A Room of Their Own by Rakefet Yarden (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📕

speak. Because he’s a fish. I saw everything from the outside, and I couldn’t lift a finger.

I guess that this is the life I’ve been doomed to live. Standing at the side and helplessly looking on.

I walked all the way home to South Tel Aviv, through Rehov La Guardia. The road was as busy as always, and cars sped past me. Some honked, and in some of them I could see the drivers eyeing me with bewilderment.

I walked fast in the biting chill and all I wanted was to feel nothing. Quick, quick, don’t think, quick until I can get home and under my blanket, hug Miko and go to sleep. That’s all I could think about. That’s all I wanted. Not to be.

Rotem

It was the end of the day and I was sprawled on the couch. The phone rang, and the screen showed “Omeriki.”

“So, Omer, did you finally despair of messaging me?”

“Listen. I’m dropping Maya off at your place to look after Yotam and we’ll take a ride to the beach. Bring beer. Do you have any, or should I pick some up downstairs?”

“All right, come over. I have some beer. Tell Maya to come in without knocking so that Yotam doesn’t wake up.”

Omer is my first nephew, and, as such, has always held a special place in my heart . I can’t refuse him for too long. He’s like my own first-born - the promo that had peeled off the initial layer, thus awakening my dormant maternal instinct. I’d never even played with dolls before he came along. What a strange little girl I had been.

“Look at that baby,” my mother would gush.

“Yeah I saw it. It’s a tiny little bald thing. Now what?”

Maya walked in with the glow of a bride. You could tell that she was still in love. Well, how could she not be? She won Omer. I took my black bag, put two beer bottles and two nectarines inside, kissed the sleeping Yotam, whispered goodbye to Maya and went out to the stairs, closing the front door carefully to keep the noise down. If Yotam wakes up, the night will be finished. I won’t be able to wake either of us up in the morning, so the entire next day hinges on the front door not slamming shut and interrupting his rest, our rest. I took the stairs quickly, two at a time. The light turned off in the middle of my descent, of course. I felt along the rail until I found the switch, turned it back on, and kept going.

Omer got off his motorcycle and came over to hug me. “Thank you, Rotem.”

“Sure thing.” I got on the motorcycle and grabbed onto him. The strong smell of the exhaust mixed with Omer’s Aramis aftershave, to which he’d remained loyal ever since his bar mitzva. The scents tickled my nose.

“Should we go to the Bograshov Beach? It’s relatively well-lit there,” Omer suggested.

“Right, It’s the beginning of the Hebrew month so it’s dark out tonight,” I said.

“How do you know the Hebrew date?”

“What do you mean? Because of the moon. How else would I know?”

There are no beginning-of-the-month-parties in Yotam’s school. They don’t send notes home in the kids’ lunchboxes saying, “Please send your son/daughter with a white shirt tomorrow,” and they don’t do sing-alongs with them to welcome in the new month. Those memories belong only to me, and Yotam is building up completely different childhood memories.

Omer drove fast, and as we reached the beach I thought about Emily again. We sat close to the water, not far from and the corner where Yulia and I always sit. The sea was calm, and a pleasant breeze caressed my face. I handed him the bottles and he opened them over a rock.

“That’s the only reason we need men around.”

“Yeah. Good thing there’s still a reason.”

“So, Omer, what’s happening with my big sister?”

“I’m worried, Rotem. I don’t really know where she is. I mean, I know that she’s in the Upper Galilee, at Kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch, renting out a two-story villa overlooking a beautiful green valley with a few other mid-life refugees, but I don’t know what’s happening with her or when she’ll come back to us. I need you.”

“What does she tell you? How do you communicate?”

“Phone calls, but mainly emails. There are whole days that go by without her answering the phone, so then I email her. It’s been a month since our last correspondence. I thought that she just needed time. After all, she’d never allowed herself to break down, always remained functional, at work, at home, for everyone else’s sake. So at first I was glad. Why shouldn’t she take this time for herself? But it’s getting longer and longer, and I don’t know how it’ll end. I’m scared that she’s in some sort of limbo, neither here nor there. She uses all sorts of expressions that I don’t understand.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, something about “samsara,” getting off the Ferris wheel, unnecessary suffering and necessary suffering, being unattached. She meditates on the rocks in the creek every day. Isn’t she a little old for that? And there’s some guy who seems to be impressing everyone there with his wealth.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Yehuda something-or-other. From what I’ve gathered, he’s a psychology lecturer at the college in Tel Hai. Used to be a Zen monk in Thailand, got stuck there during his travels, then returned to Israel, and now he’s making money from it. All day long, Yehuda said this and Yehuda said that, a real Judah Maccabi. I’m very upset about this, Rotem, and I’m scared that he’ll take advantage of her distress. She sounds confused.”

“Maybe it’s just terminology that isn’t familiar to you. It’s not some far-out cult, you know, it’s just Buddhism. It only has like 500 million believers worldwide.”

“You’re right, I don’t know enough about it, but I do know my mother. Or at least I thought I did. You know her, too. She’s not like