The Others, Sarah Blau [hardest books to read txt] 📗

and we both belt out the rest, “and no one wants kids, and no one needs kids, and we’ll never ever have them, n-e-v-e-r!”

Our voices, crooning off-key, are the voices of twenty-year-old students.

I want to go home, now. Never mind that I didn’t get what I wanted out of Ronit, I just want to get out of here.

I start mumbling the “We should probably get the check” routine, but she, instead of jumping at the opportunity to bolt and make sure she never has to bump into me again, says, “Let’s order another coffee.”

Is it just my imagination or have the mugs on the table turned into the styrofoam cups from the campus coffee machine? It is your imagination. Now pull yourself together and get what you want out of her.

“So what about this Micha?” she says casually, as if we’re picking up a conversation where we had left off years ago, on the grass by the campus cafeteria. “He’s just your type.”

There’s something disturbing about the fact that we haven’t seen each other in sixteen years and she can still nail my taste in men.

“Maybe I actually did do you a favour,” she says with her smug smile. “I’m guessing he called you with more questions about Dina, and maybe you even met again? You remember I always liked playing matchmaker.”

She stretches out in her chair and the top button of her blouse opens, revealing the curvature of her breasts, which, like the rest of her, are perfectly preserved. Two firm apples. Nothing like your shrivelled pears that look like they nursed triplets.

“Don’t bullshit me,” I say, “the last thing you care about is helping me.”

“You always were ungrateful,” she replies, straightening her blouse but leaving the top button open. “You should be thanking me.”

“For what exactly?”

“Maybe for not telling him everything I know?”

Button up your goddamn blouse. “What could you have told him?”

“What you did to me back then.”

“Back then?” There’s only one “back then” she can be talking about. “What did I do to you? I did something to you?”

“You most certainly did,” she says and pauses in expectation. “Oh, please, don’t pretend you don’t remember, you broke my hand.”

That night. I look down at her hands. Thrump! Thrump! Dina was the one drumming, Ronit just stood there laughing her head off, even when she heard that agonized scream, even when… I keep staring at her hands, strong and steady, hands that can apply lipstick perfectly, without going outside the lines.

“Sheila, don’t give me that ‘who, me?’ face. You knocked me backwards and broke my hand.”

“I only nudged you!”

“You pushed me, violently, on purpose. I broke a bone. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

“I remember no such thing.”

She narrows her eyes at me, the look reflected in them decidedly unpleasant, as is her voice when it emerges from her ruby lips that suddenly seem paler, “Well, if that’s the case, I have to wonder what else you conveniently forgot.”

9

I HAPPEN TO HAVE a strikingly good memory, Miss Ronit. As striking as your smudge-proof lipstick, which, as if by magic, leaves not a single mark on your coffee cup.

And now, as if to taunt me, you’re biting into the Danish you ordered along with your weak Americano. Tell me, where does it all go? I put my hand on the roll of flab spilling over my waistband, nature’s idea of a birthday gift to most women hitting forty, whether they’ve cranked out a baby or not. Maor actually liked my muffin top, or at least that’s what he said when pinching it. But Maor liked saying a lot of things that weren’t necessarily true. I’m telling you, I have absolutely no interest in becoming a father.

So, my strikingly good memory, Miss Ronit, might not be the killer memory I had twenty years ago (turns out you don’t need the whole post-partum brain fog for that, your memory will eventually start going downhill with age; probably too many memories better left forgotten), but you won’t make me doubt what happened or didn’t happen, what broke or didn’t break that night. I’m not some heroine in a book who finds out halfway into the plot that she has actually murdered her entire family with an axe and repressed the heinous memory. Oh, come on, Miss Ronit, that won’t be my story.

“So why didn’t they rape her?” Ronit’s voice may be soft but the note of ruthlessness is definitely there, rearing its ugly head. That old ruthlessness.

“Because it wasn’t about that, it was about motherhood,” I reply very slowly.

“Yes, but they were going to kill her anyway, right? And whoever did it has to be a complete perv, so why not rape her as well?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to shift the focus from his statement?” I hang my gaze on my empty plate while Ronit continues to chew her Danish. And maybe gluing a doll to someone’s hand and marking her forehead and working up the passion is just too complicated? “Rape Is Not an Expression of Passion, Rape Is an Expression of Violence and Control,” a lecture by Dr Dina Kaminer, 2nd semester.

But I have to say I thought about it myself.

“Or maybe they did rape her and they’re just not telling us?” Ronit smacks her blood-red lips as if she’s just thought of something delicious. It was a swift gesture, as quick as a bullet, but I saw it. “That Micha is hiding something, you listen to me.”

“Even if he is hiding something,” and he is, “I don’t think it’s rape. It just doesn’t add up. They turned her into a mother, a Madonna, a saint.”

“Well then, classic Madonna–whore complex.”

“Ronit, I’m telling you, that isn’t the case here; this isn’t Eve and Lilith.” That shuts her up real fast. “Whoever did this knew perfectly well what he wanted to accomplish, and I don’t think rape was one of the objectives.” Or not the only one. To be Dina’s friend was to run the whole