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

he got up and kicked her, again and again, finally in the head. Emily covered her face with her hands. I didn’t understand why.

I didn’t know why. Didn’t know why such evil needs to exist in the world. Maybe simply because it can. I was afraid that Shimon would beat me up, too, or kill Alexis, my poodle, as he had threatened to do on more than one occasion − once even giving a little demonstration so that I knew he meant business.

For months I’d agonized over whether she should know, so that we could move on and remedy our relationship. So that I’d stop feeling guilty for freezing, so that she could continue living instead of becoming a monk who ran away from life. But I already saw that Emily was fine, and that I was fine, and Alexis was already gone.

And our relationship . . . Well, some things can’t be mended and just have to be left alone and accepted as they are. Now Dani needs to be cared for.

Dani Is Way Behind

I tried to remember precisely how and when I became influenced by my childhood experiences with the man whom I refuse to call Grandpa. Was it back in high school, when I was a closed-off, masochistic girl? Or perhaps in junior high, when I’d decided to be a tomboy and wore oversized boys’ clothing? Although come to think of it, I was a daydreaming, distant, and disconnected child much before that.

“Dani is way behind on the material,” appeared in large writing and highlighted with a marker on one of my essays at the beginning of elementary school. I had actually felt happy and confident about that essay until I walked over to my teacher to get it back. When I saw those words, “Dani is way behind on the material,” I shuddered like only a little girl can. Thoughts immediately started flashing through my mind: What will Dad think, and what will Mom think? How angry will they get? And worst of all − they can’t find out that they have a slow daughter.

I couldn’t believe that the teacher had managed to find out I was slow, and how was it even possible that I didn’t know I was slow. From that moment on, those were the only words on my mind: I’m slow. And at that point, it was clear to me that my parents couldn’t find out.

Going even further back, to pre-school, I’d had a friend who’d invited me for a sleepover. She was a year older than me, and knew all sorts of things that I didn’t want to think about. She forced me to let her lie on top of me and she demonstrated “grown-up kissing” on the lips, tongue included. That scared me and filled me with disgust, and I decided that no one could find out about it. I’d already felt defiled back then.

Everyone played “doctor” at my pre-school, but I didn’t want to take part in those games. I tried to get out of it any way I could, but I didn’t always manage it. When they forced me to do it, I’d freeze, and I didn’t care whether I was the doctor or the patient. I usually found myself lying in bed as the patient, staring at the ceiling and thinking about green fields with wild horses running, myself among them or riding one of them. I felt desecrated then, too.

I guess I can’t put my finger on when it began, and therefore I can’t point to the moment it started affecting me, or how it affected me. It just grew along with my personality. Along with the little girl there grew the secret she’d tried to conceal, and it spun webs around her, webs that became thicker and thicker as the years passed.

My heart goes out to the younger me, and to the me that I’ve become. The time I’d spent in the hospital to organize my thoughts within a non-starved mind made me realize a lot of painful things about myself. On the one hand, they make me sad, and on the other, I feel that the realizations also allow for some relief − some answers that create a certain order in my mind.

Speeches and Tears

Somehow, Tal managed to convince me to go to Mom and Dad’s with her. I tried to protest and object, claiming that I was too upset about the lawsuit and I didn’t want to see them, and anyway, they knew that I was giving them the cold shoulder and if I were to show up there then they wouldn’t feel it.

“But you have to talk to them! We have to talk to them together and tell them that we both have these memories and that it really did happen. They can’t just live in a bubble, thinking that the whole world’s against them and that all therapists are manipulative liars.”

“But I won’t be able to get a word out − don’t you get that? I won’t be able to talk anyway, so why bother going there?...” I tried to say.

“Come on, Dani, if not for us, then for Rotem. Imagine how she must have felt, getting that letter about the lawsuit, and after everything you’ve been through together. You said it yourself: You would have taken your own life long ago if it weren’t for her.”

That’s what convinced me eventually. And putting Rotem aside, something about Tal enticed me to follow her , . . the confidence with which she talked, as well as everything she’d done for me recently. I felt a need to appease her, but differently from previous times when I’d wanted to appease everyone around me. This time it came from a place of gratitude and care, a kind of new elixir of love.

“You haven’t been here for over a month,” Dad began his attack.

I wonder why I didn’t come over all this time . . .

“First, you hospitalize yourself,” he continued,