by Mira Bartók
“Who were you talking to?” I say.
“No one.”
“But I heard you,” I say. “You were talking to someone.”
“Who were those men?” she asks.
“What?”
“Those men. What did they want? What did they say to you?”
“I didn’t talk to those men. Who were you talking to?”
“You’re imagining things. It wasn’t me.”
“I heard you. Who is it you always talk to? Tell me.”
“No one.”
My mother will always say no one.
This could be the first day I pay close attention to how we get home so I can remember which streets to cross, which trains to take, and where to make our connections. This could be when I become a navigator in a turbulent city, a master of subway systems and bus routes, when I learn to carry coins in my coat, a hidden dollar in my shoe. Just in case. Later, when I’m ten, traveling by myself on the bus to the museum, I will watch two men smashing all the windows of a store. Another day I’ll witness a man getting mugged in an alleyway; another time, a crowd of people with signs marching toward a police blockade. Cleveland is burning all around us in the sixties; the world is on fire—the river, the dying lake, my mother’s beautiful brain.
And this could have happened—something more mundane: a misheard word said in passing, a misremembered place. A mother loses track of time. She waits on one side of a building while her daughter waits on the other. There is no group of men, no woman laughing, just two people, a mother and child, humming a tune to keep themselves from falling further in the dark.
Movies I Wish I Had Never Seen
Awoke hearing my curses, echo of a life under thieves. Dreamed that Myra tells me she works taking care of a boy. I tell her the “boy” is 56, a pedophile on the lam. I ask if the other daughter is in a whorehouse but she remains silent. Later, I walked to Fairview Hospital for dollar coffee; stopped at U-Haul for red thread. Spent night sleeping at the Rapid Transit station on hard bench. $3.70 supper, 50 cents tea. $3 for one pack of cigarettes! B is for Bastards! Think of all words beginning with B to control rage: Breezy, Bestial, Bewitched. The Bactrian camel has two humps. The Arabian dromedary has only one. Baron: In Britain, lowest grade of nobility; a cut of mutton or lamb, two loins and hind-legs, as in “a baron of beef.” Baron: an air-cooled gas operated machine gun that uses 303 caliber ammo, fired from the shoulder. I can think of a few men I’d like to use that baby on. B is for Babies: where did my little girls go? Sometimes I watch movies to forget. Tonight, highlight of evening at the Manor Motel: Gloria Swanson and William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Made me think of all the movies I wish I had never seen: Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Hts, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Kramer vs. Kramer, One Million Years B.C. and all Tennessee Williams plays put on screen.
5
But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging us across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights....
John Muir, The Mountains of California
Cave Girl
In my mother’s storage unit, I found a box of my favorite books from childhood: The Call of the Wild, Robinson Crusoe, The Jungle Book. She had kept all my adventure books and the ones about Arctic exploration, ancient civilizations, and prehistoric worlds. At the bottom was a tattered red book on dinosaurs that she had covered to protect against further decline. Inside, tucked between two pages, was a picture of piano keys, like the one I found inside the book of Russian fairy tales. How many had she made, and why? In another section of the book, marking a chapter on glyptodons, was a note torn from one of her diaries: February 28th, 2001. Awake to usual Gauguin dawn. No need to read mysteries. Life is a mystery. I am still the stepchild of the universe. I miss Rachel very much. She lives on a ship and plans to return home in the spring. When I think of Myra, I think of Mozart and his early sonatas.
Why did she choose that book and not another? Did she, like me, dream of exploring ancient lands? In her letters, she said that she time-traveled but often against her will. When she took me to the Museum of Natural History in Cleveland a lifetime ago, did she stare at the dioramas and wish she could climb inside? I wanted to crawl through the glass and enter the timeless world of Inuit hunters searching for seals or creep beneath the shade of an African baobab tree. I longed to enter the den of stuffed wolves, curl up beside them, and sleep for a while.
I made my first diorama when I was ten. I built all of Africa in a day: tiny plastic babies arranged in a circle, snapdragons for lions, and small animals made from clay. I filled up shoe boxes with the Amazon, the Ice Age, and the Pyramids at Giza. Once I built the Mesozoic Era—180 million years in a box—moss, ferns, pebbles, and chicken bones for fossilized remains. A lifetime later I am building a world inside my head: I run down narrow staircases, dark halls and passageways, chased by the fear of forgetting. Inside a room is a diorama from deep time, when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
In 1969, the year our mother’s younger cousin, Philip, shipped out for Vietnam, and our father stopped sending us child support, I turned ten years old. I wondered if we would ever see Philip or our father again, and if, when the astronauts finally landed on the moon, they would find dinosaur bones buried beneath the rocks. How fast does light travel? I wondered. Where does our father sleep? How far is the nearest star?
My sister Rachel thinks about the moon all the time. She’d fly to other galaxies if she could. She is eleven and a half going on twenty and wants to travel as far away from our mother as she can. She and her friends spray Lemon Go Lightly on their hair to make it look kissed by the sun, as if they’ve all just come back from Hawaii. They write secret messages to boys they like, nasty notes to ones they find distasteful and rude. They gather in small groups and discuss which boys are cute, which ones are ugly and dumb. Rachel, who doesn’t have to try hard to be pretty, primps and preens, tying little bows in her thick auburn hair. She knows the words to all the new songs—“Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies, “Build Me up Buttercup” by the Foundations, “Time of the Season” by the Zombies. My favorite records are a 1959 Folkways recording of the Bulgarian Women’s Choir and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf—but I keep that information to myself.
Inside our apartment on Triskett Road the air feels tropical. It’s a cold morning in late February, but you’d never know it with the heat blasting from the radiators. My mother walks into my sister’s and my bedroom wearing only a bra and panties, a wet washcloth stuck in her cleavage to cool her down. I am getting ready for school.
“We’re going to a movie today, just you and me,” she says. “You’ll like it. It’s about dinosaurs—One Million Years B.C. starring Raquel Welch. I called the school and told them you were sick. Happy birthday, Baby!”
The year before, on my ninth birthday, my grandfather took me to the pound to pick out a puppy. I chose a tan and white collie-terrier mutt and named her Ginger. Pets are forbidden in our apartment so whenever she barks I lecture her on the benefits of being silent and invisible.
I follow my mother into the living room, Ginger close at my heels. My mother flips on the record player and the sound of trumpets fills the air, music of glory and pronouncement. It’s her favorite Spanish bullfight album. She is in her Latin phase. After the bullfight songs she will probably put on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, or some steamy Brazilian jazz.
“Maybe we should go on a day I don’t have school.”
“You sound just like Grandma. Now get ready and don’t dress like a bum.”
My mother sometimes takes me out of school to see James Bond films with sexy lady spies and masked men in speedboats shooting guns. There are signs embedded in the Bond films—symbols laden with meaning, clues that can unlock a code she’ll decipher later on. Will she find messages in the dinosaur movie too?
My mother wants to take me to a beauty salon to get my first real haircut and manicure before the matinee. My grandfather usually cuts my hair. He makes me wash
it with soap and icy cold water in the basement sink to save on money. In the summer he sets up a chair on his front lawn, places a bowl on my head, and trims around it. Neighbors come out of their houses to watch the spectacle. After he cuts my hair I look like Moe from the Three Stooges. Patty from across the street runs over to console me; tells me it isn’t so bad and offers me her half-eaten Fudgsicle.
In the fancy salon, the hairdresser sculpts my hair into a stylish flip with a mini-rat’s-nest teased up the back of my head. I poke the nest with my finger; it feels like the wad of steel wool Grandma uses to clean her pots. My mother gets her hair done too, reads a magazine while she sits under a giant silver dome. Meanwhile, the manicurist dips my fingers into soapy green water. She massages my palms, the tops of my hands, pushes back my cuticles, and trims my dirty jagged nails. My mother, who has been on welfare since our father stopped sending money, pays the lady out of what’s left from her monthly check. Sometimes she spends all of it by the middle of the month, buys a fancy fountain pen for herself, several pounds of frozen shrimp, some T-bone steaks, or takes the three of us to see a play. When my mother and I leave the salon, I hold my hands and arms in front of me, fingers fanned out so I don’t smear my newly painted nails. I keep my head stiff so my hairdo stays in place.
“Put your hands down,” my mother says. “You look like a zombie. Did I ever tell you how your grandpa rubbed bacon fat on my hair to make it shine when I was your age? A pack of dogs used to follow me all the way to school.”
We laugh; my mother takes my hand in hers and we walk like that, all the way to the show. We arrive just before the rain. The theater is almost empty. We sit down in front of a middle-aged bald man just as the lights dim and the big red curtains part.
The narrator of the movie tells us that this is a story of a harsh and unfriendly world, early in the morning of time. He says that there are creatures that sit and wait, beasts who must kill to survive. Clouds swirl across the screen, something explodes, and lava pours down a mountain into a river of fire. But after the lava scene, a scruffy dark-haired caveman appears, wrestling with a warthog. Another man, his father, pulls an animal horn from his loincloth and hands it to the warthog-wrestling son. The son blows the horn, pounds his fake fur-covered chest, then the shaggy tribe squats in a circle, rips the warthog wide open with their hands and teeth, and begins to gorge. The men remind me of my grandfather, how he shovels down a plate of greasy lamb.
A giant iguana comes on the screen, then a fake brontosaurus and a live tarantula blown up as big as a ten-story building. Other creatures come and go, chomping off heads and knocking each other off cliffs and sand dunes. Suddenly, from the primordial mist, a nubile, bronzed Raquel Welch appears, scanning the horizon for mega beasts.
“Goyishe whore,” my mother says. “She’s a bigger slut than Liz Taylor.”
We get a glimpse of silky thigh beneath the cave girl’s animal-skin skirt and a bird’s-eye view of Raquel’s cleavage bursting out from her top. Her unblemished body and luxurious hair remind me of Barbie and the teenage girls in my Archie comic books. “Having fun?” asks my mother, a bit too loudly. “Like the movie?”
I whisper yes in her ear, and ask her to lower her voice.
“Don’t shush me, honey. I’m not speaking too loud. So do you want a milkshake or a pop? Aren’t you thirsty? I sure am.”
“Maybe later,” I say.
On-screen, the story flips back to the dark tribe dining on warthog. The father steals his son’s hunk of meat. A fight ensues and the son falls off a cliff. The son is alone, standing in a vast, barren desert. Giant tarantulas appear, a brontosaurus, and smaller, but deadly, dinosaurs. The young hairy man escapes from death and stumbles beneath the terrible sun. He finally collapses. Nearby, at the shore of the sea, barely clad blond women giggle and spear fish for their dinner. The young women see the fallen man and run over to help. Lurking nearby is a mega-turtle. Luckily, Raquel is at the ready. I picture myself in her place, spear in hand. She tries single-handedly to battle the beast, even though it is a hundred times her size. Someone from her tribe blows on a conch shell and other smooth-skinned blondes arrive.
My mother says, “I’m going out to smoke.”
After she leaves, the man behind me leans forward and whispers into my hair, “Hey, where’d your mom go? Want some popcorn, honey? Have a piece.”
I pretend not to hear him and sink lower into my seat. The blond people look like they could be related to Debbie and Linda Kamps’s, the nice German-American family in our neighborhood who belong to various athletic and social clubs. My mother says their family breeds Hitler Youth because their daughters are in Girl Scouts and another club called the Rainbow Girls. Those people are Nazis, just look at their hair and their little brown shirts! The blond tribe on-screen could be from the tribe of the Brunners, the Bentes, the Budds, or the other families that are blond and whose last names begin with B on our grandparents’ street. Why do all their names begin with B? My mother wants to know. B, B, B, always B’s! What does it mean?
“Hey sweetheart. Your hair smells real nice.”
Raquel and the hairy guy have fallen in love. I hope nobody kisses, especially with tongues. I sink down farther into my seat. Everything looks phony, and yet, even though I can see they’re really lizards and turtles enlarged with cameras to look big and scary, they are scary in a way, the way the creatures come out of nowhere and stampede the tribe, just when everyone is having such a nice swim in the river. It’s the way they devour a man, like he’s just a little bug, that sends a shiver down my spine. I can feel the man’s hot breath on the back of my neck again. Something about him reminds me of my grandfather but I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s the acrid scent of beer and cigarettes, maybe something else.
“Where’s your mom? She leave?”
I consider leaving. But what if my mother came back and I wasn’t there because I was outside looking for her? Then she’d be alone with the man. He might do something to her, like touch her, or say dirty words. Or she’d think I disappeared and she’d call the police. What if she called the police and they thought she was crazy for taking me out of school for the day? Maybe they’d put her in jail.
“Hey, doll, come an’ sit back here with me. I’ll buy you a Coke.”
I close my eyes and make myself so small I could be a tiny creature inside a shoe box filled with moss and lumps of clay. Better yet, I am hiding behind a rock on-screen while a massive horned beast rips off the head of a hissing raptor.
My mother returns; the man relaxes into his chair. She’s distracted, rummages for something in her purse. Items fall to the floor: a lipstick, a hairbrush, a pack of Doublemint gum. The man picks up the lipstick that has rolled beneath his seat. When he passes it to her, he leans, half out of his chair, and hovers over her a bit too long. It reminds me of how the hairy dark men in the movie size a woman up with just one glance, then grab her by her hair and drag her to a corner of their cave. It reminds me of the way they eat the warthog.
My mother twists and turns in her seat. She can’t get comfortable. The scene we’re watching looks like it could turn romantic and I can’t get comfortable either. I have to pee but I’m worried that if I leave, she’ll leave again too. I whisper to her that I have to go to the bathroom.
“Do you want to come with me?” I ask.
“I just went. You go. I’ll watch our coats.”
“Don’t leave,” I say. “I’ll be right back. Stay right here.”
In the lobby, I can hear thunder and lightning from outside. We forgot to bring umbrellas. It’s February and there should be snow. Will things always be like this—strange unpredictable weather, creepy men lurking about; our father, lost in a jungle; my mother, one foot in this world, the other in a dream?
When I return, my mother is gone again and so is the man.
My red dinosaur book tells me that the Eryops was the lord and tyrant of his day. His mouth was so wide and deep that he could have swal
lowed a man whole. My book about the North Pole tells me that if you are trapped in the sea ice and starving, you can always boil your boots in a pinch. But nothing, not one single book, can tell me how to find my mother in the rain.
The movie ends. Should I leave? I have money hidden in the bottom of my shoe; I know which bus to take back home. The way back is much shorter than taking the subway alone in the dark after a day at the museum. It’s not too bad if you look at it that way. Then, outside, beneath the marquee, I see a woman with dark curly hair, pacing, smoking in the thrumming rain. She is alone and muttering to herself. Something about her reminds me of the old lady downtown who wears three coats and asks people on the street for a dime. I run to my mother, even though she could be that lady with the coats, the lady who has no teeth and who talks to her hands. When my mother sees me, she hugs me close.
“I was worried sick about you,” she says. “Where the hell did you go?”
The walk to our apartment is just over a mile, but it seems far in the damp cold. I’m tired and want to take the bus, but my mother says that someone could commandeer the vehicle and take us out of the city to a place where they hook up the hearts of Jews to machines. Even if they didn’t kidnap us on the bus, a man sitting across the aisle could take our picture with an X-ray-vision camera hidden in his shoe, just like on the TV show Get Smart, and that would just help the enemy along with their plan. At least when you’re walking, you can run if you’re being followed. If you have a knife in your pocket, like my mother does some days, even better.
By the time we get home, my feet are soaked; my hairdo has fallen flipless and limp. The nest on the back of my head is a damp tangled blob. I study my fingernails under the light to see if they got damaged from the storm. They are still pearly pink.
Later that evening, my sister and I are playing Sorry in our room. You don’t have to think that much to play. Sorry is a game of chance, the only game Rachel doesn’t always win. We scurry our blue and red pieces around the board, knocking each other’s men out of their little colored squares. Our mother calls me to her room. “I’ll be right back,” I say to Rachel. “Don’t cheat!” even though I know she never does.