Grossman David - Her Body Knows

"Okay, but I'm paying," he almost shouts.

"You're not paying anything, it's on the house." She laughs.

"But it's extra," he insists, sniffling.

"No need. Send the kid over."

He stands confused for a moment, suspicious, unable to comprehend the economic logic. But he still wants to thank her somehow, so he digs through the pockets of his too-tight pants and cannot find what he's looking for, doesn't even know what he's looking for. He finally tries to shake her hand, but their fingers miss each other. "Listen, if you ever need anything up north, at the quarries …"

I put down the pages, lunge for the cup, grab it with both hands, and drink huge gulps of water. I haven't dared to look at her until now. And I'm dying for a cigarette. Dying. How silent she was while I read. Abysmally silent. And I held the pages up between myself and her the whole time, with both hands, but the trembling only let up for the last few lines-

"Until this moment," she says softly, "I didn't know what it would be like."

"And now?" I force myself to look straight at her. Now the criticism will come. She'll say it's not her taste, it's too complicated for her now. "Smart aleck," she'll say, and she'll tell me to leave it. What does she know? What can she really make of all this, in her condition? And if you think about it honestly, when was the last time she held a book in her hand since high school?

"For a few months now, I've been lying here and thinking, What, she'll sit here next to me and read, and then what? What will happen to me?" Her voice is distant and stiff. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder what would happen to me. Old habits die hard. "So you wrote that story, after all," she says slowly.

I can't decipher her reaction. I have no idea whether what I've read up to now reminds her in any way of what happened there, if I'm even close. If that was how they spoke, she and his dad, if that was what went through her mind when he came to her with his proposition. I know so little, almost nothing. "Take him privately, make him a man"-that happened, she told me that as a kind of joke, I suppose, the day she came home. Maybe she thought it would en-

tertain me, an amusing anecdote from her job; it had turned my stomach. There were another couple of details that trickled down to me, even though I tried hard not to let them, and of course I know the ending. But in the middle there was a black hole, the chasm of her silence that stretched out from then until today. And now too, in fact, what is she telling me? Nothing. She breathes heavily. Not because of me. I hope it's not because of me right now. Every breath costs her an effort. She's very large and bulky. Fills up the whole bed. I arrange my pages for the third time, not knowing whether I should go on reading or wait for her to say something, give me a sign, a direction. Nothing comes. The most exasperating thing for me is to discover how little I had imagined while I was writing at home in London, what I would feel here when I read to her. My pretension horrifies me, and my brilliant stupidity: did I really think I could sit here with my legs crossed and tell her a story I'd made up about her and him?

"And you made me seem so angry," she says.

"It's a story," I remind her dryly, but I suddenly feel a pang, as if I'd missed something.

"When have you ever seen me angry like that?"

"It's just a story, Nili," I say, annoyed. In my mouth I already feel the saliva of a foreknown failure. And really, where did I come up with her anger there? That righteous indignation I stuck on her is so unlike her-

"And you mention Leora by name."

"I didn't change any real names. Not Leora's, not yours, not mine either."

She contemplates at length, slowly absorbing. "You're in the story too?"

My heavy heart tramples over a particularly fragile joint on the way to her. "Yes, I'm in the story too."

But now she surprises me. I think I see a shadow of a smile, almost a satisfied expression. "Go on."

She sobers up, of course, the second he's gone. Have you lost your mind? What exactly are you going to do? This is a child we're talking about. How old did he say? Sixteen at Passover. Meaning he's now fifteen and a half. That's just great. A year younger than Rotem, and you're only three times his age. Congratulations. She walks around the room nervously, gathering up mats, laying them down again, regretting, standing, staring off into a bubble of the moment. What does this have to do with yoga? She sighs, and her heart starts sliding down the familiar slope. What does this have to do with the vows you once swore to yourself, when you were standing in the light? She sits down on a plastic chair in the corner. A slight chill seeps into her stomach, the coldness of a liar finally caught. And anyway, what is all that rubbish about standing in the light? she jabs at herself. When exactly have you truly stood in the light? She straightens her back, spreads out her hands on her hips, and searches for calmness inside, an indentation, even a small hollow of relief, of momentary forgetfulness. But a thick-necked little animal leaps out of there and expertly sinks its teeth into her. And let's assume that there was a time when you stood there, in your light-well, that simply means you were casting a shadow on someone else, weren't you? Isn't that the defective logic of "standing in the light"? She gets up, walks around the room, leans her back against the wall. And something else stings her from within: Why did he come to her with this proposal? What did he sense about her? What do people sense about her from the outside? She pushes herself away from the wall, the poison of the stupid, random insult already spreading through her. How do these twisted things always stick to you? No matter how far you run and how much you try to hide from them, it won't do any good, the magnet is working. She finds herself standing opposite the little mirror over the sink, her intense green eyes shooting sparks back at herself. She furiously freshens up her short-cropped hair, looks to the side, then back, and looks sideways at her impressive nose, slightly broken at the base. You thought it was safe for you here, didn't you, with all these vacationing families, a Mecca of boredom. She closely examines her large, beautiful teeth and licks her lips and hides a smile and is taken aback: wait a minute, what do you think you're doing?

She flees to the window. She opens it, chokes, and slams it shut. Her yoga room is located directly above the parking lot for the tour buses, and when she complained recently about the exhaust fumes and the noise, the activities manager smiled at her-she's at least five rungs above her on the food chain-and said, "The choice is yours, sweetie." Four buses spit out another cycle. The new arrivals stand for a minute, stunned and slowed down by the heat, looking like groups of refugees beginning to digest their catastrophe. Only one boy, who got off barefoot, hops crazily from one foot to the other. She reads the signs: NETANYA MUNICIPALITY EMPLOYEES, DEAD SEA VACATION. The heat vapors blur the mountains behind the buses. This is it, this is the last time. She'll buy new glasses for Inbal and then to hell with the money. Her arms hug her body tightly, but even it, the pride and joy of her life, seems suddenly a little strange and heavy, and when she walks, it moves with her in the room as if enclosed in a thick frame with a gilded caption beneath that says: Woman's Body. Maybe she'll call Leora, she thinks at first, because the moment she says it to someone out loud-especially to Leora-everything will cool down and dissipate. But the boy, she perks up, he may already be on his way here. Just think what's going through his mind. And Leora-oh yes, she's a real authority on these matters-stuck with the same Dovik since age seventeen. She is suddenly struck with horror: What did he mean, "doesn't communicate"? Could he be retarded? Think, Nili, think quickly, this is no joke, and it's certainly no joke for him, it's life or death.