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Adina KayPremature RegretsSara says, mamikah, tell me, what’s new in your private life? We are sitting at an Upper West Side cafe in early March of 2005. Sara wears a full face of makeup and a white cotton sweater with a rose pinned at the collar. Ten years have passed since we last saw one another. Ten years since I lived with Sara and her family, in Maor, a farming village in Israel. I was eighteen that year. I order a large breakfast and Sara tells the waitress she isn’t hungry. She only wants a fruit juice. I can’t stop staring at her fingernails. They are long and fake. Painted pearl-white, they have silver wave-like designs at the tips. I am disappointed. I remember quite liking her short and stubby nails when I knew her years ago. I liked the contrast of her glamorous face with the short unkempt nails. There was something enviable about how she pulled it off. Sara just turned fifty but you would never guess it. I watch men my own age stare at her from across the café. Her eyes are a stabbing steel blue. Her hair is inky and black. Today it’s blow-dried pin straight; it’s thick and oily at the roots. Her skin is smooth and moist. No lines. I assume her husband, Nechemiya, has made a good living this year off of his tomato harvests; her brown leather boots look expensive. Maor, a cooperative village made up of several small farms, is surrounded by acres of date palms and eucalyptus trees. Hothouses with rows of flowers and tomato plants flank the fields. Doors to homes in the village are left unlocked. I found it hard to resist sticking a finger into the soft caramel colored dirt while squatting down to pet the family dog on my first visit, on my thousandth visit. Every time I am there, I surprise myself with little acts like this. In the evenings Nechemiya would play pool in his brother-in-law’s garage. When he saw me walk past, on the way home from visiting a friend with the family’s German Shepard trotting close at my heels, he would call out to the road in Arabic, Adina, Ahalan! Kif Halak! I would answer the few choice words that I knew, al-hamdililah, ana mabsuta, and then he and his Yemenite brothers would erupt into hearty laughter at my accent. Sometimes we’d walk back to the house together for backgammon at the kitchen table. When he’d sufficiently beaten me at the game, he’d take himself off to sleep, leaving behind the echo of his laugh and the smell of his evening cigarette. Sometimes we would take tractors into the hills at dusk. On those rides we’d pass Bedouin shepherds and tent enclaves. The backdrop was of the tan and grainy hills, flecked with weeds and tents. Evenings were spent in the front yard of someone’s house, the picnic table strewn with pistachio-nut shells and cups of coffee and cigarette ash. At some point, the old love and I would slip off and walk towards the darkness, at the edge of the rows of houses, where the road ended and the fields began.
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