by Hilary Zaid
The acrid reek of smoke nearly choked me as I walked in. Someone had left the big slider open to the patio, but the thick odor clung to the carpets, the curtains, hung like an invisible fog over the glass table. “Anya?” I’d never been in Anya’s apartment without Anya before. Aside from the smell, and the open window, everything appeared as it always did: immaculate, orderly, contained. Glancing at the window, my first thought was: She’s finally flown. (Was this horrid stench of flesh, metal, flame, the smell of the Phoenix, self-immolated, risen and flown?) Then I looked around the tiny kitchen, and found the burnt pot, and wondered where Anya had gone.
Mrs. Linde, trailing a rolling oxygen tank on a line like a small, obedient dog, lingered near her door, watching me closely as I backed out of the apartment. “She fell.” She nodded her head toward Anya’s apartment; a clear tube trailed from her nose.
Anya fell. Anya fell. Anya fell.
“Where is she?”
Mrs. Linde sucked breath through her nose. “Where?” She seemed unable to get words out of her mouth. “West tower?”
I raced back to the West tower. “Yes. I’m her daughter,” I repeated to myself as the elevator ascended to the tenth floor. “Her daughter.” But, when I got out on the tenth floor, indistinguishable from the antiseptic, mauve halls of the eighth, no one asked.
An old woman in a blue cardigan sat up in the bed near the door, flipping cards out onto the bed tray. “Hello,” she greeted me warmly. “Are you from Social Services?” I shook my head. “Here for her?” she tried. I nodded, glancing toward the curtain that divided the room, behind which, I assumed, Anya lay in God-knew-what state. “They say she got dizzy. But she’s not talking. Maybe she’ll talk to you.” She studied me for a minute, as if looking for a resemblance. Then she turned back to her game of solitaire.
I stepped behind the pale mauve curtain. The bed was empty. Anya, intact as far as I could see, sat up in a maroon chair in a white “Golden Gate National Parks” T-shirt I had never seen before, a blanket draped across her lap, her back to the window. “Anya.” Behind her, the window reflected me back to myself against the blank canvas of the darkening sky.
Anya looked straight through me, hollow, dark, simmering with anger. Her small shoulders hunched under the T-shirt. She ground her jaw. When she glanced at me, it was with wild, animal hatred. She wasn’t herself. Staring back at her, I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t her daughter. I wasn’t her granddaughter. We had no ties of blood, or love. I didn’t even know her.
I tried to keep my voice light. I could hear my sister, murmuring to Gramma Sophie in the cardiac unit. “You’ve had a shock,” I said. “But you’re going to be okay.” Anya didn’t say anything; she just glared. “I’ve got to go now,” I told her. “But I’ll come back.” Then I fled, once again, from the West tower back to Anya’s apartment, where I stood at the sink, scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing the pot.
( )
When I came back the next day, I brought hamentaschen, raspberry ones. The raspberry jam didn’t bleed as much as the strawberry, but I’d committed my usual sin, and so I just tried to choose the ones that looked the neatest, their golden corners pinched hard together, clean lines, which I knew—or thought I knew—Anya would prefer.
The bed near the door was empty, the cards stacked neatly on the table. Anya sat up in the chair facing the window. She nodded. “So,” she said, “you heard.” The stranger who had hunched in last night’s crouch of fear and anger had disappeared.
“You fell.”
She waved her hands, a dismissal of the whole, overblown establishment.
Someone—who?—had brought in a pile of Anya’s books, and the photo of Batsheva from Anya’s apartment.
“You were cooking.” When I’d gotten home, the tang of smoke in my hair and clothes, Francine had turned me around and around, sure I’d escaped from a fire. (I told her there’d been a small chemical plant explosion downtown, a not-very-credible lie.)
Anya shrugged, her gaze on the sky. “I can make more soup.”
What was the point of arguing? They’d keep her here or not keep her here. She’d cook or stop cooking. Maybe she’d burn down the place. I wasn’t her daughter. I wasn’t her granddaughter. What had I been telling myself all this time?
I pulled up a chair and sat next to Anya; out the window, the cars in the street looked like toys. The June light scooped the sky into a hollow, blue shell.
I glanced over to the stack of coffee-table art books. Idly, I slid out The San Francisco Expressionists. This is what I knew how to do. I didn’t know what to say to Anya, didn’t know how to help her, didn’t know how to claim her, didn’t know if I wanted to. But I knew how to sit, to be still, to stay beside her. I flipped through the big glossy paintings, the chunky gold and ochre hills; I liked the landscapes the best. Then I turned the page. “Ocean Park,” I said.
Anya settled a crooked finger on the page. Dressed in her own clothes, in her own apartment, her lines never seemed crooked. Here, she was stripped, an old lady.
Anya drew her finger down along the page. “Pentimenti. These are the half-hidden, underneath marks—the paths the painter explored and rejected, in search of . . . something else.” It was a relief to hear her sound like herself. Anya’s fingers stroked the book; even in the photo, I could make out the striations of the brush, the darker strokes overlapping the lighter wash. Anya cleared her throat. Her words, emerging, seemed to reorganize her whole face from the Cubist fragment of pain and rage she’d been last night. “How do you paint the watery air that envelopes you in your studio?” Her head inclined toward the window. Then she turned to me; as she spoke, her face composed itself back into the inscrutable one I knew. “In the Renaissance, these marks, these pentimenti, would sometimes appear as a painting aged, but the celebration of them as something—this is a modern idea.”
Anya and I stared together at Ocean Park No. 54, glancing, now and then, out the window, not down at the city and the cars, but up at the sky. “Anya,” I said, “there’s a record for you at Yad Vashem.” Anya stared closely at the painting, her lips pressed together. She pressed them tighter. It was easier to look at her this way, in profile. But I found I had to turn away, because my eyes smarted. “A death record.” It was all I could do not to glance at the photo of Batsheva. But I didn’t. I stared straight ahead, out the window, at the watery light in the sky. “Submitted by Batsheva Singer.” Anya’s fingers curled over the print.
She must have glanced over at the photo herself. “Cookies?” she asked. I handed her the plate. Anya picked up the neatest triangle. “You made this?” she asked with grave suspicion. She held the hamentaschen up to the slit of her mouth, opened it just wide enough and took a bite. I watched while she chewed. “A little dry,” she commented, crumbs blowing from her lips. “We need tea.”
When I came back with the tea, Anya helped herself to a second. “You.” She pointed to the plate. When we’d eaten hamentaschen and drunk tea for a while, I told her I needed to go. There were things Anya would never tell me. No point in drawing it out.
Anya nodded, grave. “I’m going home tomorrow.”
“Home?”
“To my apartment.”
“Good.”
“You have to prove everything to these people,” she spat, dismissing the Rose of Sharon with a wave of her hand.
“I’m glad you’re going home. I’ll come back then.”
Anya nodded like she didn’t care either way, a brusque little nod, and turned back to the window.
“Would you like your book?” I offered.
She dismissed me.
As I was walking out, though, she called after me, “Repentance.”
“What’s that?”
“Pentimento,” Anya said. “That’s what it means, you know.”
On the way out of the West tower, so that my alibi to Wendy wouldn’t be a complete lie, I stopped back on the eighth floor to check on Mr. Kaye. I stepped out of the elevator, watc
hful for the suspicious nurse. But the people at the nurses’ station were all different, and I made my way, unchallenged, to Mr. Kaye’s room. It was empty, the bed stripped. Through the curtains, the filtered sun submerged the room in watery light.
( )
“How did those invitations come out?” Mi’Chelle asked, handing me a pile of mail, an envelope, battered and half-torn, at the top of the stack.
“Perfect, Mi’Chelle. Thank you so much.”
Mi’Chelle closed her eyes, perfection acknowledged. She had done the graphic design for us at a very reasonable price. “Then why haven’t I got mine?” she pouted.
“We screwed up the envelopes.” Mi’Chelle looked alarmed. “But we’ve figured out a solution.” (“We’ll make them ourselves,” Francine had told me. “How hard can it be?”) Relief smoothed Mi’Chelle’s features.
“Hand-folded? Well, that is nice,” she murmured. “But don’t you wait too long. I need an excuse for those shoes I saw at Macy’s.”
I laughed and headed up the stairs, where I found Wendy at her desk, uncharacteristically silent, staring at the bat mitzvah photo of her, Nigel, and her daughter Jenny. “Jenny’s angry with me,” Wendy sighed. “‘You’re always lecturing me about birth control. You should have known better.’” Underneath her shirt, I saw something solid shift, then disappear. Right then, even I wanted to touch it—the robust talisman.
“She’ll change her mind. You know that.”
“I know. I know she’ll love the baby. It’s just that she’s so mad at me.” Wendy’s chin dimpled.
We didn’t usually talk like this. “I’ll get you some tea,” I offered. I made my way to the kitchen slowly, sliding the battered envelope Mi’Chelle had handed me out of my pocket.
Damaged in transit by the U.S. Postal Service. The half-torn piece of mail, which had been fixed crookedly with a real stamp, looked like it had been circulating since World War I. In the upper corner, the return address read “American Red Cross: Tracing.” Vicky had included a short, handwritten note, along with a Xeroxed copy of a phone book listing, printed in Hebrew and translated, in another hand, into English: Batsheva Singer, Rose of Sharon Home, Tel Aviv. I looked at the twining black letters again, carefully, trying to decipher the hidden meaning there. This is what I saw:
>Precociously sad, defiant eyes, eyes dark as the edge of the forest in which they stand, two girls contemplate each other’s shadowed places in the shadows of shedding pines. They’ve been running, their book sacks thumping, damp with sweat under their white blouses, to escape the brutality of their mothers’ holiday cleaning, the dusty beating of the rugs, the merciless screech of Batsheva’s father’s chickens; free, like boys, past the castle, into the woods. The blond, the one with the laughing eyes, falls, laughing, under a pine, lies, laughing, up at the cool September sky, and the dark-haired girl seals her mouth on the laughing mouth, as if she could catch that laughing breath in her own mouth. Then the laughing eyes and the dark eyes change; the paisley-shaped eyes open and melt into the dark eyes, and see whole universes there. That’s how it starts. With pine needles in the hair. In the shadow of the forest, in the shadow of the old monastery. They are sixteen. After that, they find ways to be alone. The dark girl discovers a taste for salt; the fair-haired girl discovers the love of shape: curve, angle; breast, bone. They learn the rhythms of breath. They learn what it means to be breathless. When they rise, their smooth, white backs come away rough with the weight of the earth.
I hovered in the hall, stunned with disbelief. The Rose of Sharon Home. And yet halfway around the world. What kind of coincidence was that?
( )
“A false intimacy,” Debbie yelled over the wind. “How many people have gotten married out of the urgency spurred by a fear of death?” She was talking about her twin brother, who had just proposed to his girlfriend. We were out at the Berkeley Marina, Debbie and Francine and I, bracing bags of kettle corn against the wind as we watched the sky. The huge, open fields, carpeted in April with crimson and clover, had given way to green and gold stubble, covered, this festival weekend in July, with people flying kites and watching kites fly. From across the highway, the wide field looked like a small patch of a tropical green sea, colorful kites swaying in one spot like pensive fish. “Anika had surgery for a heart murmur. A week later, he bought her a ring.” When I had finally told her Francine and I were getting married—on the phone—she’d exhaled, “Thank you! Finally!” But now she sounded extremely skeptical. On the field, two stunt kites soared up to an Asian-sounding instrumental, something with flutes, a cherry-blossom dance. Debbie mused, “I wonder if seeing her so mortal gave him that pang—how much he’s in love with, just, life—and he’s confused it with being in love with her.” We stared at the twining kites, which revolved around each other—a tangle seemed inevitable—then separated. “Like Ben,” Debbie reminded me.
One late spring day of our senior year, Ben, a visiting junior, had been killed in a car crash. None of us really knew him. That night in the Co-op kitchen, I stood slicing asparagus, the big orange kitchen door open onto the empty alley where the lilacs had just started to bloom. Sam was washing bowls, clattering over the rush of the sink. Dusk—glowing, particulate, palpable dusk—filtered in. Sudden and pungent as the slice of an onion, I’d felt it: I am alive.
Who wouldn’t want to marry that feeling?
Francine licked popcorn salt off her fingers. “Taking care of someone who’s totally dependent. I think that can create a sense of intimacy that’s not really there.”
“I took care of you once,” I reminded her.
Just three months into our relationship, Francine got the flu. For days, I rotated her from the bed to the couch and back again, each day a blur of grainy images of night-fired SCUDs, in front of the TV. Four months before, I’d been the person Francine wasn’t sure about. Suddenly I was her lifeline to the world.
The wind held up, brisk and constant.
“I should have asked you to marry me then,” I joked quietly.
“I was vulnerable,” Francine answered. “I might have said yes.”
The Star Wars theme thundered out over the field, where a black kite chased a white one. Even with the music blasting, you could hear the zips of wind ripping against the nylon as the kites sliced the sky.
Actually, Francine had asked me to marry her, not long after that. It was a slip, a fluke. One of those impulsive things women said to each other sometimes, because it didn’t really mean anything. It wasn’t something we ever talked about.
The sky that day had been gray; big magnolia petals lay bruised and rotting on the sidewalks as I pedaled toward home with a pile of student blue books and a fifty-nine-cent, felt-tipped, red pen. When I opened the front door, I found Francine, head in her hands, on the steps leading up to the flat I shared with Debbie. She grabbed me by the shoulders. Her face looked pale. “Ellen, marry me,” she said.
I pulled away. “Don’t you have a seminar?” I led her up the stairs to my bedroom.
Francine related a long preschool tale. She slumped on the bed, bunching the comforter in her hands. “Then he stomped off, the little bastard.”
“That sucks,” I commiserated. I’d never heard Francine talk this way about a child before. I wondered why something so infantile had set her off. I sat down next to her on the bed and let my hand fall on her thigh.
“Then, during my break, I ran into my friend Jeanette’s mother, Joyce.” Jeanette had been a high school friend of Francine’s. Joyce Babcock was her mother. Francine pronounced the name heavily, like the slice of a knife. Her face collapsed. “All decked out in her Stepford drag.” Francine traced a pattern along the leg of her jeans.
I drew up my legs and leaned back against the charcoal wall of my bedroom.
“Joyce Babcock was everything my mother wasn’t: really young, really pretty, really, really rich. They lived in a Maybeck with art deco lamps with pink glass shades. My parents love their garden—they work on
it all the time—but Joyce’s garden looked like something out of Sunset magazine. Actually, it was in Sunset magazine. She’d landscaped it herself.
“I spent every weekend over there, even when Jeanette was away at her dad’s. I even dieted with her.”
My neck pricked with alarm. “Dieted?”
“Oh, you know.” Francine flicked her knee with her fingernails. “Eight bottles of water a day and rice crackers. Jeanette refused to do them, so I did them with Joyce, for company.”
“For company?”
Francine’s face reddened. “She was interested in me. In my body.”
Not Jeanette. Joyce. I felt anger rising.
“Joyce would say things like, ‘Doesn’t Francine look amazing? Can you believe she’s lost ten pounds?’”
“Ten pounds, Francine. Jesus.” I looked over at my lover, her small shoulders hunched over her small, curvy hips and thighs, and wondered how anyone could wish for any less of her. “Francine,” I whispered. “This is very, very fucked up.”
“I know,” she agreed. “It is.”
But I could no more stop her confession now than I could stop the clouds from massing, stop Orpheus from turning back, stop Lot’s wife turning to salt. What is it about the backwards glance we can’t resist, no matter what the price? The inexorable pull, the terrible tide of the truth pulling us out to sea.
We sat quietly and listened to the pock of Francine’s tears as they hit the bed. When Francine had gone off to college, Joyce had lost interest, and Francine had developed a full-blown eating disorder.
“I was cold.” Francine told me. “All the time.”
I considered her sadly. Francine had shrunk into her shoulders. The woman who had electrified me with her dancing, the woman who had thrilled me with her opinions, her independence, had vanished; in her place on my bed sat a depressed post-adolescent, a rejected teenager, a lonely, mixed-up kid. The gray afternoon light shone bleakly on my gray walls; even Francine’s hair looked darker than bright.