Fiction: Blooms

I maneuvered my breasts, trying to find a good angle, and everyone gave tips, interrupting each other, until I began to sweat. Uncooperative, Shalev refused to latch, so I handed him to my mother and went for a walk on the kibbutz. I didn’t get far. The labour had taken it out of me and I could only manage a shuffle, my movements slow and stiff. I caught my breath on a bench as someone else approached my house, carrying a tray wrapped in foil. My breasts tingled, filling with milk. The twins, already calling me back. But I couldn’t even feed them properly. The consultant had said I’d nothing to worry about. I shouldn’t take it personally, she assured me; mothers always did.

Ants forked around my sandals, carrying a cracked leaf. Across the street, the pomegranates on the tree were purple and heavy, throwing bulbous shadows onto the grass. Why did the boys cry harder when I held them? I should drink sage tea, which produced more breast milk. But I hated its bitter taste. My mum said being a good mother was mostly about confidence.

There was a sucking sound, the kind Tamir made when he watched the news and he drew air through his teeth. When I glanced down, a leaf was stuck to my right index finger. The skin around it buzzed. I brought my hand close to my face. I could have sworn the leaf had changed color, now vibrant green instead of brown. I tried to peel it off, but I couldn’t find an edge. It was as if it had somehow got under my skin.

By my feet, ants formed a long line, stretching backwards across the road to the pomegranate tree. They held leaves above their heads at evenly spaced intervals. From where I sat, it looked like they were bringing them towards me. The closest ants moved up the arm of the bench towards my right hand, another leaf bobbing on their backs. I shifted to the other side of the bench. Apprehension shivered through me. A hand dropped, heavy on my shoulder, and I jumped.

“I thought I saw you come out here,” Tamir said.

He stood over me, his head shiny, barefoot as usual. His fingers played with an unlit cigarette.

“I wanted some fresh air.”

“In this heat?”

“I’ll come back in a minute.”

“It’s ok. Stay here. We’ll manage.”

I bit my lip hard. “Because I can’t?” “That’s not what I meant.”

I wished I was more like Tamir. He was the one changing the boys’ nappies on repeat, checking their bandages and applying new ones after their brit millah, never questioning whether he was doing it right. Why couldn’t I be useful, instead of hovering above him, asking questions? Tamir never snapped at me. He had maddening, endless patience.

He pulled me into him and I let my body crumple. He wiped the spaces under my eyes.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Is this about breast-feeding?” he said. “Alona, you just gave birth. Let’s give them formula.”

The pomegranate tree blurred and I nodded.

“We have so much help,” he said. “Let everyone else take over for now. What’s so bad about that?”

I’d married Tamir because he was calm. Practical. He made me feel like I had two hands wrapped around my ankles, rooting me to the ground. Still, something he’d said didn’t feel right. How could I explain this constant indecision, everyone else’s thoughts crowding my head? This sense my brain was wadded with some- thing soft, like the rest of my body, no room to clearly think.

He brushed an ant off my thigh. The leaf glowed in the light. Tamir thumbed it.

“Is that painful?” he asked. I shook my head. I opened my mouth to explain but he’d already lost interest, nodding to the swarm of ants. “Careful of those,” he said. He kissed the top of my head. “They bite.”

I’d lived in Kibbutz Rimonim all my life. Most of my friends had left for the cities years before, but I’d never seriously considered it. Both my parents and Tamir’s lived here; we had a mini-market and a private beach and if I needed space, I walked along the shoreline mid-week. In the evenings, I taught Pilates classes under palm trees, the dates making yellow paste under my trainers. The older women complained it was too hot but they still turned up twice a week. They said they needed to burn off calories before Rosh Hashanah and all that honey cake. They smiled when I pressed the smalls of their backs or straightened their legs, amused I was the one giving them instructions when some of them had once been my teachers. Now I had children, they could teach me again. They came on rotation, so consistently, that since I’d given birth, I hadn’t had a moment alone with the babies.

Why was I complaining? my mum asked. In Iraq, where she’d grown up, a woman did nothing for forty days after giving birth. Someone cleaned the house and other people brought over food, and the mother was given the baby to breastfeed, but aside from that, she slept. My mother was an impressive woman. She’d escaped to Israel at eighteen after it became dangerous to be Jewish in Iraq, sewing her jewelry into her underwear before she crossed the border. She’d studied to be a doctor in Hebrew, her second language, and she shared her salary with the kibbutz. She’d raised four children, two of whom were also doctors. Unlike her sisters, she never panicked if we had a high temperature or warned us not to run across the slippery trails behind the children’s playground. But since I’d come home from the hospital, she wouldn’t leave me alone.

Every time I left the bedroom, she ordered me back to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep, I replied, and then she would tell me her story about Iraq until I gave up and did what she said, jealous of her with the boys in the living room. Once, when I was feed- ing Shalev, I put a hand over his naked torso and felt his little heart pattering at high speed, and it was so incredible to me that he was here, watching me with those brown eyes and long eyelashes, that I began to cry. My mum whipped him from me and flung a muslin over her shoulder to burp him and shooed me into the bedroom. She only left when Tamir came home and I heard her murmuring to him to let me rest, so it seemed Tamir was also smuggling the babies away whenever I turned my back.

After I showered, the leaf on my finger became greener. A buzzing moved through my arm; it felt like something was growing in there. The next week, the bottoms of my feet devel- oped hard calluses like Tamir had from walking barefoot, and I hobbled around our house, wincing. Tamir gave me the balm he used for his blisters but not a foot massage like I’d hoped. He must have been too tired to see straight, the way he jumped out of bed at night when the boys cried. He barely seemed to notice me. My breasts were high and round like a porn star’s but my stomach was sore and I was still bleeding. Everything was wider; my waist, hips, thighs, and when I looked in the mirror, my body didn’t look like mine. I wondered what Tamir thought. Of course, he didn’t say anything, but his kisses were dry and at night, he fell asleep before me, collapsed on his side of the bed.

The next time I went for a walk, it was night. Tamir’s face was pressed into the mattress and Shalev and Osher’s arms were raised by their ears in the same way, copying each other, even in sleep. I could watch them forever and never get bored. They had long eyelashes like Tamir’s but their skin was darker like mine, and I leaned close to smell their milky sourness. Their shallow breathing filled the room. The buzzing in my arm stopped. Then, I began to wonder whether I should feed them every three hours, like the doctors had instructed, even though my mum had told me you should never wake babies up. And I didn’t know if I had enough milk to breastfeed or if I should make up some formula, and if the bottles were sterilized and ready on the draining board, and all the questions caused a metallic, muddy taste in my mouth, so I got up and found my flip flops and closed the front door behind me.

I walked past the fig trees in my drive, the fruit oozing purple juice on the ground, turning right at the mini market with its shutters down and kids’ bicycles on their sides in the grass, past the school with its padlocked gates, until I reached the cactus garden, down a set of stone steps. I didn’t know why I went: it was as if an invisible line had pulled me there. I stood in the garden, listening to the grasshoppers, surrounded by the fat cacti with yellow spikes the size of my fingers and the skinnier ones with red sabras fruit ready to drop. There were olive and pomegranate trees too, but no breeze, and in that darkness, everything was still. I closed my eyes and thought of the boys, how Tamir always knew what to do, even when his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. How I seemed to lack that instinct. How I’d never been indecisive before I gave birth. That I wasn’t producing enough milk. That maybe it meant I wasn’t a very good mother.

I kicked off my flip flops, wiggling my toes in the dry grass. There was a tingling in my fingers, spreading downwards through my chest, to my stomach, to the calluses in my feet. My legs clamped the ground. It was the same feeling I had when pins and needles raced through my arms, but this time, my whole body hummed. I didn’t mind it; something about the silent trees, the darkness, lulled me, and I let my feet be pulled further into the mud. It felt more natural than anything else.

The calluses in my soles seemed to open and expand. When I looked down, I’d sunken into the ground up to my ankles, which had turned a muddy brown. The color spread up my shins, my legs thickening until I thought they might fuse together. Suddenly, I realized how much I’d miss Shalev and Osher if I got stuck in the cactus garden and I felt sharp panic. I wrenched at my feet, pulling hard at each calf until the grass gave way and I fell backwards, spraying mud. Little roots curled out of the calluses in my feet, like naked white worms. Other roots, thicker, darker, slower, waved out of the holes I’d left in the grass. They slithered towards my feet. Were they coming from the other trees? I hurried up the steps on my heels, rather than the balls of my feet, where white roots were flailing around, trying to get back. When I reached my house, the lights were on.

“Is that you?” Tamir said. He was fumbling with the double carrier, struggling to clasp it behind his shoulders. Leaves swished to the floor. He let go of the clasp and stared.

“Alona,” he said. “What have you done?”

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

“Not that bad?”

I went to pick up Osher, but when I bent down, leaves fell onto his cot. My arms were the same brown as my legs, dry bits crumbling off. I managed to pick up Osher and bark flaked onto his face. I tried to wipe it away with my leafy hands, but I couldn’t get a proper grip. Osher wailed.

“It’s ok. Give him to me,” Tamir said. “You smell of mud. Go to sleep.”

He bounced Osher until he stopped crying, then bottle fed Shalev, curled into the crook of his arm. I wanted to help but couldn’t hold the boys in my stiff arms. I couldn’t even sterilize the bottles. When I used the sink, water splashed over my hands and green leaves burst from my fingertips, dropping into the milk bottles. Tamir waved me away but he didn’t seem angry. I felt uneasy relief.

“I’m sorry,” I said, eventually. “I don’t know how it happened.”

We were in the bedroom, the boys finally settled in their cots. Outside, the sky washed pink.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

He kissed the side of my head. I watched him guiltily, opening my mouth and closing it, but he rolled over and, in a moment, he was fast asleep.

i woke up thirsty the next morning, wasps flying around my head. White roots had grown from the soles of feet to the end of the bed, inching towards the potted plant in the corner. I had to pick them up to walk, but my knees wouldn’t bend and I clunked heavily every time I moved. I couldn’t resist looking in the mirror. From the neck up, my skin was tinged green, leaves bright in my long hair. If I pulled one out, a new one sprung back. My arms and legs were dark and brittle, and all my fingers sprouted leaves. Some even had waxy pomegranate buds in them, or flowers waiting to burst into bloom.

I started to cry and sap leaked white and sticky on my cheeks. How could I be with the boys if I became a tree? I wondered what my mother would say. In the living room, mugs knocked the coffee table. My roots slunk towards the fern in the corner and I yanked them back. I wanted to hold Shalev and Osher but they’d already been taken away, Tamir changing hands with my mum before he went to work. What use would I be now? At least no one would offer me advice, their voices rising as they contradicted each other, leaving me panicked and mute.

I thumped out of the bedroom, flaking leaves as I went. It looked like half the kibbutz was in the house. They gave me sympathetic smiles, their eyes meeting mine, then quickly sliding away again. Word must have got around. I sat on the sofa but Leah Gonen kept sneezing on my flowers, so I stood by the television instead, gulping glasses of water. I watched the boys enviously and felt a longing for my children so strong, my branches shivered. People kept tripping over my roots trailing the floor, so I settled next to the window, where I could at least enjoy the feeling of the sun on my leaves. I stayed mostly silent. No one paid me any attention. They swapped ideas of what to cook for Rosh Hashanah; it was agreed that Leah made the best apple cake, airy and not too sweet.

When the boys cried, I felt an anxious jolt, but my mum was quick to feed or soothe them. In the afternoon, everyone went home for lunch and my mum put the boys down for a nap, lay on the sofa, and went to sleep.

My roots had nudged open the window and were crawling over the grass outside. They wanted to fuse with the pomegran- ate tree in the back garden. It was getting tiring, jerking them back all the time. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad becoming a tree. It probably suited me more. Tamir could find a big pot and keep me in this corner, so I could at least be with them all. I let the roots slither through my hands.

In the bedroom, one of the boys whimpered. I glanced at my mum. She was asleep. The crying got louder. He’d woken the other baby, who was joining in.

“Mum,” I called, but she didn’t react.

I hauled my roots inside and went into the bedroom. Shalev and Osher were thrashing inside their cots. Should I pick them up? Try and feed them? Let them cry until they stopped? I tried to remember everyone’s advice, but each person had said something different. My heart beat fast. I called my mum again, but there was no answer. Tamir was at work. There was no one else to decide.

I reached inside the cots and put Osher on the bed with leafy hands, getting out Shalev after him. It was difficult to bend my body, but with some maneuvering, I managed to cradle them both, one in each wooden arm. I couldn’t feed them—my breast- milk had turned to sap—but I bounced them up and down until their cries lessened, then stopped. Osher gazed at me. Shalev grabbed my leaves. I’d succeeded; of course I had. I felt dizzying triumph. My arms were warm and soft. The three of us were quiet and my mind washed calm.

There was a great rustle as leaves and half open flowers and pomegranates showered the bed, breaking open on the floor. Red seeds spattered the tiles. I flexed my fingers. They had returned to their normal color. When I looked down, my roots had dropped off, coiled and shriveled by my feet.

My mum hovered in the doorway.

“Was someone crying?” she asked.

I kicked leaves aside. She reached for my boys. I gave a sharp shake of my head. She hesitated, and took a step back.

Nicole Hazan is a graduate of UEA’s MA in prose fiction. Her writing has appeared in Sapir, The New Orleans Review and Jewish Fiction, among others. She lives in Tel Aviv with her husband and twin daughters.