Shelly Oria - New York 1, Tel Aviv 0

Dora smiled.

I can try, she said, but I can’t make promises.

That’s fine, I said. That’s all anyone ever does anyway. Try.

* * *

The first thing Dora saw was a dreidel. She said it was tiny, and purple. I couldn’t see it. Then she said there were plenty of them, in all colors of the rainbow. It sounded beautiful. They were flying in all possible directions, she said, and they were too small to hurt anyone. Dora didn’t have to dodge.

* * *

My mother was coming to visit. Dora and I were baking a cake. Dora said, Remember, babe, not a word. I used too much baking soda. I committed to memory: not a word, not a word. I knew I might still forget.

My mother’s visit was the oddest thing. She kept calling Dora Jojo. Dora didn’t seem to mind. That’s fucked up, Dor, I said when we were in the kitchen and I thought my mother couldn’t hear. I was wrong. What’s fucked up, dear, my mother asked: standing in the doorway. I spilled the beans. All of it.

My mother said, Sweetheart, you are imagining these things, yes?

I said, No, Mom, you are imagining that you can’t see them.

She said, Surely, sweetheart, you realize that you’re bored. When you were young you used to try to fly. That was out of boredom too.

I don’t remember that, I said; that’s pretty stupid.

Actually, you pulled it off once, she said, but that’s hardly the point.

My mother made hot chocolate, cut the cake. Then, on the sofa, she was stroking my hair: her attempt at making me hopeful. That’s rather annoying, she said all of a sudden. What is, I said. Something is beeping, sweetheart, she said. Can’t you hear it?

1.

My wife and I took a cooking class recently. My wife and I take classes. It is a passion of my wife’s, taking classes. My wife is good at most things one could take classes in, which, when you think about it — and I’ve thought about it — means my wife excels in all things. And I believe that is in fact true. I believe my wife excels in all things. I am not blinded by love when I say this — we have been together eight years. They say after seven, whatever blindness you had is gone.

* * *

While my wife was chopping things or perhaps sautéing them, the instructor came over. I stopped what I was doing, which wasn’t much. He was a man in his sixties trying hard to look French. He smelled like years of garlic. We looked at each other until some time passed. You might want to take up poetry, he said finally.

2.

The poetry class conflicted with the cooking class — the one my wife was excited about, the one from which I was now banned. I make curtains for a living, and most of the work is done from a tiny shop I set up in the back of our house. In other words, my schedule is flexible; this sort of problem never happened before. What do you want to do? I asked my wife. In my chest I was hoping she’d say we both quit. I was imagining her saying, Intro to Tarot Card Reading. Or: I heard of a place, just a short drive north, where you can take horseback-riding classes. My wife loves intro classes, and loves anything that’s a short drive north. But instead she said, We are not one person, you know. My wife had never pointed that out before.

3.

The poetry class was led by a young man with too much gel in his hair. His bio listed literary journals with exotic animals in their names, and words in Latin. I’m a poet before I’m a teacher, he told us the first day, a poet before anything. Everyone nodded.

4.

How was the cooking class? I asked my wife when we both got home. Dominique thinks I should open my own place, my wife said. After three classes? I asked. Eventually, she said, emphasizing each syllable. She looked at me like I had something on my face, but I knew that I didn’t.

5.

Later that night, I went to my shop and cleared a small corner of my sewing table. In this corner, I thought, I can be a poet before I’m a curtain maker.

6.

Since then, every night I sit myself down, because that’s the first step to anything worthwhile. I bark at myself from a dog place in my brain, a place only I can hear: Write! Then I get up and go to the kitchen to get some olives.

7.

The poem is about my wife, I think. The poem is about Sunday mornings, when the sun is too early. The poem is about being the last human being on earth, but responsible for someone else.

8.

Of course we still have sex, my wife says.

9.

The last time we had sex, it was cold out and they said a storm was coming. My wife was shivering in fear, making lists to steady herself. For a while I was trying to cross things off her list — candles, eight gallons of water, move things away from windows. Check, I would say cheerfully at her, check check check. But the more I crossed off, the longer the lists got, and the more anxious my wife seemed. She was sitting on our bed, her upper body low like it was trying to reach her knees. I stood close behind her, put my hands on her shoulders. Honey, I said, and she tilted her head back and looked up to meet my eyes. There was such fear in her face, and I hadn’t thought this through; Honey was all I had. I said Honey again, to buy a few seconds, and then I just saw it, saw in her eyes the thing she needed to hear, saw it the way you see anything — a car in the driveway, a coat in your closet. I promise you it’s going to be okay, I said; can you trust me? She let her head lean farther back until it touched my stomach, and I held her like that for a bit, then turned her around to face me, kissed her eyes. Her body softened, opened.

* * *

When the winds came later that night, they were far weaker than expected, and we were still inside each other. It had been a while since we made love like that — hearing our rhythms without effort, reaching toward each other without haste, again and again.

* * *

When we woke up the next day, the outside was yellow and brown, a strange mix of relief and disappointment. I tucked a curl behind my wife’s ear. We didn’t die, I said, and smiled. Don’t be dramatic, she said, and got out of bed. God, I need to brush my teeth, she murmured with her back to me, heading to the bathroom; I woke up with an awful taste in my mouth.

10.

I like saying my wife to strangers, seeing their eyebrows twitch. The eyebrows always twitch. The only difference is whether they let them twitch or try to keep them from twitching because they’re liberals. When they ask — smiling, to show they never twitched at all, why would they? — How long have you been married? I say, We were in the first weddings, Massachusetts. I nod a couple times and look away. If I let myself see their eyes, I will see the next question. And I admit: I want to leave them to their twitching.

11.

Someone, perhaps my wife, used the expression in conversation. The street was being loud right as these words left her lips — loud on the end, loud on the ation. In converse was what I heard. I can use this for my poem, I thought. That is how I operate these days, like a thief.

12.

Whenever my wife wanted to read the poem, I’d say It’s not ready it’s not ready. Sometimes she’d say Read it anyway, read to me while I cook. Then I’d say I prefer to finish it first, and my wife would make a face. I didn’t know why she felt this urgency with the poem. What I did know was: when it’s ready, I want her to listen without cooking. I’d say nothing though, because what’s the point?