Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  “Why would I? It’s something both of us enjoy.”

  “But yesterday you seemed so angry with me.”

  He lowered himself in the water and then rose slowly. I said, “I’m pleased that things have worked out for you and Dina. You deserve to be happy.”

  “You know what I deserve?”

  Startled by this brief flash of anger, I said, “I guess not.”

  The lift began to descend. Aviva was slowly lowered into the pool, and I moved past this uneasy exchange and said, “This is my first time. I’ve never done this by myself.”

  “It’s not so hard.” Baruch walked toward the lift, making those little paddling motions. Ofir unclasped the belts and Baruch eased his arms beneath Aviva. The echoing voices that had provided a pleasant background a moment before now made my ears throb. Baruch was cradling Aviva when he turned. She was so limp in his arms, head thrown back, limbs loose, that I felt a surge of panic and said, “I’m not as strong as you are.”

  “Don’t you remember? In the water, she is light. Don’t be afraid. It’s very nice.”

  Standing beside Baruch, I saw no glimmer of impatience on his face. I could not say then or years later how much time passed before I was cradling my sister, my other, my twin. It was true: in the water, Aviva was so light it was as though her history had floated free and left us with no story of what might have been, only the pleasure of this moment. She made a sound I could not interpret, a yawn or yowl, and he laughed and said, “Very nice, Aviva.” He put his arms around me and said, “Now we will dance,” and drew us close so we bobbed in the water together, weightless as moon men.

  He gave Aviva a slow whirl through the water, then held out his arms so I could hold my sister, and I did, though with far less grace, since I was new at separating myself from the fraught world on land. I couldn’t say when all the voices vanished, the instructive one, the punitive one, the one that urged caution, only that they did, and there were no rules to follow, just our bodies moving in the warm water. I was surprised when the thin man with a missing tooth returned, and I realized an hour had passed and we had to stop our dancing and leave the pool. I watched as Aviva was transferred back onto the lift, staying focused on my sister and on the aides, with their sure hands. Then I grasped the ladder, took the three steps slowly and stepped onto the tile.

  I felt swollen from all that was unspoken between us, stuffed with the unspeakable, like my father had been with me. It was exhausting. I padded over to the bench to get my towel and tried to tuck it tightly around my waist. Baruch walked beside me and the two of us watched Aviva being wheeled from the room as if it was the end of a fabulous performance. Then we were alone, and I could feel him breathing, could sense the blood in his veins, his steady heartbeat, his life force, fierce and vulnerable and human.

  “You’re right that I don’t know what you deserve,” I said. “I was just trying to say I wished the best for you.”

  “Do you?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s strange to see the two of you together. It shouldn’t be, since I was the one who told her to go out with you. I saw you first. Your picture, that is. The one where you’re standing against a wall by yourself. It’s an amazing photo, the way you’re totally unguarded, looking straight into the camera. Not protecting yourself. I was so taken by it. Why did you walk away when I said you were kind? I wasn’t blowing you off,” I said. “I’d really wanted to come here with you.”

  “But it was futile,” he said.

  “What was?” I asked.

  “That’s what you said. That it was futile.”

  “I said what was futile?”

  We listened to voices echoing in the distance and the murmuring of a pump. Then we tightened our towels. Baruch, with a subtle gesture that meant whatever, said, “I misjudged how you felt. It happens.”

  “That night? In what way? I never felt so connected to anyone.”

  “You said it was futile.”

  I covered my face and tried to remember standing on the sidewalk, stringy-haired, sandy, barefoot. “Couldn’t you tell how much I wanted to be with you? I thought you did that kind of thing. Professionally.”

  “We hadn’t finished our checklist,” he said. “And you never called.”

  “I did once,” I said.

  “But never again, because it was futile.”

  “At that particular moment, it felt futile,” I said.

  We laughed. It was so ridiculous. Then we inhaled and tightened our towels again, and Baruch, with a chin gesture like Dina’s, said, “So, Vered. The world ends not with a bang but a whimper?” He looked at me in that frank, open way of his, not the faraway gaze of a distracted man, though in time I would get to know that look, too. “It’s splendid to see me with your good friend Dina?”

  “Right,” I said. “Okay. So for me, personally, it’s not so splendid, but since the two of you are together, I’m going to work toward thinking it’s splendid.”

  “What do you know of my time with Dina?”

  “’You are the most wonderful man in the world.’ That’s the report.”

  He closed his eyes and shrugged.

  “It doesn’t count that I wrote?”

  “Thank you for everything. You’re very kind.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “To me, kindness is a virtue.”

  “Tell me something. What do you want for yourself when you’re not so busy wishing I have everlasting joy with your good friend Dina?”

  “To be an honorable person.”

  “That’s a very noble sentiment.”

  “What do you want me to say, that it kills me to see you and Dina together? Okay, fine, for what it’s worth, it kills me. But, what the hell, I’m like a cat and will go on with my next life, where I’ll pursue my dreams and…go to Sicily. Get myself a nice place to live. Meet a man who is whole and healthy and tender and intelligent and sexy. And kind. You think that’s asking for too much?”

  I laughed. It really did seem like I was asking for too much.

  I untucked my towel and used a corner to wipe my face, and when I was done, he extended his hand as if we would part with a brief businesslike handshake. I reached out and he took my hand in both of his and held it until the door to the natatorium opened, and a skinny man with a frail neck and thick curls was wheeled in. I thought of the peonies in my yard, with their bowed heads.

  “For you, for your sake, I hope you and Dina are happy. But if it doesn’t work out, let me know. Or be practical, and don’t let me know, though I’d like to spend more time with you.”

  He kissed my hand in a princely way and looked up, his expression so piercing and inscrutable that I said, “Oh, what will happen to me?”

  He turned my hand palm up and said, “You will live for many years, Vered. And then on your one hundredth birthday, your friends will bring you a cake with one hundred candles, which you’ll insist upon blowing out yourself.”

  “And then I’ll die in the process, face first in the cake.”

  He turned my hand back over and said, “Yes. But it’s a long time until then.”

  He let go and walked off. I watched him leave the natatorium and thought, this is not over. I was surprised to feel so confident. We had parted with no word about the future.

  Trust what you see, I told myself. Trust what you feel in the air, what you read in someone’s eyes. Trust what you take in when there are no reassuring words.

  Then I was home and the days passed and I did not hear from Baruch. I grew shaky, and doubt rushed in, and the foolishness of falling in love with someone so far away. It was harder then, and I had to keep reminding myself: Hadn’t he called Shelley to find out when I’d be seeing Aviva? Hadn’t he waited for me in the pool? Hadn’t he put his hand to my cheek and waited for me to meet his eyes? Each time I recalled these moments, I told myself he’d call.


  Thirty

  Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, fell on the same date as Kayleigh and Ryan’s wedding in Ohio, so I missed Dina’s call, wishing me “l’shana tova,” and got only her cheerful voice and nothing about a new beau, which was what I’d been waiting to hear. By then, nineteen days had passed since Baruch had held my hand in the natatorium and looked at me in such a way that I was certain he would call. The certainty changed as often as the weather, but I was not entirely ready to say I had misread our last moment together.

  Les picked me up on the morning of the wedding in his handsome German sedan, with its purring engine and tan leather seats. He was clean-shaven, his suit on a hanger in the back. When I hooked my dress beside it, I saw a family walking to one of the half-dozen synagogues near my apartment. The interior of the car was so pristine I took off my shoes after I was buckled in. Pairs of men walked ahead of mothers pushing strollers. Grandparents with toddlers, older children zigzagging ahead, little girls with drooping headbands and patterned tights, their brothers with crisp collared shirts partly hanging out of their khakis. It was strange driving past them, as if I’d been left out of a party everyone else was attending. The culture in which I was raised had been Jewish, but the box had been empty.

  Though nothing inside a sanctuary could quench the left-out feeling, the desire to mark the new year took hold, and while we drove, I told Les about a Rosh Hashanah tradition called tashlikh, in which observers threw bread in the water, as a symbolic casting off of sins. As I talked, I thought of our city, with its three rivers and sandy trails.

  “Sins?” said Les. “Isn’t it a little fire and brimstone to be worrying about sins?”

  “Forget the sins and think of it as a time to reflect on your life. To go down to the river and symbolically cast off your regrets and sorrows. I bet you have a regret or two you’d like to send downstream.”

  “You bet. I’ve got a bushel.” He pressed a button overhead and light flooded into the car from the moon roof, and I closed my eyes and settled in for the rest of the ride.

  It was nearly five when the valet at the country club waved us over to the gravel lot where the wedding guests would park. The blue sky I’d seen from the car’s open moon roof had been replaced by charcoal-colored storm clouds. After a delay, the reception was held outdoors, as planned. The guests huddled on folding chairs, the women with shawls or men’s suit jackets across their shoulders. The minister appeared. Then at last the groom and his family walked on the papery runner covering the grass. They waited, and we did, for the bride to appear. Time passed, and the clouds darkened. Les put his arm around me, and I rested my head against his chest. The music changed, and the first chords of the Beach Boys “God Only Knows” began to play, and Kayleigh appeared. Ryan’s face crumpled as he watched her walk down the papery aisle. Les squeezed my shoulder. Hold on, you two, I thought, almost fiercely. Do not forget this moment ever.

  When fat cold drops of rain came, we scooted under the huge tent with clear plastic cutouts for windows. The women’s heels sank deep into the wet grass, and the wind came with such force that the musicians couldn’t plug in and the tent shook, its canvas luffing, its stakes squeaking and rattling. It died down during dinner, and by the time the toasts were made, and embarrassing stories unearthed by half-drunk fraternity brothers, the weather became a convenient metaphor. Les and I danced a few slow dances, and I joined some women I didn’t know for the fast ones, and then we drove home.

  In the morning, I put a hunk of frozen bread in my backpack and rode my bike through Squirrel Hill, where the sidewalks were again enlivened by strolling families, and then through Polish Hill, past the stately Immaculate Heart of Mary church, with its copper domes, and tolling bells on this Sunday afternoon. Les was standing outside when I arrived at the lime green schoolhouse, his bike against the wall, and we rode out to the trail together. At an agreeable spot we propped our bikes against the guardrail. The hunk of bread I’d carried had defrosted and broke nicely in two.

  I threw the first crumbs. The wind carried them horizontally, in an unsatisfying way. At the edges of the sandy trail were jagged little stones. I scooped up a handful. The first one I threw into the river fell with the satisfying, substantial plop of a cast-off regret. I threw another pebble and listened to it hit the water. Sorrow. That was what I wanted to leave behind. The sorrow that I’d never said to my father: Yes, there was another one. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known about Aviva. There was still the sorrow that I hadn’t said “yes.” Yes, Daddy, there was another one. The sorrow that I’d never said, What about me? Why can’t you love me, the child in your household? The sorrow of never knowing what might have come of such a conversation, if he’d needed me to speak these words before he could reveal his own heart.

  Mom, Mama, Mommy. A pebble for each forbidden name, for what had been done to her. For the way she’d harmed Aviva. Another one when I thought of Harley standing outside my house, that genial, gentlemanly veneer his downfall. Standing on the cinder trail, looking out at the water, there was the sorrow that for so long I kept expecting him to become someone else. The sorrow I’d been angry when he didn’t. The sorrow recalling him sitting on my window ledge, his despair so dark and deep. (Had it been that way for my mother that night? Had it been that way for her forever after?) I felt such sorrow to think of the effort they expended masking their despair. Harley had to pay out of pocket for his stay at the “retreat” where Byron had taken him. I imagined this as a source of sorrow for him.

  Les had walked a few feet up the trail and was standing with his arms crossed. I stepped beside him. A nearby sign said, “These waters receive sewage from sewer overflows as a result of rain, snowmelt, and other events.”

  I threw another pebble. Oh, such sorrow I felt that environmental restrictions had been eased and the river received sewage. Sorrow that the earth was warming.

  I was sorry that years before, I had thrown that puppy, tossed him mindlessly to the ground while gabbing to friends. The puppy had screamed in a most human way, then rose, trotted off, and lived until he was sixteen, which made him, in human years, roughly the age of those yogurt-eating Georgians. Though as far as I could tell, he’d been unscathed by my carelessness, I continued to hear the puppy’s scream, for which I was sorry.

  Standing on the riverbank, contemplating water that received sewage, it seemed as if the reason I was the sorriest person was that I’d been unable to discharge any sorrow. I threw a pebble, wished I had a pipe from which sorrow overflow was released. I closed my eyes, imagined all the wounded animals, the homeless and disenfranchised and victims of war that lived inside me, crawling, limping, rolling, walking down a ramp in twos, departing from my brain. This left me with the sorrow that I’d never had the chance to care for someone else before now, and the fear that I might not know how.

  I stopped. I was already doing it, wasn’t I? Or beginning to?

  I threw a pebble long distance and listened to it plop. The sorrows life dealt were different from the ones of our own making. I didn’t want to look back and say, “if only” or “I wish,” and said, “I need to go to Israel sometime soon.”

  I was sorry there was no two-state solution, no peace on the horizon, and sorry when I thought, as Dina had said, that too much wrong had been done on both sides.

  “I have to work these visits into my life in such a way that they aren’t a big deal. People do it, a lot of them. You have to admit that travel seems to loosen me up. Or maybe it’s nerves, though historically I’ve done good work when I’m gone. Don’t you think?”

  “Historically.” Les nodded.

  “Did you know that ladybugs are a symbol of good luck all over the world? Every day I find dozens of them dead on the windowsill. I try not to impart any meaning to this, but it troubles me to see them upside down on their shells. It makes me feel cold, heartless, to quote Harley’s friend. And it’s so far from the truth, wh
ich is more that it’s hard for me to follow my heart, when that’s only gotten me in trouble, and now I don’t know if this one time I should trust my heart and go for this man, this really wonderful man, when Dina spits him out, which for sure she will, since the expiration date on that union has passed, and he’s definitely not her type. He lives thousands of miles away, which makes the whole thing insane. And maybe it isn’t really what he wants, but still, I can’t help thinking that the last thing I want to do is spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t—”

  “Rox.” Les cut me off. On his face was an expression of such bald despair that I stopped apologizing for having gone on that way and said, “What? Are you okay?”

  We hugged the guardrail to avoid being crushed by a family on wheels. The youngest rolled in a closed cart attached to his father’s bike, a little pasha.

  “Nomi,” he said.

  I held my breath. Waited. Life could be so cruel.

  “I’m in love with her. Like totally.” He threw a pebble into the water.

  “Of course, you are. Why do you sound so stricken? She’s not married, is she?”

  “Oh no, oh no. Not at all. Not married at all. It’s just that she’s amazing.”

  “I know that,” I said. “We all do.”

  “It’s intense, Rox. And my track record. As you know, my track record is dismal. It really sucks, my track record. I don’t know what she’s doing with me. And the kid. I’ve already fucked up one kid, and hers, her little girl, is the nicest kid I’ve ever met, smart and open, like her mother. She’s a remarkable child.”

  I squeezed his shoulder, as if to console him for his loss. “You were practically a teenager when you had your son. Don’t you think maybe you’ve matured?”

  “Me?”

  Our mood lightened after this exchange. We threw the rest of our stones in the water at once. It was like the last blast of fireworks on Fourth of July—every single sorrow exploding in the water.