How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum

Author:Hila Blum [Blum, Hila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

32.

Four times we went on vacation just the two of us, Leah and I. Stockholm, Copenhagen, Rome, Amsterdam. Six-year-old, eight-year-old, nine-year-old, eleven-year-old Leah. In those years Meir taught all through the summer or was busy with his books and essays and reluctant to travel, and I didn’t object, I was glad. The three of us together was one thing, and when it was just Leah and me, we were another, we were different, I was different.

We slept in small hotels we had chosen from online booking sites, the trip started then, with its planning; we were manic about it, the pristine sheets that would await us on faraway beds, the towels perfumed with strange new scents, the tiny toiletries in the bathroom, the TV shows in foreign languages, these were all essential to the point. Foreign cities happen in their hotel rooms, the chilled crevices of the minibar, the questionably clean closets, the upholstered corridors; there was no point trying to explain this to Meir, whereas Leah needed no explanations. “The coffee at breakfast is catastrophic,” I texted Meir from Rome, “but they have omelets to order, and the sweetest chef in the world cooks them as if his life depends on it.” “The sea smells so good,” Leah texted him from Copenhagen. “The water pressure in the shower is a dream and the towels are a miracle,” I wrote him from Amsterdam. “If you were here you’d be spending the whole day showering-toweling.” “The people on the street are so nice,” Leah wrote him. “Everybody’s so helpful with directions.”

We had a marvelous time. The weightless European water glided over us in the shower, leaving our hair as feathery as after a fresh cut. The uncannily crisp sheets rearranged our sleep, which we floated into at night and slipped softly out of in the morning. I was drawn to the pleasant practicality of those rooms, which held nothing more than what was needed, were accommodating and easily cleaned; I was particularly drawn to their power to isolate time, to divide history into a beehive of histories, to preserve the most private existence and then wipe it clean, iron it out like the tightly tucked bedspread. With my daughter by my side it was all exhilarating and delightful, it was bliss; in the parallel universe of hotel rooms the values of our happiness shifted from relative to absolute.

We avoided subways, remained aboveground. We were captivated by the small parks, the lit shop windows. Copenhagen was luminous, even its sex shops were resplendent with light, vibrators and dildos in the vibrant pastels of toddler toys. Although we did once see, next to one of these shop windows, a very fat boy in doll-like neon sneakers, sobbing. On a tram in Amsterdam we saw a boy and girl who bore such a striking resemblance to each other they could have been twins, passionately kissing. In a café whose chairs spilled out onto the curb we saw an older woman treating herself to a

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