Twenty-two
Tovah
JANUARY SLIPS INTO FEBRUARY. I give away my hospital shifts because I can’t bear to be that close to death. I struggle to fall asleep, and when I do, I have these nightmares. A surgical mask is stretched across my face, so tight I can barely breathe. Someone’s sliced open on the operating table in front of me, a different faceless person every night. I always make mistakes. I snip a vital artery. Jab a scalpel into a heart. I have to tell waiting, weeping family members that I’ve failed. I never fix anyone.
“You’ve been ignoring me,” Lindsay says one day after seventh period. Her legs are so short she has to jog to catch up with me. “Tov! Slow down.”
I pause as we enter the senior hallway. Since the carnival, we haven’t had any conversations that last longer than the few minutes in between classes. She spends lunch with Troy, and I spend it with my homework or with next week’s Torah portion or with Zack.
“I’m not ignoring you,” I say, which of course isn’t true.
She scrunches up her face, as though this conversation causes her physical pain. “I don’t want to fight.”
Lockers open and shut along with the regular end-of-day chaos. Since my attempts at heart-to-hearts have failed, I guess I can pretend we’re best friends for a few more months. Until graduation. And whatever happens after that.
“Do you want to forget about it?” I ask, and her face softens.
“That would be so great if we could. I’m going to plan something fun for us. Okay?”
“Sure,” I say, but I’m no longer looking at her because something else has caught my attention. My sister’s at my locker down the hall—talking to Zack. “Message me later?” I say to Lindsay before she heads for her locker on the other side of the hall, and I quicken my stride.
Adina and Zack aren’t friends. They met at the carnival, when I blew her off because I was convinced she’d act like her usual storm cloud self if we hung out together. Naturally, I felt guilty afterward—when do I not feel guilty when Adina is involved? Sometimes I wonder if I’m allowed to get mad at her or if, like she said when we fought, she wins every argument we ever have.
I can’t read Zack’s face or hear the conversation, but he grins when he spots me. “Hey. I was waiting for you,” he says. “My art teacher was telling me about this photography exhibit that’s all pictures taken underneath microscopes. Wanna check it out this weekend?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, but I’m looking at Adina. “What are you doing here?”
“I saw Zack by your locker and decided to say hi.” Adina stares up at Zack from beneath her lashes. She does this thing with her cherry-red lips: she keeps them slightly parted, like a rosebud about to bloom.
“People probably tell you this all the time, but—”
“We don’t look like sisters, let alone twins. I know,” I say, because he’s right. I’ve heard it a hundred times.
He shakes his head, messy hair dipping down below his eyebrows. He probably needs a haircut. I hope he doesn’t get one until I’ve had a chance to run my hands through it a dozen more times. “I was actually gonna say that I can see the resemblance. A little bit. And your voices sound exactly the same.”
“Really?” Adina and I say at the same time. Then Adina says, “Tovah hasn’t said that much about you, but I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything. She hasn’t dated before, so she’s probably not used to it. She’s always been the innocent one.”
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek.
“I’m pretty innocent too,” Zack says.
Adina touches his shoulder. Playful. A possessiveness I didn’t know I was capable of flares through me. “I’m sure you could be corrupted.”
“No one is corrupting anyone,” I say as I turn my locker combination, missing the third number three times in a row.
Zack laughs. Like he thinks she’s making a joke. “I don’t know. I’ve had all the lectures about peer pressure.”
“They only lecture us because they don’t want us to have any fun.” Then Adina faces me, her tone sugary sweet and mock soothing. “Tovah, it’s okay. I’m sure you could figure out what to do with Zack in one of your biology textbooks. Maybe you can find a step-by-step guide.”
At this I finally get my combination, yanking the door open so hard it smacks the metal locker next to it. My face is on fire. I can’t speak. The inside of my locker—and the spine of a fucking biology textbook, of course—is the only safe place to look. Is Zack imagining the two of us together? I like to think I’d be able to figure out what to do. That we’d be able to figure it out together.
“I should, uh, actually go before I miss my bus,” Zack says. “Tov, I’ll text you later?” and without glancing at him, I mumble, “Okay.”
“And I have viola.” She peers inside my locker. Taps the metal door a couple times. “Study up, okay?”
Somehow, her boots sound featherlight as she strides down the hall with Zack, leaving me alone and feeling about as small as an atom.
Nirvana’s blasting from Aba’s downstairs office when I get home. I pocket my keys and knock on his door. He keeps an old record player in his office because he insists music sounds better on vinyl, and we used to listen in here together all the time. A live version of “On a Plain,” his favorite song, pulls at something deep inside me. The lyrics ache, and Kurt Cobain’s voice is so resigned, so matter-of-fact.
“Aba?” I knock again. “Aba? Are you okay?” I twist the knob and, realizing the door isn’t locked, push it open. He’s in an armchair, a handkerchief pressed against his eyes.
The sight of him pins me in the doorway. Pushes thoughts of Adina and Zack far, far away.
“Tov.” My name. Good. Both. He blots at his face and gets up, running a hand over the beard that’s grown in over the past week. “Is the music bothering you?”
“Nirvana could never bother me,” I say in Hebrew. He isn’t making eye contact with me. Probably embarrassed I caught him. “Could I listen with you for a little while?”
“Of course.” He gestures for me to sit down in his chair. I shake my head and instead lean against the windowsill. Sometimes I wonder if his newfound commitment to Hebrew study is because he thinks it’ll help him stay closer to Ima, or if he just needs a distraction. But I’d never have the courage to ask him that, and I don’t want to know the answer.
“Don’t tell your mother about this,” he says, and then switches to English. “I don’t know how to say any of this in Hebrew. I’m trying to be strong. I am. But it’s hard sometimes. You and I, we have to take care of them. Your mom and Adina. You know that, right?”
“I know.” My voice is tiny. I want to melt into the windowsill. Become a constellation in the night sky. Escape.
Ima recently started a new antipsychotic to help suppress the jerking and twitching and writhing she can’t control, and she sees both a speech pathologist and an occupational therapist. In her spare time, which she now has too much of, she knits scarves to fill all our closets.
“It’s a lot to deal with sometimes. I’m fine. I really am. I don’t want your mom getting worried.” He’s speaking quickly. “I don’t want you getting worried, or Adina . . .”
“I know,” I repeat. “Don’t worry. I won’t say anything.”
We’ve always had secrets. One time we took a day trip to Aberdeen, where Kurt Cobain had lived, and bought a Nirvana demo tape for more than a hundred dollars. Don’t tell your mother, Aba said. Adina and Ima could have their old movies and stale classical music. We had grunge.
“Can you tell me again about the show you went to?” I ask as the song switches to “Something in the Way.”
“How many times have I told you that story?”
“Several dozen.” But I don’t care. I want him to think about something happy.
He closes his eyes, as though trying to retrieve the memory. “It was a small venue, but the energy in there was immense. The guitar was crunchy and the feedback squealed, but no one cared. Cobain was so raw. That’s really the best word I can think of to describe it. Raw. I doubt any of us there could hear the next day. The guys were so young, too. Not much older than I was. And they had such long hair. I didn’t cut my hair for two years after that because I wanted to be just like them. Eventually my mom had to force me into a barbershop.”
I laugh. “You realize the ticket you gave me is probably worth a few hundred dollars, right?”
“Easily. But I couldn’t ever sell it.” He smiles. “When you have kids, you hope they’ll like some of the same things you do, but of course you want them to be their own people too. I like to think you and your sister have a little of both: your own passions, and some of mine and your mom’s, too.”
“I guess we do.” I try to picture a future in which I introduce Nirvana to a child of mine. It’s too blurry, too distant.
“It’s a shame you and Adi aren’t closer,” he continues. “When we learned we were having twins, your mom was so excited. Because she doesn’t have siblings, she thought you two would each have an automatic best friend. But I suppose these things wax and wane. Neither of us can understand what your sister’s going through, and I know she’ll reach out when she needs you, and she will need you, Tov.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” I say, but I can’t imagine the girl who so shamelessly embarrassed me in front of my boyfriend reaching out to me about anything.
“I can still remember bringing you two home from the hospital. How your mom and I set you down in the cribs and just stared at each other, like, what do we do now?” He laughs, but it’s a sad, hollow laugh. Nostalgic Aba is a little too much for me to handle. “Hard to believe those little babies are eighteen now. This time next year, you’ll probably be flying home to visit us on break.”
“If I get in,” I add quickly, stomach clenching. It’s still just out of reach, no matter how badly some days I want to grab it and hold it tight. Erase some uncertainty from my life. “I’ll be at least thirty by the time I actually start working as a surgeon.” Thirty. What will be happening to Adina when I’m thirty, when I’ve finished med school and internship and residency? What about my mother?
“It’ll be worth it.”
I take in my father’s khaki pants and practical Eddie Bauer button-down. His eyes are half-closed, his knuckles tapping out the bass line on his desk. I used to love looking at old pictures of Aba, who in his twenties rocked a shaggy beard and chin-length hair and plaid flannel shirts. In those pictures, he looks so cool. He doesn’t look like someone’s dad. Sometimes when I’m doing homework at my desk, I glance up at the Nirvana ticket on my wall and try to picture him at a show, screaming every lyric, lost in a mosh pit.
After her stint in the Israeli army, Ima moved to the Pacific Northwest for college. She and Aba went to the same small liberal arts school, and they met at a Jewish Student Association–sponsored Purim party, which some non-Jews call the Jewish Halloween, though the only thing it has in common with the American holiday is that we wear costumes. Really, it commemorates Queen Esther of Persia, who in biblical times foiled a plot to exterminate the Jewish people.
Aba showed up to the party as Adam and Eve—he toted around a Barbie doll with strategically placed leaves—and Ima was dressed in all black as Charlie Chaplin. She stayed silent and in character the entire night, but she scribbled her number on a napkin, and when Aba called her the next morning, he was thrilled to hear her voice for the first time. They talked for two hours.
When he tells the story, it sounds like he fell in love with her during that first phone call.
If I get into Johns Hopkins, I won’t be leaving behind just Ima and Adina. Somehow I’ve never thought about what my departure would mean for Aba. He always seems so solid, so we’ll get through anything. This crack in his armor makes me wonder if he thinks we might not.
“I’ve always preferred live albums,” Aba says. “They’re a bit of a surprise, because the song never sounds the way it does in your head. Never the way it’s perfectly recorded, you know? Cobain doesn’t quite hit the note, or the solo gets extended. . . .”
“I know what you mean,” I say, but I’m not really listening to the crunchy chords. Maybe my diagnosis wasn’t the lucky one. In my life I’ll have to watch my mother die, and then my sister. At the very end, Aba and I will take care of them. And when they’re gone, we’ll have to somehow take care of each other.
I have to live with this forever too.
The last song on the record ends and the audience starts clapping. After the applause fades, I get up, move the needle, and start the album over.