by Ani Katz
What?
They didn’t know that I was going to hell.
My mother put her hand over her mouth.
Oh, Miri, Kit breathed. She had begun tearing her napkin into little pieces, rolling the bits into tiny balls with her fingertips. She popped one into her mouth and sucked on it noisily.
The woman told me that all Jewish children went to hell when they died, Miriam went on. And in hell they wandered alone in fire and darkness, and would never find their families again. It wasn’t their fault, of course, but they were damned because their parents didn’t know any better. They didn’t know what to do to save them.
Oh my god!
At this point, I was beginning to get a little frightened, as you can probably imagine—but the woman took my hands and said that she could save me, that she would make sure that I went to heaven like all the other good children. She wanted to do it for me, because I was the prettiest girl she’d ever seen, and she knew I deserved it. All I had to do was trust her. So she led me into the bathroom and asked me to take off my clothes while she filled the tub.
Holy shit.
Did she, like, touch you or anything like that?
Did she molest you?
Sweethearts! That’s inappropriate!
No, Miriam said. There was nothing like that. She had me get in the tub, and she put her hand on my back, and said a lot of prayers asking God to protect me, and suddenly she had her other hand on my forehead and was pushing me down under the water.
No way! Deedee gasped. Did you fight back?
No, because I trusted her! Miriam said. It sounds crazy, but I really did! I thought all adults took care of children, and that their job was to keep us safe. They were our protectors, you know?
In any case, I wasn’t afraid. I lay there on my back, and after a moment the woman lifted me up out of the water. When I opened my eyes she was smiling and crying and saying that I had been saved.
I can’t believe this, Deedee said. This sounds like a movie.
Yeah, a really fucked-up one, Kit agreed.
Then she brought me into the bedroom and gave me a man’s shirt to wear as pajamas, and we lay down together in the bed. She told me that now I was a child of God, and that I was truly perfect, and that someday I would go to heaven where I belonged. Then she told me to go to sleep, and that we’d make plans in the morning.
Plans for what? Deedee asked.
Miriam shrugged.
It never got that far, she murmured. She was quiet for a moment, her eyes lowered to her plate. A stillness settled on the table—even the breeze had died.
The police arrived a few hours later, Miriam continued, looking up at us again. Two officers. One of them called my parents from the phone on the bedside table. I could hear my mother wailing on the other end.
Wow, Kit whispered.
What happened to the woman? Deedee asked.
You know, I really have no idea, said Miriam, her voice light and wondering. I never saw her again. I heard her crying somewhere as the police led me out of the house.
God, Kit murmured. I can’t believe this.
You know, said Miriam, I think maybe she wanted a child of her own but couldn’t have one for some reason. So she tried to steal me and convert me.
You think so?
I mean, it was ridiculous, really, Miriam said, leaning back in her chair, her neck long and white. I can’t imagine she thought she’d succeed in keeping me permanently. Maybe she only wanted to pretend, to see what it was like for a while. I can understand it. The wanting to pretend. I’ve done that too.
You have?
Well, nothing as crazy as that, of course.
I stared at Miriam, imagining that strange house, furnishing it with views stolen from the homes of strangers and acquaintances, places visited once or twice and barely remembered: a dim sunken living room, beige carpeted stairs, floral curtains, a chipped blue bathtub. A small girl in a huge bed, cradled in the arms of a barren woman who was making plans for heaven. It was like something out of a horror movie, and I should have put my arm around Miriam and pulled her close to me, drawing her away from that awful memory.
But I didn’t.
You never told me that story, I said. She met my gaze and shrugged.
It never came up.
I had always wanted to know about her, had always hungered after the secrets of her early life, but now I had the carcass splayed before me, and I felt sick from watching the others gnaw at the bones.
My own traumas were more than enough to sate me—we didn’t need hers.
My sisters had left the table without my noticing. They reappeared as shadows at the threshold of the sunroom, a garland of fire hovering above their outstretched hands. Everyone began to sing.
* * *
—
After the cake, my mother thanked us for the lovely evening and went up to bed. I could tell she was holding back tears by the way she pressed her lips together, her chin crinkled as if it had been smashed into gravel.
Everyone else would have left the dishes until the morning, so I cleaned up the kitchen alone, scraping clods of confetti frosting into the trash and rinsing every knife, fork, and plate before loading them into the dishwasher. I shut the door and pressed the start button, listened as the meek hum of the machine filled the silent room. Everything had been put away.
When I went back outside I could tell the girls were drunk. All three of them. They had descended from the table to sprawl out carelessly on the patio, their eyes shining with something besides the electric blue light of the pool, their laughter and voices loud enough for the neighbors to hear. My sisters were telling stories to Miriam, who leaned toward them, transfixed, prodding them with her nods and her questions. At first I could only make out isolated snatches of their talk, but as I drew closer, their words began to cohere into a familiar, shameful narrative. Then I was standing beside them, witness to the confessions I was powerless to stop.
And people just didn’t believe us, Deedee was saying. One day in kindergarten I told everyone that Daddy had hit Thomas with a frying pan, and they all laughed.
Well, Kit said, that’s because it was kind of funny.
I guess so.
I mean, it sounds funny to a little kid. Getting hit with a frying pan.
They thought I was making it up. It just sounded so crazy.
Kit put her face in her hands, her body convulsing with what looked like sobs. She couldn’t get her words out, couldn’t breathe.
But she wasn’t crying. She was laughing.
Remember? she finally choked out.
What? Deedee asked. What?
Remember the night Thomas threw Daddy down the stairs?
Now they were both laughing, bawling with hysteria. Miriam stared at them as if she were dazed.
Don’t tell that story, I said. But they didn’t hear me.
Daddy was so drunk, Deedee said. Thomas didn’t even really need to push him.
He missed the step and—whoosh!
Like he was on a slide.
And boom at the bottom.
Didn’t he sleep there all night?
No, Thomas dragged him out to the porch, remember?
Evie helped him. It was right before she left home.
They went quiet then, suddenly remembering themselves, remembering what they weren’t supposed to talk about. They looked up at me, and in the cringe of their bodies and the glossy darkness of their wide eyes I saw what I must have looked like to them—I saw that they were afraid of me.
But Miriam didn’t shrink away, or shut down. Instead she drew closer to my sisters, embracing them with her gaze and her touch. Soon the three of them were kneading each other’s shoulders, caressing each other’s ankles, joined in a feminine circle of comfort. I half expected them to kiss.
&nb
sp; Tell me about Evie, Miriam said. I’ve always wanted to know more about her.
She was the best.
But she lied about everything.
Everything!
She told people she’d run away from home when she was thirteen.
Or that our parents were dead and she took care of us.
Or that she was going to be on the next season of 90210.
Or that she was having an affair with her English teacher.
They were smiling again, relishing these memories.
What happened to her? Miriam asked, her voice low.
She moved to the city for college. She lived on the sixth floor.
And one day she fell.
No one spoke after that. We listened to the sounds of the pool and the sounds of the night—the burbling of the filter, the hiss of the crickets, the brackish breeze that rose up and fidgeted through the greenery.
* * *
■ ■ ■
There were things my sisters didn’t know about Evie.
They didn’t know that we would hide in her bedroom and read, just the two of us. They didn’t know about our pretending at love, or that when we tired of our mother’s romance novels we would read Where the Red Fern Grows, returning again and again to the scene where the boy dies, impaled by his own ax in the Ozark night, the red bubble forming and breaking on his lips.
They didn’t notice how Evie arranged puzzle-piece bits of food in colorful symmetry on her plates, how she would tongue teaspoons of soup like a kitten, how she needed something green on every dish, or how she ripped up her bread with her fingernails until it disappeared.
They didn’t know about the bright dashes of sharkskin on her upper arms, tidy marks like a growth chart.
And they didn’t know about the other things that had happened. They hadn’t even been born yet.
I can still see myself, nine years old, walking home from the park where I’ve gone to kill time after school until my mother comes home from work. I kick up leaves and caress rows of hedges with my outstretched hand. I pass a dead squirrel, ironed into the road like a dried flower pressed between the pages of a heavy book. I crunch up the driveway, tiny gravel fireworks exploding from under my footsteps, my plaid shirt coming untucked, my jacket slipping from my shoulders.
Inside, the lights are out. But then I hear Mimi, our father’s favorite: I came happily from my little nest, to respond to your call of love.
I float through the vestibule, through the dining room, drawn toward the music, toward the presence emanating from the living room like a smell.
It’s my father. Facedown on the couch, spotlit by a single dim lamp, he props himself up on his elbows and looks at me with glazed eyes. He opens his mouth slightly but no sound comes out. Mimi and Rodolfo are singing together now, reluctantly bidding their dreams of love good-bye before agreeing to stay together until spring. To be alone in winter is a deathly thing.
And then I see Evie. She is asleep, maybe—her eyes closed, her body still, so thin you can hardly see her there, under our father.
She is thirteen.
My father tries to wink at me, tries to turn on his trademark sparkle, but his eyes are red and slow. From where I stand I can smell his pickled breath.
I panic. I know it’s absolutely essential to keep my mother away from that room, because if she found our father and Evie like that, found the three of us there together, something terrible would happen. I know that I have to protect my mother from that scene, even if I can’t protect my sister.
Marcello and Musetta are quarrelling now, their volleyed accusations a vicious counterpoint to Mimi and Rodolfo’s reconciliation. I begin to cry. My father is crying too and he gets up and screams at me to go outside, his voice joined with the shouted crescendo of Marcello’s and Musetta’s bitter insults. I don’t move—I can’t move—and my father steps forward and hits me across my face.
Then I’m on my back on the floor, the wind knocked out of me. My father grabs me and slings me over his shoulder and carries me outside, then goes back in and slams the door behind him, Evie in there with him, Mimi and Rodolfo on the stereo singing together as one:
We’ll part when it’s the season for flowers again.
After a while I stop crying. I sit on the porch until it gets dark, until my mother comes home from whatever office she’s indentured to that year. I watch her get out of the car and waddle up to me. She is hugely pregnant, exhausted, the twins huddled together inside her. She smiles at me, her dear boy.
They kicked a lot today, she says, taking my hand and bringing it to her belly.
She doesn’t ask me why I’m outside. I don’t tell her anything.
You wouldn’t have believed our father was capable of such things. To an outsider, he seemed devoted. And even though Evie and I knew the truth, the apologies were always so lavish, his amnesia concerning specifics always so total, that we almost wouldn’t believe it ourselves.
Later that night, Evie crawled into my bed with me and held my hands and whispered that it hadn’t been so bad, that he’d only wanted to lie there on top of her, looking at her.
I let myself believe her.
* * *
—
The twins also didn’t tell the story of how it all ended, years later. How on the fifth day of one of his benders, my mother let our father bully her into giving him the car keys so that he could drive himself to the deli at the end of the street.
She must have been worn down from the days of delusional rants, the months of overdraft notices. She must have been tired of living in his world, where facts changed because he said so, where everyone was always out to get you. The world where you could hit your son with a frying pan, because no one would stop you.
Besides, the deli was only a few blocks away.
Ignoring the stop sign, our father coasted through the intersection, and the oncoming Volvo station wagon plowed through his driver’s side door, flattening my father into a slab of jelly and gristle.
The other driver was a high school softball star, had pitched her team to the state championship that year. She would never walk again, but she survived. Things could have been much worse. If my mother ever felt guilty about what else might have happened, she never let on.
After the funeral—smug relatives and gawkers from the Methodist church descending on the house to gorge themselves on cold cuts and baby carrots, rainbow cookies wet with jam—my mother found me lying on my back in the garden grass, the sacred space where my sisters would chant incantations and cast spells. She pulled my head into her lap and stroked my hair. She was drunk, half laughing, half crying.
Man of the house, she kept murmuring. Man of the house.
It was just after sunset, and the mosquitoes had grown bulbous and brave. My dark blazer was spread under me like a cape, already stained beyond mending.
In my mind I can see my mother taking off her ring and hurling it into the dark wall of the hedge, but I know I’m imagining that.
I was seventeen. The twins were almost eight. Evie had just turned twenty-one.
We should have been fine afterward, our entire lives ahead of us. Instead, Evie was dead by Christmas, and the twins stayed home, little girls forever. Now that my mother could finally protect her two youngest, they would start all over again from the beginning, two babies safe under their mother’s watchful care.
I was the only one who managed to escape.
Don’t mistake me. I’m not looking for sympathy. That’s the last thing I want.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I climbed the stairs to my mother’s room. I knew she wouldn’t be asleep—she could never sleep at night. She’d be up reading, or watching an old movie on the small television she’d set up on her vanity, or gazing at the faded roses blooming on the walls.
I knocked soft
ly, entered. My mother was sitting up in bed, pillows in mismatched floral linens piled around her, light from the television dabbed against her shabby nightshirt. I caught a glimpse of the screen, watched two sisters singing and dancing in the parlor of a grand house. The elder sister was a famous starlet—she would die of an overdose one day.
Sorry to disturb you, I said.
It’s all right. I’m sorry I missed the rest of the party.
No, it’s good that you left when you did. The girls embarrassed themselves.
Oh.
She didn’t ask me how—she could probably guess. She cleared her throat. They shouldn’t drink at all, she said. It’s my fault—I don’t know why I let them.
Ma, they’re twenty, for Christ’s sake. It’s fine.
Let’s please not have this fight again, she said.
But Ma.
What?
This isn’t what I want for you, I said. You shouldn’t be living like this.
Thomas.
I can help. I can take care of the girls. And you.
You do take care of us, my love.
Of course I do. I always will.
You’re so much better than your father ever was.
Just tell me what you need.
She was silent for a while, and when she looked up again her eyes were dull, defeated.
We need money, she said. Her voice was like the thud of a hand on a table, a door pushed shut.
That’s fine, I said quickly. That’s totally fine. I can give you money. It’s no problem. Everything will get better.
She wouldn’t look at me. We said nothing, listening to the bright babble of the voices coming from the television.
If you like-a me
like I like-a you