“Mama!” they cried out in unison as they neared her.
Faye saw them. Dropped to her knees and opened her arms wide. Yes, she was ready for them. Oh, just look at them, she thought to herself, like white angels or fairies. Yes, that is how they got there. Changelings from the fairy world! One day she would have to hide them so the fairies couldn’t steal them back.
“Come to me, my beamish girls!” She laughed, opening her arms wider so that she could catch them both in her embrace.
To them, her hair smelled like sunshine. As they flung themselves into her grasp, her hair fell around them like woven umbilical cords. This is how it always was. This is how it should be.
“Why can’t we stay with you in the yellow cottages and look at the water all day like you?” Blanca asked.
“Because there is no school here. You have to learn things and get smart.”
“I hate school. They are all mean,” said Clara.
“Yeah,” Blanca concurred. “Last Hallowe’en two boys dressed up as us. They painted their faces white and put mops on top on their heads!”
“Well, you have to learn things,” Faye insisted. “How are you going to grow up to be smart if you don’t go to school?”
“We are learning things, but not at school!” Clara blurted out, and Blanca started to shake with anticipation. Please, please don’t tell her!
“Are you better yet, Mama?”
“Almost. I will be home soon. Now, are you going to sing for me?”
The girls began the familiar “Flower Song” with the purity only young voices have. Voices without bravado. No scoops, no dips. Just pure sound. And all the time Faye just stared at the water.
“It sounds like water,” she told them when they finished. “Like mermaids singing, or sirens inviting you into the water. You have to be careful of the sirens. They are very tricky.”
“It takes place at the water’s edge, but not a lake, a river. And the two go off to get flowers.”
Faye grabbed up their hands and began running with them to the fields where snapdragons, Queen Anne’s lace, and goldenrod grew in abundance. The three picked and picked till their arms were heavy with the wildflowers. Then Faye began to braid them into crowns for the girls.
It was so much fun that they didn’t realize how long they had been outside, in the sun. The sun, an enemy to the fair-skinned. An enemy to the girls. Sun was their greatest threat; it could kill them. But it had all felt so very good until their white, white skin was pink and starting to blister. When Faye hugged them they cried out in pain. How, oh how, could she have been so irresponsible? How would she ever be able to care for them?
When they returned, Bob was standing there, waiting, hands on his hips.
“What the hell, Faye? They’re all burned up. What in God’s name were you thinking? Oh right, you weren’t thinking! You never do.” He pulled the girls away. “Get into the car, I got a little something I want to discuss privately with your mama.”
“No, I don’t want to talk to you.” Faye crossed her arms.
“Oh, you’re going to talk to me all right. A little chat for old times’ sake.”
It seemed slow motion, but too quick to do anything to stop her. Faye bent over, scooped up a rock, and threw it at her brother’s head. It hit right above his eye, splitting the skin. And in no time at all, a goose egg rose up from his forehead.
“What the fuck, Faye!”
On the way home the girls sat facing backward. They sadly watched as their mother receded into the distance. And with her diminishing form, all hope of ever being reunited with her receded, as well.
Gareth could hear his parents talking in the next room. Sometimes their words would blend together like the hum of an engine. A sweet engine. An engine that never had to be gunned or revved. Gareth knew that his parents loved each other, and their murmured talk at night reinforced that. Their words a blanket that wrapped around him.
“You should have seen them, Mark, little things. Twin albinos. And they were so happy to see their mother. It was all looking so positive till she snapped and threw that rock.”
“I wish you didn’t have to work there, Elaine. So many sad stories.”
“Well, we need the money. At least till the factory is up and running again,” Elaine reminded.
“Yeah, stupid me, going into management. At least when you are on strike you can picket and get paid.”
“Why don’t you stop fretting and just go back to school? You’re smarter than what you are doing. Go into mediation or labour law. Remember all the dreams we had when we first met in college?”
“I just want to take care of you.”
“Oh, please, it’s a modern age. Women are burning their bras now!”
Gareth could hear laughter and what sounded a bit like wrestling.
His father laughed. “Well, don’t you get any crazy ideas!”
“Too late for that, darling! I married you!”
Gareth was straining to make out all the words this time, only because he had heard the words albinos and twins. Could it be that his mom was the nurse to the mother of those fairy girls he met at the eye doctor’s almost eight years ago? He wondered how they looked now. If they were as magical and as beautiful or if they had become as awkward as the twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls in his school. How many times had he tried to conjure up their faces as he drifted to sleep. And sometimes it made him feel all funny … down there.
“I just don’t think that she will get out as early now. I think that the doctors will order up another round of the treatments.”
“Love the way you just say treatments instead of electroshock therapy,” Mark quipped.
“Oh, it’s come a long way. Anaesthetic now, muscle relaxants. They don’t even feel it.”
“Could we, just for once, leave your work at work? It always presents itself no matter what we’re doing.”
Gareth could hear kissing sounds, so he put his pillow over his head and tried to conjure the image of the albino twins.
They float above the ground. Because the earth cannot contain them. They hover, tiny wings aflutter. They approach him. Beckoning. Then one, the one who had given him the colouring book, holds her hand out to him.
“Away with us he’s going,” says the first one.
“Away with us he’s going,” echoes the other one.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
* * *
At the time the walnut cake had tasted sweet. With hints of orange and vanilla and a generous, aromatic cinnamon rising from the top. Inside there were tart apples and, of course, walnuts. It was Esther’s favourite cake.
“Tastes just like my bubbie’s. And when I smell it cooking, I can remember being a child again. Being so loved and embraced by my family. But they are all gone now.”
“Where did they go?” asked Blanca.
“Well, they were taken away to a concentration camp.”
For the girls, a camp was a place where more fortunate children got to spend their summers. Girl Guide camps. Sports camps. Swimming, arts and crafts, and explorer camps. The camps were endless and they were always excluded from them. Even if it were subsidized, the twins could never go to a camp. It was too risky. Too much sunshine.
“They took them to a camp?” Clara asked.
“And they never came back?” Blanca chimed in.
“Very few ever came back from the concentration camps,” Esther replied sadly.
“Doesn’t sound like a very good camp.”
“Why did they go, couldn’t they concentrate?”
Esther marvelled at what sheltered lives the girls had led. How could they not know such recent history? They really were little savages, these girls. Wild and untamed. They smacked their lips when they chewed. They had to constantly be reminded of their manners, their pleases an
d thank yous. They laughed at the nude paintings and made, what seemed to her, crude remarks. They ran about like hoodlums. And yet …
And yet there was something extraordinary about them. They had curious minds. They had the voices of angels. And they loved each other.
When they took her family, Esther was hiding behind the piano. She could see them, pushed and shoved as they were taken out. She wanted to run out, to yell at them, “Don’t you treat my parents like that,” but she had promised that, no matter what happened, she would stay quiet; she would stay hidden. Her older sisters, both married and living in their own apartments, may or may not have been taken, as well. She was told not to go to them. Not to check. Oh, how she had loved her sisters. Envied them with their thick dark lashes and long, wavy dark hair. Esther didn’t have their sultry colouring. She was fair like her mother. A dirty blond, really. Her hair was lank, straight, and unruly. A cowlick at her crown that made her hair grow out in different directions. And so, like the twins, she mostly kept her hair neat in two braids while her sisters’ hair flowed and cascaded in thick veiled curtains to their waists. But it was her hair, her lank and second-rate hair, that had saved her. Her hair allowed her to blend so that she was not given away. She did everything she was told to do. She took the papers from inside the piano and she began to walk. To walk and walk and walk, until she made it to a border crossing. She handed over the papers, spoke perfect German and waited, fingers crossed inside her coat pocket. With a stamp on the second page, she turned away from all she had ever known. But what she had known didn’t exist anymore, anyhow. She left her home, her country, her family, and her piano behind. Not knowing where she would go and how she would survive.
“I like the cake. May I have a little more? Please.”
Yes, they were learning, after all. Esther cut another slice. Topped up their teacups and offered them milk and sugar.
“Not too much, though, you’ll want to taste the tea.”
“You always say that!” The girls laughed together.
Esther didn’t make it to Canada until long after the war. There had been a quota and Jews were being turned back by the boatload so, during the war, she waited out her days by caring for Swiss children, teaching them piano and vocals. They were always very polite, those Swiss children. They bowed, took your hand, curtsied. You never had to tell them, any of them, to remember their p’s and q’s. But none of them, not one of them, could sing like these strangely white and unruly twins.
“Did you sing for your mother?” she asked them.
“Yes, she loved it!” said Clara.
“We sang Lakmé !” Blanca added.
“And which part did each of you sing?”
“Oh, we switched it up to make it fair. Why did they always make the songs in different languages in the olden days?”
“Well, it is just the language it was written in.”
“But it’s never in English,” complained Blanca.
“We should sing in our language!” enthused Clara.
“We could find something nice for you in English. Some Purcell, perhaps?”
The girls looked slyly at each other. They were reading each other’s minds. Could she be trusted? Should they let her know, let her in on it?
“We have our own language,” Clara confided.
“What do you mean?” asked Esther.
“May we please be excused?” they asked together.
The girls had come to emphasize the polite words. To reinforce that they were trying, that they were good. Worthy of Esther’s efforts.
“Yes …”
They stood together and Clara snapped her fingers one, two, three times. When they started it was a chorus of familiar but unknown sounds. Vaguely English but not. Like nonsensical poetry. There was something rhythmic about it, and yet their voices carried the notes as though on the wind. Esther could hear how the hours of making them listen to opera had inspired them. But what language was it?
The girls stopped as abruptly as they started.
“Something like that; we are still working on it,” Clara announced.
“And that nonsense language, what is that?”
“It isn’t nonsense! It’s what we speak to each other when we don’t want other people to know what we’re saying.” Blanca was defensive.
“Yeah, it’s our safe language,” Clara added.
“Are you saying you just made it up?” Esther asked.
The girls didn’t know if they had, perhaps, done something wrong. Esther was so full of questions and, really, adults only asked questions when they were trying to trick you into admitting something. First it was the questions, then it was the strap on the bum.
“We didn’t do anything wrong!” Clara yelled at her.
“We thought we could trust you, but you are just like all the other grown-ups!” Blanca added.
“We thought you would like it, we made up the song for you!”
Esther was stunned. She had no idea that her questions would upset her little guests. She looked at them, intently, making sure that her expression was as benign as possible.
“You know, you two ask me a lot of questions, too. I don’t think I have done anything wrong when you do.”
“Yeah, but you are a grown-up.”
“Not really. I just look like one! It is a disguise!”
The twins relaxed. Even smiled.
“When someone asks you a question, sometimes it isn’t to get you into trouble, sometimes it is because you are interesting. I think that your song is the most interesting thing I have ever heard. Like an ancient language. Now tell me how you made it up.”
“It just grew out of us,” admitted Clara.
“Well, it is something you should share with the world. You must continue to sing in your language. People sometimes lose their language and, when they do, they lose a little of themselves.”
Esther remembered how she drove the Yiddish out of her, preferring only Haute Deutsch, until she could blend like everyone else. But these girls could never blend. They would always stand out, be different. Hopefully these will be kinder and gentler times, she thought.
“If it is okay, could we have just a bit more cake? Grandpa isn’t home so I don’t think there’ll be supper tonight.”
“Did you forget something?”
“Please,” they both said in unison.
She put two big slices on the plates. She could always make another cake for David. She watched with contentment as the girls ate happily, and greedily, not knowing that her walnut cake would later leave a bitter taste in their mouths. It would, later, trigger the memory of the saddest day in their little lives.
Come away, oh human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
* * *
Faye had once known love. Young love. Pure and uncontaminated by expectation and responsibility. It was carefree, like a gentle breeze through her troubled life.
Timothy had been in her grade all the way through the primary-school years, but, in high school, their friendship changed. They stopped seeing each other as someone to tease and torment and began to see each other with new eyes. Faye was no longer the girl with the know-it-all personality who, every time she put up her hand and answered a teacher’s question, ended her responses with the words of course. And Timothy ceased to be that nuisance, that class clown, who obviously couldn’t concentrate enough to actually pass any of his subjects. Instead, he became the one who could make her smile, even laugh at times. He became the one to pull her from her darkness, to see the world as a place full of promise. She, in turn, was his thoughtful muse. A girl so deep in her emotional being that she was a constant inspiration for him. He wrote poetry about her. He picked up the guitar and started to write songs about her. She imagined that they would marry one day, travel far away from Cobourg, and see the world together.
<
br /> Little had transpired between them physically. A few fumbled gropes, a bit of exploring with the hands, and lots and lots of kisses, stolen in safe places, in the shadows, away from disapproving eyes.
Yes, Faye did know love once upon a time and, as she stared out over the lake, she could taste it on the moist air coming off the lake water.
“Step back a bit, Faye! You are not allowed in the water,” Nurse Elaine warned.
They were always close but, because Faye had been there so long, she had grown used to the constant presence of guards and nurses. There was a constant feeling of eyes watching from a discreet distance, analyzing every move, disapproving of anything out of the ordinary. But how different was that from her childhood? There were always eyes on her. Making her feel ashamed.
Why had she been ashamed? She was sixteen then. She had a boyfriend. She loved him, yes, and she felt that he loved her back to an equal level.
“Faye, I won’t tell you again! You don’t want to have to go into the big building, now do you?”
She did not. After she threw the stone at her brother she had been taken there for a few days, for observation. Those days seemed long and claustrophobic without the lake to keep her company. The walls seemed to close in around her, the air felt stuffy and suffocating, the other patients seemed too far gone. All she wanted, while she was resting there, was to be out of there. There were no dreams of future days in the big building. There were no dreams of happiness in the big building. Only a yearning to go outside and lose herself by staring out at the water. There’s an infinity to water. A large body of water can carry your soul to impervious shores, serene, untroubled, and vast. Looking out over the water, Faye could feel herself lift away from her own body in order to hover across that body of water, reaching shores where there were no judgments, no consequences, and no reminders of all that had been lost.
Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack Page 7