Light Years (10 page)

He shrugged. “You’ll tell me when you feel like it. If I ask again now, I won’t know if you’re telling the truth. If I wait until you tell me, then I’ll know.”

I wasn’t sure that was a compliment. Why was I suddenly feeling uncomfortable, unable to meet his eyes?

*  *  *

It rained again, and by the time I got to my room, my shoes and the bottom third of my pants were soaking and muddy. Payton wasn’t there. I dropped my bag in the corner and it slowly formed a puddle around itself, as if it were melting.

I dug out my fuzzy blue sweatpants and a pale-yellow fleece that always reminded me of the fluffy baby chickens from the kibbutz I visited as a child.

Israel never got much rain. It seemed like it got less and less every year. I associated the sound of rain—dripping from gutters and branches, plopping into puddles—with good things, good news. Though it was slightly disconcerting to have so much of a good thing now. I flicked on the electric kettle and found a packet of instant soup. Five minutes later, carefully drinking tomato soup from a mug, I sat on my bed and leaned against the wall.

In Israel, the main meal of the day was lunch. It felt right, balancing the day. But now, less than two months later, I was already on the American schedule. I tried to keep eating the big meal at lunch, but that meant I ended up eating two big meals a day instead of one. After gaining three pounds in two weeks, I stopped eating heavy at lunch. In yet another way, my life was different now than before.

I cradled the mug between my hands, letting the steam curl around my face.

It was seven hours later in Israel than in Virginia. The sun had already set, the workday was over. It was still hot there, the temperatures soaring during the day. Unfathomable.

The phone rang, too loud in the quiet room. It startled me and I nearly spilled my soup.

“Hello?”

“Maya? It’s Chris Steward. I wanted to see if you were up for running this evening?”

“In the rain?”

“Sure. It’s great running in the rain.” He laughed. “My sergeant used to say ‘It ain’t training if it ain’t raining.’ ”

I groaned.

“You should hear what else he said.”

The last thing I felt like doing was getting wet again. While running.

“What time?” I asked.

“About eight?”

“Fine,” I said, feeling more than a little masochistic. “Eight tonight.”

“Great. I’ll meet you in front of the O-Hill cafeteria.”

I finished my soup, pulled up the covers, and went to sleep listening to the rain.

I woke up at four that afternoon to the sounds of shouting. I staggered out of bed, groggy, my limbs heavy with sleep. Outside my room, Yami was standing beside her overturned bucket. A dark puddle was spreading across the gray carpet of the common room. Tiffany, who lived two doors down from Payton and me, was holding a dripping notebook at arm’s length.

“You did this on purpose!” Tiffany’s voice, always excitable, was verging on shrill.

“Look.” Yami, gruff as always, apologized to no one. “I have better things to do with my time than to make more work for myself cleaning up this mess just to get your notebook wet.”

“Apparently you don’t! Do you know how much work went into these notes?” Tiffany eyed Yami’s work smock up and down. “I guess you don’t.”

I stepped out of my room.

“Hey, Tiff, everything okay?” I tried for a calming tone, but my voice was scratchy from sleep.

“No. It’s not okay. Look what this person did!”

“Oh,” I said. “Gosh. All your notes.”

“I know!” She had no sense of sarcasm.

“You’d better start recopying what you can before the ink smears completely,” I suggested helpfully.

“You’re right,” she said, her eyes growing big. She threw a hateful look at Yami. “This had better not happen again or I’ll report you.” She stormed out of the common room.

Yami’s flared nostrils settled down and she shook her head.

“Tiffany likes being dramatic.” I felt the need to apologize. “She’s like that with everyone.”

“You mean self-centered, oblivious, and neurotic?”

“Yeah.”

Yami looked tired. Her skin seemed too large for her face and her hands hung limply by her side.

“Listen,” I said impulsively. “I’m going to have a cup of coffee to wake up and you look like you could use one too. Can you take a break?”

She looked at me with an odd tilt of her head.

“It’s just instant, but I have flavored creamer.” It was something Payton introduced me to a few weeks ago and I was addicted.

“Sure,” she said after a moment when I thought she would refuse. “I could really use a cup of coffee right now.” She righted the bucket, left the puddle on the floor, and walked into my room. I closed the door behind us.

“It seems like every time you see me either I’m going to sleep or I just woke up. I don’t usually sleep in the afternoon.” I felt the need to justify myself. I twitched the covers back into place on my bed. “Go ahead and sit on the bed if you don’t mind.”

She sat down gingerly.

“Payton and I keep meaning to get some chairs.” I filled the kettle up with bottled water and flicked it on. “But there isn’t really any place for them. The desk chairs are really uncomfortable, we always just sit on our beds. I hope you don’t mind.” I got out two mugs and peered inside them discreetly to make sure they were clean.

“I don’t mind.”

“We don’t have any sugar, but the creamer is sweetened.”

“It’s fine.”

I smiled awkwardly, wondering why I kept apologizing.

When the water was hot, I fixed us the coffee and joined her on my bed, cross-legged, leaning against the wall. We sipped in silence.

“I’ve been working here for almost five years,” she said after
a few tentative sips. “Five years I’ve cleaned dorm bathrooms and hallways. And not once has any student invited me into their room.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“They think I’m some sort of servant. Some of them get mad that I don’t clean their individual rooms.” She sipped. “Sometimes—” She stopped and shook her head. “Never mind.”

I stayed quiet.

“It just pisses me off,” she said with heat. “They care about starving children in Africa, they fight to protect the spotted owl, but they don’t have a clue. They think they’re openminded. They think they’re good-hearted. They think they know how this world works. But they’re just spoiled, entitled little brats who get drunk every chance they get.”

I studied my warped reflection inside the half-empty mug.

“Some of them,” I agreed. It was definitely what I thought of the students when I first got here. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“Present company not included.”

“I wasn’t hunting for compliments.”

“Fishing,” she corrected.

“What?”

“You weren’t fishing for compliments.”

“Right.”

“No,” she laughed. “The phrase. The phrase is ‘fishing for compliments,’ not ‘hunting for compliments.’ ”

“Oh. Whatever.” I waved away her corrections. I’d made
so many mistakes already, that one was tame. “I once said, ‘I wonder if there’s any piss in the chicken’ instead of ‘any peas in the kitchen.’ ” I shook my head. “Now,
that
was embarrassing.”

She laughed again, this time without any reservations.

“Why do you keep working here if you hate it?”

“It’s a good job. It doesn’t pay much, but I have good hours and it’s usually easy since I won’t clean vomit. The health care is great, and I guess I like working for a university. It’s better than cleaning a big office somewhere. Besides, I’m not tied down. I could go anywhere, leave anytime I wanted to. It’s easy to find another job.”

“But you don’t have to clean.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, slightly hostile. “You think going to school, getting a good job, you think that’s just part of your deal. That’s what belongs to you. But it doesn’t work that way for everyone.”

I thought of Payton’s schoolmate, the one who wouldn’t stick by her. Everyone had a battle to fight, and it was easy to lose your way in the middle of the smoke and fire.

“There’s night school, or community college. You could take computer classes, or maybe nursing school.” I was pleased I could think of so many options off the top of my head. “There’s plenty you can do that isn’t as expensive as this university. We both know you’re smart. Besides, I’m not from here. This is not part of my deal. Everyone back in Israel thinks I’m insane.”

“It’s just a job,” Yami said. “It’s not my life.”

The door opened and Payton blew in.

“Oh, hi,” she said, friendly as always. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“No.” Yami stood up. “I’m all done here.” She put her mug on the corner of my desk. “I need to get back to work.” Right before she walked out the door she turned back. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure.” But I was talking to an empty door.

“Was that who I think it was?” Payton said, closing the door.

“Yeah,” I said. “Tiffany bitched at her for spilling water on her notebook. Said she did it on purpose.”

“Tiffany’s such a freak.” Payton stripped off her wet shirt and added it to my pile of wet clothes. “I’m glad you apologized.”

“Yeah,” I said, and didn’t bother to explain.

As I waited for Chris under the overhang in front of the cafeteria, I bobbed up and down on my toes to warm up and to get in the mood for a run when all I wanted to do was go back to my room, crawl under my warm covers, and read. The rain hadn’t stopped, though it wasn’t coming down as hard. I wondered if Chris would slow down because of me or keep speeding up to show how in shape he was. He seemed like a nice guy. My guess was he’d be careful about letting me set the pace.

When he arrived, we said our hellos and hit the road. My legs protested, as they always do. I could feel the tightness in
my hamstrings and quads. Then came a mild burning. Finally, after nearly ten minutes of concentrating on my breathing, on striding out and rolling my feet, I found my rhythm. Chris was easy to run with. I thought at first that he might be measuring my stride, trying to gauge what sort of runner I was, but I stopped caring if this was his usual speed. We didn’t talk much during the run. I could never talk and keep my breath even. One of the reasons I stopped smoking after my first few cigarettes was that I could feel tightness in my chest when I ran.

We ran up Observatory Hill, past the observatory, down into the main university area, through it, and back around.

“I like running at night,” he said as we walked our cooldown. “I can’t stand it when the sun’s beating down, it just saps the energy right out.” I liked listening to his drawl, but I found that I had to concentrate or I didn’t catch what he was saying. There was a slight delay between the time he finished speaking and when I finally understood what he’d said.

“Yes,” I said. “Me too.”

“Kind of tough when you’re in Israel, isn’t it? I mean, not running when it’s hot and sunny.” It was the first question he’d asked about Israel. People seemed so restrained here. In Israel I’d be bombarded with questions. Where’d I come from, how’d I like it there, what did I think of it here. I could feel the curiosity shimmering off him, but unless I gave him an opening, he wasn’t going to ask much.

“Sure,” I answered easily enough, but I didn’t encourage
him to ask more. “I tried to run in the early morning or in the evening, though I’m not an early-morning kind of person.”

He gave the obligatory laugh. “Me neither.”

The cafeteria was up ahead; we had come full circle. It was a good run, half an hour, six or seven kilometers. I tried to calculate that in miles. Just under four, I thought.

He looked at his watch. “Not bad,” he said. “That was about seven-fifty per mile. Not my best time, but not my worst either.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said, eyeing me. “Guess the Israeli army keeps its soldiers in good shape, huh?”

I shrugged.

“So, Thursday? Same time, same place?”

“Absolutely.”

“Cool, see you then.”

He trotted off into the darkness and I walked back to the dorm room for a hot shower. The rain had felt good while we ran, cooling me off, but now that I stopped running, I noticed how wet my clothes and hair were and I could feel the chill sinking in.

Standing under a strong, hot stream of water, I thought about why I hated to talk about Israel. It felt like a bruise, and I shied away anytime anyone stretched out a hand to touch it. I shook my head under the steady stream, sending water flying. There was no point in lying to myself. It was more than that. Israel was guilt. I was a hypocrite. I ran away because living there was unbearable for me.

Every time I thought about it, that feeling came back, that half-queasy sense of failure. It was my country. I still believed I would return to Israel. I had to come to terms with it or I would break. I couldn’t live cut off from myself. But I feared my wandering mind. Anytime something reminded me of Israel, of Dov, my stomach would clench in pain, my heart would race, and I would feel nauseated. I cut off the water and stood in the shower stall, naked and dripping. I had to make it stop.

Payton was already in the room, sitting cross-legged on the bed, as I entered.

“How was the run?” She was wearing pale-blue cotton pajamas with white sheep. Her hair was up in a scraggly ponytail, already coming down around her face.

“It was good.” I didn’t feel like talking. I closed the door to our room and turned my back to her. I took off the robe and reached under my pillow for my boxers and shirt. I was tired, sapped to the bone.

“It can be hard sometimes,” she said. “Being here, not having your own space. When I first came here I thought this place looked like a prison. Our rooms looked like cells to keep criminals in.” She waved a hand to indicate the room, the building in general. “Actually, prisoners get a higher level of food quality in their cafeteria than we do.” She shook her head at life’s injustices. “The floors here are covered with gray linoleum. Why gray? The ceiling is low. We live under fluorescent lights. You know, when I first came here, I looked inside the bathroom and counted the showerheads and stalls.
Twenty girls to four stalls and four showerheads.” She rolled her eyes.