Her Sister's Tattoo

by Ellen Meeropol

  “We’re cousins, aren’t we?”

  CHAPTER 33

  Molly

  “Stop it, Molly. You’re going to tip us over.”

  I knew I should take it easy, but I liked Emma being the one caught off-balance. I jabbed the paddle deep into the water and with five jerky strokes propelled the canoe out of the boat cove toward the middle of the lake, leaving the other canoes bunched near the shore.

  Emma’s fingers clenched the metal rim, her stiff arms trying to balance the wobbling boat. “I mean it. Slow down. I told you I can’t swim.”

  I lifted my paddle from the water. Poking through the afternoon haze, the peak of Crooked Mountain looked like a circus clown’s head, tilting to the side as if posing a silent question to the lake.

  “Okay. Let’s drift for a while.” I rested the paddle across the canoe and sat tall, like the illustration in a book I loved as a kid, about an Indian boy paddling his canoe all the way to the ocean. Naturally I was always the Indian princess, with long braids hanging down the front of my fringed buckskin shirt. Even though the fringed shirt would look pretty silly under the bright orange life jacket. Even though I knew I was too old for that sort of fantasy.

  “Thank you.” Emma bowed at the waist with exaggerated politeness, her hands waving in imitation of courtly respect.

  I returned the gesture, flourishing my new camp cap stitched with the logo of an origami crane. The canoe wobbled and Emma grabbed both sides. “Stop it,” she yelled. “You’re awful.”

  “Be nice to me. Remember who knows how to paddle and who’s afraid of the water.” Being with Emma reminded me of my arguments with Oliver: fierce on the outside and tender inside.

  She pointed at a small wooded island. “If you paddle over there, slowly, I’ll show you the blueberries.”

  Five minutes later, our canoe drifted alongside the thick berry bushes overhanging the water.

  “They’re so tiny. Nothing like the blueberries we get at home.” I picked a leaf out of my mouth. “Tell me about your mom.” I swirled my fingers in the water. In the days since we visited the archives, I’d been curious about Rosa. “She sounds so, I don’t know, ferocious.”

  “She is, kind of. But when we walk around the city, she keeps folded-up dollar bills in her pocket for the homeless. They remind her of people in prison. The discards, she calls them.”

  “Is it strange having your mom be famous?” I splashed at a water bug floating on spindly crooked legs on the surface of the lake.

  “Sometimes. People come up to her in restaurants, even on the street. They recognize her and want to talk.”

  “What about all those years in prison? She went away and left you alone.”

  “Not on purpose. Besides, I wasn’t alone. I had my dad, and Aunt Maggie.”

  “Why do you call her Aunt?” I wished I had the courage to point out that Esther was really Emma’s aunt, but I didn’t.

  “Maggie was like a second mom. She watched me after school and when Dad came home, we’d eat together.”

  “Didn’t you worry that Maggie and your Dad would, you know, fall in love?”

  Emma looked at me funny, then giggled. “Maggie likes girls.” After a moment, she grabbed the paddle and dipped it into the water. “Let’s go back to camp.”

  I showed her how to push away the water with the flat side of the paddle, then turn it to slip through the air. We zigzagged toward shore.

  “How come you know so much about canoes?” Emma asked, once she got the rhythm.

  “There’s a pond near our house. How come you know so little?”

  “If you don’t know how to swim, you don’t choose canoeing for Free Choice, do you?”

  “Why didn’t you learn to swim?”

  “When I was little, I was a counselor’s brat. I spent all summer on people’s laps. Everyone thought that since I was here all those years, I must’ve learned how to swim. But I never did. Besides, I’m terrified of the water.”

  “I can’t believe you grew up without a mother. What’s it like now, having her home?”

  Emma peeled a long translucent curl of dead skin from her sunburned thigh. “Sometimes it’s hard. Like she wanted me to spend Saturdays doing childcare at the battered women’s shelter. I wanted to audition for a teen theater group—they write plays and produce them. When I chose acting, she didn’t say anything, but I knew she was disappointed in me.”

  “She expects a lot of you, doesn’t she?” I appreciated Esther letting me decide stuff for myself. “And does she really give money to beggars? Esther would help them find a job and a place to live.”

  “What’s she like? Your mom.”

  “She likes vegetable gardens and painting. Every summer she volunteers with Jake at CP Camp, doing art workshops with the kids.”

  Emma hooted. “CP! Your parents volunteer for the Communist Party?”

  “CP means cerebral palsy.”

  We looked at each other and burst into laughter, wobbling the canoe. Emma stiffened and grabbed both sides.

  “But it’s not funny.” I remembered what was happening at home. “Esther’s really sick.”

  “So why did you come here?”

  “She wanted me to.”

  We dragged the canoe halfway onto the soggy shore, turned it over, and tied it up under the low branches of a blue spruce. Straddling the canoe’s rounded belly, we dangled our bare feet in the water. Our silence hung like a low cloud over the lake.

  “I guess I don’t exactly hate camp,” I said after a while. My big toe painted a figure eight in the murky shallows, sending eddies in all directions. “I hate feeling different.”

  Emma slapped her foot hard on the water surface, starting ripples that collided with my toe eddies. “I know. I used to go to a private school with lots of leftie kids. Last year my dad transferred me to public school. The kids there don’t like me.” She paused. “Or maybe I don’t like them. Anyway, I don’t fit in. If I couldn’t hang out with my camp friends on weekends, I’d go crazy.”

  I couldn’t imagine Emma feeling out of place anywhere.

  “One time in first grade,” Emma continued, “I was invited to a birthday party for a new kid in the building. When my dad came to pick me up, I asked him if we could buy some of those little round green things because they were good. Everyone laughed at me. How was I supposed to know? We supported the Farm Workers. We boycotted grapes. We didn’t eat them.”

  I couldn’t imagine my family not eating grapes because of a farm worker we didn’t even know. It seemed like such a faraway kind of reason. But there were different rules at Loon Lake. What mattered here was that Emma’s mom was a hero, and that rubbed off on Emma. “Here everyone loves you.”

  “I belong here. There are other kids like me. Luisa—she’s a CIT— her mom is a political prisoner, and Jamal’s dad was the tenant rights organizer those landlords in Brooklyn murdered.”

  “Well, I don’t belong and I want to go home.”

  “I think I’m supposed to hate you.” Emma tossed a pebble into the water. The expanding circles spun outwards and slapped the lily pads. “Because of what your mother did to mine.”

  “But our mothers’ fight has nothing to do with us.”

  “Maybe not. But if I told people here about who your mother is, what she did, how do you think they’d treat you?”

  CHAPTER 34

  Molly

  The next morning, the out-of-tune bugle reveille sounded as discouraged as I felt. I wasn’t hungry but I’d promised Sue not to skip meals. Gray clouds hung heavy on the treetops, suffocating the morning. After breakfast was co-op and my job was weeding. Rows of alternating Big Red tomatoes and basil plants stretched forever. I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist and watched the dirt dribble onto my thigh. When I tried to brush it off, the dots smeared into dark streaks.

  Weeding made me think about Esther. Even on chemo, she planted vegetables and herbs and flowers every spring. A few weeks before camp, we spen
t the morning cutting the bottoms off paper cups to make collars for the fragile tomato plants. We pushed the collars two inches into the soil surface, to protect the tender stems from cutworms. “So many dangers,” Esther had muttered under her breath, patting the soil firmly around the collars. I wasn’t sure if she was still talking about the garden.

  I sat cross-legged in the dirt and pulled Esther’s most recent letter out of my pocket.

  Are you having fun, Mol? Have you made any good friends? I hope you’re not too homesick. Oliver’s soccer camp is fine. He’s so tired at the end of the day he doesn’t even argue. He misses you—not that he’d admit it, of course. Jake is working hard, as usual. My chemo isn’t too bad. Only two more treatments. All of us are looking forward to visiting day—less than two weeks! Remember to write and tell me what foods I should bring for the picnic, okay?

  Emma appeared at the end of the row. “You daydreaming?”

  “I’m taking a break,” I said. Was she still mad at me? Was I still angry about what she said to me?

  “It’s time to quit,” Emma said. “Co-op’s over.”

  Leaning against the shady trunk of the great oak tree, we fanned our sweaty bellies by stretching out the hems of our T-shirts and whipping them up and down. We kicked off our sneakers and dug bare toes into the faint coolness of long grass.

  “About yesterday,” I started.

  Emma held up her hand. “I’m sorry for what I said, about telling people about your mother. I’d never do that.”

  I didn’t think she would. Emma wasn’t that mean. Still, I paused before asking, “I was wondering, have you written your family about meeting me?”

  “No way.”

  “Me neither.” Actually I had been thinking about nothing else since last night. Should I tell my parents I met Emma?

  A redwing blackbird swooped and landed on the grass, shoulders aflame with orange. The redwings flocked around Jake’s bird feeders at home. Were he and Esther watching them right this minute? Were they arguing about sending me to camp? Why did Esther insist I come here, even though Jake said, “Anywhere but Loon Lake”?

  Then I got it. I mean, I figured it out. Rosa was the her Esther needed to make peace with, in case she died. Esther wanted me to come to this camp and find out for myself about Rosa, so I could fix things. What did she think I could do, when the adults couldn’t get it right? Jake didn’t think it was a good idea, because he was scared. I was scared too. And pissed off. And a little intrigued too, to be totally honest.

  “What is it, Molly?”

  “I’m just thinking. On visiting day, maybe we should try to get Rosa and Esther together.”

  Emma shook her head. “Bad idea. My mom wants nothing to do with Esther. Let’s just worry about our skit.”

  “But Esther’s sick.”

  “I don’t think that would matter to Rosa.”

  “Well, it should matter. My mom could die.” I got up and brushed the garden dirt from my shorts. “We have to do something. Our mothers screwed up and they don’t know how to fix it.”

  “Your mother screwed up,” Emma said.

  “No,” I insisted, hearing Sue’s voice in my head. “Both of them.”

  I looked at Emma’s face, waiting for her answer but she didn’t say anything. I guess she didn’t agree with Sue and me.

  Three days later, Emma and I stood barefoot in the grass near the edge of the Heart. We stared at each other, our noses less than six inches apart. We did not speak. Dressed in black shorts and black tank tops, our bare feet were planted shoulder-width apart with knees slightly bent. Our hair, still wet from Free Swim, was tucked under black baseball caps worn backwards. Our four hands hung down at our sides, palms facing palms, pinky fingers not quite touching thighs. We concentrated on imagining ourselves standing on either side of a piece of glass, six feet square.

  I slowly elevated my right hand to the height of my shoulder. Emma followed with her left, a mere split second behind, precisely maintaining the crucial six inches of space between corresponding body parts. Then my left hand and Emma’s right. Trunk shift to one side, and then to the other; four times this exaggerated motion. Always those few inches, always together. Then, subtly, Emma took over the lead. We balanced on one foot, the other in stylized slow motion kick to the side, our big toes almost touching, but never quite. Hands high above our heads with fingers spread. We mirrored each other perfectly, as if we had known each other from birth. As if our families had rented cottages next door for the same week every summer at the Cape, and we folk-danced together every Wednesday night on the Wellfleet pier.

  Then Emma stuck out her right hip, letting a sultry pout break the blank expression painted on her face. I erupted into laughter and collapsed onto the grass. “No fair. How can I copy that?”

  “Tell me again, what do you call this thing we’re doing?”

  “Mirror movements. One of Jake’s patients couldn’t move one arm— even to eat or write—without the other one doing the same thing.”

  “Like we’re doing, only there are two of us.”

  “Yeah. His patient couldn’t help it, but my friend Rachel and I thought it was a neat idea, like a dance. We used to practice a lot.”

  “This doesn’t look much like a dance to me,” Emma said. “We have five days to get good enough so we’re not laughed out of camp on visiting day.”

  “What are we going to do, speaking of visiting day?”

  Emma frowned. “You mean about getting our mothers together? It’s a bad idea. We should be plotting how to keep them apart.”

  “Maybe.” I nestled my face into the cool grass. The earthy smell reminded me of home. What I really wanted was to forget everything Emma told me about Esther. To be a regular kid at camp, even if I didn’t love the place.

  Emma started to talk about her mother, about how mixed up she felt when Rosa made speeches—proud and scared and hopeful. Then she asked about my parents, so I cupped my hands around my lips like Esther taught me and crooned the forlorn call of the coyotes in the fields and the yips of the pups. I showed Emma how Jake extended his neck and flapped his arms to imitate the adolescent birds who followed their parents around our yard begging for food.

  Emma laughed. “I’ve never seen my dad impersonate a bird. What about religion?”

  “In my family? Not much.”

  “Whenever religion comes up, mom quotes that ‘opium of the people’ line. Except for one holiday.”

  “Passover, right?” I grinned.

  “We always do a Seder,” Emma said. “No God, but lots of folk songs.”

  “Us too. Do you guys have Miriam’s cup and a new set of plagues?”

  “Toxic pesticides and nuclear weapons and homophobia and poverty.”

  “Yeah, no more locusts.”

  Emma grimaced. “This is like that stupid Disney movie where twins found each other at summer camp and switched identities to get their parents back together.”

  “This isn’t Disneyland,” I said, hugging my knees. “And I bet this is way harder to fix than divorce. Maybe we should forget about visiting day.”

  “I’m starting to think maybe we should try to get them together,” Emma said. “Although you’d think that being flesh and blood sisters, even having the same tattoo, they’d be able to figure this out for themselves.”

  “Same what?”

  “The tattoos, you know, on their boobs? The little red star?” Emma looked less certain. “Doesn’t Esther have one too?”

  Ew. I had no idea. Which breast was it? The one she still had, or the one that was cut off and buried, or whatever they did with sick body parts? I bit my lip. Esther must have worked hard to hide the tattoo from me, during all those beach vacations and campground showers. I covered my face with both hands. It was bad enough that Emma knew secrets about her family. It was unbearable that she knew personal things about my own mother that I didn’t know.

  Emma stood and pulled me to my feet. “Come on. I want to show you so
mething.”

  At the peace monument in the center of the field, Emma kneeled at the edge of the day lilies. She pointed to the grass next to her and I sat down. From our low vantage point, the metal birds burst upwards from their flowery home, catching and tossing dazzles of sunlight.

  “I love the cranes,” Emma said. “Don’t you?”

  I nodded. Then Emma started crawling, right into the middle of the lily patch. So I followed her. At the base of the steel sculpture she brushed grass and dead leaves from the foundation, then licked her finger and rubbed the dirt from a small rectangular plaque. She rocked back on her heels to give me room to see.

  I examined the tiny letters: “Peace Cranes. Esther Tovah Levin, 1958.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Your mother was the artist,” Emma said. “Esther designed the peace memorial.”

  The evening before visiting day, as two hundred voices swelled on the chorus of “Two Good Arms,” I admired Esther’s peace cranes flying in the flickering light of the campfire and thought how amazing it was, that until two weeks earlier when Charlie King visited camp with his song, I had barely heard of Sacco and Vanzetti. The last harmonies evaporated into the New Hampshire dusk and I shifted my position against the rough bark of the massive oak.

  Maybe I was imagining it, but I felt the rhythm of sap flowing up and down its trunk. The old white oak was huge and its gnarly roots had pushed up the ground around it. You could stand on one side of the tree and its root-bound hill, and not see a group of people on the other side. That’s why Emma and I chose that tree as the site for our big plan. The next day, my family would picnic on one side, and Emma’s on the other. We would keep them apart until the perfect moment for the big reunion.

  The flames ignited the evening, making my vision crackle and shimmer. I still wasn’t sure about our plan. The sisters’ reunion might be a bad, bad idea.

  CHAPTER 35

  Molly

  On visiting day, we Tubman bunk campers woke up spectacularly early. The breezy mountain air felt clean and new, blowing away the cobwebs of sleep. Tingly with anticipation, we all waited on the bunk steps after breakfast for the buses and cars to start arriving. Sharon had scrubbed the sparkly green polish from her fingernails and toenails the evening before, while everyone else cleaned the bunk.