There were dark curtains with birds and sailboats on them in the photos and long white gloves over her mother’s muscular, freckled arms. Helen Gilderstein became Helen Weill dressed in suede Joan Crawford platform shoes, and a white sunbonnet with pearls on its rim, her strong fingers in the pictures of the wedding dipping into expensive chocolate mousses and into shining glasses of champagne….
A British education at the University of London laced her mother’s manners. Helen never talked about old Jerusalem where she was born and spent her childhood—the daughter of a wealthy, aristocratic Jewish businessman in British-occupied Palestine—except when she struggled to pronounce American words. In other photos, Lilly saw the younger, voluptuous Helen, in a cotton dress with white lace neckline and sandals, smiling widely inside a limestone arch against shadows of barren and cratered hills.
Inside the living room of the American house in Westchester when Lilly was young, Helen had put a painting of Old Jerusalem up over the colonial fireplace: Jagged brushstrokes of women walking… the white-green olive trees had heads like pulled cotton. A smoky, strange painting with no footing, nothing firm. People, houses, and trees like clouds. Faint impressions were left on Lilly’s memory from when Helen took her to Jerusalem as a very young child of two and, again, when Lilly was eight years old: yellowed photo stills of dead and lost cousins, shadows lost in vistas of sun-whitened earth and beautiful four-winged houses built at the time of the British Mandate, before the state of Israel was declared, and almost all the streets named for poets and sages who had lived in Spain in the Golden Age.
Old photos showed an underground cistern where Helen and her older sister, Edna, bathed as children, catching the precious rainwater for cooking and their baths some time in 1920s. The terraces were filled with calla lilies and the leathery leaves of pomegranate trees potted in giant ceramic vases. There were garden tearooms in other photos, British Tommies with khaki shorts, and military batons with leather handles strapped to their wrists, patrolling the streets and neighborhoods. In later family albums, there were photos of rows of women in army shorts and brown boots weaving the blue-and-white national flag of Eretz Yisrael, the Star of David that hung over the limestone porches of the Jewish population by the 1940s… scraps of information and glimpses that Lilly could piece together into a story of Helen’s past.
There were many scenes of the vanquished places and its cities behind the Ancient Walls in the albums— snatches, shuffled and reshuffled through Helen’s fingers, mystical-like pieces gathered up in old photo stills.
A woman’s pubis was a bulb, Lilly once thought, remembering the first time, as a child, she saw her mother’s naked body. Helen had left the door open to her bedroom, which her mother would then do frequently. Helen had undressed in full oblivion; Lilly was in the hall and she could see her mother’s wide-open body. The view was brief and blazing, telling Lilly that every part of Helen was grand, that she occupied all space, there was no one else there, there were no other bodies in the room, not even David, the place he had in the bedsheets covered by her mother’s messy underthings—Helen was the only one, and it was beyond seduction. Her mother had stopped what she was doing, intoxicated with herself, not even aware of Lilly coming upon her. Her mother’s nakedness, curves of soft flesh, was like an enormous fruit, Lilly had thought, encountering, as she stared through the huge gap in the door, the intimate details of Helen’s body, her mother’s sex—a fine apricot-colored down, a pit at its center. The large woman was giving Lilly exhilarating access to Lilly’s own being, like a mirror that blinds. Helen’s two round, moist eyes were a source of liquid starlight that none of her mother’s frequent mood swings or fits of temper could ever take away for good. Helen was a pure energy and spread out before Lilly in an abandon without shame until the air drove Lilly to the edge of an abyss. Even the memory of it made Lilly feel again like she was becoming nothing, and that the tension inside her own body was the need to remain mute and stilled, as she stared into the masturbatory excitement of the figure who seemed to absorb all the spaces of the earth.
Helen had her own stories of Palestine before the wars and of the exotic cities of Cairo and Beirut, the old countries of Persia and Egyptian Babylon. Helen’s past had vanished, but where had it gone? Lilly had asked herself as a child. Helen loved showing Lilly the pictures of her childhood in Palestine. “Outside the house on Palmach there was a basin where Edna was in charge of bathing me,” Helen told Lilly. “You see my sister Edna with her long braids? All the time, she took great pride in cutting my hair and touching me like I am nothing but hers and only a doll!”
Helen had studied to be a nurse at the Hadassah Hospital to get out of the Haganah, and then Helen went in the opposite direction to the refugee ships coming to the port of Haifa, to New York where she married soon, as if on an impulse. Helen was only twenty-one when she met David, a law student at Columbia University.
Helen never explained why she stopped going back to her old house in Jerusalem, taking Lilly with her, but only that she could no longer recognize the places of her youth there anymore by 1960. And now—Helen had no home, except with Lilly here, in the Bedford house.
But Helen knew of a world more enchanted than any other, and downstairs, in the basement of the house in Westchester, a certified hand bookbinder, she practiced her bookbinding craft, creating her world again from old texts and etchings, perpetuating the tales as though they were spells she could cast upon herself.
Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts full of alchemical symbols and cabalistic etchings arrived by special parcel post to the house in Bedford where Lilly lived with her parents before she left for college. Helen was commissioned by museums in Jerusalem to re-sew and repair the texts using buckram or full leather fine-bindings. The certificate from London University with Helen’s maiden name, “Gilderstein,” printed in English in bold black letters spelling out “Master Bookbinder,” too, hung in a frame above her mother’s worktable. “And no such certificate exists in the United States,” Helen once told Lilly.
The seasonal winds of Bedford flowed under the rusty hinges of the basement door where Helen’s bookbinding work tools lay. As a young girl, Lilly could feel the boiler heating the basement room along with the gentle quiet when Helen hung her old leathers up, clothed in the dust of the biblical lands. The texts had souls, Lilly once thought.
Lilly could see the specially treated papers and leathers hung dripping by clothespins on a string above the worktable. In the photos of Helen in Westchester, she looked heavy and too tough, overshadowed by the perfect lawns and delicate surroundings. Her body simply did not translate here in America, nor into Westchester fashions: the A-line shifts, the boxy suits and jackets, and the Capri pants all conspired to make her look like a misfit in a landscape of white colonial houses and Chevrolet Impalas. Helen grew increasingly nervous with her American neighbors and acquaintances; she stumbled through words, laughed too loud, her face taking on the tension lines of a woman who was terrified of ridicule and pity. The two sets of albums were so radically different. Her mother leaning against the Jerusalem limestone arches and pillars, full and smiling and dangerous in the first albums, but everything was dangerous in Helen’s native country, and Helen, wearing her elegant cardigans and European-style plain cotton dress with necklines of lace, had looked like the most civilized, sophisticated object in the picture. She could have been an imported confection, her smile sweet as a flower in the sun.
The house in Bedford was still as Helen worked and, seating her on the basement floor, the damp seeped into Lilly’s legs. Lilly could feel the calm near her mother’s bookbinding tools and the workbench.
The sun went down and Lilly stayed with Helen in her smock, inside her puffy comforts. Helen brought down cocoa for them to drink, plates of graham crackers and Hopjes candies.
Lilly studied Helen. A full woman whose short but strong fingers produced a special wizardry, which was unseen, unheard by others. Here, her mother shuffled back a
nd forth on the basement floor from the hanging leathers to the soiled and tattered editions of the old Hebrew texts—the reddish, unkempt hair under Helen’s headscarf like the soft threads she used on the bindings of the resurrected books. Her mother had a tempestuous soul. Lilly saw her as a mistress of dislocation, a temporary insanity, filling Lilly with intoxicating ideas about ancient powers and reawakened spirits.
The bookbinding workplace was filled with bewitching lusts, as if it were a bedroom for lovers. Helen beat the hides of the beautiful olive and brown leathers. The room was pungent with the smells of the shredded leather shavings and the old book pages—holey and aged like soft, moldy cheeses. The sweet pastes hardened, and the wind underneath the basement door blew the delicate shavings and dusts to scatter, her mother’s fingers stained with dyes and glue. Helen’s smock was splashed with mending potions that were viscous and liquid and spread a magic through the ends of the torn pages, so that Lilly could see the outskirts of vanished ancient cities again and deep silences that still lay in the country Helen had lost with pictures of Abraham and God.
Helen strained her hands to get the dimensions and measurements precise, moving swiftly from a table of rulers and measuring tapes to the tables where the old books lay, waiting for her to bring them out of their long sleep. Helen’s face heated and flushed, beaming enchantment. The basement floor splattered with the elements that brought the books back into life: gold dust, shavings, the cutting tools that made designs on the beautiful backings and spines, the inlays and inscriptions Helen restored. Helen applied different silvers and golds, which she melted in a pot over a Bunsen burner to turn into liquid before applying to the newly engraved letterings.
“I love you, I love you,” Helen used to say to Lilly when Lilly was small, and they were alone in the big house after grade school. “My darling, my darling—,” Helen said, imitating Zsa Zsa Gabor, as Lilly lay swept in her mother’s arms. Lilly’s shirt and skirt were almost torn by her mother’s embrace.
“Mom, you’re crazy.”
“I know.” Helen’s voice was impassioned. The smell of orange marmalade was on her breath, and Helen’s big hefty arms were cotton and stone all at once.
Many times there were no reasons for her mother’s rages. No before or after. Helen shook Lilly hard in her arms; she wouldn’t let Lilly go. Helen’s terry-cloth robe opened at the breasts that loomed out like two animals. Her mother set Lilly up on her two feet suddenly; she pulled Lilly’s head squarely in front of her own bristling red face, enlarging in every crease.
When Helen’s rage erupted, the floor itself was rocking, unstable. She squatted on the floor and put Lilly over her knee, spanking her with an open hand. Helen’s knee knifed through to Lilly’s groin, and Lilly felt her night-shirt ripping as if it were her own skin. A volcano might have been surging from under the colonial wood boards, hot and deadly, purging Lilly, casting her, split, onto an unknown shore.
The Westchester moon and other faraway planets floated like distant buoys inside the confusion of Lilly’s dreams. The wind seemed to carry a fire up through the veiny blue clouds, and sometimes Lilly dreamed that her house in Bedford was lost inside distant craters and burning up. She imagined the secret parts of her own body and its vulva as a planet, a glowing bulb far above the ston-escape of the land, exploding into lava. She read once in an old schoolbook about Ferdinand Magellan, and how he discovered the planet Venus through his telescope in the night, and how Venus was covered with opaque clouds made of sulfuric acids, which showed him evidence of “extreme volcanism,” though it was an enigma, the book explained, and Lilly could not understand it either. All she knew then could turn into Magellanic Clouds like the ones she read about in her schoolbooks, small galaxies, white and nebulous, held in the grip of the ruthless Milky Way.
It was where the dead and forgotten and obscure vanished, people like the people of her mother’s country, Palestine. Lilly thought she could see them sometimes in the spaces between dream and wakefulness. History fascinated her; she thought lost beings, who might never be found again, were lost somewhere in the Magellanic Clouds. She tried to imagine what the Magellanic Clouds had looked like from her bedroom window but remembered instead Helen’s hands in the basement, over her bookbinding tools in the afternoon when everything around felt as drowsy as she.
Lying flat on the mattress now in the seclusion room, Lilly managed to settle herself back into some place of relief between exhaustion and sleep as some of the luscious allegories in Helen’s bookbinding texts filled her mind. She saw the figure of Maria, the alchemist, floating before her eyes, with her spectacular smile, and it felt as if rain had started pricking Lilly, from a sky that noticed her suffering in fire, watering tender shoots to perforate a space between destruction and becoming. As in an execution, when the condemned prisoner experiences an ecstasy an instant before death, or like a lover at climax, Lilly leaped to escape that moment before a final disintegration. But she didn’t know what to call what she was experiencing, and it horrified her, stalked her. She would have to look it up in her books.
She felt a sharp hunger in her stomach, an emptiness now. Her tears were beginning again. The night of her father’s accident was returning to her in flickers. She saw the bathroom in the Bedford house, the bathwater. In her parents’ bedroom, suitcases had lain half-packed for days already, hatboxes filled with Helen’s toiletries, her collections of scattered paraphernalia from twenty years in America. The truth of that night both choked and eluded Lilly again. Guilty, Lilly thought now, she was guilty. If her father were injured her mother would have to stay. A dumbfounded culpability took hold of her again.
She touched her hand with a finger from the other, as if holding two realities in each and trying now to connect them, like circuits or tangled fire hazards without protection. Her hand had become thin enough to see the blue branches of her nervous system. It wasn’t that she fractured, she thought, but that the enmeshed wires inflamed her, turned her whole heart into fire. Her mind went back to the examination room, the hefty nurse touching her, and the convulsion that threw her back until she was light and pure again. She fell into pieces to stop the fire, she thought, and now she needed to reconnect all the circuits inside her.
Lilly rubbed her neck. She smoothed out the hurt muscles, searched for bruises with alert eyes. The tantrum in the examination room ripped some skin on her arms. She wondered if the skin tears were from the stronghold of the nurse; a bruise was on her right arm. She saw it, wincing. She touched it, and the pain brought a kind a sweetness to her agony, a war wound, she told herself, a wound suffered only because she had fought for her life. It was a kind of animal inside her, the absolute takeover of impulses in her body she could not control. If existence meant she would be a splat on the floor, she didn’t want to exist, she thought now. The pains and aches subsided as she stared around the padded white walls.
She didn’t know how long they would keep her here, but she was slowly being allowed her own feelings again. It was not so much a prison cell to her, though the door was firmly shut, but the room began to take on the feeling of a cool white space, and she moaned without fear, as if she had wanted this incarceration for a long time, this escape from her terror of conflagration. All she required was that she be left light and pure and not in flames. Even the memory of the nurse Beverly was slowly becoming as impersonal as the white walls, and now she could feel her own body again. Even the pain and the bruises helped her feel her own body again, took it out of the numbness into which she had escaped the real world and its unbearable threats of incendiary intimacies.
Lilly went back to the mattress and sat again on its plastic. She let herself feel the harsh isolation of the white room. Her breathing was slowly measuring the beats of her freedom from the real world now, she thought. She stared up at the peels and flakes of white on the ceiling.
Was there a thread somewhere that would start to reveal a whole fierce and subtle weave inside her? She slowly allowed herself to
lie back on the pillowless mattress. But drifting into a light half-sleep, Lilly felt alienated from her body again as she lay still on the mattress. Soon she heard in a dream the cold nurse telling her to undress. She felt the cold nurse’s condescension, saw her wet eyes. The nurse was pulling on her latex gloves to handle her in the half-conscious dream, and a tangled ball of confusions was tossing around in Lilly’s head, sensations returning like ghosts swarming up her spine, swelling with the sweet sting of excitement trying to envelop her. Forced by her sudden terror, she jolted into a full wakefulness. She jumped off the mattress.
Lilly felt her skin flushing. She scrambled in her mind for some logical progression of events and causes she could write down or figure out, but it was elusive, frightening, unobtainable. She felt the bulb again as if it were a bird between her legs, fluttering, trying to take flight. When it was not throbbing inside her it was still within her body, she thought, sleeping and waiting. She had looked up the word “bulb” in the giant, unabridged Webster’s dictionary inside the library at Sarah Lawrence.
“Bulb: An underground shoot in the soil, keeping the storage of food for the yet unborn plant for when it can bloom.”
Suddenly, a noise outside the quiet room door startled her, and she listened hard on the mattress, but this time she was afraid it was the doctor again. He would be back any minute asking her more questions about her father, the accident, Helen, the bulb, everything. Surfaces could be perishable in his hands, she told herself, and she felt an emptiness gnaw at her, not chaos or turbulence but an abysmal, indissoluble, exasperating nothing. The bulb was shrinking away. They would call Helen, wouldn’t they? She thought, suddenly afraid. She imagined the quiet room door opening and there, in the crack, Helen would stand in the effacing light, not the nurse Beverly nor Dr. Burkert. Lilly had been exposed now, the bulb had been exposed, she thought. She wasn’t well, she was aberrant. She felt the burning in her back and calves again where she had hit against the metal examination table in her wild tantrum. She pulled at the icy plastic covering of the bare mattress; she felt cold here, too, in this white, unheated room. But she would not go and call for help, for a blanket. No, she would not ask them for anything. She must not ask for a thing, she told herself. It was kind of animal inside her, the absolute takeover of impulses in her body she could not control. If existence meant she would be a splat on the floor, she didn’t want to exist. What had happened in the examination? Had she wet the paper in her explosion? All she remembered was the massive malfunction from within her—as if a force were moving through her flesh, her muscles went out of control—and then she had felt without a physical body at all.
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