Free Look for Me by Edeet Ravel Page B

fingernails. She had beautiful hands. “I’m not, I’m stupid,” I said. “Well,” she conceded, “you are a little obstinate. But you’ll grow out of it. Come, the army needs you.” She took my hand and led me back to the barracks, and for once, thanks to her and to my good luck, I didn’t get caught.
    The third memory dated back to the second year of my marriage. I had dragged Daniel to a lecture about civil rights in some remote town in the north; he had not wanted to go but gave in for my sake. When we arrived we found that the lecture had been canceled. The people there invited us to stay for supper, but Daniel was too angry to accept. As we headed home a downpour hit us and our car got stuck in the mud. There was no one around, so we had to abandon the car and start walking. Neither of us was adequately dressed, and the rain chilledus as we trudged through the shallow puddles on the dirt road. By this time Daniel was in such a bad mood that I sat down in the mud and cried. Daniel began laughing, and then we both laughed and he sat down next to me and we kissed. Eventually a Druze came by in a truck. He tied a rope to the fender of our car and pulled us out.
    These memories were wonderfully dense and heavy, like an imaginary object that can’t be lifted even though it’s the size of a pea. They began to merge as I grew drowsy: I was in the mud, sand was blowing around me, Sheera was handing me my weapon, Daniel was kissing me but we couldn’t kiss properly because there was sand in my mouth. Sheera’s long brown fingers, the rope the Druze tied to our car … The pleasant confusion of near-sleep—the last stage before drifting off—took over and I yielded to it.

    Daniel and I quarreled again, about a month after our first fight. We quarreled about the mess in the house, and it was a conflict we never resolved, it came up again and again, and we argued about it again and again. My father had been neater than my mother, but it never seemed to bother them. Sometimes my father tidied up after my mother and sometimes he didn’t.
    But in our case the clash between Daniel’s approach to his environment and mine was a problem we didn’t know how to solve. Daniel was calm, usually; he felt that keeping one’s cool was a national duty. He said that if people became nervous and irritable about everything that was wrong with the country, they became part of what was wrong, because one of the main things wrong with the country was that everyone was nervous and irritable. He either joked about things that bothered him or tackled problems pragmatically. Sometimes he had an outburst—whenour tires were slashed, for example, because I’d put a sticker on the car that said AIDS KILLS: WEAR CONDOMS / THE OCCUPATION KILLS: WITHDRAW , but there was something theatrical and innocuous about his anger, as if even he didn’t take it seriously.
    At first he tried to understand me. “How can you live like this?” he’d ask, truly baffled. “How can it not bother you? It’s so ugly. It’s so ugly and disgusting. Don’t you care whether you step on apple peels at night on your way to the bathroom? How can you not be grossed out by gobs of hair in the sink? Disembodied hair …it’s like seeing a corpse. Beauty matters. How can someone not care about beauty?”
    “I don’t mind if you clean up,” I offered generously.
    “I can’t spend my life cleaning up after you, and I resent it. And I just hate coming home from work to this; it makes me think you don’t care about me or about how I feel. Why is it so hard for you, Dana, to put a cup in the sink, or hang up a shirt?”
    “I feel as nervous when things are neat as you do when they aren’t,” I said.
    “You’re just lazy.”
    “I feel more at home, cozier, if there’s a mess. This isn’t a museum, it’s a place where we live. I like having our stuff all over the place. I get scared when things are too orderly, it makes me think of being forced to do