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

in my ear, “It should have been you hanging from that rope.”

By the time I enter my apartment, my nerves are so shot it takes me a moment to realize someone has been here.

My home looks like it was taken apart and put back together; the changes are minute, but when you live alone, there are entire areas left untouched for stretches of time: a newspaper lying around in the same spot for weeks, a small mound of dust by the bathroom door you kept meaning to sweep up – suddenly the paper is lying at a different, straighter angle, and the dust isn’t there at all. The hairballs have gone. It’s the relative order that reveals the apartment has been searched. Don’t mess with my mess.

My suspicion falls on one man and one man alone: Mister That-Was-Fun. I cast my eyes across the apartment, Think, are you sure? Absolutely sure it was him? Couldn’t this just be a way to vent your aggression over him ghosting you? I scan the living room again, and there it is! The small pile of hairballs and dust under the lower shelf, the same one I stare at whenever I do my squats and lunges, and vow to take care of the next time I sweep – well, it’s gone. And now I know what he was looking for, although he left the albums exactly how he found them. What’s more, I know that he didn’t find the photo in question.

I didn’t take too many photos during my college days. Most of the time I wasn’t in the right mood, and this was the pre-smartphone time, when we used actual cameras, so we only took photos on special occasions, like a particular Purim party.

I try to imagine my future selfie with Micha. Both of us squinting at the camera, our colours complementing each other, and I choose just the right filter to make us look the same age. Keep dreaming, moron.

Eli picks up the alarm in my voice and rushes over with a pint of rum-raisin, my favourite flavour.

“You’re missed at the museum,” he says, “and everyone’s giving Efraim a hard time for telling you to go home.”

I assume that by “everyone” he means Shirley and himself, but I appreciate the gesture.

When I scoop the ice cream into two bowls (clean ones!), he blurts out, “Should I get you some pickles to go with that, or any other weird cravings?”

“Very funny,” I say, and realize it’s the same didactic tone I used with Gali. See what you would have turned into if you had become a mother?

Eli takes the bowl with the smaller scoop for himself, and I immediately feel a wave of warmth towards him, despite his inane pickle joke. We never seriously talked about the whole kids thing. That’s what’s so great about our relationship, that we both know the limits of this delicate tango, and we each know where not to step.

But there was that time, two years ago, when his expression suddenly took on a serious note and I panicked that he was about to profess his everlasting love and crack out the old “why not give it a try.” My mind started formulating retreat strategies, but he just looked at me and said, “We never talk about it, but if you’re planning on having kids, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that now’s the time. I don’t want you suddenly to decide you want one when it’s too late.”

I instantly blurted, “But I don’t want one,” and my voice cracked into a high-pitched squeal, and I realized that what bothered me was the fact that he thought I wanted a baby. I felt an urgent need to explain that I don’t, that I have everything under control.

Since then we never talked about it, I mean, not overtly. But in a roundabout, subtextish kind of way, you haven’t stopped talking about it.

That same week, a distant friend called to wish me happy holidays, and somehow we got to talking about kids, somehow?, and when I very casually stated that I wasn’t interested in having them, a long silence followed. I’m talking real silence – without even the faint sound of breathing on the end of the line – which he finally broke with “So you want to be childless?”

The word slapped me across the face. Childless. The arid, lacking less of it. Childfree may sound like a trite New Age euphemism, but it’s still better than childless.

And now Eli, with his pickle jokes.

“Are you, is everything okay with…” he stammers, pointing and staring at my stomach, as if he’ll find redemption there.

Then it dawns on me that Eli is about to turn forty-two, and even if it all goes well for him, the possibility of being a young father is long gone, and my heart sinks. The decent, well-tempered line-toer Eli could have been the world’s best dad, and I suddenly realize that he’s hoping I actually am pregnant, because who knows what I’ll decide to do with it, and what could happen along the way… It’s common knowledge that in our generation there’s no one way of doing things. There are many routes and detours and bypasses, which all eventually lead to babydom.

“I’m not pregnant, Eli, drop it.” My tone sounds harsher than I intended, and Eli withdraws. I see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows a spoonful of ice cream and insult. Bad mother.

“Let’s see if we can sort this out.” Luckily, Eli isn’t one for grudges. It’s one of his nicer qualities. I, on the other hand, can let my insult (real or imaginary) ferment for years.

He takes out his phone and starts typing. “We have two murder victims. Both were turned into mothers upon death. Both spoke out vociferously against having children. Which is what we knew from the start, but then we found out they had another thing in common.”

Did they ever.

“They were both your friends,