Chapter 7
On Monday morning, Halimi left early for Tel Aviv, long before the snarling traffic, for a staff meeting at the radio station. Lily lay awake in bed, cradling her blankie to her right ear and staring placidly at the ceiling.
I stopped by the bedroom door before entering.
“Mommy …” she gurgled, her mouth full with the pacifier.
I crept into her bed and under the blanket like a thief, and when I reached the warmth of her body, I gathered her into my arms. Lily squirmed, howling, and hit me over the head with her pacifier.
“Okay, okay, okay,” I said and took hold of her chubby hand.
I passed the back of my fingers over the smooth, tender skin of her arm and held her close.
Lily began wriggling to escape my grasp and tried to get out of bed, squashing one of my kidneys and pinching the flesh of my thigh with her foot.
Finally, she escaped and went off to pee.
I heard her dragging the step stool closer to the toilet so she could climb up and then the sound of her less-than-graceful attempts to place her little tush onto the toilet seat.
I fixed coffee for myself and chocolate milk for Lily, and then some oatmeal.
We ate it on the balcony, as usual, with cubes of butter and salt.
“There’s no rooster in the hotel,” Lily declared.
“There isn’t?” I said, scrambling to catch her drift.
“No rooster,” Lily repeated, counting on me to explain why.
“Does that make you sad?” I asked hopefully. Lily frowned.
“But there is in the little room with the pillows!” she said angrily.
“What kind of a rooster?” I ventured.
“Robinod’s rooster!” Lily’s voice cracked, and she began whimpering.
“Ah …” I sighed with relief. “You couldn’t watch Robin Hood in Grandma’s bedroom at the hotel?”
Lily shook her head dolefully.
“No, I couldn’t,” she whispered, a tragic note in her voice.
“But he was in the little room with the pillows?” I tried.
“Yes!” Lily crowed, leaping up and bouncing on her chair. “Okay, okay,” I smiled at her. “Sit down, so you don’t fall over.” Lily, who knew all about falling over, settled back into the chair.
“He was in the little room with the pillows,” she said, fixing her eyes on me with satisfaction.
“You’re such a little Robinod,” I told her. I inhaled air into my lungs, one of those deep inhalations that finally releases trapped breath, and everything looked lovely.
Half an hour later, I was sobbing my heart out by the gate of her preschool, grappling with the question that every parent confronts: Is it possible that I’m a monster, leaving her like this?
Only the stern gaze of the shop owner on the corner stopped me from charging back in and taking Lily home.
I strained to hear if Lily’s weeping was still audible, but the preschool’s morning commotion was a blanket of happy, well-organized mayhem.
I gave in to the urge and texted her teacher—“Hi, it’s Idit, Lily’s mom.
Is she okay?”—and sent it before I had time to rebuke myself.
Once home, I made myself another coffee and found a note from Simone on the fridge door, saying that she and Richard had gone for a stroll by the sea.
I went out onto the balcony with my laptop, tobacco, and coffee.
I tried calling Dina, but she didn’t answer, and after a cigarette and a half, I texted her, “Call me on Zoom, urgent,” and went back inside.
“I feel like a monster,” I flung the words at my sister as soon as her face appeared on the screen, her hair wild, her ripped T-shirt with the logo of a heavy metal group I didn’t recognize. “I dump my daughter at a place that makes her cry, just so I can have time to fuck around all morning.”
“Relax, it’s fine,” Dina laughed easily. “Lily’s just a drama queen.” She chewed loudly on a chunk of kohlrabi from a ceramic bowl that covered a quarter of the screen.
I resolved to go pick up Lily from preschool once I’d finished my coffee.
My cell phone beeped. A text from the teacher.
“Everything’s good. She calmed down thirty seconds later.
Played very nicely with Noam and now doing great in animal hour.
I wanted to send you a photo but couldn’t find you on WhatsApp.
” A surge of relief swept through me. I felt dizzy and leaned back into the couch.
“Where were we?” Dina said, swinging Max up with a practiced hand onto her lap and baring one breast.
“The teacher messaged me. Everything’s fine.” Max suckled happily at her breast, and his hand played distractedly with her hair. “Dinka, it’s gross, he’s almost four years old,” I blurted out.
“Shut up,” Dina answered cheerfully.
I settled down on the couch and reached for my coffee. “Listen. You’re not going to believe what happened to me over the weekend.”
“I’m not going back to that jerk,” I sniffled.
I lay there like a pregnant whale, on a sun lounger at a café on the Tel Aviv promenade, trying to ignore the raucous music that was playing.
Dina, who’d arrived a week earlier, refused to stay at our place (“I want to be my own person, not creep around your apartment on tiptoe,” she answered when I protested) and reserved herself a room in a boutique hotel in the Yemenite Quarter.
“She’s turned into a cold European,” I told Mom, enraged, on our weekly phone call.
Mom was also miffed that Dina only stayed with them for one night (“Ditka, I don’t think Dinka loves us anymore”).
Dina preferred to spend her time in Tel Aviv, wandering around at leisure (“Tel Aviv winters are just perfect”), meeting up with old acquaintances, exploring old and new places.
She got a new tattoo, a baby Chinese dragon, and had a fling with the Russian tattoo artist.
I was happy to join her earlier in the day for more modest activities. It felt good to exist without Halimi, whose social life continued, irrespective of my advancing pregnancy.
“I can’t believe I encouraged him,” I sighed, trying to imagine what it might be like raising a child as a single parent. Just the thought gave me arrhythmia.
Our wedding was wonderful. I had prepared myself mentally for something to go wrong—that the dress would rip around my huge belly, that there wouldn’t be enough food.
But it was a long, relaxed party on the beach, exactly as we planned it, nothing over the top, mountains of good food and alcohol.
Friends and family kidded around together, everyone danced and was happy, my mom got quite drunk, Simone reclined on a sun lounger by the shore, Dina and Georg’s daughter, Eva, showered us with flowers under the wedding canopy (Georg and the kids had left the day after the wedding, but Dina stayed “to party”).
When Halimi said the traditional “If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem” at the wedding ceremony, he looked me in the eye with steadiness and emotion.
“So, what now?” Dina asked. She drank beer from a bottle and smoked a joint.
“This morning, his phone didn’t stop beeping when he was in the shower, and I saw it was a Facebook chat with some chick,” I said dramatically. I tried unsuccessfully to find a comfortable position to lie in.
“A Facebook chat, so what?”
“They’ve been sending each other all sorts of songs with hidden meanings, and cute emojis, and they arranged to meet at some café. The same week we got married, for God’s sake,” I sniffled. It was infuriating to be thrown into the role of betrayed wife, yet again, and in such a ridiculous manner.
“Go ahead, go ahead, all the best studies say it’s great when you’re about to give birth,” Dina said.
I took a hit from my sister’s joint, watching two old ladies walk along the waterfront.
I got the feeling they knew what I was doing and were judging me.
“Okay, so they arranged to meet, so what?” Dina continued, blinking at the sun.
“What do you mean, ‘so what’? Does it seem normal to you that a guy has an affair with someone five days after getting married and his wife’s about to have a baby?” I began coughing wildly.
Halimi was full of tenderness, but his mind was elsewhere.
His sexual attraction to me hadn’t diminished, but in my ninth month I was pretty inaccessible.
It made me shy and a little withdrawn; Halimi made no attempt to draw me out.
When he left the house that morning, saying he had a business meeting, I scrutinized him long and hard.
Good-for-nothing stupid liar, I thought.
I had a feeling he understood what my eyes were saying, but he just picked up his keys, grabbed his bicycle, and fled.
“‘Normal,’” Dina repeated contemptuously. “If you’d wanted normal, you should have married some tech CEO and bought an apartment in the suburbs.”
“I don’t get it,” I burst out. “Why are you on his side?”
“I’m not on his side,” Dina said. She placed a calming hand on my belly. “I just don’t want you getting overexcited. Perhaps it is a business meeting. You know how the younger generation communicates these days: It’s all smileys and kisses and hearts.”
“Younger generation? Right!” I snorted. I sank into deep thought and tried to reconstruct the chat I’d read.
“It wasn’t a business meeting,” I said with certainty. “And you know I’m cool with one-night stands. But the week we got married! And why doesn’t he tell me? Damn it, that’s what we agreed on—that if something’s going on, we tell each other.”
I sighed. I imagined myself giving birth alone, breastfeeding in the dark in a tiny one-room apartment, ugly and cramped, in south Tel Aviv. The joint went straight to my head after months of abstinence, and I felt a panic attack coming on. Dina took my hand and held it to her breast.
“Everything’s okay, kitten,” she said softly. “Let it go. He’s just a jerk who isn’t used to serious love. He’s got a lot to learn.”