Imaginary Men (16 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Literary Collections, #Literary Criticism, #test

BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 99
placed his hand over my heart. I felt the blood throbbing in his neck with my fingers. Then suddenly, I felt his body stiffen. He yanked his hand from my blouse, squeezed my shoulder, and cried out, "Maggie!" From the corner of my eye I saw the bronze legs of Mrs. Gumm.
"What is going on here?"
I buttoned my blouse.
"How dare you! How dare you do this in MY school." Julio kept holding my hand on his thigh. Mrs. Gumm leaned into my face. "Maybe they allowed such goings-on where you came from, but not here. I won't have it," she hissed. "I won't have any tramps in my school."
"Open the door," I said.
"Girls like you have nowhat door?" Mrs. Gumm was confused.
"Open the door," Julio said quietly. "Please, just open the door."
As if moving through someone else's nightmare, Mrs. Gumm complied. Though we couldn't see the kids from where we sat, we had a clear view of Mrs. Gumm's face as she beheld her angels caught in the act. Her mouth opened slowly, forming the shape a mouth makes before it howls in pain. "MISS SIMONS!" she yelled over her shoulder. "Come here immediately!" Then she froze. The deaf kids must have noticed her in the doorway, because I heard a scurrying inside like kitchen mice at night. Miss Simons came clanging up the steps. Mrs. Gumm turned to me again. "However you got up here, you get back down," she ordered. Then the two women strode into the room and slammed the door shut.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
A special assembly was called that afternoon right before school let out. By then, of course, everybody knew what had happened. I regretted having left my wheelchair in such plain view. If I had asked Julio to fold it up and hide it behind the stairs, Mrs. Gumm might never have discovered us or the deaf kids. Other than that, I felt no regret whatsoever. Julio had already told Carl he was madly in love with me, and Carl had already told me that Julio had told him.
The buses waited in the parking lot like big yellow slickers waiting for rain. Mrs. Gumm and Miss Simons joined forces at the front of the room. "I have always thought of the deaf," Mrs. Gumm began,
 
Page 100
"as children who are seen but not heard by anyone . . . except God." Was she going to cry? I looked at the deaf kids. They were as relaxed as usual. "His real sheep," she went on. "And I am shocked and appalled." She sniffed. ''I don't know how these perversities began, but they will not be tolerated." The deaf girl with reddish hair nudged my shoulder and smiled. Carl, sitting on my left, was as expressionless as a juror.
"If I cannot trust my children here in school, I cannot take responsibility for them out there," her arm swept up, "in the real world." Carl looked at his wristwatch. Julio circled something in his English book and passed it to me:
Rom: For stony limits cannot hold love out
.
"Therefore I have canceled our field trip," Mrs. Gumm announced. There was a low groan from the room. "You are not deserving of it, particularly considering the nature of your" she searched for a word, "waywardness." Miss Simons's rendition seemed much more to the point: she jammed her finger in and out of a fisted hand.
Carl's voice cracked. "Not all of us were bad," he said, holding back tears.
"I cannot single anyone out for favors," Mrs. Gumm answered, making me hate her at last. I'M SORRY I wrote to Carl. Julio underlined it in blue and passed it to him, giving my hand a quick squeeze. Carl read it and pushed the notepad to the floor. I wanted to tell him it wasn't the end of the world, that maybe it was better in some mysterious way that he wasn't going to see Christ of the Orange Grove. But when I turned to tell him, the bell rang and he rolled past me through the door.
 
Page 101
The Problem with Yosi
Naomi's eyes swept the crowd in the kibbutz meeting hall to make sure everyone was listening. Her head moved deliberately, like a gun turret searching out a moving target.
"Then, he reached over and touched my breast," she said.
A unanimous "oy" rose from the members.
"What does Zalman say?" a woman asked.
The kibbutz doctor, seated beside Naomi at the table on the dais, leaned forward on his arms. "Other than his weight, he's in excellent health for a man of thirty-two. He's got some appetite."
The crowd mumbled. Naomi stood to get their attention, her silvery hair and freckled face shining in a beam from the overhead lamp. "What about a psychiatrist?" she asked. "Maybe we should
 
Page 102
send him down to Haifa to see Dr. Morganstern. She helped little Dafna that time. Remember?" she prodded them. "When Dafna pulled her eyebrows out?"
"Yes," the doctor said, "but that was what we call a neurotic compulsion. Yosi isn't sick. He's just lonely."
"No one ever wanted to marry him," a man called out. "I remember when he tried. Seemed like he asked nearly everyone."
"Last night on the path he touched my breast," Naomi repeated. "This is not a good omen. Something must be done."
Heads nodded agreement. The membersthe
chaverim
began to brainstorm, leaning forward and back in their folding chairs. "Order!" the leader, Lev, cried. "Let's take a break and have our tea." The
chaverim
aligned themselves at the back of the room near the samovar, their voices swelling and quickening. The name ''Yosi" moved up and down the line like a password.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
In the cow shed, Yosi was settling the milk cows for the night and cleaning the stalls. Sharon was helping him.
"You are liking the smell of the hay?" he asked, handing down a bale from the loft.
"Yes," she answered in her careful, American-accented Hebrew. "I like the smell of the hay." They had agreed to have bilingual conversations so that each could practice the other one's language. "You like the cows, don't you?" Sharon led the oldest dairy cow, Tsiporet, into her stall.
"Oh, yes. I'm liking them very much."
"Better than Ton-and-a-Half?"
"No, not better," he said. "Just different. Like two different animals, like a cat and a dog."
"But they're all the same, cows"
"No," Yosi interrupted. "No, the girls are cows. The boy cow is . . . is . . . I don't know the word in English, is
shor
."
"A bull.
Shor
is the Hebrew?"
"
Shor
, yes. He is a bull. He is different."
"Is he mean?" she asked, leading the last cow in from the outdoor pen.
"Oh no. He's a good bull. He always does his job."
 
Page 103
"I know." Sharon lined up the water pails to be disinfected. She had seen Ton-and-a-Half do his job. He was a prize bull from America whose sperm was used all over Israel to improve the breeding stock. Yosi was the one who collected the specimen each week. Two months before, she had seen the bull pumping into the warm receptacle built into the "breeding wall." It was her second day on the kibbutz. Yosi had run back and forth, leading the "teaser'' away just in time to turn the bull's attention to the surrogate opening. This had been Yosi's job for years, in addition to caring for the ten dairy cows the members kept for their own supply of sweet milk and cream.
"Ton-and-a-Half is very happy. So he's not mean. I think he knows what I'm doing. He doesn't mind. He never gets the heifer. Once in a while I bring him a real cow like Tsiporet to make fresh her milk."
Sharon scrubbed and hosed out the buckets. "How did you get your job?"
"I've always been a
bakar
," he laughed. "Like Roy Rogers, like Hopalong."
"A cowboy?" Sharon studied the face set on the thick neck. A fringe of wispy blond hair glowed halolike around his bald head, giving him an expression of perpetual amazement. "You don't look like any cowboy I've ever seen," she said.
Yosi lowered his gaze to the floor as if he'd dropped something of value.
"Oh, but I think all that's missing, really, is the hat," Sharon added.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The meeting resumed. "Order!" Lev shouted, pounding the table with his hand. "Eli?"
A burly redhead rose. "Let's try to arrange a
shiduch
for him. My mother knows a matchmaker in Tel Aviv"
"Yosi doesn't want to live in the city," Naomi objected. "A match with a city girl? They don't like the kibbutz life. They like their fancy clothes and their typewriters and their lipstick." Though Naomi had brought the complaint against Yosi, she had only his best interests at heart, she explained.
"How serious is it, Naomi?" Miriam asked.
 
Page 104
"He put his hand on my breast."
"Yes, but you're old enough to be his mother. Do you think it could go farther than that? Do you think," she hesitated, "he might force himself on someone? Become violent?"
"Violent?" Naomi swatted the word away with her hand. "We're talking about Yosi. He's not a criminal. But it's so unpleasant having to push him away, treating him like a child. Yosi? I don't think he has violence in him. Still, we must do something. We can't have him hiding in the bushes waiting to touch women in the darkness."
"I think he was staring at me when I came out of the shower house the other day," another woman offered.
"So what's the harm in looking?" Lev joked. The women in the room groaned in unison.
"You want him looking at your wife, maybe?" It was Miriam.
"Pardon me," Lev said earnestly. "All right. Let's be practical. Who has an idea? Don't be shy,
chevrai
."
The room seemed to inflate like a balloon as they sighed deeply and pondered the question. Finally, Shimon spoke. "I was just remembering what my father did when I was seventeen. I mean, what he did to educate me about women."
The members waited as he groped for words, their eyes bright with anticipation. "He arranged for me a meeting in Tel Aviv."
"What does this have to do with Yosi?" Lev asked.
"A moment," Shimon continued. "He found a prostitute there, not an ordinary prostitute"
"Tell me," Naomi chuckled, "what Israeli prostitute is an ordinary prostitute?"
"Order," Lev said calmly.
"She was very high-class. Superior in every waygentle, kind"
"And how did your father manage to find such a righteous whore?" Miriam asked.
The
chaverim
laughed. "A good qvestun!" shouted the old Russian, Samuel, from the last row.
"I don't know," Shimon confessed, his face red. "Anyway, it's not important"
"To
you
, mebbe," Samuel countered. "But to your mother?"
"Order!" Lev repeated. "I think Shimon has an idea here."
"Thank you," Shimon said. "If Yosi is lonely and awkward with
 
Page 105
women, why not get him a prostitutea very nice one, of course. A prostitute of his own, so to speak.''
"Tel Aviv is too far away. I never noticed any in Haifa," Miriam worried. "I don't think there are any."
"You, mebbe, didn't notice," Samuel said. "You mebbe didn't notice World War I, but I assure you it happened."
Dr. Zalman took the floor, twisting the band of his wristwatch into a pretzel. "This idea sounds practical to me. And if it doesn't work, we'll know the problem goes deeper."
Again the
chaverim
buzzed and turned in their chairs, discussing the pros and cons. "Do I hear a motion?" Lev asked.
Shimon stood quickly to claim his idea. "I so move: that the kibbutz send Yosi to an appropriate prostitute"
"How often?" someone asked. More buzzing. Shimon looked out over the faces in the room, watching their lips move, catching the emphatic phrase. "Once a week," he concluded.
"Everyone in agreement?" Lev polled them. Every hand went up. "Done! And who will tell him?"
"Let the doctor tell him," Naomi advised. "Say . . . that his hormones are building up and that it's healthy for a man to have sex on a regular basis. True?"
"True," the doctor agreed.
"And you, Samuel, you know-it-all. You find the prostitute."
"Mit pleasure."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Yosi studied the woman's calling card.
Leah Star (Strovosky)
18 Michael
Haifa, Israel
A bright purple star exploded in the upper right-hand corner. The magenta letters were raised and seemed to flow like liquid under his calloused thumb as he touched them over and over.
Number 18 was the upstairs rear of a small apartment building overhung with bougainvillea, the orange blossoms bright against the

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