Free The UnAmericans: Stories by Molly Antopol Page B

only she was thirty-six then with a four-year-old daughter eating dinner with her grandparents in the next room. From the kitchen the three of us would listen to her carrying on, her voice high and clear and always drowning out the other person’s, which probably made her a good teacher during rowdy assemblies but not such a hit on those dates. There were so many nights when I’d watch her crawl into bed beside you after her date had left, her back to the wall, her bare feet wrapped around yours, holding on to your stomach so tightly it was like she feared the distance you might fall was so much greater than from the bed to the carpet.
    I want to tell you mine was a great love affair, but the truth was that the only reason your grandfather started coming into my tent at night was to protect me. There were so many things to be afraid of in the forest. Not just the soldiers but bears and snakes and wolves. Russian communists who lived in other parts of the woods, coming by our camp, offering bullets for a night with one of the girls, sometimes taking one even if refused—men who disliked your grandfather but respected him enough, even as a boy, not to touch the one he was with. Anyway, it was almost winter—I will always remember that as the coldest season imaginable, the winter I watched hot tea freeze in a cup—and when your grandfather climbed inside one night and lay beneath my blanket, his hands roaming up my shirt and into my pants long before he thought to kiss me, it didn’t feel romantic—more like a basic physical need that had little to do with me.
    We’d already seen each other naked, anyway—we all bathed around each other, there was no other choice—and even though I was thirteen years old and he was my first kiss, I wasn’t so naïve to believe your grandfather was in love with me, though for a lot of my life I did believe our relationship wasn’t so bad. We had no one but each other when we first arrived in the States, and a big part of me wondered if I had another option. We never even talked about marrying—we just did it. I think your grandfather and I both wanted to forget everything that had happened and try to be as normal as all our neighbors on Dinsmore Avenue. It was only years later when you and your mother were living with us that I had to listen to her opinions on how I would never be normal, my fuse was just too short, she’d never met a person who could go from zero to sixty so quickly. From the beginning it was like that with your mother and me: even in the womb I think she was kicking me on purpose. Whenever we argued, your grandfather would walk out the door and around the block, as if your mother and I had taken up all the air in the apartment. But you would always stay. It used to drive me crazy, watching you watch us , as if our fight were being transcribed and filed away in the Dewey decimal system of your mind. But the truth was that there were moments when I’d look at you—you always resembled me more than your mother, especially when you were young, with your light hair and cheeks that went red no matter what the weather—and think that you reminded me of an alternate version of myself.
    I too might have lived in my head if, when I was a girl, I’d had a school to spend my days in and an apartment for my nights, rather than a tent and a bed of pine needles that I shared with your grandfather. But to his credit, he never once tried to pretend ours was some sweeping romance. At fifteen, he’d already had a life separate from our village, a life of organizing and combat training and falling in love with Chaya Salavsky, whom he called the most brilliant thinker from his youth group and promised to reunite with one day in Palestine, where she had gone with his three younger brothers and most of their brigade. After the war, he said, he’d join his brothers on the collective they’d started, and every day he’d swim in the sea and eat grapefruits and lemons that grew wild