The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (42 page)

“So what? Now that you are a soldier you are too good to
answer a question from an uncle?” the bus driver asked. He was ha-ha angry. He was not her uncle, but he knew her father so he called himself her uncle. “How’s Dad? Where are you serving?”

The collar of the green uniform chafed Mom under her jaw. What she wanted to do more than anything was make the chafing stop, but no matter how she straightened her collar it didn’t help.

“Dad is happy. I am serving as an air traffic controller in Sharm el-Sheikh,” she said. When she said it out loud it sounded so correct. This was who she was. This was where she was going. She needed to take the bus to get there. The bus company was there to serve her. So was the driver.

The driver was angry, angry actually, at her answer. At how confident she had become. This was, at least, what she thought, because it sounded like he was no longer joking, so all that was left was anger.

“Tell Dad that if he keeps on drinking and missing work, we won’t cover for him for much longer, you hear me?” the driver told Mom.

She heard him. She thought that by now the skin under her jaw must be pink. But she didn’t touch it.

“A house full of women, and you can’t take care of one slow man,” the driver said.

Mom leaned her head against the window. A lady with too many chins looked ahead with her neck stretched as if she were driving the bus herself. Mom looked at the lady as though if she only looked hard enough, she might never have to become her.

Mom had never flown before, and she was so eager to see the streets of Tel Aviv from above and to watch the crowded
beaches and hotels becoming smaller beneath her that she thought she would stare out the window the whole flight, but instead she fell asleep. She dreamed of her father. He was chasing her like he did in real life, after she cut her oldest sister’s shoulder with a razor so deep there was no choice but to take her to the doctor because she bled through all the fabrics they used to stop her blood. Mom and her sisters often cut each other when they were little. This was because they didn’t have a pencil sharpener, so they used rusty razors to sharpen their pencils for school. They would stand around the trash can and sharpen, and then they would bicker over the same things all sisters do. Over the ways their faces and smells had turned excruciating to each other because they were so near, because they were so much like their own. The only difference was that they had razors in hand when they bickered.

In her dream her father had chased her just as he did in real life, and he was drunk, just as he was in real life. The difference was that in the dream he was slow. He kept trying to reach her, and although she did not want him to reach her, she also did not want to be one of five women who could not take care of one slow man, and so she ran slowly herself.

She woke up when the wheels thumped onto the asphalt and bobbed her head sideways. When she looked out the window, she saw sands that stretched as if untouched yet keen and an ocean so quiet she thought it had stopped stirring just for her.

M
OM CALLED
my most chronic problems
sulas
. Over the course of those three years at the beach, Mom once had to
practice compassion so well so that it accidentally became a habit, so that she was able to live for the rest of her life without ever desiring half a thing for herself. I could tell her problems that didn’t even have words, problems I could never tell my friends about, not even Emuna or Avishag, and she would give them words just so she could do something about them. She noticed my first
sula
herself. I didn’t even have to explain it to her. It was she who explained my problem to me. She explained that a
sula
was a bad habit, like knocking on wood or biting your nails. That it was a type of habit that only you knew what you were hoping to gain by preserving but that you didn’t have words to explain to others. Her explanation sounded perfect. She said it was the worst thing in the world.

What you have to realize is that every
sula
was a serious problem. A problem that you didn’t remember what it was like not having and could not even imagine your life without. Almost like being pregnant when you don’t want the baby or being infected with a deadly disease, but worse, because no one knew about it and because you suffered from it every second.

My first
sula
had to do with my neck. Or rather, that area under my jaw. One day when I was five I made a funny face that stretched it out. From then on, it felt as though I was doing it accidentally all the time, and when I looked in the mirror I started worrying that by making that funny face I would give myself a double chin. I was ten and worried about looking fatter in the face, because I had heard Mom say that once you gain weight it doesn’t matter if you lose it; your face will stay fat until the day you die. It got worse. I somehow started believing that snapping my fingers three times when they were under my chin, so that I could feel the snap
smacking the skin, would cancel out the influence of the funny face. I had no reason to believe that, but I believed it so much I couldn’t stop. My fingers hurt so much I couldn’t hold a pencil. I would swallow my mayo-mustard-tomato sandwiches so fast at school because I couldn’t wait to have them out of my hands so I would be able to snap my fingers again. It was only when Mom tried to take a picture of me on the eve of the first snow that she noticed and screamed: “Sula!” Then she let me stay home from school the next day and watch my Argentinean soaps as she fed me pita and yogurt and clementines.

I would like to tell you that just knowing that there was someone out there who understood fixed the problem, but this was not true. After the problem with my neck there was that time Mom said that standing next to the microwave would make your eyes run away from each other. She said it to my sister, but I heard. This led to almost half a year of the eyes
sula
. I would roll them in their sockets till they screeched, then again. I couldn’t watch TV. My head hurt so bad I would sometimes have to sit down as soon as I stood up. In the darkness of my bedroom I worried that I had rolled my eyes so much the darkness was my own blindness.

The teeth were the last of it, and also the worst. Teeth are worse than eyes. I had a whole summer vacation of freedom from
sulas
until I bit into a corncob and accidentally ground my front bottom tooth with my front upper tooth. I managed to get the bottom tooth above the upper tooth, and this hurt like nothing I had ever felt before, so much so that soon I kept on trying to create the same exact pain just because waiting for it to accidentally happen again was worse than feeling it. And I would do it again. And again. Chills would run down my moves and steps. I had to wear sweaters in the middle of
that Israeli August. When September came, I would wait for class to end because I could not bear the grinding, then for lunch at home to end because I could not bear the grinding, then for the day to end, then for sleep. I was waiting, waiting, waiting for a relief that never came.

“I have to make it stop. I can’t go on like this anymore,” I told Mom.

I was paralyzed by a problem that wasn’t even real. I couldn’t even tell Avishag, let alone Lea.

Mom said: “Yael, I understand, I understand, I understand.” She said it again, then again. She looked me in the eyes when she said it. Dad spent months sleeping with his legs folded in my bed. She understood me through the night. Had it not been for someone who understood a problem for which I had no words, I might have gone mad. Minutes chased hours that chased my sleep.

I don’t remember when or how or why it went away. I remember that there came a point where I could only breathe when I fantasized about the moment in which I would no longer think about teeth and that there came a point where I was unable to even remember or imagine what a moment like that would be like.

But it went away. This much I know, because when the neck
sula
came back when I was eighteen, right after Dan died, all I could do was wait for the teeth to start.

T
HE BASE
on the beach was small. This is the same beach where the president of Egypt would flee, years later, at the finish of a thirty-year rule, when the streets forced him to see
they could not love him any longer. Today it costs over five hundred dollars to get a hotel room by that beach in Sinai, and it is so crowded that tourists who visit Egypt waste a lot of time finding a place to lay their towels, but back then twenty or so soldiers possessed that strip of land all by themselves, because it was declared to be a closed military area.

There were only two other girls on the base on the day that Mom arrived. She said that they were both blonde, with short hair. The blondes both grew to have many children, but only sons, and Mom said she could not have imagined it any other way, starting from the day she met them. She could never imagine them having daughters. Mom’s black, sensitive hair reached down to her bony ass, and her nose was still broken. The girls were also air traffic controllers. They were the daughters of pilots. They were even dimmer bulbs than Mom was. The base was not a popular posting for air traffic controllers because it was far away and soldiers only got to go home once a month because the army could not spend much on internal flights for soldiers. Mom didn’t mind. She had wanted to stay on that beach forever since the moment she got there.

The work in the air traffic control tower was simple. Back in those days planes landed there only once in a while, as part of the training of new pilots. All Mom had to do was look at the lane and make sure no other planes were on it, and she had to make sure she didn’t give two planes permission to land at once. If the red phone rang she had to answer it, but it never did. Aside from that, all she had to do was wait. She showed up one hour early for her first shift and then one hour early for every eight-hour shift after that. She picked up smoking and spent all of her pocket money on cigarettes and
always made sure she gave more cigarettes to the other two air traffic controllers than she smoked in a day.

Aside from the two blonde girls, there were about twenty other soldiers in the base. Most of them were fuel fillers and ground technicians for the air force. There was one cook, the oldest of all the soldiers, a twenty-seven-year-old man from a kibbutz in the desert who used to make ha-ha-angry jokes at Mom all the time and say her skin was dark as an old chocolate cake or shit, and that she should not be allowed in his dining room because it was a health risk either way, and who gave her kisses on her neck and hard-boiled eggs he had left over.

T
HE FIRST
time Mom ever told me about that beach was after I explained to her about the problem I had with my neck, about how it all started when I began to worry that I might have a fat neck. She reached for what she could say because it was she who had told me that once you get fat you will forever be fat in your face.

“You know, you don’t have a fat neck, but even if you did, and you never will, know that that’s not going to kill you. You know, if you are nice, boys can’t even see you are ugly. Being a good sport and a laugh is much more important than being pretty. Boys and girls don’t like a sour girl. When I was in the army, there were two beautiful, sour girls at my base, and even though I was ugly all the boys loved me because I always smiled.”