At my aunts’ house, though, I plant myself conspicuously in front of an old, pinkish-gray framed photograph that hangs in the front stairwell. “Yes, darling,” Aunt Bernice says. “That’s our family. I’m the one on the left there, in the pinafore, and that’s your Aunt Charna with the big bow in her hair, and your Aunt Adela is in the lovely lace dress. Those are our dear parents, and the littlest one, in the sailor suit, is your father.” The six terrified-looking people dressed up in bizarre, old-fashioned clothing stare straight out, as if embarking on a perilous voyage. They all look exactly alike, including the little boy, my father.
* * *
“A samovar,” my mother says. “For God’s sake! I don’t know why they don’t sell that ruin of a house and all the vulgar old trash inside it and get themselves reasonable little places of their own where they could live independently, away from the spell of that harpy, and at least dust.”
The dust in my aunts’ house is the dust of transformations—a languid, floating gauze that becomes sparklingly apparent when the rare light comes in through the tall windows. The gilded armchairs in the parlor are upholstered in dark velvet so worn on the seat and arms that the white muslin shows beneath, a ghost poised to emerge from within a dying body. The immense oriental rugs are worn almost white in places too, but as you study them the sleeping intricacies begin to surface in the weave.
When I am tired of drawing with the colored pencils I have brought, I mark off the hours, even the minutes, before I can return to my mother. The house is huge, and as many things as there are in it, it is still nearly empty. I go from room to room in the faint, gauzy sunlight, pausing to stare at some object or small piece of statuary until its transporting properties warm up. The ghosts flimmer in their chairs, the hieroglyphics rise in the rugs, the stopped gilt clocks and cracked ornaments begin to pulse with the living current of their memories, and a few filmy pictures, too faded to see clearly—streetcars and cafés and people in heavy, old-fashioned clothing hurrying along in a cold, twilit city—peel off into the sparkling dust.
* * *
Sometimes, when Aunt Charna is away on a trip with a person who has asked me to call him Uncle Benny or a person who has asked me to call him Uncle Solly, I sneak into her room and lie spread-eagle on her red satin bedcover that looks like a rumpled sea of blood, staring up at some splotches on the ceiling, which are friendly or unfriendly, depending.
In the room where I sleep there is a shallow fireplace. There are similar fireplaces in each of the bedrooms on the second and third floor—six in all. None of them work now, but Aunt Bernice says they all used to. Mine is the prettiest. The tiles are pinkish marble. Some of them are missing, and each blank patch where a tile is missing is like the blank patch left by a picture that shimmers for a moment in the transitional landscape of waking from a dream and then is gone.
I stroke the patches where the tiles once were, close my door, and descend one of the lordly mahogany staircases that march up and down the house, all the way between the attics and a vast, green warren of subterranean areas, thick with whirring pipes, that I’ve peeked into from time to time before scurrying back up into the house again. On one quick reconnaissance mission I glimpse a strange, tall table, covered with something fuzzy, sort of like blotting paper, that has channels along its edges and round drains in the corners.
“Is Morrie coming home soon?” I ask my aunts over and over when I visit. “Soon, darling,” they say, but Morrie is always away now, at the conservatory, because he is to have a great future. He no longer looks like an angel, and when he finally does come to visit, he spends most of his time practicing, or playing duets with Aunt Bernice, though once in a while he can be persuaded to play cards with me.
“What is the fuzzy table in the basement for?” I ask him clandestinely, as he puts down yet another winning hand and rakes in yet another heap of matchsticks.
“The fuzzy table . . . ,” Morrie says. “The fuzzy table. Oh, yes. Billiards.” I search his face, but it’s as blank as any good liar’s. “Billiards was a game that wealthy people used to play.”
* * *
“My other grandfather was rich,” I cannot refrain from announcing to my mother when I get home.
“Have you been communing with the dead?” she says.
“Morrie told me.”
“Well, Morrie’s never wrong, is he. Yes, your grandfather on that side came over dirt poor like all the rest of them, made a lot of money in textiles, and then he lost it all in the Great Depression. He was poor and then he was rich and then he was poor again just in time to die, and those girls are living in the crumbs and ashes.”
My mother says that when you hear Morrie play the violin you believe he really will have a great future, as an accountant.
* * *
One day my Aunt Bernice and my Aunt Adela bring me along on errands, and there in a shop window we’re passing is a fluffy pink sweater that looks like cotton candy, just my size. “That would be adorable on you with your red hair,” Aunt Bernice says, pausing.
On me? Joanie Hodnicki, the prettiest and meanest girl at school, has a similar sweater, but hers isn’t even as good as this one.
“Would you like to try it on, doll face?”
My head starts to throb. It’s true—I do have an acquisitive streak!
“Don’t you like it, darling?”
It is impossible to speak, or move.
My aunts look at each other helplessly.
I close my eyes and feel myself sway as I imagine the delirious joy of squashing Joanie Hodnicki’s face in.
“It’s all right, darling,” Aunt Bernice says, “You don’t have to. Come along.” I catch them exchanging glances again.
But what can I say when Aunt Charna returns from a trip with Uncle Benny or Uncle Solly carrying a gift for me? Because she can’t just go back to where she was and return it! Once she brings me a big pad of delicious paper and some gorgeous crayon-like things, pastels, which I leave at the house for when I visit. And once she brings me a set of ten smooth, miniature square bottles filled with different colors of nail polish, lacquers, they’re called—Sun and Jade and Leaf and Ruby and Midnight and Ocean and Flame and Amethyst and Dawn and Moon—which I successfully hide from my mother.
But the very first thing Aunt Charna ever brings me, when I am very little, is a lovely baby doll, and when Aunt Adela deposits me back home, I rush to show my mother. “She blinks,” I say joyfully, waving the card that came in the box with my new doll. “And she cries.”
My mother regards the doll dispassionately for a moment. How can she not be dazzled?
“And she can even wet herself!” I add pleadingly.
“Really,” my mother says.
And so not only have I upset my mother, I have also humiliated a defenseless doll, who was given to me for safekeeping.
* * *
My aunts have their suppers in the kitchen unless Aunt Charna is there with Uncle Benny or Uncle Solly and we eat in the dining room. We sit with our broth amid the silvery clinking of our spoons against the chipped porcelain, and if I squint, I can almost see the terrified old witch in the family photograph—my own grandmother—at the head of the huge table, hunched noisily over a dish of slops.
There are two pianos in the parlor. I don’t play the piano. My lack of musical talent is impressive, my mother has informed me, and lessons would only be a waste of money. This is a shame, though, I explain solemnly to my aunts, who listen with raised eyebrows, because my mother says that those of us who will not necessarily be able to rely on our looks need to invest time and effort on cultivating our other assets. My aunts look at one another, and then Aunt Charna puts her hands over her face and lies back, her lazy, round laugh rolling from her. My mother can be counted on to speak her mind, she says, and Aunt Bernice and Aunt Adela titter a bit, sadly.
Aunt Bernice plays a piece, making so much noise, it sounds like she’s playing both pianos at once. I inspect an ornate gold clock that
always says nine minutes after three and contemplate the wonderful samovar—teakettle, I think, severely—and before the piece finishes I still have all the time in the world to watch a sated moth stagger along on one of the silk curtains.
Sometimes I think I’ll go mad, my mother says about one thing or another. And sometimes I think I’ll go mad, from boredom—especially in my aunts’ empty house, with its ceaseless, nagging murmur of indecipherable allusions. When I’m so bored I don’t care whether I live or die, I go out in back and consider the ravine.
The ravine is a great, jagged cleft in the earth, so clogged with vines and poison ivy and fallen trees and trash that you wouldn’t know how to put a foot into it if you dared. Something lives down there with fur and bright eyes.
“Do they put dead bodies in the ravine?” I ask Morrie on his visit home. “Who?” he says, with that blank face.
* * *
“Those are shamrocks,” Aunt Adela tells me as I peer at the happy little clovers on the teacup from which I’m drinking hot cocoa. “Shamrocks signify good luck in Ireland, where your mother’s father came from.” “Ireland?” I say, studying the shamrocks to affect indifference while a balloon of invisible information starts to fill up the room. “It was not Great Britain?”
“Ireland, Great Britain . . .” She shrugs. “I don’t know where his people were from or why they stopped in Ireland. But that red hair of yours and your mother’s probably came from Galicia, where her mother’s family came from.”
Galicia. I contemplate the beautiful name as it unfolds, disclosing delicate, prancing, caparisoned horses and the lovely princesses riding them whose undulating red hair reaches to the carpet of flowers beneath the hooves. “You could always tell the Jews from Galicia by their red hair,” my aunt says dreamily.
“Oh, dear! Did you burn yourself, doll face?” she cries, jumping, herself, as my teacup shatters on the floor. “There, there, it’s nothing, it’s nothing.”
“Galicia!” my mother says when I’m back home again, pouncing upon my cautious, squirming hint. “Absolute nonsense! What have those ninnies been telling you? My mother was Hungarian. From somewhere near Budapest. Don’t stand there with your mouth open, you’ll swallow a fly. Budapest, the most sophisticated city in the world. Your grandmother was poor, but she was very beautiful and very refined. When she put down newspapers after she scrubbed the floor, she called them Polish carpets.”
* * *
But I have more pressing worries than having gotten my aunts in trouble. Because it has struck me that if Mary Margaret finds out that my aunts and my mother are Jewish and—I suspect—that maybe I consequently am, too, she might not let me come to church with her any longer. I am not exactly allowed to go to church with Mary Margaret anyhow, so I have perfected a careful course between lying to my mother and disobeying her, and I join Mary Margaret when her frame of mind and my opportunities align.
In any case, my mother’s main objections to my spending too much time with Mary Margaret seem to be that when he is not working his shift, her handsome father is often on the porch, drinking beer straight from the can, and that one of her many, much older brothers has been sent off to prison.
Still, it’s not too hard to sidle next door to Mary Margaret’s house, where nobody notices us especially amid all her relatives. And then sometimes Mary Margaret agrees to take me to church, though she won’t let me get up to take communion with her because I’m not in a state of grace. I’m afraid to ask why not. I can guess. It’s because I haven’t washed well enough. But even if I’ve washed and washed, I don’t protest, because I am more afraid of violating a rule in the lofty, solemn place full of God’s echoes and perfume and fleeting colors than I am even of stepping on a crack in the sidewalk and breaking my mother’s back.
Whether or not to tell Mary Margaret has been weighing on me for some time before I conclude that it is necessary, for the sake of my soul and hers, no matter what the consequences. So one day, after a wracking night, I hunt up Mary Margaret, to whisper my confession.
Mary Margaret whispers back: “I already knew it! My father calls you and your mother ‘the Jews’!”
“Are my mother and my aunts and my cousin and I going to go to hell? Cross your heart!”
We stare at each other in consternation, and then she nods. “But maybe if I bring you to church with me enough, we can get your term reduced.”
I get Aunt Bernice to clarify whether or not Jews believe in God, and she tells me that yes, absolutely, we Jews certainly believe in God, although strictly speaking, she herself doesn’t and neither do Aunt Adela or Aunt Charna as far as she knows, though of course they all sometimes observe the High Holy Days together, and neither, she thinks, does my mother.
* * *
All right—so, you’re walking around in a cloud of facts that are visible only to others. This has become evident to me. Your eyes blink, like a doll’s, you can move your arms and legs, you can even cry or wet yourself, but you weren’t born like a doll in a box, with a little card that says things about you, and if you want to know how it is that you arrived on this planet of ours, you can’t just sit around blinking like a doll.
So, I begin to give detailed attention to my mother’s bedroom and rummage when she’s out. I find remarkably little of interest, except for a few ground-down lipsticks, a bottle behind her shoes, the colorless contents of which I identify confidently, after a puzzled sniff, as whisky, and small caches of money. These last have practical value at least, as Mary Margaret has been charging a small fee to take me to church with her, which seems reasonable enough now, considering.
I break into sweats whenever my mother emerges from her room frowning. But I am meticulous about covering my traces and circumspect in what I lift, and in time it becomes clear that she doesn’t keep careful track. The secret activity produces an irresistible physical thrill, better than the stupid slides and swings in the playground, which I’ve long outgrown, better than horror movies on TV, better than poking a foot into the ravine at my aunts’ house to see if the mud will swallow my ankle and suck me down into the vines and poison ivy and animals and dead bodies.
* * *
But it’s as if my mother knows. Because around the time I enter high school, I always turn out to be wrong. I have gotten a spot on my skirt, or my hair is a mess, or my posture is deplorable, or—my mother says—I’m glowering. Nor do I do enough around the house, and I refuse, in general, to take responsibility.
That’s true—but when I try to be useful, I wreck things! For instance, my mother has been distressed because the curtains are dingy and she can’t afford new ones, so one Saturday, while she is working, I take them to the laundromat for a surprise, and out of the machine comes a big wad of shredded rags.
I throw up, of course. And when my mother gets home and sees them, she turns white and then red and then white again. She makes a phone call, puts me in the car, drives me to my aunts’, reaches across me to open the car door, waits until I get out, and speeds off, without going in to say hello.
Aunt Bernice tactfully makes a pot of tea while I sit in the parlor, not crying—not crying—not crying even when she comes back with the tenderly painted little tray, the tea, the milk and sugar, and sits down not too far from me.
We sip our tea for a few minutes, and then Aunt Bernice says vaguely, “She was a beautiful woman. She might have expected more from life. My brother was a very charming person, but not very forceful. No doubt they both expected something very different. Your mother has had disappointments. And, frankly, darling, I suspect that the change is hard for her.”
The change? Ah, yes. It’s a fact. I used to look different. A bit like my mother. But now all that’s left in me of her are my red hair and my unremarkable legs. Now I look like the other side of the family. I look like the little boy in the photograph, my father.
“Perhaps she feels it’s the end of her life as a woman,” my aunt says, gazing forlornly into her teacup.
; * * *
All through the rest of the country, the rest of the world, people just a few years older than me are trying to learn to be kindly, rather than vicious, animals—letting their hair grow as long as it wants to grow, letting their clothes fall off, joining hands, considering matters of justice, hugging one another, smelling flowers, seeing visions. What clothes they do put on are brighter than any nation’s flag. In our small city, where darkness and cold go on and on and most things smell and taste like lint, I groan with longing. The shadows of the freed young people flicker from the TV screen across my mother’s impassive face until she summarily stands up and clicks off the set.
* * *
One Saturday my mother and I go to the bakery for a treat, and we sit at our favorite table. I am a bit smeary from eating my éclair with my hands, which is amusing my mother not one bit, and in walks Brucie Miller with his brother, Preston. “Hey, hi,” Brucie says vaguely to me.
My hand is paralyzed in its reach for a napkin. “Oh, hi,” I say, and look at the walls and the ceiling.
When we get home, my mother sits me down in the living room, which always means trouble. Why now? Did she see Mary Margaret sashay by in that tiny new skirt of hers?
“There’s something we have to talk about,” my mother says, and closes her eyes for a moment. “Pretty girls are not to be envied. Because when a boy sees a pretty girl, he does not see a real person. He sees a mirror of his own desires, and he falls in love with the mirror. Boys put a pretty girl on a pedestal. Do you know what I mean by that, ‘on a pedestal’?”
“Obviously,” I say.
“No need for truculence. A boy will do anything to get the attention and admiration of a pretty girl, and then he courts and pursues her, and when she finally falls in love with him, he understands that she is not a mirror, and he runs as fast as he can. But girls who are not pretty are in an even worse situation. Boys believe that girls who are not pretty have only been put on earth as a poor compensation for what all boys believe the world owes them.”
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