One False Note by Tali Shapira Shechter

Author:Tali Shapira Shechter [Shapira Shechter, Tali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

I laugh in spurts, splutteringly, then one long, rolling laugh, like a car when its brakes fail. I apply the handbrake, turn around, and smack into a concrete wall. The airbag opens, boom in my face, a bloated laugh. Life’s funny. So funny I started crying.

“Workers’ committee summer camp?” I want to kill her.

There’s a new sitcom airing. “Mother Stanislavski and Her Odd Ideas.” I still haven’t found a cheap enough summer activity to please the children after a busy school year, financial ruin that means we can’t order pizza delivered to our home anymore, their father Nadav has become mute, their mother Edith is angry because she lost the partnership, a lover and a large apartment in the big city – and now my mother wants to send my royal princes and princesses to join the union.

“Why are you laughing?” She’s offended. “I’ve already been speaking to people; my friend has connections. They say it’s lovely. They give the kids chocolate milk and a bread roll and there’s an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It’s well organized. There are mobsters on the streets, you know.” My mother is an obsessive consumer of newspapers, searching for disasters, coming up with emergency plans for the summer vacation, tomorrow is the first day of July.

What does she think I’ll tell the children? Until now, we flew every summer first class across the world, we are croissants in Paris, waterskied at Club Med, and now they’ll board a neighborhood bus to the community center, they’ll wallow around in urine-saturated water, and they’ll drink water from the faucet? I’d prefer them to stay in isolation, with the television and the computer. My heart contracts, squashed like a fly on the wall, I finally understand, it’s over. I want to die.

“And where is he?” she has to bend over and pack instead of Nadav, “Tomorrow it’s done, slava bogu,” my mother thanks God in Russian, counting the minutes until she sees the removal company taking the junk from the ninth floor of the Ramat Aviv Gimmel apartment building.

She’s already eighty-something but she looks no more than seventy-five; her back isn’t what it used to be, but she wants to help.

I want her help on one matter alone: I want her to leave and go back to her home in the big city.

“Just don’t let Nadav see you like this, it’s not good for the sex.”

“Nadav’s dealing with the electricity in the new place.”

“So, now he’s an electrician?”

“We’re checking with a different bank, maybe he’ll start working as a consultant in a private company.” I’m not telling her yet that Nadav’s looking for work. When he got rid of the banker’s suit he said, Armani on the outside, Kmart on the inside, and anyway, I always wanted to be a shepherd, you can make a living from agriculture, too. I told him that rather than count on sheep that piss on goats, he should talk to Paul and Candice Goodhart. Ever since he met Paul as part

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