Light Years (17 page)

Payton sighed.

“It’s so sad,” she said. “I can’t imagine living like that.”

I shrugged. “You get used to anything. Besides, it’s not like we have a choice.”

Two empty bottles of cheap strawberry-flavored wine lay on their sides on the floor. Payton eyed them with distrust. We’d been drinking for about two hours and snacking on leftover candy from a party down the hall. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten started talking about Israel. It was the first time I’d
really said anything about it to her. I had a pleasant buzzing in my head, and I fell silent, listening to it.

“I don’t think that—” She stopped for a moment, as if listening to some inner voice. A wet-sounding belch suddenly erupted from deep inside her and I started laughing. Then I noticed that her face had turned colors. “I don’t feel so good,” she said, a hand pressed to her stomach.

“Are you going to be sick?”

“I don’t think so.” She took an unsteady breath. “But maybe.”

The heaves started and I scrambled off my bed, grabbed her arm, and hustled her over to the bathroom.

“I’m fine,” she said. “You don’t need to do this.” Then with a loud retch that echoed off the tiled bathroom wall, she dropped to her knees and vomited a massive amount of pinkish liquid mixed with half-digested chocolate and pretzels. I held her hair back off her face and neck. She retched until nothing came out but long, silvery lines of spit.

When most of the dry heaves had stopped, I wet a handful of paper towels and laid them on the back of her neck like my mother always did for me. Payton’s face was red, and the violent retching had forced tears from her eyes.

“Leave me alone,” she moaned, resting her head on the toilet seat. “I’m gonna die now.”

“You’re not dying,” I said. “And I’m not leaving you.”

I handed her a tissue, and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“Let’s get you up,” I said, helping her stand. “Come on, let’s go back to our room.”

I flushed the toilet and then helped her over to the sink, where I made her wash her face and rinse out her mouth. We walked slowly back to the room and I got her into bed. She curled up on her side, hugging a pillow to her belly. I laid more cold towels on her temple and the back of her neck.

“That feels good,” she said.

I turned off the lights.

“Thanks, Maya.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I made my way over to my bed and lay on it, not bothering to change out of my sweatpants into pajamas. It was quiet for a few moments, and I was sure that Payton had drifted off to sleep.

“Maya?”

“Yes, Payton. I’m here.”

“I’m so glad we’re roommates,” she said, her voice blurred with alcohol and sleep.

“Me too.” Then I was silent, barely able to make her out in the soft darkness, the fan in the window making its usual white-noise hum.

“Payton,” I finally said, wondering if she was still awake.

“Mmm?”

“Why haven’t you ever asked me about what happened in Israel?”

I thought I heard a soft laugh in the darkness.

“Didn’t you know? In the South, we don’t ask you why you’ve got a white elephant in your living room.”

“What white elephant?”

“Exactly.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “When you feel like telling me, you will. Until then, it’s not my place to pry.”

“Oh.”

I heard the covers rustle as she shifted and snuggled deeper into her bed. “Good night, Maya.”

“Good night.”

My white elephant stood in the middle of the room, huge, silent, and impossible for me to ignore.

I was heading into my last summer in the military and the heat started early and viciously. February and March had both been unusually hot and dry. By April, temperatures were soaring. Newspapers forecast a major drought. Politicians debated the costs of more desalinization plants to turn seawater to drinking water. Hot debates about the cost and benefits filled the papers, droned on television. Tempers flared quickly and malignantly, traffic snarls escalating into shouting and honking skirmishes.

I would collapse on my bed in the afternoon after work, drained from the hot bus ride home. The sun was intense, baking everything until the dirt cracked and flowers withered and died. I stopped wearing metal barrettes to hold my hair after I blistered my finger touching one. No matter how much I drank, I couldn’t seem to stay hydrated, and the lines at the ice cream shop and juice stands were annoyingly long and pushy.

There was a sharp increase in traffic accidents, and the tempers of people without air-conditioning in their cars often snapped at the slightest provocation. Amid this bout of national goodwill, there was a spate of terrorist bombings. Most
of them were in the territories and Jerusalem, but two were in Tel Aviv.

Everyone wanted to know what I planned to do after my service ended in June. I had applied for study in the United States months before and had just received an acceptance letter from the University of Virginia. I applied there after seeing the Rotunda in a friend’s architecture textbook that cataloged one hundred of the most beautiful buildings in the world. After I’d gone online and seen that the school was well ranked and had an astronomy program, I decided, on a whim, to apply.

My aunt was purely against it.

“There are plenty of excellent universities here,” Hen said. “And if you plan to live in Israel, you need to make your contacts here, not in the United States. It’s all about who you know. That’s how you get the good jobs. Don’t waste this opportunity. It’ll be much harder to succeed if you don’t stay here.”

My friends were making plans. Daphna wanted to travel through Thailand, maybe backpack in India, and have adventures that sounded great after tedious office work. Irit told me she and Leah were going to take a two-month trip through Europe. She invited me to come with them. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want aimless travel, I didn’t want to sleep in youth hostels or sell cheap jewelry on city streets. I wanted to really become a part of another culture, for my time there to have meaning.

Dov, of course, wanted to know where we stood. We both
knew that four years apart was too much. We wouldn’t survive it. He couldn’t come to Virginia with me, not if he wanted to make it in his uncle’s company. If I wanted us to be together, I needed to stay with him in Israel.

“All your opportunities are here,” he said. “If you want to go to school, you can. If you want to work, you can. But I can’t work in Virginia. You’re twenty years old. You need to decide what’s important to you.”

“I want to see the world. I want to get away from Israel, not from you …”

So we fought, and made up. And fought again.

“You’re the one leaving,” he would say when I cried. “Not me. All you have to do is stay.”

But I couldn’t. I had this burning desire to go, to study astronomy, to live in another language, to try something completely different. The days got hotter and hotter. Even at night, the roads and sidewalks pulsed with heat. Air conditioners broke, unable to keep up. Electricity prices rose, paralleling demand. It was too hot to think. I evaded my parents, who said I needed to make a decision and stick to it; evaded getting pinned down by my relatives and friends. At night, lying in bed, I tried not to move, to stay as still as possible as I felt drops of sweat bead on my skin.

My father, sensing that inertia would keep me in Israel, began to push for a decision one way or another. The deadline to let the university know my decision was approaching. By now there wasn’t enough time to mail it; I would have to fax it to get it in on time. And still I didn’t know what to do. The days
were getting hotter, no rain, not even clouds to ease the piercing of the sun. Even the modest prayers for dew that are done in the summer (when even the Talmud teaches that it’s useless to pray for rain) weren’t having any effect.

I took to walking along the shore at night, something that gave both Hen and my parents palpitations—for once, they agreed. But I needed air. I needed space to think. I didn’t know how you made a decision like this. Yes or no. Go or stay. So much riding on such small words.

In the end, I accepted my invitation to attend the University of Virginia.

After I decided, I slept one more night, a sort of eight-hour insurance policy to make sure I wasn’t going to change my mind. I woke up and faxed in my acceptance from the office. I danced a little jig as it went through, feeling elated and nervous and weak-kneed.

I told Dov that we needed to talk. I didn’t want to tell him over the phone. So we agreed to meet at Shtut. It had been almost a year since I’d gotten the busboy fired. At first I didn’t want to go back. But after months had gone by, I missed it. I’d been back a dozen times by now.

I called home.

“I knew you’d go,” my mom said when I told her.

“You couldn’t have known that,” I said. “I didn’t know it.”

“I knew,” she said, “you wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge. You never have since you were a baby and nearly crawled off the balcony.”

“Are you okay with this?”

“Oh,
pashoshi
, you know I am.”

“And you,
Abba
?”

“I couldn’t be happier,” he said from the other phone in the kitchen.

“You don’t think it’s too far away?”

“Telephones, Internet, plane tickets, Maya, the world is an awfully small place these days. You couldn’t get too far away from us if you tried.”

“I love you so much,” I said. “You are amazing. Every time I think I finally understand you, that I know how you’ll react, you surprise me.”

My mother laughed. “Oh, honey, I hardly want to think what sort of narrow-minded people you think we are.”

“It’s our job,” my father said, “to keep you on your toes.”

I had a stupid grin on my face.

“Wow, oh wow. I can’t believe I’m going.” I was nearly hopping in place. Now that my parents knew, it was real. I could picture myself, a college student in America. My heart skipped a beat. “You wanted me to do this all along, didn’t you?” I said. “You just didn’t want to push me, right?”

“No,” my father said. “We wanted you to choose what was right for you. You’re an adult now. Whatever you chose would have been the right thing.”

“I thought you might stay,” my mom said. “Mostly because of Dov, but I’m glad you’re going. I think this is one of those opportunities that you would regret passing up.”

“Have you told him yet?” my dad asked.

That cooled my high. “No, I had to tell you first.”

“I don’t think he’s going to be as happy.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Okay, I’d better go. I said I’d meet him at four.” I glanced at my watch. I had thirty minutes to get ready.

“So he gets to hear it face to face and we only get a phone call?” my mother said.

“
Ima
, don’t.”

“Just kidding, honey, just kidding.”

I hung up, smiling. But I was worried about Dov. Would he really believe I was abandoning him by going to Virginia? I couldn’t really blame him if he did. Maybe I would feel the same if I were the one staying behind. I loved him so much, and it hurt thinking we’d be apart for so long. But we could do it. If we really loved each other … I wondered if he would want to break up with me, and my breath hitched at the thought.

So. I washed my face and fixed my hair, leaving it mostly down, the way he liked it, even though it was hot. After a moment’s hesitation, I went ahead and put on makeup. If I was going to find out he didn’t really love me, if he was going to break up with me, then I wanted to look good. If he did love me, and if he did think we could do it, then I’d still look good. Besides, Hen was always urging me to put some on when I went out.

“You put clothes on your body,” she said. “Why go out with your face naked?”

I still didn’t exactly agree with her, but nearly two years of living with her had rubbed off on me.

No base, no powder, too damn hot for that, but I put on mascara and eyeliner, making my eyes slightly more catlike.

I decided to wear the rust colored halter top from the night of the party with the mayor. I slipped into a narrow black skirt and borrowed Hen’s strappy black sandals, grateful once again that we wore the same shoe size. I didn’t know what I would do when I moved out and wouldn’t get to use all her great shoes.

I went into the kitchen for a glass of juice. What was the best way to tell him? God, this was so difficult. How could I make him see? And then before I could take a sip, the glass slipped through my fingers and I had time to say, “Damn it!” before it hit the ground.

There was a mess by my feet—broken glass, juice on the floor and the cabinets, dripping in red lines down my legs and on the sandals. Damn.

I mopped up the floor and wiped down the cabinets, making sure to get all the little slivers of glass because both Hen and I walked around barefoot. Then I went back to my room to figure out what to wear instead of the skirt and how to clean Hen’s expensive sandals.

As soon as I stepped out of the apartment building, the heat hit me like a fist. My face prickled with beading sweat. The blacktop shimmered with heat, and I knew by the time I made it to Shtut, I’d be dripping.

Pearl, Hen’s neighbor, was struggling with her bags of groceries. I glanced at my watch. It was already four. I ground my teeth and then hurried over to help her carry them in. She wanted to chat, but I was able to get away.

I hurried to the bus stop.

The bus arrived a few minutes later. I found a seat near the driver and hugged my purse. I tapped my foot impatiently and kept glancing at my watch. I hated being late. I really didn’t want to keep him waiting. At the same time, I was elated. All this time I’d been scared to decide, afraid I would disappoint people who needed me. And yet my own parents supported me. I wanted to dance, I wanted to fly. This was finally the sort of adventure I’d dreamed about, doing something special and exciting. And it didn’t have to hurt anyone. Like my father said, it was a small world these days. Maybe Dov and I could work it out. I could come back every summer. We would e-mail, call, visit. I wasn’t a bad person, selfish and shallow. If this was really love, if this was meant to be, then it could work. If not, then what did it matter anyway? It was the first time I thought that I could actually have everything I wanted. Maybe I didn’t have to choose.