My only true story about Rona

Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen I was an overactive observer of my own life, constantly alert and waiting to soak up a profound moment or conversation, rush home while repeating it to myself to save it from being forgotten or maligned and then, in the privacy of my room, jot it down in sloppy handwriting on the blank pages of a hardcover sketchbook. My ears were always perked and I did my best to mold the mundane events of my teenage life into taciturn prose that all but plagiarized Raymond Carver. As my short story collection grew so did my far fetched fantasies of publication and the whiz-kid fame my early success would bring. In between bouts of shame and self doubt I actually enjoyed plenty of moments of pride in my writing and a belief in myself that I would never feel again, even though I knew my skills had only improved since. I’d named my collection “eighteen short stories” in false modesty; I was ready to become the next Salinger twice over.

For over a year I’d kept my words to myself. When I was seventeen I slowly began to expose them to my friends, one carefully chosen friend at a time. My first reader was borne out of necessity; I’d typed up all of my stories onto my family’s computer and was itching to hold the printout in my hands, but my house didn’t have a printer. The first few friends who read my stories did so in complete silence. They were not surprised to learn that I’d been writing, and it seemed that everything about my stories was to be expected. I got no reviews, no critiques and no words of praise. If I pressed they’d say it was “cool” that I was writing, and that the stories were “good”.

Those days my oldest friend Roi was deep into his first romantic relationship with a beautiful and serious girl named Rona. We were walking down the street one night when he introduced the idea of her into my life. He said “I met someone. She’s smart. Smarter than I am.” He’d said the latter in great reverence. It was what he’d always looked for; a girl who would humble him.

Rona was a short girl with a monkey mouth and long wavy hair who would think through every sentence twice and speak in formal, schoolteacher Hebrew that was either endearing or infuriating but undeniably unique. Their new relationship had swallowed my friend whole in the way that first loves tended to, but a few months later Rona had turned from the reason Roi was gone to the only thing linking the two of us together. She would call me up for long, random phone conversations about writing and depression and emotional intelligence, sometimes doing so from Roi’s house with sounds of him in the background trying for her attention and pulling at her shirt, which would earn him a motherly scolding from her and a gracious departure on my end.

She said “You’re Roi’s most emotionally intelligent friend.”, but there was such frost in her voice when she said it that I couldn’t take it as a compliment, she’d made it so that I wasn’t free to enjoy it. She said “You came up many times in my conversations with Roi before I met you. I still find myself comparing you to his descriptions.”
“So? Am I living up to your expectation?” I asked.
“Well, yes, of course, you are who you are. But there are discrepancies. You and Roi have a very complex relationship, though, so he might be right about everything only I can’t see it.”
At times when he was running late for a date with her Roi would ask me to pick her up in my mother’s car and entertain her at my house until he’d get there. He didn’t bother telling her it would be me picking her up and not him, and it was all the same to her. “I guess he doesn’t perceive you as a foreign element that would call for an early warning.” She said to me. Those were the kind of sentences she’d construct at sixteen.

I wanted Rona to read my stories; in fact I felt that I needed that of her. I knew better than to go around Roi’s back, I knew that for Rona to read the stories Roi would have to get them first. Were it not for Rona I probably wouldn’t have had him read my writing; it just wasn’t the kind of friendship I had with him. We’d survived for years and would continue to survive because that wasn’t the kind of friendship we had. But I’d met her through him, and in this way she had brought us even closer together. I decided to invite them over and hand the stories to both of them as a couple, as a unit. I would be showing Roi no disrespect that way, and he would probably appreciate my treating the two of them as one.

They never showed up. Roi called me up and apologized in a whisper; Rona had fallen asleep, he’d thought she’d wake up but apparently she was very tired and was out cold… He spoke with extreme caution that almost made me laugh. I said don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal, but he still sounded wet from sadness. “I just know that she really wanted to come over too.” He said.
“It’s ok,” I repeated. “Listen, are you still up?”
“Yeah, but I can’t leave, you know, in case she wakes up…”
“That’s ok, I’ll just drop by for a minute and give you a copy of my stories.”
“Your what?”
“My stories. My short stories.”
“You wrote short stories?” He was the first one who’d expressed any surprise at this news, and by now this was surprising to me.
“You didn’t know?”
“You never said anything, how the hell was I supposed to know? Was I supposed to guess?”
“No, I just thought maybe someone told you.”
“No one said anything about any stories to me.”
“Well. Anyway.”
“Just don’t ring the doorbell. I’ll hear you parking your car.”

Roi’s house was dark as ink when I walked in, and he wouldn’t turn on any lights. He wanted me to leave. He started reading the stories by the crack of light that emanated from his room the moment I handed the stapled booklet over to him, and I chuckled in embarrassment and said “Don’t read them right in front of my face!” He skimmed through the pages and mumbled something about how I had used everybody’s names. I said goodbye, he barely looked up at me from my words.

The next day I had a few friends over for a cookout in my back yard; my parents were away and we had my house to ourselves to play with. We had just started on the steaks when Roi made his way through the thicket of plants covering the path to the back and said “Man, what’s up with those stories of yours? Are you fucked up?”

A nervous tick of a smile froze on my face.
“What? Why?” I asked.
“What’s up with all that depression? You need a fucking shrink, man!”
And with those few words, delivered as a meaningless, offhanded joke, I imploded. All the fantasies I’d woven around my stories were instantaneously replaced by nightmarish, fisheye lens images of ridiculing laughter and pointing fingers. I was stripped naked in my own back yard. I hid it well; no one seemed to notice how I’d fallen silent for the rest of the day.

Roi said “Hey, man, I was only joking, yeah? Don’t pay any attention to me.”, and that was all he had to say about my stories. Another friend asked him about his six month anniversary with Rona, and Roi gladly told them the story. He had had flowers delivered to her mother’s apartment. The flowers had arrived early, and were waiting for them when they got back to her place. “She was sure that I’d forgotten, and she was so emotional, I swear, she nearly cried. She had tears in her eyes.” I was afraid that I had tears in my eyes as well. Roi had poisoned me.

I drove him to Rona’s that evening and then just kept driving until I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I parked the car wherever I was and called him.
I said “You know, you’re a son of a bitch.”
He asked “Why?”, but it wasn’t a surprised question, it was a worried one.
We had a terrible conversation in broken voices. He apologized to no end, he had never meant to say what he’d said and he'd known that the moment he'd said it. He didn’t really think I was fucked up, he promised with a passion. I was in no place to forgive him, if I hadn’t been fucked up before then I had become fucked up then and there. None of it made any sense, but our conversation progressed as if it did, and we spoke as if we understood everything we were saying. I said I’d rather not talk to him for a while, but in fact the moment I said that was the moment I lost all of my anger, towards him and towards myself.

Rona called me to try and bridge the gap in her most perfunctory way. She stated dryly “I don’t know what happened between you two. He won’t tell me and he won’t let me read your stories.” I was too tired to deal with her. Instead, I said “It’s complicated.”
“You’re making it complicated.” She said.
“Didn’t you just say you don’t know what happened?”
“You can’t stuff me and Roi into one body and shut me out with him.”
“You can read the stories if you want to.” I said.
“He won’t let me.”
“Look, I gotta go.”

Roi and I met a few days later, though it felt like years had passed. We had a mutual and unspoken agreement to allow our breakdown conversation to be the end of that story. At some point during the day, Roi said “You know, your stories are good. It was Rona who gave me the key to understanding it. She said I should think about them in relation to the blank page, and to how I would fill that page if I had to. And I realized that what you write is pretty good.”
“Thanks.” I said.
“You guys talk a lot, right?” He asked. “You and Rona.”
“Does that bother you?” I asked.
“What can I do, I can’t tell you not to talk to her.”
“You can tell me if it bothers you.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, it doesn’t bother me.”
“So why wouldn’t you let her read my stories?”
“Man, do you know what she’d do to you if she read those stories?” He said. “You don’t even want to know.”
“Yeah I do. What would she do? Why would she even do anything?”
“She’d make you miserable. She’d bug you about it for the rest of your life.”
“Does she bug you about things?”
“Yeah, she says I’m not in control of my life. And that my relationship with my parents is cold and distant.”
“You’re kidding.”
“She says really harsh things, you know? Really harsh things. Like that I don’t know how to be a friend, that I’m going to lose all of my friends. And I never even expect her to apologize, you know? Anything she says is fine, and if she feels like ignoring whatever she just said then that’s the way it is. If I try to tell her that what she says hurts, she starts yelling at me about how I’m trying to censor her and make her watch her mouth around me, and she ties it in to chauvinism…”
“Wow.”
“And she keeps threatening to leave me. She says she’ll leave me because she doesn’t like the fact that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. And because she doesn’t approve of my relationship with my parents. She’s crazy.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“And she keeps talking about how depressed you are.”
“She does?”
“Yeah.” He said. “Anybody else would have dumped her by now, believe me.”

Eventually my short story collection faded away, and so did Rona. After a miserable breakup, Roi strayed clear of long term relationships and of smart women. “Smart is not as important as you think.” He said. He started smiling a lot, and laughing his contagious laughter more often. He said “I’m collecting stories now.”, and by that he meant that he had become a player, and an extremely romantic one at that. As a soldier he’d picked up many women on the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa. I enjoyed his stories and never said much about them other than the fact that they sounded "cool", and that I was glad he was having a "good time".

I never saw Rona again. Of all the girls and women that have passed through my life, she might be the only one who could pass me by on the street nowadays and go unrecognized. I can’t truly remember what she looked like. It’s a strange thought to admit to, since I’m pretty sure I loved her.