by Beth Helms
That day we were eating candy and comparing wounds. I had a tear in my shirt; a cat scratch on my arm like a line of red stitching, a raw knee from the rough wall we had just scrambled down. Catherine sat on the listing iron bench, white terry shorts hiked up around her thighs, elbows on her knees, staring down at a spider making erratic progress across the crumbling flagstone. The spider scuttled back and forth as if confused, into the cracks and out again, its tiny shadow round and blurred. The sunlight through the trees made a filigree on the brown earth of the garden, a duotone, and there was almost no grass at all; pitiful tufts of it grew here and there in the dirt.
Against the red ribbing of Catherine’s shorts, between her legs, was a spatter of round bruises, plummy and soft-looking, no bigger than the small lira coins we used to buy individual scoops of ice cream or pieces of gum. She hadn’t accounted for them and I reached out to touch one: a question. She stood swiftly and moved away from me, and in that abrupt movement was the faint implication that I’d overstepped. I fell back, looked around, put fingers to my hot face. Catherine turned away and bent to examine the spider more closely, at eye level, squatting down to the ground.
I watched her back: the gathered-together, winged jut of her shoulder blades as she hunched over, the wispy tendrils of hair at her neck, clinging there in the heat, pasted down. I drew in an airless breath; the garden was still and primitive, the noise of traffic seemed faraway.
“Where did those come from?”
“What?”
I could barely hear her. Her back was to me and her voice sounded blurry, muffled by her posture, distorted by her downward gaze. Standing again, she lifted one sneaker and let it hover, the elongated shadow of her foot dwarfing the spider, erasing its silhouette; it was just a dark pinprick under her sole. She brought her foot down slowly, grinding it on the ground—there was no noise, just the shift of dirt, the horseshoe of her heel mark.
When she walked away I put my hand down on her shoulder to make her stop.
“The bruises on your legs. What are they from?”
“The barre,” she said. She looked me straight in the eye and my hand fell away. Catherine’s eyes were hazel, shot through with yellow and green, the irises wide. Her eyebrows were thin and looked cultivated, though I don’t believe they were. They were a fine architectural detail, a surprised peak in each one. My own brows were mismatched, arcing in an irregular way. I had tried to correct this with my mother’s tweezers but had only made matters worse.
The bruises made me think of John, Simone’s houseboy, and the way his fingers looked in the kitchen pressing tissue-thin dough out on a wide marble board. The shallow indentations left when he lifted his hands away; the delicate swirls of his fingerprints etched in pastry. When we ate the things he’d made I always felt a shivery sense of something like cannibalism, as if I were taking him inside me—his smell of lemons and starch, his crisp shirts and dark eyebrows, his pretty, insolent manners.
“Any more questions?” said Catherine and raised one of those perfect brows; her forehead wrinkled.
We watched each other. Her skin was pale; her lips sucked in at the corners, as though she were biting hard at the insides of her cheeks.
So I brushed my hand on my backside, ostentatiously, as if I had dirtied it on Catherine’s hot, round shoulder. Beneath my hand her shoulder had felt like a rock warmed in the sun, perfectly hard, smooth as an egg.
Catherine let the air out of her mouth, whistling; it resolved into a short little tune she’d learned from my mother.
“Stop,” I said and hit her on the leg. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t master whistling, could not get the components of my mouth to cooperate. My mother’s whistling was an accompaniment to the sound of her bangles, which she’d acquired in the gold district on Tunali Hilmi. She moved through the apartment completely without stealth, the notes of music and bracelets fading and approaching, pausing, resuming. The sound made my teeth hurt.
Catherine moved toward the gate, still whistling, and hurried her steps to avoid my hands, which hustled the air, lightly smacking at her as she unhitched the gate, slid out. Then she took off down the alley at full speed, her shoes making rubbery noises on the cement, the whistling coming in sharp, jagged bursts as she ran.
And then there was a roar of wind in my ears and that tune of my mother’s was caught up in it like the eye, the vortex: I heard a woman screaming in Turkish at a neighbor high above, many floors up, the two of them shouting from balcony to balcony. The laundry flapped like great white wings above us. The noise of the traffic grew louder, we were running toward it—it was a wall of sound we were approaching, headlong, as solid and impenetrable as steel.
THE LOBBY of Catherine’s apartment building looked like this: dim, gritty floored, a dirty-orange railing running tubelike along open concrete stairs. The smell of something floral mixed with dirt. Our school shoes scuffed on grime, sliding through swooping wet tracks left by the kapıcı’s wife. Three or four times a day she squatted beside a leaking bucket, dunked a rag and made crablike progress across the lobby, from one side back to the other, cleaning. The kapıcı—whose name we were told over and over but never retained—hunched outside in a box of shade thrown by a balcony and clenched squat cigarettes between his lips. His mustache was thick, dripping over his mouth at the corners, and his uniform—a frayed pinstriped shirt and sagging workpants—never changed. His duties were almost as mysterious as our own fathers’. For one thing, he dug his finger in his ear like a man who’d lost something valuable, digging and digging before withdrawing his filthy nail, examining it and then returning to business. He could, and did, do this for hours. At the top of the first flight of stairs, a quick turn around the railing—fingers trailing on the orange cylinder—and then two doors opened into Catherine’s apartment: one to the entry hall, the other to her parents’ bedroom suite, which was strictly off-limits.
Inside, quiet: our footsteps made a brief clatter on parquet and then nothing; our feet sank into the muted patterns of carpet after carpet. We made a game of leaping from one to another. Through the swinging door at the end of the hall was the kitchen. Inside we could hear John working—the clatter of china, the ping of crystal, the heavy, muffled whoosh of the refrigerator door. Even when he was not audibly busy, we could sense him in there—leafing through a comic, patting his winged black hair, scrutinizing his impeccable white shirttails for stains.
In Catherine’s room down the narrow hall—one, two, three doors on the right—were two twin beds with matching ruffles, a dresser, framed prints of ballerinas. All was neatness, order, girlishness. Shoes off on the white carpet, quiet games only when Catherine’s mother was home—but when she was gone, as she was today, we mounted furtive expeditions into her perfumed bedroom.
We moved cautiously down the hallway, Catherine behind me, her hand hovering just above my shoulder. Inside: the oversweet smell of gardenia, the nose-clogging dust of talcum rising in motes, captured in the freckled light that filtered through the bunched damask draperies. The dressing table was a world unto itself: crystal atomizers, a drape of beads, a lone earring, the little stool upholstered in velvet tucked into the crotch of the mahogany table. The room whirled with damp, secret scents; our hands reached for things and drew back; we glanced over our shoulders, edged open drawers for a glimpse of lace and lilac silk, brushed them with our fingers and then pulled back as if burned.
I reached for one of Simone’s atomizers—a delicate, crystal thing, designed to hold scent or genies—and it slipped from my hand and fell with a muffled thud to the floor. As it rolled under the bed we scrambled, our hands touching and grabbing beneath the bed skirts, feeling desperately for its shape, its weight, its diamond-cut facets. We heard footsteps outside the door and froze. The noise moved away; it was only John, on some unrelated errand.
We left the room breathless, gardenia in invisible blankets around our bodies; we used our hands to beat it from our clothes and ran silently, on ti
ptoe, back to Catherine’s room. Noiseless laughter, amazement at our boldness, our narrow escape—we fell on the twin beds and pulled our knees to our mouths, bit the soft flesh like fruit and rocked ourselves back to calm, until our breathing was smooth and even and our trapped hearts arrived again at a bearable pace.
Catherine said, “Are you my best friend, Canada? Absolutely and forever?”
“I am,” I chanted, giddy. “I am, I am, I am.”
“Feel my heart.” She pressed my hand to her chest, flush against its hammering cadence. I felt her thin collarbone, the starch of her school shirt, the frantic drumbeat of her center.
After school, as afternoon wore slowly away to evening, sounds would awake in the dining room beyond Catherine’s closed door: John, moving through the hallway holding a stack of laundry—tiny ironed panties and undershirts, knotted pairs of anklets—would straighten a perfectly straight carpet with his sock feet (the hushed noise like leaves moving restlessly on a forest floor) and suddenly, Catherine’s mother would be moving through the apartment like an angry little wind, checking up on the evening’s preparations. Then I would get up, locate my book bag and my shoes, let myself out onto the landing and clatter down the concrete steps into the evening air—which would not have changed appreciably, or cooled, but quieted somewhat, the traffic noises having given way to those of insects whirring in the trees, the shadows throwing leafy semaphores across uneven sidewalks, the waning light against the long hill that led up to my apartment glowing a deep, burned red, and the slopes and hillocks of the empty field between our homes taking on human forms. I saw hips and haunches curling in sleep, breasts pressed together in flirtation, the profile of a woman in a sulk, her lips a mogul we had once flown bumpily, dangerously over while sledding alongside the Turkish children, children who did not speak to us or acknowledge us except to spit in our direction, or shoulder us aside at the top of the hill. This didn’t disturb us particularly; we didn’t want to be included or liked by them, and their hostility was no more or less than we expected.
What kind of girls were we? We were similar in many respects, easy in the company of adults, well read through necessity, adept at amusing ourselves, and mostly secure in our secret lives, aware that our parents—those adults we shared rooms with, under whose loose, sporadic authority we lived—were generally disinterested in us, and could be counted on, for the most part, to be otherwise occupied.
We were not children who believed their parents’ lives revolved around them—we would never have entertained such a conceit. We were adaptable, malleable, we went along: reading books under the table at restaurants, fading into the scenery at cocktail parties when babysitters could not be found, trailing our parents through churches and ruins and, though bored stiff, maintaining pleasant expressions, rarely whining, and able to sleep in the most unaccommodating circumstances.
Of course, we had the normal talents—listening at doors, piecing together through fragments the substance of our parents’ discord—but we had others as well. We could muddle whiskey sours and set a reasonably elegant table, count to twenty in at least three languages, competently hail taxis and make simple transactions in foreign currencies. It didn’t occur to us that these were uncommon dexterities; they were nothing more or less to us than knowing how to play hopscotch, jump rope or hold our breath under water.
But we were different from each other. Catherine’s biddable exterior disguised a certain immovability; I was impulsive and suggestible, given to quick passions and imaginings of every stripe: romantic, vengeful, fantastical. Catherine was steadier and more disciplined, a cautious, watchful girl. At least that’s what people thought of us, and we believed it ourselves, falling into our roles comfortably. And perhaps we just liked to be thought of at all, to be categorized or noted, by anyone.
During the school year Catherine and I sat in her room and played games of our own devising and long, dull matches of concentration with packs of dog-eared cards. We didn’t speak as adults will of interests and activities—we never discussed Catherine’s ballet, for example; and later on, the subject of my horses never arose between us. Our points of intersection were those of children—immediate, discrete and confined to the small places and rooms of our friendship. When I left her house I often did not think of her until the next day, when she appeared at the bus stop, or met me in front of my apartment building’s iron gate to make the walk together. We were busy after all, having our own tricky domestic landscapes to negotiate. We sometimes traded books back and forth—boarding-school series, thick anthologies of poetry, gothic paperbacks and enormous sagas of Welsh families beset by tragedy, volume after excruciating volume. We stole some of these books from our parents, hid them beneath our pillows and mattresses, though really, I can’t imagine anyone would have cared what we were reading. That kind of censorship wouldn’t really have occurred to our mothers, and if they’d found us with these books their response would likely have been a vague, amused disapproval, or the flick of an overplucked eyebrow. It might have been something they’d mention to their friends at a cocktail party—they might even have liked, within certain strict parameters, to believe us precocious.
But in truth, or this version of it, I can really only speak for my own mother.
2
FOR GRACE, THE DIM AND SWELTERING AFTERNOONS BRING endless games of whist, small plates of olives and cheese and honeyed pastries scattered on lace tablecloths. She’s joined a group put together by the embassy, advertised as a meeting of Turkish and English-speaking ladies for the purpose of exchanging culture and language. She assumes, of course, that it’s intended to keep them all out of trouble.
She sits with these new friends, playing the unfamiliar game—where hands are swiftly dealt, bids made and quips and affectionate insults fly by in both languages. The afternoons in the dark put her in mind of hours spent with Edie, her friend from Olson Loop in the States, where they’d bided their time before the orders for Turkey had arrived. But here the noise of the city is heard through the windows, its raucous tenor softened by the height at which the days are idled away, high above the city among Mediterranean furnishings. The walls are swagged here and there with velvet draperies, and painted in hues that make Grace think not of the color but rather of the taste of cinnamon. All day handsome young houseboys move quietly through, replacing plates, refreshing tea served in voluptuous gold-rimmed glasses, set on tiny saucers.
All these women speak exquisite English when they need to, and under their gentle tutelage, during the sleepy afternoons, Grace’s Turkish progresses nicely. Flicking cards, their slender wrists sing with stacks of scored gold bangles; Grace has recently affected ones just like them. Beside them, the foreign women—American, British, Canadian—seem drab and stiff; their glasses of tea balanced carefully, their faces arranged in attentive expressions. Powder, pinkish and overapplied, cakes in the lines of their polite faces; their limbs, set rigidly on the antimacassared arms of divans, remind her of old-fashioned china dolls. Grace stirs the cloudy tempest of sugar at the bottom of her glass and daydreams of Victorian women dropped into a sheik’s harem: she loves the Turkish ladies and their hazy, nodding, pouting hours, their languid postures across pillows sewn from exquisite remnants of carpet.
Her hostesses, dark and diffident, hold children with one drowsy arm as the other hand takes tricks, ringed fingers clicking on the sharp edges of cards. Grace hears that odd Turkish noise of disgust when a hand is lost, a sharp cluck of contempt or dismissal that she herself has picked up—it is strangely satisfying, and perfectly articulate.
Everyone rises in unison when the muezzin calls for the fourth time; even Grace tells time by him now. Soon the electricity will hum to life again and chores will be resumed, husbands will arrive expecting dinner and consolation, children will be roused by the noises, by the cooling air, and demand attention. At home, in a nearby section of the city, Canada will return wrung out from her day with Catherine.
Always, these aftern
oons must be shaken off like overlong naps, or hours lost in an opium den, deep and disorienting. Grace wanders home, half drugged, through the newly familiar streets, past the shops and rug merchants, stopping along the way to buy pastries or dates, to finger an evil eye, a silver puzzle ring. The faces of the merchants no longer seem sinister, but friendly, eager to enter into a haggling session over some trinket. In this way Grace acquired the Maşallah pendant around her neck, and the string of rough blue beads she has hung over the kitchen doorway for luck. Maşallah, Inşallah, Avallah, as they say in Turkey. God bless, God willing, praise be to God.
Often Grace walks home with wealthy, beautiful Bahar, who lives close-by, in her own concrete aerie. Today, they pause in the tiny park that lies at one end of Tunali Hilmi. A sign shaped like a swan hangs at the gate and inside is a round coin of water surrounded by benches. Here a few women carry babies or let them totter around on the grass. The swans on the lake—a gift from Beijing—are huddled together and the women stand near the edge and watch them. The park is buffered from the traffic by a ring of ancient poplars, though the main street of the market is still visible through a leafy arch, and apartment buildings encircle the skyline.
Bahar has become one of Grace’s closest friends in Ankara, a frighteningly chic woman with a wicked tongue and an expensive European education. She befriended Grace quickly, with the irresistible force of her personality, her seductive way of inclusion, her confiding, intimate manner.
Bahar kicks with her heel at a loose stone on the cobbled walkway. In the background, small children run past, screaming, and a few women give halfhearted pursuit.