The Goddesses

One day, when I was about ten, I think, we visited my grandmother, who lived on the third floor in a small rundown apartment building in Tel Aviv. These were changing times in her neighborhood. When my grandparents moved in, it was a neighborhood of middle-aged Eastern European immigrants, many of them Holocaust survivors. Then, with time, the older people moved out of the neighborhood or out of the world, and suddenly my grandma’s house was located in the hippest part of the city.

That’s just a bit of background to explain how come when I was ten I looked out of my grandma’s bathroom window and saw on the second floor of the building next door two young women getting undressed.

It was amazing. They took their time getting undressed and then dressed again, moving from one room to another to try out various clothes, then taking them off again, checking themselves in the mirror, talking to each other naked.

Meanwhile, my grandma was yelling at my mother in French, and my mother, in turn, was asking me to stop running around the house. But I didn’t care. The women were moving from one room to another, so I had to do the same.

Then, when they finished getting dressed, they were no longer goddesses. They became just two women; two adults.

It reminds me of my girlfriend when I was sixteen. I remember the last time she put her shirt on while telling me we were through. I remember, button by button, how she changed from being my girlfriend to being just another person in this big world. With her clothes on, she was now someone who would no longer affect my life, other than through memories of youthful intimacy. And it felt weird, the way a few buttons made all the difference.

A year later, she sent me an anonymous love letter, but that’s another story.