The doorbell rang for a long time (it sounded like the airport melody: final boarding call) and Nadia froze in the kitchen (gripping a greasy frying pan covered with dishwashing soap), tensing up as if the caller were a collection agency or the security services. Then she snapped out of it, stepped away from the sink, picked up her lipstick from the table and hastily applied it, and smacked her lips together as she walked to the door. Matti’s parents walked in, dressed semiformally (the mother’s red hair was braided into a high updo studded with pearls, stretching her painted eyebrows out toward her temples, but she wore a zip-up tracksuit top so as not to mess up her hairstyle). They paused just inside for a long time and glanced fearfully around the apartment. Ilan and Gramsy sat side by side on the couch, watching television and snacking on pumpkin seeds. It was Gramsy who cracked the shells in her mouth and carefully placed the shelled seeds in Ilan’s hand.

Finally the parents sat down next to each other in the dining area, encircled by several stuffed shopping bags they’d brought with them, which were piled on top of one another like sandbags in a fortification line. Nadia sat down opposite them, poured Coke into tall glasses (“Do you have Diet?” Matti’s mother asked), and forbade herself to say anything until they did. She did not trust the volume or tone of her voice. The brief silence—disturbed only by the fizzing of the liquid in the glasses and the loud metallic clangs coming from downstairs, where the gas canisters were being switched out by the gas company workers—sprawled between them, juicy and charged with unspoken ideas. “Okay, so?” said Arieh, Matti’s father. He removed his reading glasses from their case, polished them thoroughly, and put them gingerly on his nose. “What’s happening, how are things progressing?”

He was an affable man (“Delicate, delicate, a delicate person,” Nadia had observed with restrained reverence after their first meeting), at least a head shorter than his wife Peninit (she had changed her name from Penina years ago), clear-eyed, and on his large bald head he had several reddish-purple splotches, covered by a Chicago Bulls cap he wore frequently, winter and summer, much to Peninit’s chagrin (“All right, wear a hat, but why a kid’s hat? Why? Can’t you find something better?”), and even now, when he removed the hat and put it on the dining table, she glared at it resentfully. Two years ago he had retired from his job with the Israel Electric Corporation and now spent most of his days on the beach with his other retired friends, busying himself with long phone calls to the lawyers who were representing him in a suit against his brother (who was not invited to the wedding) over a challenge to his late mother’s will.

If it were up to him (“If this were up to me,” he often started to say, staring at Peninit, and his voice seeped into the silent loop left by his unfinished sentence), he would have given up the legal battle long ago, negotiated with his brother and reached a compromise. But Peninit, as well as the brother’s two sons, viewed any attempt at compromise as a stinging insult and a grave injury to their honor (“It has nothing to do with money”). Things became especially fraught when, shortly after the mother’s death, Matti and Margie moved into her home and were kicked out in the middle of the night by Arieh’s brother’s sons, who claimed the couple had neglected the garden and the lawn, hadn’t paid the bills, and had allowed the apartment to deteriorate into such a disgraceful state that the neighbors complained to the sanitation department. Arieh did not believe this slander about his son and his girlfriend, and insisted that the whole affair was “just a mistake, a misunderstanding, as they say,” a claim that drove Peninit mad because it attested to what had always tormented and anguished her about Arieh, one single quality that went by three different names: innocence, total blindness when it came to human beings and their motives, and superficial judgment bordering on stupidity.

Now (seated around the brass-framed, rectangular, glass-top dining table in Nadia’s apartment, while the tall glasses of Coke sweated beads of condensation) Peninit’s adorned fingers, their nails freshly polished in an antique shade of pink, played with a matchbox that sat on the table. She took the matches out of the box, arranged them in front of her in a straight line, then separated them into pairs. She avoided looking at Nadia’s face, which had an ashen tone and contained, Peninit sensed, a call for help that Nadia herself was completely unaware of, which was precisely what made it so painful to Peninit.

“I don’t know what to say, I really don’t,” were the words finally blurted out by that ashen face—not by Nadia herself.

Peninit found the courage to look up, although in fact she looked past Nadia, at the milky lamp shade behind her. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s up with Margie?”

The ashen tone vanished, pulled off at once like a rubber mask, and fury mixed with insult imbued Nadia’s cheeks with a newfound strength, making them suddenly flower into a purple blush. “Who told you about Margie?” she asked in a metallic voice. “Who’s already been blabbing?” They looked at each other awkwardly, momentarily united in their covenant of embarrassment. “We called Ilan. No one answered so we called Ilan, we didn’t have any choice,” Peninit confessed, uncomfortably rearranging her body on the chair and fiddling with the tracksuit’s zipper pull, waiting for things to settle inside her and to find her trusty voice packaged and preserved like a carton of powdered milk. (She was a deputy branch manager at the National Insurance Institute.) “That’s not the point now, Nadia, who said and who didn’t say. Not the point. Don’t even get into that. What’s going on with Margie, that’s the point,” she accentuated and let out the last two words as though spitting out two plum pits she’d been rolling around in her mouth. Nadia stared distractedly into space, touched her chin, and probed around with her fingers for the three tough hairs that had recently sprouted on it. “That Ilan,” she said ponderously, almost serenely, “I’ll dig his eyes out one day with a teaspoon, that Ilan.”

“Did you want me?” Ilan suddenly appeared, as though having erupted from the large air-conditioning unit to the right of the table, along with the chilled air. “What’s up?” He went over to the sink and emptied out a dish of pumpkin seed shells.

“Did you tell them about Margie? You open your big mouth?” Nadia fumed. (The couple trembled slightly when she said “them,” and turned their synchronized facial expressions toward the front door.) “They asked,” Ilan explained, leaning over the kitchen sink with his back to Nadia. “They called, so I told them.” Nadia hurried over to him (her thighs got a little tangled up in the dress’s satin slip) and pinched his thin arm, hard. “Hurt? Hurt? That’s what you did to me, you made it hurt. That’s not even anything compared to the hurt you gave me,” she cried. Ilan barely forced out a smile, exposing two large front teeth (he was considering getting them filed down) and rubbed his aching arm: “Way to go! Good for you, Aunt Nadia,” he said. Arieh started to get up, pushed his Bulls hat away a little, and the glass of Coke fell over and spilled. “Come on, come on, really. We’re family. Family,” he said, and mopped up the brown puddle of Coke with paper napkins that promptly became sopping wet and disintegrated. Arieh helplessly crushed the napkins between his fingers, and as he did so he noticed a large wet stain on the front of his pants, tried to wipe it off with the crumpled ball of wet napkins, and urged them again, “Family, we are. Family.”

Peninit hurried to the kitchen cabinets and examined the marble countertop. “Do you have those reusable paper towels? There’s nothing better for these little accidents,” she announced, opening and shutting doors. “Reusable?” Nadia sounded incredulous. “You mean, like, a paper towel you can reuse?” She gazed hypnotically at the woman (“She’s not my daughter-in-law, or my mother-in-law, that’s what she is for Margie . . . But what’s the name for what she is to me? I can’t remember . . . ”) with the tower of red hair that now tilted to one side, and the flattened, bejeweled fingers, who was bustling around her kitchen, doing things, saying things, overturning, arranging, detaching, rattling the hanging pots, the long ladle and forks, all with intolerable alertness, an energy and vitality that were out of place and which were an affront, in Nadia’s opinion, not only to good taste but to morality itself. A wave of aversion, if not actual hatred, passed through Nadia toward her (“Peninit, Peninit,” she remembered, “her name is Peninit!”) and every movement she made in the kitchen, exuding her dense vapors of scent (“It’s her perfume that makes me nauseous,” Nadia remembered), every gesture or tone of voice aroused in Nadia a sharp pain and distress, just like a pair of crude, clumsy hands touching a sick, fragile body lying helplessly in bed. This glacier of loathing swelled and expanded inside her until her throat closed up and she was overcome with shortness of breath (she coughed, trying to alleviate it), provoking terrible fear for her own well-being (“I’m having some kind of heart attack”) and of herself (“I could right this minute strangle her with my own two hands, right this minute”). She dug her fingernails deep into her thighs, near her buttocks, trying ostensibly to halt the surging of that glacier, which was now turning into a careening truck threatening to run over and annihilate her and her home (“The home,” she remembered with dread: “The home.”). She strained her eyes, tried as hard as she could to push away the violent fog and focus on the tall woman (“Peninit, Peninit”), her eyes latching on to Peninit’s long earrings with their diamond teardrops that dangled down to her neck, acquiescing to the pleas that finally started cohering inside her (“She could destroy me, that woman. She could destroy the lot of us after all the money she put down at that catering hall. Where are we going to come up with that money if she asks? And she will. She wasn’t born yesterday, she’ll ask, and where’ll we come up with it?”), joining together and slowly rising into a voice, weak at first but then firm.

Nadia found herself walking over to Peninit and putting her clammy hand on her cheek. “You look so beautiful, it’s stunning the way you look with your hair up,” she said, flustered by herself and by all the tribulations of the invisible path she’d been down these last three minutes. To her surprise, she was completely present in the words she said, and she looked with absolutely genuine marvel, almost admiration, at Peninit’s plump, reddish mountain of hair (her own hair had thinned and shed in the past few years, and she tried to reinvigorate it with expensive products and disguise its sparseness with devious hairstyles), underneath which lay her glorious, white forehead. Peninit hugged her, pressed her to her chest, still holding two wet rags (the metal zipper on her tracksuit poked Nadia’s eye, since she was far shorter than Peninit). “There, there. It’ll be okay. You’ll see it’ll be fine, open up your heart and it’ll be fine,” Peninit said and walked Nadia back to the dining table, sat her down and sat down next to her. Nadia covered her face with her hands, then suddenly leaned over and put her lips on the back of Peninit’s hand. “God bless. I wish only good things for your kind heart,” she said.

Ilan looked at the two of them from his post near the cabinet (searching for the cookies Nadia had hidden, mostly from herself, because of the diet). “Fantastic. Maybe you can just marry each other? That’ll definitely be a lot more joyful,” he said on his way to the living room and bumped into Matti, who was just coming in.