Housebroken (22 page)

“So I hope you don't mind my crying on your shoulder tonight,” he said and tapped his fingers on my shoulder, in time to some tune he was humming to himself. I wondered what it was, maybe something he had liked listening to in high school. He cleared his throat and said: “You know what? Sometimes I feel as lonely as a dog,” and then the phone rang and I got up to answer it.

It was my father. He had gotten mixed up. He wanted to call my mother and dialed my number instead. He apologized and said: “Oh, it's you, Maya? I was going to call your mother”—this was the first time he had ever called her “your mother”—“Do you know where she is?”

I told him that I thought she was at a lecture at the university. For months she had consulted me about what she should take, what I thought would suit her, leafing through the catalogs as if they were fashion magazines and pointing with her fingernail at all kinds of bizarre courses. This evening she finally took the plunge.

“She told me that she was going to a lecture,” I said.

“At this hour?” he asked.

“I don't know, Dad,” I said. “Sometimes those lectures go on till late.” He said: “Oh, I see,” and we hung up. I could hear him walking around the apartment, which didn't have any furniture yet. I wondered if he was sitting on one of the chairs I lent him, the ones I took from their apartment ten years ago, when I left home. I wondered if he was listening now to PBS public radio on his little transistor radio. I wondered if he was crying.

Once in my life I had seen my father's shoulders heaving with sobs. This was a few days after my mother had consulted me about a lawyer. I went into their apartment, opening the door with my key. I didn't expect to find him at home. These were the hours when he ran his errands, the time of day he liked best. Every morning, Monday to Friday between eight and twelve
A.M.
, he roamed the city, getting on and off buses, going in and out of office buildings, holding a shabby cardboard folder under his arm, chatting with drivers and clerks and doormen, making jokes, waiting patiently, happily, on long lines.

He had retired two years earlier. His colleagues in the accountants' office where he worked gave him a farewell party. For months before his retirement he had prepared himself to swallow the insult of the gold watch. “What do I need a gold watch for?” he grumbled, but eventually he managed to persuade himself that he needed one, and on the morning of the party he said: “All right, so a gold watch it is,” and before he left for the office he took off his old watch and put it in the drawer of his bedside table. But they didn't give him a gold watch. One of the two partners in the firm, Ofer Horowitz, a man my age, presented him with a fancy executive's diary with an artificial leather cover and an envelope containing two hundred shekels worth of vouchers at a household goods and gift shop. The three typists in my father's department collected money to buy him flowers. There were also cakes from the bakery across the street. With the vouchers my mother bought a wok and began practicing Chinese cooking, but the fancy diary remained closed and appointmentless, lying in its gift wrapping on top of the heap of his old suits that piled up on my childhood bed during the months of that summer and fall.

That morning he didn't go out on his errands. Maybe he saw the crying as an errand in itself, something that had to be done in order to get it over with. My mother was at the hairdresser's. Thursday was her day at the hairdresser. He was sitting on a chair in the living room, facing the balcony. The shutters were closed, but one ray of sunlight entered the room and illuminated the place where he was sitting in a square of light. I don't know if he heard me come in. He didn't make a sound and his shoulders heaved, and I wanted to go up and lay my hand on his shoulder, but I knew that it would be like shutting him up. I stood behind him and waited and when I heard him sniffing I asked if it was because of the divorce that he was crying. He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

“It's sad,” I said.

“I'm tired,” he said. “I'm not sad so much as tired. All this running back and forth to the Rabbinate, at my age. Who's got the strength for it?”

“I'll go,” I said. “I'll try to spare you as much running around as I can.” But I knew that this wasn't what he meant. He liked going on errands, but he liked errands that had a point, ones that he initiated, and he didn't see any point in this divorce, and it wasn't his initiative, and he was afraid of being alone.

He was a great believer in marriage, my father. He wasn't familiar with anything else. Before he met my mother, who worked for a few years as a switchboard operator at the accountants “Horowitz and Amit,” he had another wife, Violet. He never showed us any pictures of her, because he had burned them all. Violet was hit by a bus. My father was married to Violet for ten years and they never had any children. Violet, so Mother told me, was never in a hurry.

It was my mother who poured water over my father when he fainted on the morning he was informed of Violet's death. Violet, who was never in a rush, ran across the street to try to catch her bus, and was hit by a bus coming from the other direction. “Number four,” was all my father volunteered when Tali and I expressed a healthy girlish curiosity, and to this day we don't know whether number four was the bus that hit her or the bus she was trying to catch. Mother says: “Both.” She doesn't like talking about Violet either.

Mom was sitting at the switchboard when it happened. She saw my father coming downstairs, passing the glass aquarium where she sat, hesitating for a moment at the entrance, touching the wall with his fingers, and then collapsing on the floor. She was the one who had transferred the call from the police to him a few minutes earlier, and she knew it was bad news. When she saw him collapse, she took a jar of flowers—every morning she would buy herself a few flowers on her way to the office in order to make her aquarium seem like home—and rushed over to him. He woke up in her arms, wet and surrounded by daisies, and that's where he stayed.

I promised him I would make some initial inquiries at the Rabbinate, and the next day I drove there, but I was told that my parents had to come themselves. I asked the clerk if it was because I was a woman. “No,” he said, “that's got nothing to do with it. The mother and father have to come themselves,” he said, “and the daughter can accompany them if they need help.” He said “the daughter” as if it was some hypothetical daughter he was talking about. Then he explained where to find parking. “Let the husband and wife come!” he shouted after me as I thanked him for the information and started down the stairs; like a master of ceremonies he cried: “Let the parents come!”—let the royal parents enter the stage.

“Who was it?” Micky asked when I sat down again on the sofa, trying to remember exactly where my head had been. He put the poem he was reading back onto the pile.

“My dad,” I said. “He got mixed up. He was trying to call my mom.”

“They don't live together?” he asked.

“They got divorced this morning,” I said.

“Don't ask, I have terrible problems with my parents too.” He sighed.

“Really?” I asked.

“My father broke his leg last week skiing. They were in Switzerland. They go every winter.”

“How old are they?” I asked.

“I don't know exactly. Fifty something, fifty-five? Something like that, I think. Wait a minute, my father's fifty-five, he had a birthday recently. And my mother's a little younger, maybe fifty-three, or - two,” and suddenly I envied him, not because his parents were so young, but because he didn't know how old they were.

“So your parents got divorced this morning?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and laid my head on his shoulder again. “I was at the Rabbinate with them. It was a nightmare.”

“Yes,” he muttered. “You know what? I think she's there too now, with her husband and kid.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Rinat. She married a lawyer. Every year they go to Saint Moritz to ski. I think they go to the same place as my mother and father. My mother told me that she saw her there two years ago, with the kid. Never mind,” he said sighing. “So now father's home all day and he drives my mother crazy. We got him a Filipino nurse and he drives her crazy too. He's so spoiled. My big brother and I have to go and visit him all the time and be nice to him and to the Filipino nurse and play chess with him. They're not taking the cast off until next month. It's a nightmare.”

“It is,” I said.

We had sex on the sofa. It was too narrow for both of us, so at some point we slid onto the floor, all worked up, but not enough not to feel we were crushing the pages; not enough to really damage them. When I got up I had a poem stuck to my behind. I peeled it off carefully and apologized, and gave it to Micky who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, horrified by what had happened to his poems. He crawled around on his hands and knees collecting them, smoothing out the corners and blowing on the pages. We drank tea and I saw him hesitate, trying to decide whether to stay the night. I told him that I liked sleeping alone and he was relieved. When he left, I too suddenly felt like writing a bad poem. I knew I was capable of it, but before I had time to start writing I fell asleep.

6

My parents got divorced on a fine day at the beginning of February. I drove them to the Rabbinate, let them off outside the building, told them I'd meet them inside, and went to look for parking. My mother, who was sitting on the seat next to me, got tangled up in her seat belt and couldn't get out, and my father leaned over and tried to extricate her. She fell out of the car, groaning and gasping, clutching his shoulder. Her bag had come open and the contents were scattered over the seat. My father and I tried to put everything back quickly, but someone was already honking behind me and I had to drive off. I saw them in the mirror, standing on the sidewalk, hesitating, my mother waving at me and my father looking at a window display of electronic equipment and watches.

There was no parking in the place where the clerk had promised there would be; apparently a lot of people were getting in and out of marriages that morning, and I had to drive around the block five or six times. On the seat next to me lay a broken cigarette and a mint that had escaped from its wrapping. I wondered whether my mother was sucking one of those mints now, whether she was rummaging in her bag to find my father his sugar-free candies, whether he was sitting next to her, his open palm lying limply in his lap, waiting for her to find the candy while she said “Hold on,” even though he wasn't pressing her. I wondered whether they were sitting on a bench in the corridor, waiting for their turn, quietly sucking their candies.

I found parking in one of the side streets and ran back to the Rabbinate. I was afraid I would find them still standing on the sidewalk and waiting for me, but they weren't there. The clerk told me they had already gone inside. I waited outside, on the bench. I took out a book of crossword puzzles I'd bought at the newsstand outside my house that morning, but I couldn't concentrate. I tried to hear what was going on inside, the sound of the marriage ending, the quill squeaking on parchment, a wooden gavel banging on a table, the judges' stifled laughter at the sight of the elderly couple who'd suddenly decided to get divorced one fine winter's day. But no sound escaped from Hall number 2. My parents, who always made such a racket together, got divorced in silence.

When the doors opened they stepped out, dazed and blinking as if they'd emerged from of a movie theater. My mother said that the divorce had made her hungry and suggested that we all have some breakfast. My father shrugged and took his wallet out of his pocket to see if he had enough cash.

We went to a café not far from the Rabbinate. The three of us sat at a small table, round and unsteady, and had nothing to say to each other. My father waited for my mother to take the last cigarette out of her pack. He wanted the pack so that he could use it to steady the table. When she pulled out the last cigarette and lit it, he took the pack, flattened the cardboard with his fist, folded it, and pushed the square under the rocky table leg. As he straightened up, he was flushed and out of breath. He hadn't taken off his coat. Nor had she. He picked up one of the big laminated menus that the waitress put on the table, and hid behind it. My mother smoked pensively. Then she glanced at the menu and asked him whether she should order the large breakfast or just coffee and a croissant. He said he didn't know, and ordered the large breakfast for himself. This included an omelette made with two eggs, salad, cream cheese, swiss cheese, jelly, rolls, fresh orange juice, and coffee. I don't think he was that hungry, but he didn't know where his next meal would come from.

I had no appetite. I never had an appetite in the morning, and never in my parents' company, and especially not now, because of how early it was and the circumstances and the intimacy of the little table, which was still wobbly. They never pressed me to eat. Tali was the problem child, but this morning they looked at me anxiously when I put the menu down and asked the waitress just for coffee. Their eyes pleaded with me to eat something. Even something small. “Just a little something,” my mother urged, to give me strength.

My father paid, my mother behaved naturally. He calculated the tip exactly and left the waitress a stack of ten-cent coins on the saucer. I was embarrassed, but I didn't want to say anything, an hour and fifteen minutes after his divorce. My mother went to the rest room and he stood up, swaying, and put his wallet in his coat pocket together with the little containers of jelly that came with the full breakfast.

We stood outside and waited for my mother. A cold wind suddenly began to blow and all at once the sky clouded over. I tightened my father's red woolen scarf around his neck and pushed the ends into his coat collar. He smiled shyly at me. Then I wiped a crumb from his chin. I was glad to have something to do so I wouldn't have to make conversation. This was the first time we'd been alone together since they had separated. Through the glass front of the café I saw the waitress going over to our table and collecting her tip with irritable, jerky movements; then she pulled the folded cigarette pack from under the table leg and threw it into the ashtray.