Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  After I exited the highway and began to take the series of turns up the mountain, the car began to buck, and my mother woke.

  “Did I fall asleep? It’s not like me to nap in the middle of the day.”

  “People get drowsy in the car,” I said.

  “Where are we?” She put her hand against the window. “You know, I haven’t the foggiest idea…”

  I wondered if she was seeing the craggy landscape, or if her perception went no farther than the glass, and I asked, “What is home to you, Mama?” A few minutes later, when I saw the first small sign for Chaverim, I asked again.

  This time she said, “New Jersey.”

  It was a curious answer, one I would not have given myself, though most of my life I had lived there. “Why?” I asked.

  “I had a wonderful career at Bell Laboratories. I was the first woman to become a department head, you know, and our group… We published many important papers. Work that is still cited. I had a wonderful career, you know…”

  “I do,” I said. “Even when I was a kid I knew you were special. Do you remember that I brought you into school for show and tell? Ma?”

  “I was the first woman to become a department head at Bell Labs,” she said.

  “Do you remember where you were born?”

  My mother said, “Bad things happened to me.”

  “I know,” I said, holding my breath, waiting.

  “Everyone is dead. My husband, Morris. He did everything for me…”

  I let her continue, telling me about my father, until I pulled into the parking lot at Chaverim. Then I said, “Do you remember that you had twins, Ma? Vered, Roxanne, that’s me. And your other daughter, Aviva. That’s who we’re visiting today.”

  “Is that so!”

  “Aviva is a pretty name. Was she named after someone?”

  My mother looked out the window, hearing, not hearing, ignoring me, unable to answer. “Do you remember having twins and that something was wrong with one of them?”

  I reached for her hand, and she withdrew sharply. “Stop mutchering me.”

  “But if you really forgot Aviva, why did you leave me behind and move here? You hated religion, hated Zionism. I never even thought of myself as Jewish.” The parking lot was nearly empty. “Mom?”

  “I’m an old woman. Leave me alone,” she said.

  You’re barking up the wrong tree, babe. This favorite expression of Harley’s seemed apt just then. I was always barking, and every tree was wrong.

  I held out my hands and helped her step from the car. She looked up, shading her eyes with her hand. “You know, I haven’t the foggiest notion where I am.”

  “We’ve come to Chaverim to visit your daughter. The other one. It’s chilly outside. You might want your jacket.”

  She let me help her into the tan windbreaker Sunny had packed, an old “Members Only” jacket that had been my father’s. It smelled of mildew and mothballs, like everything my mother owned, like my mother herself. She took my arm when we walked up the wide path to the main building, pausing every few feet, saying, “Wooo,” then asking where we were. She seemed not to notice her surroundings as we entered the building, did not comment on the enclosure with the chirping birds, or turn when we passed the Orthodox family, the mother adjusting her flowing blonde tresses, the son in a wheelchair, his face blotchy with acne, limbs folded like wings, yarmulke on his small head. I realized I wasn’t the only one she could not see, that she did not see anything, really. Her tormented question, “Where am I?” seemed unrelated to place.

  An aide walked us to the room where Aviva’s music class was about to begin. We waited in the hall while aides wheeled two residents through the broad door. Next came a boy, secured to a standing frame with blue Velcro straps. The device’s swivel casters were noisy on the tile floor. In the final wheelchair was Aviva, dressed in a red cotton turtleneck. Thick pads supported her head, and a seatbelt was fastened around her waist. Her long black braid was shot through with gray as mine would have been, had I stopped coloring it. Bony face, long-lashed eyes that fastened on nothing, slack mouth. Her hands were fisted, her feet turned in.

  A finger in a live socket, I thought. Pain without purpose.

  The residents were arranged in a circle. I took my mother’s arm so we could stand beside Aviva, because there was a second voice within my head. Your sister.

  My mother shook me off. “These people are in wheelchairs.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “Let’s say hello.”

  The aides began handing out instruments. Aviva got bells with straps that looped around her wrists. I was trying to get my mother to join me in the room when an aide passed, pushing the wheelchair of a woman with a small malformed face, and a tube attached to her neck. My mother called out to the aide in Hebrew, and I cried, “Ma!” and tugged on her arm. She jerked free. The aide spoke a few soft words and brought her a chair.

  The room was stuffy and unpleasant smelling—saliva, peppermint, sweat. I walked beside Aviva. Her blinking eyes were almond-shaped like mine, her black eyebrows unplucked. Slack mouth, chafed chin, kerchief tied around her neck. I touched her arm, then moved beyond the fabric of her sleeve to take her hand. There was no grasp, no reciprocity. Fraud, I thought, and I took Aviva’s hand, because just then, this sister, this mother, I wanted to be free of both.

  A CD was popped into a player and music filled the room. The drummer used the stick between his teeth to bang on his drum, and the tambourine player shook her ankle and screeched. To shake the bells meant moving or trying to move her whole body, and Aviva did this, making an odd sea mammal sound. The man beside her sang in an off-key voice, and the therapists joined in, these tenders and touchers as inscrutable to me as their charges, happy, it seemed, enjoying the familiar tunes, chatting, clapping, singing along. Then the next song. Ein. I heard that word. Ein li eretz acheret. Land—eretz.

  A new voice joined the others—dry, tuneless, confident. It was my mother singing. My mother, softened and transformed by the music, was clapping her hands with the melody. I felt a kind of lightness in the room and had the same odd sense I’d had in the car: Look one way there was illness, heartbreak, broken beings. Look the other way, and it was a sing-along, enjoyed by all.

  Another song began. A tall aide put her hands on Aviva’s shoulders and moved her to the rhythm of this slower, moodier song. My mother knew this song, too, and swayed without self-consciousness. Then the music stopped, and the aides began gathering the instruments.

  I walked over to Aviva and waited, as if she might glance up at me. Then I stepped behind her chair, took the grips, and wheeled it a few feet forward. It was heavier than I’d imagined. My mother got up and pushed past the wheelchairs lined up in the doorway. “Wait!” I called.

  A Slavic-looking aide—tall, willowy, blonde hair in a knot—gestured go with her chin, and I let go of the wheelchair and hurried after my mother, waving my arms, and crying, “Hang on!”

  And what did she say?

  “I want to go home.” Of course. “Take me home. I want to go home.”

  After my mother was settled in her apartment, I crossed the hall and knocked on Dina’s door. When she saw me, she laughed with pleasure, dark eyes sparkling, glossy hair cut to chin length, a stunning look. She took my hands, kissed my cheeks, pulled me into her kitchen, all the anguish I’d caused her forgotten. While she tossed half the contents of her fridge onto the table, I said a few words about these last days. Aviva, unresponsive; the kind Shelley Silk. Her parrot marched from side to side, squawking and pecking at dust. Our parting, which left all my emotions jangling. Aviva wheeled one way, my mother hurrying in the opposite direction; that I’d never said goodbye. In the midst of talking, I knew I would wake early and return one last time to Chaverim.

  The man from Winnipeg was long gone. I sat with a cup of tea and a small container of
yogurt and listened to Dina tell me about the new man, a dental surgeon who in photos had the unlined face of a child. The parrot followed us to her office, where she wheeled the wobbly chair beside her own, so we could look at her new suitors. While I helped evaluate the subtext of their messages, I thought about the long drive back to the Galilee. Was my need to return the same pathology that kept me calling my mother each week? Or maybe that wasn’t pathology. Maybe it was what you did—for your mother. For your sister.

  We worked on a response to the apple-cheeked Dov, who glowered at us in his photo, chest hair blooming from the top of his shirt, leather jacket. They’d spent Saturday night together, and, “Oh, you would not believe!” I thought of Dov in bed with Dina, and my little rental car, sputtering, grunting. The empty parking lot. The flittering birds. The questions I could not answer. What was the purpose of my life?

  Sixteen

  A week had passed since my first visit, almost to the hour, and Aviva was in the pool. Instead of standing by the door to the natatorium, I decided to wait on the patio at the back of the building.

  It was chilly, and no one else was outside. I zipped my jacket high and sat on a teak bench near a cluster of century plants. The birds were louder and more raucous than the ones in the enclosure. I needed to be patient. After Aviva was done swimming (with the Man Who Likes his Job?) I had to wait until she was showered (how?), dried off (by whom?), and dressed.

  I could feel my bare hands stiffen from the cold. To steady and distract myself, I took the small journal from my bag and began to doodle. At first just designs. Then the doodling changed into big-eyed, button-nosed dolls with round Victorian faces. I turned them into paper dolls with tabs above their pudgy, naked shoulders, and then drew outfits. A bonnet; a high-necked dress.

  I was so deeply into drawing that the sound of the doors sliding open jolted me, and when I looked up, out he stepped, the Man Who Likes his Job, a tall, thin bird, the locks of his gray hair lifting in the breeze, tragic, playful expression, many-pocketed shorts, boyish, loping gait. First, I lowered my head so he would not see me. Then, curious about this man who took such pleasure being in the pool with Aviva, I looked up.

  He passed, halted comically, then backtracked, stopping in front of me. “You’re Aviva’s sister.”

  I snapped shut my book and said, yes, here I was again, and wanting to say sorry. “You went through all that trouble of finding me a bathing suit, and I never even went into the pool.”

  “So the next time you’ll come in. I promise you’ll like it very much.”

  We looked at the empty chair nearby, and when I nodded, he pulled it close and lowered himself slowly, extending his long, pale legs. A fresh thick scar ran along one knee.

  “Did you know that last week was the first time I was meeting Aviva?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Chaverim is a very small village.”

  “It’s not such a happy story,” I said.

  “Should it be?”

  Something in his gaze, benign but frank, his bright, sad eyes, and this gnawing sense that we’d already met in some distant life, made it possible for me to say what I felt, rather than what I was supposed to feel. “Everyone here is so cheerful and matter of fact. Maybe to you this is part of life, but to me, honestly, it’s disturbing. I just couldn’t make myself go into that water.”

  I watched him massage his scarred knee. “It is part of life, you know.”

  “Then maybe I’m a terrible person, because it’s not one I’m able to face.”

  “I doubt you’re a terrible person,” he said. “You probably just need time to acclimate.”

  Three women in white uniforms stepped into the garden, one passing a cigarette to her friend, another pulling two chairs to a third so they could sit together. Tenders and bathers, like this man. Openhearted people who believed all humans were loveable.

  “You’re a traveler, yes? Where do you come from?”

  “Pittsburgh. It’s in the U.S.,” I said.

  “And you speak Hebrew?”

  “Not at all.”

  “So, okay, then you know what it’s like to find yourself alone in a strange city very far from home. You don’t speak the language; you can’t find your way around. The food is terrible; the people push past you, everyone scowling. The narrow streets seem full of danger, and you want to go home; it is all you want. But then you return to this city. Perhaps you must, for professional reasons. And this next time, you recognize a landmark. You know how to ask for bottled water, con gas. To say thank you. You step further from your hotel and have an encounter, something trivial, but pleasant. Then slowly it begins to change. You’re less fearful, less suspicious. Then without knowing it you start to enjoy. Chaverim is a different country. I didn’t come to this understanding quickly. It took time. First I had to get used to the foreignness. Then I was able to enjoy.”

  “How much time?” I asked. “How long did it take you?”

  He thought about this, massaging his knee. “Maybe three months to become accustomed to my friends here, like Aviva, longer before I began to enjoy, which at present, I do.”

  “How long have you worked here?” I asked.

  My question amused him. “I’m a visitor. Like you.”

  “Oh.” Had I offended him? “You have a child here—”

  “A nephew. His mother—my sister—asked me to look after him when she got sick. No one else would make that promise, so I agreed. On those first visits, what I saw, what I’m thinking you see, was a kind of living hell, yes? Let these poor souls die. I’m not ashamed to tell you it was what I thought, particularly of Dan, whose life truly seems one of unrelenting misery. I’ve come to see this isn’t the case for many of his colleagues at Chaverim, but it is for him, I fear. Seizures all day long, muscle spasms, skin ailments, fed by a g-tube, so much medication to treat the symptoms and alleviate the pain that his ability to be awake and alert is minimal.”

  “And you continue to come here all the time anyhow? That’s pretty remarkable.”

  “It isn’t. This is what I’m trying to explain. The first visits, after my sister died, felt like a punishment. I’d drive here, and Dan would be in pain or sleeping, unimpressed by my efforts, and I’d ask myself why I bothered to honor this promise to my sister when my presence meant nothing to him. I wrestled with this dilemma for many weeks until Shelley, Rochelle Silk, helped me find ways to make these visits enjoyable. That’s how I began to swim with Aviva.”

  “Because she had no visitors?”

  “She enjoys the water,” he said.

  “And no one else takes her.”

  “Her time with me is extra.”

  I pressed on my chest to push back the wild creature beneath my ribcage. “Does she know you after all the times you’ve gone swimming with her?”

  “Are you asking if she anticipates my arrival? That I can’t say. Does she in her own way know my touch? I think yes. But I’m not driven by such expectations.”

  The clatter of swivel casters on tile distracted me, and when I looked up I saw that several people had drifted into the garden, among them the boy from Aviva’s music class, secured against his standing frame with blue pads and Velcro straps. A couple, his parents, I supposed, were rolling him into the shade.

  “Do you mind me asking all these questions?” I asked.

  “Why would I mind?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you’re in a rush and I’m straining your patience.”

  “If I was in a rush, I wouldn’t have stopped.”

  This exchange amused me. “Where are you from, with that flawless English?”

  “Hardly flawless,” he said. Then he told me he’d lived in the U.S. for nearly ten years—in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Minneapolis, where his son had been born, and where now he was doing a post doc in chemistry.

 
I shielded my eyes from the glare and the Man Who Likes his Job transformed into a man with a son in Minneapolis. Then the two of us shifted so smoothly from Chaverim, it was as if a breeze had carried my troubles over the mountains. Soon there was a daughter in Tel Aviv, a documentary film editor; a restaurant he liked in Pittsburgh, where he collaborated with a group that did work in facial expression analysis; his fondness for San Francisco, where he’d lived long enough for his wife to get a Masters in Family Counseling, and where they thought they’d stay. “My wife was very happy in San Francisco,” he said.

  “And now is she happy in Tel Aviv?”

  “Now she is not my wife.”

  Was there a new wife? I wondered but did not ask because we’d turned to our overlapping time years back, where we’d lived, had espresso, browsed through books at City Lights, maybe even run into each other.

  “I’m thinking I saw you there, checking out books in…”

  “Social sciences. Philosophy…”

  “I guess not,” I said. His name was Baruch. In San Francisco, he’d been studying the role of maternal depression in mother-infant bonding.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “I was a runaway,” I said.

  He knew, without my explaining, that I hadn’t been a teenager sleeping in the street, but rather someone trying to escape from unpleasantness. In those days, there were so many of us in the city who’d changed their names, donned saffron robes, imagining, as I had, that in a new place, you could invent yourself. He knew something about the necessity of space and time to dream; I could tell by the questions he asked when I told him about all the hours I’d spent doodling in the green velvet chair at the Chic Pea. Young, unencumbered, with just enough money for food and rent and so little vanity or professionalism that I pretty much gave my work away. I told him, because he asked, about the album cover I did for a local band for a couple of hundred dollars flat, that when the record went gold, the cover became a calling card, the way I began to build my career. And he told me about his early studies with mothers and infants and the kind of work he did now, with computer vision.