Eden

by Yael Hedaya

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the head writer of the original In Treatment, an exquisite novel of the maturation of a girl, a family, and an entire community

Eden is no paradise: it is the stifling, rural community in which upscale urban escapees, Alona and Mark, drift apart and divorce under the resentful scrutiny of Roni, Mark's needy adolescent daughter. Against a rich panorama of Eden's oldtimers and newcomers, Mark, an emotionally detached architect, begins an involvement with his ex-wife's best friend, Dafna, who is desperately trying to conceive through the torments of technology, while sixteen-year-old Roni pursues the attention of older men by readily dispensing sexual favors. Over the course of one month, Roni's self-dramatizing turns to tragedy, her parents are jolted out of their absorbing concerns, and a new family structure begins to form out of an unlikely set of characters.

Through a portrait of family entanglements, disappearing countryside, and disappointed expectations, Yael Hedaya, a determinedly plainspoken novelist, has brilliantly mapped the social and emotional ecology of midlife and achieved miracles of insight and understanding.

Release date: October 26, 2010

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Print pages: 496

Sample

Part One

Dafna

So what is the moment? What does it look like? What shape does it take and when does it occur, that instant which is not a moment and yet is everything? And why does it slip away from her time after time after time?

Because to talk about the moment of conception sounds trite, too small for the occasion and utterly imprecise. And to speak of the encounter between sperm and egg sounds silly, like the press releases she formulates every day (a historic meeting, a once-in-a-lifetime summit) and also untrue. The lab technicians have seen Eli's millions of sperm swimming obediently, though perhaps unenthusiastically, toward her eggs as they sit in little petri dishes like parked cars, waiting for someone to break into them, start their engines, and drive them away. The simple fact is that nothing has happened.

Even the disappointment no longer mattered very much, and not because she had grown used to it. "It's disappointing all over again, every time," the nurse said when she gave Dafna the results over the phone and heard her slow, restrained okay, more of an exhalation than an utterance, because her heart never said it was okay, not once, but her lungs mechanically filled with air to push down the sobs. The nurse had it wrong. You didn't feel disappointed all over again, every time. The disappointment settled like another story on a vast construction project with an unknown completion date, a building with scaffolding made out of hopes, now removed, and from month to month it looked more like a tower block, a concrete monster with closed-in balconies. Sometimes the nurse said, "It'll be okay, Dafna; it will work for you in the end, too," and the for you stung more than the disappointment, more than the word end; and besides, what would work? What was it that would work in the end? She no longer knew whether this thing, which was not working, would fix everything that was broken and start her life again. But she didn't care. She just wanted it to work.

She was standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil so she could mix the sunrise potion concocted for her by the Chinese doctor, in whom she no longer believed but did not yet doubt enough to strike him off her list of alternative practitioners whom she'd visited in recent years: the ones who said her womb was too cold and the ones who compared it to a burning-hot oven, the ones who named her spleen as the source of the trouble and the ones who blamed her kidneys, the ones who said everything was fine, just fine, and likened her ovaries to nuts or tubers and her fallopian tubes to lilies. Perhaps she felt a little sorry for the Chinese medicine guy, because there was something pathetic and dated about his office, because he had not asked her to listen or visualize or believe, instructing her only to stick out her tongue, and she had felt that she was sticking her tongue out at everyone, at the healers and the Chinese doctors and the alternative practitioners, all of them, and at Eli waiting downstairs in a café, sipping a double espresso that had no ill effect on his excellent sperm count, much like the five cigarettes he smoked every day, no doubt poring over some legal file or reprimanding an intern over his cell phone, waiting for her to finish her appointment with the guru du jour—and yet for six months she'd been drinking the potion every morning, and still: nothing.

Now she thought that she would like to implant a tiny video camera in her body, to roam the expanses, spy into corners, slide down curves, and attach itself to the sticky walls of her womb—which quite possibly were not sticky enough, and maybe that was the problem: embryos tumbled off them like mountain climbers plunging to their deaths from a slippery rock wall. A camera would catch everything, projecting the images onto a screen and she would watch: a video clip of her body. She would fast-forward and rewind it, freeze it, examine every frame, every angle, especially that one instant when it all came to a head, the moment that could not be defined, the moment that had been driving Dafna out of her mind for seven years.

Because the idea of a single moment when a pregnancy takes hold is false. There might have been dozens of pregnancies that had taken hold, maybe even hundreds. When she was young she hadn't been careful (her friends called her irresponsible, and the guys she slept with said she was playing with fire, but they still came inside her, and she had only started using contraceptives when she got married, a fact she now found ridiculously insulting), and she realized that what had seemed at the time like tempting fate was in fact prophetic intuition, and perhaps, she thought, as she poured water into the Duralex glass—chosen as her lucky glass, refusing to replace it even after it had disappointed during the last in vitro fertilization—perhaps hundreds of pregnancies had taken hold, but something (what could it be?) had made them change their minds, spurred them to press their ejection buttons and flee. These treacherous cells preferred to grow parachutes over placentas; they quarreled when they divided or disliked the lodgings they found: it was too cold or too hot; she knew all the permutations. She was all too familiar with the mechanics and the details of the hormonal environment, and she knew the statistics for women her age. Still, that moment remained mysterious and elusive and critical—a celestial instant; that was how she thought of it at first, though lately it seemed all too earthly, subterranean and dark—a moment from another world and, in some clear and wounding way, not of her world.

The mixture of ground leaves and roots and whatever else was in the glass swirled around, painting the water a nauseating yet promising greenish earth-toned hue. She looked through the window at the backyard, still obscured in darkness, and she could picture its borders lined with jasmine, hibiscus, and honeysuckle bushes—and oleander. "If we have a child we'll have to pull it up, it's poisonous," Eli had said, not long ago, and his if, which used to be when, scared her more than the thought that their child would swallow a leaf or a flower. She gazed at the lemon cypresses, black and hulking like dozing beasts, and at the lawn, which glistened with moisture in the halogen white that filtered out through the kitchen window. Daylight would soon break and turn the square of darkness into their garden: a phosphorescent green lake of lawn touching a patio tiled with flagstone, adorned with a complete set of oak garden furniture, 9,530 shekels—odd that she remembered this price, of all the fortunes they had spent on the house—and the fancy grill, and of course the rockery, Eli's pride and joy, built from pebbles, centered around a small pool lit with bluish underwater spotlights. The water made a trickle that sounded like a recording, and goldfish swam indifferently in the pool, playing their parts as ornamental fish. When the mid-October sun rose she would see the neatly pruned bushes, and when the last patches of darkness unraveled she would think what she thought every morning when she looked out: in all the world there was no uglier beauty.

Hunched over with her arms resting on the marble countertop—wearing a nightshirt that once, before a hundred washes, dozens of injections in her rear end and her stomach, several intrauterine inseminations, four IVFs, and God knows how many glasses of Chinese silt and needles, used to have a bunny print—she thought she looked old, like her mother, on whose land the house she and Eli lived in had been built (the old house was about to collapse anyway, Eli had said, when she suggested they renovate it instead of tearing it down). The plain, modest house had been destroyed with chilling simplicity, and even the contractor, who was no stranger to tearing down homes, had complimented the structure for seeming to surrender willingly, as though the bulldozer's touch was merely a tickle that sent it crumpling to the ground and rolling around with laughter, churning up clouds of dust. The contractor, a Gulliver with a frizzy red mane of hair, with whom they later fought and were embroiled in a court case, reminded Dafna of her father, a large man who had bequeathed her his physique. "The burning bush," Eli had affectionately nicknamed the contractor before he started referring to him as "that shit." The contractor had a habit of nervously chewing his lower lip, just like she remembered her father doing when he was tense or thoughtful—her father who had wanted to live in the countryside.

A few weeks after her parents left their home in Petach Tikva and moved to the moshav with their three children—eight-year-old Irit, five-year-old Dafna, and Gadi, a two-month-old baby—her father had suffered cardiac arrest and died in his sleep.

Dafna remembered waking up that Saturday morning to the sound of her mother sobbing. She was dashing around the house wearing a slip, which she had never done before and which amused Dafna and her sister, whom their mother quickly sent next door to the neighbor, the widow Sonia Baruch, along with baby Gadi and a bottle of milk. Only after breakfast, when their mother came in, her eyes red and puffy, and whispered with Sonia in the hallway, and they heard the two women sniveling, and Sonia came back into the kitchen and told them they would have to stay until evening, and outside in the yard people started to gather—only then did they realize something terrible had happened.

Eli, like her father, had also wanted to move to the country. He would pace their penthouse apartment in north Tel Aviv and complain that he couldn't breathe, he was suffocating, he was spending too many hours at the office, in offices in general, in court, and he had to get out and work the land, at least on weekends. "Yes," he said, "you can laugh all you want, but I have an urge to work on the land." The person who ended up actually taking care of their half acre was Bobo from Thailand.

Dafna's father was forty-one when he announced to her mother that he had a unique opportunity to buy a two-bedroom house in Eden for a steal, and they wouldn't even have to sell the apartment in Petach Tikva. "You'll see, Leah, it will be paradise for the children." After his death, the house remained exactly as it had been when he bought it and the garden just a thought: a square of lawn that Dafna and Irit and, later, Gadi watered obediently twice a week. Every winter the lawn fell into decay, seemed finally on the verge of death, and then came to life again in the spring. That lawn, she thought, was a yellowing, angry longing for her father, who had left them with the promise of a different life and with so much work.

When her mother died, five years ago, Irit and Gadi agreed to split the profits from the sale of the apartment in Petach Tikva and give Dafna the house on the moshav, which no one imagined would become one of the most expensive areas in Israel. "We made a good deal," Eli said, although he had initially objected and claimed Dafna's siblings were cheating her. "I was wrong, big-time," he conceded, whenever she reminded him of how he had tormented her for stupidly giving up her share in the apartment for a crumbling house that, granted, was sitting on half an acre of land, but who needed half an acre in a place like that?

In the late nineties, Eden, originally a farming collective founded by Polish and Hungarian immigrants in the early nineteen fifties, emerged as one of the most desirable communities in central Israel. Young families, mostly from Tel Aviv and Petach Tikva, purchased entire farms for ridiculous prices and built houses that looked as if they had all been designed by the same architect: one- or two-story stucco buildings in pastel shades—lemon yellow, pale pink, baby blue, or pistachio green—with large Dutch-style windows in smoky colors. Their flat roofs seemed to mock the mossy red slate that capped the original old houses, which were gradually disappearing along with their owners as they died or moved to live near children in the cities and suburbs. There were a few who stayed, a handful of elderly couples, one widower, and several widows, who began to resemble their houses: the opposite of pastel, the opposite of designer. There was an odd contrast between the owners of these crumbling buildings and their land, which by the first decade of the millennium was worth millions.

When prices soared and the elderly homeowners and, more markedly, their children lost their financial innocence, the wealthy began to arrive. In the past two years a few giant estates had sprouted up alongside the old houses and their newer pastel-hued neighbors. Hidden behind high walls with electric gates that opened onto double and triple parking bays, these mansions, precisely because they were hidden, looked enviously ostentatious, quietly terrifying, and masterful, like yawning lions sprawled among herds of zebra. Now Eden comprised three distinct classes: upper, lower, and elderly. The last had its own subgroups: those who held on to their land, sometimes to the chagrin of their children; those who wanted to move and left the negotiations for their children, who sometimes demanded such high prices for the condemned house and land that their parents had to keep living in Eden, unable to attract a buyer; and the third most vulnerable group, the elderly who had no offspring to shield them from those who coveted their property. Shortly after moving to Eden, Eli told Dafna his idea for a new business venture: Why shouldn't he represent these people, in return for a modest percentage of the sales, and make sure no one screwed them over? She said she hoped he was joking, and he said, "Not really, but I gather you don't like the idea."

"It stinks," she said, "taking advantage of these people."

Insulted, Eli asked why she called it taking advantage when all he would be doing was mediating, even offering protection. After all, if he weren't taking care of them, the buyers would just trample all over them. "You could say I'll be the son they never had. A child gets something from his parents, doesn't he? Didn't you inherit this house?" He reminded her that he himself had inherited nothing: his father's apartment in Jerusalem's Nachlaot neighborhood had been rent-controlled, and when he died it reverted to the owner. Everything he had ever owned had been bought with hard work and sweat. She asked how much exactly he was thinking of taking, assuming anyone would be foolish enough to use his services, and he said, "One or two percent, just like an agent. And don't play innocent, Dafna, real estate lawyers take hefty sums just for sitting in their offices drawing up contracts." Besides, he said, he was getting sick of being a criminal lawyer. Not that it wasn't profitable, but sometimes he envied his colleagues who made a fortune without ever leaving their desks, while he worked his ass off. "So what do you care if I sniff around a bit to see if there's any demand for this kind of service? What do you say?"

She said no. She thought about people like Sonia Baruch, who, if she had still been alive, living alone, would have been one of Eli's victims. Her home had stood abandoned for several years after she died childless, and on Saturdays families would drive by, stop their cars, and peer through the fence at the house, which hid defensively behind tall weeds and thistles. The site became a destination for all sorts of potential buyers who had heard about the abandoned property that stood on well over an acre of land. It was a good thing she and Eli hadn't lived in Eden at the time, so she hadn't seen the silent fight over the house with her own eyes, the cars circling like sharks dizzied by the scent of injured, isolated real estate. The house was eventually turned over to the Public Trustee, which office quickly sold it to a couple from Ra'anana named Shuki and Iris. They later boasted of having made the deal of a lifetime by buying the land in 1998 for less than a million shekels. Today, it was worth that several times over.

It disgusted her. To think that the place where she grew up, whose secret beauty, she believed, was in the rich, rebellious wildness of the flora that grew undisturbed between the houses, separating but also connecting them with a greenish glue, this place where she had spent an admittedly lousy childhood but which was still hers, had turned into a real estate amusement park. As though along with the land and the houses, what had also been traded in was a childhood spent hiding among bushes and tall, wild weeds, roaming orchards and fruit groves—those faraway days of small loneliness and big plans.

Every place that had once stood for something had been ruined, which only made it all the more symbolic and nostalgic. When she moved back with Eli in the summer of 2000, almost nothing of the old Eden was recognizable except the grocery store, although only the old-timers still shopped there. It stood on a paved square in the middle of the moshav, with heaps of cardboard boxes and plastic crates full of bottles near the entrance, and a pay phone that looked like a museum exhibit, because who ever used it other than the Thai workers?

No, she had not wanted to come back here, but Eli had insisted. And not just because of him, he explained, not just because of how stifled he felt in Tel Aviv—and he was amazed she didn't feel the same way; how could she not?—but because it was much healthier to bring up kids in the country. "Think about the future," he said, and she felt he did have a point; even though they were already having difficulties and were about to leave her ob-gyn and switch to an infertility expert, it had never occurred to her either that five years would go by and they still would not have a child or that Eden would not be the same Eden, not really.

That was what pained her. She tried to explain it to Eli, though she knew she was wasting her words. She couldn't help seeing a parallel between what had happened to Eden and what had happened to the country. She also sometimes saw an analogy between Eden's evolution and her own: uncontrolled weight gain as a result of the hormones and the occasional attack of binge eating but inside—nothing. Nothing was growing.

No, she didn't want Eli sniffing around, but knowing him he'd probably already done it behind her back. "Since when do I go around behind your back?" he protested. "Your back's too big for me to do anything behind it anyway."

It was a compliment, because that was what he loved about her so much, he said. That was why he had fallen in love with her, because of her strength and her idealism and the fact that she still cared about what happened in this country. Unlike who? she had asked him. "Unlike me," he replied, "I admit it." It wasn't that he didn't care, he added, so much as that he believed it was all a lost cause anyway, that caring wouldn't do anyone any good anymore. What ultimately stayed with her, and grew bothersome and gnawing, was not his cynicism or his civic laziness, as she privately called it, but the thing with her back. She had never been petite, always a broad woman, especially around the shoulders. "Like an Olympic swimmer," Eli used to say affectionately. But now, after moving back to Eden, she had gained eighteen pounds, all of which seemed to have settled on her back.

When the estate was first divided up between Dafna and her siblings, she and Eli rented the house in Eden to a young couple with a baby who had just come back from a long trip to India and were looking for somewhere quiet. They lived there for two years and were easy tenants. They never asked for anything to be repaired and never called them when something broke. When they left, the neighbors who had bought Sonia Baruch's house told Dafna and Eli that their tenants had been a serious nuisance, with raves and drugs and stray dogs they fed who kept hanging around the street even after their benefactors had left.

"A real pain," said Shuki from behind the wheel of his Mitsubishi SUV one afternoon when they came to see the now-vacant house. Shuki owned a security company and was trying to be friendly. They stood chatting with him, apologizing for the distress they had unwittingly caused.

"Why didn't you call? We would have done something, talked to them, made them leave, you know?" Eli said. "I'm a lawyer. I would have kicked them the hell out."

"We wanted to, but you know, every time it quieted down a bit we decided to lay off, and anyway we were doing renovations, so part of the time we weren't living here. We just moved in a year ago."

"You did a great job on the house," Eli said, even though it was ugly. He asked where they were from.

"Ra'anana. We had a piece of land there too, but not like this. Come inside, have a look."

"Some other time," Dafna said.

"So are you going to live here now?" Shuki asked.

Eli said probably and looked at Dafna.

"You really should. You can't match the quality of life. By the way, I'm Shuki." He held out his hand.

"Eli. And this is Dafna."

"Nice to meet you," Dafna said.

A woman came out to the driveway wearing sweats and running shoes. "This is my wife," said Shuki. "Iris, these are the owners of the shack."

"Finally!" Iris exclaimed. "So, are you going to build?"

"We might renovate," said Dafna.

Iris grimaced. "Are you crazy? Pull it down and build. We had an amazing contractor, if you want the name, and we have a young architect couple, they've just graduated, so they're pretty cheap, and they're talent to die for. You should get in on them before it goes to their head. Would you like to see our house?"

Eli looked at Dafna. She said she'd love to, some other time. They had to get back to Tel Aviv.

"Do you have kids?" Iris asked.

They both said, "No, not yet, and you?"

"A son, he's three. He's at tae kwon do now."

"After-school activities? They have that here?" asked Dafna. "Since when?"

"What are you talking about?" Iris started jogging in place. "There's stuff here to die for; really, you should pop in next time you're here; we'll bring you up to speed. They built a pool here last year, but I'm sure you know that."

"No, no. A pool?"

"Wait, didn't the board ask you to pay?" Shuki asked.

Eli shook his head.

"You'll get the bill, you can be sure of that. So you really have to stop by; we'll tell you everything."

"We will," said Eli.

"Cool." Shuki took a pen out of the bag on the seat next to him and wrote his home number on a business card, pumping the gas pedal as he did so.

"So, your offices are in Holon?" Eli asked, when he looked at the card. "Traffic must be a bitch in the morning, huh?"

"If you leave before six-thirty it's okay. One minute later, disaster."

"Well, maybe we really will stop by one Saturday."

"Saturday sounds great. You'll come over; we'll do brunch. Iris found a shop nearby that makes real bagels, just like in America." He shook both their hands and left.

They traipsed through the empty house, assessing damages and potential. Some of the tiles they stepped on were blackened, some were cracked, and others wobbled and made a crunchy sound.

"Tear it down, Dafna. We have to," Eli said, and she nodded. "Look at this place," he said, when they stood behind the house in their vast private field, surrounded by waist-high thistles. "I'm telling you, you made the deal of a lifetime." He looked out to the horizon, past the orchards that spread beyond their land and the odd little grove they abutted. He glanced at Shuki and Iris's house to their left and his eyes lit up. "We could put a pool in the yard, you know? If we have any money left over."

"But we won't," Dafna said.

"I know, I know, we don't have to do it now, but it's cool, isn't it? Just the idea! Do you get what we have here? Do you get it?"

The thought of a pool filled her with sorrow: a thorny memory of endless summers with her widowed mother, squashed between her adolescent sister and her asthmatic little brother. Almost every morning during summer vacation, the four of them used to march to the bus stop, unless someone drove by and volunteered to take them to Petach Tikva, where they spent the day baking under an umbrella at the public pool.

The three females loathed the pool, but Gadi needed physical activity, according to the family physician, Dr. Moshe, whose clinic they went to once every month or two. "As much sport as possible," ordered the doctor, whom Irit and Dafna hated because he kept winking at them and held his stethoscope to their budding breasts for too long when he examined them. Their mother always said, "Once we're here, won't you check the girls as well?" and he always agreed. Once, when she was eleven, he told everyone to leave because he wanted to ask Dafna a few questions about womanly things. "But why don't you want to ask Irit?" she asked, and the doctor—who was a little afraid of the older girl because she talked back and had once told him he had bad breath—said Irit was grown up and there was no need, but that Dafna was at a sensitive age. Dafna's mother said all right, they'd wait outside, although Dafna thought she detected a flash of discomfort or apprehension.

The doctor dragged his chair out from behind his desk and sat opposite her, with his knees touching hers, and asked how school was and how she was doing. She mumbled that she was fine and her gaze roamed the walls, lingering on colorful photographs of smiling babies and one poster she especially liked, of three ruddy cocker spaniel puppies crowded together in a wicker basket. "I'm glad to hear that," he said, and asked if she knew how babies came into the world. She said she knew. She thought that would be it and she'd be able to leave. "I'm glad to hear that," the doctor. "Why don't you tell me how, then? So we can be sure you really understand." She made a face and said she knew and that was that. She looked away from the wall and stared at the floor. "You're a lovely girl, do you know that? You're a special, sensitive girl, not like your sister." She looked up at him and noticed for the first time that his eyes were green and that he had a transparent protrusion on one of his eyelids, which looked like one of those tiny snails you find stuck to blades of grass. "You look like your father, may he rest in peace," he said, and added that it was such a pity, poor man, a wonderful person dying like that, so suddenly. He'd only met him twice, he said, when he first came with her mother and the baby, but it was obvious that he was a man of great stature. When he saw Dafna's tears—which were brought on not by the memory of her father's passing but by having been abandoned by her mother, whom she could hear scolding her little brother as he ran around the waiting room—when he noticed her tears the doctor hugged Dafna, pressed her to his chest, and whispered, "You can cry, honey, it's okay." She stood up, shoved him away, and ran to the door, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

When she emerged, her mother asked if she wanted to stop at the toy store near the bus stop. She could buy that big talking doll she had wanted last time they were there. Dafna said that was a year ago and she didn't want the doll anymore. "Then something else," her mother offered, thinking she had to compensate her middle child yet not knowing exactly what for.

Shortly before she died, Dafna's mother told her about having had three abortions. The first one had been two months after Irit was born, and the second and third—"Two in six months," she boasted—were about a year before Dafna was born. When she heard her mother on her deathbed bragging about these secret abortions, it occurred to Dafna that she might have come into the world simply because her mother was afraid to have another one, whereas where Gadi was concerned—and this was no secret, as her mother had spoken of it all these years with unknowing pride, although it now occurred to Dafna that perhaps it was very much knowing and that her mother even enjoyed offending her daughters—"We had Gadi because we wanted a son."

She remembered one of their last conversations, on the balcony of the house (which at the time did not yet have a garden in front or a backyard, or hedges and fences, or a patio), with her mother slumped to one side in the old armchair that had once belonged to the cats Dafna and her siblings had raised. The bowel cancer had finished gnawing away at her insides and the only thing left to do was to wait. Her mother knew without being told about Dafna's attempts to get pregnant, and Dafna looked back nostalgically on those days, even though they were the days of her mother's dying and even though she had been forced to take care of her because Irit was on bed rest with her second son and Gadi was busy with his crumbling marriage—still, she remembered those terrible days with nostalgia, because she and Eli were at the beginning of the road then; it hadn't yet occurred to them that something was very wrong, and they had not yet set foot on the long path of disappointments that lay ahead.

It had been a September evening, cooler than usual for an Israeli autumn, and the weather reminded her mother of the only time she'd been overseas, ten years earlier, on a package tour. She'd been to see the foliage in New England (she struggled to pronounce the name without an Israeli accent) and it was cold, just like now, she said, and asked Dafna to go inside and bring her the off-white cable-knit sweater she'd bought in New England at a seaside village tourist shop. She hadn't worn it since because she said it was too warm and heavy for Israel