Grossman David - Her Body Knows

"Is there perhaps something you'd like to tell your body?" The question pops out of her mouth and surprises her, and he hardens a little. "You can say it now," she suggests, recalling how he had almost cried when she talked with him about his body two days earlier. Still, she feels something has opened up in him since then. "Say it silently or out loud. Tell it what the problem is." She sees a slight furrowing of his brow, and quiet. Then he lets out a very small smile.

She holds back, and the class goes on, but before he goes off for lunch, he stops at the door. "Know what I said before to. my body?"

"What?"

He laughs, kicking at the tiles. "Nothing really, I just asked if it was happy with me." She doesn't understand, but he eagerly explains: "I always thought of it the other way around, like whether I'm happy with it. But suddenly, when you said to ask it, I felt sorry for it, you know, that it had to be mine, like …"

She smiles with him and still doesn't comprehend. Such a beautiful body, refreshed, etched, and it responds to him with suppleness and harmony. For a minute-without even feeling it-she stretches out her healthy, gloriously beautiful body like a person taking a deep breath after leaving a sick friend's house.

Later, when she's alone again, she throws herself into her weekly room cleaning-her little display of freedom against the manager and the cleaning staff. Something disturbs her: the permanent, insulting thought that she is, in some way, not complicated enough. Apparently not messed up enough either. There are clubs, she knows, that wouldn't let her in; the people she feels closest to and loves most have whole areas she is forbidden to enter, and all her seeing skills aren't enough to even guess at what goes on in their twisted, sophisticated crevices. She will never know what they really think of her there, and she has always had a gnawing suspicion that those are the places where she is being betrayed. Now that she has come this far, her thoughts already know their own way home: maybe one day, years from now, the girls will finally appreciate her true value. They'll grow up-

"Rotem."

"What?" She alarms me when she stops me like that in mid-sentence.

"I have a request."

"I'm listening."

"Don't read now. Speak it to me."

"Speak what?"

"What you have written down."

I don't get it. "What-"

"Don't say 'she.' Say 'you.' Talk to me."

I shrug my shoulders and quickly scan the next lines with my eyes. I don't know where she got the idea, and I briefly consider objecting in the name of artistic freedom. I decide to give her the "you," but certainly not to compromise on the other protagonists. "Maybe one day years from now" -I read to her, hesitating a little at first, checking every stone before stepping on it, but then it starts to flow- "the girls will finally appreciate your true value. They'll grow up, they'll be mothers too, their eyes will open … Is it all right like that? Is this what you meant?"

"Yes." Her eyes are closed. "Go on."

You lean on the mop, dreaming up scenes from their future motherhood, conjuring up for them a quiet smiling man with broad shoulders, a Lego house with a red roof, and two or three kids, maybe even four, why not. There will be joyful moments on the playground and at the dinner table, and there will also be arguments over what to wear to kindergarten and when to go to bed, and then over what time to come home from parties, whether or not to smoke, and what to smoke, when to start having intercourse, and with whom, and then a new understanding will emerge in them, and they'll suddenly comprehend the gift of motherhood you bequeathed them. The internal liberation you gave them with your ostensible anarchy, and with the absolute equality that prevailed between mother and daughter in your home. You sigh quietly: it is true that sometimes, if you were to look at things unflatteringly, from an external and foreign point of view, it may seem as if you and they are in fact the same age, helpless and scared subjects of the arbitrary and misunderstood adult world.

"Yes," she murmurs, her eyes still closed, her lips moving along with mine.

But then, out of the murkiness of your blessed forgetting, you see a row of what look like humps-different-sized islands of memory, both the inconsequential and the critical: the lunchboxes taken to kindergarten and found to be empty at lunchtime, the puddles of urine gathering next to the front door when you were late getting home. The furious quarrels that erupted every time you tried to help them with their homework, and the boredom and suffocation that took hold of you when you were forced to sit with them for even ten minutes and study for an exam. Every minute seemed like an eternity to you. And the slap you once gave Rotem while she was struggling through the Pythagorean theorem. Your insistence on treating her only with homeopathic medicine, even when she had strep throat, and the horrible comment made by the doctor at the ER, who hap-

pened to be a former classmate of yours, giving you a broad perspective on your character-

I keep on reading the long and fairly tedious list. I enjoyed writing it, and I felt just and strong and full of self-pity, and I thought what fun it was that everything was behind me and I could be happily embittered over every episode as if it had just happened yesterday. But now my insides are shrinking with insipidness and shame as I realize that this is the hot air I've been existing on for thirty-five years. Even so, I keep on reading to her, setting off land mine after land mine in her face, but preserving the same voice and clean staccato I've been using all evening, not a single word emphasized, no blaming and no apologizing, no influencing and no bribery. I present her with my text without interfering, and I have lots of experience doing that, because in some sense, that has been the way we have talked in recent years, the method I developed so as not to flare up when she would invade me in mid-conversation and hover around my allergic areas with her criminal innocence. But when I have almost reached the end of the list, my mouth starts to grow dry and I glance feebly at the clock. It's ten now in London. Melanie gave me unequivocal instructions about the next few lines. She talked about the need for total honesty, even now, especially now; "It will purify," she said. "It will liberate you both." But I'm not Melanie, and I fix my gaze strongly on the dark corner of the lie, and pathetically skip to the beginning of the next section.

Nili, with her eyes closed, grasps my wrist with a strength she does not have and says, "All the way, Rotem, read until the last line."

. And men staying the night, trapped in front of torn childish eyes as they walk out of the shower naked, relaxed, staring in embarrassment; and the nights Rotem sobbed as she banged on your locked bedroom door, lashing out against everything that was stormily occurring inside it; and that cursed week, which should have been shoved into a place it could never emerge from in any therapy, when you stayed in the apartment getting high with two of them, two animals-oh God, what did you do to her?

Silence. She finally lets go of my hand, and I have shrunken to the size of a foundling. It scares me to see what she is capable of knowing if she only wants to. That's exactly how it was when, suddenly, in the middle of a normal phone conversation two months ago, she said, "You're writing that story, aren't you?" I choked and tried to squirm my way out of it, and she asked, "Why that of all things? Don't you have any other stories?" And I said I simply had to, and she asked, "Now?" And I said, "Yes," and I wanted to scream. How can you not understand that it's my last chance, while you're still with me a little. I won't be able to do it later. But all I could say, with a kind of embarrassing squeak, was "Please, Nili, just don't tell me not to." Melanie, making a salad behind me, stopped and didn't move; she understood from my voice what the conversation was about. Nili was quiet, then she took such a deep breath that she seemed to be inhaling me through the line, and said, "But afterward come to Israel and read it to me, as a farewell gift."