In the last moments out on the porch, before we’d drifted inside in a dream of dusk, the afternoon had ticked down and shadows had deepened on the lake’s far bank. The other men, dazed, had shuffled away. Russell’s two younger sons had stood on the shore and tossed ropes with grappling hooks to retrieve old Buddy. Bailey’s boy stood on the bank hugging himself against some chill, watching them swing the books back over their shoulders and sling them, the long ropes trailing out over the lake, where the hooks landed with a little splash of silver water. Л momentarily delayed report reached us, softly percussive, from across the water and the lawn. Bailey stood on the steps and watched them, his hands on top of his head.
“Look at that,” he whispered, the grief and regret of his life in the words. “Old Buddy.”
They brought the old dog out of the water. The boy, Lee, fell to his knees. Russell’s sons stood off to one side like pallbearers. Above the trees across the lake, a sky like torn orange pulp began to fade. Light seeped away as if extracted, and grainy dusk rose up from the earth. For a long while none of us moved. I listened to the dying sounds of birds out over the water and in the trees, and the faint clattering of small sharp tusks against steel fencing out in the grove, a sound that seemed to come from my own heart.
John Weisman
There Are Monsterim
from Unusual Suspects
Jerusalem, July 1977
Liz’s fifth birthday was on Saturday, and so Terry, the perfect father, took her to Nahariya on Wednesday for a long weekend at the beach. Sainted mother Maggie let them go without her.
They’d first thought of celebrating the kid’s premier half-decade in Haifa, in a big room at the Dan Carmel where, from the terrace, they could look down on the bustling port and eat dinner at the perpetually crowded Romanian restaurant on the edge of the farmer’s market. But while Terry had already telexed his “Summer Travel in the Holy Land” piece to the New York Times Tuesday, Maggie was still tied up polishing a profile of Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan that was due at Woman’s Day. She wouldn’t shake free until Friday night.
Besides, they decided, the Dan was expensive and he’d have to pay for a double room all five nights. Besides, they rationalized, Liz wasn’t a big fan of Haifa anyway, preferring the construction of sand castles, wallowing in the surf, and the scarfing of fast food to romantic harbor views and Romanian steaks slathered with — in Liz’s words — “Eecch, garlic.”
So, after a brief parental discussion about four-year-olds’ eating habits, family finances, and the fact that he’d be carless in Haifa until Maggie arrived, they chose to go farther north and stay at a modest pension they knew in Nahariya, chockablock to a dozen falafel and shashlik stands, fifty yards from the water and, as it happened, one-fifth the price of the Dan.
Terry packed a duffel for himself and Liz, carefully stowed Liz’s teddy bear, Shmulik, right on top of the bags, and then they all piled into the beat-up Renault 4 and Maggie dropped them at the taxi stand on Luntz Street, where they taught one of the Israeli communal jitney t abs known as a sherut to Haifa. The big gray Mercedes diesel car was just about to pull out. Maggie gave them quick pecks on the cheek and shooed them on their way. They shared the two-hour ride with a Hasid who smoked incessantly, a middle-aged yenta who fell asleep just after the turnoff to Abu Gosh and snored contentedly for the rest of the trip, and two Israeli Army girls on leave.
Liz, too, slept most of the way to Haifa, waking only briefly when the sherut stopped at the Herzliyah interchange to take on a passenger, then dropping back into full snooze, her knees curled fetally, head on Terry’s lap.
He, the conscientious parent, developed lock-joint in his knees by the time they pulled into Haifa, his long legs having been frozen uncomfortably in one position for forty-four kilometers.
In Haifa they switched to an aged Egged bus that chugged and wheezed, Lizzie insisted, like the Little Engine That Could, gears grating and the red-faced driver, a cigarette clenched between tight lips, cursing the autos that had the audacity to pass on the narrow, two-lane highway north of Akko. Terry watched Liz as she kneeled, nose pressed to filthy window glass, remarking on every olive grove, banana tree, hitching soldier, donkey, and tractor in the fields as the bus lurched inexorably northward.
Four-year-olds, the father thought, were incredible. He never stopped marveling at the creature he and Maggie had created: he took pleasure in watching Liz sleep; doted on her when she was awake; snapped endless pictures of her antics, her poses, her wide-eyed grins.
He sometimes wondered whether this perpetual enchantment with his daughter was the result of his becoming a father so late in life, or whether it was based on his own middle-aged fears of mortality and the deep-rooted, primordial need to procreate in order to see one’s self reflected in another human being. Those were two possible answers, of course. But more basically, he simply loved his daughter with a love so total, absolute, and all-consuming that, from time to time, the enormity of that love frightened the hell out of him.
He reached over and caressed Liz’s cheek tenderly with the back of his hand. She’d gotten herself all dolled up for the trip north, declining Maggie’s practical suggestions of jeans or shorts with a maverick shake of golden hair and insisting instead on wearing a bright pink and white plaid “Mommy dress,” as she called it, accompanied by a quartet of plastic sparkle bangle bracelets, a necklace of fluorescent green beads, and a rhinestone barrette carefully placed askew atop her head.
“Etonnant!” Maggie’d exclaimed as she coolly perused the defiant combination of colors, then giggled and swept the child into her arms to rearrange the barrette. “You are your mother’s daughter.”
Even after her sherut nap. Terry realized, the kid was tired by the time they reached Nahariya in midafternoon, and so instead of going down to the beach immediately they shared a pair of greasy falafels spiked with piquant tomato sauce and a couple of grapefruit sodas swigged from the bottle at a kiosk near the bus stop. Then Terry swung the duffel bag over his left shoulder, swept up Liz with his free arm, lugged the two bundles three blocks, and checked into a first-floor room at the Pension Har Zion that had a three-by-six-foot balcony overlooking an alley and lots of other three-by-six-foot balconies, and the two of them lay down for an hour on squeaky camp cots.