Her Sister's Tattoo

by Ellen Meeropol

  After Allen announced that Rosa was pregnant and had gone underground, and after Allen left their apartment, Jake took Molly into the bedroom. He put her in the crib and began singing to her. Esther stood alone in the living room.

  Profoundly sorry, Allen had said. The two words swirled around her, reverberated and gathered speed. They ricocheted off the walls and the syllables elongated. The sound swelled into the desolate stretch of coast the year Mama and Pop picked them up at camp and drove to Maine. They spent a soggy week in a rented cottage listening to the seagulls and the endless foghorn. Pop fished, standing alone in the surf, his slicker flapping in the wind. Esther and Rosa watched him from the rocking chairs on the porch, tucked in with quilts while the fog transformed them into ghosts.

  How could Rosa leave when things were so unresolved between them? How could she not say goodbye, not tell Allen he was going to have a kid? Esther wished Allen had let her hug him. They could have cried together about losing Rosa.

  Esther tried to imagine her sister pregnant. Could she have a baby underground? Or an abortion? Would pregnancy change how Rosa felt about the idea of going to prison? Was that why she left? Esther tried to picture the events of the last few months unfolding in a different way. Would she have acted any differently if she’d known Rosa was pregnant?

  Over the next weeks—weeks with no word of Rosa—Esther speculated endlessly about those questions. While she folded laundry, she worried if Rosa had clean clothes and a warm place to sleep. While she fed Molly, she pictured Rosa nursing a newborn on the run. While the cops questioned her about Rosa’s whereabouts, she tried to picture Rosa and a whimpering infant wandering the narrow streets of an unknown city. What did underground really mean, anyway, when it wasn’t some romantic escapade, but day-to-day life with a baby? Even harder, probably, with a mixed-race baby. Would she face prejudice? And how would she even afford to have the baby without accessing her health insurance?

  Thanksgiving that year was a mournful holiday. Mama made Danny’s favorite stuffing, but it was dry and hard to swallow without him there to take a third portion. Esther tried to eat the pumpkin pie Rosa loved so much, but it wedged like sweet cement in her throat. Mama and Pop were mute. Aunt Miriam and Uncle Max were broken. Rosa would have sparked the conversation around that table, would have brought up the genocide of the Native Americans while waving a huge drumstick in the air, keeping everybody engaged and arguing at once. After dinner, Esther washed dishes and Jake held Molly on his lap and read Goodnight, Moon over and over. Deborah chased her toddler daughter around the dining room while her husband Bubba watched the football game. As they got ready to leave, Mama hugged Esther for a long time.

  “I’m so sorry,” Esther said. “It’s my fault.”

  “Shush. Rosa brought this on herself.”

  Esther shook her head. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Riding the bus home, Esther stared out the window at the city streets dark with rain.

  “Wasn’t Allen invited?” Jake asked.

  “Sure, but he told Mama he wasn’t celebrating anything this year.”

  “I’m worried about your parents.”

  Esther stroked Molly’s sleep-limp hand. “Yeah. They seemed subdued.”

  “Subdued? More like catatonic. They may never recover.”

  We may never recover, Esther thought.

  December 11 was the one-year anniversary of the day Danny stepped on a mine near Khe Sanh. Esther sat with Molly on the shag rug in the living room building a tower, counting out each wooden block as she placed it on top. On one and two, Molly watched, her arms flapping like chubby wings. On the count of three, she swooped, both hands swatting, sending the blocks tumbling onto the rug. She rocked forward, leaned her hands on the floor and laughed, a deep rumble starting in her belly and bubbling up through her toothless mouth. Then she settled back, lifted her hands, and waited for the next tower.

  Danny would have loved the game, but he never had the chance to meet Molly.

  The last time Esther saw him was at his sister Deborah’s wedding, spiffy in his dress uniform, out on a weekend pass between Basic Training and Vietnam. Esther had always had mixed feelings about Danny and Deborah’s family, even though Danny was her favorite cousin and Aunt Miriam was Mama’s only living sister. The two families were close, despite Aunt Miriam being the kind of person who always left out the crucial ingredient—on purpose—when you asked her for a recipe. Mama and Miriam disagreed vehemently about religion and politics, so they compromised by alternating holidays between the two households. One year they held a traditional Seder at Miriam and Max’s house, and the next a secular celebration of liberation at Mama and Pop’s. Crazy, but they never missed a year.

  Danny’s military uniform wasn’t the only problem with Deborah’s wedding. Esther hated the showy ice sculptures and hand-sequined dresses and imported orchid arrangements. Rosa said she couldn’t stomach watching Danny accept the back slaps of the older men, who talked about their wars over cocktails decorated with small paper American flags. And then there was the bachelor party, which Jake and Allen described in detail, with a stripper shimmying out of a cardboard cake. Worse of all, the sisters agreed, was the rehearsal dinner at the ritzy suburban country club that had only started admitting Jews a few years earlier, and still routed people with dark skin to the service entrance. Allen refused to attend but insisted that the rest of the family go.

  “Hypocrisy,” the sisters whispered to each other when Bubba and Deborah stood under the chuppa, the small bulge of pregnancy mostly hidden by the satin folds of her dress.

  A few months later, when Danny stepped on a land mine, Esther never quite forgave Deborah, even though logically Danny’s death had nothing to do with the awfulness of the wedding. That winter, Esther started working on a series of collage paintings: Segmented plastic worms wove in and out of lace wedding veils. Yellow spatters of napalm on torn strips of tuxedo alternated with ripped muslin painted with rice fields and jungle scenes.

  She started a new alphabet block tower for Molly. Would she ever make art again?

  An envelope shot through the stamped metal mail slot. It rode into the room on a chill draft and settled on the rug, bumping into the letter “B.” Picking it up, Esther recognized her sister’s handwriting. She lunged for the door and yanked it open, ran down the hall to the stairs, but there was no one there, and no postmark. Back in the apartment she found Molly sprawled on the rug, whispering nonsense syllables to herself. The room was silent except for the purr of the yellow kitten. Esther opened the envelope, unfolded the single sheet of paper, and read.

  Dear Esther,

  I never expected you would go through with it. Testify against me like that. How could you betray everything we believe in, everything generations of our family believed in? You are a traitor to yourself, to me, to Mama and Pop, to Leah and Tovah. You are a coward.

  I’m ashamed of you.

  Your daughter will grow up ashamed of you.

  We are no longer sisters.

  Stunned, numb, Esther refolded the paper in thirds, rubbing her thumbnail along the crease to sharpen it. She had to hide the letter. She would think about Rosa’s words later, figure out how to dull their edge, but Jake would never understand or forgive. He would hate Rosa even more.

  Molly had fallen asleep on the rug and Esther covered her with a blanket. She knew just the place for Rosa’s letter. She took a small rectangular box from the desk. The fabric cover was red, embroidered with a stylized Asian scene—curved wooden bridge, willows dipping their branches into the faded blue water. Inside nested four smaller boxes with the landscape replicated on their covers, each tiny box stitched with a quarter of the scene. Ten-year-old Esther had been enchanted when the gift arrived from her Japanese pen pal. Rosa had been envious.

  Esther opened the box with the weeping willows and removed a four-inch coil of braid. Three colors of hair braided together: red, deep brown, and gray. Rosa, Esther, and Leah.

&n
bsp; Grandma Leah had died during breakfast when Esther was sixteen. Leah had had a mild stroke several months earlier, but was getting stronger and her speech was coming back. That morning she was sitting at the kitchen table, her chair pushed up close so cereal drips wouldn’t stain her chenille bathrobe. Esther sat next to her at the breakfast table, looking down at the geometry book in its brown paper cover resting on her lap. She spooned milk-limp Wheaties into her mouth while memorizing the formulas for volumes of cones and cylinders for her third period test.

  There was a clunk and Esther looked up to see Leah’s head resting on the green-checked oilcloth. Her forehead landed on the paring knife and a streak of blood pushed through the smashed banana.

  In the rush of activity and tears and the ambulance, what Esther remembered most was her mother fussing about the cut on Leah’s forehead. Mama had been half-dressed for work with fuzzy bunny bedroom slippers over her stockings. “Is she still bleeding?” Mama kept asking. “Get me another bandage for her forehead.”

  Rosa took a bus home from Ann Arbor, and the next morning the sisters had a few minutes alone with their grandmother’s body in the burgundy family room at the funeral home. Rosa used Leah’s tiny sewing scissors, shaped like a silver heron, to snip off a generous lock of hair. Then she solemnly cut a similar length from her own red mane, and from Esther’s deep brown curls. The sisters made three braids, fastened at each end with a strand of hair. They tucked Leah’s braid into the left sleeve of her cornflower blue blouse, up out of sight.

  “Say goodbye,” Rosa said.

  “I love you, Grandma Leah,” Esther whispered. “I’ll never forget you.”

  Then it was Rosa’s turn. “Too bad you hooked up with the Mensheviks.” She spoke into the wrinkled ear, with authority born of the Comparative Revolutions course she was taking.

  “What’s that mean?” Esther asked.

  “Not revolutionary enough.”

  “Like me?” Esther asked. It wasn’t fair that Rosa was named for a revolutionary and all Esther got was a Persian queen no one remembered from one Purim to the next.

  Rosa raised one eyebrow, a gesture she had appropriated from Uncle Max in sixth grade and practiced until it was perfect. She leaned again close to Leah’s ear. “You cared about your world. You were a freedom fighter. I’ll never forget you.”

  Esther had been so impressed at her sister’s words, so envious of everything Rosa was learning. Just Rosa’s luck, to arrive in Ann Arbor at the perfect time. When the four black students in Greensboro sat in at that lunch counter six months after Rosa got to the university, Rosa organized support pickets. That sit-in sparked a whole movement, and Rosa was right in the middle.

  Esther wrapped the braid around her pinky finger, admiring the contrasting colors. She slid it back into the tiny fabric box and then into the larger one, wondering if Rosa still cherished her braid, or if it was part of her life left behind. She folded the awful letter again so it would fit under the lid, and buried the red box in the back of the bottom desk drawer.

  She wiped the tears from her cheek with the corner of the baby blanket and then rearranged it to cover the rusty fuzz on Molly’s head, protecting her from the chill creeping under the door.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jake

  On the bus ride home from the hospital, Jake worried about the ten-year-old in sickle cell crisis in intensive care. He found Esther in the rocking chair, holding Molly and weeping. He dropped his coat on the floor and kneeled next to her.

  “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “Molly’s hair. How can I stop thinking about Rosa when I’m reminded of her every time I look at my baby?”

  “We could dye her hair? Shave her head?”

  Esther sobbed harder and buried her face in Molly’s neck.

  Jake stood up and turned toward the dark window facing the street. “This city isn’t healthy for you. Our friends don’t talk to us. You barely leave the house.”

  “People look at me like I have a fatal disease and it’s contagious. The bookstore cut my position. Even my sisters in my women’s group won’t talk to me. Everyone’s on her side.”

  Jake wished he knew what to say. He was furious with Rosa but still found himself looking carefully at redheads on the bus, scanning women’s faces as he walked through the crowded ER waiting room.

  “Even Maggie won’t return my phone calls. I heard she has a new girlfriend, but that never affected our friendship before.”

  “Let’s move,” Jake said. “Go someplace new.”

  “Go where? This is home.”

  “We’ll make a new home. The three of us.”

  Esther shook her head. “How could I do that, Jake, how could I leave my parents? Then they’d have no one; no daughters, no grandkids, nobody.”

  “They’ve got each other,” Jake said. “And Miriam and Max. You’ll visit often, with Molly. I’m worried about you, about us.”

  He picked up his jacket from the floor and hung it on the wroughtiron coat tree from Goodwill. He was fond of Esther’s parents; they had become his family, too. His own parents barely survived the death of his brother, then died in a fiery car crash a month after he started med school. He suspected they waited until he was set on a life course before ending their pain.

  Leaving town was definitely the right thing to do, but Jake wasn’t anxious to see Esther’s reaction to his news. He wasn’t sure how to tell her.

  She looked at him funny, tilted her head to the side. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been looking into transferring to another residency program,” Jake admitted. He hadn’t said anything about his plans, in case he wasn’t accepted. Esther couldn’t deal with another disappointment.

  “Without discussing it with me?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t sure it would work out.” Not a good reason, he knew that. “I got a call today from the University of Massachusetts. They offered me a place and I took it.”

  “Boston?”

  “The western part of the state. You’ll love it.”

  “No I won’t. I’ll hate it. How could you make a big decision like that on your own? We’re equal partners. Haven’t you learned anything from the women’s movement?” Esther squeezed her eyes closed and leaned down to Molly again.

  “It could be just for a few years,” Jake offered, then stopped. He understood that the conversation was over. She was right; he should have talked to her. But she hadn’t been easy to talk to in the past couple of months. “I’m sorry.”

  She probably wouldn’t love western Massachusetts, not at first. But something had to change. If they left Detroit, maybe it would break Rosa’s spell. Esther would learn to be happy with just Molly and him. They could move there for a year or two, while he finished his residency. Maybe Mama and Pop would sell the store, come live near them. He kneeled again next to the rocking chair, put his arms around Esther and rested his head on her breast. Molly looked at him.

  “Don’t worry, Monkey,” he whispered and stroked her cheek. “I won’t get in the way of your dinner.” He inhaled Molly’s milky fragrance. For a split second he remembered the patchouli oil Rosa wore, how she had dabbed some just under his nostrils during his first clinical rotation, when he admitted that the smell of sickness made him nauseous. He pushed the thought away. This was home, the safe place he and Esther had created with Molly. He had to protect that place, despite Esther’s inevitable reaction.

  “One other thing,” he said.

  “What other thing?” Esther asked.

  “We’ve got to leave the past behind. Start over with a clean slate.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Promise me that we won’t tell Molly about this stuff. About Rosa or the demonstration or the trial.”

  “Not talk about my sister?”

  “Rosa will never forgive you. Our only way forward is to leave her behind.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “How can you not? This is very importan
t to our family. Promise?”

  Esther didn’t say no, and Jake pretended not to notice the flooding of her eyes. He knew how hard this was for Esther, but it was the best way. At least he hoped that twenty years from now they’d talk about how they made it through these awful times. His knees hurt on the hard floor, but he knelt a moment longer in the nest of her unspoken promise, savoring the milky aroma of shelter.

  Two weeks later, their living room was a muddle of cartons and trash bags stuffed with books and clothes. Packing up the apartment was challenging. Molly had mastered crawling and couldn’t be trusted for a single, unobserved second. While Esther emptied the front closet, Molly played in a makeshift playpen of cardboard boxes. Jake packed books into cartons and tried to gauge Esther’s frame of mind.

  “Here, Mol.” Esther picked dust bunnies off a soft fabric ball and rolled it to Molly, who startled at the jingle of the bells stitched onto the surface. Then she laughed and grabbed for the ball. Esther scooped the sleeping cat from the open carton labeled “Art Supplies” and turned back to the closet jumble. She gathered a handful of old paintbrushes, the bristles stained with shadows of color, and flung them into the trash.

  At the noise, Jake looked up from a stack of paperback novels. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m finished with art.”

  “That’s nuts. That’s why we’re moving. So you can get your life back.”

  “I can’t paint anymore.”

  “You’ve got to.” Jake reached into the trash bag to retrieve the paintbrushes. He handed them to Esther with a flourish. “Please.”

  Stroking the velvety bristles back and forth against her upper lip, she looked absent, like her mind was elsewhere. Jake picked up a brush and stroked his own face with the soft bristles. He wanted to touch Esther like that now, with the whispery graze of brush on skin. He half-closed his eyes to blur the present image, to remember Esther at camp.

  The summer of 1960, Jake hadn’t planned to work at camp again, but his hospital orderly position fell through at the last minute. Loon Lake was desperate for counselors and he needed work. During the second week of the session, he sat alone at the edge of the ball field eating an apple and watching his campers play nobody-wins softball. Camp was boring and he wished he had looked harder for a job in the city. He shoved the apple core into his mouth and licked the juice from his fingers. It had gotten Jake teased before, the way he ate every last bit of the fruit, seeds and core and all.