Unravelled

by Anna Scanlon

  "What should we put on it?" Eva mused as the three of us sat down on the kitchen table, my hands smoothing down the red and white checkered tablecloth. The baked cakes sat in between the three of us, their haphazardly frosted white and brown sides resembling more a third grade science fair project than a confectionary delight.

  "How about just 'Welcome Home'?" I suggested, tracing small circles with my fingers.

  "Or we could put 'Boldog születésnapot' and then 'Happy birthday' underneath." Mother nodded, standing up to begin mixing the frosting we would use for decoration.

  "What in the-" Eva started, her mouth slack at the long string of Hungarian words.

  "It means Happy Birthday in Hungarian," I told her, feeling proud that I could at least recall that.

  Mother had spoken Hungarian to me as a small child, but had given up by the time I reached first grade. It all stopped with the Peeing Incident. As I sat in class on the second week of first grade, I felt a familiar tugging at my bladder. I raised my hand, but in the midst of the new school and new surroundings, my words had gotten stuck in my throat and I spit out my request in Hungarian. Not understanding, my teacher simply gave me a confused expression and moved on with her lesson, and I ended up with a sopping wet dress. My father shook his head and told my mother I couldn't afford to get mixed up like that anymore, and with that, my Hungarian lessons were over.

  "Should we draw anything on it?" Eva asked, watching my mother flutter around the kitchen like a trapped butterfly. "Like maybe a Magen David?"

  I put my finger to my chin and thought about it for a moment, painting the identifying Star of David on her cake.

  "That might be a nice idea," I nodded, standing up to grab the frosting bag so I could begin the decorations. "Maybe with some flowers on the sides or something?"

  Eva nodded enthusiastically, my mother a whirl of excitement as she funneled the red decorating frosting into the bag so that we could squeeze it onto the cake.

  "Is Dad coming back?" I asked Mother, licking a piece of stray frosting from my index finger. Eva had already begun decorating the vanilla cake, hunched over the way the French man who owned the bakery four blocks away did, as if she were painting a masterpiece instead of confectionary flowers and leaves.

  Mother shifted from one leg to the other, watching Eva intently before drawing her red lips together and then breathing out a sigh.

  "Yes," she nodded. "In a couple of months."

  "He's leaving us here alone for a couple of months? With Aliz?"

  Mother shrugged, as if the disappearance of her husband hardly affected her anymore. It was like they were standing on either side of the Grand Canyon, speaking to each other only occasionally from across the gorge.

  I suppose my parents were in love at one point in their lives. At least they were enough for Mother to drop everything in Hungary and come live with him over 6,000 miles away. Old pictures of them proved a testament to the fact that there had been something between them, their eyes locked on each other in the sepia moments stolen in time. But as I grew, the shine of their love had begun to grow dull. Father took me to the theater, baseball games, the movies and dance lessons, anything to show me that their rift hadn't been my fault. As the war grumbled on, growing closer to home, forcing San Francisco families to practice blackouts and brown outs in case the Japanese or Germans flew by, my father seemed to be on a totally different planet. He was sent to a training camp just a few weeks before the war ended, having been one of the last men remaining in the neighborhood.

  He hadn't seen action, but he remained aloof and quiet, just like the boys in our neighborhood who had been in the frontline trenches. He spent days shut up in his office, furiously typing away at a novel or a book of poetry. Dad had worked at an ad agency before the war and was offered his job again, this time requiring him to take frequent trips to Los Angeles to monitor their Southern California offices. At first he would go for a few days at a time. Then, he began going for weeks. Once, he left for six months. He called and wrote me religiously during his time down there, phoning our home only to talk to me. When Mother picked up, there would be a mysterious click at the other end of the line and the voice of the operator telling us we had lost our caller. They communicated by writing letters and very infrequent phone conversations, Father sending us a Western Union with money in it twice a month or depositing it in a letter.

  Mother sucked in her lips and began painting the vanilla cake, turning its blank canvas into a field of red flowers.

  "Do you think she'll like it?" Eva asked, sucking in her lips and looking over her creation, which boasted a large Star of David with the word "Welcome" written underneath it, a little haphazardly. The "m" had blended with the "o", making it a little difficult to read.

  "She'll love it," Mother answered with confidence, as if she knew anything about the child. Mother claimed she had talked to Aliz once on the phone, her high-pitched voice sounding innocent and far away through the telephone wires.

  Moments later, the phone rang, making Eva jump so that she accidentally smudged the leaf she was putting underneath one of the flowers.

  "I've got it," Mother nodded, placing her bag of frosting on the table and moving gracefully over to the telephone. She picked it up with a click, her voice intermittently flowing into the kitchen.

  Eva and I took the opportunity to begin giggling right away, discussing whether or not we thought our classmate Mary Jenkins had been sent away to her aunt's house in Idaho because she had gotten pregnant. She had been looking suspiciously plump in the past few days, her cheeks rounded out just a little bit, not to mention the frequent trips to the bathroom during class. And, we concluded, as if it were concrete proof, all of the etchings under the desks that read, "MJ is a whore," probably sealed the deal.

  As Mother tiptoed back in to the kitchen, she turned her dark brown eyes to mine, locking them on me. She stood for a few moments before saying anything, clearing her throat and wiping her hands off on her off-white apron.

  "That was your teacher, Mrs. Booth," Mother nodded, clearing her throat again, something she habitually did when she was uncertain. She shuffled her slippered feet on the floor and moved a hand through her up-do. "She says she has your recommendation? Recommendation for what?"

  I looked at Eva who opened her mouth to say something, then quickly closed it. For so long this had been my sweet secret, but I eventually shared it with Eva and Mrs. Reilly quietly and coyly. I chewed on the bottom of my lip and scratched the corner of my mouth.

  "Nothing," I shrugged. "Just, like, this, um, class I want to take next year. It's an advanced English class."

  "Oh," Mother nodded approvingly. "Good for you."

  It was a lie. A bald-faced lie. And I didn't even know why I was so adamant about covering it up, either. My parents had never told me I couldn't go to college, but I knew through their words and actions as I grew up that they hadn't really expected me to go either. Father was always talking about how tight money was, and it would be more so after paying for Aliz's trip. Mother was always going on about how I'd make a good wife someday and wondering why I didn't date more. But the truth was, I wanted to go to college. And not just college, I wanted to go to college and become a lawyer, defending those who were unable to afford their own attorneys. I don't know when this fascination struck me, perhaps it began when Eva's cousin was falsely accused of robbing the YWCA. The culprit had been a tall, Asian man, nothing like Eva's short and stocky cousin, with a mass of curly hair crowning the top of his head. He had served time anyway, for a crime he didn't commit, all because Eva's family couldn't afford to hire a good defense attorney.

  Ever since then, I became obsessed with the idea of being a lawyer, wearing a beautiful tailored suit as I stood in front of the court, pleading my client's case. I would serve justice, bringing a little bit of light into the world. And, I would be living on my own, making my own money, without depending on a man to take care of me. It's not that I didn't have a desire to get
married and have children, I did, I just wanted to taste life on my own terms for a bit before giving myself over to a family. Growing up, I would often watch my mother as she went about her daily chores. She fed our dog, Gable (named for Clark Gable, my mother's favorite actor), washed the clothes, scrubbed the floors, cooked three meals a day, went to the Piggly Wiggly and then changed the routine by giving me or Gable a bath. It seemed like a prison, like a never-ending cycle of boredom. How could a woman feel fulfilled if she didn't do anything but work at home looking after her family?

  I had secretly been gathering up applications for pre-law programs in the area. I had Bobby Johnson get me one from Berkeley on his visit there with his father, and Eva and I had gotten one from San Francisco State while pretending to run errands. It wasn't so much that I was afraid my parents would disapprove, they wouldn't. Like any Jewish family, they valued intelligence and hard work. But the final decision might come down to money, or lack-there-of, or the need to go to work to pitch in with the expenses in the house. I wanted to prolong the "No," the final word, until I could come up with a plan. I would write everything down, show them exactly how much it would cost every year, get a scholarship and a living stipend and type it all up on my father's typewriter. They would be so impressed by my thriftiness and adultness that they would have no other choice but to let me go.

  Eva exchanged a knowing smile with me as she finished decorating the cake. She was thinking of going to college, too, but for something a little less ambitious. Eva wasn't looking to conquer the world, the way I was. Instead, she wanted to earn an Associate's degree or something similar. When she spent the night at our house on weekends, we would sit up until the wee hours of the morning, playing Frank Sinatra records at the lowest volume we could hear, giggling and laughing about the day when we would be roommates in college.

  "All done," Mother smiled, looking at the cake she had decorated. She smiled crookedly as she cocked her head to the right and then the left before letting out a whistle of a laugh. "It looks terrible, doesn't it?"

  She had attempted to write "Welcome Home" in Hungarian, but the words had blurred together to make one long red clump. The letters were indistinguishable from one another, appearing as if they had been haphazardly placed on the cake instead of put on with a steady and diligent hand.

  "Art's not your strong point," I smiled, putting my tongue to my teeth. "She'll love it anyway, I'm sure."

  And with that, the three of us left the cakes to sit, pulling out a game of Parcheesi to pass the gray, lifeless afternoon.

  12 CHAPTER twelve

  ✪

  Mother ran around the house in a daze the last few hours before Aliz's train was scheduled to arrive. She counted and recounted the sheets and towels, folding and refolding them periodically. She fluffed up the pillows on her new bed again and again until they were so plump that the stuffing threatened to burst at the seams. She straightened the colorful Degas ballet paintings she had nailed to Aliz's wall, making sure they stood in line like wooden soldiers. She wanted everything to be perfect, flawless. Mother didn't say so, but I knew this was the moment she had been waiting for, for years.

  An hour before Aliz was set to arrive, Mother pulled on her sweater and sunglasses, stuffing her hands in her gloves.

  "We want to get there early," she nodded. "In case her train is a little early. I don't want her waiting at the station, scared to death."

  She snapped her black and gold purse shut, sliding her feet into her slightly worn black heels.

  Uncommon of women in our neighborhood, Mother drove. Father had taught her how to do so a few years ago as I sat on the front porch with Gable, watching my mother steer the car up and down the street with all the grace of a child at a fair, making his way through a sea of bumper cars. I don't quite know if she drove because of her own insistence, or because my father had secretly been planning his getaway and wanted to leave her self-sufficient. Either way, he had left mother his old cream-colored Studebaker while he bought a brand new, sleek black Ford.

  The new Ford had most definitely been a source of contention between the two, Mother telling him she didn't think now was the time to buy a new car when they could barely afford the one they had. They argued in hushed tones, with the door to their room sealed, thinking I couldn't hear them over my Perry Como records. Occasionally their voices would rise just high enough, just above the threshold, so that I could hear every word they uttered.

  Even though she could drive, Mother was by no means good at it. She clutched the wheel as if it would protect her from unseen danger and shifted nervously in her seat. She kept the Studebaker at a good ten miles per hour under the regular flow of traffic, prompting even old men who could barely see over their steering wheels to honk at her and then ultimately pass in front of her. Her mind seemed to always be elsewhere, always in Hungary, even when she was driving. She narrowly missed one of the neighborhood children running out in the street to catch a baseball a few months ago, prompting his mother to run out into the street, red face and give my mother a talking-to. Mother simply nodded every few words to make it seem like she was listening, but kept her eyes looking toward the sky, away from the angry words.

  We arrived at the train station almost a full hour before Aliz was set to arrive and wordlessly made ourselves comfortable on the hard waiting benches. They reminded me of pews in a church, the kind I had seen when I had gone to volunteer for a church bazaar a few years ago to help needy children in Europe and Asia. My mother folded and unfolded her hands, crossed and uncrossed her legs, jiggling the balls of her feet on the linoleum floor and clearing her throat. She ultimately took off her gloves, revealing the modest wedding band my father had bought her all of those years ago, back when they were in love, back when they were different people.

  I busied myself at the newsstand, flipping through colorful pages announcing the new movies that would come out in the next few months. Glamorous women in long dresses and simple up-dos and men in dapper tuxedos and slick hair smiled back at me with impeccably white teeth. It was as if in their world, the war had never happened. Auschwitz had never happened. Children were never left abandoned by their governments. People were never burned. Atom bombs never fell. Mothers didn't spend their entire lives in one country, with their heads in another.

  As I mentally took note of the movies Eva and I would see with our baby-sitting money during the rest of Christmas break, I heard the sharp whistle of a train announcing its presence. With steam, the train screeched to a halt, clouding the platform next to it so that the well-suited men and women waiting coughed ever so slightly.

  "San Francisco! Station stop, San Francisco!" a shrill voice came from the front of the train, announcing the arrival to the passengers and those waiting to board alike. The train, crowded with businessmen, honeymooners, families and even a few servicemen buzzed with life as those getting off tried to push their way onto the platform, while those trying to board were desperately searching for their train car.

  Mother immediately began looking around, her senses on high alert as she scanned the busy crowd for Aliz. We had received a picture of her just a few months ago, one that had been taken to post on survivor boards in Displaced Persons camps, in case her parents or other relatives recognized her and wanted to know her whereabouts. In the picture, she sat on a dark toned block, her back slightly slumped, her hair cut to her shoulders. Her big eyes drooped,, her mouth curled slightly up as though she had decided to smile at the very last moment before the photographer captured her.

  Herds of passengers made their way into the station, stopping to buy chewing gum, check their luggage, hug those waiting for them or simply sitting for a moment at the diner while they chewed on a sandwich.

  And then she appeared. She turned the corner, around a Grecian inspired column, a gloved hand held tightly in the hand of a woman in her late 20s or early 30s. The woman looked positively exhausted, large bags under her eyes, her face puffy as though she had just been awakene
d moments ago in order to make her way off the train with Aliz.

  Aliz had started her long journey from Katowice almost a month earlier. Escorted by several different chaperones, she had taken the train from Poland to Germany, where other children were picked up. Then, together, they had gone to London. What would have been a few days trip before the war had turned into an Odysseus-like journey. A year and a half after the war's end, train tracks were still in ruins from enemy bombs, forcing passengers to ride only as far as the tracks would go until they switched trains, going sometimes hundreds of miles out of their way.

  From England, Aliz had met another chaperone who escorted her and several other children on a ship bound for New York City. They slept together in a crowded third class cabin; barely enough room to stand up, let alone room to put all of their things.

  After landing in New York, where a few children were dropped off with new guardians, Aliz spent several nights. She was evaluated by a group established for Jews who had come from war-torn Europe, and again it was recommended through the phone wires that she be put in an institution, or at least receive intensive therapy.

  She then boarded a crowded stream train bound for Chicago, before making her way west to San Francisco, each stop providing her with a different escort and chaperone who took copious notes about her behavior, diligently noting any changes or anything unusual. The trip had been, simply put, extremely long and totally exhausting. Even just thinking about it made me want to curl up and sleep for a week. I couldn't imagine how Aliz must have felt, starting a journey at her home in Szeged two years ago, only to find herself in a totally foreign country with relatives she had never met.