “It was just a brief mention, young children from a war-torn nation, something like that. I think the message was that Northampton is a peaceful town people can take refuge in, but that it's important to have a greater global consciousness. Anyway, it turns out that the features editor from the
Daily Hampshire Gazette
goes to that shul, and he called shortly after I spoke to Val to ask if he could write a story about us.”

“What did you say?” Matt asked, weighing the prospect in his mind, thinking about the candid shot of him on the front page of
Ma'ariv
, which had inadvertently placed him in the center of the family while all the articles erased him completely.

“I said I had to think about it,” Daniel said. “Don't you think it'll make everybody in this town feel sorry for us?”

Matt's mother murmured, “No. It's just compassion, that's all, there's nothing wrong with that.”

Daniel considered. “Also,” he added, “isn't it a little annoying the way everybody applauds fathers for simply raising children? If we were women, women raising children, it'd never be regarded as newsworthy.”

“That's so true,” Matt said. He and Daniel had both been on the receiving end of many a dazzling smile when they were out in public with the kids, and sometimes it pleased them while sometimes it grossed them out a little. People who'd never given them the time of day suddenly had a lot to say to them.

“I think you're reading too much into it,” Shirley said, looking up from where she was bent over the dishwasher, trying to find space for one more sippy cup.

“Mom,” Matt said, sounding even to his own ear like a whiny adolescent, the old trapped feeling worming its way into his throat.

“Hello, Daddy,” Noam's toy cooed, and they laughed, and through his pacifier Noam laughed too, a big, phony social laugh, as he practiced how to be in a group laughing.

THEY LET GAL GO
to bed in underpants and a T-shirt because all her pajamas were in the laundry, and they let her begin the night in their bed because even though it set a bad precedent, she was exhausted and looked as if she were on the brink of a tantrum. She was stretching out on the sheets of the big bed, cooled by the air conditioner, while Daniel closed the blinds against the summer twilight. She watched him as he tended to her, bringing a glass of water to the night table, switching on the bathroom night-light, fishing the book they'd been reading from under the covers at the foot of the bed, and, reacting to the sweetness and intimacy of being alone with him, the way that if she closed her eyes just a little, or just listened to his voice, she could imagine he was her father, said, “You're not my
abba
.”

Daniel crawled onto the bed beside her, a little stung, even though he knew she was just experimenting—with the names for their relationship, with how bad or mean she was allowed to be.

“I don't think I'll ever call you Abba,” she said speculatively, glancing sideways at him. In the vivid, shadowy landscape of her mind, something had happened to Daniel since they'd come to America; he'd caved in, like the mouth of an old man she'd once seen who had no teeth. When they came toward each other, she had to go soft, nervously avert her gaze, not knowing whether she'd bump into the solid man or walk right through him as if in a dream. Matt was big and spindly and light, and she could fling herself against him, even though his anger was sometimes blistering, and she might be tickled or stung. Daniel, though, was fringed in darkness. He'd sit with a book, staring vacantly into space; sometimes he walked by her without seeming to see her at all. There were moments when, at rest or at play, a strange fearful pressure built in her chest that made her feel as though there was a balloon trapped in there, bumping against her lungs, trying to break loose and take flight—and she had to struggle not to run, or howl.

“What will you call me?” he asked.

“Dani,” she said.

“Okay.”

The book was
Abba Oseh Bushot,
My Father Always Embarrasses Me
. In Israel, it was a special book that Ema read to her, loudly, so Abba could overhear all the embarrassing things the
abba
in the book did to his little boy, Ephraim: singing loudly on the way to school, warning that if he didn't get a kiss when he left Ephraim at school, he'd have to kiss one of the other children, wearing shorts to Aunt Batya's wedding, sliding down in his seat and hiding behind his fingers at the scary parts in movies. They liked to pretend that her
abba
was as embarrassing as Ephraim's dad was.

Daniel read a page, lingered over the last line with his finger under it for Gal to read herself. The witty Hebrew prose pushed a smile behind his eyes and forehead. He loved the portrayal of the dad as a lazy and slovenly writer, the illustrations in which there was always someone looking at him askance, the way the mother was a cool customer, a newspaper reporter in heels and makeup who gave her son a quick kiss on her way out the door and who laughed at the father's eccentricities. Partly, it was a book about how embarrassing it was to have a stay-at-home dad.

“Good job,” he said to her, and turned the page.

It wasn't really a good job, Gal thought, because she knew the book by heart already. But Dani didn't know that because he wasn't there when her mother read it to her. His oblivion to that made her despair, which converted into peevishness. She snuggled more deeply into her pillows, sliding down from Daniel's armpit till his elbow hovered awkwardly around her face. She pushed it away with a put-upon sigh.

Daniel looked down at her slouchy demon self. “Gal, don't push, please; ask if I could please move my arm.”

“You smell bad,” she muttered.

Daniel closed his eyes. It was a refrain, one with curious power, and he and Matt had consulted about it. Breath? Body odor? Matt would sniff him all over and shrug. “You smell good to me.” Recently they'd wondered if she meant simply that he smelled different from Joel.

“Okay,
buba
, I'm going to give you a kiss good-night, and I'll see you in the morning.”