Gravity (7 page)

We stumble out of the trees into a clearing surrounded by sumac bushes, the grass flat like a cushion from where deer have lain. Lindsay flops down on her back, still giggling. I pick a milkweed pod and lie down next to her.

“Look.” I break open the green shell to show her the layers of white feather-like plant inside. “It’s like a female peacock.”

Lindsay touches the pod, sap dripping.

“Monarch butterflies feed on them.”

“Uh-huh.” Lindsay rolls over on her side. “Last night in the water...”

My shoulders tense, a film of sweat covering my back. “Yeah?”

“I know what you wanted to dare me.”

I freeze, my chest tightening. I stare at her. She doesn’t have her usual teasing look, the manipulative gleam in her eyes. She touches my bare arm, milkweed sticky on my skin. Raising herself on one elbow, she hesitates, moves her lips close to my ear. “I dare you to kiss me,” she whispers. “I want to know what it’s like—to kiss a girl.”

The earth seems to tilt, my pulse races. I roll over on my side and stare at her. She presses her mouth against mine, her lips stiff at first and then soft and warm. My arm slides tentatively over her waist, down the curve of her hip. Lindsay holds her breath, her eyes closed. She doesn’t stop me.

THE NEXT MORNING
I wake up early, shivering under a thin blanket, dawn barely etching the gray sky. Bubbie and I drink tea, bundled in sweaters on the porch, and watch the baby loons. She passes me the binoculars. I can’t focus. I drum my fingers on the edge of my chair, keep checking my watch.

When it is finally late enough, so I won’t seem too eager, I run to Lindsay’s. My feet are light and quick through the trees, past the leaning birch, over the spruce log, past the marsh with the rusting car. I force myself to slow down at the
sumac trees at the edge of Lindsay’s lawn. I stop at the porch stairs. The blinds are drawn, the doors shut, the patio furniture put away. My heart thumps. Down on the water a whip-poorwill calls
weeee-heeee
. I walk around to the front of the cottage. Lindsay’s mom’s Jeep is gone. Maybe they just went for groceries or mini-golf. Peering in the front door of the cottage, I see the magazines are neatly stacked, the fans still, the counters clean.

I pace up and down the porch. Then I kick a pile of pine-cones onto the grass. Shivering in my fleece, I lean against the railing Lindsay’s mom didn’t want. I didn’t even get to ask her if we could meet back in the city.

THE SUN BEATS
down hot on my back, the water cool around me. My right arm comes up over my head, slips into the water. Cup and pull. Then my left arm—inhale— splashing into the water. I swim a few more strokes, shoulders contracting before reaching for the air mattress. I spit out a mouthful of water.

“You’re doing great,” Bubbie tells me. She lies on the mattress, paddling beside me.

I nod, out of breath. It’s not quite the way I wanted to swim to the island. However, as Bubbie says, it’s better than becoming fish food.

I rest my head on the hot plastic, close my eyes against the bright sun, kick my legs. I glance over at Lindsay’s empty dock: the lawn furniture and fishing gear are gone, even the canoe is put away in the shed.

Bubbie follows my gaze. “I haven’t seen Lindsay in a few days.”

“She’s gone.”

“Pardon?”

“Home. They went home.”

“Oh, I guess it’s that time of year. We’ll have to pack up after lunch if we want to be in time to get your parents from the airport.”

“She didn’t say good-bye.”

Bubbie frowns. “Maybe something came up.”

I shake my head.

Bubbie shades her eyes, looks at me. “She’s a slippery one.”

I nod, avoiding Bubbie’s glance, and slide off the mattress. I push myself under water for as long as I can before breaking into a front crawl. Bubbie follows along beside me on the air mattress.

I rest again, this time halfway across the bay. Our dock seems far away, the logs on the other side equally hazy.

“I caught a frog the other day,” I tell Bubbie.

“Tell me about frogs.”

“
Phylum chordata, class lissamphibia
—that means it’s got smooth skin,” I tell her. “I always thought frogs would feel slimy. They’re smooth, just like their name.”

“Do you know those things from school?”

I laugh. “Bubbie, religious girls don’t need to know about frogs or birds or fish, except to know if they are kosher.”

Our days in school are divided into religious studies in the morning and everything else in the afternoon. Science is
crammed into two hours one afternoon a week. We read the chapter in our textbooks, answer the questions. The ecology sections are in the back of the book, and we never get there by the end of the year. Once I asked my teacher how dinosaur bones could be older than creation. The teacher said God put the bones there to test our faith.

“Are frogs kosher?” Bubbie asks.

“Nope. No fins or gills.”

“Oh, they taste like chicken.”

“So I’m not missing anything then?”

“You’d like to study more about frogs, about nature, wouldn’t you?”

I laugh. “Yeah, sure.”

Bubbie just nods, and so I swim again, practicing my breaststroke, like a frog. Bubbie follows on the mattress.

When we reach the island we stand on a fallen log, holding onto the mattress. “Looks a lot like the other side,” I tell Bubbie.

“Yep.” She points to a blue heron skimming across the water. I rest in the shade a few minutes. Bubbie says, “We’d better get going.”

“Five more minutes?”

“You don’t want to be late for your parents.”

I sigh and take one more look around. I grab hold of the air mattress next to Bubbie and together we push it with long lazy kicks.

AT THE END
of the day I stand on the dock, gazing out at the island. The sun sets pink and gold over the bay. I stay one more minute and then wrap my arms around a tree trunk before leaving to join Bubbie in the car. Now I know the feel of wet pine needles on my arm, the crunch of dry leaves in my palm, small berries rolling under my feet.

In the city I know all the surfaces already: concrete, linoleum, plastic, Formica, porcelain, all cold and hard. Polished wood at best, but with a layer of paint over top.

Four

I
ma bursts out of the airport, her eyes glittering with an alarming intensity. Abba follows her, luggage-laden, jetlag etching his smile. They climb into the car, showering us with kisses.

“You had a good time?” Bubbie asks.

“Wonderful,” Ima says. She leans forward and squeezes my hand before putting on her seatbelt.

“Absolutely amazing,” Abba says.

Bubbie pulls out of the airport into the maze of sun-scorched highway.

“It was just incredible,” Abba sighs. “When we got off the plane we could smell orange blossoms. And I tell you, the land feels different there.”

Bubbie rolls her eyes.

At the house, Abba opens windows, turns on taps, sifts mail into piles. Ima grabs my hand and pulls me up the stairs with her suitcase. “I have so much to tell you.” She closes the bedroom door and turns on the air conditioner. When she pulls off her blue cotton scarf, her rich brown hair cascades over her shoulders, sweaty and threaded with gray.
I notice the leather dye of her new sandals has bled into her white socks.

Most of Ima and Abba’s room is taken up by the bed with its patchwork comforter. A low wooden dresser is jammed below the window with framed pictures of Abba’s parents, Bubba Rosa and Zeyda Yuri, on it. The air conditioning gradually cools the room, cutting the thick humidity. I sit on the bed and stretch my T-shirt over my knees.

“So? Tell me about the trip.”

Ima kneels on the floor beside her suitcase and starts filling a laundry basket with crumpled blouses and balled-up socks. “It was unbelievable,” she says. Outside a dog barks. “Wonderful,” she repeats.

“Did you see the sea?”

“The sea? We went to Israel. It’s a desert.”

“Sand dunes?” I imagine sand fanning out, licked by the wind’s tongue into crescent-shaped grooves.

“No, it’s more rocky and hilly.”

“Oh.”

“But it’s ours.” Ima’s eyes flicker with excitement. She leans back on her heels, her arms wrapped around her legs.

I nod, letting my hair fall forward to hide my face. Neshama and I have had long discussions about whose land it is.

“That slice of sand and desert with its heat and all its troubles, it’s ours,” Ima continues. “Here is all kinds of different people, not Jews.” She takes a deep breath. “There the land is ours.”

“The
Kotel
, did you go to the
Kotel
?” For weeks before Ima left, all she spoke about was the Western Wall.

“Oh.” She flushes. “I’ll have to tell you about that later, when Neshama comes.”

I stare at her sparkling eyes.

“Here,” she says, digging in her bag, “I brought you something, a present.” She pulls out a small plastic bag. I expect a book or a necklace, something Jewish.

“For you,” she says stroking the bag, “I have brought”—her voice dropping to a whisper—”a perfect Israeli specimen.”

She sits down on the bed bedside me and pulls out a fruit, round like a tomato, the color of an orange. I roll the rubbery sphere, my brow furrowed. It smells of the earth, not tangy or citric. “You snuck fruit through customs?”

Ima ignores my raised eyebrows. “What tastes like a peach, looks like a tomato, but is the color of an orange?”

“You brought me a riddle?” I squint at Ima.

She smiles again and pulls my head close to hers until I can smell her familiar lavender scent. “Sultan’s peach, Roman tomato, King David’s orange,” she whispers. She picks the fruit out of my palm. “This persimmon is my Israel.”

She pulls a pocketknife out of her suitcase and slices the fruit into quarters. I pull the skin off with my teeth. The smooth peach-like flesh tastes like perfume.

“This persimmon is like smashing the cup at the end of a wedding,” she says.

“What?”

“It reminds me of our tenuous hold on Jerusalem. We own the land now, but around every corner I saw shades of the past, shades of how light our hold on the country is.
Sure, we build new settlements to...to sink our teeth into the soil, but it’s only sand. It crumbles, gives way. In this fruit”— she grasps the persimmon’s remaining brown seeds, her knuckles white—”I see every army that ever passed through Jerusalem, and I understand how lucky we are to have it.”

“Uh...yeah.”

Ima cradles her bag of persimmons in her lap before putting them on the bedside table next to the small copper lamp. “Did you have a good time with Bubbie?”

“Yeah, I had a great summer. I swam a lot and learned to paddle a canoe.” Heat crawls up my face. “So you didn’t swim in the Mediterranean?”

Ima zips up the empty suitcase and shakes her head.

Of course they didn’t, not my modest, white-skinned parents. Not on the beach in Tel Aviv where I’ve seen pictures of scantily-clad Israelis in bikinis with uncovered hair, naked limbs. Like Lindsay. I start to blush again and duck my head so Ima can’t see. If I ever get to Israel, the ocean will be the first place I visit.

Ima has had a summer of sand and dust, while I have been learning to swim. Crouching by the water’s edge, I looked at crayfish, rising early to push a canoe through the quiet water to chase loons around the bay. I think of the wet mulch at the edge of Lake Missisagagon, the mist rising off the water.

“Oh, here, I brought you something else. It’s from the desert and also the sea.” Ima rifles through her straw shoulder bag, pulling out a handful of mints and a film canister.
“Hold out your hands.” She pries off the lid of the canister and pours gritty bits of sand and some tiny white shells into my hands. “It’s from Mitzpe Ramon, this crater in the south.”

I stare at the shells. “By the sea?”

“No, in the middle of the desert.”

“There are shells there?”

“Yes, I thought you’d like that.” Ima smiles at me.

I sift the sand, poke at the gritty bits, the small white swirls. I imagine the sea raging across the sand, then departing, leaving remnants on the shores. I squeeze the bits in my palms. “What is this, evidence of Noah?”

Ima’s back to sorting laundry. “Maybe.” She glances up at me. “Where’s your necklace?”

My hands fly to my neck. “I took it off to swim.”

“It was Bubba Rosa’s.”

“I know. I just forgot to put it back on.” I go get it from the suitcase under my bed and fasten the chain around my neck. I lower the neckline of my T-shirt to show Ima the small gold heart with the Star of David carved on it. The necklace feels tight around my neck.

“Beautiful,” she says and kisses my forehead.

THE CAMP BUS
drops Neshama at home in the evening. She is tanned, blonder than before—streaks, I suspect—and carries one more bag than she left with. I peer at it suspiciously.

Ima hugs her. “How was camp?”

“Wonderful, amazing,” she says.

Abba studies her outfit—a three-quarter-length-sleeve sundress with buttons down the front—before he kisses her.

Upstairs she nudges the imitation Louis Vuitton suitcase under her bed. I raise my eyebrows. She pushes me into the bathroom, pink pearl nails fluttering, while Ima goes to get a laundry basket.

“Contraband,” she hisses.

I raise my eyebrows.

“Things for you too,” she adds.

“From camp?”

She shoves me into the towel rack. “No, silly. We sneaked out.” We hear Ima on the stairs. “Outlet mall,” she whispers. “Wait till you see.” She smiles and pulls her dress tight against her chest to show me the outline of her bra. It’s not the shapeless beige kind Ima buys for us.

Neshama puts on a long-sleeve cardigan, covering her forearms. “Don’t want to piss off Abba too soon.”

“What’s up?”

“Later,” she hisses.

After my parents have gone to bed, the air conditioner droning in their room, Neshama pushes the lacy pillows and teddy bears off her bed and spreads out her new treasures on the pink bedspread. Neshama’s room is stuffed. Her dresser is strewn with tubes of lipstick, nail polish and jars of makeup brushes. Fashion magazines and romance novels spill out from under her bed. A shelf holds her collection of music boxes.