Precious

by Sandra Novack

  If the truth were known, Natalia herself felt that, in just over twenty years of marriage, she had taken care of others so well that she had no space for herself anymore, no sense of what she might have wanted if asked or given the simple opportunity. Natalia might have said that she caught sight of herself one day—her face longer, the network of lines, the downward turn of her lips—and that she didn’t know where the time had gone to. This realization produced in her an inexplicable irritability with Frank, with the girls. A feeling that everything was wrong often came over Natalia, a need to run ahead and leave everything behind her.

  “It’s not you,” Natalia managed to say, though in that moment she felt as though saying anything might cause her to change her mind and stay. She stopped, realizing her error: Eva stood, red-faced, the skin over her chest suddenly blotchy, a desperate look shadowing her normally smooth face.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Eva asked. “Because you fight about me?”

  “No,” Natalia said again. “You’re too young to understand what it’s like to lose things.” She knew that whatever she might try to frame with words would fail and be subjected to Eva’s scrutiny. Her older daughter, like her youngest, was versed in scrutiny. She loved them both, but Natalia had to admit that she often felt burdened by the girls, too, by their needs and problems, their worries and fevers, their desire to be at the center of everything, and by their questions—why a beloved fish had to die, why God would let that happen, why someone might leave. Because, she’d say, things die. Because God lets everything in the world happen, bad and good. Because God’s eye wanders like a Gypsy, and bad things pass by. Because that’s the way life is.

  Children only ever wanted more. They had no sense of mercy. They had no need for it.

  There was never a good way to say “I’m leaving,” never a way to make it not hurt. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. In that moment, she remembered a day long before, when she had been only a child and new to the country. That woman who was still a stranger—her new mother—had made Natalia stand onstage and repeat words she’d learned from Hansel and Gretel, words coated in such a thick accent no one listening could understand. Natalia, only eight or nine, stood still when the lights came on, thinking first not of English or German but Hungarian—“Az erdö mélyén élt egy szegény fávagó, a feleségével és két gyermekével” “Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children.” She fell silent. The performance was a spectacle. Such a spectacle, as if the world were turned suddenly upside down. Crying, she’d marched offstage, away from the lights and people.

  It was like that with Eva, too. An awkward silence, a terrible dread. There was nothing she could translate—no emotion, no truth. To compensate, and because she hated silence, and because Eva, on the other side of the bed, was already indignant, Natalia said, “Make your own choices; at least you can try to do that in life, whether people understand or not. At least the choices are yours.”

  Eva said nothing.

  There is always more to say, Natalia thought. Always those things that can never be said. If she told Eva she loved her, would it ever convey what she needed it to, fully? “I’ll write,” she said instead.

  “That’s great,” Eva said, wiping snot from her nose. “You’ll write.”

  “I will.”

  “What about Sissy?”

  Natalia concentrated on the shirt she held, the slippery texture, the creamy sheen. She indulged the thought of turning over the suitcase and letting all the clothing fall to the bed and ground. “Sissy? She’s with Mrs. Morris.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Eva crossed her arms. “It’s almost Christmas.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Natalia said, though she was no longer certain of anything. “She has you.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You and Sissy have each other. And your father—”

  “You don’t even care.”

  “I feel shame when I look at myself,” Natalia said suddenly. She looked up. “But I’ve never been the type of person to cry and sob and scream, if that’s what you want. You can’t know a person and know what’s inside them. A person’s heart doesn’t shed itself like a tree in winter; it doesn’t bare itself just because you want it to.”

  It was true, after all. It wasn’t that Natalia didn’t feel pain at the thought of leaving. For days she had turned in sleep and felt her stomach grow sick with worry. For days, her chest had grown tight, constricted, every time the girls or Frank was in the room. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel the terrible wrenching away from her own life, the prying away from family like one pulls away skin.

  The moments dripped. Natalia zipped the suitcase.

  “You lie,” Eva said finally. “You don’t feel anything, not even shame.”

  With that, Natalia felt her resolve take hold. “A few months, and I’ll send for you and Sissy. I’ll get you both.”

  But Eva turned her head, and Natalia knew that she’d never be forgiven.

  If with Eva it was a full-blown argument, then, earlier in the day with Sissy it had felt subversive and deceptive, simply by virtue of age, a task made easier by lies and stories. With Sissy, Natalia acted as if everything were normal, that the day were just like any other—the two of them in the kitchen, the afternoon sun invisible behind clouds. Frank was at work, as was Eva. Sissy prattled on, happy for Christmas break, happy for the reprieve of getting picked last for basketball in gym, while Vicki Anderson got picked for captain. She was eager for snowballs and the cold on her tongue.

  Sissy noticed but ignored how her mother often looked over from the sink, watching her as she sat at the table, peeling off the crusts of her sandwich. If Sissy noticed her mother was dressed up on her day off— slacks and a creamy cowl-neck sweater, hair up, a pin above her right breast: gilded holly leaves with red-beaded berries—she didn’t seem to think it odd. Down the hall from her, in the living room, the plastic tree was shored up against the bay window, the lights on since nine in the morning, the silver tinsel draped over the long branches, the trinkets, made by both girls, hanging from wires—cutouts of children, little bells, beaded and sequined balls—the pointed, severe-looking star crowning the top of the tree.

  Natalia couldn’t bear to think of the holiday, and so did not think of it at all. She had tried, earlier, to read the bottom of her cup, but she saw only a mess of garbled tea leaves and nothing more. The house was clean, at least, short of the dishes, which tired her to look at, for it seemed life was an endless succession of small tasks, a repetition of simple rituals.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Natalia said. She sat down at the table, searching for the similarities between them, the lines of recognition, the lilt of the brow. She leaned in. “Are you ready to hear something shameful?”

  Sissy beamed. How she longed for access into the adult world, into the hushed conversations and suppressed laughter of women and men, into their secretive languages that unfolded over drinks and games of pinochle and Parcheesi. How often Sissy tried to sneak into the room, to pass unnoticed. How often she lingered at the top of stairs when there were arguments about Eva. Was it possible that her mother was finally willing to grant her entry to this world? Was it possible that, in sharing, she would learn some terrible secret, something shameful? Her heart delighted. She sat up straighter and scrunched her nose, anticipating. “A secret, really?”

  “A secret.” Natalia whispered, “Your father can’t touch his toes.” She leaned back in her chair and drummed her hands on the table.

  “That’s it? That’s the secret?”

  “That’s it. I said it; it’s true. Your father, Sissy, is too fat.” It was a cruel remark, but she was still feeling cruel, remembering that the night before Frank had told her, plainly when she’d asked, that yes, she was looking older by a good measure, weren’t they all. She had told him that if she were old, at least she wasn’t fat. “What do you want?” she’d asked bitterly. “For me to be a girl again
, like that, poof, magic?”

  Sissy took on a look of disappointment. Did it matter if her father could touch his toes or not, or if he loved butter too much? She didn’t care particularly what time did to bodies. Unlike Natalia, she never thought how time increased the burdens of some and lightened those of others so that, as they walked down the street, some seemed tethered to the ground while others, conversely, seemed to float and drift apart from everything, like leaves, like feathers. To Sissy, her father was normal enough—a stomach, yes, but flesh that seemed lived in and worn, like a favorite chair. Does it matter that he might be fat? Sissy wondered.

  Judging from the seriousness that marked her mother’s face, she concluded it did matter and that, in fact, it was of grave importance. She responded plainly: “I can touch my toes. Want to see?”

  “I’ll take your word,” Natalia said. “Sometimes I think your father has never been happy and that’s why he can’t touch his toes. When you’re not happy, your body crunches up on you.” She sat up straighter and breathed deeply. “You see? I’m crunchy too, these days, but at least I can touch my toes.”

  Sissy stretched her legs absentmindedly under the table. She kinked her head.

  “You’re nimble. You could probably run a marathon.”

  “When I run in gym,” Sissy said, “I get cramps.”

  “Well, if ever that happens again, try some vegetable juice. It might help.”

  “We could give some juice to Dad,” Sissy said.

  “It’s not the same thing.” She got up and returned to the sink. She took a dishcloth from the wicker basket on the counter and looked out the kitchen window to the backyard. A light snow fell, mottling the ground, and coating the tops of the metal fence. The sky was gray. By late evening, temperatures would slide below freezing and whatever moisture the sky still held would turn icy, pelting the skin of those unfortunate enough to be outside. Natalia would be delayed at the airport, arrive a day late, though no one in the Kisch family would know this.

  “Do you think I look old?” Natalia asked without turning. “Ponce de León thought there was a cure for aging, but for men that only means a younger woman. There’s no good juice for stripping away time.”

  “No,” Sissy said. “You don’t look old.”

  Natalia looked up and, seeing her daughter’s expression, she stopped. Maybe Sissy was thinking, Natalia reasoned, of that woman years ago in Atlantic City, that short blonde with the nice smile, how Frank sat on the beach and talked with her while Natalia and Sissy bobbed in the ocean, the day ablaze with children and activity. She suddenly felt ashamed again. That was only a flirtation, wasn’t it? She was the one who was leaving with the doctor, not Frank leaving her for some girl. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said.

  “Are you okay, Mom?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m fine.” The dishes sat in front of her, waiting, as they always did. She thought perhaps she would make a pie if there was time, though after their recent argument, a pie seemed like an insult to Frank’s waistline, and, after all, maybe it was. She had an old thought of hunger and need: how she came to this very country, to this very region, without any choice to do so, and how after a time, in high school, she met Frank and life gradually seeded itself, without her ever seeming to make a definitive choice, one way or the other. It was peculiar to Natalia how much of life was thrown upon us: lucky or unlucky.

  She mulled over her plan to meet the doctor, Ronald Finley It was only a week before that he’d come up behind her as she was filing away his papers. He laced his arms around her waist. They’d been seeing each other for two months, since his divorce had been finalized, and he told her that he needed a change of scenery and was going on holiday for six months, to Italy. He said, “Come with me.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “You know I can’t.”

  He held her tighter, and she could smell the lemony aftershave he wore that day. “I don’t ascribe to can’t. Not for me, or you. You’re an exquisitely beautiful woman,” he said, kissing her neck. “Your bone structure is lovely.”

  Natalia couldn’t think of a time she’d ever been called lovely. In her youth, she had been awkward and a bit harder than she’d wished with people, difficult to know. She had been self-conscious of her looks, of the thin line around her neck that she often covered with scarves, a line that now, after years, looked only like a trapping of her age—a wrinkle. Dr. Finley had walked into his office then and returned with a gift of winter pears set in perfect rows, three by three in a wooden box, each pear wrapped in green tinfoil that was so festive she could not help but be delighted. But there was the small thought that nettled her—that Ronald Finley, unlike Frank, did not yet know that she hated pears, their gritty sweetness. She would have preferred green apples, freshly picked and stolen from the farmer’s orchard, juicy and bitter on the tongue, sweeter, though, for all the sneaking around and laughter.

  She watched now as the flakes fell outside the window. She washed a dish, ignoring the numbness that set into her hands from the hot water. “My mind today,” she said. “It wants to jump from thing to thing, Sissy. It must be the snow.”

  “Why the snow?” Sissy asked.

  “What?”

  “Why the snow?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just because.” She ran a sponge over the plate, rinsed it, and set it into the drying rack. “I could tell you a story if you want,” she said.

  Sissy’s eyes lit up, not only in anticipation of the story itself but also of the changes that she knew would assail her mother’s face as she spoke—the way her lips would turn downward when the story became grim, the way her eyes would widen when something surprising unfolded, the exaggerated movements of her hands when a detail struck her as amusing, or times when she was made so angry by her own tales that she’d let go a barrage of lamentations and curses spoken in another language. (Tolvaj! Megállj! A fenébe!) When her mother told a story, her face became transparent, mutable, and subject to fanciful twists of emotion. There were so many stories given to Sissy and Eva over the years: the campfires that kept the darkness at bay and burned down to cinders in the morning; travels through the barren countryside, made in intricately carved caravans with stained-glass windows. Many Gypsies, she once said, were kings, their fingers adorned with rings, their voices filled with laughter. In the telling, the caravans grew majestic, as stately as the mountains behind them, golden harps crowning them like jewels. There were stories of traded horses, stories of bears that could dance on their hind legs, chains of bells around their necks. There were tales of women who married men that turned magically into animals—a wolf, a crow, and once even a rooster. There were charms, conjurations. (Fevergo away!) Spells against toothaches. A coin for luck. A stone to worry in your pocket. A reading of cards. A song for the dead. A wish that everything precious be given back to you. Stories of Budapest, stories of Hungary stories remembered from Natalia’s mother that Natalia passed to Eva. And then, when Eva no longer cared to hear the stories, when she was busy dating and picking out outfits and buying records, Natalia told Sissy the stories instead. They were all she remembered of her life back then, in that place, all she remembered of her kompánia, her family. They were, truth be told, only bits and fragments that, over time, she added to, letting her imagination fill in the holes. She had no stories from her adopted German mother. The woman was fastidious with numbers.

  As it often happened when trying to recall her mother’s stories, Sissy would later massacre the tales told to her. The specificity of detail and the ordering of events were ruined. It was like stars blurring into one vast woven blanket. In imagining a hillside Sissy might feel the dirt crumble in her fingers and grind under her nails, or the dancing bear might be transformed into a man searching for his lost family.

  A harp. A cymbal. A violin.

  There was always music.

  “Okay,” Natalia said, her face changing. “Let me think of one.”

  Sissy waited. />
  Maybe it was the snow, the feeling of her mind wandering, moving backward and forward and backward again, further, to more unreachable places. She tried to push the thought away, but it was there, suddenly, as fresh as the day itself. “Sometimes in life,” Natalia began, “you breathe even when you don’t want to. Sometimes in life, you take in the bad along with the good and rub them together until something, however small, shines.”