Housebroken (37 page)

I was trapped in a freezing car buried in the mud on a dirt road with two hysterical children and an unconscious husband whose head was leaning against the window with the seat belt choking his neck and I hated him.

I yelled at him to wake up and he rubbed his forehead on the wet window and opened his eyes for a second but closed them again and mumbled: “I don't feel well.” “Matti!” I screamed. “You have to wake up!” He opened his eyes again and in the dark I could only see the whites of his eyes and he said: “I feel really sick.” The children tried to climb over the back of the seat and reach me, and Shahar held out his arms in a panic.

“Matti,” I whispered and slapped his cheeks. “Wake up!” I screamed. “Wake up!”

I got out of the car and opened the door on his side and unfastened the seat belt and tried to push him over to the other seat, but he was too heavy and he didn't budge, and I slapped him on the face because what else could I do? But it didn't help and his body slumped and slid halfway out the door and I could hardly keep him from falling into the mud.

I don't know how much time went by before he woke up. Maybe it was the cold and the rain that woke him, and I shouted quickly: “Move to the right, Matti, please! Move to the right! Just a little! Try to move just a little!” And he dragged himself over to the passenger's seat and let his head fall back and Shahar wound his arms around his neck so as not to lose him again, and Uri looked at his father's dead face and asked me what we were going to do now.

I didn't answer. I asked Shahar to take his arms off his father's neck because I could see it was hard for him to breathe and I said: “Uri, tell Shahar a story.” And Uri said: “I can't. I don't know any, I'm scared.” I put the car into reverse and said: “Then tell him the story that Daddy always tells you before you go to sleep, the one with the elephants and monkeys and rhinos.” And he said: “There aren't any rhinos.” I said: “Then tell it without rhinos, Uri, it makes no difference.” And he burst into tears and said: “Yes it does!” So I said: “Then tell it however you want.” “But I don't remember!” he wailed. “Yes you do,” I said and pressed down on the gas pedal, and my foot slipped off it because the sole of my shoe was wet. “Do your best!” I yelled.

The wheels spun around and the car didn't move and out of the corner of my eye I saw Matti staring into space with a drop of spittle dribbling from his mouth and I said: “Tell him the story Daddy always tells you. You remember. Don't say you don't remember.” “But I'm scared,” he said, and it seemed that the rear wheels were moving a bit but it was only my imagination. “I can't remember any stories when I'm scared,” and I pressed the pedal again, this time all the way, because I didn't have anything to lose anymore, and the car leaped backward with a terrible screech.

Matti and the children fell asleep and I tried to find the way to the hospital. First the main road, I said to myself, and then the hospital, and when we finally got onto the highway I felt my whole body trembling and I felt nauseated, and cold, and I thought that in a second I was going to pass out too, but of course that was out of the question, so I went on driving and the rain stopped and signs which suddenly looked so friendly began appearing at the sides of the road and Matti woke up and asked where we were.

“Near Tiberius,” I said. “We're going to the hospital.”

“There's no need, Mira,” he said. “I'm feeling better now.”

“Yes there is!” I said. “It could happen again.”

“I'll go to the doctor tomorrow,” he said, “okay? I promise. Let's just go home now.”

“No,” I said. “We're going to the emergency room. We must, Matti. You haven't been feeling well for a long time now. Maybe it has something to do with what happened on the night of the Passover meal.”

“But I already told you, it was the food.”

“You almost killed us all just now. You realize that? You can't see properly, you get dizzy spells, and now you passed out. Why are you so stubborn?” And I reminded him that a week before he had woken up in the middle of the night in agony. “You remember that?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “And you were in such pain that you didn't even know what you were doing.” “What did I do?” he asked, worried.

“You kicked Uri. You pushed Shahar away and you kicked Uri. You kicked him in the stomach. He had a large bruise.” “I didn't kick Uri,” he said. “Don't talk nonsense.” “You don't remember,” I said, “you just don't remember!” And he turned his head and looked at Uri, who was sleeping wrapped in a big towel, with a tearful expression on his face and Shahar curled up next to him, his back rising and falling as he breathed, and I said, this time without anger, because I knew that nothing would ever be right again: “You really don't remember?”

He took off his sweater and spread it over the children, arranging the sleeves so that they would cover as much of both of them as possible, and said: “I remember,” and promised me that tomorrow we'd go to the doctor together. “But let's go home now, I'm exhausted and I don't want to spend the whole night in the emergency room, and anyway doctors don't know anything. When did it stop raining, Mira? It hadn't rained so hard on Passover for a long time,” he said and touched my cheek, and my eyes filled with tears. “Yes,” I said, and he said, “Years,” and I had no idea yet that this was our last Passover, and the whole way home we were silent and the children slept soundly and when we arrived he took Uri in his arms and I took Shahar. We left the luggage and the wet sleeping bags in the car.

24

“It's dark,” he said. “You have to go home.”

I lay on my back on the bed in the towel he had wrapped me in and listened to the sounds of the neighbors' dinners, the clatter of spoons and forks, and I didn't know what time it was but my hair was already dry. “It's dark,” he said. “They must be worried about you by now. We don't want to get into trouble. You can come again tomorrow. We'll see what happens tomorrow. Why don't you come first thing in the morning?” And the strange thing is that I had no fear that by tomorrow he might forget me, this fear was acquired later on, with other men in other rooms, and maybe this is what made him fall in love with me, just this—when he looked at me as I tightened the edges of the towel around me and got up to look for my clothes and said: “So I should be here first thing tomorrow morning?”—because of my innocence.

“What time can you come?”

“Seven.”

“Seven? Then I better give you a key.”

And that was it. It was that simple.

He got up and went to the closet to look for a key, bending down and searching through the drawers, piling little boxes and envelopes on the floor, talking to himself, naked and busy. He stood up and looked around and mumbled: “Where could it be?” and scratched his head, and the insect bites on his legs, and he went into the kitchen, opened and closed drawers again, and asked: “Where are you where are you where are you?” singing to himself, and then came back to the room where I was standing all dressed holding my bag in my hands.

“I remember seeing it somewhere,” he said, and glanced at his books. “It couldn't have just disappeared.… Here it is! It was on the dictionary.” And he opened my hand and put the key in it and said: “Close your eyes and I'll give you a surprise,” and I closed them and felt his lips on mine, and his tongue inside my mouth, and his hands pulling up my tank top and unzipping my jeans, and we did it again, and all the time I was clutching the key in my hand.

25

The next morning I called the hospital and made an appointment. It was for May, but if it hadn't been for the secretary whom I went to high school with we wouldn't have gotten May either. “You're lucky to get this appointment,” she said, and asked me how things were in general and what I'd been up to all these years. “You're very lucky!” she said and was impressed with the fact that I had two children. “How many do you have?” I asked. “Me? I'm not married. Do you know any single men?” “I'll think about it.” I laughed. “What are you looking for?” “Handsome, rich, I don't care if he's old and dies and leaves me all his money. So May fifth, three o'clock, okay? I put you down,” and I curse the day I made the appointment.

26

Because who knows? Maybe, if Mrs. Rosen hadn't called us, her husband wouldn't be lying now surrounded by tall trees and the stillness of terminal places. Two women are sitting on the lawn, each on her own side: one has short, steel-gray hair and the other dyed orange hair. Mrs. Rosen is sitting on a bench drying her eyes with a tissue which she then shoves back into her handbag, and the other woman is sitting on the grass making a chain from pine needles. For two weeks now Mr. Rosen has been lying next to an old man, and when he occasionally wakes from a restless sleep he complains that his neighbor is filling the room with the smell of death.

Every morning Mrs. Rosen changes the flowers in the jar standing on the night table, but he says it doesn't help and she doesn't argue with him anymore. She takes a bottle of perfume from her bag and sprays it around the room. “Is that better?” she asks with the restrained gentleness of someone trying not to fall to pieces. “No,” he groans, and falls back to sleep.

The other woman doesn't dare go in. She waits until noon, when Mrs. Rosen goes home, she steals into the building, walks quickly past the nurses and doctors who know her face but don't know who she is, stands outside the room for a few minutes, and then retraces her steps. Sometimes she returns to sit on the same spot on the lawn, and smokes a cigarette or two, and sometimes she gets into her car and drives away. The other day both cars—the Rosens' white sedan and the other car—were parked side by side.

Mr. Rosen is sinking fast, and they both know it. The wife from what she sees for herself and her long conversations with our colleagues, and the other woman by the appearance of Mrs. Rosen. When she came to us a month ago to arrange for his transfer to our hospice, she made one more desperate attempt to negotiate his dying with us. We showed her the results of his latest brain scan, as if we were showing a child learning to read a book with big letters. She nodded and bit her lower lip, but this time she didn't cry.

“So, this is it? There's nothing more to do?”

“No,” we said. “Only to make him as comfortable as possible.”

“So he's dying?” she asked and again we couldn't bring ourselves to answer this simple question, and this time we felt a sense of failure.

“Because if he goes into the hospice, it means he won't come out again. It means he's dying. Doesn't it?”

“Yes,” we said, and she seemed relieved.

And on New Year's Eve there was a vacancy and an ambulance that wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere was sent to pick up Mr. Rosen. He spent the holiday sleeping, his right eye permanently closed and his left eye open in what might look, to anyone unfamiliar with the phenomenon, like an expression of terror. Patches of thin black hair cover his head and his hands are gray and swollen. When his blood pressure drops, there is also a reflexive trembling of the fingers. During the last week he has also begun to lose his ability to speak and the only word he manages to pronounce now is: “no.”

Sometimes this “no” is aggressive and childish, and sometimes whining and old, sometimes there is a whole string of “noes” and sometimes just one long drowsy one, but in any case it's a definite “no” which comes with increasing frequency, and the medical personnel as well as his wife by now regard it as one more meaningless detail in Mr. Rosen's disintegrating personality, the patient being no longer conscious of the fact that he's negating everything, and whose “no” means no more than the tremor in his fingers. Next week, we assume, the foul odor coming from his roommate will also stop bothering him.

27

It's horrible how much I've changed. He probably wouldn't recognize me anyway. And maybe it's better this way. I haven't seen him for ten years, except once, three years ago, at the gas station, when I was here visiting my parents. At first I didn't recognize him, because he'd gotten another car, and the new one didn't go with his old image, but suddenly I realized that it was him sitting there in the white car, underneath the black hair, next to his wife.

If he'd been alone I might have approached him, but then again I probably wouldn't have. So I pretended that I didn't see them. I was afraid of him. I was afraid of what I did to him, even though to this day I'm not sure exactly what it was, and if it was really so terrible. I've left men, and men have left me since then, but maybe there's something extra cruel about the first time, before you learn how to do it right. On the other hand, there is no perfect way. I didn't know what to do then, except pretend I was sleeping, and when he fell asleep, sometime after midnight, pick my clothes up quietly from the floor, put them on in the bathroom, take the lighter I bought him out of my bag, a plain silver-plated lighter without any inscriptions or monogram, because I thought it might seem ambivalent: How can you give someone a good-bye present hoping that he'll forget you, and at the same time inscribe your name on it? And I left it on the kitchen table, next to my key, and went out and closed the door quietly behind me, without locking it.

We were together for a year until he lost his nature's child, which I, apparently, never was. A year till that morning when I opened the door and heard the water running in the shower, and I went in and said a tired hello, and he turned to me with the nudity I already found boring, and saw me with my face all made up and said: “What's this? Take it off. You don't need it. Wash your face. You look like a slut.” Because I really overdid it, with the exaggeration of sixteen-year-old girls, which makes them look like a scary cross between an aging nymph and a clown, and what's more, removes them from the custody of the guy who loved them in his own particular way, the love of old men.