Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  Mothers came later in the morning with little kids disappointed there were no toys. I let the girl from across the street who’d been outraged by my defection pick out a few beaded bracelets for herself, and as she tried them on, the world seemed to brighten, along with her opinion of me. Nomi sat at the cash box, and Les stood at a distance, watching her, useless in this state of love and resistance, and Jessie wandered on the driveway and lawn, clutching shoppers’ arms and asking, “Home?” Oh, I don’t know, it’s too nice to be stuck inside. “Going home?” I’ve been ready for an hour. “In a car?” As soon as my wife stops dickering over those placemats.

  Watching people recoil, I found myself wondering: Why are we afraid? Was it her difference, her foreignness? Her impenetrability? The intensity of her grasp? Did her question trigger a longing for home in its deepest way? But still, why fear? She was so small and skinny, with wild auburn hair, budding breasts, knock-knees.

  When noon approached, I headed back to the garage to tell Ryan and Kayleigh they could cut the price on anything left, heard from above the scratch of metal against wood, and saw the casement window facing the beautiful gingko swing open. By then, it was less about business and more a chance to socialize. Kayleigh was gesturing with a ceramic lamp; our letter carrier, distracted from the swift completion of her appointed rounds by a velvet cloche, was showing Ryan the dolphin tattoo on her ankle. An old man with a long white beard and a belt so tightly buckled his trousers looked like a grocery bag was studying a piece of amber someone had given me years before. He held it up to the light, and I looked too, and heard the voices of strangers and neighbors, Jessie’s plaintive “home?” and it made me feel part of a web. I wondered if I could hold onto this feeling, bank it, build on it, use it as a bridge to a future.

  “Take it,” I said to the white-bearded man. “You can have it!” I called out to a mother admiring a bronze candleholder, while her chubby son rolled down the driveway on a plastic trike, his father shuffling protectively beside him.

  My next-door neighbor pulled up at the curb and was getting out of her black sedan. I’d left a note for her, saying we’d clear out by noon, and now at twelve-thirty, a few stragglers remained—the white bearded man, the chubby boy, his parents, my crew. I started down the driveway to apologize, and just as I reached her, saw a branch of the gingko tree tremble. Both casement windows in the sleeping porch were open wide. We shielded our eyes against the sun. “Look!” she cried. It was a squirrel getting ready to catapult himself to her window.

  We watched the squirrel bear down on the branch, get it rocking, then leap. “It’s so clever how they do that.”

  What happened next was sudden and unexpected. Harley’s leg on the ledge. His other leg. I grabbed onto my neighbor’s sleeve. Below the window were air conditioning units. A cement pad. I went very still, unable to speak.

  “What’s he doing?” she asked, peeved rather than alarmed. “He shouldn’t horse around like that. It’s dangerous!”

  Harley, perched on the window ledge, began to howl. The people milling on the driveway turned. For a moment, we all froze, as if afraid a sudden move or barked command would unbalance him, and he would fall to the unforgiving ground. Harley covered his face, but the grief escaped with such force he swayed on the ledge, his neatly-tied boat shoes dangling. “Home?” Jessie called, in a plaintive voice. I clutched my neighbor’s arm, the way Jessie had clutched mine, not knowing if it was worse for Harley to see me, or worse if he thought I was not there.

  Nomi stepped out of this tableau, reed-thin and calm. She looked upward, blinking in the sun. Her daughter hurried forward, and Nomi said, “Harley?” and scooped her close. “Harley, I’m Nomi. And this is Alix, my little girl. I want you to hold on, Harley. Just hold on. You have friends down here. And children. Alix and Jessie. And a little boy.”

  Harley was weeping hard, swaying.

  “You’re a father, aren’t you, Harley? You would never hurt your children. You would never want them to see something awful. Something that would trouble them for all their days and nights. Listen to me. Please. I want you to take a deep breath. Will you do that for me? Will you breathe with me for just one moment? It will calm your aching heart. Just breathe. Hold on and take a very slow deep breath, because sometimes, Harley, we have these moments of pain that seem so unbearable we forget they’ll pass. I want you to breathe with me, Harley.”

  I loosened my grip on my neighbor’s arm and stepped away from her, breathing deeply, aware of the stillness. No wind, no motion, only Nomi’s firm, reassuring voice. “You aren’t alone, Harley. Alix will breathe with you. And Jill. We’ll all breathe together, along with you. Everyone here. Will you do that with us, Harley? Will you do this? Together, starting with puraka. A single long inhalation. Let’s do this together. Good. Beautiful. Yes, that’s okay, you can pause. It’s called a broken puraka. Harley, we will get to the exhalations, but for now, I want you to stay with me. To feel the way we are all breathing together, everyone here, the men, the women, the children. We’re going to share your inhalation, your lovely, deep, calming inhalation that relaxes your entire body. Harley, okay, abhyantara kumbhaka. Pause, you will be motionless. Don’t make your lungs work. Ease your shoulders. We are pausing with you. We have reached rechaka and will exhale, all of us here. We are all with you—puraka. Look around at your friends, at the kind faces below. Abhyantara kumbhaka rechaka. Harley, a smooth, continuous exhalation. All around, we are exhaling with you. Can we do that again? Can we all breathe with Harley?”

  The old man in suspenders breathed deeply and paused. The boy, motionless on his trike. Ryan, who’d tattooed the first lines of The Metamorphosis on his arm—I could feel his puraka as I slipped into my house. And Kayleigh, who loved Ryan, I could feel her exhale with Harley as I worked my way up the stairs, stepping over the hangers and clothes and books on the sleeping porch floor. While my neighbors were breathing with Harley, I stepped up to the wide-open windows, leaned as far as I could safely stretch, feet planted firmly, in those moments not thinking or worrying or grieving, not guilty or regretful. Only my arms extending until I could embrace from behind this man I had once loved—this aching, wounded being, still breathing with Nomi, still following her so closely I could pull him safely inside.

  Twenty-Seven

  Harley’s brother Byron drove him to a “retreat” in Western Massachusetts, and I moved into the top floor of the duplex where I would live until I figured out what I wanted next. When I called Byron to find out how Harley was doing, he made the retreat sound like a vacation destination. Everything I said made him uncomfortable. There’s no shame in this, I wanted to say, because I knew he was ashamed of Harley, and knew well this unbearable emotion.

  The website was just as evasive. There were many photographs of Sunnyledge’s “gracious environment” and “elegantly appointed rooms” that made it the perfect setting for an “intermediate length of stay.” You had to look hard to see the fine print saying insurance was not accepted. Byron didn’t want to talk to me. He did not want to know me. “Little Bro has always been a problem child,” he said, and hurried off.

  The moving truck had not yet arrived, and in the morning light the empty apartment looked bleak and shabby, with a living room carpet stamped flat by prior tenants and a permanent gray crust where the carpet met the molding. The walls had been freshly, if hastily, painted a yellowish beige gloss that showed off the drips, each one ending in a tip as thick as a match head that marked the place where the paint had simply stopped moving. On the kitchen counter was a box of chocolates and a welcome note from Jill.

  A charitable organization had picked up whatever I hadn’t sold, and the movers carried so little upstairs it only took a couple of hours for me to set up. After flattening the last carton, I stood in the middle of the living room and imagined myself congealing right here like a drop of wet paint. Then I found my backpack and walked “upstreet” to buy some food.


  The dark brick duplexes that lined both side of my street were softened by flowers in window boxes, planters and garden beds—pansies, nasturtium, zinnias. Tall sunflowers rose against the walls, their heads drooping as if in sorrow.

  It was late afternoon and hot. Early September. School had just started. I didn’t know this neighborhood well and felt an edge of discomfort as I walked—single, childless, in my shabby digs. As I reached the stores I saw a long line snaking down the street and around the corner. Closer, I saw that the line began outside a store that sold ices. The girls wore tiny shorts and flip-flops and boys were in T-shirts and droopy shorts, and they were bouncing and giggling and pushing against each other, their exuberance contagious, and when I passed, I thought with some excitement: Of course you feel a little uneasy. You’re creating your own story. Right now.

  The person I am now is walking into the supermarket.

  It seemed, then, that the discomfort I felt was intensified by how new this was, not merely the apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood, but the story, my story. I was stopping at the post office as a twin, wheeling my grocery cart as one of two, with a sister who was in me and far away. I didn’t know the end. That day, though, alone as I felt, I understood that part of the reason I’d cast off so much of what I’d owned was that these trappings had belonged to the hollow old self, the fake self, and this was new.

  This was the year she took a modest apartment.

  Her landlord left her chocolate and a card that said: May your days be sweet.

  At the front of the checkout line, I smiled, thinking of this welcome gift. The cashier eyed me warily. “Do you have your Giant Eagle Advantage card?”

  “Somewhere,” I said. “Give me a second while I check.”

  Harley was at a retreat in Western Massachusetts; the young couple and their dog were moving into my house, and I was searching my wallet for a Giant Eagle Advantage card to get ten cents off on cottage cheese.

  I lowered my backpack slowly onto the table. I did not arise from a spore, like a ginkgo, did not invent myself, was not a citizen of the world. I was a single woman, born in Israel, raised in New Jersey, living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I lowered my backpack slowly onto the table. My mother was dead. Like millions of others, I had ties in more than one country. I put the groceries away and saw in the fridge a bottle of sparkling wine with a curled ribbon around the neck. I felt energized, full of possibility.

  That night I found the sheets and pillowcases I’d packed and made up my bed. These familiar linens made me feel at home, and I fell right to sleep.

  Then light, and raw, ragged screaming that jolts me awake, cutting through my chest like a knife. I try to sit up and catch my breath, but the screaming is stuck inside me, and it is Aviva, my mother, Amber Chatsworth, frustrated that she was difficult to feed, it is a baby, it is me, it is someone screaming, Stop it, stop!, and I am sobbing and want it to go away, the screaming, the life, this history. Then quiet, and I take in the shiny, unfamiliar walls and wait for fragments of reality to reassemble. My mother is dead. Aviva is at Chaverim. Harley has not jumped. I’ve sold my house. It’s Jessie from downstairs. It’s only Jessie.

  By the time I get myself outside, Jessie is already standing on the steps.

  “Home?” she asks me. Her lush auburn curls are tied in a ponytail, and her pale face is smooth and untroubled. We watch a wizened Chinese couple push a baby stroller up our short hill. “Home?” Jessie calls, flapping her arms as they pass. It’s impossible to believe she is the same raging being I’d heard only minutes before.

  Later that fall, after the clocks changed, Jessie’s raw, primal screaming reached me in the darkness and unearthed what I will call memory—vivid, wordless. It seemed to bring me back to that small flat where my parents had lived with their unexpected babies, children my mother had not wanted and could not nurture, one healthy, the other impaired, one consolable, the other red-faced, wide eyes wet with tears, impossible to calm, her skin-piercing wail breaking my mother as Jessie’s wail broke me.

  Trembling in bed, with the light barely rising, this is what I wished I could have told Baruch: I was raised by a mother who had been damaged in her youth and had motherhood thrust upon her, that I’d never know what was in her heart that night or years later, only that she had been as impossible to comfort as a wailing baby. Whatever accommodation I made with the facts of my own life, which I was only now, slowly, beginning to assemble, it would not be as simple as “blame” or “forgiveness,” but something else I could not yet name, some still undetermined path of my own making.

  In the weeks that followed, I got to know Jessie. I saw her walking to school with her arm linked through her mother’s, or breaking into a flat-out run, arms flapping, backpack flopping, laughing in the same unrestrained way she screamed. On Sundays I sometimes sat on the brick patio out back, paging through the Times while she and her mother sat at the round glass table, an antiquated boom box covering the hole where an umbrella might stand, listening to “Under the Boardwalk” or “The Sloop John B.” I learned that Jessie was tactile-defensive, so distressed by certain sensations, that Jill had to detach all the labels from Jessie’s clothes or she’d rip them off her body, but that she’d let her mother brush her lustrous curls with an old-fashioned boar bristle brush.

  I no longer thought she, as I had with Aviva. Her. This life Jessie had with her mother, the school she attended with other children who rolled and walked down the sidewalk on outings. I no longer thought they. I thought of the way my mother had spoken about Arabs, or what Harley’s mother, “the most unprejudiced person in the world,” thought about “Jewish people,” those loud, pushy others, and I was reminded that my world was narrow, not in the way Harley thought it was—long on “artsy” friends and short on MBAs—but ignorant thus far on the ways of Jessie and of Aviva.

  I would never get used to the screaming.

  

  The afternoon Dina called to tell me about her new beau, I was again sitting on a wrought-iron chair in the small yard behind our duplex, the Sunday Times spread across my lap. Pots of burgundy and gold chrysanthemums had been set out on the brick patio, and the last red leaves fluttered from the maple beside my rickety chair. Otis Redding was singing “Dock of the Bay,” all that emotion squeezed and distorted through the puny speakers in the boom box, and even so, it pierced my heart. I’d booked a flight to Israel, and now, watching Jill brush Jessie’s hair, I could feel in my chest and arms the desire to sit beside Aviva, to hold her hand, and if she liked it, to loosen her hair from its braid and brush it, gather it, divide the locks in three and make a new braid. I was eager to see Shelley Silk, too. We’d been in regular contact these last months, regarding the therapeutic horseback riding that was being planned for Chaverim. Money my parents had left me would cover the cost of the stables.

  I tried not to moon over Baruch and in daytime succeeded, though at night, I still felt myself in the sea with him, the waves bringing us close, pushing us apart. I did not cultivate these memories and even went out on a couple of dates with an energetic thrice-divorced man named Fred, about whom I could say: not Tom, not Harley. So the sea inside me, so often churned up, was as still as glass.

  Dina had a long update on the renovation in my mother’s apartment, the young oboist who lived there with her husband, and the fantastic new man in her life, and in the background Otis sang, “I can’t turn you loose.” I wondered, too, what it must be like to have something so raw and pure inside, to be able to open your throat and let it out, and Fred came to mind, his place in my life, it seemed just then, was to give me something to tell Dina, whose sentences were in a little boat on the still sea inside me.

  Jessie lifted her chin high in the air, and Otis, who died at twenty-six, began singing, Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa, and when I asked myself whose life was hardest and lined up all the people I knew, it was not Aviva, who’d win the popular
vote, not Jessie, who did not perceive herself as different, had no angst, was not “challenged,” the way her mother often was.

  Harley. Handsome, affluent, father of sons.

  A name rocked the boat. I covered my free ear and my chair wobbled on the bricks.

  Then a detail about the profession of Dina’s fantastic new beau. He studies faces! It is the most interesting work.

  “Wait a second,” I said, rising so suddenly the chair fell backward. “What’s his name?”

  “Baruch,” she said.

  “That’s crazy!” I said, standing so suddenly the chair fell backward and Jessie shrieked.

  “We saw him together.”

  “Yes!” Dina said. “You said ‘go out with him,’ and you were so right, Roxanne, he is the most intelligent man.”

  I walked between the duplex apartments, away from Otis and Jessie and Jill, and by the time I reached the street, I remembered seeing his photo on JDate and the profile I could not read, and Dina trying to get me to contact him, and that I’d said, “You like him, you go out with him.” You take him, as if he were an object at yard sale. You can have him.

  I lowered myself to the stoop, listened, and did not listen. Across the street, a neighbor was raking her small lawn. Her dog rolled over, scratching his back in the pile of leaves, scattering them. Dina laughed, asked how far Minneapolis was from Pittsburgh, and the neighbor, admonishing her dog, said, “Bernie. Bad!” It all seemed so absurd—Dina and Baruch, that I lived in this duplex, that the woman across the street was castigating her dog in a loving voice.