“Do you consider yourself an authority on sororal relations?” I said.
“Where do you get these words, Clara?”
“Sororal relations is not a word, it’s a phrase.”
“Where do you get these phrases, Clara?”
I gave her a look. I can do it, too, give looks, although I rarely choose to do so. The truth is that I attract unusual words and phrases. They come drifting toward me out of thin air, invisible, and then they sense my presence and quickly attach themselves to me. That’s because I’m a word-person. My first-grade teacher told me that.
“Clara Winter,” he said. “You are a word-person and don’t ever forget it.”
He was right. He knew. He could tell. It’s something that can be sensed. There’s a difference between word-people and non–word-people. The old man, he was a non–word-person. Was the old man’s mother a word-person? His father?
Who knows?
It all comes back to the truth, and what the truth might be. Still, it’s easier to make up a story than to tell the truth. I don’t even know what the truth is. Tamar will not answer my questions. She does not even allow me to ask my questions. It’s a force she exudes. It’s an aura that surrounds her. I want to know everything about my baby sister, and everything is what I don’t know. There is so much left unasked, so much that can’t be answered.
“Was I a premature baby?” I asked Tamar.
Notice how I did not say “were we premature babies.” Tamar would not have responded if I had used “we.” She does not respond to me when I refer to myself and my baby sister as “we.” Tamar answers only to “I.” I have to phrase everything in the singular, as if it was ever only me, me myself and I, no baby sister twirling and somersaulting beside me.
“A little.”
I’ve done a lot of research. There’s a great deal I know about conception and pregnancy and birth, things that Tamar may not even know despite the fact that she has experienced all three and I am but a callow youth.
Can a girl be callow? Or is it a boys-only word?
Tamar is a straightforward person. She believes that knowledge is power. More than once she’s told me, Knowledge is power, Clara. If knowledge is power, then why won’t you tell me about my sister? is my silent response. You can’t say that to Tamar though. She’s not that kind of person.
Baby Girl may have had undeveloped lungs. She may have been unable to take a breath of frigid Adirondack air even if she had wanted a breath of it.
A baby’s heart beats extremely fast. Not as fast as a hummingbird, but far faster than a grown human being’s. If you’re trying to get a baby’s heart going, you have to keep jabbing and jabbing at a baby’s chest. I doubt if that’s something Tamar knew how to do. This was quite a while ago. This was eleven years ago. They may not have known much back then, about how very fast a baby’s heart beats, and about how hard you have to work to keep it going.
Was Baby Girl an old soul? Was she not supposed to be born? Was she accidentally trapped inside my mother’s body, a terrible mistake? Do babies have a choice? Do they have the ability to choose to live or die?
My roll of green adding-machine paper used to sit snugly in the holder the old man made for me. I can still see it, even though it no longer exists. When last I saw my roll of adding-machine paper, many notes had been taken about the old man. Most of them I took down when first I met him, when he was my immigrant oral history project. Some of them were about his little brother, Eli.
The day I asked him about Eli, the old man was wrapping tinfoil in the shape of a butterfly around a sweet potato. The old man loved sweet potatoes. He often ate one for lunch.
“Okay,” I said. “Why didn’t Eli come to America with you? That was the plan, wasn’t it?”
The old man pinched the tinfoil butterfly until it had antennae, then he carried it over to the fridge and put it inside next to his quart of Dairylea milk. The old man only bought a quart at a time. It would last him a week unless I put too much in my hot chocolate. Then he ran out and had none left for his coffee. He never said anything though. He just drank it black. I wonder now if the old man hated drinking black coffee, those times when I drank up his milk.
“Wasn’t Eli supposed to come with you?”
“It was snowing,” he said. “There was a lot of snow.”
He got up and went over to the sink and ran some water onto the dishes.
“Snow that was blowing straight into my face. I couldn’t see.”
I unspooled some more of my green adding-machine paper and wrote on it. Snow … straight … couldn’t see. I know about snow like that. The old man drank the rest of his coffee. It had to have been extremely cold by then, but he never wasted anything.
“Was Eli wearing boots?”
I pictured boots, heavy lace-up boots such as they must have made long ago in the old man’s country that doesn’t exist anymore.
“Yes.”
“Did he follow in your footsteps? That’s what I did when I was nine and Tamar and I were stuck in the blizzard.”
“No.”
“Did you carry him then?”
“I left Eli with the lantern,” he said.
I held the thickly spread bite of toast under the table, then I put it into my mouth. I tried to swallow it without biting, the way Catholics do with the wafer.
“It was too cold,” the old man said. “There was too much snow. It was the dead of winter. I couldn’t carry him.”
The old man couldn’t carry him.
There was too much snow.
It was too cold. Too much snow. That was all I needed to hear: There are many ways to die, I remembered the old man saying to me, long ago.
I wrote it all down. Then I wound the spool of green adding-machine paper back up. Around and around I went. It took a long time. Then I put it in my backpack. The old man finished wiping the dishes dry, plucked up his damp yellow dish towel, and hung it over the oven door handle. He hung it exactly the same way he always hung it, smoothing out the damp wrinkles.
Too cold. Too much snow. I couldn’t carry him.
The old man’s little brother, Eli, died in the snow. I watched the old man smoothing out the wrinkles in his yellow dish towel. Even if I closed my eyes so that the sight of the old man smoothing his dish towel disappeared, I knew I would still see him. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been minutes earlier. Now everything was different. Now he was an old man who had lost his brother.
The church lights were on across Nine Mile Creek, but they wouldn’t be on for much longer. Choir practice was almost over. Tamar would soon be driving up to the entrance of the Nine Mile Trailer Park. The windshield wipers would be on because of the almost-freezing rain, and the broken one on the right would be squeaking. I looked out the window at the church across the creek, trying to see the lights through the rain, but all I could see was a young boy—eleven years old—lying still in the snow, wearing a pair of heavy lace-up boots.
Inside my chest, my heart hurt. It came to me that my whole life long, I would carry with me the memory of the old man standing by his stove, smoothing his dish towel. Up and down, up and down, yellow stripes appearing and disappearing under his hand. Across Nine Mile Creek, the lights blinked out. The old man sat across from me at the formica table that he found on scavenging night, lost in his dark lantern world, unspeakably sad.
Six minutes ticked by, and it was time to go. I folded my jacket over my arm and took two sugar cookies wrapped up in a paper towel, one for me and one for Tamar, for the ride home. I wiped my eyes on my jacket sleeve. It was dark. Tamar wouldn’t notice.
She noticed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Tamar kept one arm on the steering wheel and one eye on the road. She kept looking over at me. She knew to be quiet. When we drove into the driveway, she leaned across me and unbuckled my seatbelt. She stretched her arm way out and opened up the car door for me. She used to do that when I was a child.
It was cold in the house. It’s always cold in the house. I turned up the thermostat to 72 degrees and sat on top of the register in my room. Warm air came blowing up underneath me. It made my hair fly up in the air. It came seeping through the layers of socks and pants and underpants. I curled up with my knees to my chest and lay right on top of the register. Two floors below me, the furnace hummed. I love that hum. Warm air blew around me and through me. I warmed. My muscles started to unclench.
There were footsteps in my room. I kept my eyes closed. I stayed curled up. The footsteps came over to where I lay on the register. Something clinked onto the floor next to my head.
Footsteps receded.
I opened my eyes. Steam curled out of the mug on the floor next to me. I breathed in sharply through my nose, to try to draw the steam over to my nose so I could smell what was in the cup. Tea? Hot chocolate? The steam would not cooperate and drift itself over to where I lay breathing in quickly. I started to hyperventilate from trying so hard to drag it over. Coffee? Hot mulled cider, which I had once read about in a book?
None of the above.
A mug of hot water, with slices of lemon floating in it. I took a sip. It tasted sweet. Could there be sugar in it? Could Tamar have spooned in some white poison, which is what she’s been known to call sugar? I lay back down on the register. Tamar had not turned the thermostat down, she had not said anything to me about wasting energy, she had not told me to put a sweater on if I was cold. Tamar, my mother, had brought me something sweet and hot to drink.
I closed my eyes and tried to let the young Georg drift through my mind, standing on the pier at Ellis Island, drawing stars and stripes in the air with his nose, his dark olden-days coat hanging down on his shoulders.
But he wouldn’t stay. He disappeared.
What came to me instead was the old man at his forge, the one he rescued from the auction in North Sterns. The old man stringing aluminum soda can tops together. The old man searching for possibility on scavenging night. The old man making me a lantern that was not a match for my missing lantern earring.
Warm air kept blowing up through the register. I sipped at the hot lemon water until it was all gone.
There’s many a time I’ve missed Baby Girl, missed her terribly. She would have walked beside me in the halls at school. Her locker would have been next to mine, in the last row of lockers where the U-V-W-X-Y and Z lockers are. There’re only a few of us at the end of the alphabet. There’s not all that many students at Sterns Middle School to begin with.
She would have understood without explanation why I changed the W in Winter to w. That’s what twins do. They don’t have to explain things to each other. Or maybe the W would have remained uppercase after all. If my baby sister were alive, winter would not have won. Tamar and my grandfather would not have been defeated by a blizzard.
They would have triumphed in the face of adversity.
They would have laughed in the face of death.
My baby sister would have been born, taken her first breath of icy Adirondack air, and screamed. My grandfather would have had no reason to flee to a patch of primeval forest near the Vermont border and become a hermit. There would be only one topic to avoid with Tamar, and my sister and I, together, would have insisted that she tell us about our father. Helpless against the mysterious power that twins together exert, she would have agreed.
Perhaps Tamar would choose to eat foods not necessarily jarred or canned. She might like not only marinated artichoke hearts but fresh artichokes steamed and eaten with lemon mayonnaise, such as I once read about in a magazine. Tamar might have allowed more sugar in the house. The three of us—Tamar and her twin daughters—might have baked sugar cookies together.
Everything might be different, if my baby sister had lived.
CJ Wilson might never have looked at me with those eyes. He might never have flipped up my skirt, the first day of school last fall. My chickens might not have turned out mean. There would have been someone to feed them with me, to research chicken violence with. There would have been someone else to love the words I love. Peter Winchell, who has a locker next to mine, would be the person who was supposed to have a locker next to mine, instead of being a boy taking away a locker belonging to someone else, someone he’s never met, someone the school never heard of, someone no one besides me has ever known and no one besides me has ever dreamed about, a ghost girl: my sister.
Chapter Ten
It was the old man’s idea that I go to Utica and seek out my grandfather. We were at Crystal’s Diner. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and instead of going home after school I had walked to the old man’s trailer. I used to do that sometimes. I was taking notes on my roll of adding-machine paper, which I started keeping at the old man’s trailer when it continued to irritate Tamar.
“The very sight of that damn green thing annoys me, Clara,” Tamar had said, one time too many.
The old man was stirring cream into his coffee and watching Johnny Zielinski play in his booth. Crystal brought Johnny a plate of french fries and a little bowl of ketchup—red, his favorite color—to dip them into.
“Now, how close was your father’s forge to your house?” I asked the old man.
I was asking a series of questions for Georg Kominsky: American Immigrant and I wanted to get the details right. Take a fake book report for example. You have to get the details right, otherwise who would ever want to read the fake book?
The old man looked at me.
“My father’s forge?” he said.
Then I remembered. I had made the whole story up. It was all a figment of my imagination. It’s hard to get away from things once they’re written down. Written down, things become real. I had a memory of the old man as a child, little Georg, living with his father and mother and his baby brother, Eli, in a hut next to a forge, in their town that doesn’t exist anymore. Georg and his father, every morning eating their cornmeal mush and heading out the door for a day’s work. Georg the apprentice, his father the master.
None of it existed.
None of it was true.
“My father’s forge?” the old man said again. “What are you talking about, Clara?”
“Nothing,” I said.
He watched me tear away the part of my roll of adding-machine paper that had the made-up story notes on it. I rolled it into a tight tube and then I folded the tube over onto itself. Then I put it into my mouth and chewed.
“Clara?”
I shook my head at the old man. The paper wouldn’t chew. It just got soggy in my mouth. There was a taste of paper throughout my entire nose and mouth. How do spies do it?
“Clara.”
The old man couldn’t read anyway, so I took the paper out of my mouth and threw it into the trash behind the grill. Crystal watched but she didn’t say anything. I pictured the old man the night I first saw him, hanging lanterns in Nine Mile Woods.
“What will happen when you’re gone?” I said to the old man.
It was happening again. Words, tumbling out of my mouth without heed.
“Like if you move away or something?” I said.
Too late. The old man already knew whereof I spoke. He already knew I was looking ahead to the day when he wouldn’t be there, to the day when he would be gone.
“Clara.”
Clara clara clara.
“It happens,” I said.
He said nothing.
“Everyone will be gone,” I said.
“You have your mother.”
“I want my grandfather. I want my sister.”
The old man regarded me. That’s the term for a certain kind of look.
“It’s true that I will be gone someday,” he said. “So will Tamar.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“But by then you will have found something, Clara,” the old man said. “You will have found the one thing that will change everything, the thing that will make sense of your
life and keep you going.”
I asked Tamar about my father once, point-blank. Is my father dead? I asked her. For all intents and purposes, she said, which is a typical Tamar response. Where does he live if he’s dead only for intents and purposes? I asked. As far as I’m concerned he doesn’t live anywhere, she said, which puts him in the same category as my hermit grandfather, who may or may not be living in a patch of primeval forest near the Vermont border. I kept on, though, and finally Tamar caved in just to make me stop talking.
“Your father was someone I met one night at a party,” she said. “The next morning he drove to Virginia and I never saw him again.”
She made her eyes huge and stared back at me.
“There,” she said. “Does that answer your question?”
“Yes and no. What was his name?”
“He didn’t have one.”
“Everyone has a name.”
“I have no idea what it might have been.”
“Is he still alive?”
“No idea.”
“Did he know about me and my sister?”
“You mean did he know about you,” Tamar said. “You don’t have a sister.”
“Did he know about me?”
“What do you think?”
She stared at me and didn’t blink. That’s another of her skills. Tamar can go a long time without blinking. It’s very difficult to go without blinking. Try it. I didn’t answer her question. Answering questions gives the question-asker the upper hand. That’s what I wanted to avoid. So I just repeated my own question.
“Did he know about me?”
That’s the kind of thing I’ve learned to do just from observing Tamar.
She shook her head. “Your biological father does not know about you. He has no idea about you. I doubt he even remembers meeting me, and therefore it is as if he does not exist.”
She stabbed an artichoke heart with her fork.
“Got it?” she said.
She stuck the fork in her mouth.
“Got it,” I said.
Then I cleared my plate and scraped it into the wastebasket and put it in the sink. I threw my napkin into the wastebasket. I put my glass of milk into the fridge for breakfast tomorrow morning.
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