He smiled. “I meant how many brothers and sisters.”
“Oh. None. My mother left when I was a baby.” I looked to see his response to the fact that my existence had been insufficient to bind my mother to me, that I had failed utterly and completely at the first task of personhood, which is to make your mother love you enough to stick around to care for you. “She wasn’t entirely normal,” I said before he could state the obvious.
“What’s normal?” he asked, the way people do when they come from normal and think it’s boring and overrated.
“Loving your own baby, for starters.”
“Why do you assume she didn’t love you?” His tone was so purely curious that I answered without the usual self-consciousness I felt when I talked about my mother, without my usual alertness to the possible responses of others.
“The evidence,” I said.
“The evidence,” he repeated. “And is there some … evidence that you haven’t mentioned?”
“You mean apart from walking out when I was three months old and never coming back? No. Not really. A few rocks over the years.”
“Rocks?” Now he looked quizzical, so I found myself describing the rocks she’d sent me. He listened, nodding, no longer smiling but not grim or pained either. When I was finished he was quiet for a minute before responding.
“It’s like the stones people leave when they go to visit a grave,” he said.
“But I’m not dead,” I pointed out.
“It was just the first thing it made me think of.”
“She was from Europe,” I told him. “She lost her whole family in the war.”
He nodded. “So you don’t have any family?”
“I have my father’s side.”
He nodded again.
“Are your parents from here?” I asked him.
“My mother is. My father’s from Poland, but he came when he was young. Before the war.”
Neither of us said anything for a while as we watched another student put a quarter into the machine that had just dispensed our coffee, then shake the machine and finally kick it as it failed to deliver the wretched liquid we had just ingested.
“He should be thanking that machine,” I said.
Reuben smiled. “Did you ever think about trying to find her?” he asked.
“I’ve thought about it.”
Reuben nodded, but didn’t push for more.
“I used to get teased in school about her being off her rocker,” I said. “Because of the rocks … Off her rocker.”
“I get it.”
“Which made me think I must be off my rocker too.”
“Why?”
I remembered how I would hold each rock when it came and how an image of her would come to me. And how at night sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would take out the rocks and pick each one up and imagine her holding the same rock in her hand. Images and sensations rose in me then and I felt comforted, calmed somehow just to think that my mother had held the same rock and had shared the same sensations. I told Reuben about that. “It’s like I could feel her presence through each rock that she sent me. It’s almost like she was talking to me in her own language that no one else in the world could understand, but she knew I’d understand.”
Reuben nodded as if he also understood, and I didn’t go into my usual routine about how strange I knew it all was, how bizarre.
A silence opened up between us then. I say opened, because that’s how it felt: spacious somehow, comfortable, like the cool, dark air pockets I used to create and inhabit during the summers of my childhood and early teens by capsizing a canoe in exactly the right way and swimming up from under the surface of the water into the domed quiet space. A few minutes passed in that way. There was no feeling of awkwardness, no pressure to speak, to re-emerge into conversation.
“Just how religious are you anyway?” I asked after a while. I had known the second I saw him that the wool cap he wore—had not removed despite the adequate level of heat in the student union building—served a function unrelated to warmth or style.
“Enough that I won’t mention your agnosticism when I tell my mother about you.”
“So you’re already planning to tell your mother about me?” I asked, flattered but also a little taken aback.
“I’m planning to marry you.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious,” he said.
“We just met.”
He shrugged as if that were a minor detail.
“You’re being crazy,” I said. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know you,” he assured me. “My first instincts are infallible.”
IT WAS THE SORT OF MARRIAGE PROPOSAL that would have put off some women. Carrie, for example.
“What an arrogant jerk,” she said. We were in her bedroom, propped up by pillows on opposite ends of her bed.
“He’s not a jerk.”
“He has one conversation with you and decides on that basis that he knows you and is going to marry you—never mind that he hasn’t even bothered to find out if you have any feelings whatsoever for him—and you don’t think he’s a jerk?”
“I know he isn’t.”
“So what would you call him, then?”
“I’d say he’s someone who trusts his instincts.”
Carrie looked at me for a moment. “Only a psychopath trusts his instincts in that way,” she said.
“Not necessarily. You did.”
“When?”
Carrie had walked up to me on the first day of grade one, as I stood against the chain-link fence, surveying but not yet ready to enter the mob of yelling children who would henceforth be my classmates and friends, and announced that she would be my best friend. It was an opener not entirely unlike Reuben’s in its certainty, its instant and unambivalent embrace of me—but when I pointed this out to Carrie, she looked at me again as if I’d lost my mind. “We were six then, Ruthie. Remember? There’s supposed to be some level of psychological and emotional development between the ages of six and nineteen.”
She reached for her cigarettes, took one out and started tapping the end of it on her night table, the first step of a ritual that would go on now for about ten minutes.
“Do you love him?” she asked me.
“I don’t know yet. I just met him, remember?”
“If you were falling in love you’d know it.”
There was no sensation of falling, I had to admit, just a feeling of extraordinary calm and comfort in his presence.
“That would be great if he were a shoe,” Carrie said when I tried to explain this to her. “But we look for different things in men than in shoes. Comfort, for example, is supposed to come later with potential husbands, after the falling in love part.”
How could I explain to her that the comfort I felt with him was more compelling to me than the sensation of falling over a cliff? How to explain the appeal of his instant and unambivalent embrace of me, to Carrie especially, who loved the thrill of uncertainty because she had never known the dread of real doubt? I couldn’t because I didn’t fully understand it myself at that time, had always imagined the real thing would be more of a thunderbolt than a feeling of safe arrival.
Carrie had now moved on to the actual smoking of her cigarette, an act she would manage to perform in its entirety while technically adhering to her parents’ rule of no smoking in the house. She would do this by holding the cigarette out the open window of her bedroom, extending her head outside every time she inhaled or exhaled, and waving around her free hand—which was inside the room—to disperse any smoke that had blown back in. I waited to speak until her head was in the room.
“I trust it,” was all I said, and she nodded as if she understood, but I knew that she thought her own first instincts were as infallible as Reuben found his, and that nothing had budged her from thinking he must be an arrogant jerk.
“I HEAR YOU’VE MET SOMEONE,” Nina said when I met her for coffee a couple of weeks
later. I had started seeing her more regularly now that I was downtown every day for school. Often we met in her apartment, which was just a few blocks from McGill, but that particular afternoon we were sitting in one of the Hungarian cafés downtown where they served flour-less tortes and coffee so strong and rich that it bore almost no resemblance to the watery beverage we brewed at home.
“Word travels fast,” I said. Reuben and I had just had our fifth date the previous Saturday night.
“Elka said it’s serious.”
“She hasn’t even met him. He’s only ever picked me up at my father’s.”
“She says she sees a big change in you.”
“What kind of change?”
“She thinks you seem happier, more mature.”
“Talk about wishful thinking.”
Nina smiled. “She just wants you to be happy. Isn’t that why people have children in the first place?”
“So they can make them happy?”
“So they can push their own failed hopes onto the next generation.”
“What failed hopes?”
Nina looked at me as if she couldn’t understand my question. “I wouldn’t exactly call Elka’s marriage to Sol the romance of the century.”
Now it was my turn to look at Nina in wonder. Did she think Sol and Elka had an unhappy marriage? “They may not be Zhivago and Lara,” I allowed, “but that doesn’t make them unhappy.”
Elka had spent most of her early childhood lying on the waxed linoleum floor behind the counter of her mother’s shop, playing with her dolls while her mother stood above her, arranging and rearranging the diamonds her uncle Chaim had sent her on consignment that nobody came in to buy. Then, when she got older and went to school, she had to rush home to serve tea and sweet wine to her mother’s matchmaking clients while the other girls in her class got to play outside or go over to each other’s houses for milk and cookies. She would listen to her mother discuss with her clients the compatibilities of background and affinities of character that form the basis of a good match, and at night, as she lay sleepless in her bed, staring into the darkness of the room, she would wonder about those affinities and compatibilities—or equally powerful aversions—that her mother claimed held the world together or could tear it apart. She knew that she was the product of disharmony, that her moodiness and other bad qualities were expressions of the incompatible union she embodied. And she wondered more and more about her father, a man she had never known. She made up fantasy fathers comprising bits and pieces of her mother’s customers and of the heroes of the novels she read and the movies she went to, but whenever and whatever she asked her mother about him, Ida Pearl claimed she couldn’t remember.
“How could you possibly not remember the colour of his hair?” Elka finally demanded of Ida Pearl when she was twelve or thirteen.
“What difference does it make?”
“No difference. I’m just wondering.”
“What’s to wonder?” her mother responded. “Do you think he wonders about you? He doesn’t, I assure you. A man like that is too busy saving the world to wonder about a daughter he’s brought into it.”
He left for Russia soon after Elka’s birth, Ida Pearl had told her. “To be with all the other Bolsheviks.”
“He’s a communist?” Elka asked.
“Absolutely,” Ida Pearl answered. Though, once she had let drop that it was actually Palestine he had gone to, to be with all the other Zionists.
“You’re lying,” Elka accused her. “How can he be in Russia and Palestine at the same time? He’s probably in neither. He probably never left Montreal in the first place.” And when her mother didn’t answer: “He’s probably been here all along.”
“Do you see him?” Ida countered, sweeping her arm around the dreary apartment that she had worked so hard to attain. “Have I missed something? Has he been here all along and I just haven’t noticed?”
“And whose fault is that? Whose fault is it that I have no father and no one invites me to their parties?” Elka cried, throwing herself on the couch. She would never know peace, not in this life, and she raised her head to tell her mother that.
“No one needs a peaceful heart,” her mother answered. “It’s enough to have one that beats.”
“I might as well die,” Elka wept into her pillow.
“Enough with the dramatics. You have homework to finish.”
What Elka had wanted from marriage—from life—it seemed to me, was to be part of a family that looked like other families, to have a husband who would come home every night, and to live in a house that was decorated in the style of the other houses in the neighbourhood and that was filled with children so confident of their parents’ love that they dared to be noisy and to misbehave. All of which she got. And it thrilled her and changed her and opened her in all the ways that transformative love is rumoured to thrill and change and open a person up. I could attest to this because I lived in her home and saw the satisfied smile on her face when she complained on the phone to her friends about the domestic chaos caused by her ever-present husband and their three boys, or the pleasure it gave her to playfully swat Sol with a dishtowel in the way that Lucy and Ethel and other wives in the TV sitcoms that we watched swatted their husbands for similar husbandly misdemeanours.
None of which I could say to Nina without feeling I was betraying Elka in some way. “Elka seems happy enough,” I said.
Nina looked at me with her clear brown eyes that always seemed to see more than she was saying. “And what about you? Are you as happy and mature now as she says?”
“Can’t you tell?”
She smiled and began to tell me about an audition for a TV commercial that she had been to the previous day. “It’s not exactly a Greek tragedy,” she admitted, “but it pays a lot better than the radio ads I’ve been doing. And maybe it will lead to something.”
To yet another TV commercial, I feared. “Were you ever in a Greek tragedy?” I asked her.
“Not on the stage.” She stirred the sugar into her tiny cup, then drank back her coffee in a single swallow. “Don’t look like that. I’m just kidding. My life has hardly been a Greek tragedy.”
But was she happy? I wondered
I knew so little about her, I realized. She had left for Palestine in the spring of 1945, a couple of years before I was born, to teach teenage survivors from Europe the ABCs that they had missed learning because of the war. It was unclear to anyone how she had gotten in, since she possessed none of the qualifications the British required for the purposes of issuing visas to Jews, or what her life had been like there, or why she had wanted to go there in the first place just when war was ending and life beginning everywhere else. But none of that really mattered to anyone in my family. What mattered to them was that she had left for Palestine as a pretty and talented girl of twenty-one, and when she returned from Israel in 1954 she was an old maid of thirty, and even more out of step than before with everyone around her.
“Why did you go to Palestine?” I asked her now.
She thought about that, then shrugged as if it was so long ago she could barely remember. “For the same reasons Elka married Sol, I suppose. To escape an unhappy home life. To find the piece inside me that was missing.” She looked at me as if to let me know that I didn’t have to say out loud what she had already seen for herself about Elka. “For the same reasons you’ll probably marry this Ronald.”
“Reuben,” I said. “And I don’t have an unhappy home life that I’m trying to escape. Nor do I think he’s a fairy tale prince who can magically—”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. I just meant that that’s what we do when we’re young. We look outward for answers and solutions for our lives. We look to other places and other people. In my case, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did.”
“Why not?”
“I wanted to act more than anything in the world. So I went to a country where I didn’t speak the language. How smart was that?” She s
ignalled the waiter to bring her another coffee.
“Did you find it?”
“Find what?”
“The piece inside you that was missing.”
“Not there. No. And the sun was ruining my skin.”
The waiter brought her coffee.
“Do you want a piece of cake?” she asked me.
“No, thanks.”
“Bring her a piece of cake,” she told the waiter. “The one with the walnuts and apricot jam.”
“Did you know that Elka found her father?” I asked Nina.
She looked at me as if she wasn’t sure she had heard me right.
“She went to his funeral.”
“She did?”
“Uh-huh.” I said, feeling the sick drop in the gut that accompanies the betrayal of a confidence, though I knew I hadn’t, technically, betrayed Elka’s confidence since attending a funeral is a public act that anyone can witness.
“How do you know?”
“I went with her.”
“And?”
“There’s no and. She took me out of school, we went to the funeral, then we went out for ice cream afterwards. I was wearing a blue and white seersucker dress.”
I supplied the detail about the dress as a way of proving the truth of my memory, and as I did, the image of myself in that dress pulled with it to the surface of my mind another memory: lilacs sitting on my teacher’s desk, a vase full of purple, mauve and white lilacs whose scent I inhaled as I walked to the door of the classroom where Elka was standing.
“So, what? Tell me.”
“That’s all I remember.” The dress. The lilacs. The hard bench at the rear of the chapel. The hat Elka wore with the half-veil that covered her eyes. There had been a grimness to her—something about the way she clutched my hand as we entered and left the funeral chapel, the set of her mouth. And a furtiveness. She had bowed her head as if to hide her face at the moment the coffin was carried past. And as we slipped out immediately following the mourners, her hand like a vise around mine, I had the feeling that we were fleeing.
“How did she explain it to you?” Nina asked.
“She didn’t. Not then.” She had turned up at my classroom door and spoken in a low voice to my teacher, who then told me to gather my things because there was an appointment I had to go to. But I knew already, before Elka said anything to me, that she wasn’t there to take me to a doctor or dentist, though I couldn’t say why. Her grimness, perhaps. Her dark suit that I associated with the High Holidays and other sombre, formal occasions.
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