Precious

by Sandra Novack

  Sissy says nothing. Disbelieving, she bows her head slightly and bites her fingernail. She turns and runs upstairs. There is a trample of footsteps, the ascent, a call for help, a frantic call not for her mother but for Eva instead. “Eva! Eva!” she yells.

  “Fucking Christ, Sissy, what?” Eva pokes her head out of her bedroom door, ready to holler more, but immediately she sees Sissy’s dismay: her pallor and excitement, the thin wash of worry falling over her face. Sissy shakes her head, unable to speak. She grabs Eva’s arm and pulls it violently.

  “What?” Eva asks again. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Sissy mouths, “Mom.”

  Eva rights herself. “You’re lying.”

  Still bewildered, Sissy shakes her head. She crosses her heart, but privately she doubts what she has seen, as if she might have imagined it all, as if she dare not call upon the confidence to validate things, not if she wants them to be real. Perhaps it was her mind playing games, wishing things into existence and then placing them where the mind and heart expect. She has no time to doubt, really, no time to find an answer for Eva. Eva storms downstairs, and then there is a reality Sissy can hold on to: Eva’s shrieking—persistent, high-pitched rancor filled with obscenities. She listens a moment, tentatively, until she hears her mother’s voice rise to match her sister’s. She scurries back downstairs. Eva stands in the hallway, angry tears running down her blotched cheeks. “You have no right,” Eva is screaming. “You think we need you now? You think you can just come and go?”

  Eva lunges forward, then, in a way that an animal might—angrily unpredictably—but Natalia holds her back, firmly, by the shoulder. She tries to soothe Eva, an action that produces in Sissy an inexplicable confusion: her mother’s new reserve, her attempt then, when Eva’s words fail her, when Eva is left to angry sobs, to reach for her older daughter and embrace her. “It’s okay,” Natalia says, composing herself as well. “You’re angry.”

  Eva steps back and frowns before another insolent look comes over her. If she could know what to do or say, she might stay there in the hallway and let the reality of the moment settle in. She might explain how missing someone can produce not more love but resentment and hate. Instead, she can only think to mumble “Bitch” under her breath before storming off again. She slams her bedroom door in a defiant way with such force that Sissy can almost feel a breezy current travel down the steps.

  “Well,” Natalia says, too loudly. She places a hand on Sissy’s shoulder, cupping it, but she does not attempt this time to draw her child near. “That went well, didn’t it?”

  Sissy nods, still not moving closer. “I guess.”

  “I missed you,” she says. “I missed all of you.”

  “Okay.” Sissy doesn’t know why she suddenly feels reduced in this moment. Nor does she understand the hesitation in her that this utterance causes, the newly formed doubts.

  Natalia eyes her in a questioning way. “Do you think I should go upstairs and talk to your sister?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Sissy says quietly. She slips her arm around her mother’s waist, the feel of her at once familiar and strange. “If I were you,” Sissy says, “I’d stay right here instead.”

  When Natalia feels out of sorts, when she feels nervous, she tends to want to order things, to cull satisfaction and comfort from the knowledge that everything is in its proper place, that a cosmic sense of order pervades not only the universe but the immensely complicated world of one kitchen. There is a benign satisfaction that comes from scrubbing the stove, from performing a task that requires only her hands. Later, when she finishes the stove, she washes out the Brillo pad and wipes her hands on her jeans and work shirt. She moves to the refrigerator next, throwing out an old container of sour cream layered with mold, wiping away milk rings. She throws out a wilted head of cabbage. She would give anything to make tóltótt káposzta now, to bury her hands in meat and rice and garlic, to press the meat into balls, roll them in the steamed cabbage leaves, and submerge them in tomato broth and vinegar.

  “You’re burning that hole through me,” Natalia says, feeling rattled again. She can sense Sissy behind her but focuses her attention on the empty lunch-meat tray instead.

  “Eva says she won’t come down as long as you’re here.”

  “She seems different,” Natalia says. “Does she seem that way to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Sissy says.

  Natalia hears the hesitation in her voice, the obvious lie. If she turns now, she will likely find Sissy’s lip slightly raised, an involuntary action she performs whenever she engages in untruths. “Are you hungry?”

  “No.” Another lie. Sissy shuffles into a chair, draws her knees up to her chin, thinking.

  “Good,” Natalia tells her. “Because there’s nothing to eat anyway. We’ll have to go shopping.” She removes all the jarred items: the pickles and relish and marmalade, as well as the cans of Coca-Cola, and places them on the countertop in a neat row.

  “I have a question,” Sissy says.

  Natalia turns her head slightly, just enough to see Sissy’s stern, unhappy look. “Yes?”

  “I want to know why you left.”

  Natalia searches for an explanation that will soothe her daughter, but she knows of none. Her heart stills for a moment as she thinks. She pulls out the vegetable drawer and submerges it in sudsy water. She takes a dishcloth and wipes the surface, her free hand gripping the metal lip too tightly. She rinses it with scalding water that reddens and burns her skin. When she turns again, Sissy is still watching her intently, rolling the plastic place mat, and then unrolling it.

  “It was a mistake to leave,” Natalia says.

  “But then why did you leave? You didn’t say goodbye. I spent all day with Mrs. Morris and her dumb stuffed cat.”

  Natalia shakes her head slightly.

  She takes a towel embroidered with a pineapple the size of her thumb and dries the drawer. Upstairs, her daughter has locked herself away in her room in an angry, silent protest at her presence and at having left, having—Natalia shapes the word for the first time— abandoned her. She knows of no mother who would do such a thing—certainly not her real mother, who, although once threatening to sell her, later clawed at a soldier’s face to keep Natalia from being taken away. Even Clara wouldn’t have left Natalia alone as a child. And now here, in her kitchen, her younger daughter burns holes through her for such carelessness, her daughter gifted with an evil eye. Outside, the day is crisp and bright and birds sing. She thinks of that day in December when she snuck out of the house like a negligent thief, her body slumped over her suitcase. “I was self-centered,” she says, finally.

  Sissy says nothing. She lowers her legs and kicks at the chair adjacent to her until it moves.

  “Sometimes you just don’t know why you do the things you do. You just aren’t thinking at all, I suppose.”

  “That’s not a good answer,” Sissy says, her tone suddenly brooding.

  “There aren’t good answers for things like this.”

  “Why weren’t you thinking of us?”

  “I was thinking of myself. I was thinking of what I wanted.”

  “Well that’s just great,” Sissy says smugly. She folds her arms and kicks the chair again.

  Natalia sits down at the table. “Once,” she says, “a long time ago, there was an irresponsible girl who wandered away from her family, all of them, in the woods. The girl slept on a bed of moss that was as soft as fur but comfortless. At night she climbed the trees and tried to touch the empty moon, not realizing how high it was, how far away. You see? Then one night the woods caught on fire and the fire swept over the trees, burning everything. The girl ran and ran. After a time she wandered out of the forest and through a city where people busied themselves on the streets, selling bread and cursing at one another over pennies. No one spoke her language—they were all strangers to her. And it was then that she realized she missed those known to her—her family.”

  “S
o,” Sissy asks, frowning, “what happened to her?”

  “She searched for those she remembered. She decided home was a place you choose, not a place you have to be. She found a home again.”

  “We’re not strangers,” Sissy says.

  “No,” Natalia responds, feeling something in her throat catch. “You’re my family.”

  “I’m not going to Mrs. Morris’s house anymore.”

  “Fine. That’s fair.” Natalia brushes crumbs from the table and into her waiting hand. “Who cleans here?”

  “Everyone.”

  “I see.” She gets up, opens the cabinet, and takes out vinegar and paper towels. She wipes the window above the sink, scrubbing it until it squeaks. She removes the small vase with dried flowers. She brushes the dust from the bachelor’s buttons, wipes down the sill. “When I was young,” she says, “I buried bachelor’s buttons in the ground, to find true love. And then I met your father.”

  “You did that for Dad? I doubt it.”

  “Ah,” Natalia says, eyeing her. “It’s hard to imagine that your father and I were ever that young, right? That we were ever different.”

  “How different?”

  “We laughed more.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “That isn’t the question. The question is, does your father still love me, or will he look at me like a stranger?”

  Sissy’s face clouds over. “Mrs. Anderson comes over,” she says, tentatively.

  “Oh,” Natalia says. “I see.” She concentrates on the window, which reflects back a face she does not wish to see at all.

  “I don’t like her, though. I don’t like her at all. Vicki Anderson,” Sissy says finally. “She got lost in the woods, too, at the park when her mother was drinking. Eva says she was probably sloshed.”

  Natalia stops cleaning. “What do you mean?”

  “A month ago Vicki Anderson disappeared. I think she ran away. Eva thinks she’s dead.”

  Natalia listens as Sissy relays what details she knows, mostly things overheard, the events that shaped the month, the abandoned bike, the policemen who for weeks patrolled the neighborhood, the sniffing dogs. She lapses into events, fusing in details as they come to her, in a random sort of order: the unfilled pool, the Desert Rose and investigations, the searches the children conducted and clues they found that went largely unrecognized by uncaring adults. The summer comes out in a flood of stories, each intricately mixed with the next—Eva’s terrible speculations, the signs posted on telephone poles, the found shoe. She prattles on, telling her mother about water holes and carousels, and as she listens, Natalia sorts through what is real and what can only be imagined, sieving the information as one might flour.

  “Eva thinks she was raped.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Natalia says sternly. “Don’t listen to your sister.”

  “Do you think she’ll come back?”

  Not knowing what to say, Natalia takes to the window again. She can only imagine what Ginny must be going through, what toll this must be taking. She thinks of her mother, how when the soldier clutched Natalia’s neck as though she were a duck ready to be slaughtered, her mother screamed and spat at the ground. Still, even children can go through horrible events and survive. Anything can change—if for the worse, then also for the better. In a moment, a new story might unfold—the girl found, Ginny’s house restored to harmonious order. “Anything in the entire world is possible,” she says to Sissy. “Forget what Eva says. What story do you tell yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” Sissy says. “But the one thing I do know is that if Vicki would have had a dog with her, on that day, I bet nothing would have happened to her. The other thing I know is that we’re going to need to cut an onion, too, for Dad, so he won’t yell at you so much when he finds out you’re back.”

  If anyone can soothe Eva’s wounded sensibilities, it is Peter, whose voice when he’s comforting turns to velvet, cushioning her. If anyone understands that the tensions of a house are sometimes too much to bear, it is him. She imagines—she has always imagined—that it is the same for him, that they share a mutual desire to shuck off confining rooms, to be away from the demands of the people in them. They’ve been talking a lot lately, him sneaking furtive calls when his wife is away, their conversations sometimes brief and sometimes extended, sustaining her for the day like a pleasant meal.

  Now she dials a number she hasn’t yet dared to call, but one that she still knows by heart, having run her finger over “P. Fulton” in the phone book so many times, it borders on absurd obsession. When Peter answers, Eva blubbers out, “She came back. Can you believe my mother came back?” She tries to keep her tears in check, but it’s no use, her emotions always betray her. “Peter?” she asks, sniffling. “Are you there?”

  There is an awkward pause on the other end, a muffled, deadened noise, and then Peter calls to someone else—his wife, Eva suddenly realizes—telling her that he’s got the phone, that it’s no one. Hearing this, Eva becomes even more upset. “I’m trying to tell you something,” she begins again, more stridently, “and you say I’m no one?”

  “Eva.” His voice sounds put-upon and burdened. He breathes in, waits. “Jesus Christ, don’t call me at home.” Then what follows is a click, a complete silence. She is suddenly as inconsequential as the day her mother left—cast off, adrift. She bites her lip, confused momentarily and, above all else, hurt. It seems she must make a decision then— to stay locked away in her room as she has for so many days, or to take some decisive action. She rummages through her jewelry box and slides on a tigereye ring. She changes into fresh clothes, a long white dress. Resolved, she takes her keys from the dresser, vowing that she, as much as her mother and father and Peter himself, can do as she pleases. Downstairs she finds Sissy in the kitchen, still upset, Eva thinks, but subdued, possibly stunned. Her mother, changed into work clothes, is down on all fours, cutting into the kitchen tiles with a wire brush. She looks up, eyes her daughter, the dress, the sudden need.

  “Where are you going?” Natalia asks.

  “What does it matter?” She opens up the phone book and writes down the address, just so she makes sure she remembers. “Where were you when anything mattered? Where did you go?” Eva thinks of saying more, but when she sees the look on her mother’s face, the deep crease between her large eyes, she stops.

  “Go, then,” Natalia says, scraping harder across the floor, her muscles straining. “Be alone.”

  It is a twenty-minute drive to Peter’s house on the other side of town. She gets lost twice and stops for directions at the gas station, the attendant finally drawing her a map before sending her on her way again. The winding streets around Peter’s house daze her slightly, as do the idle park benches and newer houses. On Arbor Place, she turns and drives slowly, studying the numbers etched into brass fixtures on the mailboxes and front doors. She slows and parallel parks across the street from a blue colonial. The windows are open, the curtains flapping in the breeze. Wind chimes clatter. In the front yard a plastic kiddy pool lies abandoned, the slide shaped like an elephant’s trunk. It all seems so practical, so mundane in a way, that it hurts Eva to witness. She expected Peter’s house to be an altogether different shape, perhaps round with solar panels and Grateful Dead music blaring from smoky rooms—something hip and cool, but not this. Not this at all. She expected the house to have a different temperament altogether. She checks the slip of paper she clenches in her moist hand. Written there is “247 Arbor Place,” a number that matches the one etched on a brass plate next to the windowed door.

  She has imagined herself here so many times. She has constructed all the rooms of Peter’s house, imagined herself moving through them, opening his drawers, running her hand over his tweedy smoky clothing, opening his refrigerator, lying down in his bed, the nutty smell of him on the covers. But she has never tempted the fates before in this way. She beeps the horn, waits, but no one pulls back the curtain. No one opens the door and steps outside. An eld
erly couple strolls along the sidewalk, eating ice cream with a pleasant laziness. A chubby boy jogs down the street, his cheeks pushing out air like small balloons.

  She plans what to say, what to do. A sense of alarm grows in her, a sense of danger. She knows he is married. She knows he has a daughter he’s talked about frequently in class and once or twice, more tentatively when he was alone with her. She knows all of this, and yet in light of her mother’s return and his callous response, her mind turns over new questions: Why should his wife have all of him? Why, if he and Eva are together, shouldn’t he be there for her when she most needs him? She’s filled with a sense of undoing and daring. What would happen if she walked up to the door? Knocked? Rang the bell? Announced herself as Peter’s lover, told his wife about their exchanges, their bodies pressed together slick with sweat? She might say, Do you know where he goes when he says “to the library”? Do you know the things that happen behind your back, when you aren’t watching? Thinking of all this gives her amused satisfaction. How liberating it would be to say these things aloud. If he thought he could keep her from his life, if his wife thinks their life so perfect, so immune to hurt and disruption, how wrong they both are. Eva lacked the bravery to say what she thought to her mother—her mother who in one moment managed to silence her yet again—but she could say what she thinks to a stranger, to this wife. The thought is simply tantalizing.

  Resolved, Eva primps her hair and checks her face in the mirror. She gets out and sprints across the street, smoothing her dress as she ascends the walkway. She passes the kiddy pool, realizing that sand, not water, fills it, along with two plastic shovels and a bucket. What kind of mother would let her little girl play in dirty sand? Eva wonders, her sense of entitlement and swagger growing. She inhales deeply, hesitates only for a moment, and presses the doorbell. She waits, peering in through the columned windows on either side of the door. She views the front entrance, the curved wooden railing that leads upstairs. To the right, she catches sight of a dining room that has, in the corner, a desk with a reading lamp and envelopes stacked in thin slots. She imagines Peter sitting there, back turned to his wife, his attention consumed with his poetry his sestinas. Around the desk, toys lie scattered on the floor. She holds her hand up to her forehead, cutting back the glare.