Any Day Now (13 page)

“Look at this thing, would you?” Gunnie was pouting at herself in the mirror, a tuque the colour of baby poop pulled down over her ears. “This is why I prefer summertime hats.” And she took off down the aisle, pompom bouncing, for more haut de gamme.

“What about the boots?” Pamela called after her.

“Jesus Lord, don't put the pressure on,” said Gunnie.

Pamela browsed the shelves around her. Housewares you might call this part of the store: mostly glass salt and pepper shakers, china sugar bowls and creamers, things you could buy at the dollar store for cheaper. It was all ugly, but not outrageous,
interesting
ugly. This stuff couldn't even qualify as kitsch.

From women's wear, Pamela heard Gunnie yell, “Hallelujah!”

They take back the town, these sane zanies, pedalling on their bicycles, strolling arm and arm in the village. There are ostriches, Pamela suddenly remembered. Ostriches and lions and llamas strolling about, too, because they free the animals from a travelling circus. “One must exaggerate…life is so dull,” the madam says to Alan Bates, the Scottish soldier sent to save the town, and whom the inmates crown their King of Hearts. At three minutes to midnight, as Bates despairs that they have only three minutes to live, Coquelicot, his betrothed, says, “It's wonderful…three minutes!”

Pamela had wept and wept the first time she'd seen Philippe de Broca's sixties, anti-war film. She'd promised herself: I will not be afraid to live. I will stay open, open, painfully open.

“We almost forgot that boy of yours.” Gunnie was back and leading her by the elbow, not gently, toward another wall of the store. Children's Shoes. The sign was bigger than the selection. But between pairs of fuzzy, mangy slippers, was a pair of boots, rain boots, red, like miniature fireman galoshes. They were a size too small, but as Gunnie said, Willem could scrunch his toes up and it was the idea that was important anyway.

“You understand a lot, Gunnie,” said Pamela at the checkout.

“It takes a crazy to understand another crazy,” said Gunnie.

“Willem's not crazy,” said Pamela. “He's autistic.”

“Fancy word,” said Gunnie. “Poor lamb.”

“He's not crazy,” said Pamela.

“Course he is,” said Gunnie, and put her head on Pamela's shoulder.

“Are you buying the hat?” asked the checkout girl, pointing to the tag that hung from the side of Gunnie's tuque.

“She is,” said Pamela and paid the $2.99, though she felt tolerance and patience leaving her. Maybe it was all sentimental bullshit about the insights, the access, the deeper humanity gained through mental illness. Sometimes a crazy person was just crazy. And worse, sometimes just as cruel as a normal person.

The cashier wrapped each boot separately in tissue paper and placed them carefully inside a plastic bag. They were a Band-Aid, a little solution to a big, long problem. But the boots would make them all a little happier for a little while.

“Such a beautiful kid,” Gunnie told the girl. The girl looked at Pamela and smiled. “Really, you should see him. He's just about the sweetest kid you ever saw. And smart, too. Oh, I forgot this,” Gunnie added, pulling the red beret from her purse. “I won't be taking it now that I have this.” And she batted the tag on her tuque. The girl looked at Pamela, smile fading.

“Can I buy you a coffee?” Pamela asked in the parking lot.

“Sure,” said Gunnie.

“Second Cup, OK?” Pamela asked.

“I got someplace better,” said Gunnie.

Pamela had walked by the coffee machine in Provigo many times but had never stopped, assuming the coffee would be better nearly anywhere else.

“Best coffee in town,” said Gunnie, taking the two loonies from Pamela's palm and putting them in the machine.

“Haut de gamme?” said Pamela.

“Sure,” said Gunnie, handing her the first cup. “Listen, would you mind if we prayed?”

“Right here?” said Pamela, but Gunnie already had her head bowed over her Styrofoam cup.

“Jesus Lord, those little boots sure are cute. And this coffee's great. You really know how to treat a person.”

The coffee, Pamela had to agree, was not bad at all.

She bent to look at the fish. It bore no resemblance to the rainbow trout her mother used to make with slivered almonds and lemon-butter sauce. This fish was beginning to decompose. She looked at it for just a second too long, enough time to see maggots burrowing into the eye socket and for the smell of it to get inside her. She tasted this morning's breakfast at the back of her throat — green pepper, cream cheese, Cream of Wheat, cocoa, in that order — leaned against the cement wall of the showers, breathed in fast until her lips and fingers tingled. She heard the mop drop.

The fish ponds were miles from here, deep in the Huleh Valley, a twenty-minute drive. Someone would have had to carry the fish — in a pocket? — to put it here. Someone had gone out of their way. “
Mah zeh
, Aviva?” She turned toward the doorway, saw sunlight with a male shape inside it, the bottom edge of shorts. Rubber sandals moved toward her: Ari, the
sadron avodah
, the kibbutz work organizer. Like all the other kibbutzniks, he spoke Hebrew to her, although she still didn't understand more than the basics and even these often failed her. Her own name still gave her trouble. “Arlene?” The teacher at the
ulpan
, the Hebrew course she'd taken right after arriving in this hot, loud country, had hit the “r” hard, pausing only a moment over her name. “Here your name is Aviva. In Hebrew, Aviva means spring.”

Israelis had never had the luxury to think too much or too long about the weight of words and actions, to be sensitive. Aviva had seen this right away. First there'd been a new country to build, and then forever after, to defend. In this late summer of '71, Katyusha missiles from Syria and Lebanon — both just miles away — were landing randomly in schoolyards, grocery stores, in people's kitchens over breakfast. One had struck the kibbutz bee house in the spring. The bees had gone crazy, she'd heard. The news from the south, from Egypt, was darker: “Our sacred duty is to liberate the land and renew the fighting with the enemy,” Sadat said. “We will fight until the last grain of sand is returned.”

Aviva liked to say she was apolitical, which was another way of saying she never read the newspapers. But she knew a little something about the Occupied Territories, and she knew that if she wasn't the enemy personally, she was living among the enemy.

No wonder the people in the closest town were stoned on Valium. Kiryat Shmona was one of the country's new towns — an unbustling place of concrete slab buildings and unpaved streets, settled mostly by unemployed immigrants from Morocco. Sometimes Aviva took the bus into town for a break from kibbutz food and kibbutzniks. The heat down there was monstrous, not a breeze, but the falafels were good. One of the Danish kids had told her you could get Valium over the counter in Kiryat Shmona. Aviva held this knowledge like a secret from herself. But it made her feel calmer, knowing this: Valium for all.

“Mah zeh,
Aviva?” Ari was now practically standing on top of her. Aviva pointed to the fish. Fish in Hebrew, fish in Hebrew… Ari reached down for the mop and, as if he were on a golf green, swept the fish through the door. He put the mop back into her hands.

“
Ani me fached
,” Aviva said.
Scared
was one of the words she remembered from the
ulpan
, along with
tired, hungry, happy.
What she really wanted to say was, “I'm pissed.” And some other word, something more complicated than fear or anger.

Ari looked at her, smiled slowly. She hated when a man looked at her like this, as if he knew something about her he assumed she didn't yet know. “Tough for you?” he said in English. “America isn't like this?”

“I'm OK,” she said, and began making wet circles with the mop again. In another few hours the place would be full of dusty, overheated bodies. Sweat and hair and dirt from the fields would mix with water and soap, and clog the drains. The uneven cement floor would need to be mopped down again. That was the thing about menial labour, she'd realized in the first week. As long as you and other people dirtied up the world, there it was: work.

“Here.” Ari took the mop out of her hands and began moving up and down the room, wetting a swath as he went. He was practically jogging. He was a handsome man, if you liked his tan, curly-brown, blue-eyed sort. Manly good health pulsed out of him. Aviva watched his arm muscles flexing and releasing.

“You don't work like this in America?” Ari asked, but it wasn't a question. Statement of fact: American women are lazy.

“We don't work six days a week,” she said, putting out her hand for the mop. He stopped his run; handed the mop back, it seemed, reluctantly.

“How old are you?” he asked. He smiled and flashed his eyes. Aviva didn't answer, went back to mopping,
was
trying to pick up her pace. “How come you're not married?” he asked. He put his hands on his hips, widened his stride. The shift of weight made him open his chest and circle his pelvis toward her, an adjustment she could interpret as suggestive. But in the cement-walled shower room, the smell of decades-old sweat and watered-down bleach rising from the floors, he was just a man in shorts.

She mopped. He left, whistling “Your Song,” Elton John's latest, which had been pumping out of the kids' transistors every damn night. She didn't blame the kids. They were
kids
, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from White Plains and Toronto and Muncie. Mostly rich, Jewish kids, even some problem kids whose parents had packed them off to a kibbutz for the summer, hoping strong sun and hard labour would straighten them out, or at least wear them out. There were also others, not rich, not Jewish: the white-blond boys from Denmark, the sturdy girls from Holland, the tall Aussies with their relentless good humour. They were younger, all of them, but they tolerated her, even welcomed her into their loose nightly circles where tokes and stories were passed round. Though she was a dozen years older, half and only nominally Jewish on her long-dead father's side, she fit right in.

Work levelled it out. Everyone got up at 4:00 a.m. Some of the girls limped off to the dining room to set up for breakfast, others walked in the dark to the laundry room. Most crawled onto the kibbutz's open-back trucks and were dumped into the
mattah
, the apple orchard, by 4:30, just as the sky turned pink.

Aviva had picked apples a few times when she'd first arrived. She'd balanced on a thin-legged aluminum ladder, stretched up and out for the slippery fruit, dropped them into the metal basket strapped around her neck like a peanut vendor at the ballpark, listened to the constant haranguing from the bosses: “Only one cart? What's the matter with you?” She actually looked forward to the tin pot of muddy coffee and packaged cookies brought out as grudging encouragement at 6:30, then breakfast at 8:00 when the trucks would come back to pick them up.

It was the hours before the next break, lunch, that had made her desperate. The sun moved higher. The bosses pushed harder. On the way back in the trucks at noon, everyone — even the Aussies — was too tired to even crack a joke. Cleaning bathrooms was degrading, but picking apples in 115-degree heat, the sun drilling into the top of your head (even with a hat), the sweat running into your bra, that was hell, Aviva had decided. She admired the kids for doing it day after day.

No, the kids were fine. The kids were cool. With them and their music around, she could still live like one herself. With them it didn't matter that she was thirty-one with no job, no man, no particular future in mind. There was grass when she wanted it, sex when she wanted it. The last had been an Indian guy who'd kept her up four nights in a row, then decided to move to another kibbutz. She wasn't worried. Somebody else would turn up.

They all lived together — the Scandinavian goys, the rebel kids from New York yeshivas — in thirty-year-old barracks built at the edge of the kibbutz. It was close living, with everyone sandwiched two by two into one-room compartments. That everyone, kibbutzniks and volunteers, referred to it as the Ghetto didn't escape even the non-Jewish kids. It
was
like a
shtetl
, separate and not quite equal. In Aviva's room the wind blew through the space where the door and floor should have met. Once a bat got in this way. But at least she had her own room, some privacy. Fanya, her former roommate, had escaped to Tel Aviv a few weeks before. “To go from Leningrad to Israel is to go from here” — short, squat Fanya had gestured above her head — “to here.” She'd pointed to the ground. At night, Aviva heard the radios, the giggles of doped-up kids. Sometimes through the patchy walls she heard their delirious humping. God, they were glad to be away from home.

She knew that relief, although since Spain, she'd been thinking of home more. Not that this meant she should go home. The kibbutz was “OK for now,” as she wrote to her mother back in Philadelphia. After eleven years of roaming the world, living in one place for six months, another for a week, OK was pretty good. OK could be a party.

Spain had not been OK. Carlo hadn't warned her about the winds that blew through Madrid in April, even when he knew how much she hated the cold. On Crete a few years back she'd had cards done up à la Holly Golightly: Arlene,Warm-weather Woman. Now all she'd need was her name. Aviva means spring.

She mopped. In three hours, the bare, tender soles of men would stand on her handiwork. The shower spray would ricochet off their white, hard-worked asses. She'd heard that a few of the American boys had been caught spying through a tiny hole in the cement wall that separated the women's shower room from the men's. They'd soap themselves up and wait for some of the Danish girls to come in and strip. She saw the scene in her mind, the boys, big, soapy dicks in hand, getting it nightly, but still wanting more, more, more. The thought made her laugh, made her horny. It was time to turn the radar on again.

But when her rubber sandal skidded on the dead fish on the way out, she got that other feeling, the Spain feeling, a sense of things not flowing the way they used to. Carlo had taken it out of her. Or maybe it had been the months before in India and Nepal. “Come home, why don't you, darling? Your room's always here,” her mother had written on a postcard last month.

Aviva took off one rubber sandal and nudged the fish down the low cement step until it landed on its other side in the dirt. Stuck in its side was a nail. This time she had to swallow hard to keep breakfast down and keep from shouting. It was so...deliberate. She thought of the teenage boys who lived on the kibbutz. They watched her, this American woman, with a mix of curiosity, envy and contempt. She was used to that look after travelling all over Europe, India, the Middle East. The look that said: “We love you! We hate you!”

She looked down at the fish again. What a rotten, dirty joke. As if cleaning the kibbutz's bathrooms six days a week wasn't dirty enough.

“I'm sure you don't have to do this in America,” Ari had said when he gave her bathrooms after she'd begged off apples.

“Even Americans shit,” Aviva had answered, using the international “ca ca,” not yet knowing the word for shit in Hebrew, and Ari had smiled, impressed by her answer, tough as any
sabra
's.

No, somebody else would have to deal with the fish. She walked across the dirt to the next set of buildings, propped the mop against the outside wall, went inside to wash her face, re-tie her hair. The climate hadn't been bad for her so far. The sun was so strong it hurt the eyes, but it was also streaking her hair lighter, was turning her face and neck and arms a nice burnished shade. The muscles in her upper arms flexed as appealingly as Ari's as she lifted her arms to undo her ponytail.

She was, thank you, God, looking a helluva lot better than when she'd left Spain. She'd been going pale and puffy through the long rainy winter into long, rainy spring. When Carlo stopped touching her sometime in February, she'd turned to more wine, more bread. And to his friend. Bernard. Bernardo? She'd heard him called both ways, had never gotten it exactly straight. She'd called him nothing in particular.

She came back out into the daylight, then turned down the path toward the
haderokhel
, the communal dining hall. There'd be the usual for lunch. Chicken soup, cucumbers, green peppers, tomatoes, sour cream,
gveenah
(the cheese squares that tasted like her mother's cheesecake), and sliced bread. Lunch was basically the same as breakfast and dinner, just some warm food added in. She'd eat lunch as quickly as she could, come back, do the other set of bathrooms by 2:00, then have the afternoon free. She'd gotten a new stash from a German kid the night before. The kibbutz, with kids coming from all over, was an international network for grass and hash. She'd heard it was getting harder to score back home.

Aviva passed the same boys she'd seen that morning as she came into the dining hall. Kibbutz boys with long, brown legs and already-muscled arms in faded, navy cotton shirts and shorts, the official work garb. They were sitting in a clump of eight at the end of one of the long tables. One sort of smiled, one shook his head. The others looked up at her from soup bowls, from plates full of bread and salad, looked in a way that would be considered rude back home.

She felt their eyes on the backs of her legs as she walked to the tables at the rear, the ones set aside, unofficially, for volunteers. Freedom for all had been the credo when the kibbutz was set up by Hungarian and Romanian leftists in the late thirties. Now there were so many unwritten rules, so many infringements on the smallest preferences, she might as well be in a work camp.

Maybe she should try to talk to the boys. She still had some weed left from her week in Jerusalem. Kids always responded to weed, the one universal. But the thought of actually trying to talk to these cool kids, with their beautiful, throaty Hebrew, their confidence, the sense of the world being theirs, felt daunting. She watched them as they jostled each other on the benches, as some stood up and stretched, ready to hit the fields again.