Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

“You cannot take Aviva from this beautiful place where they look after her with such love.”

  I knew that too. I’d never uproot her. “I’ll do what my father did and see her four times a year. That’s the way it is for a lot of families these days, isn’t it? His son in Minnesota, your daughter in Greece. How often do you get to see her?”

  “My daughter. Fff. She is happy with her low-class job.” Dina waved her hand, then rejected the beets. When Baruch returned, we both watched him settle into his seat. “I know a very nice man, a history professor. You’ll like him very much,” Dina said to me.

  “Dina is always trying to fix me up,” I told Baruch.

  At home, in my imagination, we understood each other. Here, beside Dina, he seemed completely closed off. I clasped the edge of the table and shook it lightly. Once I’d seen someone tip over one of these and send all the dishes clattering. It was very dramatic.

  “Everyone should have a chance to be happy!” Dina said.

  “You can be happy and single,” I said. “People do it all the time, women better than men, according to studies. Women have friends; we know how to take care of ourselves.”

  “You turn me down every time, and look!” She elbowed Baruch gently and laughed. “See what you can find?”

  “A big fish,” I said.

  Really, it was a pan of calamari the waiter brought to our table.

  As we were dividing it, a woman in a billowing muslin dress paused beside our table and said, “That looks utterly delicious. What is it?”

  “Calamari,” Baruch said. “Squid.”

  “Squid isn’t Kosher!” The woman and her husband backed off, then stopped in the middle of the stone walkway to consult their guidebook, blocking the path of other tourists. The man had on a terry porkpie hat. Yards of wrinkled muslin went into the woman’s dress, and beneath all the layers, thick-soled Mary Janes. Nothing good was going on there.

  “What’s that supposed to be, homeless chic?” I said. “The paper-bag look? You want to be cool, there are other ways.”

  Baruch looked at me, his expression unreadable. My cheeks burned. “Comfortable cool. It probably seems shallow for me to go on this way, but I think about these things, the way you think about faces. Maybe.”

  The American couple backtracked, taking the table beside us.

  “Dina tells me your mother was a physicist,” Baruch said.

  “She was,” I said. “Did she also tell you I was a negligent daughter?”

  Dina laughed. “She told me nothing,” Baruch said.

  “She worked in psychoacoustics,” I said. In high school, I’d tried to impress a boy by saying my mother’s field was psychoacoustics. Thereafter, whenever he saw me in the hall he danced around me in a googly-eyed circle, crying, “Psycho!” and flapping his hands. “Have you ever heard of Bell Labs?”

  “Of course.”

  Of course. For an instant it was as if nothing had come between us.

  “Did she know Penzias and Wilson?”

  “Sure. She adored Arno Penzias. He was a Hungarian Jew, an émigré, like her. After he and Wilson won the Nobel Prize, she brought home a red T-shirt with little 3ks dancing all over for it for three degrees Kelvin—three degrees above absolute zero, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation at the time of the Big Bang, which I guess you know. Then below all the dancing 3ks, it said, ‘This is the way the world began, not with a whimper but a bang.’ Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize and all I got was this lousy T-shirt,” I said. It was an obscure joke, which I hurried past.

  I’d loved that T-shirt. I knew the temperature of cosmic background radiation and the original line from “The Hollow Men” because I wore that shirt all the time and got to explain what it meant. “It’s not like I actually understand the Big Bang. It’s not like I understand anything. Obviously.”

  Baruch met my eyes, bored, interested, I couldn’t tell.

  “Here’s a story my mother loved,” I said, propelled by nervous energy. “Penzias and Wilson came to Bell Labs to do radio astronomy, because radio waves are important for all kinds of things, including communication, and they were trying to get rid of all the noise in radio amplifiers, trying and failing, because something kept coming in from outer space. There was this other guy, an engineer, who also noticed this low noise. The engineer was set on solving the problem of how to make the best amplifier ever, but Penzias and Wilson were physicists like my mother and interested in the fundamental nature of the universe, and they started asking bigger questions that led to their accidental discovery of background radiation. For my mother, the greatest thing in the world was to be a real scientist who asks big questions and not just a technician.”

  This was a life lesson I actually loved: that you were supposed to look up. To ask big questions. How strange and disturbing that the scientist who believed this forgot her own daughter.

  Dina’s eyes filled. “She was a very great woman.”

  “A great scientist, maybe, but a terrible mother,” I said.

  The waiter lowered a plate on which was a small sizzling fish. Dina made space on the table, and the woman in the billowing muslin dress leaned over and inhaled deeply. “That smells divine. What is it?”

  “St. Peter’s fish,” Baruch said. “It’s Kosher.”

  Baruch took his fork and worked the skin and flesh cleanly from the bones.

  My mother was gone, but there were still unanswered questions, dancing around like those little 3ks. I handed Baruch my plate. I hadn’t seen that T-shirt in ages.

  The tables on the patio began to fill. Dina spoke to Baruch and then got up. I watched her walk into the restaurant, kept watching until she was no longer in view. When I turned back to the table, he was sitting across from me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He gave away nothing, just took me in with those big, pale eyes.

  “I get to thank you at least, don’t I?” I asked.

  The breeze blew a hank of his hair straight up.

  “Baruch…” His name an exhalation, a question.

  “Vered.” He said my name with such tenderness.

  “Listen,” I said, then hesitated, searching for words. I closed my eyes to blot out the voices of tourists and diners, the plaintive cry of gulls, and sizzling from the nearby kitchen, the scent of olive oil, garlic, brine, the scrape of chairs against stone, the Americans at the table beside us, with their grating, familiar voices. All that came to me were images, sensual ones in the sea, where we had rocked together, his lips, his body against mine, the tacky feeling of dried salt, the pitch and tenor of his beautiful voice. The chocolate seeping from my mother’s lips, the loose skin on the back of her hand, my sister in the leaf chair, her fists turned inward, her need, I feared, like mine, to have someone curled in my arms. Not someone, no, a man; not any man…

  “Is this serious?” I managed.

  “You mean Dina?”

  Easing back into her chair. “The smell from what they are cooking! What do you think, Roxanne, is this fantastic? I speak to the man who owns this place and he is going to bring us something special, like you never had before. You wait.” She pulled her napkin off the table with a flourish.

  “I’m totally stuffed.”

  “Roxanne, you must have what he bring. I ask him to make it special for you.”

  “Ai!” I cried.

  “Take a bite already,” said the husband in the porkpie hat. “It’ll make her happy.”

  In the parking lot, Dina began to make plans for us for the following day. She was upset when I told her I’d be spending the afternoon with Aviva. I kissed Dina and promised we’d get together on Sunday, then stood on my toes and pecked Baruch chastely on the cheek.

  On the long drive to Ronit’s, I was drunk with fatigue. The thought of falling into Galia’s bed kept me focused on the r
oad. But first I had to email Shelley Silk, so she’d know when I would arrive. As soon as I got back to Ronit’s I wrote the message. I reread it to make sure it was coherent and then went to sleep. The next day, I saw I had requested some intruction so the too of us could be in the pool together. The too of us. I had written that.

  Ronit and Meir were already gone when I woke; it was just me and my bad spelling in their house. Then me—my grammar toasted by lack of sleep—punching radio buttons, seeking a distraction on the drive north. Israeli pop music, a talk show with angry Israelis, a BBC reporter with her plummy voice and depressing news, my own interior voice: The too of us. The too of them.

  Twenty-Nine

  When the mild, imperturbable Shelley Silk saw me in the doorway of her office the next day, she rose, hugged me briskly, and said, “We are over the moon! Leave your things here, and let’s go down to the site.”

  I put the bag with my bathing suit and towel on a chair, and we left the building together. On the broad path toward the parking area, Shelley took my arm, and I slowed my pace to match hers. The sun was blazing in the bright sky, and the wind whipped my hair across my face. In the distance was the large, flat expanse of land, already cleared of stones and scrub. Modest plans for a stable had been in the works before I’d talked to Shelley about the money I’d inherited from my parents. Now, though, we could have a full-time instructor and four horses for the residents of Chaverim, as well as space to board privately owned horses and future plans for adaptive riding classes for nonresidents, which would defray the costs of the residential riding program that would bear my father’s name.

  “I wish your father could have seen this,” she said, pointing to where the stables and riding ring would be. He would have been thrilled. But I was here, and it was marvelous. “You remind me so much of him,” she said with surprising affection.

  “Really?” No one had ever said this. “In what way?”

  “He was a little sparrow, like you. And his hair was very dark. Mine was, too, in those days. We grew old together, your father and I.”

  I shielded my eyes and looked out into the field, imagining what might be in the future.

  “He really loved it here, didn’t he?”

  Shelley paused, sensing, it seemed, the bitter sense of loss I still felt. “He felt a great deal of guilt about Aviva and about you, but when he was here, he was able to let it go. He had a home here. Everyone adored him. We were like children, waiting for him to arrive.”

  “What did he tell you about me?”

  “That you were a wonderful artist, and beautiful and good—you were a good person. He brought photos of you and newspaper clippings about a show you were in.”

  “I wasn’t so good,” I said. “I wish I could be like you and take comfort thinking I did the best I could and he did the best he could, but I can’t. I’m still wishing I could go back in time, knowing what I know now. It would have changed everything. I was so scornful.”

  Something between us had shifted. It wasn’t just the money for the stables, I thought, but that I was invested in Chaverim and would keep returning, as my father had. Or maybe, like my father, the burden of holding onto secrets had worn her down.

  “I sat with someone when I read her medical records,” I said. “Not the first time, but later. Is Aviva the only one with such an awful history?”

  “I’m afraid not. Years back, the details were scant so we could only surmise.”

  “‘It was reported,’” I said.

  “Yes, that’s how it was. Now, though, physicians are alert to these kinds of injuries, and there are CT scans and MRIs. The records are much more thorough, so you see this. Not often, but you do.”

  “Was my father candid with you?” I asked.

  She seemed relieved to say yes. “He had no one else, did he?”

  “He had no one.”

  We turned and headed back to the main building. On the steep upgrade, Mrs. Silk paused to catch her breath, and I took in the cloudless blue sky. The air was crisp and fresh and full of contradictions. A community, where all humans were treated with dignity, set in this most contested land.

  “Shelley,” I said. She’d been asking me to call her Shelley since we’d met, but this was the first time I’d complied. “Did my father see what happened to Aviva?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I had needed so much to hear that. It hurt but it was what I needed to hear.

  She went on, “He could never forgive himself for failing to understand how sick your mother was. Not that he was alone. Back then, even the so-called experts dismissed postpartum depression. You read childcare books from that era, where it’s called the ‘baby blues,’ as if it’s a little mood swing that will pass. Sometimes it does—it did for me. But not always. From what I understand, your mother was unstable even before.”

  “And after,” I said.

  She put her arm through mine and after a few steps, stopped again. “It was very hard, your growing up, wasn’t it?”

  Even then, standing outside Chaverim, where my sister had been placed—battered, broken, deleted from the family—my parents’ history retained its power, and I said, “Harder for them.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Your mother had her work, and your father had Chaverim and Aviva. Who did you have?”

  I was searching for an answer when she asked again, “Who did you have in that house?”

  The main doors of the building parted for us, and the sound of bird song filled the space. A family caught sight of Mrs. Silk and converged on her, and I sat on a bench and studied my trembling hands, replaying the end of the sentence. That house. She greeted them tenderly, the parents and able-bodied boys, the rigid, pigtailed sister in a wheelchair, her gaze fixed upward. That house, where everything was in place, and I was alone, and the long stretches of silence that were pierced by my mother’s episodes, where my father could not meet my eye. That house, where I flailed and kicked, shadow-boxing the nothing, the everything, believing the only way to “find myself” meant brushing off the tiniest dust of history that still clung to my shoulders. Wasn’t this what I wanted—a name, a reason, a story to frame and color in the blankness of my history? Wasn’t this what I needed to give me proof, yet again, that however good or bad I was hardly mattered? Yes, my father saw what happened.

  Another family stopped to talk to Shelley, and I listened from the bench. Even in Hebrew, with its harsh sounds, her voice had a soothing effect. I turned my hands palm up and asked them to be still, and they would not obey. It was so sad and complicated, this past that lived inside me.

  When Shelley was back beside me, we talked about a timeline for the stables, a date for groundbreaking, publicity for the opening. We talked about getting Aviva on a horse. The heaviness remained. Then she looked at her watch and said, “I’m pleased that you and Baruch have become friends.”

  “He’s amazing,” I said, in a weary way. “Too bad he lives here.”

  “When I was a girl, ’love’ was a man and a woman, living in the same house, day after day. There was no other way, except in books, where love bloomed through letters, which, frankly, I never fully understood. If I’ve learned anything after all these years at Chaverim, it’s what a ‘relationship’ can mean, and all the shapes and satisfactions of ‘love.’ Go enjoy your visit with Aviva,” she said, rising slowly. “Don’t worry about transferring her from the wheelchair to the lift. It isn’t something family members ever do. I’ll get Ofir to bring her to the pool.”

  I followed her to her office, where I’d left my canvas bag and rested in her chair, looking at the cacti on her windowsill and the lithrops, the living stone, and thinking about Shelley and my father, turning it over, wondering if they had been more than just friends. It was difficult to contemplate just then—impossible, probable, hurtful, reassuring, in the past, like everything except Aviva, who was just then being dre
ssed and transported to the pool.

  I put on my suit in the changing area and entered the natatorium, with its thick air and chemical tang. A dark thin man with a missing tooth greeted me with a nod, and a moment later Aviva was wheeled in by Ofir, a burly tattooed aide I recognized.

  My stomach knotted when I saw my pale sister, with her slack mouth and fisted hands, her long braid, with its strands of gray, and her red swimsuit, baggy on her skinny frame. I’d been so philosophical with Ronit the day before, and made it sound, even to myself, as if I was completely at ease here, in a place beyond sorrow. And I was not.

  I stood near Ofir and watched closely. Aviva seemed to like his firm, gentle support as he eased her onto the hydraulic lift. Her gaze was untroubled, her body relaxed as he began to secure her in the seat.

  I watched, aware of voices behind me, the familiar, inscrutable sound of Hebrew. I took in the language, the way I took in the smell of chlorine, the light in the bubble columns, the neon wands in the basket, absorbing these sounds and scents as if I were Aviva: echo of indecipherable voices, soft mechanical hum from the pump, one voice rising above the others, its familiarity piquing my interest. The pitch said listen. And even then, the gentle tone was such that I did not turn to see the speaker, merely noted it among the other voices, as I watched my sister slowly settle.

  The water changed, the surface no longer glassy. There was a slight chop, and when I turned, Baruch was walking toward the lift, the water halfway to his chest. Not the man from the day before, but the slender, sad-eyed one I’d seen five months earlier, with that rabbit-tail tuft in the middle of his chest.

  “Hi,” I said. Avoids making sustained eye contact.

  “Shalom.” Even though the water was shallow, he made those little paddling motions, as if that were the only way he could propel himself forward. “So today you will join us,” he said, noting my bathing suit.

  I turned and stepped down the ladder. The water felt like a liquid extension of my own body. It really was something else.

  I worked my way over to Baruch, awkward, relieved to see him, and when we stood facing each other, I said, “I was worried you’d stop swimming with Aviva.”