Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

“I slept a lot. Did I miss anything?”

“Plenty. Especially a lot more corn. So, we’re in Urbana, and because we got stuck on the way out of Chicago, we’re a little behind schedule. If your sister is a punctual person, then they’re already waiting for us at the hotel. I thought you’d want to wake up before we got there.”

I rested my head on his shoulder. He removed the lid of my drink, and I smelled coffee and Styrofoam and the smell of my good luck’s neck.

“I think everything’s going to be fine. Even the weather is on our side in the meantime,” said my good luck.

In hindsight I find a nice literary logic in the fact that my sister and I arranged to meet in the lobby of a hotel. We spent our childhood in a pension, many of our private experiences took place in its public space: wasn’t it natural for our reunion to take place against the background of a similar décor? Wasn’t it apt for the sisters to fall into each other’s arms in a hotel lobby, and for their tears to mingle in precisely that place? Isn’t that a pretty picture? My little pigtail-sucking Alice would have made a meal of it, and no doubt ended my story on this charming note. How nice it would be to conclude it like this, a decorative ending that massages the glands and gently strokes the heart. But to hell with the pigtail sucker from Alaska, and to hell with literature. The literary logic is false and the charm is a lie. I can definitely say that if Elisheva had lived in a normal place, Oded and I would have driven straight to her house, and that the reunion would have taken place there, not in any hotel reminiscent of any childhood pension.

Elisheva was a punctual person, and when my husband and I wheeled our suitcases into the lobby, she and Barnett were already waiting for us. At first I didn’t see her, that is to say I saw someone, but not exactly my sister. All I took in was a flash of recognition and a rapid, familiar blinking, and a second later her coat exploded into mine. I think we stood there for quite a long time, in a bear hug, and I think that I closed my eyes. And when we disengaged our arms my sister said: “Oh my God, I’m so happy to see you! Thank you, thank you, thank you, my Lord, I’m so blessed.”

That’s what my sister said. In English.

When we disengaged our arms, I suddenly didn’t know what to do. Barnett and I shook hands. The men shook hands, Oded went up to the reception desk to get the key, and Barnett insisted on taking my suitcase and accompanying us to our room. Did we want to rest? No need, the drive was very comfortable, apart from the exit from Chicago.

My brother-in-law suggested that the four of us go in their car, and although I still wasn’t seeing very well, I could see that my husband had no desire to let go of the wheel. Somehow it was decided that we would take both cars, the men in one and the women in the other, and only when Elisheva opened the door of the gleaming pick-up for me, I realized that she was going to drive, my sister drove, and in fact how could she possibly live here without driving? Of course she drove, and moreover she was going to drive me.

Even before she took off her coat I noticed the change in her appearance, not exactly the details of the change, but mainly in what her body gave off. The woman who took the car keys out of her pocket was so different from the girl who walked down the corridors of the Pension Gotthilf with the bunch of keys in her hand, that they hardly seemed to be the same person. Without her coat I could see that she had grown thinner, and I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed right away, because her face, framed in a stylish bob, had lost its roundness. I, who in my childhood had refused to eat, had grown rounder after my marriage, and after the pregnancies and births, in my twenties, I had started to wear a bra. Whereas my sister in the meantime had concentrated herself into a smaller body. Only her breasts under the blue sweater were still heavier than mine.

I complimented her on her appearance. “You look like a swimmer,” I said and it was true, because her thick shoulders had taken on an efficient firmness that they didn’t have before.

My sister smiled a gentle, grateful smile, which was familiar to me, and to my relief she began to speak to me in Hebrew. She said that while she didn’t swim, she did quite a lot to keep fit: most of the people here engaged in some kind of activity, and Barnett had encouraged her in this, he was so supportive. So with all this support, she had started to run, at first only very short distances, later more and more, and today she could no longer imagine her life without it. Last Saturday Sarah’s class had gone out for a country run, parents and children together, and she was so glad that she could take part and that her little girl had no cause to be ashamed of her.

Barnett’s mother, she added, would take Sarah to school today, and later on, in the afternoon, Granny would bring her home to meet her uncle and aunt at last. I had no idea how excited the child was.

The men overtook us in the hired Chevrolet and disappeared around the bend in the road. The colors of the town we were passing through departed from the dreary uniform yellow of the road leading to it. Giant green trees rose high above the houses they dwarfed. Other trees blazed in autumn colors. The pavements were decorated with the red and orange of the fallen leaves, and a few orange pumpkins left over from Halloween grinned at us from doorways. Next to the street corner where the men had turned off, a huge plastic Santa Claus swayed next to a reindeer made of extinguished light bulbs lowering its head to the lawn.

“I have so many things to talk to you about,” my sister said, and the old blinking gathered new wrinkles under her eyes. Her hair was dyed a darker shade than her natural color. A week before I had gone to the hairdresser to have mine dyed again.

Two little girls, one dark and one fair, which of the two is the prettiest — the grownups said — the dark one or the fair?

We drove and drove, and my sister did indeed talk without stopping, she talked like a tourist guide. This is Urbana, our big town. Our house is in this direction, in the north part of Monticello, there isn’t much in the town itself, actually we only come here to visit friends. Everything you see to the right is part of the university campus. This is the football stadium, the baseball stadium is on the left. There, at the back, is the faculty of medicine and veterinary medicine where Barnett teaches one day a week, and this is the learning dairy for the students, they moved it out of the town not long ago.

When we approached the fields of stubble again, I asked her to tell me about her life, what she did every day, and my sister shrugged her shoulders: “You know how it is, there’s so much to do that you never get it all done.” She kept house, she helped Barnett in the clinic, especially with the paperwork — ever since she had discovered computers it turned out that she was capable of even coping with the bookkeeping. She worked slowly—“You know how it is with me”—but Barnett never stops thanking her. With his support, her self-confidence had grown to such an extent that she even sometimes helped his mother with the paperwork for her business, which was the least she could do, because for all the urging and all the attempts, she was still afraid of horses, and she couldn’t overcome this foolishness. Sarah, just like her father, sat on a horse even before she learned to walk, but this was apparently something you had to grow up with. Apart from all this, there was always community work: there were activities for the church and the Sunday school, there were sick people who needed assistance, and there was one disabled old lady, a wonderful lady, whom she assisted on a regular basis.