Chapter 17: TALIYA IS IN CHARGE
God's Little Drop of Water
If you’ve just discovered this (Hi!), begin with Chapter 1 HERE.
New chapters every Saturday morning @ 9:09 a.m. EST. Yay!
The next day, Friday (Shishi), was a short school day and Taliya entered the kitchen and found Yair was already at the table, eating breakfast. Yair always rose early and eagerly on Friday, knowing it was time for the weekend.
Taliya was not as excited for the weekend, however, because it meant that tonight Ima and Abba were going out to meet friends for dinner. It also meant that a babysitter would be brought in to supervise the children. Taliya took great exception to this for two reasons: first, neither of the girls had made any attempt whatsoever to do the job for which they had been paid, as both of them had fallen asleep on the job. Taliya wasn’t certain, but she was pretty sure a person could be fired for falling asleep on the job, especially if it were a job in which remaining awake were very important, such as flying an airplane or driving a train.
The second reason Taliya disliked having a babysitter was because she knew perfectly well that she and her brothers were capable of minding themselves while Ima and Abba were out. She would be in charge, of course, because she was the oldest.
Taliya was both surprised and pleased, therefore, when Abba informed her that they were to have no babysitter that evening, and that she would in fact be in charge.
Ima spent several minutes going over the names and phone numbers of the friends whom they would be visiting that evening. Ima had written everything on a piece of paper and fastened it to the refrigerator with a magnet, where all of the children could read it. Little Yaroni had not yet learned to read, of course, but he pretended to. He even managed to memorize the phone number simply by listening to Ima repeat it to Taliya several times. Taliya suspected that Yaroni was very smart, as was Yair, and both of them would surely grow up to be scientists or engineers, like Abba.
That evening, Taliya and her brothers stayed up late watching the new color television, which made everything so magnificent. The children were only slightly annoyed that once every ten minutes or so, the picture reverted to black-and-white, and one of them had to get up and go switch the color back on.
But soon the boys fell asleep, first Yaroni, and then Yair. Taliya led each of them gently to their beds and tucked them in. She then went all about the apartment, turning on all the lights, every single one of them. She sat on the sofa, eating chocolate from the refrigerator and watching an American movie called Saturday Night Fever, which was a story about a young American man who spent a great deal of time at the disco. Each time the television picture switched to black-and-white, Taliya was the one who had to get up and switch it back of course. But she was really only partly paying attention, as she was also listening for the distinct sounds of her mother’s high-heeled shoes clicking on the sidewalk downstairs, which Taliya could hear through the open balcony windows.
When at last Taliya heard the sound of her mother’s shoes, she leaped from the sofa, switched off the television, and hurried all about the apartment, turning out all the lights before running to her bedroom and diving into her bed and huddling under the covers. Taliya grabbed her doll, Mimi, and held her tight. She then lay very still, and pretended to be asleep when Ima and Abba came to check on her.
Read next chapter:
