Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  This is what Dina wanted. Not gratitude. Not an orchid or a bottle of wine or a scarf—gifts made her uncomfortable. She wanted me to listen as she haltingly translated notes written by potential suitors, then offer an opinion on their messages and her replies. It was a grueling task, but I hated letting Dina down, when she’d already been so disappointed. Her marriage had been loveless, her daughter devoid of ambition. Her family, wealthy merchants, who’d left Baghdad during the great exodus of Jews in the 1950s, had come to this country that had broken her heart. Peace would never happen. Too much wrong had been done on both sides.

  These pasty-faced suitors, a parade of Shlomos, Shmuliks, and Shukis, seemed so vulnerable, with their public declarations of loneliness and yearning. Maybe that was why they posed with children or dogs or friends, why one embraced the wheel of a powerboat, another propped his arm on the wing of a plane, a third held a beautiful chicken with a medallion around its neck and an iridescent plume of feathers. While her beady-eyed parrot stepped side to side, squawking Ma! like a spoiled American kid, we discussed the significance of the time that had elapsed between her outgoing message and the man’s reply and sought to interpret the silence, particularly when she could tell her present crush was online but had not written to her. Maybe she really was having fun with JDate. Who was I to contest this? All I can say is that it felt like serious business, and Dina, a Talmudic scholar, capable of endless interpretations of even the briefest responses she received.

  “Now we will find someone for you,” Dina said, at the end of a long night.

  I’d tried to explain that I missed my house and business partner, and the steady satisfaction of work, but Dina wasn’t having it, so I lied. “I have a boyfriend.”

  She thrust out her square chin, tossed her fabulous hair. “So where is this boyfriend?”

  “He’d be here if I wanted.”

  It was true. Even now I could call Harley. The time difference wouldn’t matter. I wouldn’t even have to speak. All I needed to do was breathe into the phone and he would say, “Where are you, babe? Are you okay? Do you need anything? I was just looking at your picture and thinking how gorgeous you are and how lucky I am to have found you.” Hadn’t I wanted my whole life to hear this? “You’ve changed my life, babe. You’ve taught me the meaning of love.” It would be like winding up a music box, watching the ballerina spin.

  When I returned to Mom’s apartment, I listened to her rhythmic snoring and began throwing out hanging files, accordion envelopes filled with receipts, file cards, old mail, cancelled checks. I could not start feeling sentimental. Everything had to go. I opened the desk drawer, found the ceramic burro I’d stashed a few days before, threw it in the bag.

  I hefted the bag and started down. I didn’t mock Dina in her search for love. It was what I’d wanted, too, what I might have had, if I’d been somebody else. The garbage area was packed. When I lowered my sack, dumping it beside the rest of the trash, I remembered the morning I’d stood on a chair and began to sing, “On Top of Spaghetti All Covered with Cheese!” The sun was shining and my father was peppering the scrambled eggs, and when I sang, “I lost my dear meatball when somebody sneezed,” my mother began to laugh. As I walked back upstairs, I wondered why I’d thought of my childhood as relentlessly barren. I hadn’t been whipped or molested. My parents had fed and clothed me, paid for orthodontia, eyeglasses, college tuition. Why had I expected them to understand the child in their midst, when they’d been deprived of childhood themselves? I needed to be done with this, to stop demanding like a baby, stomping my feet, carelessly flinging whatever was offered to me.

  Was this what I had done to every man who tried to love me? By the time I pushed open the apartment door I was breathless from distress. And to my mother?

  I went back down to the garbage area, untied the black bag, and sorted through sweaters that stank of mothballs and reprints from journal articles until I found the ceramic burro with its blue flower and broken leg. I placed it on the desk. Then I carried a chair beside her bed, listened to the buzzing motorbikes on Ha’Yarkon, and watched her sleep.

  Nine

  Dina wrote Ronit’s address in Hebrew on a slip of paper. This, I took to the taxi stand across the street from Mom’s building on the Friday I was invited to my cousins’ house. I hadn’t seen Ronit since we were teenagers and she had spent the summer in New Jersey. When my father had first told me that I’d be showing my cousin a good time in America, I’d moaned and whined and threw a large rock on my bare foot, attempting to break my toe, as if this would absolve me of my responsibilities to this girl I did not know and had no wish to meet. The rock fell on my instep and rolled off, leaving me sadly able-bodied.

  My life is over, I’d thought, on the drive to the airport to meet Ronit’s plane. While my friends were hanging out and going to the shore, I’d be stuck with this boring stranger. I’ll wait in the car, I said when we arrived.

  It was a muggy day in late June. My parents, bored with my complaining, went into the terminal without me, leaving me to stew in my own outrage for the next hour. Then Ronit appeared, a big, ruddy, morose-looking blonde, her bushy hair tied in a braid. “Vered?” she asked. My mother said, “Roxanne.”

  She poked my shoulder when we were alone. “Vered, I have a big need for a cigarette.” These were her first words to me, accompanied by her miming gesture—cigarette between her fingers, the deep inhalation.

  All summer, Ronit looked morose, full of woe, though in fact she liked going to the mall and watching TV. Also cartoons, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, individually wrapped slices of cheese, the salty French fries we got at the concession stand at the town pool, and American candy—Milk Duds and Raisinettes.

  “Vered,” she called me, gesturing with her chin in a forceful way that left me assuming that “Vered” meant “hey you,” and was not the name on my Israeli birth certificate, a name I had never heard.

  Ronit was into bubble gum music and could dance for hours at the rec center—no Bob Dylan or heavy metal or glam rock for her. She was an exotic creature who stripped to the skin at the slightest provocation, revealing her baggy cotton underpants, and lush blonde armpit hair. She sang “Sugar, Sugar” in the shower and in a year would join the army. Meanwhile, seemingly at once, she could work at the waxed bag inside the Milk Duds box, sing the chorus of “Rocketman” that played on the radio, and name the dead on her mother’s side, gunned down by the Einsatzgruppen, nineteen people in all.

  Nearly every day we went to the town swimming pool. The boys liked Ronit. She looked sexy in a swimsuit, chunky but firm in an awesome Amazonian way. The way she said “penis” instead of “peanuts” was a source of constant humor. Half the summer passed before I realized that she hung around the concession stand less for the fries than because of the boy who worked there, a tall, well-built senior named Tad, stupid and good-humored, with no self-consciousness about admitting he hadn’t known that Israel was a country or teasing Ronit about her accent. He made her tell all the customers her favorite sandwich, just so he could hear her say she liked penis butter and jelly.

  When I heard her husky voice on the phone, I wondered if she recalled what a hit she’d been that summer, or if she remembered the night Tad drove a group of us to a raucous Irish bar in Inwood, in Upper Manhattan, where no one was carded, and the girls got wasted on sloe gin fizzes and the boys had boilermakers. When we arrived home, miraculously intact but hours past curfew, my father was waiting on the front lawn, angrier than I had ever seen him, and frightened, it occurred to me years later, because I’d been entrusted with his niece’s well-being. I listened with my arms tightly crossed, and when at last he stopped berating me and walked into the house, I said, “What a jerk,” to Ronit, who two hours earlier had been dancing on the sidewalk outside the bar with boys she’d never met.

  “This is the way you speak to your father who has only you in the world and worries only natura
lly for your safety?”

  I will never forget the look of disgust on her face when she pushed past me into my parents’ house.

  And now, all these years later, I stood on Ronit’s doorstep, taking in the pale yellow stucco and tile roof, the giant spiny century plants that seemed to stand guard, white wine warm in my sweaty hands.

  First impression upon seeing my cousin: she looked exactly the same as she had as a teenager. “You haven’t changed at all!” I burbled.

  An instant later, I realized I wasn’t looking at the chunky teen with bushy blonde hair who charmed the boys with her love of penis but a dour, gray-haired, middle-aged woman in a loose linen shirt and pants. It was the morose expression that hadn’t changed at all, as if she still held a grudge against me.

  “My mother isn’t so well,” I said, to explain why I arrived by taxi alone. I did not add that my mother hadn’t the slightest interest in coming with me.

  Ronit walked me to a patio out back and introduced me to her small bald husband and daughter Galia—their older daughter was on holiday in Cyprus. Plates of food covered the table, and there were birds-of-paradise and banana palms, tweeting birds, purple flowers poking through a trellis, planters full of begonias and Sweet William. I was about to comment on how peaceful it all seemed when Galia, green-eyed and beautiful, said, “So what do you think of this horrible place?”

  I gave an exaggerated shrug. What right do I have to think? It was a line from Casablanca.

  The conversation bumped along awkwardly at first. The husband, Meir, spoke no English, and Galia, just out of the army, and eager to be with friends, was unhappy that she’d been pressed by her mother to stay at the table. I praised the lemony chicken and roasted onions, but this did not seem to soften Ronit. She was offended that my mother had been living in Tel Aviv and never once had called and at the same time was not at all surprised. She kept returning to this and pushing it away with both hands, as if these facts were compelling and distasteful. Why hadn’t we told her about my father’s death? Or the Gorelicks who’d visited the year before? Why hadn’t I called before now? I was too busy?

  “My parents were out of touch with everyone. I don’t know how it happened.”

  Ronit sent Meir to bring a photo album to the table. Tucked inside were a few loose snapshots in an envelope. A man with a corona of gray curls smiles in the top one. White teeth, blue shirt, slight paunch, his arm around a sleepy-looking wife. “And these are?” I asked.

  Ronit was surprised. “Mark and Marilyn. The Gorelicks. They live near you in New Jersey.”

  “I don’t live in New Jersey anymore. I live in Pennsylvania. In Pittsburgh.”

  “You have a husband in Pitts-boorgh?”

  “Once I did,” I said, as if I’d misplaced him. Then I turned back to the photos. “Is this Mark? Wow. He’s a man. I guess we grew up. I haven’t seen him or his brother since I was a kid.”

  “You didn’t visit with your father?”

  I had a faint childhood memory of my father bringing me to a party one summer so I could meet my cousins, two brothers who took me upstairs to their bedroom and led me out a dormer window so we could sit on the roof and shoot spitballs at the adults below. A waste, my mother had declared of my cousin Mark, who went to trade school. A nothing. And now here he is in the photo, tan from touring the Holy Land.

  “Once. Maybe twice. My father almost never went anywhere without my mother. She didn’t drive.” I was aware just then how absurd that explanation sounded.

  Ronit slid the photos back into the envelope and opened the photo album full of pictures of people I should have known and didn’t. My mother set the law, I thought. Her disdain for my father’s family was as much a fixture of my childhood as the oval dining room table, the breakfront filled with china, the carpet that my father often vacuumed. I never questioned it, never dared to question anything. First were old sepia-toned ones. I pointed to a stout white-haired woman whose hat was perched at an angle, and Ronit said, “That’s your savtah, your grandmother.”

  In the next photo, two handsome boys, their wavy hair high off their foreheads, pose beneath spindly trees, arms around each other’s shoulders. One has tiny wire-rimmed glasses. “Your father,” Ronit says of the bespectacled one. “My father,” of the taller one. “They loved each other very much.”

  Galia got up to clear the table, chided her mother in Hebrew, and left. Meir brought his chair closer. The two brothers are posed beside each other in a later photo, a glossy black-and-white. My father’s hair is thinner; he holds a cigarette. They wear loose shirts tucked into baggy high-waisted trousers, and they are laughing, which stuns me. Had I ever seen my father laugh? I wanted to study each photo carefully, but Ronit flipped the pages, busy with the when and where of everyone’s death. The color had faded from the next pictures, until the man on the left was the father I knew, morose and bespectacled, his thin hair combed straight back. The brother beside him on the couch is gaunt-cheeked, near death.

  Ronit set the album aside and put her small, meaty hand on my wrist. “Tell me, Vered, are we so terrible?”

  No!” I cried, taking in these people seated around the table in this verdant garden in Ra’anana—strangers, family members. “Not terrible! At all!”

  I was wondering what had become of my ability to speak English when Ronit said, “So you’ll come back. You’ll see we’re not so bad.”

  She got up from the table, and when she returned she gave me a recent photo of my father and told me her husband would drive me back to Tel Aviv. I was too weary to argue strenuously in favor of calling a taxi and simply, once again, said, “Thanks.”

  Meir drove reasonably until we reached the Ayalon Highway, where he floored it, weaving between the lanes, braking hard like a taxi driver, and pointing out various sites. I said “ah!” and “yes!” and took in the twinkling lights that shone from the windows of apartment buildings and tried not to think about my own mortality. When we at last pulled in front of my mother’s building, I searched for a way to say good night and came up with “bon soir.” He squeezed my hand and laughed. I waved goodbye, happy to be alive. Also, oddly, just plain happy.

  The TV was blaring when I unlocked the apartment door. I lowered the volume and pulled the bamboo-framed chair beside my mother, who was dozing on the sofa.

  When Mom opened her eyes, I said, “I’m sorry you didn’t come. You’d like Ronit. She’s a systems programmer. Her husband drove me home. I’m going to go back again and maybe you’ll come with me. She’d like to see you.”

  I said a few more words about the garden and family, none of which piqued her interest. Then I gave her the photo of my father and went to the kitchen to put water up for tea. On the way back into the living room, I saw her holding the picture in both hands, shaking it hard, and asking, “Why,” in an angry tremulous voice. “Why did you leave me like this? Why didn’t you let me die with you?”

  That night, when I threw my father’s vests and jackets into a trash bag along with a felt hat that smelled of hair, I thought, you just need to do it. To move on. To be like the men playing mat-kot behind the hotels, slamming that hard rubber ball as if they were young men living at a time of peace. You need to keep going forward, I thought, filled with such resolve to change that I retrieved the stupid little burro from the desk drawer where I’d stashed it yet again, and buried it under reams of paper, manuals, and installation instructions for long defunct appliances. As she had, I thought, hoisting the bag over my shoulder, recalling my mother’s husky laugh of years back, her vitality. She had lost a bottom tooth. It distressed me to realize she no longer knew or cared.

  The bag ripped on the way downstairs. I clenched the torn part, barely making it to the garbage area, where I lowered it carefully. By the time I was back in my mother’s apartment, I was crying so hard, my knees buckled.

  I went back downstairs, sat on the filthy floor a
nd took everything out of the black bag until I found the burro. This time, I put it in my pocket—this broken burro, which I did not want and needed to keep forever.

  Ten

  Two days before Dr. Berenbaum arrived, Dina went away with one of her suitors—Shuki, the oral surgeon; Shlomo, the guy with the Cessna; or Shmulik, the rotund translator, whose wife had killed herself six months earlier and who stared mournfully from his photo, his sport jacket so askew it looked as if he had paused in deep thought and forgot to finish dressing. While she was gone, I fed her noisy parrot and sat at her computer to work. Now and then, when I lowered my eyes, I saw the parrot giving me a beady-eyed look. “Ma!” he squawked. “Ma shlomkhah?”

  “Not much,” I told him.

  Everything previously drawn or assembled could now be done electronically. In an instant, I turned the oyster pail matte black, made the inside glossy red, and sent it off to Les. Then I looked at our newer projects. I read the marketing plan for an energy drink for a mature consumer. I hated this product. I hated the words mature and consumer. Alone, except for this noisy, bandy-legged bird, my ability to loathe something trivial wasn’t much fun. I was homesick, tired of being illiterate, tired of washing my hands with shampoo and eating mayonnaise. I missed my house, missed sitting with Les, watching him lean back and cross his arms while he pondered an idea, the cotton of his T-shirt straining. I missed the epitaphs we wrote for each other. Les Sheldon—He was short, but he was buff.

  I scrolled through some photos on Dina’s dating site. The night before, to satisfy her desire that I “choose someone,” I pointed to an olive-skinned man I’d thought was handsome. “Roxanne!” she gasped, as if I’d confessed to a creepy perversion. My second choice got an even more dramatic response. “Such lowlife you choose!”