‘Sorry. Did it hurt? Are you okay?’
Yolanda was spitting, tongue-tied, not looking at me. I gave her the rest of my flask instead of saying sorry again.
§
That was a monster out there. Two a.m., the second week. I smelled her through the vents. Wine teeth, beef stock, salivation. My mother still would not turn on the air conditioning. My father had changed to night shift at the hospital. He said at home it was too goddamned hot.
Barbra peeked through the crack of my door. ‘I’ll just sit at the bed, okay, until you fall asleep.’
She wore green satin short shorts and a tight white tank top with cartoon-looking lace. She had worn this during the day.
I felt guilty about what had happened between us. I’d left some books for her to borrow on the basement stairs, Arthur Koestler and Colette. I didn’t think she’d read those books in Israel. Barbra had been taking Abigail to camp every day and Abigail told me that people there thought Barbra was her nanny. I thought that was totally fucked up. Don’t people know that an almost-twelve-year-old girl doesn’t need a fucking nanny?
I’d avoided Barbra successfully all week. Pretty much every day I went to the tennis club with Joel, who kept asking me if Barbra was as hot as she looked in her picture or what. I hated his tennis. I hated every sport.
‘Maybe he’s interested in tennis lessons?’ my father said to my mother. ‘You know, maybe he’ll get off his ass?’
‘Maybe you should ask him,’ my mother said.
Joel even thought I liked watching his athletics. He bragged about going to some summer championship thing. I watched him scuttle around the court like a bisected ant. The ball made a sound as stupid as him. Guh, each time he hit the thing. I imagined a poisonous spray can, chasing him. Tennis was ping-fucking-pong. I thought that at the end of Letter to the Father, Kafka would finally speak truth to his dad.
‘You see me beat that little shit into the turf?’ Joel always said after practice.
Joel wanted to meet Barbra. He said I should bring her to one of his games.
Tonight, in my room, Barbra seemed only tipsy, not drunk. Her tank top looked like lingerie. Since she’d come to my room that first time, I was terrified that she thought I was racist. I could not stop thinking about it. Like, did I only like her because of the colour of her skin? Because of the pineneedle hairs peeking out from her armpits? Because of the roll in her belly, her beef-stock bubble sweat, loam under our house – God, the walls were buckling from her heat. She was here again, back again, at the foot of my bed.
‘Why are you so scared of me, bruh?’
Ever since I was fourteen, my mother stored a box of condoms in the basement. I could not remember: did someone in Israel treat her like a dog? Or did she say dogs? Was it multiple people, multiple dogs?
‘I asked you, why are you so scared of me now?’
I’d scratched my scrawny white thighs when I’d jerked off not thinking of her.
‘Are all you Jew-boys in Canada so scared?’
‘What’d you just say?’
Jew-boy was anti-Semitic.
‘You fucking trembling now or what?’
Did they have gang-bangers in Israel? Why was she talking to me like that and laughing? Israel had fucking rescued her!
‘Maybe you should leave now,’ I croaked. I wrung my sweaty hands together.
‘Trembling, look. He’s trembling!’
I wanted her out of my room, her roiling open-mouthed glee. It occurred to me right then that she was the racist. She was anti-Semitic. She was a person on purpose swinging me round! I banged left and banged right, my head hit the ceiling. How could a Jewish girl who was rescued by a Jewish country actually hate that country? I wanted to know: did she hate us or Israel? And what the fuck was Jew-boy? Was Jew-boy code for white boy? Joel said that when he turned eighteen he was going on Birthright. ‘For the bitches,’ he said. ‘Girls are hotter with guns.’
God, I felt afflicted by a nightmare in my real life.
Barbra stayed on my bed, sparkling in her green satin shorts.
‘Your dad says he wants me to go to university here.’
I held my leg. It was bouncing. No, my father didn’t say that. He said program. I didn’t want to tell her, he meant community college. ‘And,’ my father said, ‘they had to fundraise, talk to Bill, do the corn roast and school talks and church talks, get a lawyer, a lawyer who specialized in these things.’