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

that. She’s focused, grounded, independent, doesn’t need some guru running her life, and she’d never leave me and Ya’ara like that. We’re her kids. She’s been there for almost a year. I thought that she would just take a few months off and then come back home.”

“I didn’t even know that she’d left. Ever since your father died she hardly ever talks to me, and it’s been a year since I last saw her. There are people closer to her than me − colleagues, friends.”

“She’s cut off contact with all of them, just cut everyone out. I’m telling you, Rotem, she hardly even talks to me and Ya’ara.”

“Well, I was the first person she stopped speaking to. So why did you come to me?”

“You know why. You’re familiar with this kind of stuff.”

“Are you trying to say that I’m a little bit crazy?”

“I’m saying that you’ve gone through certain things yourself, and found a few solutions. You seem to be better. I thought that maybe you could come with me. That we could try to talk to her together.”

“Talk to her and what? Persuade her to come back home? Because I’m not so sure it’s a good idea, Omer.”

“I just want to be sure that she’s all right. If she doesn’t want to, then she won’t come back home. I surely can’t force her to do that. I just want her to feel that someone cares about her, and that maybe there are solutions other than becoming a modern-day monk and disconnecting from life.”

“This is the life that she’s currently choosing, and even if you suspect that someone may be influencing her, you should know that she’s the one allowing herself to be influenced. She’s not a little kid, Omer. She won’t hear you out if she senses that you think she’s making a mistake.”

“Then why doesn’t she ask us to visit? Why doesn’t she share her oh-so-wonderful life with us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she needs more time to herself . . .“

“Time?” Omer interrupts me. “How much time? Isn’t a year enough?”

“This sea existed before us and will exist long after us. What’s a year when compared with eternity?”

“Come on, Rotem, be serious. Then what’s 100 years? I’m talking in terms of people, not mountains. We’re here now and we love her and care about her. Why does she choose to live with a bunch of strangers instead of us?”

I suddenly realized what was going on . Pay attention to him, Rotem. He’s trying to deal with his mother’s having left him. He hasn’t yet experienced a few life stages with her.

“You’re right, Omer. To you it’s a long time, and still, they’re probably not be strangers to her. She’s encountered something there that she’d lacked. Otherwise she wouldn’t stay. Something has touched her, something that she needs. Omer, your mother is mourning her previous life. Mourning what she had and what was taken from her. Mourning the way she’d perceived the world, the people close to her, and herself. And everyone reacts differently. She had never before let herself confront all of this. Now she’s made herself available for it.”

“You know what, I get that she copes with things differently than I do. I can accept that different people need different things. That everything she’s ever believed and known has collapsed. Maybe I’m just insulted because I didn’t betray her and I didn’t disappear, and I don’t understand why she won’t stay with me.”

“You’re a big boy now. You’ve grown up beautifully and you don’t need her in order to survive. Both you and Ya’ara have your own lives.”

“Rotem, I have to ask you. Where did all of this sympathy come from all of a sudden? You want to tell me that you’re not angry with her?”

“Of course I’m angry, and it’s nothing new. Sometimes I explode with anger. But the way I see it, Emily didn’t leave a year ago, or three years ago. She left me a long time ago, or at least left the little girl that I used to be, who is still inside me searching for her. You can’t leave someone without having been with them to begin with, and Emily was really with me. Not the way I wanted her to be, but now I finally understand that it was the only way she was capable of.”

Friday evening in a squeaky-clean house, washed of the past week’s toils. An array of salads in elliptical aluminium bowls set out on the table. Two challah breads encased in sesame seeds, resting beneath an embroidered cover, so as not to feel inferior to the wine being used during the blessing. Even the bread has to fight for its status in this household. My mother serves fish swimming in sauce as a first course, meat as the main, and three large red watermelon triangles for dessert. My father reads the weekly Torah portion, Vayishlach. Jacob is angry with his sons, who have massacred the people of Shechem and raped Dina. “Should he treat our sister like a harlot?” Jacob’s sons answer. Rubi and Moshe’s voices rise, having been inspired by the reciting.

“The referee is a son of a bitch. He doesn’t understand which team really counts.” Rubi doesn’t get it either.

“You’re the son of a bitch,” Moshe tells him.

Am I the only one not getting it? Aren’t they talking about the same mother?

They bicker heatedly , and the cup for the blessing over the wine flies up in the air.

To me, those dinners were always like having a picnic in the middle of a minefield. I never had any idea which direction it would come from, or what I was allowed and not allowed to say, so I remained silent. And then they’d call me a snobby Ashkenazi. Discriminated for having pale skin in an Eastern family. I must have been the first case the world had ever seen.

While recoiling into myself, I see her, Emily, sitting at the end of the table, pensive. I’m