“It’s just for a while,” Nathan had promised Bella, which had touched her. It was the sort of promise a man made to his bride, not his mother, and she had not expected to hear such a promise out of the mouth of a man again. She had boarded at Mrs. Pozniak’s during the war, and while she had hoped she might have a home of her own again one day, or at least be invited into one of her children’s homes when and if her sons returned alive to Montreal from the war or her daughter, Nina, returned from Palestine, where she was teaching school, she had tried very hard not to expect it.
“Did you have a good day?” Bella knew the question was one better asked by his wife, but Lily never asked, didn’t seem to care.
“Not bad.” He opened the icebox to take out a beer, saw the supper Lily had prepared. Then he saw the hamburgers sitting on the counter. Which would it be? he wondered. Who would be the victor of this particular skirmish? “Is Sol coming home for supper?”
“He didn’t say,” Bella answered.
“He has a date,” Lily said.
Bella looked at Lily.
“He told me last night,” Lily said. “I was up when he came in.”
So, Sol she talks to, Bella thought.
“You couldn’t sleep again?” Nathan asked. He knew about Lily’s insomnia but usually slept through her comings and goings in the night.
Lily shrugged. “Not too well.”
“It’s so hot,” Nathan said.
“You’re late getting home today,” Bella said. This too seemed to her an observation that should have been offered by his wife. Did Lily even notice the length of Nathan’s workday? Bella wondered.
“I had a meeting.”
“A good meeting?”
“Good enough,” Nathan said. He winked at Lily as she set the table.
Lily smiled, lowering her eyes. She had noticed he was late but hadn’t commented. A man doesn’t want his comings and goings commented on by a woman, her mother had taught her. She put the hamburgers in the frying pan, looking away as she did so, breathing through her mouth to avoid the smell of dead flesh. It permeated the room, that fresh-kill smell with just the faintest underpinning of rot. She glanced at Nathan and Bella. Was it possible they didn’t notice it?
“A business is always slow at the beginning,” Bella was saying. “It takes time to build a base of customers, to find suppliers who aren’t out to cheat you.”
Nathan’s business was building fast, faster than anything he had imagined possible when he’d told Eisenberg that he wouldn’t be returning to his old job once he was discharged from the air force. It was hard work, yes, but steady. More and more metals were being released from war production every day. Steel, iron, aluminum—everything that had been in such short supply. And more and more customers were lining up to buy them. It wouldn’t be long before he would need his own truck for deliveries, rather than borrowing and renting as he’d been doing until now. And soon he would also need an office of his own. A rented corner with a desk and telephone wouldn’t do for much longer.
“Business isn’t slow, Ma.”
Bella and Lily both looked up at the confident tone of his voice.
“Business isn’t slow at all.”
“Don’t get cocky,” Bella warned him. His father had been cocky once, she remembered. It was an attractive quality in a man, but dangerous. No man was stronger than life, Bella thought.
CHAPTER 4
It was a full year and a half before the next package from my mother arrived. October 17, 1954. The date is recorded in the scrapbook about her that I started soon after the arrival of the first package. I was in grade two by then, so I wasn’t home for the mail delivery; Elka gave it to me when I was having my after-school snack. Jeffrey (two and a half then) and Mitch (eight months old that October) were upstairs having their nap, so it was just me and Elka in the kitchen. Girls’ time, Elka called that brief period of time between my arriving home from school and the boys waking up from their naps.
This time the package was wrapped in plain brown paper, which wasn’t as nice as the blue, but I would still save it, I thought, and put it into the scrapbook. The scrapbook didn’t have anything in it so far except the blue dotted paper, the Canada goose stamp that Elka had steamed off the paper for me, and the index card that told me, in my mother’s own writing, where she had gotten the piece of pink quartz that now sat on top of my desk in my bedroom.
The stamps on this most recent mailing were all of Queen Elizabeth, which presented a dilemma. They should more properly go into the scrapbook I had made about the Queen’s coronation, a scrapbook I still added to all the time because I had expanded its scope to include ongoing stories and photos of the Queen’s family, her corgis and the trips she took with her husband, Prince Philip. But the Queen’s scrapbook was already full to bursting and my mother’s was all but empty, so I decided I would put the stamps in my mother’s. I would cut them from the corner rather than steam them, because I needed help to steam and Elka was busier since my cousin Mitch was born, and not always as interested in helping me with my projects.
Elka was cooking something at the stove while I unwrapped the package, but I knew she was watching me as she stirred whatever she was stirring. I ran my finger over my name. It was written in block letters, so it was easy for me to read. Then I unwrapped the paper, careful not to rip it. It was another little box, though not from Birks, and when I opened it there was the same layer of cotton. Beneath it, another rock.
“What is it, honey?”
I lifted it from the cotton, carefully, as if I could harm it with rough handling. But I couldn’t harm it; it was solid. A smooth, flat grey stone shot through with veins of other kinds of rock. It was beautiful, I thought, and this time I wasn’t disappointed.
“Is there a card?”
I pulled out an index card and started to read it, but Elka had to help me. “Rainy Lake, Ontario, 14:00, October 9th, 1954, overcast, 56 degrees F, light breeze,” we read together.
“Well …” Elka said.
I looked at her. She was doing that little thing with her mouth.
“Your mother likes rocks, I would say.”
In retrospect I can see that that was the response of a woman at a temporary loss for words, but at the time it seemed like a perfectly reasonable observation to make. And it gave me an excellent idea for the scrapbook. I would have a page where I would list all my mother’s likes. “And lakes,” I added. “She likes lakes.”
“Yes, that’s true. The last one was also from a lake, wasn’t it.”
“Gem Lake,” I said.
“Right.”
“Where is Gem Lake, Manitoba?”
“Far away.”
“And Rainy Lake?”
“Also far away.”
I liked the name Rainy Lake. It would smell nice there, I thought. We had been to a lake the previous summer, Trout Lake up in the Laurentians. I’d learned to swim there but had felt a little afraid every time I went into the water after Sol told me to be careful not to let the trout nibble at my feet. Nothing would nibble at my feet at Rainy Lake, I thought. I would float on my back and the rain would fall softly on my face.
“How far away?”
“She’s not there, sweetie. That’s just where she was that day.”
“Is it closer or farther from here than Gem Lake?”
She thought about that awhile before answering. “Closer,” she said.
SHE DIDN’T COME ANY CLOSER, though. Or if she did, she didn’t let me know, because another whole year passed without anything from her.
And then one Sunday evening my father told me to go put on a dress because we were going out to eat. We usually only went out to eat for special occasions, but it wasn’t unheard of for Elka to announce that she didn’t feel like cooking on a Sunday night, or for Sol to announce that he was taking us out on the town. Then we’d all pile into Sol’s car or my father’s and we’d drive either to Ruby Foo’s on Decarie, which wasn’t kosher, so we could only
eat the fish or vegetable dishes there, or farther, all the way across town to my father’s and Sol’s old neighbourhood to go to Green’s, which was kosher, so we could eat anything and everything that was on the menu, though I always ate the same thing, chicken fricassee, and always made Jeffrey cry by telling him that the chicken’s necks in the dish were the fingers of little boys who had snooped in their older cousin’s things.
“Stop that,” my father reprimanded me. We had gone to Green’s that night and, like always, I told Jeffrey that he was eating a little boy’s fingers.
“She’s just fooling with you,” Sol told Jeffrey, but Jeffrey was still snivelling.
My grandmother Bella and Ida Pearl hadn’t joined us that night, which was unusual, because we always stopped to pick them up when we went out to eat. My aunt Nina never joined us because she was very busy.
I wiggled my fingers at Jeffrey in a creepy crawler sort of way, which set him wailing again, but no one saw me do it, so no one knew what had set him off. Sol told him sharply that that was enough now, which made him cry harder.
“Really, Sol. Do you think that’s a help?” Elka asked, but she was busy with Mitch, who was two then and also making a racket. She shoved a large piece of a dinner roll into Mitchell’s mouth just as he opened wide for a good howl and pulled Jeffrey over onto her lap.
While Mitchell was busy trying to figure out how to chew the big wad of bread in his mouth, and Jeffrey was leaning into her chest sucking his thumb, Elka looked at me and asked how I would like to have my own room with flowered wallpaper. The last time Elka had talked to me in such a babyish way had been two and a half years earlier when she asked me how I would like a beautiful little baby girl cousin, a few months after which Mitchell had been born.
“I already have my own room.”
“I mean at our house.”
There were only two bedrooms in their part of our duplex, so I had to share a room with Jeff and Mitch when I slept over.
“Sol and Elka have bought a new house,” my father told me. It was on Alpine Avenue in Côte-St-Luc, not very far from where we lived now, but newer, better. I was supposed to be happy, I knew. That’s why we had gone out for dinner, because it was a special occasion, and the new house was what was special.
“And we’ll stay on Cumberland?” I asked him. I didn’t want Sol and Elka to move away, but I could stand it, I thought, as long as we stayed where we were. I knew all the kids on the street. My school, Talmud Torah, was just a few blocks away on Chester. There was a willow tree in the back that Sol had planted when we moved in, and we had a swing set and a jungle gym. But most of all, paramount to any other thing: my mother knew how to find me there.
“No. We’re moving too,” my father said. Into an apartment on Côte-St-Luc Road a few blocks away from Sol and Elka.
“A really nice apartment,” Elka said. “Way up on the tenth floor with an elevator to ride up and down.”
“What about my jungle gym?”
“We’ll take that with us,” Elka said. “And the swing set. It will all be set up in our yard, which is much bigger than the yard we have now. And you’ll come over every day. Just like you do now.”
I thought about that for a while.
“You’ll like it, you’ll see,” Elka said.
I thought about it some more, stabbed one of the giblets in my chicken fricassee with my fork and put it in my mouth. “I’m not going,” I said.
I saw the adults exchange glances.
“I know it’s not the same as living in the same house all together,” Elka said. “But it’s really not far. You’ll see. And you’ll still come to our house every day straight from school, like I said. And you’ll still eat supper with us. And Carrie lives right down the street.”
Carrie was my best friend. We saw each other every day at school and had never had any problem going over to each other’s houses after school while I lived on Cumberland, where my mother could find me.
“I’m not going,” I said again. I stabbed something else in my stew, some indefinable part of a chicken. “I don’t want to live in a stupid apartment, with a stupid elevator, with stupid flowered wallpaper.” The flowered wallpaper was actually going to be in my room at Elka and Sol’s, not at my father’s, but that was an irrelevant detail at that point. “I’m not going!” I shouted.
“Keep your voice down,” my father said.
I saw Elka rest her hand on her belly, where the new baby had probably just turned or given her a kick. The stupid new baby, who would probably be another boy and was probably the whole reason we had to move. “I’m not going.”
“You are going and you’re to calm down right this minute.”
That was my father, and I noticed Elka laid her hand on his for a minute as if he were the one who needed calming down.
“I’m not going. I’m not going!” I shouted, my voice getting louder and more hysterical with each repetition. “I’m not going, I’m not going, I’m not going!” I cried hysterically as my father lifted me from my chair and carried me out of the restaurant.
THE MOVE TOOK PLACE over a weekend in the middle of March. It was decided that Bella and Ida Pearl would take me, Jeffrey and Mitchell for that weekend. To make things easier. Ida Pearl and Bella lived in adjoining apartments in the building on Decarie Boulevard that Ida Pearl had bought just after the war. Her jewellery store was on the ground floor, along with May Flowers, and she rented out the two storeys of apartments above. Until Elka got married Ida Pearl lived in a duplex in N.D.G., like we did, but not in such a nice one as ours—older, smaller. Once Elka and Sol got married, though, Ida Pearl moved into one of the apartments in the building she owned, and Bella moved into the one next door.
I spent a lot of time at my grandmother Bella’s, but not at Ida Pearl’s, because Ida Pearl worked all day at her store and she didn’t really like me. I don’t mean in the more general sense of her not really liking children. Bella didn’t really like children either, but in her case that general distaste broke down when a specific child that she loved was right in front of her. Me, for example. Bella regularly overcame her distaste for noisy, snivelling children to grab me in a big hug, or read a book to me, or tell me stories about being a little girl in Russia and getting buried in a snowdrift or some other such disaster. Ida’s distaste for me was something different, more particular. I sensed it, though she was never actually unkind to me in any way. It was her coldness, I think, the lack of pleasure she derived from seeing me. “You’re too sensitive,” Elka told me, tousling my hair. Which was different from saying there was no truth in what I was sensing.
I assumed, of course, that if Bella and Ida were taking care of us for the weekend, I would be sleeping at Bella’s, but that was not the plan. It was Jeffrey and Mitchell who were going to Bella’s. I would be going to Ida Pearl’s.
“Ida Pearl’s?” I asked when I heard the terrible news. It made no sense. But I couldn’t say outright to Elka that her mother hated me, so I put it another way. “She’s not even my grandmother.”
“She’s as good as one,” Elka responded. Because she was Elka’s mother and Elka was as good as a mother to me. That’s what Elka meant.
“But she doesn’t really like me.” It had to be said. I’d been pushed to the wall.
“Don’t be a goose,” Elka said. “This is a perfect chance for you two to get to know each other better.”
Elka, though, obviously had her own concerns about the bonding weekend ahead. As she got me ready she scrubbed my face so hard that my skin hurt, and she pulled my hair so tightly into pigtails that she caught half my scalp in the grip of the elastic bands, and all the while she kept reminding me that her mother didn’t like a lot of noise and fuss and that I was to eat whatever was put before me and to remember to say thank you. But whatever nervousness Elka felt couldn’t match my own as she deposited me at Ida’s door, flowered suitcase in hand.
Ida greeted me with a brisk hug and ushered me into the den, where she had m
ade up the couch to serve as my bed. I placed my suitcase on top of the blanket, then worried it was the wrong place—the bed was so tidily made up, the blanket pulled flat as a skating rink—so I removed it to the floor. Then I worried that might also be wrong, so I cast about for the place that might be right, and while my mind was occupied with that I peed my pants. I had not peed my pants for years by that time, not even in sleep—I was eight years old, almost nine—and my mortification as I felt the spreading warmth was compounded by fears more specific than the heavy but vague sense of dread that I had felt about the weekend until then. I worried that Ida would yell at me, that Elka had not packed spare clothes and I would have to spend the rest of the weekend bare-bottomed or in my pyjamas. But Ida wordlessly extended her hand and led me to the bathroom, where she stripped off my pants and underwear and lifted me into the sink as if I were as light and small as a three-year-old. And when I was clean and dry and had a towel wrapped around my bottom half, we returned to the den to decide together what would be the best outfit for our next activity: tea in her living room, a room that I had never been invited into before, the den and kitchen having been designated as the only domain appropriate for a child.
When Ida opened my suitcase—whose proper place turned out to be the ottoman beside the couch—I was relieved to see that Elka had packed several changes of clothes, including my favourite yellow turtleneck that went with my favourite black stretchy pants with the stirrups that went under the arches of my feet, and my favourite skirt: a green plaid kilt that was held together with a gold pin. The mere sight of these familiar things lifted my spirits, and Ida must have sensed that, because she patted my hand as I patted my yellow turtleneck and said, “Sometimes things can feel like friends.”
A few minutes later, dressed in my green kilt and yellow turtleneck, I made my debut in Ida’s living room. It was a formal room, decorated in shades of blue, with scallop-edged blinds behind layers of drapery, and lace-scalloped lampshades and a gilt-framed mirror hanging over the powder blue sofa that Elka referred to as the Louis Quinze sofa and that didn’t look like anything I should be sitting on but was the only object in the line of Ida’s pointing hand, so I sat there as she had indicated I should, hands folded on my kilt, and waited for her to bring in the tea. She brought it in on a large silver tray that was crowded with pots of various sizes, placed it on the coffee table in front of the sofa and poured out two cups. She poured the tea from the largest of the teapots, placed a slice of lemon in one cup and poured in some amber fluid from a smaller pot, then stirred a spoonful of raspberry jam into the other cup and handed it to me as if it hadn’t crossed her mind that I might spill the scarlet-tinged liquid onto her powder blue sofa. As if I were no longer the same girl who had peed her pants ten minutes earlier.
The Imposter Bride Page 5