A young woman bursting with shopping bags approaches our table and stutters, “Is that you, on the magazine? I wasn’t sure.” She looks surprised and excited, and Ronit smiles, as proud as a puffed-up peacock. Doesn’t even bother hiding it.
“Good for you, really,” she tells Ronit. “Not every woman has to have kids, I’m a big supporter of your cause. And hats off for the essays, super important.”
Ronit is still smiling, but her tone is cautious, “Thanks, sister, but it’s important to remember that Dina Kaminer was the driving force and the woman who, hmm… wrote the essays.”
I stare at her with leery distrust. Modesty has never been her strong suit.
“And if you’re interested in the subject, you can talk to Sheila over here,” she continues. “She’s actually the one who gave Dina the idea for that groundbreaking essay.”
Something’s definitely wrong. Ronit doling out credit? Ronit paying me a compliment? Publicly??
“Oh, you’re into that too?” the young woman enquires in a friendly tone. “So, none of you want kids? What is this, the national childfree women’s conference?” she asks, then gives us a polite, light-hearted giggle and walks away, but doesn’t forget to turn around, raise her hand and part her index and middle fingers in a cheerful V-sign. One day we’ll rule the world. And render humanity extinct.
Ronit and I don’t dare look at each other.
“Say, why did you tell that detective that I’m a suspect?” The silence congeals into a sticky goo, and it feels like the right moment to get down to business. “You honestly think I killed Dina?” If I didn’t kill her sixteen years ago, you think I’d do it now?
She takes her time answering, still fishing the pine nuts out of the ginormous salad she ordered, still sipping her coffee without leaving lipstick traces on the mug, just like she never left any traces on the styrofoam cups back in college. Her traces are of an entirely different variety.
“That detective,” she parrots me, “who do you think you’re fooling? His name is Micha and you obviously have a crush on him.”
Ronit might be an actress, but as a mimic, she can’t hold a candle to him. Not that I have any intention of sharing that information with her.
“I see your man-picker is still off,” she says. “Same old same old.”
A tall figure flashes before my eyes. Neria. My first and certainly not last mistake. But at twenty you’re allowed to make mistakes. The only problem is that my twenties are so far behind they’re a dot in my rear-view mirror, and I’m still making a twenty-year-old’s mistakes.
“So did you or did you not tell him I’m a suspect? That Dina was afraid of me?”
“Look, I remembered how much you love being the centre of attention, so I did you a favour,” she giggles. “It worked, didn’t it?” she asks, and her giant, scarlet pie hole opens wide with laughter.
No, she isn’t mourning Dina’s death either. I consider her, this laughing, frivolous Ronit, this wicked, evil, whore with her mammoth mouth agape just like it was back then, that night, We’re just messing with you, jeez, you’re so uptight, with that same gaudy lipstick like a bloody stain. With the raised knife, and the scream, so full of anguish, with Ronit doubled over in laughter. Thrump! Thrump! Thrump!
“I’m messing with you, Sheila, it’s just a joke, jeez,” she says, “where’s your sense of humour?”
“I never did care for your dumb jokes,” I hiss. “You’re confusing me with Naama. She was the only one who liked them.”
That shuts her up. Nothing like dredging up a corpse to make someone clam up. Especially when the head count is now two dead and two living. Ronit sticks her fingers back in her salad and starts tweezing out pine nuts again, and I wonder whether she ever talked about Naama over the years. When she met with Dina, her “best friend,” did she allow herself to share certain memories, or did they both just put her behind them, leave her there swaying on her rope, forgotten?
“Did Dina even talk about her?” I can’t help myself.
“What do you think? Of course not!” There it is, the faint but familiar note of aggression. “And I already told you, it’s not like Dina and I were close!”
“Didn’t keep you from giving that interview,” I say.
“I always said, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” she says calmly. I can’t believe she actually used that stale cliché, but then again, Ronit was never the sharpest lemon on the tree.
“Besides, I’m about to star in a TV show about four friends, so the interview came just in time. I don’t think Dina would have minded.”
At least she’s not giving me the whole “that’s what Dina would have wanted” spiel, because we both know nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t get to piggyback off my fame.
“And there’s a song there that really reminded me of us,” she says and pauses for a second, “I mean, our old us. It goes like this:
“Four little girls, playing with their dollies,
Snap! went one – and then there were three.
Three little girls, playing with their dollies,
Off came a head – as broken as could be.
Two little dollies, one disappeared,
And then there was one – just as she’d feared.”
Her singing voice is a creaky, low-pitched whine.
“Sounds like a children’s song,” I say, despite the fierce urge to get up and run far, far away.
“I don’t like children’s songs,” she replies.
“No one does.”
“And no one likes children,” she says,
