“This malefactory fan?” said Daphna, never without a word.
“Call an electrician,” I advised, and fled.
And so, on late Wednesday afternoons, Daphna, not needing even to chop those onions herself, was free to call on her four resistant neighbors.
We each had a way to avoid her.
Lucienne — seventy-five or so, widowed, overweight — could duck under her kitchen counter as fast as a girl. Fat legs bent, fat arms encircling knees, the whole round self keeping company with a trash can and a bin of root vegetables, Lucienne rested in her makeshift cave until the doorbell stopped ringing. Then she crawled out and struggled to her feet, retying whichever romantic chiffon scarf she was wearing that day.
Connie, who worked mornings at a clinic, had a more deliberate Wednesday defense. At four o’clock she popped a chicken into the oven for her family’s dinner, then ran upstairs to her little alcove of an office, where she could remain unseen. She unlocked her briefcase and did paperwork for two hours; sometimes the bird shriveled, but so what?
I had an easier time than either Lucienne or Connie. I am divorced and my children are out of the house. Perhaps once a week I poach a sole for my friend Rand, but otherwise the kitchen rarely claims me. (Saturday nights he takes me to the dining room at his club: long windows, long portraits, a lengthy evening.) At the real estate agency that bears my name I can always arrange to show a property, and so on those dangerous Wednesday afternoons I was usually convincing a customer to buy some house, mostly by not talking. My height and slenderness alone can make a sale, my staff claims; my golden hair, they add, if they really crave a bonus.
But Sylvia, our street’s spinster, was easy prey. Sylvia started nipping after lunch, and a few hours later she often opened the back door in a fuddled error. Her blouse had by then crept out of her skirt. Her gray hair, which had started the day in a bun, was now a limp corkscrew hanging below its elastic band.
“Ah, Sylvia, I’m so glad to find you at home. Have you time for a cup of tea?” But Daphna didn’t say that. She didn’t say that to any of us when she succeeded in making a capture — of Lucienne, standing in plain view at the window over her sink, having forgotten it was Wednesday, fixed by Daphna’s stare; or of Connie, daring to run downstairs and baste her chicken at just the wrong time, stopped by a knock on the glass door from the deck; or of me, home early, the sale accomplished, intercepted on a dash from garage to back door.
What Daphna did say was some version of this: “Shalom, dear friend. Scandals here, scandals back in Jerusalem, and the French minister of tin cans was found in bed with his biographer. All politics is local, the gentleman said. Local? Smaller yet: household, if you ask me, though who asks me. My gutters are clogged with leaves. I can’t stay long — cranberries are simmering on my stove.” Cranberries were frequently simmering on her stove, and were often forgotten there. Sometimes on trash-collection day, Daphna’s pile of newspapers was topped with an aluminum pot whose interior was glazed an unscrubbable purple. “More than two million bushels of cranberries are produced each year,” she might go on. “The plant is cultivated on acid soils of peat or vegetable mold. Such scrupulous recycling of natural elements — it is as if the Talmud decreed it. The Hebrew word for cranberry is hamutsit. The French is canneberge. The Linnaean term is…” The briefest pause here perhaps — during which opportunity, still in my backyard, I claimed to hear the telephone ringing; or, leaning against her jamb, Sylvia softly belched; or, at her window, Lucienne, adjusting her scarf, mentioned that it was time for a nap; or, sliding open the glass door to the deck, Connie indicated in her flat Wisconsin accent that the monologue might continue inside.
It continued inside anyway, whatever any of us did, as Daphna followed me into the house, cocking her head at the silent telephone; or advanced on Sylvia; or ignored Lucienne’s invented fatigue until the poor woman plodded to her back door and opened it. “…Vaccinium macrocarpon, the Linnaean cranberry.” By this time Daphna was seated at Sylvia’s breakfast table, Lucienne’s, Connie’s, or mine; and Sylvia, Lucienne, Connie, or I was seated opposite her, our fingers splayed on wood or cloth. We gazed at the backs of our hands. We avoided eye contact with her as we would with a rabid dog.
“Politics, you were saying?” Daphna remarked. “The things husband says to wife at breakfast, wife to husband, determine the course of the day, the year, the nation; they influence everything from some grocery clerk’s nervous mistake to the idiocy which commands our destinies.” She leaned forward. “They influence the policeman on the beat.” She leaned farther forward. “My youngest child has the highest mathematical aptitude of all eleven-year-olds in the town of Godolphin.” Another of her boastful hyperboles. “What shall I do about the leaves in my gutters?”
She had quantities of brown frizzy hair and a perfect lozenge of a face — brow narrow, chin narrow, cheekbones curved like almonds. Her large gray eyes were calm as water, her full lips about to froth. She favored ankle-length skirts and long overblouses, wore sandals in winter and no shoes at all the rest of the time. She might have stepped out of the pages of a child’s illustrated Old Testament, just as her husband might have stepped out of a photograph taken in 1890 on Hester Street: an immigrant tailor, wearing black pants, black vest, white shirt, and a little beard. No skullcap, though. They were not pious, Daphna assured me — their Friday-night meal was simply a reenactment of Jerusalem life. “Every family, the godless, the frum, they all sit down together Erev Shabbat. To interrogate each other. It’s our tradition.”
They were thorough Jerusalemites, she said, all born there — Avner during the Mandate, Daphna during the Suez Crisis, the older girls during the First Intifada, the third during the Madrid Conference. They had lived in a beautiful part of the city: “Stones so golden they are almost pink, like very expensive face powder.” Then Avner accepted the offer of a professorship of political science at the university here, and they arrived pell-mell in August, and somebody gave them my name, and I sold them the crumbling stucco house on my own swab-shaped street. Its feeble owners, after boldly installing a new furnace, had entered a nursing home. For house and furniture they’d take a low price. A low price was what they got.
Avner was sixty years old. Daphna was forty-five. How, once upon a time, had the little scholar won the tall beauty? We didn’t have to speculate. “Ah, my Avner, his mind makes me think of a high-rise hotel, on every floor something is going on. I was twenty-six. He proposed on Mount Gilboa. We had climbed to look at the irises. I ran through the fields. He ran after me. He proposed again on Ben Maimon Street, under a eucalyptus. Again on Rav Kook Street. He asked for my hand from my father, in my father’s house, in my father’s study lined with books in seven languages, no, nine, no, eleven, he speaks ten, my beloved Abba, there’s one he only reads. And that one is? you inquire,” she might demand of whichever neighbor was at that moment studying her own knuckles at her own breakfast table. “Persian.”
Daphna seemed to consider the four of us one woman — one ear, really — though she acknowledged certain individual attributes. Lucienne, who’d had a French mother, knew about sauces. Connie the social worker could recommend a course of action to take with a daughter’s brief defiance. (In fact Connie made no recommendations; she kept her mouth locked, like her briefcase.) When Sylvia wasn’t drinking she was thinking. She had grown up on the campus of Swarthmore College, where her father had taught philosophy; she was acquainted with meaning. She was probably acquainted with sorrow too.