“I feel like a monster,” I flung the words at my sister as soon as her face appeared on the screen, her hair wild, her ripped T-shirt with the logo of a heavy metal group I didn’t recognize. “I dump my daughter at a place that makes her cry, just so I can have time to fuck around all morning.”
“Relax, it’s fine,” Dina laughed easily. “Lily’s just a drama queen.” She chewed loudly on a chunk of kohlrabi from a ceramic bowl that covered a quarter of the screen.
I resolved to go pick up Lily from preschool once I’d finished my coffee. My cell phone beeped. A text from the teacher. “Everything’s good. She calmed down thirty seconds later. Played very nicely with Noam and now doing great in animal hour. I wanted to send you a photo but couldn’t find you on WhatsApp.” A surge of relief swept through me. I felt dizzy and leaned back into the couch.
“Where were we?” Dina said, swinging Max up with a practiced hand onto her lap and baring one breast.
“The teacher messaged me. Everything’s fine.” Max suckled happily at her breast, and his hand played distractedly with her hair. “Dinka, it’s gross, he’s almost four years old,” I blurted out.
“Shut up,” Dina answered cheerfully.
I settled down on the couch and reached for my coffee. “Listen. You’re not going to believe what happened to me over the weekend.”
“I’m not going back to that jerk,” I sniffled. I lay there like a pregnant whale, on a sun lounger at a café on the Tel Aviv promenade, trying to ignore the raucous music that was playing. Dina, who’d arrived a week earlier, refused to stay at our place (“I want to be my own person, not creep around your apartment on tiptoe,” she answered when I protested) and reserved herself a room in a boutique hotel in the Yemenite Quarter. “She’s turned into a cold European,” I told Mom,enraged, on our weekly phone call. Mom was also miffed that Dina only stayed with them for one night (“Ditka, I don’t think Dinka loves us anymore”). Dina preferred to spend her time in Tel Aviv, wandering around at leisure (“Tel Aviv winters are just perfect”), meeting up with old acquaintances, exploring old and new places. She got a new tattoo, a baby Chinese dragon, and had a fling with the Russian tattoo artist.
I was happy to join her earlier in the day for more modest activities. It felt good to exist without Halimi, whose social life continued, irrespective of my advancing pregnancy.
“I can’t believe I encouraged him,” I sighed, trying to imagine what it might be like raising a child as a single parent. Just the thought gave me arrhythmia.
Our wedding was wonderful. I had prepared myself mentally for something to go wrong—that the dress would rip around my huge belly, that there wouldn’t be enough food. But it was a long, relaxed party on the beach, exactly as we planned it, nothing over the top, mountains of good food and alcohol. Friends and family kidded around together, everyone danced and was happy, my mom got quite drunk, Simone reclined on a sun lounger by the shore, Dina and Georg’s daughter, Eva, showered us with flowers under the wedding canopy (Georg and the kids had left the day after the wedding, but Dina stayed “to party”). When Halimi said the traditional “If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem” at the wedding ceremony, he looked me in the eye with steadiness and emotion.
“So, what now?” Dina asked. She drank beer from a bottle and smoked a joint.
“This morning, his phone didn’t stop beeping when he was in the shower, and I saw it was a Facebook chat with some chick,” I said dramatically. I tried unsuccessfully to find a comfortable position to lie in.
“A Facebook chat, so what?”
“They’ve been sending each other all sorts of songs with hidden meanings, and cute emojis, and they arranged to meet at some café. Thesame week we got married, for God’s sake,” I sniffled. It was infuriating to be thrown into the role of betrayed wife, yet again, and in such a ridiculous manner.
“Go ahead, go ahead, all the best studies say it’s great when you’re about to give birth,” Dina said. I took a hit from my sister’s joint, watching two old ladies walk along the waterfront. I got the feeling they knew what I was doing and were judging me. “Okay, so they arranged to meet, so what?” Dina continued, blinking at the sun.
“What do you mean, ‘so what’? Does it seem normal to you that a guy has an affair with someone five days after getting married and his wife’s about to have a baby?” I began coughing wildly.
Halimi was full of tenderness, but his mind was elsewhere. His sexual attraction to me hadn’t diminished, but in my ninth month I was pretty inaccessible. It made me shy and a little withdrawn; Halimi made no attempt to draw me out. When he left the house that morning, saying he had a business meeting, I scrutinized him long and hard.Good-for-nothing stupid liar, I thought. I had a feeling he understood what my eyes were saying, but he just picked up his keys, grabbed his bicycle, and fled.
“‘Normal,’” Dina repeated contemptuously. “If you’d wanted normal, you should have married some tech CEO and bought an apartment in the suburbs.”
“I don’t get it,” I burst out. “Why are you on his side?”
“I’m not on his side,” Dina said. She placed a calming hand on my belly. “I just don’t want you getting overexcited. Perhaps it is a business meeting. You know how the younger generation communicates these days: It’s all smileys and kisses and hearts.”
“Younger generation? Right!” I snorted. I sank into deep thought and tried to reconstruct the chat I’d read.
“It wasn’t a business meeting,” I said with certainty. “And you know I’m cool with one-night stands. But the week we got married! And whydoesn’t he tell me? Damn it, that’s what we agreed on—that if something’s going on, we tell each other.”
I sighed. I imagined myself giving birth alone, breastfeeding in the dark in a tiny one-room apartment, ugly and cramped, in south Tel Aviv. The joint went straight to my head after months of abstinence, and I felt a panic attack coming on. Dina took my hand and held it to her breast.
“Everything’s okay, kitten,” she said softly. “Let it go. He’s just a jerk who isn’t used to serious love. He’s got a lot to learn.”
A few weeks earlier, Halimi and I had decided against going on a honeymoon in my ninth month—I was nervous enough about giving birth before the wedding—and planned on a long vacation after the baby was born. Dina claimed that if everything went according to plan and I recovered quickly, this would be our best option for the next few years. “Remember, two months after Eva’s birth, Georg and I went to the Glastonbury Festival? It was perfect. Two years later, we went back, and it was a nightmare. I spent every minute of the day running after her to make sure she didn’t drown in a puddle or accidentally drink MDMA.”
“Let’s go there!” I said decisively.
“Go where?” Dina asked.
I rolled my eyes at her. “To the café where they’re meeting,” I said, feeling both pathetic and like a cat ready for the kill at the same time.
“Be my guest. I’m staying here,” Dina said. I gave her a withering look but said nothing. In her place, I’m not sure even I would have gone along with what might easily turn into a juicy family scandal for everyone to see. I quickly found a taxi—one of the advantages of my huge belly—and ten minutes later, I was there.
