So Far (,) Houses By Avital Gad-Cykman
The White House
A tiny corner house. The girl has a little bed in her parents’ room. At
night, she dives into her bald teddy bear and sleeps uninterrupted. She
never hears them, but she sometimes wakes up into an angry room. When they
laugh, the air is lighter.
The living room is soaked with her grandfather’s aftershave, cigarettes and
aging skin. She doesn't let him go for six months to her aunt’s. Her parents
say he must. She clings to him until he releases her grip with promises. The
house is incomplete without him.
Neighbors pass by and drop in like they belonged. But the girl knows they
don’t. The woman from the house on their right eats a whole herring with
half a loaf of bread every morning as soon as her children go to school. She
is fat, a camp survivor. Her son and daughter refuse to eat because they
don’t want to look like her. The girl doesn’t want either. Her mother
approves.
The neighbors behind have a grandson the girl can’t call “retarded” although
she knows he is: other children have told her. He is slow and friendly, so
she's slower beside him, and it can be nice. It’s different from frolicking
with her friends in the fields around the houses.
Her father says the boy is down on his luck. She longs to play with him, but
her mother says she shouldn’t. She watches him sail a plastic duck in the
air. He doesn’t see her through the grapevine and the fruit trees. Her eyes
don’t leave him, while her hands keep busy with leaves and thorns and muck.
The garden flowers she plucks won’t be arranged in a vase, because her
mother doesn’t want to watch them die. The girl hides them.
Every year, the father goes away for a month. He tells her he’s only doing
paperwork at the army, but he’s a paramedic. She doesn't think about it. She
believes every word he says until the day he dies. It hurts so much, she
almost forgives him for lying. It happens in the blue house.
The Blue House
Not a house, but an apartment, and only the parents’ room is painted blue.
The girl has a peach-colored room all her own, and the grandfather sleeps in
a veranda closed with glass doors and curtains to make it look like a room.
They cross the parents’ room to get to his. She reads to him from the
Yiddish papers, and he laughs at the way she pronounces the words. Since she
has no idea what she reads, she goes by the letters.
She tells her parents to be quiet when her grandfather sleeps, because they
can wake him up. They laugh from the two single beds drawn together until
they fight.
She leaps into her father’s lap and asks for stories. The neighborhood
children are amazed she doesn’t know how people make babies. “With love,”
she quotes. “They fuck,” they tell her.
There are no fields and gardens there, only dunes, and the girl learns to
roll down them. She runs on the streets like she owned the town, though her
mother scolds her for every deep scratch, and the crew at the health center
teases her about the stitches and tetanus shots.
She sometimes enjoys staying at home. The closed drapes keep it chilly when
outside it's too hot. Since her father works long hours, and her mother has
headaches, she plays alone, reads a lot and spends hours with her
grandfather. Beside Yiddish, he speaks four other languages she doesn’t
know, but she understands him. Her vocabulary is constituted of fifteen
requests and pleasantries and three melancholic songs. He laughs when she
says a name of a boy and calls him a schmuck. He only learns a few words in
Hebrew before he dies. She is eleven.
The Gray House
The Blue House still keeps its colors when the father leaves it for the
hospital.
The girl sits at the Formica kitchen table, sips a cocoa and listens to
Nights in White Satin and Venus. The music burst against her mother and
inflates her impatience until it blows up.
They put away the curtains of the closed veranda and the bed is scorched by
sunrays. The glass doors accumulate dust. Then, an unknown cousin from
America announces her visit.
The girl throws herself into work in order to make her cousin believe that
she is always nice and pretty and the room is always clean. She already
loves the woman for being a cousin.
She brings her father apples, but he gives them to his guests. He comes
home, grills potatoes over open fire and feeds his two women, as he calls
them. He laughs when the coal leaves the girl and the kitchen dirty.
In the morning, her mother hugs her and says he went back to the hospital,
but it’s nothing.
The cousin arrives and doesn't mind the details, but the girl notices the
walls have gone gray.
She runs away from the boys or chases after them, as the game goes. She
loves the one who’s the most confident and cheeky.
Her father returns home with a patch on his right eye, and he and her mother
allow her to give her first party.
The living room is bright and spacious as she enters it in her best clothes,
wine colored pants and a peach woolen blouse. The boy she loves wears an
overly-colorful shirt, red and green heads and tails, but she forgives him.
Her parents are curious, after she has confessed her love. Her mother says
she thought he'd look different, and the girl thinks it must be his slight
frame.
She puts on an even louder music, and he dances with another girl. She
dances with the short boys. Her father leaves for the hospital and doesn’t
return.
The Beige House
The blue house has become too big, and the mother says it needs a fresh
paint and new couches. She works as a multi-lingual secretary for an
import-export store. The girl comes to visit and halts in front of the fox
logo hanging over the entrance.
After work, the mother buys fruits they used to grow around the white house.
When she’s not upset, she is worried.
She sends the girl to assist a teacher in a school for children with special
needs. The girl understands why they aren’t called ‘retarded’ when they beat
her in a memory game. Her memory is different. She guards her father’s days,
so they don’t pass through others’ minds and mouths. Nobody could love him
well enough.
Her best friend, a girl with the malice and the body of a woman, cries for
the girl's father with the girl’s mother one afternoon. The girl admires her
friend for that, but then she doesn’t. The friend tells her she’d ask boys
to dance with her. The girl hasn’t grown breasts yet, and boys enjoy her as
a tomboy.
The mother chooses beige with delicate flowers for the living room walls,
and blue and black striped sofas. The girl cries when the used furniture
salesman who shouts his trade in Yiddish “alte-zachen” comes for the old
couch. She remembers how her grandfather spoke Yiddish too. She feels the
warmth in her father's lap right there on the lost couch. At the same time,
the new design fascinates her. Her mother may yell with her and try to take
her to the father’s grave, but she is a lady people regard highly and her
refined taste shines.
Every afternoon, the girl runs out and leaves her mother reading, with her
pained feet raised up. When she is back, her mother hasn’t left her place,
though it’s been hours. Nothing makes the mother happy. The girl thinks that
this is why her mother falls down all the time without any apparent reason.
At night, they sit on the new couch and watch BBC dramas.
The Cerulean House
The house is huge. The mother loses her womb and ovaries in secret. She
would have denied her months at the hospital if she could. The time clock
measures another half a year at home. They mark the girl's sixteenth
birthday, but the girl celebrates it with friends. Then, the mother stops
saying that her falls mean nothing.
The ambulance goes along the Mediterranean and through many crossroads.
Behind the curtain in the E.R, the girl overhears a physician say the truth.
She brings her mother a green scarf for her bald head, watches her practice
walking between two bars, and waits for the lucid moments to appear among
the hollowed-eye periods.
She washes the floor and dusts the house every week and keeps her schoolwork
up-to-date without thinking. When the end is close, she indulges herself,
stays in bed until late, bends over and plays with the gathering dust balls.
She has a boy friend now. He finds an aging onion and a rotten tomato in the
refrigerator. They laugh like it’s funny. She wants to paint the walls dark
to keep the warmth in.
One day, she agrees to disconnect her mother from the life machine. Her aunt
doesn’t want to be responsible for the decision.
The girl brings home the green scarf. She tries on her mother’s shoes and
clothes. She goes through the cupboards and finds a picture where her mother
is young and stunning, not yet a mother, without a worry in the world.
She mixes azure blue with a bit of gray and paints the house cerulean. She
doesn’t dare ask anyone for help, afraid to seem needy. She is not
professional at all, and the paint leaves blue tongues on the ceiling and
tiles.
The walls gather around her, as she lies down, her thumb in her mouth,
tightly curled to abandon.
