The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  Sadie does not seem unnerved, though she has always been a good actress. Her gait is purposeful and when she waves Goldie in the direction of Celia’s room, her smile, though small and brief, appears real.

  THE WOMAN in the room sits in a wheelchair. At first glance, she is not the same person Goldie remembers; she’s not even definitively female. Her face seems oddly young, but static, with a droop on the left side. Her hair is very short, salt-and-pepper, starting to curl.

  “Celia, good morning,” Sadie says, and kisses her on the cheek. There is no change in Celia’s expression. “Goldie’s here.”

  Sadie seats Goldie in a wooden chair beside the wheelchair, and it’s then that Goldie first gazes directly into Celia’s eyes, which are the same hazel as always. Celia’s watchful, or seems so. And Goldie is timid; gingerly, she touches Celia’s left hand.

  “The right hand is better,” Sadie says. “Celia’s got movement there, she can probably feel you.”

  “How are you, Celia? It’s Goldie.” As if introduction is warranted. She takes Celia’s right hand then, which is warm and oddly soft, like powder under skin. The limpness is unnerving: Goldie resists the impulse to let go and leave the room. Celia’s eyes stay on her, intent, as if Goldie’s mind is transparent and Celia sees exactly what she’s thinking, what she has ever thought. Goldie’s face flushes warm; there’s a rush of grief; and she breaks away from Celia’s gaze.

  “Are you ready?” Sadie says. She’s removed her coat and arranged herself on a wooden chair, the slate blue suit and stockings and shapely heels incongruous against the beige walls and green linoleum.

  Celia’s gaze shifts to Sadie. There’s a book on Sadie’s lap, a novel, which Sadie opens. The one she’s picked is a romance, lively and improbable. It has a character named Edward, who in a gentlemanly way flirts with beautiful, witty Anita. Celia stays fixed on Sadie. Is Celia calm? There is no simple way to tell; there is no simple way to tell anything about her. Sadie reads on, but Goldie can’t focus on the plot. Instead she concentrates on the shapes of certain words—Anita, cocktail, parkway—the cadence of Sadie’s voice, which seems more important than anything. There is a moment then of being held, of the room and the three of them and the order of all things drawn together by Sadie’s voice and the diffuse light filling plain space.

  When they leave the nursing home, Sadie’s mood seems unchanged: a pragmatic brightness, reassuring but opaque. Was Sadie always so opaque, or was it simply that Goldie had thought her transparent? Every day I am shocked. But you have to look closely to see the doubt flicker. And Sadie is more solid than she used to be, more assured. Today Goldie feels less so: it’s only noon, she’s already rattled, and they have yet to visit the house and Jo, and Irving, who on the telephone sounded like a quiz show host. Falling snow cuts visibility but Sadie is not driving toward Lancaster— that much Goldie can tell.

  “Is it like that most days with Celia?”

  “About like that. Sometimes there’s a little more spark.” Sadie glances at Goldie. “We’ll go to the house after lunch.”

  They stop at a coffee shop in Sadie’s neighborhood, and it’s comforting to sit quietly and eat soup and sandwiches and drink hot cups of coffee. Goldie doesn’t remember this place: she barely remembers this neighborhood, which edges into suburb. The city’s changed, Sadie says, they’ll have to tour downtown. She and Bill will take Goldie out, maybe Irving will come along.

  “By the way,” Sadie says, “Jo’s a little odd.”

  “Is that new?”

  “Well, no, of course not. But yes. I mean more than a little odd. She’s upset about Celia.”

  “I’d imagine,” Goldie says.

  “She’s fine when she’s calm. If not, she might seem cruel. I thought you should know.”

  EVEN WITH the fortification of soup, Goldie’s sense of time—of hours, of years—is off-kilter, and it’s difficult to get her bearings. Did she feel this way before the Sisters of Mercy? The air keeps filling with snow, and Sadie leads her, first to shops to buy Goldie gloves, a hat, a lamb’s wool cardigan, then to the old neighborhood.

  “We’ll just stop by the house for tea,” Sadie tells her. The car slides a couple of feet as they turn from Delaware onto Lancaster, then regains traction. Sadie does not seem to notice. “If you want to stay longer, just say so.”

  From the outside, the house appears well cared for, but the snow is melted in patches and the path is shoveled haphazardly, which gives it a shabbier air. Goldie’s sense of proportion is off: the house seems smaller than she expected, though it’s substantial, and the place she’d imagined from California was the size of a snapshot. Inside, Goldie is immediately aware of a smell she thinks of only as the past, or there—now here—the complicated smell of wood oil and hot steam pipes, rust and cooked sugar and old tobacco smoke. The hall and parlor are covered in the rose wallpaper their mother chose, as if their mother’s desire for delicate things were still alive, separate from the body. More reassuring than unnerving, Goldie decides, but the snapshot image wasn’t wrong: she seems to be walking through a photograph. There is no apparent dust and yet the house has the feeling of dust, and when she turns from the rose wallpaper she feels herself a dusty blankness.

  It is a house, and here is Jo, plump and pale, dressed up in a maroon wool skirt suit and pearl earrings, her hair pinned back. She has gone to some effort. But there is something wrong with her, and not just with her teeth, which are a tea-stained ruin. She does not touch Goldie or hug her, but shrinks back as if a passing touch will burn her. Sadie ignores this, leans in and kisses Jo on the cheek. There is no sign of Irving, who has promised to meet them before dinner.

  “Hang up your coat if you like.” Jo waves at a full coatrack. “You probably want to look around. I’ve moved a few things.”

  Perhaps Jo has moved an ashtray or a vase, but it seems that like the wallpaper, nothing has changed in the rooms downstairs: in the parlor her father’s chair and pipe stand are stationed in the places he preferred, the carpets and sofa the same though faded, and as she walks through the dining room and lower halls there is the thickening sensation of an underlit museum. The kitchen seems identical to the kitchen of memory—or could her mind be correcting? Upstairs, their father’s room remains as it was, seemingly inhabited but for the extremity of order. Goldie checks a drawer and finds his shirts in wrappers from the cleaners. The suits in his closet are arranged by color. Behind her, Sadie sighs but says nothing. It’s Goldie’s own room and the rooms of her siblings that have changed: the bedroom she once shared with Sadie is white and almost empty; Jo’s room immaculate and pale yellow. Irving’s room is a sea of clothes, the furniture covered by shirts and underclothes and trousers.

  “Where is he, anyway?” Sadie says.

  Jo shrugs, the same eye-rolling shrug she’s made since she was six. She tells Goldie, “He’s not here much,” and for a moment there seems to be an opening: yes, Goldie remembers this, the mutual eye-rolling over Irving, their small head-shaking society. This time she isn’t sure what the gesture implies, but it isn’t hard to nod.

  In Celia’s room the bureau is covered with knickknacks and costume jewelry, pots of rouge and bottles of perfume; scarves in blues, greens, and yellows hang off the rocking chair. It seems a functional disorder, the single clue to Celia’s absence the basket of clean laundry near the door: Celia never folded anything. Two cats stare up from the bed, one calico, one gray, and Goldie sits on the quilt’s edge and holds out her hand for them to sniff.

  “I’ve been looking after them,” Jo says. There’s a slight haughtiness to her tone.

  “I’m sure Celia’s glad for that,” Goldie says.

  “She would be,” Jo says.

  “How about some tea?” Sadie says.

  But Jo’s taking Goldie’s measure. “It’s been a few months, you know.”

  And there is Sadie’s warning look. Upset, yes, Jo’s edgy when she’s upset.

  “Let’s get the tea,” Sadie
says.

  “All right. Let’s,” Goldie says. The cats remain unblinking on the bed, and Sadie starts down the hall, Goldie following, Jo nearly at her side.

  Jo touches Goldie’s arm and stops, shaking her head. “She’s dead, you know.”

  Sadie turns. “Don’t start with this.”

  “What are you talking about?” Goldie says.

  “Celia. You heard me,” Jo says.

  “Jo, she’s not dead,” Goldie says. “I just saw her.”

  “How would you know? You don’t know Celia. Celia’s dead.”

  “Stop it, Jo,” Sadie says. “Would you please go downstairs?”

  “I just saw her.” Goldie pictures Celia’s hazel eyes tracking her, tracking Sadie in the small plain room, and there’s a warm flush to Goldie’s face, her pulse beginning to speed.

  “Sadie tell you to say that?”

  “I saw her. She isn’t dead.”

  “That’s a lie,” Jo says. “She’s dead.”

  And a droning rises fully now, not unlike approaching bees. Goldie feels a splitting pressure, as if her ribs might separate and push into her lungs. The swarming and splitting and pressure collide, one vast lush rage: for an instant she is breathless and dizzy, and as the air rushes back, her right hand moves of its own volition, an open-handed slap, which catches Jo not on the face but the side of the head. Jo shoves her fast against the wall, the hard flat surface like a live thing striking her shoulder, and Sadie shouts, “Stop this,” and wedges herself between them.

  Goldie’s skin feels strangely hot, Sadie’s hand on her arm cool, and there’s a wash of lilac scent.

  “Go into the bedroom,” Sadie says, herding Goldie to a door, pushing her inside, and closing the door fast. Through the dark wood Goldie can hear ragged breathing, and then Sadie’s voice: “Go downstairs Jo. Now.” As if she is disciplining a child.

  THE AIR IS close and stale, and Goldie is quivering, her own breathing thick; the room is disintegrating into objects gathered without purpose. She’s trapped between the wooden door and the iced windows; she shuts her eyes and covers her ears, the old mired feeling upon her—a sense of perpetual dying, perpetual turning away—and she concentrates on breathing. If she waits, the room will take its proper form: this she remembers. She counts to thirty and Jo is still in the hall: beyond the door there’s whispering. Celia’s not dead, though not all right and Jo isn’t all right either. Goldie herself is anything but dead, though once she might have been.

  The bedroom is Irving’s, soiled shirts layered on chairs, and dust like silt over the bowl of glass marbles, an empty brown suit hanging on a rack. She sits on the unmade bed and tries to catch her breath. Her parents are dead but Celia is not. Something has happened to Jo, a kind of inversion. Something has happened to all of them—how is it that she struck Jo? She doesn’t remember striking anyone before, not like this: as a girl she slapped Irving’s and Celia’s hands when they tried to steal sweets.

  Outside snow is falling thickly. Eighteen degrees, the radio said, and the snowflakes are fine and small, half the windowpane etched in frost. It seems that she has always sat before a window etched in frost, she has always lived between the wooden door and the patterned glass. California? How hard it is to sense that life. She opens the window for air, a gesture from her old life—wasn’t she always opening windows, even in winter? How is it, she wonders, that the living die and the dead surreptitiously live?

  More sounds in the hallway. “Come on, Jo,” Sadie says. “I said leave her be.” And Jo is a silence, and then they are both retreating footsteps.

  Bits of snow drift in the open window, and she can hear steps on the back stairs. Goldie envisions Sadie and Jo moving through the house, the past as proximate as the tree beyond the window— the undeniable echo of her sisters as girls. For an instant time wavers: she can almost sense the moment her mother wakes for tea, her father pacing downstairs. But the moment doesn’t take hold, its release accompanied by a sharp pang. The movements downstairs seem askew: Irving’s room is over the dining room here, farther back than hers was.

  Venice Beach: she lives in Venice Beach. She is fifty-four years old. She’s visiting her sisters, who are not dead. In this house she does not belong. As for the city, it’s hard to tell. She can stay in Buffalo long enough to see Celia a few more times, to repeat Sadie’s daily routine of greeting the nuns and smoothing lotion on Celia’s hands and reading; long enough to see the Falls again, now rimmed with thick green ice, the river flowing underneath, snow blurring the boundary between countries, between river and shore. She can go to the pictures with Sadie, or with Sadie’s daughters. For a few days she’ll stay at their house, then fly back to California.

  For now, she’s too raw and quivery to face Jo: God knows what Jo will say next. When she’s certain Jo and Sadie are in the kitchen, Goldie slips out of the bedroom and crosses the hallway to the front stairs. She’ll wait in Sadie’s car, or, better, catch a cab on Delaware to Sadie’s house. She would like to breathe and swallow properly, would like to stop the quivering, and walking will help: it always helps. But at the bottom of the stairs she hesitates. The interior doors are open and she can peer down the hallway to the kitchen, where Jo and Sadie sit at the table. There’s murmuring— Sadie’s. Jo’s head is slightly bowed and Sadie is stroking her hair. They do not look up. Despite the open space of the hall, the sensation is of gazing through window glass.

  Goldie slips through the foyer and out of the house. She’s starting down the porch steps when a blue Ford with a cap of snow pulls into the driveway. The driver’s door opens and a man in a chestnut overcoat and fedora steps out. It is and is not her father, an altered image—shorter, his body moving more loosely—yet still the same face. He is surprisingly beautiful. She stands in the walkway, watching him, unsure of what to say, but he is crossing the snow of the lawn, he is holding out his arms. Her life astonishes her: he is calling her name.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Gail Hochman and to Robin Desser for their guidance and faith in the novel, as well to their assistants, Joanne Brownstein and Diana Tejerina. I’m grateful to Helen Herzog Zell for her exceptional support; to Ann Patchett and Elizabeth McCracken for their remarkable kindness and encouragement; to Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, and my other colleagues at the University of Michigan, as well as to dear colleagues at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Florida. During the writing of The First Desire, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Brecht’s House Society, the Ragdale Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, the Millay Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts all provided generous support.

  The research collections at the Buffalo Public Library and the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society and Mark Goldman’s histories of Buffalo were particularly helpful, as were my conversations with many family members and friends, among them Ben and Lenore Polk and Tillie and the late Bert Gross. I am deeply grateful to Carin Clevidence, Ann Harleman, Rick Hilles, Ronna Johnson, Lynne Raughley, Linda Reisman, Helen Schulman, Heather Sellers, and Therese Stanton for their invaluable manuscript readings and comments; and to Jesse Lee Kercheval, Dale Kushner, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Providence Area Writers for their early and ongoing support of my work. This book would not have been possible without the generosity of these friends and of my family and other loved ones, including Jeanne Reisman, Leonard Goldschmidt, and Deborah Goldschmidt, Linda and Jack Reisman, David Reisman and Betsy Abramson, Robert and Rena Reisman, Janet Gross, Lo Wunder, and Sue Cooperman, Leonard and Judith Katz, Jenny, Doug, Olivia, and Taylor Boone, Margaret Lewis, Jill and Isabella Polk, Kenneth Kidd, Brandy Kershner, Pamela Gilbert, Bill Waltz and Brett Astor, Pamela Perry, Dorothy Antczak, and Lyn Bell Rose.

  My profound gratitude and love to Rick Hilles, who teaches me joy.

  NANCY REISMAN

  The First Desire

  Nancy Reisman is the author of House Fires, a short story c
ollection that won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in, among other anthologies and journals, Best American Short Stories 2001, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

  ALSO BY NANCY REISMAN

  House Fires

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2005

  Copyright © 2004 by Nancy Reisman

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of

  the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Portions of this work have previously appeared in Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review,

  Tin House, Best American Short Stories 2001 (New York: Mariner Books, 2001) and Bestial Noise:

  The Tin House Reader (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. for permission to

  reprint an excerpt from the poem “Crusoe in England” from The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 by

  Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Reisman, Nancy, 1961–

  The first desire / Nancy Reisman.

  p. cm.

  1. Jews—New York (State)—Fiction. 2. Jewish families—Fiction.

  3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Buffalo (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.