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My father put her headshot on the fridge about one month before she arrived. It was an old-looking, folded, passportsized shot,
black and white, with a camera flash flicker lodged in one of her eyes. She had frizzy black hair bobby-pinned slick on one side. Tiny, mottled, square-shaped teeth and doe eyes like a caricature.
‘Naive,’ said my mother to my father. ‘That’s a woman, not a kid.’
‘Ruth, you of all people should understand,’ my father said. ‘She doesn’t have a family. Her family let her go when she was five. She’s been in Israel without her family for years.’
‘We learn to place kids within their communities,’ my mother said.
‘Come on, where the hell do you suggest they should’ve “placed” her? There are no Jews left in Ethiopia, Ruth! We had Operation Moses and Solomon for that. We are trying to help orphans get a handle on their lives.’
‘Orphans,’ my mother snorted.
My mother was finishing her Master of social work. ‘I’m not sure your “team” is using the right word.’
My father said that he fought to sponsor this exchange student, a Jewish one from Israel, a Jewish student who needed it. My father always repeated that he was the only Jewish member of his Rotary Club. My mother thought the Rotary Club was sexist. My father said that my mother didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘That girl was transferred to Israel by the military,’ said my mom, ‘when Israel had no long-term plan for integration. It’s a total disaster. Look at Tel Aviv. It’s all white. It’s for whites. They abducted the Yemenis, too. Israel has absolutely no framework for understanding race.’
‘Jesus Christ, Ruth. These people are Jews – not Black people who are offended by the colour white,’ my father yelled. He turned to me. ‘Tell your mother, Israel always has a plan.’
Before I met Barbra, I was kind of on my dad’s side.
‘I am not cooking for this person I don’t even know,’ my mother told my father on the day she was set to arrive.
‘Social work, Ruth? Sometimes I don’t know about your compassion.’
Me and Abigail were watching America’s Next Top Model in the family room. Fatima was getting her photo taken on a dairy farm in short shorts and a USA crop top. Fatima had just confessed to Tyra Banks that she had been circumcised when she was a kid.
‘Clitoridectomy is the removal of the clitoris,’ Tyra Banks explained to the other models, glossy-eyed, holding Fatima’s hand. ‘Because they don’t want a beautiful woman like this to be free!’
There was no way Abigail understood all of this. She was glued to the screen, mouth-breathing. Fatima broke down in tears on a haystack. Tyra bent over, hugging her, crying, too.
I walked up the stairs to the kitchen, my back wet with sweat. Even in a heat wave, my mother wouldn’t turn on the AC.
‘Passive-aggressive,’ my father said, glancing at me. He was holding the Windex and had a dishtowel over his shoulder. ‘Your mother is very passive-aggressive.’
‘He thinks I can write off this whole summer,’ my mother said to herself.
My father sprayed the lowest part of the fridge around the grates. ‘I thought your mother would be happy that an Israeli is not in the army,’ he said.
‘She can’t live in that country if she doesn’t finish her bloody tour.’
‘The girls don’t do “tours,” for God’s sake, Ruth.’
‘Right. They just deal with the trauma of the boys.’
‘Listen to her, trauma. What do they teach you at that place?’
‘You mean the fucking University of Toronto?’
‘Listen to how you’re talking in front of your son.’
‘What comes out of my mouth is my choice, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Again. Oh my God.’