Motti by Asaf Schurr

wakes up the children. And Menachem, of course. Menachem too. She feels obligated to listen to classical music, but nevertheless listens mainly to talk radio. And gets annoyed by the callers to those programs, by what they say and by the vulgar language. Listens nevertheless. And loves cooking with fresh herbs, in moderation. At night with Menachem she prefers to be on top and close her eyes. And when she gets close she opens her eyes and looks right in his face. Sometimes this turns her on. Sometimes turns her off completely. But she can come other ways too. When she’s on the bottom. Also from behind. More daring things than this they don’t do. Even though each of them thinks about it on their own. Menachem just because, in the middle of the day. And she only when she does it to herself in the shower. She wears makeup in moderation, and prefers her old skirts that have already taken on the shape of her body. And sleeps sometimes in a very, very old shirt that belonged to someone she slept with once. Not the teenager. One of the other ones. How many washings that shirt has gone through since. Not a single cell of his skin remains there. Holes have appeared in it. She loves her clogs too. And the cutting board that she took from her parents’ house when she left, it’s still with her. She cuts up the most delicious salads on this board. With a new knife. She has a habit of saying what she really means, and then laughing as if this was only a parody of what other people meant, other people entirely, altogether different from her. Her mother does this as well (when she complains to waiters, for example, or wonders why some item or another in some store or another isn’t on sale when she would be very interested in buying it if it was). And Edna sometimes recognizes this similarity and is crushed. She doesn’t read poetry, though she wrote some once. Gets along with dogs. With cats too. Not with Sweet’N Low. That aftertaste, she thinks, it’s something not worth getting used to. And she was proud of herself when she learned to draw out, at work, tables on the computer and to make it so that some of the fields would update themselves, with mathematical functions that sometimes were really complicated. On the back of her hand she has an old scar, impossible to remember what from. She had a root canal once, but has still never taken the car in for an inspection herself. Not because of chauvinism. Out of convenience. Burned-out lights make her sad. She hangs shelves herself. She doesn’t play an instrument. Women’s magazines annoy her. Once she sprained the small toe on her left foot. Hit it on the doorpost at night, and her eyes filled with tears. Menachem was in the reserves then. She catches colds easily. A pack of tissues is hidden in a drawer at work. She doesn’t need glasses. Or maybe just for reading. Her shoulders are just the right width. When she breastfed, her nipples cracked. When she was a teenager, the signs of her growing sexuality made her rebellious. More than this: they outright offended her. That all at once the world reduced her to the status of a biological machine—this is the organ for mating and this is for breast feeding, and the widening hips are for giving birth one day, and the blood that synchronizes all this comes once a month (regular as a clock, with her). Now, go figure why, she finds beauty in all that. Comfort even. At the time she thought that her sexual organ was like a wound gaping out at the world. Sometimes she still thinks this. Her breasts have become like the anchor that attaches her to the (relatively) stable ground of life. She won’t tolerate dirty fingernails. Nor insects. She doesn’t like hearing her own recorded voice. Quickly erases messages that she left on the answering machine at home. They really disgust her. Never smoked much. Only in social situations. And sometimes, as I pointed out, she’s had it up to here (she