Aquarium by Yaara Shehori

Author:Yaara Shehori
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTEEN

When she was seventeen, Georgia O’Keeffe presented to her the file upon which was written “Dora (Dori) Ackerman,” as if to say, “We have nothing to hide.” Her calm cat eyes looked directly at Dori, who held the file in her hands. For a moment, as she grasped the rubber band that held together the two cardboard folders, Dori seemed to consent. But the moment passed and she returned the file without reading it. From Dori’s side, things looked like this: she felt Georgia’s admiration for her actions like something alive, something sensual, with soft, glistening fur. When her hands stretched out and placed the file on the small table between them, she already understood that in this tiny act, in her avoidance of reading about herself, she had earned a limitless line of maturity credit.

And yet, if from Georgia’s perspective she had excelled in this test, for Dori it was no challenge at all. She already understood then that at best she’d read a story about someone else, a girl from a troubled home, a girl who grew up in conditions that the establishment abhorred, until it decided to remove her from this home, from these conditions. She knew that what she’d read would miss everything. “And if I’m going to”—she’d say to Anton, lifting her chin—“if I’m going to read about abusive childhoods, I prefer literature and not the formulations of welfare officials.”

In the years after, Dori wondered what would have happened had she leafed through the personal file, learned a bit more about her life’s circumstances. But from the beginning Georgia had been kind to her for the wrong reasons, even though it wasn’t always easy to be kind to her. Dori was a tough case, one that didn’t quickly produce results. Were she a plant that was transferred from silty soil to a rich flowerpot (let’s suppose), a plant that was finally cared for by a sure hand, she would have already budded and strangely bloomed. But that wasn’t how it went. Dori herself knew this and in general had reservations about gardening imagery, but that moment, when she was seventeen and Georgia O’Keeffe’s age was some multiple of that number, that moment, when Georgia O’Keeffe’s eyes rested on her with obvious admiration and Dori was like a moon upon which the light of a great sun was finally cast: that moment the two of them would remember, as if they’d believed for a moment that the moon had shed a light of its own.

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