David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

But neither Papa nor Mama noticed, they were so full of their happiness, they took long, loud slurps of compote, how he loved to watch Yaeli sipping from a glass, because then he could see her pretty mouth double, but now their lips curled in convulsive laughter and they looked like prisoners jeering at a newcomer to the cell who is trying to pretend he doesn’t belong there. The words they used rotted in their mouths: wonderful words like “pleasure” and “love”; he would have to abstain from those words for a full day now. No: for a full seven days. Till they were clean again. “There’s one thing I still don’t get,” said Papa, unbuckling his belt and spilling out into the room. “You walk her home from school with Gideon. You play in the valley with her and Gideon. You go to the movies — with Gideon again! He’ll probably tag along on your honeymoon and hold the candle for you too.”

Papa heaved with loud, heavy laughter, but in Mama’s eyes there was a strange metallic glint. “If you wait too long, he’ll snatch her away,” she said in a humorless voice. “Remember, Aron, when it comes to things like this, no friends and no favors! It’s first come, first served! Nice guys finish last!” She threw a sharp glance at Papa and there was sudden silence as an onerous memory filled the room, almost as if it had burst in through the walls and the floor.

“Take it from me, Aron”—Mama repeated the warning, whetting her voice to rip the silence to shreds—“when it comes to things like this, if you wait like a lamb you’ll end up bleating like a lamb! Beeeeh!”Her mouth formed a fleshy crescent. “You understand what I’m saying?” And all the while she was feeding Grandma, her hand rising and falling from the compote dish, catching a drop every three trips under Grandma’s mouth. Yochi couldn’t stand it anymore.

“I won’t have you sticking your nose up, young lady!” Mama fumed at her. “You’re a real authority, you are! So where are the beaux in your life? In their envelopes? Under the stamps? Let’s see them!” “Sha, enough, Mamaleh. Leave the girl alone!” With Yochi’s matriculation exams coming up, Papa protected her with deep solicitude. He would get up in the middle of the night sometimes and tiptoe to the kitchen, caress her head as she dozed over the notebooks, and make her coffee and a nice, thick sandwich, and then tiptoe out again so as not to distract her. “I will not put up with this from her,” grumbled Mama. “When she gets a husband let her do what she likes, not here.”

Aron buried his face in his plate and chewed the mush in his mouth. The potatoes will go in and some of them will come out in my shit and the rest will stay inside and become a part of me. So, in fact, I am eating a part of myself, before it has actually become me; it’s strange to think that any old potato, or even a cucumber or an egg, might someday become a part of me, Aron Kleinfeld, or a part of someone else, for that matter, but I still can’t tell what’s mine and only mine and not from someone else and not available to anyone else even if I wanted to give it to them, because it can’t exist in anyone but me, and when I find out what it is I will cling to it with all my might, because the rest will be taken from me, I know that already, or else I’ll give it away, and maybe it wasn’t really mine in the first place, but that which is mine and mine only I will cling to until my dying breath; he didn’t want to listen to Mama’s insinuations, or the urgency in her voice, as if his entire fate depended on winning Yaeli, on conquering Yaeli, but how can you conquer someone you want to love, how can you conquer someone you love precisely for being free and independent. He stuffed more and more food into his mouth just to avoid looking at Mama’s bouncing chin, and he vowed never to be jealous of Gideon on Yaeli’s account, because that was the beauty of their three-way friendship: without a word they had made an equitable division, they each got all of Yaeli, and at the same time, the Yaeli of each of them was a different Yaeli, because Gideon knew the Yaeli everyone else knew, the more public Yaeli, whereas Aron was in love with a different Yaeli, the Yaelishe would have wanted to be, and no one knew her the way he did, deep inside.

No, he wasn’t jealous of Gideon, if only because he didn’t really know which of them gave him more happiness — Gideon, who made it possible to get close to Yaeli, or Yaeli, who made Gideon open up to him again. Or maybe his great happiness came from the two of them combined? He stole a glance at Yochi, all hunched up; she’d probably hate him now because of Yaeli, but Yochi glanced back encouragingly, and his heart went out to her. Don’t give in to them, li’l brother, said her eyes. Neither of them has ever experienced the twin joys you feel in your heart. They know nothing. They know less than a fourth of what you know. Maybe that’s why they’re abusing you now. But Mama spurred him on with her prickly tongue, and listening to the way she sounded, seeing the fierceness in her eyes, you might have thought she was the one competing with Gideon around here. “Take some money, go on!” She stuffed it into his hand as he was about to leave for the movies. “And if he buys her a falafel, you buy her a shewarma! Don’t skimp! Everything’s on me!” And later, when he returned from his evening out, she would be waiting for him in her bathrobe, looking ruffled as a bird of prey, interrogating him down to the smallest details: what did she say, and what did he say, did it seem to be coming to a head yet, were there any hints of a decision? She wrung her hands, muttering the monosyllabic answers along with him. Sometimes when she dunked him in her bitterness, and painted a lurid picture of the trouble there would be if he wasn’t careful, if he let Gideon snatch her from right under his nose, he had a strange suspicion that she derived a twisted pleasure from infecting him, from lashing his ear and forcing him down to earth, her earth. “And next time you see your doll,” she warned him, sparks flying out of her eyes, “don’t show her you’re interested! Not on your life! She’ll only want to humiliate you if you do!” She squinted at him narrowly and her voice was solemn, resonating with age-old innuendos. “And don’t act like a pipsqueak around her, the way you usually do! Don’t let her see what you’re thinking. Don’t sell yourself cheap, don’t give yourself away. Play with her a little. Why not. Women like that. I’m telling you!” Aron thought of his innocent Yaeli and the rosy blush that spread over her throat, and he almost burst out laughing.

“Don’t laugh like that, nebbich,” she raged. “Your little doll isn’tthe innocent lamb you think, not if she knows how to twist the two of you around her finger like that; you listen to me, Aron, she knows very well where legs sprout from.”

She shook her head self-righteously, and again he saw the bewildering contrast between the pious expression she wore and her actual face, which was handsome and animated, almost provocative. For a moment he felt trapped in a maze of illusion. Then he shrugged his shoulders and tried to wriggle out.

“And just where do you think you’re going, stand up straight.” She lowered her voice. “Over to her house?”

“Leave me alone. I was about to go to Grandma’s room. To read the newspaper to her.”

“What, are you nuts? Going to read to Grandma? A fourteen-and-a-half-year-old shmo spending time with his grandma? You think she understands anything you read to her? Why don’t you go out with your doll instead?”

“’Cause … ’cause Gideon isn’t home now.”

She hooted at him: “You poor little sap! And what if he’s there, by some strange chance? What if he’s with her in her house, in her room now, sitting on her bed with her and laughing at the fool?”