“Hersh here, your father.” Kayla took my little hand and placed it on Hersh’s knee. His pants were scratchy under my palm. “You should be proud of him. He is a very great man.”
“I see,” I said.
“Can you say it for me? ‘I am proud of my father.’”
“I am proud of my father,” I said, picturing a man in a cabbage field, but looking at a man with a pair of glasses glinting around his eyes and a mustache that hid the dark holes leading into his long nose.
THE SEVENTH DAY
On the seventh day, we rested. Men put their feet up and looked out the window at the rain that had not stopped falling. Children ate honey on slices of bread. Mothers rubbed a little butter on their dry heels. We looked back at our first week of life, our plans and accomplishments, and most of us felt proud. The trees applauded with their green, green leaves.
The stranger, prayer-ready and shivering, tapped her foot in the mud puddle below her rootless chair. The jeweler brought her bread for breakfast and cheese for lunch. He brought her tea on the hour every hour and dried her feet with an old towel.
When Hersh and Kayla collapsed in a parenthood-induced nap, I slipped out the door and went to the stranger. “Help,” I said first. “Help,” I said again. She waited for my prayer. I asked, “Is this real? Am I still me?”
“You know that smell, when you put your nose up to a pine tree?” I told her I did, perfectly. “No matter how long it has been, you always will. Like you are storing part of that tree in your own body.” Was this a gift or a sacrifice? Had I given up my entire body to storing a sliver of every single object on earth? I said that I hoped there was a little room left for myself, just a small cave somewhere between the imprinted feel of walking across wet grass and the precise tension of an apple giving way under a knife. “You are thinking of it wrong,” she comforted. “Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change.”
Until a long time later, until I was a mother myself, until I lost everything, until it found me back, I did not believe the stranger’s words. Everything stays true. Now I know that. Now, it’s all I know. And knowing it saves my life again every time I wake up.
That night, I stood up in my lightless room. Blackness seeped into anything with an opening. I pulled the drawer handle and let the dark inside and released the smell of crushed rose petals and dust. I opened the music box and let it sing to the darkness, the darkness got in close to that little spinning dancer. I took the note out and lit a candle to see it by. Dear Regina, Dear Regina, Dear Regina. Outside my window, the tree branches pointed me in all the wrong directions. They yelled to me, branch by branch, this way, up, come in, turn back. I ripped Dear Regina off the note and tore it into bits. I undid the lock on the window and pushed the two sides apart. Cold air and a mist of rain swept across my face. I threw the shreds of my sister’s name out the window, where the moon made them glow and the endless rain smashed them into the earth. I closed the window. This is how I love you, the note said to no one in particular.
I took the note and put it under my pillow. I tried again to smell my sister on that pillow and could not. I tried to smell myself on that pillow and could not. I rubbed my body against the rough cotton sheets, turned around and around in the bed. I spit up and down it. Rubbed the spit in. This time, my nose pressed to the sheets, the bed was full of my own mouth’s bitter scent. It was small, but it was proof of my miserable existence. I fell asleep imagining the note growing under my pillow, growing into a tree, branching out into the room, outgrowing the ceiling, outgrowing the reborn world. If I could climb it, I might reach a place high above the cloud cover of this weary, cold sorrow.
• II •
INTRODUCING: EVERYTHING
It is a beautiful day,” the saddlemaker said to me. “We have a daughter and she is you and the day is just waiting for us.” His thin fingers whispered across mine.
I was far, far away, having left only one thing behind: my body. I put on the mask of a smile.
On the stove a pot boiled furiously. Something salty foamed down the sides. “I think the water is boiling,” I said. Kayla did not so much as turn around to look. She explained that my father was going to work but not to worry because this would be the most beautiful day of my life so far. And tomorrow would be an even better day—and forever after, on like that. Kayla was so excited she choked on her tea. Her big face turned red while she coughed. She kept trying to excuse herself, but all she could manage to get out was “Ex, ex, ex.”
Hersh stood up to pat her on the back. “Hush,” he told her. Kayla blew her nose and wiped her cheeks, striped by tears.
“Can I hold you on my lap?” Kayla asked me through a cough. “Can you be my baby?” My blood stopped. My fingers tingled with the loss of it.
“Do as your mother asks.” Hersh nodded, but I could tell he was worried. He tipped me out of my chair and lifted me up. “The pot is boiling over,” I said, this time meaning my heart. “Thank you,” he said, smiling back. He placed me on Kayla’s doughy lap, where I was awkward and too big, where my legs had no place to fall and my head rolled around.
“This beautiful baby is my baby,” Kayla said, trying to rock me, pressing me into her large breasts. Her face was still splotchy from her coughing fit. “Say coo. Say goo. Like a baby.” I was quiet. “She doesn’t want to talk, my baby doesn’t want to talk. She just wants me to hold her in my arms, because I’m her mother and I love her the most out of anyone in the world and she knows that.”
Someone began banging on the door. My heart leapt. My true parents, come to take me back. But when Hersh opened the door, I could see from the shined and pointy shoes that this was no savior. It was the widow, taller than any man in the village and with a voice that sanded down your ears. Her body was all legs. She was like two old trees that had grown together in a brief love affair. Her arms were stiff branches and were always being waved around.
“We have no time to waste. This child might already be too old to teach. Look at her—you can tell just by looking at her that she can’t sing. She can’t sing one note. I might as well give up now.”
“I’m paying you,” Kayla reminded her. “I am paying you to teach her to sing. She is going to be a star.”
“She’s teaching me to sing?”
“I’m a saint. I’m doing God’s work in this farce of a world. He will bless me and love me,” the widow said to herself.
It had never occurred to either my aunt or uncle that I might need some sort of talent. They had gathered their gold coins together, enough to pay for the lessons, and these coins were polished and shining and it seemed impossible that they would not transfer themselves into notes as golden, as bright, as beautiful as the coins themselves.
“Wait. Do we know about opera?” Hersh had asked his wife, not wanting to break the rules of a world that had provided them with their dearest wish.
“I know about the opera,” Kayla insisted. “Look, I don’t have time to waste. My daughter has to learn to sing immediately if she is to have a chance. Immediately.”
Alone together in the sitting room, the widow said to me, “You have very little chance of doing well.” The red velvet couch looked child-size under her.
I said, “I don’t know anything.” It was the truest statement I had ever uttered. I was sitting on a chair opposite her, watching her cross and uncross her tremendous legs.
“You’re telling me.”
The widow put the leather case she had been carrying down on the rug next to her chair and took three things out of it: a bottle of vodka, a large glass and a stick.
“Okay,” she said to me, “go ahead and sing some notes.”
“Some notes?”
“Sing a song, sing anything. Make noise with your mouth.” She poured herself a glass of vodka and sat back, crossed her feet at the ankles and drank. “That is good,” she said to her glass, “that is wonderful.” She looked at the child in front of her, picked up her stick and
waved it up and down. “Sing! La-la-la!”
I creaked out a few notes, low to high, and the widow said, “That was terrible. Again,” and I creaked out a few more notes, high to low, and the widow said, “That was terrible. Again,” and I tried again, and again until the widow said, “I do not deserve this,” and laid her head back against the high back of the couch and fell asleep. The stick reclined on her lap like a pet, like a loyal kitten, and she kept her hands over it lovingly while she snored. I sat down on the floor and waited. I petted the rug. I looked at the shadow where a grandfather clock must have stood, its shape darker than the rest of the sun-faded green wallpaper. I imagined that clock filling with slime at the bottom of the river. I listened to the absence of my own song. Dogs barked and howled in the distance, cries they did not have to learn and practice but knew automatically, just by being alive as dogs.
In the evening Hersh came home and we forked dark bread and dark meat while Hersh and Kayla drank dark wine. I ate little and spoke less. Hersh hoped I would soon not look so stunned. He asked me, “Do you like chocolate? Do you like cake? Do you like cookies? Do you like kittens? Do you like horses?” in a stream, which I answered all at once—“Everyone likes those things.”
“Then name one thing only you like,” Hersh said.
I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said, meaning it.
“For example, many people like babies, but don’t like mud . . . or rain.”
“I do like all those things.”
“Well, then you must be a happy girl.” Hersh laughed with a wave to the wet windowpane. “Very happy!” I took stock of how I felt in that moment, a half-eaten piece of meat on my plate, my feet in a pair of socks, sitting in a chair too tall for my toes to touch the strange new floor. All the mud was outside or trapped in the tread of shoes at the front door, while the only rain I could see was hanging limply on the glass. Was this what very happy felt like?
Kayla put down her wineglass, empty, and interrupted the conversation. “Can Lena sit on my lap?” she asked.
“Again?” Hersh asked.
“She is my baby.”
“I’m not a baby,” I said. “I’m eleven, going on twelve.”
Kayla picked me up, sat back down and began trying to shrink me by curling each limb up. I felt like a bug, tucked into itself. My feet, pressed into her leg, made a dent in that dough. Kayla’s eyes narrowed. “You are the smallest. No one is smaller than you. That means you are the baby. I will make you be . . .”
Hersh interrupted his wife with a desperate stroking of her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “We are really lucky. Let’s be careful. Plus, a baby isn’t in voice lessons yet,” Hersh said, trying to reason.
“You’re right!” Kayla hollered. “How could we have been so stupid?” She laughed and rocked her baby girl. “We have a lot to learn about being parents,” she whispered into my soft hair.
Hersh had to think carefully. His darling had not snapped back into sanity now that she was a mother. She had snapped into something, but it wasn’t that. He met my eye and I knew he wanted to tell me he was hoping to save us both. If I followed along, perhaps I would be spared. He built his first fatherly strategy, saying, “I have a feeling this baby is going to grow very fast.” Here we were again, trying to save ourselves by telling a story. “Pretty soon I bet she will be as big as a one-year-old, not long after that as big as a two-year-old. She’s a very unusual child.” He looked at his wife with her oversize load. “Don’t you think she’ll grow quickly, my dear? Don’t you think she’s a prodigy? A prodigy at growing?”
“Could we be so blessed?” Kayla was not looking at her husband. She stared into my eyes as if the rest of the world had dried up around her. If Hersh had become a dead balloon of skin on the floor right then, she hardly would have noticed. But his voice seemed to filter into her like light. In this way, he offered his wife a deal—I could be a baby, a crying, drooling, helpless baby, but not for long. Every few weeks I would gain a year. Hersh wanted to catch me up with myself quickly so that the eleven-year-old they had adopted could soon be the girl they lived with and loved. He hoped sanity, reason, would be there to meet them then. He did not see how seriously his wife would take the proposition—the weeks that would continue to represent years, past when I should have slowed way down, aging as everyone else did, the change invisible from one day to the next.
“A prodigy!” Kayla glowed. “We are so lucky to be her parents. Where can we show her off?” Hersh begged me silently to comply. Just for a while, his eyes said. Before you know it, the upside-down world will right itself.
For my debut, Kayla dressed me in a green velvet frock with a frilly collar and new pointy leather shoes that laced up the ankle. She clipped a string of delicate pearls around her own neck and another around mine. For the first time in her life, she put a ribbon in her daughter’s hair. Hersh wrapped a soft gray blanket around me and held the whole cocoon in his arms.
“Here we go,” Hersh said shakily, twisting the cold brass doorknob. The seam between the walls of their house and the rest of creation was a puddle my new parents had to leap over. The rain had softened to a mist that tickled my face. “This is our baby,” Hersh said to each person they passed. “Please forgive me.”
“She was born perfect,” Kayla said.
“Oh?” the villagers asked. They studied me. I could not defend or save myself.
“We are trying to believe,” Hersh said. “We are trying, in general.” The heartsoreness the villagers felt when they looked at Hersh was a bruise whose origin they could not remember. He looked unprepared not only for the demands his love would make, but for his own endless desire to fill them. A happy wife is a happy life, the grandparents used to say. This kind of devotion tested that theory. The villagers examined me, this new version of me, and they thought I looked all right. The world was new, and there would be many surprises, wouldn’t there? Isn’t the fun of telling a story that you don’t know what will happen?
“She’s very, very beautiful,” they said. “She’s big.”
That was it. If I tossed a rope out, no one was going to drag me back to shore. I bobbed out there in the depths and the villagers settled on picnic blankets, waiting to see what would happen next.
My new parents and I walked circles around our village, past windows trimmed with white, past flowerbeds turned and ready for new bulbs, past the few remaining stakes of an old fence, rotting and covered in vines. They walked until the round cobblestones had worn Hersh and Kayla’s feet into crescents, until they were soaked and their eyes stung with dirty mist, until Kayla’s hair began to fall out from its precise twist. There was little light left to see by and Hersh was tired from holding the sixty-pound infant. But they kept walking. And the longer they walked, the more they both felt the sting of being parents. Of loving something so much that their organs were crushed under the pressure. Their eyes were slimy with love, their throats were dry with it, and their bodies were purposeless except to protect the new life.
Crushed but safe in my uncle’s arms, I did not cry or beg to go home, either my real home or my new one. I did not insist upon my own age or otherwise chew my way out of the cocoon Kayla and Hersh had me in. I said a very small prayer, a prayer for the right thing to happen, and then I closed my eyes, and in the arms of the man who would be my father forever after, I went soft, but I did not sleep.
Kayla said they would have to show me everything or I wouldn’t know what it was.
“Should we take her to the river?” Hersh asked.
Kayla thought for a moment. “The river!” She laughed. “She doesn’t even know what a river is!” Hersh laughed with her. “Can you imagine what that must be like, not to know?” they said. They looked into my eyes, foggy and wet. Hersh shifted me in his arms.
“Do we tell her or do we keep it secret?” Kayla suddenly asked.
“Once she knows she will never not know again,” Hersh said.
“Let’s keep it secret. Let’
s not tell her everything yet.” They danced in the street, celebrating every unspoken fact of the torn and blooming world. Every iris and daisy and gravestone was theirs to give to their daughter when they saw fit. And before that, my eyes were as useless to me as river rocks.
“I want to nurse her—I bet she is hungry,” Kayla said.
Hersh stopped short. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What kind of father are you? Are you the kind of father who starves his children?” Kayla sat down at the edge of the road and undid the long string of buttons on her top. “Close your eyes,” she said to Hersh. My eyes were already closed and I kept them that way. I did not open them even for one short glance. Kayla took me to her substantial breast. She put the point of the nipple into my mouth. I tried not to cry, but was unsuccessful. If Kayla had looked down she would have seen that the only liquids being transferred between us were tears.
In the darkness, folded tightly into bed, the whole mysterious world was wrapped around me. Its wooden houses with their pointed roofs, the old bare trees out front, the wheelbarrow, the woodpile, the haystack. Shop windows and signs in those windows advertising jars of clover honey and bags of flour, and footprints in the mud leading to the doorway, and then leading back out through the mud again. The mud, which was a mixture of dirt and water, water that fell from the sky—what a miracle that was, to be there when it was falling, out of nowhere, no one in charge of it—down and down onto anything it could hit, onto any warm or cold or sharp or soft or lost or found thing, roaming or sitting dead still, mouth agape, swallowing whatever it was given.
And then, ping. Just like that. The sound of something hitting my window. I opened it, and the stranger’s cloaked face was there. I had wanted it to be my mother. I wanted that worse and harder than anything. “Once upon a time,” she began without saying hello, “there was a beautiful baby, but the problem was that two different women claimed to be her mother. They fought bitterly, but neither one would give in, so eventually someone called the king, who proposed a solution: he would cut the baby in half and give one part to each woman. One woman agreed, the other said that she would rather give up her half to ensure the child remain whole. That was how the king knew she was the real mother.”
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