Grossman David - Her Body Knows

A warm fingerling darts through my stomach. Me? Translucent?

As he arches his back, she inquires again, matter-of-factly, whether his father asks about what he's doing here all these days. He laughs. "My dad can ask all he wants." She tries carefully to understand the nature of their relationship, tries to paint his world, to guess what might nourish him when he goes back there.

"What do you do, say, when you go home for Shabbat? Are there any friends that you-"

"No friends." He cuts her off and drops his pose, and Nili feels his heart chakra constricting in him with a quick spasm.

"Then what?"

"Nothing." He sits with his legs crossed, puts his head on his hand, and stares at the floor tiles. "We maybe go get lunch at the Burger Ranch, and that's about it. He sits in his room listening to the game, and I sit in mine, with headphones on so I won't hear."

"And you don't talk?"

"What do you want us to talk about?"

"Don't you have any-I don't know-topics of conversation?"

He stares at her intently. He has a kind of look, sometimes, as if he's peering at her over a thin glasses frame. You saw him, didn't you, his look says. Yes, she answers, I most definitely did. She tries delicately to explain to him, without explicitly using any cauliflower, that even our parents are somehow chosen by us. Meaning, we choose parents who will help us grow, gain strength, sometimes even overcome what they do to us.

"And do we choose our kids too?" he asks with bitter mockery.

She is confused until she realizes he means only his father and himself. She slowly absorbs his pain. "Yes, kids too." Then she assails him again: "But he loves you, you can't understand that yet, but when you have children …" She inflames herself, recalling his father's surprising tears of shame when he came to give her his proposal. Only now does she recognize the familiar combination, the mixture of immeasurable compassion and cruelty that only parenthood, it seems, can produce. "And just so you know, he may not know exactly how to say it to you, but I'm sure you are the most precious person in the world to him."

"He hates me, he hates me!" His voice rises and turns into a wail. "If he could make it so I would die, so I wouldn't ever shame him. You know what he calls me?"

She says nothing, remaining alert and tense. For a moment she can almost read his father's derogatory name for him in his eyes, but the word is quickly erased before she can get it-again that tail, the speckled one, wrapped around a tree, lingering, then disappearing.

He gets up, walks around, and lifts his T-shirt up. For the first time since they met she sees his bronzed, velvety back, ripped up and down and across with long stripes of strange scabbed pinkness. "He only stopped when I got taller than him."

As if he had been listening in on their conversation, his father comes to see her after their class. He slips inside the room. Her whole body is on edge. He stands with his rooster chest puffed up, a smile smeared on his indecent lips. When he sees her face he falters; he thought she'd be happy, that she'd tell him something about the kid. Still, he makes an attempt. "What's up? Since he's with you we don't see anything of him. He's a real handful, my son, hey?"

Her eyes dry up the words in his throat. "Get the hell out of here."

Absorbing the punch, he utters, "What the-?"

"You heard me. Go."

"But what's the matter with you? Did I say something wrong again?"

"Leave, or I'll. " She starts moving toward him.

He moves to the door in alarm.

Nili stumbles back in and slams the door. She leans over the little sink, her whole body shaking. I could have murdered him.

Her hands were always drawn to touch. If anyone's body made some gesture or expression of pain, her hand would instantly be drawn to massage, to melt. With everyone: strangers, acquaintances, a girl from my class who brought me my homework when I was sick, a lonely neighbor, a hairless dog racked with scoliosis who adopted her and became addicted to her massages. Her hands were a natural extension of her gaze, her talk. Once, she did it with my school principal: in the middle of a discipline talk in her office, the two of us were sitting there innocently when suddenly the Tyrant put her hand on the back of her neck and moved it around, sighing. Nili was behind her in a flash, at the ready with her ten fingers, while I measured the distance to the window and a redemptive leap. But then there was a strange struggle among the principal's facial features, and an unbelievable fraction of a minute during which Nili, alone, almost beat the entire system.

Time is running out; they both feel it and think of it, and he, almost eagerly, tells her more and more: the studies at the boarding school, the wild boys who live there with him, who've already been kicked out of every other institution, the friend he once had there-

"A friend?" She perks up. "Wait, you didn't tell me about him, who is he?"

But he ignores her-and the Arab who converted to Judaism and is now his roommate. And running away nights to go and play pool, and the punishments they endure, and the supervisors' beatings, each one with his own method, and the obligatory fasting days, the spiritual reinforcements, and the card games in the basement, where the loser has to give someone a blow job.

"And you take part in this?"

"Not in that." He looks straight at her, a look that is too horizontal and congealed.

She becomes alarmed. "But in what?"

He wants to tell her, but he resists it too. She can feel the pressure mounting at once between the joints of his fingers, in his shoulder muscles. "There's an old guy," he finally says, looking at her fearfully, "a little old midget of a guy, Iraqi, he's maybe fifty, lives near the market, and he pays."

"For what?"

He gets up and walks around the room quickly. Then he stops and stands in warrior pose, with his arms reaching out to the sides. "All kinds of stuff. He gives me clothes to wear, you know, girls' clothes. He doesn't touch. Just watches and jerks off."

"And you?"

"Nothing. I what?"

"Do you enjoy it?"

"Are you kidding? It's for money. Twenty shekels every time."

But she already knows the changing tones of his voice, and she senses the skin of her scalp stretching; her heart feels crushed. He shifts his weight to the other foot. His eyes are focused on his fingertips. She glances at him. Somehow it doesn't surprise her. She thinks about herself at his age. What did her father know of what she was going through? And what does she know now about what's really happening to Rotem? (If only, oh God, if only Rotem is hiding a stormy love story from me, if only the whole world knows about it but me. Not even stormy, as long as there is some love there, some affection, friendship, one single drop flowing beneath the layers of flesh, behind her antibiotic look.)

But she won't let him off this time, it's too late, and she goes back and insists: "And that friend you mentioned?"

"It's nothing." There is already a slight darkening in the shadow behind his eyes.

"A friend is good," she insists, and knows that he can sense every time her voice tries to conceal an ambiguity. "It's good to have someone to pour your heart out to, isn't it?"

"I'm hitting the showers," he says, and leaves her feeling as if her fingertips had touched a glowing ember.

Two hours later, they relax at the end of an exhausting class in which she seemed to be trying to polish and peel him. He is tired out and glistening with sweat, and she sits beside him and tries to direct herself to what he needs most (remembering that as a girl she was always surprised at how the medicine she swallowed knew exactly how to reach the hurting part of her body). If only he would tell her explicitly what he needs. But he is taking, she thinks, he is definitely taking something. It's not clear what, but something is being taken from her, her exhaustion today tells her that, a little like when she gets her period. And she thinks that since yesterday, since he mimicked her, he has really started consuming something from her, but in his own way, he is careful to keep his content a secret, incredibly trained, trained to conceal. Sometimes when she's with him, she feels like a big city, abundant and serene and innocent, and he is a stealthy guerrilla, emaciated and glowing, who slips into her every so often from his forest, grabs something he needs to survive, then disappears. And maybe it has nothing to do with her yogi qualities, this thing that he is taking? She opens her eyes in wonder: What, then?