by Beth Helms
She heard Edie say, “Oh.” Then the noise of Rand fumbling in the cooler for a beer—the sound of ice sloshing—and whispers between the two of them and more laughter, sheepish and delighted from Edie, low and conspiratorial from Rand.
Later she said to him, “I could have drowned,” and the words sounded plaintive and dramatic and she bit back tears and he looked at her from across the room where he was toweling off and said, “Not with our hero around. Not with Mr. Fantastic to save the day.”
But now just three days after the party, and the birth of Firdis’s baby, there is a letter from him, from Mr. Fantastic, and Grace reads it standing on the landing outside the door of the apartment in Ankara, her hand braced on the wall, tumbling shopping bags at her feet.
Edie has left him, Greg writes. Certainly the baby business was the final straw. Grace had surely known about the complications they’d had, the baby they’d lost? The doctors had told them not to try again; the risks to her health were too great, and the results would likely be the same. But then the adoptions that fell through, the false pregnancies and the crazy schemes, and then staying locked up in that dark house on Olson Loop for all those months. The incident in Cairo had been a public scandal—she had snatched a baby, right out in the street. His career would certainly never be the same. It had taken two years to persuade them to send him to Saudi, for him to prove that she was stable enough for another post. Grace must have noticed something? After all, Edie would barely venture past the front stoop. And now he hears she has arranged for a baby on the black market. Has she, by any chance, had word? After all, the two of them are such great friends. I’m so sorry, he writes in closing, so sorry to lay all this on you. It must come as a terrible shock.
Grace stumbles into the apartment and sinks into a chair in the living room. She rereads the letter several times and lets it flutter to the floor. She hears Firdis on the landing, hears the noise of her gathering up the oranges and the cans that have spilled from the string bag, hears her open the door and stand for a moment in the hallway, staring at the back of Grace’s head before she shuffles off to the kitchen.
In the living room, Grace thinks about this letter from Greg. Once, just once, Grace tried to talk Edie out of wanting children; it seemed the least she could do. At the beach that weekend, she had recited, with an accuracy and quickness of thought that surprised even her, all the disadvantages, the negatives, the irretrievable losses. It felt less like a betrayal of her family than a confession, and it helped that she was a bit drunk and had smoked one of Edie’s stunted little joints. They sat on the crumbling concrete outside the converted barracks and lifted their shirts when a breeze came in from the water. They held their tops up around their shoulders, biting the fabric in their teeth, letting the air play on their breasts. Edie wore no bra; Grace could not bring herself to go quite that far.
“And this, for one thing,” she said, pointing to her ugly, matronly bra, tugging it down to reveal a puckered white seam in her flesh. “And the noise, and the demands and the dirt.”
“I don’t mind dirt,” said Edie.
“You haven’t seen dirt,” said Grace.
“I appreciate the thought,” said Edie. “Really, I do.”
“There are times,” said Grace, “I’d happily trade.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I might. I think I really might.”
“Even so,” said Edie levelly, “you shouldn’t say it.”
What Grace heard in her voice was not so much sanction as caution. Against calling up bad luck and ill will. Edie stored superstitions like Grace collected trinkets: she lifted her feet when driving over railroad tracks, held her nose past graveyards, read her horoscope obsessively.
All this was before Grace herself ever thought of such things. But just a week ago now she’d wrapped an evil eye bead in a small envelope and tucked it inside a letter she was sending to the address she’d been given in Frankfurt. She thought Edie would get the joke. She, Grace, so long lapsed from faith, a new convert to cards and tea leaves and kismet.
But what now? In the living room, Grace folds the letter from Greg and places it in the envelope. At this point, it simply seems like more information that she doesn’t need to know. And after all, there is nothing, nothing, that she can do.
FIRDIS HAD gone into labor the day of the party she’d given and at the last minute Grace had to ask Simone for John, which galled her. The messy bits happened here, in the kitchen, and, panicked, Grace called Bahar, who’d come quite calmly and taken Firdis away in a taxi. Later, Bahar appeared at the party and reported that everything was fine: Grace, by then flustered and overwhelmed, had needed several moments to remember the bloody and chaotic events of the afternoon.
Grace and Bahar take a taxi to the orphanage just days after that awful letter comes from Greg. Grace can think of few things she’d less rather do, but when Bahar appears at the door and says she is holding a taxi downstairs, there does not seem to be any graceful way to excuse herself. She picks up her coat and handbag and slips away without a word to Firdis. The taxi ride is quiet: Grace does not intend to share the contents of Greg’s letter with Bahar: not yet, not unless she has to.
At the orphanage, Grace sees immediately the power Bahar wields in the grim hallways, the deference she is shown by the frumpy administrators and the weary matrons, who are scurrying in her presence and falling over themselves to please her. Bahar takes the tea they bring her and sets it down politely on a table in the corner of the nursery; she does not even pretend to put her lips to the glass. As they move through the nursery toward the crib that holds Firdis’s baby, Grace senses the branching arms of what Bahar called consideration, the oiling of unseen machinery, the backroom transactions and private dealings. She sees how the benefit will be spread around, but it is Bahar and Ali, no doubt, who will take the lion’s share. It will be Bahar who will travel and deliver the child to Edie in that distant German city.
Inside its crib, the baby looks like any other baby. Grace cannot quite say why this surprises her as it does. Except that this is the only child in the nursery wearing clothing that is not threadbare; in fact, its tiny footed outfit looks brand new.
Bahar leans into the crib and almost touches the baby’s clenched fist. But then, instead, she brushes her hand across the terrycloth fabric of the little blue suit he wears. “This belonged to one of my boys,” she says. “I brought it over.”
Grace looks down at the baby. The matrons have moved away and a few babies cry softly in their cribs. In their small, whimpering sounds Grace registers a note of resignation, as if these infants do not expect to be comforted or consoled, and are crying only out of habit, and only to themselves. Grace feels something seize inside her chest.
“Perhaps,” Grace ventures, “this isn’t such a good idea. Firdis seems very down. I think maybe she’s changed her mind.” Firdis has returned to work, but her activity in the kitchen has taken on a plodding, despondent note.
Bahar steps back from the crib and makes a sharp noise, then she tempers it with a laugh. “Such emotions are common, believe me. When she has this American money she will hum a new song. And anyway, this thing, it is quite done. But it’s a shame the baby was a boy. Had it been a girl there would not be this upset, this second thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
Bahar looks hard at Grace for a moment. “You should not have had that houseboy that evening. You should not have told Simone about Firdis.”
“I had to tell her something,” Grace says. “I certainly didn’t tell her everything.”
“It never even occurred to me that you might do such a thing.” Bahar shakes her head, wonderingly, in a way that reminds Grace of Rand, when he is trying to impress upon her the stupidity of something she’s done. “Simone talks too much. And this is not a nice young man. Trouble. I thought you knew this.”
“I was desperate. Anyway, what does it matter?”
“It does not,” Bahar says,
in a tone that effectively closes the subject. She turns and begins to make her way back across the nursery and Grace follows. Bahar does not even glance into the cribs as she passes them; she simply steps around them with the same blank face she wears on Tunali Hilmi. As though the babies are merely things in her way on the sidewalk, or some street smut that she does not want to get on her shoes.
Later, Grace thinks to address it all with Firdis herself, but she’s put off by the complications of language, to say nothing of the embarrassment and dismay that would attend such a wholesale unraveling of hopes and plans. She begins avoiding Firdis’s eyes and the sensation—real or imagined—that Firdis is itching to be engaged in conversation. It seems that the most innocuous inquiry or eye contact might provoke some heartfelt confession or plea from Firdis and, accordingly, Grace moves quietly, in the margins of her home, and does not quite light.
Grace cannot begin to imagine how a child of Firdis’s might turn out in Edie’s care. Firdis’s children were thickset, their features hinting of mushrooms. But in a different atmosphere, might one blossom differently? In the dark rooms Edie favored, eating tapioca pudding and pound cake smothered in cream, listening to her accented English, her French records on the turntable, her wizardry with all things fine—needlework and delicate smocking, the musical click of flashing needles—could some transforming miracle occur? Edie had not once said to her, What do the others look like? Are they clever or lovely or imaginative? Tall or short or dull-witted? It had puzzled Grace, and it shamed her, Edie’s great, uncomplicated need, utterly without conditions or qualifications.
In her own marriage Canada had been a surprise and Rand had been displeased, suspecting her, she thought, of deception, some woman’s trickery.
He didn’t know her well enough to know that this is not a trap she’d have set for either of them.
RAND’S ABSENCE has been pure relief. Without him, everything feels fresher, cleaner, more alive. Even Canada, who has always been a creeper, an unsettlingly quiet child, thuds a bit more down the long hallway and closes the front door with a resonant little bang. Grace does not bother to scold her. She no longer feels the edginess that sharing a space with her daughter always provoked. She even enjoys her presence at the card games they get up in the afternoons, the women coming in flushed with cold and smelling of coal fires and chill.
Canada, her growing hands dealing out cards with her father’s precision, or picking at the candied almonds and dried apricots set in crystal dishes along the table’s center, is more and more a young lady. Suddenly her daughter’s self-sufficiency and autonomy seem like things to be proud of, rather than defiances to be quashed. Grace feels a trace of regret. She’s watched with such unease her daughter’s lengthening limbs, the peaks that have appeared at the front of her cotton blouses, the smudge of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She’d never really wanted a pretty daughter, not a daughter like Catherine anyway, whose mournful face and bursting mouth are arresting, whose perfection seems unnatural, a little dangerous. Grace suspects Simone does not much like it either; that she will do what she can to hide it, or disguise it, or banish it. She thinks this accounts for Catherine’s ridiculous dresses and face lift–tight hairdos, and for more than a little of Simone’s own pinched personality. (Envy, her own mother used to say, is bad for the complexion.) She thinks of Simone sharing rooms with her daughter’s beauty and wonders if she hopes that the blush on Catherine may only be youth, and fade accordingly. Does Simone sense, as Grace has in that apartment, the lingering glances her darling houseboy throws at Catherine, and does it make her feel as invisible, as irrelevant and time-ravaged, as it does Grace?
But recently Grace has had fleeting feeling of invincibility, of the kind of power and ease she has long envied in other women. And an entirely new generosity, one that comes of having affection in surplus; she detects a glow to her skin, a new lightness in her limbs. She cannot keep herself from laughing, and she begins to understand Bahar’s irresistibility; it is just the beauty of being desired. Now it seems that eyes follow her in the street, and in restaurants waiters hover near her place, anticipating things she hadn’t known she wanted.
17
AT CHRISTMAS THE CITY WAS ICY AND COLD AND DARK. A GRAY pall of coal smoke hung so close in the air that it seemed you might thrust out your hand and see it disappear to the elbow. The day itself was long and dull: my mother and I opened our packages and ate a silent meal together at the table. It felt as though we were going through the motions, though we lit the tree for show and my mother made an elaborate holiday feast, using the good china and the Christmas linens. Music tinkled from the stereo and in the afternoon we went to church at the British Embassy. Later, when the dishes were cleared, we sat in the living room reading and adding logs to the fire. Dressed in silky lounging pajamas, my mother took photographs that would later show an entirely different Christmas: none of the dragging hours and edgy little conversations, my mother’s attempts at seasonal cheer, my rude rebuffs. It was as though we were waiting for something to happen—the doorbell to ring, the phone to trill in the hallway—and it was a relief when the clock at last struck a reasonable hour for turning in. My mother sighed and rose from the couch, stretching as though she had enjoyed the day and zigzagging off to bed with a wineglass.
A few nights later she dragged me to a party at Simone’s. Catherine was locked away in her room—avoiding me, I assumed—and while looking for a place of my own to hide I ran into John in the hallway. We were caught together for a moment, in an awkward dance, trying to pass each other.
“You and my mother,” I found myself saying. “I saw you.”
He looked at me curiously. “You have bad dreams,” he said. “It is common in children.” And then he was gone, slipping gracefully around me and disappearing into the kitchen. His hatred for us—all of us—was like an object you could weigh in your hand.
I stood for a time in the bathroom, washing my hands again and again with the lavender guest soap and staring at myself in the mirror. Then I left the bathroom and went uninvited into Catherine’s room. It was strange to be there; so much time had passed.
Her face was pitying, her voice stony. After I spoke, repeating what I’d said to John in the hallway, she said, “You. You’ve been a sick puppy around him forever. I’m not blind. And you’re only saying these things because he cares for me.” But I think my story must have shaken her a little. How could it not?
“Besides,” she said nastily, “he would never have anything to do with your mother.”
When she said it, I knew she was right. He wouldn’t. You could see that John wanted nothing to do with imperfection. He had no use for the old or the bruised, for anything tired or overtouched. Hadn’t I seen him choose fruit?
But that didn’t stop me. “He’s doing it with your mother too,” I said. “They all say so.”
“With everyone but you,” Catherine said. And she smiled her beautiful smile and returned to her book. Her finger had kept her place the whole time.
But after a moment she looked up and said in a more conversational tone, “That day…” The words held an inquiring note, though I knew of course what day she meant. “That day. Well, I got home. I guess you know that. But I saw your mother. Kissing someone in the street, at a café. Not your father of course. She must be very busy, your mother, very popular.”
“That’s not true,” I said. But my face grew hot and I could well imagine it.
“Really?” said Catherine. “Actually it was John who pointed them out. We were walking together that day. You wouldn’t know that. But he came to meet me. Strange, that. The way he turned up. I guess he knew something was wrong. He never liked you, of course. Never trusted you.”
It seemed I stood there for an eternity, and I do not remember leaving the room.
She said one more thing before we were finished with each other. She said, “You should be careful. You and that mother of yours. I’ve never seen John so angry. He can’t
stand either one of you.” She tossed her head and her thick hair, and her eyes were no longer tranquil but hard as agate, and just as unforgiving. Oh, I saw it clearly then—though there’d been a million signs that Catherine was outgrowing me. Once, I’d come up behind her in the kitchen and tickled her waist—it was just silliness, giddiness—but she’d whirled on me with a dark, adult, furious face.
“Sorry,” I’d said, throwing up my hands and backing away from her. “I’m sorry.”
“Yes,” she’d said. “Yes, you are.”
How did she outpace me so completely, in those few short months? When did her concerns become grown-up ones, and the games we’d manufactured suddenly grow so tiresome and immature?
THE LAST days of the year were smothered in smog and filth: everything I’d looked forward to had slumped by disappointingly. Without my father, without the promise of excursions or his company, the remainder of the school break stretched like an eternity. And then suddenly my mother had plans I wasn’t privy to: a little trip that involved museums, shopping and mosques. A train ride, a cheap hotel. She assured me I’d be happier with friends, but she made the arrangements without consulting me.
Ultimately it was not hard to figure out where she was going: she left her paperwork and guidebooks scattered around the apartment. I was sent to stay with Kate and her family. We staged water fights on the rooftop garden of the house despite the cold and played complicated games of truth or dare. We slid back and forth on the icy patches we’d made on the roof and went sledding on the hill down from their house, where Kate and her siblings interacted fearlessly, even belligerently, with the Turkish children. I shared Kate’s crumb-littered bed and fought with her for three nights over a share of the grubby duvet.