Free Two She-Bears by Meir Shalev Page B

have the same name, no?
    Yes, Varda, it’s very interesting. And what’s even more interesting is that they’re also the same person. But never mind that now. You’ll understand later on. What’s important is that I kept my family name. Eitan was Eitan Druckman and I stayed Ruta Tavori. It wasn’t popular then like now, a woman keeping her family name. I raised many eyebrows, and not for the first time. I’m telling you, Varda, if raising eyebrows were an Olympic sport, I would bring great honor to the State of Israel. The contestants enter the stadium, each one does his thing, the number of raised eyebrows in the crowd is counted, and, as the whole moshava knew in advance: first place, Ruth—pause—Tavori, Israel! Come get the medal, national anthem, “Hatikvah,” drumroll please, the blue-and-white flag is hoisted, a sea of tears and glory. I will place one hand on my chest, like the American athletes do, and a single tear will trickle down the winning cheek. I’m good at tears, I have lots of practice and it shows.
    Whatever. I kept my name. I didn’t want a new name, and I also can’t stand the custom of married women lugging an oversize load of two family names. If you’re an independent woman, do what I did: keep your family name and that’s it. Eitan, by the way, didn’t mind at all. The opposite. He said, I fell in love with Ruta Tavori, so I don’t want any Ruth Druckman instead. And he didn’t stop there. Soon enough he changed his last name to my family name. From Eitan Druckman to Eitan Tavori. At first he introduced himself as Tavori only as a joke, another one of his jokes: “Eitan Tavori, my pleasure.” Then adding: “You have no idea how much pleasure.” I see you’re smiling, yes, he was a very funny guy back then, and I was a very good audience for his wisecracks.
    To make a long story short, one day he got up and went to the Ministry of the Interior and officially changed his last name to my last name. Dovik said to him, “What’s gotten into you, Eitan? Are you crazy?” But I actually liked it. I told him that I saw it as a unique sort of romance. And you know what he said? He said, “This time it’s not you I’m romancing, it’s Grandpa Ze’ev, he’s the top Tavori around here. Not you.” But to me this was downright romantic. He knew how to romance and loved to romance, but I sometimes felt that in his romantic theater I wasn’t always the character who was romanced, that sometimes I was the stage on which he could mount his productions.
    Birthdays, for example. In general, birthdays are of more interest to women than to men, but my first husband remembered every one of my birthdays, made it special, made an effort, invented things, and on each of those birthdays he would tack a sign on the wall: HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUTA, THERE ARE SO-AND-SO MANY —and the number would change, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen— YEARS TILL YOUR FORTIETH BIRTHDAY . And on every birthday I would laugh, God, how I used to laugh with him then, in those days, and ask, “Why are you so hung up on forty?”
    “That’s the age I love. The age I want you to be already.”
    “Forty? I still have the skin of a teenager and you want wrinkles? Gray hair is what you want? Good thing I have small tits that will always hold up.”
    And he insisted: “I always wanted a woman of forty, and I’m willing to wait.”
    “So why didn’t you marry a woman of forty and be done with it?”
    He laughed. “Because I wanted you. I saw in you how great you’d be when you finally got there. You were a long-term investment.”
    “And in the meantime? Are you suffering?”
    “Suffering a lot,” he said. “Suffering but looking forward with hope. Fortyward.”
    You get it? I’m the one who reads books and teaches Bible, and he, who barely graduated high school, my wild uneducated ignoramus, trumped me with that “fortyward” of his.
    “Forty is not a nice number,” I told him. “It spells only trouble: the