I half-ran to the hall near the change rooms. I’d forgotten my sandals on deck. My shorts dripped. I pursued. The hallway was purplish and smelled of bare feet.
I spied the dancing girl and a woman going through rotary gates. The girl was hunched over. Her head scarf was off. She was being dragged by her bathing suit by the other woman. I got scared. I kept going, running through the windy tunnel to the pool entrance, too. I ducked underneath the turnstile. I followed them into the scorched parking lot. The girl had a swinging black braid and she was fighting the woman who was head-to-toe covered. Sun spiked my head from the open-faced sky. I thought of my sister. The girl being yanked. I thought, I cannot get back into this pool without cash. Then the woman pushed the girl up against the parking lot fence. I was scared. I crouched at the side of a car. The woman started slapping the side of the dancing girl’s head. I burned my back on a gleaming door handle. The woman slapped the girl’s head on repeat. I was paralyzed. That girl did not do anything wrong! Her elbows were up. She didn’t make any sounds. A siren released from a speaker above me. The girl crumpled down at the fence. ‘Stop!’ I heard myself say. My name came from the sky. ‘Stop hitting her! Please!’ My name on repeat. Her braid swinging around. I heard the voice of my mother, running in her bathing suit. A lifeguard was with her, a security guard.
‘When I got back you weren’t there!’ my mother screamed at me, punching the hood of the car I’d been hiding behind. ‘Your father was sleeping! We are not in Toronto! You need to tell me where you are!’
Cherry skin rippled out of her bathing-suit armpits.
I turned back around to the parking lot fence.
‘My God, oh my God, look what happened to your feet.’
That hurt Arab girl and her mother were gone.
‘Jesus Christ. This, your father has to see.’
Crooked blood lines between two of my toes. That girl had been slapped by her mother so hard. I hobbled back to the pool. My mother had spider-veined thighs. On deck, my father played war with my sister. Abigail’s forehead glowed with zinc. My father wore mirrored sunglasses. He shook his head at me.
I noticed the bikinied girl and her friends sitting in a circle. The oiled-up, old, hairy bears had changed sides.
I hated my mother. I hated my father. I wiped the blood from my foot with a plush hotel towel. My mother sulked on the cracked concrete deck.
I thought, my mother did not know where I was because my mother did not know who I was.
In the pool’s glare, in Israel, I felt like
I’d just discovered my purpose in life.
My purpose was to help rescue kids from abuse. I thought of those kids on the monkey bars flying, the sad women dumped in the lot behind fences. My mother had said they were here from domestic abuse.
My thinking had progressed. Now it split off from my mom’s.
I thought in a logically articulated sentence: I pledge to help kids who are being abused.
Look, Mom, now it’s obvious to me that Barbra led me into what you call an abusive dynamic that by thirteen, in Israel, I’d already intuited existed.
I was not the victim; I was not the abuser.
I was fulfilling my fate of liberation, same as she.
§
I took Barbra’s hand outside the airport as we waited for a cab. She’d changed from combat boots into strap-up-thecalf sandals. Our palms were sweating. It felt like a hundred degrees. I did not care what the schmuck thought of me and Barbra holding hands. She pulsed me in code. I pulsed her back. In Israel, it occurred to me, men were more in touch with their feelings. They could open right up – it was the flip side of fear. I felt it like a buzz – male passion, male emotion – in the air.
I imagined Ariane laughing: All this time you were a Zionist!
We got into a taxi. Barbra sat in the middle. The highway was jammed with tour buses, tanker trucks. We passed bigbox malls next to highway huts. I kept pulsing her palm. I closed my eyes. My seven years without Barbra compressed into thought, this dizzying, totalizing, Zionist thought:
Sabbatai Zevi and Ka-Tzetnik are interfacing.
Multiple telephone wires hung low like intestines. I opened my eyes. The buildings were sand-coloured, semicircular.
I felt a crack in my lip. A horn on my head.
If possible check out the settlements, Abigail pinged me. From a design POV: fucking blood-curdling!
Our car descended from a highway down a thick concrete slope. The sun slid behind buildings marked with tar and graffiti. I wanted to glue myself onto Barbra’s mushroomcap shoulder. But I smelled rank. I got panicky.
I instinctively typed back to Abigail: Pray for me.