I’m pretty sure my cousin Benji lured me into the trailer. He became a Rabbi when he grew up, subsumed entirely into Chassidism—payot, a wife in a sheitel, the lot. A properly observant man living a good life.
In my memory or dream or whatever it was, we were teens. No, younger. Nine? Ten? I hope I was very young. Just a child. I can picture the trailer, whether from memory or an echo from a TV show or something I flat out invented: a humped, white oblong with a maroon stripe across the side, rusting in an ivy snarled patch next to the fence. Crusty windows like eyes on one end. A narrow door leading in. If we were at the Toledanos', there would have been a pool on the opposite side of the yard. If it was someone else’s, then I don’t know. I don’t remember. The man was very old. Bald, stooped, all the old man things. And grumpy. He scared me. It didn’t take much when I was a kid.
We’d have been there for a family gathering. A pool party, maybe. A barbeque. So many cousins, mostly distant. My grandmother’s brother’s family. My father’s blood relatives, although my mother was the one who'd found them and forced us into their ranks.
Inside the trailer a line of glossy, porcelain tigers decorated the windowsill above the kettle and dishrag drying on the edge of the sink. Cute. Each about three inches long, sitting, lying down, curled up asleep. One had a butterfly on its ear. Their black and orange stripes gleamed in the sunlight. A strange thing for an old man to collect. You don't expect them to treasure anything so twee.
Benji swore on his life. He promised the damage would be temporary. He would fix them afterwards.
If it happened at the Toledano's, there would have been a swimming pool. I hated the shock of cold when entering a pool and would ease my way in, inch by inch, until I'd acclimatised. My father liked to ambush me. He’d grab me and launch me into the water all at once. It entertained him. I'd sit on a lounger, simmering with anxiety, hoping that this time he'd leave me alone. I begged my mother to talk to him. Maybe she tried, but he didn’t stop. I couldn't relax, couldn't enjoy myself, wondering if and when it was going to happen. It always happened. He knew I hated it and that made him enjoy it more. I loathe swimming. When I was in high school, I lied about being allergic to chlorine so I didn't have to participate on swim days.
He denies it now. My father. He says he never did it. He tells me I'm crazy. Making things up again.
So, I get why Benji targeted me and why I let myself believe his lie. I’d been trained to believe my feelings didn’t matter. Benji was insistent enough to make me doubt. And I wanted to believe him the way you want to believe there's a hidden world at the back of the wardrobe. There was a part of me that thought, well. Maybe.
I was a small, weird, overly reactive kid. That kind of thing happened to me a lot.
My parents would get the Toledano girls to babysit. Barbara, Naomi, Hannah, Raz. I'd be happy at first. They were older and had silver jewellery, bellbottoms and fringed jackets. Centre-parted, waist-length hair. Boyfriends and stories about surfing and cigarettes.
They'd hide behind doors then jump out and shout to frighten me. It did. Just like the pool, I knew it was going to happen and existed in a fever of anxious dread until my parents came home. Sometimes they'd do it more than once. Sometimes they'd do it over and over again. I begged them not to. I begged my mother to tell them not to, but my reactions were just too funny. How could I blame them? How could anyone?
We're all adults now and they're lovely women. Kind, giving, thoughtful. They've lived through their own family tragedies.
Bright summer sunshine bit through the cloudy trailer windows. The tang of eucalyptus trees flooded through the open door and blended with the murk inside. Benji dared me to smash the tigers. He swore he could put them back together. I knew he was lying. Even as a child, I knew. I believed him anyway.
It was like that time I was thirteen. Alone at home after school when the phone rang. I stood in the kitchen in front of the sliding glass doors leading to the patio. Did she know my name? I think she might have. Or she knew my mother’s name. There was something, some fact that made me reluctant to slam the phone down. The low, authoritative voice was a woman’s, but I could hear a man murmuring in the background. She told me to take my shirt off. Yes, go ahead. Take your shirt off. Your mother would want you to listen to me. Now your trousers. Now your bra. I protested, but she insisted. I didn't hang up. I did what she told me to do, ashamed, sick with fear. Almost naked in the kitchen. I was in just my panties when she told me to get a knife. I didn't want to. I said no. She was an adult. I was raised to do what adults ordered me to do. I got the knife. That's when I heard my mother's car pull up outside. I told the woman on the phone. She said no, your mother's not home, you're lying. She told me to pick up the knife. I hung up and tugged my clothes back on before my mother could see what I'd done.
Did that really happen? It could be something I dreamt. What did the people on the phone want? Who were they? What would have happened if my mom hadn't come home?
When I was sixteen, I watched over my friend Randy's shoulder as he played Asteroids on his computer. White graphics on a black screen. Electronic beeps and blasts. Glen, an older guy I'd had a crush on, came up behind me. Right there in the room with Randy. He rubbed against me and pulled my hand behind my back to touch him. When I told him to stop, he said he couldn't. We all went really quiet. Randy knew what was happening. I don't know why I didn't leave.
Benji promised me he could fix the tigers. He swore on his life: one of those ultra-serious childhood oaths no one ever broke. I'd smashed three by the time the old man lumbered into the trailer, his home in a relative's back yard.
He yelled, red-faced with tears in his eyes. ‘Why would you do this?’ That fragile old man. Trembling. He probably died soon after that. He probably died within months.
‘Why would you do something like this?’
Ilana Lindsey is an American expat living in South London. She has a BA in Philosophy and thinks way too much. She loves tigers, forests, alt-rock, and dark stories that dig into the depths of human experience and emerge with a beacon of hope. The angst and beauty of growing up neurodivergent in a Jewish family is woven through her work. Her stories have been published in Mystery Tribune, Tangled Locks Journal, and Formercactus.
