“You awake?” Rita asks poking her head through the door.
I put down the iPad and invite her in. I have no choice in the matter.
She joins me on the bed. “What are you reading?”
“Nothing interesting.”
I am not going to say anything about the surfers who rode the highest waves of the year today, while she was buying cork shoes on the other side of the mountain. She will probably say she read about it on the blog of the Israeli tour guide she uses to plan our trip and make me feel even stupider. Or she might shrug it off and say, who cares?
“What’s going on?” I ask. I can see that she wants to talk.
“Fred is driving me crazy.”
Tell me something I don't know.
That’s one of Rita’s favorite topics of conversation. Complaining about Fred’s laziness, his personal hygiene habits, and his addiction to Fox News. I am inevitably going to get sucked into the familiar territory of endless resentment. Unless she needs to bad-mouth her ex-husband and his new wife who is always dressed to perfection and is highly educated, which drives Rita mad with envy. Though she wouldn’t admit it, because her life is much better than the life of the new wife. I am not sure why, even though Rita explained that to me once or twice. Or more.
“What happened?” I resign myself.
“He’s going to quit his job.”
Fred has been talking about quitting his job for several months. He hates his boss, his boss does not respect him, and he does almost nothing all day. People ignore him in the office. He’s sick of driving all the way to wherever his office is located. Yes, he’s making good money, but he can do better staying home and playing the stock market.
“That’s old news,” I say after considering several other responses.
“Yeah, but now he’s really going to do it and I can’t have him sitting at home all day and bothering me.”
“He’ll get tired of being stuck at home after a while and look for another job,” I try to encourage her.
Well, that’s the price you pay for attaching yourself to him, I think to myself. He’s part of the deal. You can’t expect him to give you everything you want and stay out of your way. We all pay a price for the choices we make. And you’ve been doing a pretty good job with it until now. Compared to my other women friends who attached themselves to men with piles of disposable cash you’re the one who has lasted the longest.
“I told him he should get a job as a stockbroker but he’s a coward, he won’t do it. He’s all talk and no action,” she whines.
“You can always go out and do something if he gets on your nerves,” I suggest, not for the first time.
“But then he wants to go with me everywhere I go,” she fumes. “And all he wants to do is sit in a bar and talk politics with people he doesn’t know. Like anyone cares. It’s so boring. He thinks he is going to join me when I guide tours. I can’t let him do that.”
I know she can’t. Fred is too big to travel with her in the small RV he bought for her a couple of years ago after she decided that she needed one for reasons that still elude me. The two times she used that miserable RV to go to Palm Springs or Lake Tahoe, Fred drove his own car and stayed at a hotel while she spent the night in the campground mingling with strangers. I’ve heard about it. And letting him travel with a bunch of Israelis who don’t speak much English to Yosemite would surely be a stretch even for her. I mean, how is she going to explain his presence to them?
“It’s going to be fine, don’t worry,” I try to cheer her up even though I don’t believe my own words. What else can I say? I’ve had this conversation with her many times during our walks. As the ad hoc encourager-in-chief I can practically recite my responses in my sleep. She’s just letting off steam and I am the most available sounding board. She knows that she can’t complain about the situation to her mother. Her parents are more than happy that she is someone else’s responsibility. Especially her father, per her own testimony. He was so happy when she finally got married that even the fact that her ex-husband was younger than her and a devout Muslim from a hostile Arab nation did not put a dent in his support for that doomed union.
“He said he was not going back to work after he returns from Israel,” she says, exasperated.
“He already told his boss?” I just want to make sure that this is the last time we talk about this topic.
“He told him he was going away for two weeks and then he is going to quit.”
Her story sounds plausible. Before we left for Portugal, she said that Fred was coming to Israel for Thanksgiving to spend a couple of weeks with her. He decided to do it after he found a hotel in Jerusalem that caters to Americans and offers a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
“He invited my parents to the dinner. But my mother, you know, is not too excited to go all the way to Jerusalem to eat turkey. She doesn’t eat that stuff.”
That does not surprise me at all. From what I’ve seen so far, I can tell that it would be hard to impress Vera with over-the-top gluttony. She’s a down-to-earth kind of woman. She will find a way to belittle the extravagant dinner, I have no doubt. Maybe not to Fred’s face, though.
“I told him my parents would not drive to Jerusalem just for dinner, so he booked a room for them at the hotel,” she says as she rises from the bed.
I don’t want to read into why she is telling me all this, even though a little voice inside me insists that she is bragging about Fred’s ability to spend money on life’s extracurricular activities. I let it go. Then I say, “I’m sure you’ll have fun.”
On this note, she gives me a crooked smile and leaves my room.
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