Tanya didn’t know who she despised more in that moment. Jesse or her father.
* * *
—
IT WAS WHEN TANYA was in high school that she began to seek out Simone, when they started to form a relationship separate from the rest of the family. At the beginning, Tanya didn’t talk to her stepmother about anything huge. She didn’t tell Simone about what had happened, that night with Nessa and Dan; it was years before Tanya told anyone about that.
But she spoke with her stepmother about her high school boyfriend, Dylan Starr, and her friends at school whom she’d met through Dylan. She told Simone about the classes she was taking, where she wanted to go to college, what she wanted to do when she grew up. She talked to Simone about Nessa. It had taken a long time for Tanya to understand that there was a sadness inside her sister, a sadness that had a way of rubbing off on Tanya, that seemed to leak down from the top bunk to the bottom bunk each night.
Before she understood that, she’d been furious with her sister. Falling asleep and waking up had started to feel impossible with Nessa right above her. Something as harmless as hearing her sister yawn might set Tanya off. And when she heard her sister moving above her, the faint rock of the mattress—Nessa went about it quietly, as though Tanya wouldn’t be able to hear what was going on just above her—Tanya felt the urge to throw her feet up, kick hard onto the bottom of her sister’s mattress, scream at her to stop.
Tanya oscillated between feeling angry at Nessa and sad for her, and it was the feelings of sadness that wrecked Tanya, that made her want to run as far away from home as she possibly could—away from Nessa and their mother and the claustrophobic air that lived, bottled up, in their house on Winter Street.
A decade passed before Tanya told anybody about what happened at Dan’s house. To this day, she’s only told two people.
First, she told Simone. This was several years ago, around the time Tanya started to fall in love with Eitan. She didn’t tell Simone very much. Just the bare bones: the email address, the beers in the living room, the bedroom he brought her to. She didn’t talk about him at all—about the things he did or said. She didn’t tell Simone his name and when Simone asked for it, Tanya said she didn’t know it.
“You have to tell Eitan,” Simone had insisted, afterward. “Not for him, but for you. For your relationship.”
“It’s humiliating.”
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about, Tanya.” She leaned in and took Tanya’s hands in her own, which had surprised Tanya. Usually they didn’t touch one another, except to hug hello and goodbye. “Nothing,” Simone had repeated. It was the first time Tanya wondered if this might be true.
“You can’t tell anyone.” Tanya was trying hard not to cry. “You can’t tell my dad.”
“I won’t.” Simone squeezed her hands. “I love you very much.”
And though she didn’t say it back, she knew that Simone understood that Tanya did love her. That she’d gone to her for a reason.
So she did tell Eitan, a few weeks later—and it was Eitan to whom she told the details.
Now, she looks at her stepmother, sipping her coffee and soy milk, and imagines what it would be like if she were Simone’s daughter, and not Lorraine’s. She wonders how her life would be different; how she would be different. It’s a pointless line of questioning, of course. She wouldn’t be Tanya at all, if that were the case. She’d be an entirely different person.
Tanya is her mother’s daughter. There’s no getting around that. The same undeniable way that she is Nessa’s sister.
They share more than just genetic material, more than just history. When she and Nessa were little, they called it the Wild Thing; a certain intuition for danger. Though now Tanya wonders if it was less of an intuition and more of a predisposition—maybe even a wish. Tanya reaches up and fingers the scar on the back of her head, the slight divot invisible to the eye—discernible only by touch—a physical manifestation of the Wild Thing. Like so many things, she and her sister don’t talk about the Wild Thing anymore, not after what happened and not after Tanya got hurt. Though Tanya is certain that Nessa must still get it sometimes, just as Tanya does. It isn’t the kind of thing that simply disappears.
1999
The song playing in the orthodontist’s office was one of those bouncy love songs that made Nessa want to dance. Inside her sneakers, she flexed her toes to the beat, while keeping the rest of her body still.
Dr. Paterson was pressing down hard on her bottom molars and a small animal noise escaped from the back of her throat.
“Bite for me,” he said. “Good.”
With one eye Nessa took a peek. Dr. Paterson’s face was just inches from her own. Up close she could see the pores on his nose, zillions of pinpoint dots, all moist with oil. He leaned in closer, one of his eyebrow hairs squirreling out, almost touching her cheek. It was longer and coarser than the rest, like a pubic hair.
“Almost done,” he said.
Nessa closed her eyes and squeezed her hands together, inhaling through her nose. Dr. Paterson smelled like soap from a doctor’s office and something else all his own.
“These are going to be sore for a few days, Nessa. You’re going to want to stick to soft foods for about a week.” He snapped his gloves off and tossed them away, then slid his wedding band back on his finger.
Nessa swiped her tongue over her teeth and pretended not to be upset. The inside of her mouth felt too small with all this new equipment. Dr. Paterson held up a hand mirror and Nessa gave it a fake smile. She looked like a machine.
“Two years,” he said. “If things progress the way I want them to, maybe less.” Then he waved his hand and she walked out and down the hallway toward the waiting room where her mother and Tanya were waiting.
She noticed it right away when she walked in: the shimmering curve against her mother’s collarbone. It had been three days since she’d hung the necklace on her mother’s bedside lamp and she’d started to think Lorraine would never notice it.
As though she could hear her thoughts, her mother’s hand flew up and briefly touched the chain. Lorraine set her magazine down, smiling. “Hi, sweetie. Let’s see ’em.”
Nessa bared her teeth.
Tanya glanced up curiously from her book and Lorraine came closer to get a look. “How do they feel?”
“Kind of sore.” Nessa didn’t dare look at the necklace directly, but as she stared into her mother’s face, she could see it, a little ways down.
“What color did you pick?” Tanya asked.
“Pink and green,” Nessa said. “Every other.” Nessa closed her lips over her mouth. She was going to have to learn how to smile without teeth.
* * *
—
ON THE RIDE HOME, Nessa sat up front with their mother. “I’m going to make noodle soup for dinner,” Lorraine said. “The receptionist gave me a list of braces-friendly foods. Jell-O, mac and cheese, ice cream. Soup, of course.” She listed them on her fingers. “All your favorites.”
“I don’t want soup,” Tanya said from the backseat.
“Today is Nessa’s day, Tee.”
Nessa glanced behind her. Tanya was hunched over her book, her hair spilling onto the pages. One of her thumbs rested at the base of her nose.
Nessa didn’t want soup either, but she didn’t say anything. She liked the sound of Nessa’s day. Her mother glanced over at her. They caught eyes with each other and smiled.
* * *
—
THERE WEREN’T ENOUGH NOODLES in Lorraine’s noodle soup to make it seem like real food, so Tanya found saltines from the cabinet and dunked them into the broth, ate them like cookies in milk. “Want some?” her sister asked, offering up the sleeve of crackers. Nessa shook her head. Maybe the upside of braces would be that she’d eat less.
After dinner Lorraine asked them if it was oka
y if she went out for a drink with a friend. A drink with a friend meant going on a date. They both said sure and Nessa followed her mother upstairs to watch while she got ready. Lorraine undressed and put on a new pair of underwear, then disappeared into her closet. The dress she emerged with was the black one Nessa had seen on the dating website.
Lorraine shimmied it down over her hips and adjusted the fabric so that it fit snugly over her chest. Years before, to make them laugh, Lorraine used to lean over so her breasts hung like coconuts. “This is Mommy,” she would say, squeezing one. “This is Daddy. And they kiss together.” And then she would press her breasts together as though they were kissing, turning her cleavage into a deep ravine. “Do the boob thing!” they commanded sometimes, and she would do it, and all of them would laugh. Since their father had moved out, Lorraine had stopped doing the boob thing and Nessa and Tanya no longer asked her to.
Lorraine examined her reflection in the bathroom mirror and Nessa waited for her eyes to flicker over the necklace, but her mother’s gaze moved from her hair to her face down to her chest without stopping to linger anywhere in between.
“What do you think?” Lorraine asked. “Up or down?” She pulled the clip out so that her hair fell in waves over her shoulders.
“Up,” Nessa said, though she wasn’t sure why. Her mother looked prettier with her hair down. And then, unable to stop herself: “I like your necklace.”
“Thanks, sweetie.” Lorraine gathered her hair again and held it in a clump on top of her head, made her eyes big, and flared her nostrils. “You really like this better?”
“Yeah.” Nessa paused. “Where’d you get it?”
“CVS, I think.”
“No. The necklace.”
“Oh.” She touched it again, like she’d done at Dr. Paterson’s office. “Dad gave it to me a while ago.”
Her mother’s lie came out so quick and easy Nessa wondered if Lorraine really did think it was a gift from her father. Maybe he had given her a gold necklace at one point.
Lorraine cupped her hands over her mouth and exhaled, then poured mouthwash into a cup and whirled it around.
“Who are you going out with?” Nessa asked.
Lorraine spat into the sink, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “A man named Raymond.” She made a face at Nessa in the mirror. “He’s a doctor. Well, a chiropractor. I don’t know if that counts.”
Nessa nodded. She didn’t know what a chiropractor was.
“How do the braces feel, Ness?”
“They feel normal now,” Nessa said. “I can’t remember how my mouth felt without them.”
* * *
—
NESSA AND TANYA watched The Sound of Music while their mother went out with Raymond. Halfway through they paused for ice cream and Nessa put the carton in the microwave to soften it, while Tanya got the whipped cream and the chocolate fudge and the jar of maraschino cherries from the refrigerator.
They settled back into the living room under the blankets with their ice cream. Nessa liked the second half of the movie better, when the Nazis come and all of a sudden everything feels dangerous. It had only occurred to her recently that she might have been involved in all this, if she had been born during a different time in history. The thought made her feel a mix of shame and pride. She’d started tutoring for her bat mitzvah just two weeks before her father had moved out. Though nobody had told her directly, Nessa’s bat mitzvah had been called off. Tanya was no longer going to Hebrew school.
Nessa knew this should be a relief; she no longer had to go to tutoring, and she didn’t have to learn a Torah portion or write a speech. Truthfully, though, she was devastated. She was never going to be a real Jew—not in the way she’d started to think of herself.
“You know what the Holocaust is, right?” Nessa asked Tanya, during the scene when Rolfe brings Captain Von Trapp a telegram from the Nazis.
“Yeah,” answered Tanya, in such a way that Nessa wasn’t sure she did. Her sister hadn’t gotten to the part in Hebrew school where they learned about the concentration camps or read Number the Stars, and now she never would.
“It’s when the Nazis made all the Jews go to these camps, and they had to shave their heads and get tattoos of numbers on their arms, and then they—”
“Nessa,” Tanya whined. “I’m trying to watch.”
Eventually Tanya fell asleep, her face pressed against the back of the couch. When the movie ended, the clock on the DVD player read 9:51. Nessa felt too tired to walk upstairs. She was about to put in a second movie when she heard the front door open and her mother’s lilting voice. “I had a great time, Raymond.”
“Please,” the man’s voice said. “Ray.”
“Ray,” Lorraine repeated silkily.
“I did, too. I’m sorry again about your linguine, though.”
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not your fault.”
They both laughed. It was Lorraine’s fake laugh, the one she used with adults.
“I’d love to see you again,” Raymond said.
“I’d like that, too.” Then her mother lowered her voice and Nessa had to strain to hear. “I’d invite you in, but my girls are asleep.”
Then there was silence, the kind where Nessa could feel them kissing. Her back and hips tingled where she imagined Raymond’s hands were touching her mother. Nessa slipped one hand between her legs. She could feel it there, too. The sensation was like being on a roller coaster—the moment when you drop and everything inside your body feels like it’s floating.
Then the front door closed and Nessa heard her mother’s footsteps. She curled over and pressed her face into the back of the couch like Tanya and closed her eyes. A few seconds later she could feel her mother looking at them. Then Tanya farted in her sleep, a loud unapologetic pop, and Nessa stuffed her face harder into the back of the couch to stifle her laughter. She waited for her mother to laugh, too, but she didn’t.
There was the sound of her mother’s footsteps, the soft feeling of a blanket over her back—the blue woolen throw blanket, she could tell by the smell—and her mother’s hand, cool on her hair. Nessa listened as Lorraine walked into the kitchen. The kiss of the refrigerator door opening, then closing, the snap of Tupperware, the beep of the microwave. The smell of soup. Over the whir of the microwave, she could hear Lorraine crunching on saltines. When the microwave beeped, Nessa opened her eyes. Quietly, she pushed back the blanket and tiptoe-ran from the living room into the front hallway, then upstairs to her bedroom.
* * *
—
A FEW NIGHTS LATER when the phone rang, she could tell by her mother’s tone—her girlish What’s up?—that it was her father on the line. The extension was in her mother’s bedroom, so Nessa ran upstairs and picked up just in time to hear her father say, “It’s about Nessa.”
“What about her?” Lorraine asked.
Nessa moved the mouthpiece away so they wouldn’t be able to hear her breathing.
“I think she may have taken something from my apartment the other week.”
“Okay?” her mother said. Nessa could hear the disappointment in Lorraine’s voice, that he was calling about Nessa and not her.
“A necklace,” he went on. “A gold necklace.”
Nessa pictured her mother’s hand flying to her neck.
“Have you seen it?” he asked.
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Then Lorraine’s voice turned sarcastic. “Since when have you started wearing jewelry, Jon?”
“It’s not mine.”
“Obviously.”
“I wouldn’t have bothered you with this, but it was expensive, and I think Nessa may have taken it.” He paused. “I’m worried about Nessa, Lorraine. She’s gained a lot of weight. Don’t you think?”
“Oh, fuck you,” Lo
rraine snapped, as though he had just called Lorraine fat instead of her. “Nessa doesn’t have your girlfriend’s necklace, okay?”
Nessa slipped her hand under her shirt and squeezed, assessing her flesh, the way she’d seen her mother squeeze fruit in the grocery store.
For a long moment her father was quiet. Then he said, “Lorraine, this is what I mean when I say you make things inappropriately about yourself. May I speak with Nessa?”
There was a sharp intake of breath, and when Lorraine spoke again, her voice was so small and young she sounded like a whole different person. “Did you introduce the girls to this woman?”
When her father didn’t answer, Lorraine started to cry. It was quiet at first, lots of watery sniffs. But then it got louder and she was crying the way she must have cried as a little girl, holding nothing back.
Nessa started to cry then, too. She put her hand over her mouth and tears slid down her face and over her hand, into the crease of her neck.
“I’m sorry, Lorrie.” Her father’s voice tumbled out. “I’m sorry.”
Lorraine choked a little bit and made a sound like she might throw up and that was when Nessa forced herself to put the phone down in its cradle.
* * *
—
AT DINNER LORRAINE was no longer wearing the necklace, and when she didn’t speak to Nessa or look at her, Nessa got the queasy feeling that she’d messed up badly. Tanya was blabbering. Neither one of them was listening, but they were both pretending to, and Nessa was relieved that Tanya was there, that her little sister gave them somewhere to look besides at one another. When Tanya asked if she could be excused to watch TV, Lorraine nodded, but when Nessa stood to follow, Lorraine pinned her with her eyes. “Stay for a minute.”
Lorraine waited until the sound of the TV came on in the other room before speaking. “Why didn’t you tell me that your father has a girlfriend?”
It wasn’t the question she’d been expecting. The truth was, she didn’t know why she hadn’t told her mother about Simone except that to have said the word girlfriend to Lorraine would have been frightening. “I don’t know,” she said.
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