The World Without You (7 page)

It turned out Noelle did have a hearing problem, discovered when she was a freshman in high school, and maybe that was why she was doing so badly in school: she couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying. There had been hints of this earlier, Noelle at seven saying to her mother, “Why if people have two ears do they only hear out of one?”

“What are you talking about?” her mother said, but Noelle insisted she was only joking.

At fourteen, when she went to the audiologist and discovered she had moderate hearing loss in her right ear and a little in her left ear too, Noelle began to blame everything on her hearing loss. She had a slight lisp, which she’d always attributed to an overbite, but now, sitting in the ENT’s office going over the results of her test, she became convinced that her lisp was because she couldn’t hear well. She was listening to the doctor even as she wasn’t listening to him, turning him off as she’d learned to do, and when he asked her if she’d be willing to wear a hearing aid, she said, “Sure,” even as she was thinking,
No way I’m wearing a hearing aid, hearing aids are for old people.

Later, at home, she overheard Clarissa and Lily talking about her.

“Now are you proud of yourself?” Clarissa said. “Saying, ‘What are you, deaf?’ She’s hard of hearing.”

“Oh, come on, Clarissa,” Lily said. “She’s faking it.”

How, Noelle wondered, did Lily know? Although she wasn’t faking it, her hearing loss wasn’t as great as the doctor believed, because when the audiologist tested her she intentionally got some of the answers wrong. It was the same way with school. She wasn’t an A student and would never be one. But if she tried harder she could have gotten B’s. But who wanted B’s? You got B’s and no one noticed you. She would get C’s and D’s. She’d flunk out. She’d get left back.

Home from the audiologist, she asked her parents to enroll her in a sign-language course. At first they refused, saying she needed to focus on high school, but then they struck a deal with her that if she did better in her classes they’d let her take sign language. And for a time her grades improved.

Once she saw a group of deaf teenagers on her subway car, and though her signing had gotten better, she still had trouble following them. She watched them, glanced away, then watched them again until, finally, one of them shouted, “Stop staring at us!” her voice as high-pitched as a hyena’s.

She went to a party sponsored by the New York Association for the Deaf, but not knowing anyone, she stood in the corner sipping a beer, feeling excluded and alone. She would use sex, she thought; she’d make a pass at someone. But she found herself, a hearing person among the deaf, unusually self-conscious in front of the guys, and when she tried to approach one she was convinced all the girls were staring at her, accusing her of trying to steal one of their own when all she wanted was to talk to somebody. Then the dance music came on—everyone danced by feeling the vibrations beneath their feet—but it was so loud she couldn’t tolerate it, and she had to go out onto the balcony. Standing next to the chips and the keg of beer, watching everyone gesture to each other, the beautiful choreography of sign language, she resolved to go back inside and dance, thinking if she exposed her ears to the noise maybe she would really become deaf.

At home, she tried to facilitate the process. She practiced backflips on her bed, treating the mattress as a trampoline, and she began to do this with Q-tips in her ears, hoping to block out the world of sound, but also thinking what if she slipped and landed on her side, plunging the Q-tip into her ear.

She learned about someone who had gone deaf at age twelve and could read lips so well you couldn’t tell she was deaf. She was a graduate student at Columbia and taught a section of introductory European history. She could even talk on the telephone; she would be on one receiver and her roommate would be on the other repeating what the person said, and when she spoke there was no lag time. Noelle tracked her down, pretending she was a student studying for her midterm, until, revealing she didn’t know anything about European history, she heard the woman ask who she was, and she panicked and hung up.

For days after that she felt disgusted by herself. She was always impersonating people: her sisters, her mother, the girls at school. Only in a boy’s arms: that was the one time she felt she belonged, huddled like a duck in the AV room, attending to him, the look on his face, the grimace, the
Oh, Noelle, oh, God
, the feeling that they’d melded. But then he would roll off her and she’d be alone again, a lump of shame, and his gaze was slack and distant, his eyes like sea glass, and she swore she would never do it again, never have sex with another boy, but then the next one came along and she convinced herself this one would be different.

Even as a baby she was self-punishing. She would tug on her hair and squeeze her stomach. As a teenager, she developed trichotillomania; she pulled out clumps of her own hair. Sometimes she thinks she was simply born this way. Other times she traces it back to Leo. She was four when her mother got pregnant again, and from the start of the pregnancy there were complications. Finally, labor was induced at thirty weeks. In the delivery room, Leo’s heart rate plummeted, the umbilical cord was noosed around the baby’s throat, an emergency C-section had to be performed. There was some question about loss of oxygen. Leo developed late; he didn’t walk until twenty months and he spoke even later. The doctors said there might be brain damage, maybe simply learning disabilities, maybe nothing at all. Those first few weeks, no one except Noelle’s parents was allowed to handle him. The quiet, the delicacy, her mother sick, the baby sick, the baby’s sleeping, don’t wake the baby, don’t disturb the baby, don’t hold the baby, don’t drop the baby. Always the baby, as if it were hubris to give him a name. Don’t touch the baby, as if telescoping to Noelle’s most unspeakable thoughts: her wish to drop the baby, to kill the baby, to be the baby. It was what she’d been her whole life; she’d always assumed she’d continue to be that.

She was the last one to see Leo alive. He spent Shabbat with her and Amram in Jerusalem, and a few days later, in Iraq, he was abducted. Then came the week when the family was on TV, pleading with his captors for his release, handsome, buoyant Leo looking drugged. And when his body was flown home, President Bush called him a martyr in the war to rid the world of evil. He invited Noelle’s family to the White House. Publicly, her mother refused to go. She wouldn’t allow her son to be used that way, to become an instrument in the service of the war.

Immediately, the family was frozen out. Rumors were floated, the sources unnamed, that maybe Leo wasn’t as innocent as people had said. He’d violated journalists’ protocol; he’d wound up where he wasn’t supposed to be. Why, Noelle wonders, did these rumors surprise people? You slap the president in the face and he slaps you back. And she speaks as someone who voted for Bush, who sent in her absentee ballot from six thousand miles away. Her brother is dead—she still grieves for him—but Bush is the best friend Israel has ever had. She’s the one who has to live with the terrorist attacks, the sounds of katyusha rockets going off at night.

Brain damage? Learning disabilities? In no time, Leo had outstripped her, as successful in his own way as Clarissa and Lily were in theirs. It was a relief to move to Israel; finally she wasn’t simply someone’s sister. She views the girl she was in high school with disapproval, but it’s a faint, abstract disapproval, as is the pity that accompanies it. She regards the sex the way she regards everything else. She wouldn’t deny it was her, but it doesn’t trouble her any longer.

Across the aisle, Amram is flipping through a computer magazine. He’s in the software industry; at least he was until he lost his job. She still doesn’t know what happened—Amram won’t talk about it—but the specifics are almost beside the point. What happened is what always happens. Amram is smart, but he alienates people. Temperamentally, he’s meant to be the boss and he hasn’t accommodated to the fact that he isn’t the boss, so the real boss fires him. Noelle knows what people say behind Amram’s back. She feels embarrassed for him, and for herself as a result, but there’s nothing she can do about it. Amram is good-hearted and he’s misunderstood, but after this last firing she, too, has grown exasperated.

It’s an unspoken lie in their marriage, perhaps
the
unspoken lie, that Amram’s salary supports them. His paycheck certainly helps, and Noelle is hardly in a position to complain; she brings home barely any money herself, working two mornings a week as a teacher’s aide, though she knows that if she were paid for raising their children, she would—or at least should—be well compensated. But their own situation is tinged with regret because her grandmother, Gretchen, gave each of the grandchildren a substantial sum of money when they turned twenty-five, and Noelle frittered hers away. Strangely, the regret comes principally from Amram, who didn’t even know Noelle when she was twenty-five. He spends considerable time talking about what they would have done with the money if only they’d gotten it a few years later. Because they didn’t, they’ve been forced to rely on Noelle’s parents for help, which humiliates Amram; he feels his masculinity is being impugned. He has become frugal to the point of unreason, deploying tricks to save money, when the real trick he’s playing is to convince himself he isn’t accepting help from his in-laws. He buys the cheaper brands of yogurt and cottage cheese, gets the
lachmaniot
in bulk though the bread becomes stale quickly, and having salved his conscience and saved a few shekels, he places the money he’s accumulated into a piggy bank that he hides beneath his and Noelle’s bed. Noelle finds this endearing and a little sad; her husband, thirty-eight years old, veteran of the Israeli army, has a piggy bank into which he places his shekel coins, thinking of this money as a vacation fund, what will send the family on a
tiyul
to the Negev, when what’s in there will likely cover gas money and little else.

Yet at the same time, Amram will invest a thousand dollars in a company on a tip from a friend; he’ll shirk his responsibilities at work. Penny-wise and pound-foolish, the saying goes, but it’s more than that. Amram believes in reinventing himself. He has done this already by becoming religious, and he’s done it in other ways too, by shedding seventy-five pounds in a year only to gain the weight right back again. He believes in spectacular acts—miracles, essentially—not just by God but by man, and given the choice between caution and glory, he’ll choose glory any day. This is what has gotten him into trouble, and it’s what he and Noelle have been fighting about. Though they’ve promised themselves to stage a truce, for the sake of Leo’s memory, and for the sake of their vacation, which they’re hoping to enjoy.

A flight attendant distributes wipes, and the boys shred the packets and wave the wipes in the air. Soon Yoni starts to shred the wipe itself before Noelle reaches over and stops him.

Another flight attendant hands out customs forms, asking the passengers are they U.S. citizens, are they Israeli, and Akiva, proudly, says they’re both, to which the flight attendant says, “Well, someone’s double trouble,” and she hands Akiva the forms for the whole family.

A voice announces, first in Hebrew, then in English, that the captain is beginning his descent; they should be touching down at Logan in forty-five minutes.

“
G’virotai v’rabotai
,” Akiva mimics. “Ladies and gentlemen …”

Yoni and Dov get into an argument about whose English is better, and then they’re on to the question of whether there are more Americans or Israelis on the plane, a subject about which they also disagree.

“Come on, kids,” Amram says, “we’re almost there.”

Noelle, to lend support, points out how well behaved everyone has been on the trip.

“Ari didn’t even throw up,” Yoni says.

“You see?” says Noelle, who in the cab to the airport had to mediate between the brothers, none of whom wanted to sit next to Ari, thinking he would vomit on their laps.

At customs they get their visas stamped, and then they head over to the baggage carousel, which Yoni and Dov promptly mount. They ride around on it, pretending they’re luggage, until Amram insists they get off. Then they’re through the swinging doors and out into the terminal, where Noelle scans the crowd for her sisters.

3

“Jesus Christ!” Lily says. She’s standing in Logan waiting for Clarissa, who’s an hour late. She looks up at the arrivals screen above her head, but what’s the point: Clarissa and Nathaniel are coming by car. She waits a few minutes longer, then heads over to international to meet Noelle alone. She skips the automated walkway; she’ll get there faster on her own two feet. She cuts a striking figure, a pretty redhead in capri pants, threading her way between the travelers.

She checks her voicemail and finds a message from Clarissa. She’s been waylaid, it seems. It’s hard to hear her sister over the voice of the P.A. telling travelers to pass to the left, stand to the right, issuing an endless loop of gate changes, but the upshot is clear: Clarissa won’t be making it to the airport; she’ll meet up with them at the house.
I’m truly sorry
, Clarissa says.
You’ll have to strap those kids to the roof of the car. I love you, Lil. I owe you one.

Lily mouths the words back—
I love you
—then presses on. Clarissa: her older sister, her best friend. She does love her, but right now she’s annoyed. Strap those kids to the roof of the car, indeed! Though even that won’t be sufficient. With Noelle and Amram and their four boys, with all the luggage and car seats (Lily and Malcolm’s friends are always transporting their car seats wherever they go—it’s as if they’re cabled to their arms), they’ll have to rent a car as well.

Lily doesn’t know Noelle’s flight number—all Clarissa told her was the airline—and when she arrives at international, she looks up at the screen and sees multiple flights from Tel Aviv.

Terrific, she thinks.
Lovely.