Precious

by Sandra Novack

  Then, more white space.

  That day my mother, who was always well-meaning, didn’t want me to be upset, so she called my oldest sister and charged her with my care for the rest of the day. After Carole left, my other sister took me and a friend to a local amusement park. I remember sitting in the back seat of our car, asking if Carole was going to come home, so I must have been worried. But I’m also sure that my worry quickly gave way to delight when we got to the park. I went on rides, ate cotton candy, had a hot dog. I must have forgotten about my sister at some point, dismissed the argument in a naïve way, as simply a fight that would blow over in time and not as the terrible thing it actually was: an altercation that would leave my family forever broken.

  I must have laughed.

  • • •

  I never found out the exact nature of the argument between my father and sister, or discovered, at least in those immediate years following her departure, what could have been so terribly bad that she would have wanted to run away forever. Indeed, my sister’s departure on that bright, sunny day was too painful a thing to talk about at all, and, when pressed, everyone in my family seems to have a different story surrounding those events, complicating the truth further and keeping it just out of reach.

  In my family, we argue about the nature of truth and memory.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” my brother once told me at one of those rare moments when we actually talked about our sister at all. “You weren’t five when she left home, you were seven,” he said. “And I pumped the bike tire for her; it had a flat.”

  I cannot begin to explain how this one statement devastated me years after the fact, how it trapped me in a lie I didn’t even know I’d committed. What was most upsetting was the realization that came with my brother’s statement: I could not remember anything of those two lost years that I had suddenly recovered, that span of time between five and seven. Yet surely things must have happened. My sister and I must have joked around. She must have brushed through my always tangled hair. I must have accompanied her to the mall, played board games with her, bickered with her. Because I remember myself as younger than I actually was, I have effectively wiped out time and history with her; I have lost entire years I shared with my sister.

  But why do I remember myself as younger? Was I particularly vulnerable at that moment, susceptible to the moods of the house? Is this why I remember myself as smaller? This error of memory leads to even more questions and doubts: Why, for example, do I remember that the floor was smooth and cool under me? Was it really so dim in the kitchen on what I also remember to be a sunny day? Most likely my mother or father had turned off the lights to help cool the rooms in those pre-air-conditioning days. But perhaps, too, I am adding details without realizing it, so that I can give this memory verisimilitude; the more detail there is, the easier the moment is to recall and the longer I am able to hold on to it. Perhaps I need to flesh in details to moments that, for me, are all I have left of my sister, ones that are inadequate at best. Or maybe this is the inherent problem of memory and of truth, that both exist only as fragments—mere moments—those isolated from the larger context and day. Who looks back over any remembered event, good or bad, and recalls every single detail?

  I think that there is something in the brain that resists such fragmentation and that is the stuff of stories. What I can say are the following truths, these moments in a day that changed my life: My sister ran away from home and never came back. It happened on a very hot summer day. I was hiding under the table when she came through the door, crying. She rode off later on her bike, and I spent the rest of that day at an amusement park, playing with another girl my age.

  Now, let’s dwell here again, but with a new context, a new problem: A young girl has gone missing at a local park. Her mother grieves. Her best friend feels responsible. Down the street, in another house, a family is in crisis.

  To say that the idea of a girl who goes missing is inspired by my sister is a true enough statement, accurate in a sense. But to say that the little girl is also me would be equally true, that I went missing on that day as well. Using images, ones taken from my own experience— the bike, the lost child, the hot summer, the amusement park—I have, in Precious, reordered them and given them a new context and meaning, woven together entire pages—entire lies—around what are a few true moments, those details long held in my memory. As a writer of fiction, I do this all in an effort to recover what is lost, to breathe life into something that is gone forever from view.

  questions and topics for discussion

  1. Precious is set in a small, blue-collar suburban town in the 1970s. Do you think this setting plays an important role in the story, or merely serves as a backdrop?

  2. How does Vicki Anderson’s disappearance mark “the beginning of fear”? How does it affect the course of the novel?

  3. Sissy Kisch’s beloved doll, Precious, figures strongly into her friendship with Vicki Anderson and the stories Sissy writes. Why do you think the novel is titled Precious?

  4. How do characters in Precious cope with or mismanage their loneliness? Or feel “on the periphery of things”? How do loneliness and freedom become intertwined for many of them?

  5. Consider Natalia: her childhood, her stories, her rituals, and the impact her absence, and eventual return, has on the Kisch family. How does she change? How does the family change? Does Natalia’s return do more harm than good? Is it all “lucky or unlucky”?

  6. Discuss the types of obligation in Precious: between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between sisters, neighbors, friends, lovers, and strangers. How is obligation enforced? Manipulated? How and why is this used as a means of control?

  7. The day she leaves, Natalia tells Eva: “Don’t give up your freedom. The day you give up your freedom, the day you lock yourself away is the day you disappear. In your own skin, you vanish”. What do you think she means by this? How does Natalia attempt to attain freedom? Eva? Frank? Peter? Is anyone in Precious free? Do you think this advice haunts Natalia?

  8. Examine the characterization of the women in Precious: Natalia, Eva, Ginny, Amy, Sissy, Vicki. What similarities do you find among them? What differences? Are they victims, or something else? Do you identify with them? Why or why not?

  9. How does Peter justify his relationship with Eva? How do their expectations differ? How does Eva’s expectation that “Love, a life away … Peter would help her forge a greater sense of the world” differ from the reality of the situation? Do you sympathize with Eva? With Amy? With Peter?

  10. Discuss the characters who disappear in Precious, even those who just feel invisible, or “ghostly.”

  11. “There is always a story. No one leaves forever.” How do stories and memories of those we’ve lost serve to “resurrect the dead”? Do you agree with Sissy that “There [is] always a way home again”. Why or why not?

  12. The final moments of the book mark a conversation between Sissy and a stranger she meets while traveling. Given the novel’s trajectory and the Kisches’s fates, how do you interpret this final interaction? Does it satisfy, or fail to? And how might that feeling work with the overall tone and theme of the novel?

  Read on for an excerpt from Sandra Novack’s

  Everyone but You

  MY FATHER’S MAHOGANY LEG

  My father’s mahogany leg arrives via priority mail. Here is the box, lying on the coffee table, and inside the box I find the leg bandaged in bubble wrap along with a note from my father written in shaky, eager scrawl: Dear Anna: Here is my leg. Do with my leg what you wish, My Darling.

  Of course it goes without saying that this leg is the most impractical thing I’ve ever received, more farfetched than the Publishers Clearing House letter lying next to it, more pointless than the Book of the Month Club and mailings that promise self-help through holistic medicine—Lose twenty pounds with verbena supplements and Alter your mood with St. John’s Wort.

  For starters, I have two legs alrea
dy. And they are beautiful, very presentable, very real legs—thin and muscular, milky and always clean-shaven—legs that look good in skirts and cowboy boots, which I always wear. My legs bustle me around the city, where I flaunt them at men who wait for public transportation, pudgy men and harrowed-looking men in wrinkled suits and balding men in sweatpants who have, once again, decided to walk, then finally decided to ride the bus the last few miles home. My legs hoof it ten blocks to the CD store where I work, peddling Top 20 Hits to angst-ridden, tech-savvy teens with absolutely no sense of the classics.

  My legs strut and stroll, prance and pirouette. They are actually really fucking wonderful legs. Over the years I’ve worked hard on them—gymnastics and swimming, painful dance and hovering on pointed toes only to stare out, blankly, into a room of other children’s doting fathers. In contrast, this wooden leg is idle, severed, blunted as a crutch. Like you, My Darling, it is simply an afterthought, an appendage, but hey, better late than never.

  That the leg was sent priority mail annoys me.

  What am I supposed to do with a wooden leg, a leg that my father decided to will to me after his death? Should I dance with it around my living room? Cast it into the fire? Chew on it for a while, gnaw at it like a bone?

  I think about calling Jimmy #3. In a rapt, seductive tone, I could say: Jimmy, you want a little extra wood tonight? Ha, ha. But Jimmy has no sense of humor, and I am never as funny as I think, so instead of calling him, I pop the bubble wrap around the leg. The cushion of air deflates between my fingertips. The popping sounds festive, like champagne bottles popping at a party that could be going on right now in my apartment if I had the gumption to throw a party, which I do not. I pretend that getting this leg is like getting a rare and beautiful gift, like getting the Hope diamond without its curse, and not like getting something sorrowful, like getting someone’s wooden leg, which is exactly what I’ve gotten.

  Via priority post.

  I hate to dwell on my father—God, I hate to dwell on anything—and yet here, in this moment, I have no choice. I unpack the leg from its defeated wrapper and run my hands over burnished mahogany that smells dusty with time and age. The leg has a fake foot, a shallow etching of toes. I stand the leg up on the coffee table; it wobbles but stands on its own. It is its own leg, festooned with straps meant for strapping over the nub of my father’s knee. It is heavy as years, hard as my father, and more durable in the end than a body or a heart.

  I have questions: Of all the things my father might have given, why did he leave me his leg? We were never close. He has not spoken to either me or my mother in years, and mostly only then in a few letters, letters in which he tries to explain his sense of shame—shame for not being there for us, shame for his inability to be the man my mother wanted. After my father died, who packaged the leg? A friend? A lover? Did this person think that I, too, am lumbering along, missing a vital part of myself, hence the decision to label this leg a “priority”? When this person packaged the leg, did he or she regard it, note how severe-looking it seemed, how maniacal? And did this stranger wonder who I was? This girl named Anna Lee, age twenty-seven, a girl in cowboy boots and skirts, a girl who never visited her father for well over twenty years? Could this stranger guess how many times I’ve wished my father dead, a wish that, now that he is actually dead, is a horrible thought to admit? If my father spoke of me, was he nostalgic? Bitter? If bitter, did his bitterness mask regret? Love?

  Leg, I say. What say you?

  The leg’s attitude is appallingly cavalier. Only a perfectly round hole in the leg gapes at me, like a great gorging mouth. The hole is cut mid-calf and reminds me of a birdhouse opening. I peer into it and look for something, say, a canary, but inside the leg there is only more leg, there is only the hollowness of the leg, the grain of wood lapsing into uneven circles.

  I didn’t expect to end up with my father’s leg. This is exactly what I say when I phone my mother.

  She seems surprised. In over twenty years, my mother has never received anything from my father, not even his ashes. She says, Something is better than nothing. She sighs in a manner that is too nonchalant, and then the moment reduces itself to a bewildered, stony silence. Tall, still slender, and always well-dressed, my mother was once the beauty queen of her hometown in Rhode Island. There is a photograph I have of my mother and father, taken on the night she received her crown. Before his accident, my father was a tall, strikingly handsome man with chiseled cheeks, a straight nose, and sleek hair. In the photo, my mother wears a tiara and an affecting smile. She holds roses in her hands, and her head is thrown back; her pinned hair rests in ringlet curls that hug her neck. My father stands behind her, grinning, his arms looped around her small waist. On the back of the photograph my mother penned the following thought: “We were in love. Together, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t accomplish.”

  Her soul, to this day, is shot with narcissism.

  Growing up, I can recall many of my mother’s subsequent lovers, those men who paraded in and out of our home. There were doctors and lawyers always on call, poets and painters who scraped by on pennies, businessmen who wooed her with shopping trips in the city. Over the years, my mother has received many proposals. She tells me sometimes, in a vague way, that she would have only married my father, that it was a long-ago war that separated them. They had only dated a few months before he went overseas—called by duty—and, by then, my mother was pregnant with me.

  You always say you hate him, I remind her now. You hated him for leaving us.

  I say a lot of things that are entirely different from how I feel. I hate what happened to him, she tells me. He was so different when he came home, and he was missing his leg, Anna. I never got over seeing him like that.

  Does it have to be about you? I ask. There is a leg on my coffee table, Mother. I remind her: What we are talking about here isn’t so much a man, as a leg.

  AFTER WORK the next day, Jimmy #3 comes over to my apartment. It is a lovely apartment, decorated with an eye toward the minimal, a place with large, domed windows, walls the color of burnished brass, and and vaulted ceilings. When I walk, my cowboy boots clap against the wooden floor. The sound fractures and sends out echoes into the empty space, and Jimmy #3 stares at my legs. I go to the kitchen and fetch him crackers and brie, but he takes my offerings and says, Can’t you give the boots a rest? Who do you think you are, John Wayne? Sit a spell, will you? Let’s talk.

  Listen, Pilgrim, I say. These boots are made for walking.

  Jimmy #3 doesn’t laugh, of course. He eats a cracker instead. Then he takes off his lab jacket and sits down on the couch. He works at the pharmacy on Randolph, pushing pills to the public for exorbitant fees. It’s when I tell him this—that he is part of a grand system designed to screw the American people, that everyone knows insurance companies and doctors are swift bed partners and pharmacists are their dope pushers—that he finally laughs and takes me on the couch, even though, to my mind, I’ve said nothing funny. Despite this, I relent. My paisley skirt bunches around my waist. Off comes one cowboy boot, then the other. My legs wrap around him, my calloused feet dig into his back.

  I like sex. Who doesn’t? Still there is sometimes the pulse of something more, that mysterious undercurrent of affection that rises up between our bodies, and then, finally, there is that moment when Jimmy’s face is so close to mine that I can feel his warm, salty breath on my skin. He stares intently. Then, finished, he rests his forehead on my shoulder.

  Anna, he begins.

  Yee-ha, I say, interrupting. I kiss him quickly, pull away, and then watch as, resigned, he sweeps a tuft of hair from his eyes, gets up, and goes to the bathroom—the click of the door, the subsequent quiet, a relief.

  I lie on my belly, search under the couch, drag the leg out by its false toes and pick off lint that has attached to it. I close one eye and look the leg right in the canary hole, as I did when I was five, on that occasion when my mother first took me to the building where my father l
ived, and I breathed the stale air of his apartment and the acrid stench of scotch that assaulted me as I neared my father. He sat in a tattered chair, his hair disheveled, three-day stubble on his face. He sized up my legs and toes and frowned. Then he bent down and rolled up his pant leg, and it was then that I saw the wooden leg. When I ran from him and hid behind my mother, burying my head in her wool coat, my father coaxed me to him, saying, Come look in my leg, Anna. Come see the canary that hides there.

  I peeked in the hole but saw nothing. So I peeked again. My father explained that the canary had flown away, that the canary was a magical bird, one that disappeared just as you tried to find it. Imagine, he said. Weird, I told him, though I wanted to believe this story. I wanted to be dazzled by this man who also frightened me, this man who was my father. On the second visit with my father, my mother dragged me down the narrow, oniony-smelling corridor that led to his apartment. Thick with scotch and painkillers again, thick, as my mother said, with shame, my father threw a bottle at the door and yelled at us to leave. My mother’s hands trembled as she hauled me out of the building. She walked briskly, dragging me behind her, back out into the winter day, where we stepped out into the slushy, dirty snow and dodged traffic that crawled by us, cars beeping. Never again, she said. Never.