Page 32 of Alarm Fatigue

“Yes, why not? The thing is, I can’t read your mind, Mark. You honestly have taken me by complete surprise. I thought I felt something between us at times recently, but I really believed that on the whole, you have disliked me for years, even when I was with Eli.”

He is quiet for a moment, his back is to me, and then puts eggs on two paper plates. Is this thoughtfulness about my keeping kosher or lack of concern for the environment? I have so much to learn about him.

He hands me my eggs and a plastic fork and, looking right at me, he says quietly, “Rachel, apparently you need to hear it again so I will admit to you that I have wanted to kiss you from the first moment I saw you. I worked to keep you at arm’s length all this time because I wanted to be with you, but for one reason and then another it never seemed right.”

I back pedal, mentally.

“You had me fooled, that’s for sure.”

“That was the idea.” He looks thoughtful for a moment and then says the last thing I ever expected. “Eli knew.”

I almost choke on my eggs. “What? Are you saying you told your friend, my husband, that you wanted carnal knowledge of his wife?”

Mark actually laughs. “I never would have told him, but he guessed my feelings correctly. He and I had lunch one day and he told me I did not need to be so hard on you to hide my secret. I asked him what secret he might be referring to. At first, he did not answer. Instead he talked about how you had been hurt so badly by your father and the loss of your mother that I did not need to be unkind to you as a cover. A cover for what, I asked him. That is when he said it was okay, and that he could tell I was trying to hide the fact that I was in love with you. He said that you would never believe it even if I told you to your face. He said because of how badly you had been hurt, you thought you were not lovable.”

I proceed to cough and Mark moves to help me but I wave him off. Way too much information to be followed by him touching me. I drink some water and eventually stop coughing.

“He said that?” Tears burn my eyes and not entirely from choking on my eggs.

“When he said it I did not really understand the truth of it at the time. I was still operating on a certain level of denial. I mean I could admit to myself that I was attracted to you, but never that I had really fallen for you.”

Okay, that is the second time in as many minutes he has indicated he has feelings for me, and all I can seem to do is talk around it.

“That must have been after the time you made me cry during a code. He found me in the stairwell and I told him what had happened.”

“Not my finest moment.”

“No, probably not.”

Afraid of meeting the elephant in the room head on, I pick up a different thread.

“Did Eli tell you what my father had done or how it was for me?”

“Not exactly. He said it was your story to tell.” He looks at me with concern now. “He said your father killed your mother in a drunk driving accident but that it was more complicated than that.”

“Yes, my father did do that, and that is not all. He was an angry and cruel man, not simply because he was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He was a narcissist who abused my mother and me. Verbally.” I take a breath. “And physically.”

I am looking down at my plate now, but can feel Mark’s eyes on me. Mark waits for me to gather myself. If I am going to scare him off with the truth, then whatever he thinks he feels for me is not real and we can just move on from all of this.

“The thing is,” I continue, “I will never know if he was just a bad person, or if the alcoholism and addiction warped his personality. A cruel man was the primary version of him I experienced…” I pause for a drink of my water.

“If you can bear with me, I will start further back, because it is all connected. My mother was born into a Catholic family. They had moved here from Ireland just before she was born. When she fell in love with my dad she converted and her family disowned her. I do not know much else about them. She was so careful with her beliefs. She was very aware that there were some people that would never accept her as a convert, and she threw herself into being probably the most strictly observant person I have personally known. I think the truth was she longed to belong to something and she thought this was her opportunity. Instead she married a man that used her choices to condemn her constantly. She would never be good enough. My father ridiculed her pronunciation of Hebrew and worse, he used her choice to dress modestly as a way to beat her regularly in places no one would see. He did everything to put her down and keep her feeling small. And so she never felt valued.”

He continues to look at me, with sympathy, but does not interrupt.

“As for me, he seemed to love me when I was very little, but the moment I was no longer a small child, he became progressively cruel. I was ugly, too thin, too fat, did not look enough like him, I was too quiet, too loud. No matter what I did, he wanted me to be kept small. The physical stuff was traumatic mostly because he was so unpredictable. But the cruelty of never measuring up, especially after he took my mother from me, those are the tapes my brain still plays to me—be quieter Rachel, speak up Rachel, don’t bother trying, you will never succeed, how could a daughter of mine be this stupid….Anyway, you get the idea.”

I chance a look directly at him and see he most certainly does get the idea. He looks both angry and pained. That is enough about me for now, I think.

“How about your parents? What were they like?”

He waits a beat. “My father died when I was too young to remember him. He was in a training accident with the army. I was born in Israel, if you didn’t know.” I didn’t know that actually. “Of course, he has been made out to be something of a hero-like figure but I have not ever really felt that I could know him, as much as all of his sisters have tried. My mother and I moved here, to the U.S., to live with one of his sisters. Then my mother died from ovarian cancer when I was still in grade school, and my aunt Esther raised me.”

Listening to him, I drink my water. And so here we are, two survivors, pulled together by attraction, clearly, but what else? Loneliness? We continue to talk about our childhoods until my eyes start to grow heavy. Mark seems wide awake but does notice my sleepiness.

“I can show you to the guest room and maybe we can pick this up over dinner tonight after we get some rest?”

“I would like that. There is still so much to say, and questions I have, but I cannot keep my eyes open.” I smile at him. The adrenaline of the revelations of this morning and last night is starting to wear off and I am crashing hard. “Maybe we can take this over to my place as I will need to change my clothes. We could eat there?”