Recalculating
The unexamined life is not worth living — Socrates
Editor’s Note: A short story by Galina Vromen about a woman who receives an unwanted phone call that causes her to reflect on some dark times. —David Michael Slater
Credit: Galina Vromen
Sharon immediately recognized Omri’s voice on the phone, even after 15 years.
“You must be surprised to hear from me,” he began.
He was right. Sharon stopped chopping the cucumber.
“I bet you’re wondering how I got your number.”
Right again, damn it. She finished chopping, then nudged the diced vegetables into a salad bowl as Omri told her he’d run into her Uncle Ed during a fund-raising tour in Canada. Noticing the last name on Ed’s name tag, he asked if there was a family connection. Uncle Ed gave him Sharon's phone number and an update on her life: married plus two and living in Israel, traveled the world for a software company until she was diagnosed with cancer, in remission now.
Uncle Ed couldn’t know that Sharon had no interest in speaking to Omri. Even if she were feeling better. As it was, she was raw after the surgery, the chemo, and the radiation. Although she was regaining physical strength, picking up the reins of life interruptus, she was struggling to steer life with more deliberate consideration of what mattered. Omri did not.
“I understand you’ve had a bit of a hard time,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, squeezing the juice from a lemon onto the salad. She had no desire to talk about her cancer with a man whose parting gift the last time they spoke had been a curse. Although she didn’t ask him any questions, he chatted on about a national arts program for special needs children he was directing. Exciting stuff. Too complicated to explain over the phone, but no doubt about it, the world would recognize the brilliance of his new technique with teachers.
“Come visit me sometime,” he said.
“Sure. Maybe. I’ve got to go.” She hung up, stuck the salad in the fridge. Why hadn’t she told him to go to hell?
Sharon first met Omri and his wife Einat when he was a shaliach, a Jewish youth educator, sent from Israel to Cleveland’s Jewish Community Center in those years, just after the Six Day War, when Israelis were besotted with victory. His smile telegraphed delight at the world and his brown eyes, magnified behind too-big, plastic-rimmed glasses, radiated curiosity. Omri was in his mid-twenties, light on his feet, and a good folk dancer at a time when boys Sharon's age had limbs they seemed clueless to control. It wasn’t just that Sharon, 17 at the time, had a crush on him, which she did, he’d opened the window of her life and urged her to fly out.
At the JCC, Omri ran the afterschool program and taught beginner’s Hebrew; Sharon was his star pupil. He drew her into what he dubbed “meaning-of-life-and-all-that-jazz talks.” What would you do if you had $1000? If you had to leave Cleveland for the rest of your life and never see it again, or if you had to stay in Cleveland for the rest of your life and never leave it, which would you choose? If you could spend a day with any famous person in the world, who would it be? When he liked her answer, he’d cuff her on the head.
Sharon poured out her heart to him, over teachers, parents, and particularly her older sister Becky, who was more beautiful, more popular, and seemed determined to convince Sharon that she would never be anything but odd and klutzy.
“Your sister says green doesn’t suit you because of your blue eyes? Nonsense. Green suits you fine. So does yellow, orange, purple—any color, because your eyes are alive—and that means they go with everything. Remember that.” He cuffed her on the head.
Omri didn't seem to think Sharon's gothic teenage thoughts were weird. He didn’t laugh when she said the world would surely blow itself up in a nuclear cloud the day AFTER she took her last final exam. He listened when she divulged that she had some suggestions for God on how to improve the human body: by giving us a milder version of a skunk smell when someone like Becky annoyed us and by adding an ability to purr so we would know when someone was happy and we wouldn’t have to ask. He seemed to think all this was normal. He considered her trustworthy enough to give her a job as a theater counselor at the JCC day camp. Most of the time, Sharon wished she had a skunk’s smell, but in Omri’s company, she wished she could purr.
He soared to the rank of super-hero when he convinced her parents to let her spend a gap year in Israel. “It will do her good,” he told her parents, “she’ll love it there.”
Omri was right, 100 percent. She came back from Israel only because she’d promised to college in the United States, then worked to earn money and to screw up the courage to make aliya. When, ten years after her gap year, she finally settled in Tel Aviv, Omri was living in Jerusalem. She earned a modest living as a programmer in a high-tech company, sharing an apartment with two roommates. She went on some weekend hiking trips with the Nature Protection Society. Everyone had been pleasant; no one became a friend. With men, there had been too many I-thought-you-thought-I-thought misunderstandings that masticated the relationships to oblivion. She shed some of the moroseness of her teen years, but she didn’t have a sense that the report card of her life was one she could proudly present to Omri. His cameo role in her past was so treasured she was reluctant to disturb it. She didn’t look him up.
But when she took a day off to visit Jerusalem and passed him on Jaffa Street, they simultaneously whirled back to each other in a flash of recognition and gushed into what-a-surprise, imagine-this, how-great-to-see-you’s.
He still had a contagious smile and warm eyes, and the same, black-framed glasses someone should have told him were way beyond unfashionable. His hair, always unkempt, had thinned and needed a trim; his belt had given up on keeping his pants up and burrowed under a belly it couldn’t contain.
He invited her to his office, just a few yards away. “You’ve just got to see what I’m doing these days,” he said, “see the kids, meet my staff. Come on, it won’t take long.”
He introduced her to his three secretaries as his most promising protégé. “The only person I met in Cleveland good enough for Israel,” he laughed. He grabbed a brochure off the reception counter. “Here,” he said, “read about us.” Sharon glanced at the leaflet. It explained that Ayeka was dedicated to the artistic development of the hearing-impaired.
Omri’s office had nothing in it but two wooden chairs and a desk piled with stacks of papers. She recognized a faded photograph of the Cleveland JCC summer staff. There she was, standing on the far left, her long hair covering most of her face. Her attempt to obscure her figure with an oversized t-shirt was a total failure; it only made her stand out. She’d thought herself fat and ugly back then. Now, she realized, she had been passably pretty. Newer photos showed children dancing, playing music, and mustachioed and high-heeled in theater productions. Closest to his desk, where his eyes would fall on it first, was a photograph of three girls with his doe eyes and Einat’s thin nose.
“Yours?” Sharon asked, pointing to the picture.
“Yes,” he smiled.
She noticed a part had been cut off. “And Einat?”
“No Einat. We’re divorced. The kids are great though; they’re eight, seven, and five. We have joint custody. How about you? A boyfriend? Thoughts of babies?” he asked with the probing interest she remembered so well.
Nothing serious, she answered. As for children, she didn’t know how people had enough faith in the future to have them. “Just the thought of raising them exhausts me,” she said.
He tried to listen but a kid from his program, speaking in the atonal voice of the born-deaf, came in to say the clay the class needed for a project had dried out. A flash of envy seized Sharon when Omri cuffed the child on the head and said he’d be there in a minute.
“Look, I’ve got to get back to work,” he said turning back to her. “You and I have a lot to catch up on. Come have supper with me and the girls. You’ll love them.”
They set a time for dinner on Friday night in a week.
“Your eyes are alive, every color looks good on you,” she murmured as she trolled through her closet, preparing for dinner at Omri’s. Her roommates had already gone off to their various relatives for dinner. She was glad that tonight, she, too, had somewhere to be. Friday nights were tough sometimes. There was nowhere she was regularly expected. Not that she minded a quiet evening, but the apartment was dingy. The speckled tile floor emanated cold in winter; the living room was furnished with sofas and chairs from the 1950s, which their landlord refused to remove and refused to let them discard.
She tried on half a dozen outfits in front of the mirror in the dimly lit hall before settling on a demure black scoop neck top and khaki pants, a gold chain choker, and matching earrings. She applied mascara and eye shadow, decided she looked like a raccoon, and wiped it off.
When she got to Omri’s apartment in the outlying Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem, there were no kids there. He forgot it was their turn to be at their mom’s for the weekend. He gave her the grand tour of his apartment, furnished in modern Danish, all beige, rust, and mustard tones. Shag rugs in muted tones, immune to the rain pelting the windows, added to the sense of casual comfort. A lava lamp she remembered from his office in Cleveland undulated in chartreuse waves on the coffee table. But the lamp totally threw off the living room’s color scheme. “I know,” he said when he saw her amusement, “I should be past lava lamps. But it reminds me of a good period of my life. Do you miss home?”
“Not really,’ she said. “Sometimes it’s weird living in a place where I have so little personal history. But Cleveland’s hard to miss. I have no regrets.”
He showed her a new dictionary he’d bought, leafing through it and stopping at words whose derivation he had just learned. He pointed to the word for “guest,” which had the same root as the word “caravan,” or’cha because, for the ancient Hebrews, guests came in caravans that traveled through the desert.
Sharon smiled. There were words she used every day that she still associated with his lessons back at the JCC. Like the word kesher. Connection, relationship, a knot. The root of to call someone up on the phone is the same as to tie them up with a rope.
She kept him company in the kitchen while he cooked dinner, stir-fried Chinese, her favorite. He’d remembered.
“Is your sister still as catty as she used to be?” he asked, mixing in the mushrooms and the bean sprouts. “Always wanted to marry a doctor. Did she catch one?”
Sharon laughed. No need to pretend affection for Becky around Omri. “Just about,” she said, setting the cutlery by the dinner plates. “She’s engaged to Benjy Roth. Remember him? He’s in med school, of course. The wedding’s in Spring. My parents would love me to follow suit.”
“No hometown boy for you,” Omri declared. “Certainly not a doctor. Something more interesting, surely.” He slid the stirred fried vegetables from the wok into a serving bowl with a flourish.
Over dinner and after, they talked about books, movies, her parents, his work. During a lull in the conversation, she looked up from her food and found him staring at her so intensely, she stopped chewing, which yanked him out of his reverie. “You’re still so sweet,” he said and laughed.
Later, he brought mint tea and some chocolate-filled rugelach to the living room. She moved aside a copy of A.B. Yehoshua’s recent bestseller, A Late Divorce, to make room on the coffee table for the tray.
“I loved this book,” she said.
“I’m not surprised,” said Omri. “You’re a sucker for complex situations, you like good writing, and you’re always looking for greater meaning in the most everyday things.” They hadn’t been in touch for a decade. How could he presume to know all this about her?
“What’s the matter?” he asked, noticing her frown as he plunked down beside her on the sofa.
“Nothing,” she said, annoyed to be so neatly summed up, so predictable to him, “I’m fine.”
“You’ve forgotten how well I know you,” Omri said, putting his arm around her. “Always have, always will. Better even than you know yourself. I’m awfully fond of you,” he added. “It just wasn’t right to show you how much when you were younger.”
Sharon was surprised, but why should she be? After all, she’d changed clothes six times before deciding what to wear for the evening. He kissed her, but she hesitated. “You know you want this,” he said. “You’ve always wanted me. You just never wanted to admit it.”
Yes, she’d fantasized about him then. Now, the soft brown eyes that had so attracted her just looked hungry. His mouth pushed down on her. His hands reached for her bra hooks.
“Wait, this is too fast for me.”
“I’ve waited too long already,” he said. “It’s time.”
Her stomach lurched, but it wasn’t the surge she was used to with men, the kind she might even have imagined feeling for Omri when she chose her clothes for dinner. It was a grinding, unexpected changing of gears, like a science fiction movie when a character turns into a monster-alien when least expected. As a teen, she’d dreamed of what it would be like to kiss Omri. But his non-stop tongue in her mouth, her ears, all over her neck, was disgusting. She wanted to leave.
She managed a glance at her watch. Midnight. How would she extract herself from under Omri’s weight, which was pressing her into the sofa? If she left in a huff now, she would have to stand on the cold, deserted street and try to catch a taxi. She hadn’t dressed for a Jerusalem winter, or for rain. There would be the long wait for a sherut group taxi back to Tel Aviv, the creepiness of the Tel Aviv bus station at this time of night, then finding another taxi to her dingy apartment. This was Omri. He knew her better than anyone ever had and remembered so much about her. He’d sensed that she had dreamed of his kissing her. In a way, it was flattering to know he had harbored the same feelings. She felt like a spoilsport at a party who claims the fireworks aren’t going to work and tries to leave before they go off so as not to be proven wrong. Maybe he was right; it was time for this fantasy to play itself out.
He moaned, repositioning himself, his hands grabbing her crotch, kneading as if it were dough that could be coaxed to rise. She tried to surrender to the Omri she had adored, to merge the image with the overweight man lowering her onto the living room rug. But she couldn't. She focused away from what her body wasn’t feeling and reran an endless loop of the pretense under which he had invited her: to meet his daughters for a family dinner. As he grunted into her, Sharon wondered if he’d planned this all along. When he was done, he flopped onto his back and closed his eyes. Sharon rolled away from him. She looked at the dust balls under the sofa, her mind empty. They were silent for a few minutes.
“I’d give you a six,” he said.
“What?” Sharon turned towards him. His eyes were still closed. He hadn’t moved.
“That was about a six—on the sex.”
No one had ever graded her, at least not to her face. “Out of 10?”
“No, six out of 100,” he said, glancing at her for a moment before closing his eyes again.
His crudeness surprised her. But she wasn’t offended. It was a fair grade for what had transpired. She knew herself as an enthusiastic lover, easily satisfied. She didn’t consider sex complicated: Her body knew what it wanted. And what it didn’t.
“I’m going to sleep in your daughters’ room.”
“Sure,” he said, drowsily. As she moved to get up, he gave her a post-coital cuff on the shoulder. “Tomorrow we’ll have a nice day together. We can go for a ride, head for the hills.”
“You take people who only rate a six on day trips?”
He opened one eye. “Hey, kid. Take it easy. We’ll be fine. Sex isn’t everything.” He smiled, closed his eyes.
Lying in the narrow bed of one of the daughters, Sharon tried on the idea of Omri as a lover, but it didn’t fit. The more she reran the evening’s dinner and conversation, the more it seemed a calculated prelude to the predictable climax. Her eyes roamed the room. There were photos of Omri with his girls at a zoo, rowing on a lake, in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Unable to sleep, she rose, wrapped the bed sheet around herself, and walked through the apartment. In Omri’s study, she noticed a yellowed article from The Forward in a frame, about the opening of Ayeka two years earlier. Hugging her breasts against the night chill, she read about the work he’d done to integrate special needs kids into Jewish day schools in America, which inspired him to create an art program for deaf and other special needs kids in Israel. She stared at the accompanying photograph of Omri cutting the ribbon for the center. She continued her tour, rummaged for a towel in the linen closet, and took a shower. The warm water felt great, but she couldn’t get rid of the feel of Omri’s touch. She returned to the girls’ room and curled up under the covers.
When she awoke, the desire to re-establish the Omri she once knew matched her revulsion at the Omri of the previous night. None of it added up. Maybe last night had just been a big misunderstanding that she was judging too harshly. As for the rating of a six, she obviously hadn’t lived up to his fantasies any more than he had lived up to hers. By staying, maybe she could salvage what had once been.
When she walked into the kitchen, Omri looked up from the eggs he was frying and smiled. Coffee was percolating.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“I slept great.” He slipped two sunny-side eggs on her plate. “I thought we could drive out to the Soreq Caves.”
“Sure, why not?” She hadn’t been to the stalactite caves in years.
Omri kept up a constant chatter through breakfast and as they drove through the Jerusalem hills. As if the previous night never happened. The Soreq Caves were closed for maintenance, so they hiked in the surrounding park instead. Sharon was too numb to murmur more than an occasional “mmm” to Omri’s riffing as they followed the trail. His incessant cheerfulness, once so comforting, rankled her.
They stopped in Abu Gosh for lunch at a restaurant with an enclosed terrace overlooking the Arab village.
“What happened with you and Einat?” she asked, wiping her pita into the humus appetizer while they waited for their main course.
“Irreconcilable differences,” he said. “You know, the usual.”
Sharon didn’t know, but she didn’t question him further. There was no such thing as a no-fault break-up, and she’d never met a man who’d ever blamed himself for the end of a marriage. She nodded, wondering who had left whom. Omri would surely say he left Einat. Maybe he had. Sharon remembered Einat with a long braid down her back and a face perpetually perplexed, trying to understand those peculiar creatures—Americans—among whom she, an eighth-generation Jerusalemite, had been thrust when she moved with Omri to Cleveland. Sharon wondered whether her assessment of Einat back then as tediously earnest might have been unfair. There was a lot to reconsider.
Omri took a swig of his beer. “The kids are great, though,” he added. “They’ve been fine with the divorce. I took them to Paris last year.” He took her hand and, smiling, told her it was time for him to think about himself.
“I’m sure it is,” said Sharon, withdrawing her hand.
He took it back, this time clasping it between his hands so she could not easily withdraw it. “Look at those flowers curling through the trellis,” he said. “Gorgeous.” The light filtered through the leaves of the purple and white clematis vines like a stage set. “And a salamander is watching us,” he noted, nodding toward the trellis post.
“It’s a gecko.”
“How do you know?”
“They interest me,” Sharon told him. “When predators catch them by the tail, they shed their tail and escape. The discarded tail actually twitches, so the predator thinks he has them. But he doesn’t.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Cool, huh?”
“You were always interested in animals. Remember when you told me you wished people could purr like cats?”
“Yeah, well, I identify more with the gecko.” Sharon looked down at her hand still in Omri’s and withdrew it. They were both grateful when the main course arrived.
Omri dug into his kebabs with enthusiasm. Sharon picked at her food. He offered to finish her portion. They skipped coffee and dessert, headed back to the car, and continued their drive through back roads of hairpin curves and dusty pines back to Jerusalem.
“I know you think this is strange,” Omri said, “but you’ll get used to it.” It was the first time he’d acknowledged that the previous night had tilted their relationship out of kilter. He shoved the gear into second up a hill. “You’ll see we really are right for each other.”
“Why do you keep thinking you know what’s going on in my head?” Sharon asked.
“Because I read you like a book. I always have and I always will. I know this is freaking you out. But I know you love me. You just have to open yourself to it. And you’ll see, when you do, we'll be a great couple—the sex, too.”
“Really?”
“Really. It was meant to be. You'll see.”
She was relieved when Omri dropped her off at the Central Bus Station at the end of Shabbat. He leaned forward for a kiss but Sharon leapt from his car to catch her bus.
He called a few days later to suggest they meet.
“There's no point,” she told him. “I don’t want to see you again.”
“It’s a pity,” he told her. “We could be wonderful together, happy. But you won’t let yourself be happy.” And then came the parting shot: “You’ll never be happy. It’s just the way you are.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. If he hadn’t once known her so well, she would have shrugged off his declaration, this curse. But she couldn’t dismiss what he’d said. Maybe he could no longer read her heart, but he knew her. She constantly felt she was teetering on the edge of a dark abyss that was waiting to swallow her up. Omri’s judgment felt like a life sentence.
For years, she felt its weight. On weekends, when she buried herself in books to forget she was lonely, Omri whispered, I told you so in her ear. When she cried all night after Becky’s wedding, he whispered that she couldn’t be happy for anyone until she could be happy for herself. When she woke up in the middle of the night and the ogre of all her expectations pressed down on her until she could barely breathe, he whispered that she would never stop berating herself. When she felt she couldn’t face another load of laundry or another phone call to the refrigerator repair man and was overcome with a lethargy she couldn’t explain, he whispered, Doesn’t take much to defeat you. When she could barely rouse herself to go out with friends and was bored when she did, she had to admit that he was right. His curse gnawed even months after she met David on a camel trip in the Sinai.
David, an oboe player, taught her to believe in a life filled with children who brought their picture books into the parental bed on Saturday mornings. Then they would all stuff themselves with his homemade pancakes, which were the best in the world. David hated fireworks but was the sort of guy who stayed after the party and helped until the last plastic chair was back in place. She appreciated this about him well enough but she couldn’t know just how deeply considerate he was until the cancer, a territory they groped through together, two cave explorers lost in the dark, the children trailing behind them.
For years, Omri’s parting curse agitated, like a speck of dust in the eye you think your tears have washed out, only to discover it still there, annoying you from a different point.
And then, there he was again. The chutzpa, calling her, after so many years, his notions of her still intact, his cavalier assumption of intimate knowledge and his selective amnesia. He was not easily put off. He called a second time, pressing her to come and visit him.
“I’m not really up to it,” she finally admitted.
“Well, okay,” he said. “I was sorry to hear about your illness. And sorry for what happened between us that time in Jerusalem. It was a strange period in my life, after the divorce and all.”
“Yeah, well, it’s hard for me to forget about it,” Sharon told him. She knew he didn’t get it. He thought it was all about the shabby sex 15 years ago. No recall, she was sure, of damning her to inevitable unhappiness, no sense of the power of his curse. Her revenge was not to let him know, not to let him in. “If I want to, I’ll be in touch.”
“Don’t wait too long,” he replied and hung up.
Three months later, she saw his smiling face in the newspaper, an old photograph from his younger days with those too-big glasses, accompanying a long obituary of his many accomplishments. Dead at 52—from cancer.
He must have known he had cancer the last time he called. He could have let her know then that they were members of the same lethal club when he asked to see her, maybe to apologize in person. But he hadn’t let on. Rereading the obituary, she wondered what she would have done if he had. Would she have told him how much his curse had haunted her? Would they have found a way to be kind to each other?
It’s been years since Omri died. His curse no longer has a hold on her. She has escaped unhappiness like a gecko. When she sits with David and the boys around the table on Friday night, when her sister calls for a chat, when she rides her bike, contentment sneaks up on her like a shy cat. At first, it was a stray. Now it has taken up permanent residence, wandering away only once in a while.
Sometimes, when Sharon drives through the Jerusalem hills on her way home from work, she takes a detour to catch the sunset on a bluff near the Soreq Caves. She cuts the engine and lets the breeze flow over her. She thinks about the stalactite formations, the newer dripstone covering the underlayers, the present smothering the past. Serenity has dripped into her life, a force of nature she cannot explain, piling up on itself so slowly. It took her time to notice.
The memory of Omri floats into her mind like the white plume left by the plane crossing the crimson sky. She’s sure that even he would agree. When it came to knowing her, he never deserved more than six out of 100.
Galina Vromen is the author of Hill of Secrets, a historical novel based in WW2 Los Alamos, NM, where the world's first atomic bomb was built. Published in October 2024, her debut novel (previously excerpted in Judith Magazine) has garnered more than 3,000 five-star rankings on Amazon and the Hebrew translation was chosen as the November 2024 book for the reading club of Israel's largest bookstore chain, Steimatzky. Vromen's short stories have appeared on NPR’s Selected Shorts, in Jewish Currents, Ilanot, and the Adirondack Review, among other publications. Earlier versions of "Recalculating" were published by Tikkun Magazine and the Jewish Literary Journal. A former international correspondent for Reuters News Agency and the founding (former) director of PJ Library's sister programs in Israel in Hebrew and Arabic, Vromen has divided her time between Israel and the US for much of her life. For more information see www.galinavromen.com
“Recalculating” first appeared in Tikkun magazine in 2014 and in a different version in the Jewish Literary Journal in 2018.
What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?
Coffee in bed in the morning
Playing matkot on a Tel Aviv beach at 7 am
Plunging into a lake in summer
Clever kitchen gadgets
My husband snoring (softly) next to me
What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?
Challah
The song Eli, Eli (words by Hannah Senesh)
Late Friday afternoons in Tel Aviv, just before Shabbat
Lighting Shabbat Candles
The Hebrew word/concept “firgun” – (no equivalent in English)
This was so satisfying and lovely.
That was captivating!