Adina Kay

Premature Regrets

Sara 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.

Sara is very hard and very soft at once. Back then, I would perch on a friend’s roof across the road from Sara’s house and watch her slide out of her car after work and slip silently through the back door to the basement level master suite for an afternoon nap. When she woke, her hair would be in a ponytail and she would pad barefoot in her t-shirt and loose pants out to the hothouses to visit Nechemiya. She’d return to the house with flushed cheeks and a pail of milk brought straight from the dairy. We’d boil the milk in a tin pot and then skim it for our early evening coffee.

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.

On certain weekends after I had already left Maor, I would return for visits. I arrived at the village in a rattling old car under the heavy black blanket of night that covers the region. With an old love I sat in the backseat of the dark car, giddy at the prospect of a weekend in the wide-open space. I’d roll down the car windows and stick my nose in the wind like a dog, waiting for those smells that meant we were close to home: burning wood, the smell of hot bread cooked on an outdoor stove, dirt, cow dung, mint, smoke.

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.

At the café, I eat my breakfast and Sara watches me. She tells me who has left Maor for want of jobs and gone to America. We talk about Nechemiya’s foray into growing flowers, tulips, buttercups and lavender. Then Sara lets a beat pass and asks me again about my “private life.” So tell me, Adinush. Suddenly I feel colorless; a little dead. She suggests I come to Israel. You should come back, Adina. This is still the answer. This will always be the answer. She never considers my family, my studies, my goals. I shake my head in muted disbelief. It’s too simple; it’s old fashioned. I am offended by her logic, her prodding.

I am also enticed.

Later, as I head home along the concrete swaths of upper Manhattan, I allow myself to think of it: the promise of nights spent walking along the dirt roads towards the edge of the fields. A blue and white tiled house. A red roof. My husband with thick hands, my children tan and sleeping. A date palm; the family dog resting quietly in the middle of the road.

So fine then. I admit it. I think it might be nice. To put on a white dress, on a Friday night, and wait by the window for my love to come home.

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