The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “Yes, of course,” the woman said. She kept her face blank. She was not as beautiful as the real Lucia.

  The fizzing insisted itself on Jo’s throat, dropped through her chest and lungs. “I was on the block,” Jo said. “Perhaps I should speak to Mr. Schumacher another time?”

  The woman thumbed the heavy desk calendar, and Jo said, “I think that would be best, another time. I’ll call him at home. Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  The fizzing propelled Jo into the hallway, and she did not look back; the office seemed to lock and crumble behind her.

  THERE SEEMED no end to the fizzing and pressure; some mornings she could barely speak, and Celia would sit quietly and wait for her to return to herself, as if this were the ordinary course of things. It was a slow drowsy winter, and she kept the house meticulously clean, and hid herself in dime-store novels, in which the florid descriptions of bodies titillated and alarmed her. She teared up at odd, unpredictable moments: the sight of an unfamiliar car passing the house, or the thinning tips of tree branches, the thud of the newspaper’s daily delivery. There were of course the daily walks with Celia, daily meals with Celia, the laundering for Celia, but occasionally Celia went out alone, and Jo went into the city by herself, and it seemed a moment from a separate life. Nothing fizzed. The sky seemed the same cloud-rich sky she’d watched all her life. And yet it seemed there was no separation from Celia: in March, months after she’d stopped working at the store, she was for the first time mistaken for Celia. This by a woman older than her father, a woman who had known her since childhood and had for those many years run a small bakery on Jefferson. Jo walked in out of the windy afternoon, and the old woman, Rachel Levy, said, “What will it be for you, Celia?”

  There was a moment, like a skipped beat, of turning and checking to see if Celia had in fact followed her, but no one else was in the shop. Clearly Mrs. Levy was speaking to Jo. Jo removed her hat and scarf then. “I’m Jo,” she said.

  “Yes you are, aren’t you? My mistake. What’ll it be today, Jo?”

  And the day righted itself, the transaction proceeding as every other transaction she’d had at the bakery: Rachel Levy’s careful wrapping of the bread, slow notation of the sale on the small paper tablet, lopsided smile as she handed over the package and accepted the money and sent good wishes to the family. She was close to eighty now, a tiny woman, her spectacle lenses as thick as oven glass. She had known Jo’s mother, had probably held both Jo and Celia as newborns. She was simply confused. She might have as easily called Jo Sadie, or Irving, or Rebecca.

  But later Jo wondered. She did not believe she looked like Celia beyond a general family resemblance: a similar shape to the mouth, the same eye color, a shifting hazel. Their bodies had both, it seemed, widened more than Sadie’s, and now had a similar pearness, which was why Celia could so easily borrow her dresses. But this was all. Rachel Levy knew them as sisters, had made an old woman’s mistake. When Jo glanced into windows and mirrors, she saw not a bit of Celia, only Jo, though a Jo grown plain with time. A bit wrinkled but clean, always clean. She bathed daily, washed her hair often, combed and pinned it up. Twice a month she treated herself to the beauty parlor for a wash and set, the pleasure of the careful hands on her head: one girl, Ruth, was especially good, gentle and not rushed, always remembering to check the water temperature. There was a pink-and-white calm to the beauty parlor, the air flowery and warm. In those moments she felt no panic, the world seemed solid and whole, and afterward she’d stretch the time by lingering at the reception desk, slowly choosing her next appointment, and in the perfumed ladies’ room, trying out lipstick. Yet these moments were brief, and she knew she was not a favorite customer.

  And Celia, Celia was not clean. Her aversion to bathing, downright refusals, increased over the winter to what Sadie called “abominable.” A crisis, Jo admitted. Nothing, it seemed, would convince Celia to do much beyond washing her hands and brushing a damp cloth over her face. Every day became a battle to persuade Celia that she would not drown by bathing, that warm soapy water would not infect her. Jo changed Celia’s linens two or three times a week, endlessly laundered her clothes in an attempt to compensate, checked Celia’s hair for lice, bought her new scarves to wear, daily laundered the scarves.

  Once in midwinter, Sadie stopped in and lambasted them both for Celia’s state. She tried to bully Celia into washing: “You’re filthy, Celia, your hair is just filthy. What on earth are you thinking?”

  Celia shrank into herself.

  “You get her to wash then,” Jo said. “She says she’ll get infected. She’s afraid she’ll drown.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Sadie said. “That’s perfectly ridiculous. Celia?” But Celia was gone. Sadie returned the next day with expensive soap that Celia left on the shelf and a box of chocolate she absconded with. Later, when Jo in her own panic dialed Sadie’s number, Sadie answered by saying, “Jo? Again? Well, did Celia take a bath?”

  Both her father and Irving delicately avoided them—Irving was out of the house in the morning before she woke, and home late after his time in the clubs or tomcatting, whatever it was he was doing, no longer telling stories or singing radio songs in the kitchen, shrugging off her questions about Goldie. Her father seemed translucent, pale from winter and the preceding years, pale, she thought, from too many visits to shul. On the nights he stayed home, he would take his supper alone, with his newspaper and his Hebrew books, and then retire to bed. And it seemed that she would be forever yoked to Celia, with no escape and no other company.

  In late March she was again taken for Celia, this time by a pharmacist who said, “You know you can’t stay here, I told you that. You buy what you need and then leave.” The other customers stared and she rushed away without her mineral salts. It was then she began to wake in the morning feeling murderous, suffocating in Celia and more Celia, and wanting nothing less than obliteration. Jo heard her father rise and leave for work, heard Irving rise and leave, and there was in her fists a smashing energy, the wish to smash unbearable. She was herself an anger, an ugliness, untouchable, and it seemed she’d been that way forever, and whatever she touched was corrupted, and whatever sweetness she might have claimed went to Celia, who wasted it. Whatever work Celia could not finish became Jo’s. Celia’s mind was touched, and now Jo was touched, and she was never to make Celia stop, or to leave Celia; there would be a slow dissolution until nothing remained of Jo, there would only be Celia, grown fatter on chocolate and Jo, crying because she couldn’t find Jo, shocked to discover Jo’s bones scattered about the house. Celia did not intend any of it, and yet sit in a room with her and her vast need, and she would take all that you were, until you were emptiness. Life seemed to leak away through her. And she was yours nonetheless. And when she was peaceable and sweet you were supposed to forget the horrible nights, the days you yourself had lost calming her down and coaxing her out of her room, cleaning up the stink of her when she let it go too far. And she remained devoted to you, would do anything for you, because you were her hold on the world. And if you refused her? If you let her drown? One way or another you would drown with her. There was no way out. There were only small reprieves, a morning, a cigarette, an hour. Pinches of reprieve.

  The smashing rage surged again. It was still early. Jo wrapped herself in her coat. As she left the house she sensed Celia treading the staircase, heard her call, “Where are you going? Jo? Where are you going?” But she hurried away, the smashing feeling too strong, and she walked the muddy, iced streets off Richmond and up Elmwood, through the park, through the cemetery, hours it seemed, until the rage abated and she felt a tame emptiness. And she returned to the house to find Celia in the bathtub. Celia sat weeping, shivering, pale in the white porcelain tub, her hair soapy, the cool bathwater two inches deep.

  “I’ll help you,” Jo said.

  “Where were you?”

  “I had to go out for a while.” Jo rolled up her sleeves, added an inch of
warm water to the tub. Carried in another basin for warm water, filled it, dipped a washcloth in and began by wiping Celia’s shoulders and arms, so she wouldn’t be frightened of the washcloth closer to her face. Jo ripped a towel into strips to make a headband for Celia, to keep the soap from her eyes and the water from her face as Jo rinsed her hair. Celia closed her eyes and leaned her neck back against Jo’s left hand, bit her lip while cup after cup of clean water poured through her hair. When that was done, Jo wrapped her head in a towel, turbanlike, and helped Celia wash the rest of her body, insisting she soap beneath her arms and between her legs, pouring her more hot water and periodically draining the tub to keep the water level reassuringly low. And after Celia dried off and dressed in clean clothes, Celia herself changed her bedsheets and Jo’s, as if to prove her good intentions. In the kitchen, Jo smoked a cigarette and then another, and made hot chocolate for the two of them, slipping a little bit of brandy into her own. The afternoon was a peaceful one, of listening to the radio and drinking more chocolate and smoking cigarettes.

  Jo began to get up early again, before everyone, to leave the house for long walks alone, so the rage would not surge, and the impulse to smash was siphoned off onto muddy streets and the days would take their muted course. When she returned, Celia was often awake, and if it was a good day she was in the kitchen with the orange cat, and would say, “Better now?”

  “Yes.” Then it was time for breakfast and the radio and a quiet mapping out of the day. If it was not a good day, Celia was in bed, or rocking herself in the parlor, or gone, and Jo left again to find her. Luckily, the fine weather suited Celia, and the fine weather was increasing. Luckily there was the garden to plan, the cat to look after, the afternoons of radio.

  IT WAS in late May, in Delaware Park, Jo and Celia on an afternoon walk, when they saw near the small lake their father walking arm in arm with Bertha Schumacher, escorting her as if she were a dignitary. And behind them, Moshe and Lillian Schumacher strolled and sometimes Lillian touched her brother’s shoulder or pointed to the lake’s edge or the sky. Their father’s head tilted attentively toward Bertha, and once he reached over as if to hold her left hand in both of his. It was known now that the better part of Bertha Schumacher’s family had disappeared in Poland, some of them certainly had perished in the camps; and it was rumored that Bertha had gone into seclusion, that she was no longer the familiar Mrs. Schumacher, instead an expressionless woman who resembled her. And yet here she was on the lake path in Delaware Park, walking with sure steps and a touch of royalty, in her pale blue spring coat and beauty parlor hair, and their father, strolling the park with her, as he had never done with Jo or Celia. Nor had he walked in the park with their mother: he’d taken no time for such things. Yet Bertha and her father seemed to be a respectable couple, strolling the familiar paths in familiar ways, and the four— Bertha, Moshe, Lillian, their father—were clearly a family of sorts. There was something about the easy pace and easy distance between the two pairs, the casual turning to consult, the continued pointing at birds and jonquils, that spoke of long-established ritual, a private world of four in which Jo and Celia did not even appear as thoughts. And Jo wanted in that moment to be all of them and also to be what passed among them, to breathe the air of that small world, to be made of such air. The longing was as sharp as a craving for sweets, and she began to walk in their direction, thoughtless, following the craving. Her father and Bertha were several paces on now; she’d have to hurry to catch them, perhaps she’d have to shout. And then she felt a tug on her arm and Celia’s liquid gaze. “You can’t,” Celia said.

  “What?” The question as much to herself as to Celia. Moshe’s heavy backside and legs were shrinking in the distance, the four-some appearing more like decorative figures in a painting of a lake, but the craving persisted.

  “I know you want to but you can’t.” Celia pulled Jo’s arm in the direction of the avenue, toward the cars and buildings and bus route. “Wouldn’t you like a coffee?” Celia’s voice a perfect imitation of Sadie’s lovely hostess voice. “Let’s find some coffee.”

  The lake began to blur, and hot tears sprang up. “Coffee helps,” Celia said. “You’ll see.” And when they had reached the avenue, and the four figures had vanished altogether, Celia murmured, “That isn’t us.”

  They did not discuss that moment again, and it became one in a universe of things they did not discuss but that nested in the trees around the house and occasionally popped into view. Love and falling in love and the other ways their lives might have gone: the closest they came to this was in reference to Sadie’s daughters, now in their teens, more than usually beautiful in the way of teenaged girls. It was a shock to see them, these girls, and a greater shock to recognize how far Jo and Celia were from girlhood. There would be courting, Celia said. Dances and corsages and boys kissing them. Sadie would have her hands full, Jo said, and nothing more. She did not want to think about the actual kissing of boys and men—it was something else in novels—and there was that piercing longing she’d felt years ago, now resurfacing, as if for an instant, the young Lucia or the dream Amelia touched her face, then evaporated. And just as the piercing shot through her, Celia patted her hand. Celia was silent, as if to give the sadness time to make itself known, and leave. Then she said, “They’re nice girls,” bringing Jo back to Sadie’s daughters. Celia speculated about dresses she’d seen in department store windows, satiny gowns, pastel summer shifts. Then she changed the subject to lilacs. They did not talk about other teenagers or children, or what it might have been like to have daughters or sons.

  On good days, Celia seemed to possess this precise awareness of exactly what they would not mention. The universe of unmentioned things solidified after the moment in Delaware Park, and as the summer—Celia’s best time—took hold, they spent bright days in the garden, listened to the radio, and slept in the hottest afternoons, waking to drink lemonade and sit in the shade and smoke, and there seemed an increasing oneness of thought between them.

  For most of July, Jo felt no pressure, no fizzing, little need to call Sadie. Celia tended the marigolds and roses and zinnias, the tomatoes and peppers and beans, lounged with the cat, ignored their father, ignored Irving. She bathed in shallow tubs of water every other day and allowed Jo to wash her hair twice a week, such was her calm. Once Jo drove them both to the Falls, and they walked along the rapids, blue green and frothy in sunlight, the water like a live thing. And for a few minutes Celia sat on the grassy bank and Jo walked alone, and the river—vast and rushing—seemed surprisingly intimate. Exposed. Jo had not visited the Falls for years; standing beside the river, she missed it terribly and did not want to leave. Up the hill, Celia waited. And if Jo did not leave, and stood there indefinitely? Sooner or later she’d fall, or the rain would wash her into the river, the water melting her down to bone and then nothing; and yet she imagined herself for a moment complete, her own muscle part of the river’s. How green the water seemed, its white froth unending. Yet Celia was there: from the grass, Celia watched her. Jo turned and strode uphill, and the two of them found a flat, sunny stretch of grass, and spread a picnic blanket, and watched the rising plumes of mist.

  IN EARLY AUGUST, the sunflowers fattened on thick stalks, the nights remained warm. A month to let yourself drift in, to stay in the yard and smoke and allow yourself to forget anything beyond the flower bed’s bright palette and the breeze from the lake, and at night the movement of low clouds, the intermittent moonlight. Jo had been staying up late and waking early, and sometimes dozed in the afternoons. The colder months seemed far off and any other way of living seemed farther.

  August 3, less than a week into the month. Irving left the house before eight o’clock, with plenty of time to open the store. Now it was ten-thirty and her father had not risen and would not rise: she wanted to pretend she had not seen him on the bed, that she had not pushed the door open and called him and found him there unbreathing. Already his body, his hand was strangely cool in the s
welling heat of the day, and after she touched his wrist the skin on her own fingers seemed to crawl. From the window she could see Celia in the yard, sitting in a wrought-iron chair, her back turned to the house. Also motionless, though a breeze lifted the corner of Celia’s scarf and made the leaves flap against each other, and a bird called, a high trilling call. A cardinal? And Jo imagined but did not see a flash of red pass through the maples.

  From the parlor telephone she dialed Sadie, who did not answer. Instead it was the Colored girl saying Mrs. Feldstein had taken her daughter to an appointment. The jewelry store’s line was also busy, and Jo felt fizzy and breathless. She dialed Bill’s office, where the receptionist did not like her and tended to hang up abruptly, but Jo insisted in a hoarse bark, You have to get him, and bit into her lip, and then he came on the line. Celia was still in the yard and Jo said, “My father is dead.” The parlor air seemed overrun with dust motes, the walls thinning into imitation walls. Celia had not heard her though, Celia was in the yard, at the little table, perhaps with a cat—Jo had seen only the pink summer dress and the matching headscarf pulled over the hair she would not comb.

  “Jo,” Bill said. “Tell me more.”

  “He’s in his bed. Just there in bed.”

  And then there was an empty while, with Celia in the yard and their father in the bed and Jo in the kitchen stirring sugar into undrinkable tea, and a bird trilled again, and another bird answered with a complex unintelligible call. Jo walked into the yard. Celia did not turn around, and when Jo said Celia’s name, Celia did not answer, though she unlike their father was breathing, you could see the movement of the dress. Jo approached and gazed into her face and Celia seemed far away and blank. The cat lay on the nearby grass and Jo lifted it and placed it in Celia’s lap, where it stood for a moment, ignored, and leaped back to the grass. And it seemed unbearable to be out in the yard with Celia not bothering to speak to her, and her father dead upstairs, and she walked back into the kitchen and stirred the tea until time seemed to break down into hot vague stillness. Bill arrived and went upstairs and came back down to the parlor, and on that same telephone dialed and hung up and dialed: she could hear the professional murmur, which meant doctors or funeral homes. Sadie arrived, and Jo could hear them talking in the parlor, and then Sadie appeared in the kitchen. Jo recounted her morning.