Zabelle

by Nancy Kricorian

  Finally it came time to turn off the lamps and go to bed. Toros and I went into our room, and Vartanoush went to hers.

  “She despises me!” I said as soon as the door was shut.

  “Keep your voice down,” he said. “My mother is concerned for my welfare and yours.”

  “Am I to live for years like this? With the two of us in this house, one of us might end up dead.”

  “I would sooner send you away than my mother, who raised me, who sacrificed years of her life for me, who lost everyone but me.” His voice was icy.

  There was nothing else to say. I lay with my back to Toros, careful that not one scrap of nightgown, not even my least toe, touched him. An old man who loved his mother better than his wife. I should have married the spice dealer; at least his mother was dead. Toros was rigid on his side of the bed, too, and I lay awake until I felt the tension ebb as he fell asleep. Now I knew that I was on my own.

  After a few days the battle zone quieted with an unspoken cease-fire. Cold weather kept us in the house, so there was no relief from her malice, and I was saving my strength. She talked to me like I was a servant. I addressed her as little as possible. Toros spent more time with his account books in the evening and left earlier in the morning for the store.

  I still had my English book, my notebook, and my pencils. Whenever there was a free moment, I worked like a fury to learn that language. I read the newspaper, the back of cereal boxes, the medicine jars in the bathroom cabinet. Every new word I learned was like a brick in a wall between me and my mother-in-law.

  One morning several weeks later, snow fell from a dark sky. I was sweeping the kitchen floor, whisking the dust and dried bits of food off the landing onto the stairs. The old woman slammed a pot she was carrying onto the counter and marched over to me.

  “What way to sweep is that, you fool? You have spread dirt all over the stairs and dust onto the banisters.” She tried to grab the broom from me, but my grip didn’t slacken. We faced each other, Vartanoush looking into my determined face. She jerked the broom one direction, and I pulled in the other direction.

  “Let go of that broom, you demon!” cried Vartanoush.

  “I won’t let you hit me with it, and I’m not letting go.”

  “Have you no respect? Have you no shame? The devil has his hooks in you, and you’re going to burn in hell.”

  We struggled over the broom, our movements getting broader until we rocked dangerously close to the top step. The old woman pulled hard at the wooden handle, and when I yanked it back with equal force, Vartanoush, on a sudden impulse, let go. I sailed down the stairs, the broom flying with me, and crumpled in a heap at the bottom.

  I lay there, the wind knocked out of me, and didn’t move. Let her think I was dead. Let her imagine explaining to Toros how she killed his wife. I would look angelic in the casket, and Toros would never be able to forgive himself for not standing up to his mother, Satan’s handmaiden herself.

  Gripping the rail, Vartanoush hurried down the stairs. As she stood over me, her fear like a sour smell, I finally opened my eyes. I rubbed a spot on my skull where a lump was forming.

  With not a thread of doubt in my voice, I said, “If you touch me, I’ll kill you.”

  “You snake!” Vartanoush hissed.

  She never laid a hand on me again. But it was a long war we fought, living in our house like enemies in tents pitched side by side.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Birth of Love

  (WATERTOWN, 1928)

  Of all the button sewers at Ohanessian’s Shirt Company, I was the fastest. We were paid by the button, so at the end of the week I had earned almost twice as much as the second fastest girl. The other girls weren’t jealous. They liked me, because I joined in the gossip and didn’t play up to the boss.

  Ohanessian was shaped like a pear, with narrow shoulders sloping down to an enormous belly. His eyebrows were poised on his forehead like bushy insects about to take flight. When he was angry, his bald head turned crimson, and when he shouted, spit flew in all directions. He never yelled at me, though, because I was his best worker.

  The seamstresses sat in rows behind their sewing machines in one room, where the shirts were made, and we button sewers sat around a long trestle table in another room, with our needles and thimbles. A boy—his name was Moses Bodjakanian—trundled the shirts from one room to the next, taking them finally to a third room where they were pressed and boxed.

  At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about Moses. He was an ordinary boy, about my age, who worked in a shirt factory. Not very handsome, not particularly smart. But when I noticed the way he stared at me, his eyes like two lamps, I looked at him closer.

  His square hands were steady when he hoisted a bale of shirts. And his ears were perfectly shaped and fitted to his head. He was amusing, full of jokes and laughter, like a small boy or a clown. But when I spoke, he listened intently, as though I were delivering a biblical prophecy. Most of all, though, I liked the way he responded in his gruff, sweet voice.

  In the morning as I left my home—which Vartanoush filled with the bad odor of her moods—I felt life seep back into me with each step I took away from the door. By the time I reached Ohanessian’s, I had changed from a drab daughter-in-law into a young, strong woman with shining hair, red lips, and a sheen to my skin. The journey home worked the opposite, so that when I entered the house I was as flat and gray as newsprint.

  It got to the point that I could barely stand going home at night and counted the hours until the next morning’s tray of buttons was set before me. The weekends were suffocating. Toros wasn’t a bad man, and I was beginning to feel a certain fondness for him. He was respectful and often kind. But everything between us was controlled by his mother, who loomed like a giant bird of prey. I longed for the sound of Moses’s voice, which was full of life, like a sapling growing in a forest of charred tree stumps.

  Our flirtation, if you could call it that, was so subtle that the other workers didn’t notice anything. Even if anyone had suspected, we never did anything that could be criticized. We were proper in all respects. If romance was a woman who filled a room with strong perfume, our friendship was a girl who left in her wake a hint of soap and damp hair.

  When we were working, the girls told stories and gossiped. My needle darted through the button, anchoring it to cloth, no matter what the talk. I always kept half an ear on the discussion.

  “Did you see how fat Digin Ohanessian has become?” asked Maral Topalian.

  “Her double chin has grown a triple chin,” said Seta Barsamian. “She could at least get some bigger dresses.”

  “All she does is read magazines and eat pakhlava.” Manoush Agahigian grabbed a handful of buttons from the tray.

  “If you had a wealthy husband, would you be skinny?”

  “If I had a wealthy husband, would I be sitting here sewing buttons?”

  “At least your mother-in-law does the cooking.”

  “You call that cooking?”

  My mind drifted to Moses. He ran his hands through the waves of his thick black hair. His face was unmarked, with a high broad forehead. When he laughed, he tipped up his chin and showed his teeth. The way he walked was a rolling dance over the floorboards.

  It was a good thing that none of the girls could read my mind. I tried to be fair to Toros, but on certain days—when Vartanoush had been especially nasty, and Toros had hidden behind his newspaper—my husband’s list of positive attributes was pitifully small. He sometimes offered to brush my hair at night. He hung his clothes neatly in the closet. His snoring wasn’t so loud. And he was a hardworking man who owned property. Moses earned less than I did.

  Still, I would daydream. If I were married to Moses, one Sunday after church—or maybe we’d skip church altogether—we would take a picnic and spread a blanket under a tree in the Boston Public Gardens. Moses’s mother would live with his older brother’s family, so he and I would have an apartment all to ourselves.
Breakfast and dinner I would cook, and we would sit down together, just the two of us. Moses would never read the newspaper at the table, and after dinner we’d sit on the porch, watching the sun go down over our garden.

  There I stopped. A husband is a husband, I said to myself. I had one, and it was useless to imagine what kind this other one would make.

  “My mother-in-law snores so loud that the neighbors bang on the ceiling with a broom,” boasted Maral Topalian.

  “Mine doesn’t sleep at night. She prowls around the house like a thief.”

  “My mother-in-law is so modest, she wears her underwear in the bathtub,” I said. I had never seen Vartanoush in the bathtub, so this might have been true. In any case, everyone laughed.

  Sometime after that, my needle began to feel like it was moving through cardboard rather than cotton. Since my speed was the prod that kept everyone working, when I slowed, the number of finished shirts at the end of each day was noticeably fewer. The big boss came in and shouted what was meant to be encouragement.

  “Zabelle, what’s your husband going to say when he sees the pay you bring home this week?”

  Moses was in the room at this moment. If my needle had been a sword, I would have lopped off Ohanessian’s head and thrown it to the rats. I leaned over the shirt in my hands, as Moses left the room behind a mountain of cloth. He and I never talked about Toros or anything to do with my life at home.

  I tried and tried, but I couldn’t seem to push the needle any faster. My stomach was queasier than it had been on the boat from Constantinople, and I was bone weary. I felt like I was swimming in honey. All I wanted to do was crawl under the table, lie on the wooden floor, and take a long nap. It wasn’t until Maral made a comment—pointing her eyebrows in my direction—about how tiring the first months of pregnancy were that I admitted to myself what I already knew.

  I decided not to say anything—not to Toros, Vartanoush, or Ohanessian. The fear of leaving my job one day before it was necessary made me work as hard as I could. How would I survive interminable days alone in the house with my mother-in-law? Grabbing a handful of bone buttons, I bowed my head over a shirt.

  I carried my secret for several months. I’m sure the other girls knew, but no one said a word. Everything continued as usual, including my friendship with Moses. He had taken to joining the button sewers at midday and sat next to me. I brought an extra apple or pear from the market to give to him. If the girls were looking at us sideways, I didn’t notice.

  When my energy came back, so did my appetite. At meals Vartanoush watched suspiciously as I filled my plate for a second or third time. Her cooking was tasteless, but I would have eaten mattress ticking to appease my hunger. I carried saltine crackers and raisins with me everyplace, trailing crumbs. I stopped to visit Toros at the market, where I’d pick up a candy bar and a piece of cheese. The baby began to turn inside me, flicking his tail like a little fish. Finally my belly was as round as a cantaloupe, and I didn’t think I’d be able to disguise my condition much longer.

  It was Vartanoush who, with her usual tact, made the announcement as we sat down to Friday dinner. “Well, Toros,” she said, “it looks like there’s going to be another mouth to feed.”

  I paused, my fork frozen in midair. I had been planning to speak to Toros that night. Once again the witch had managed to get herself into the middle of our business.

  “What do you mean, Mayrig?” asked Toros.

  “Son,” she said, talking with the patience one might use with a moron, “your wife is going to have a baby.”

  Toros looked to me for confirmation.

  “In September,” I answered. I knew I’d have to give notice at Ohanessian’s on Monday. Back to the gray world of long days under my mother-in-law the prison warden. I sighed.

  Toros smiled, pressing his palms together in thanks. “God is blessing our marriage with this child,” he said.

  Vartanoush added, “I’ll pray for a son.”

  I thought, Lord, don’t let me give the world another daughter-in-law.

  “It’s time to buy a house,” said Toros.

  All the girls at Ohanessian’s were happy for me. The unmarried ones wished they were married; the childless ones wanted a child. There were a few girls with husbands and children, and they were envious that I would no longer have to work at the factory. Ohanessian was annoyed that he would lose his best worker but put a good face on things. He promised me a farewell bonus. I didn’t have the heart to say anything to Moses, but I knew he’d already heard that Friday was my last day.

  Moses avoided me all week, and I was miserable. He came in and out of the room, dropping off and fetching shirts, but he didn’t stop to say anything. He took his lunch elsewhere.

  What did I expect? I was married. I was carrying my husband’s child. I was leaving work and wouldn’t see Moses again. What could I possibly say to him? What did I want from him?

  On Thursday, when he paused to say something to another girl, the room suddenly seemed hotter than I could bear. The air was stuffy, the overhead light too bright. My head clouded, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor with one girl fanning me and another patting my hand. I saw Moses by the door, but when I met his eyes, he darted out of the room.

  On Friday the girls showered me with handmade baby gifts—blankets, knit booties, three cotton gowns with drawstrings, a soft white sweater with mother-of-pearl buttons, and two small bonnets trimmed with satin. It was hard for me to imagine a creature tiny enough to wear these clothes. When Ohanessian handed out the weekly pay, mine included an extra five dollars in a separate envelope. At the end of the day I lingered, not wanting to say farewell to my friends. I wished that Moses would at least say good-bye, but he had disappeared. I left the girls clustered outside the factory’s front door and heard their chatter recede as I walked slowly away.

  Halfway up Spruce Street—the hill seemed longer and steeper than usual—I sat down on a flight of stone steps in front of a large gray house. Home was close, but I didn’t want to go home. I felt the fluttering limbs of the baby as it turned in my belly.

  The child inside me had started out as a tiny seed, barely an idea. Already the whorls of his fingerprints had formed, and his ears were listening to the sounds of my rushing blood. He would emerge from my body into the light as a new person, where life would unroll before him like a carpet. An American life.

  I glanced up and saw Moses standing a few feet away, half-hidden behind a tree. He walked over to me. I moved to one side on the step, so he could sit down. The six inches between us hummed.

  “I’m going to Worcester to work in my mother’s cousin’s wire factory,” he said.

  I couldn’t even think of anything to say. Each turn of my mind took me down a blind alley.

  “I have something for you,” he said. “Put out your hand.”

  Moses extended his closed hand, and I put out my palm, into which he dropped a silver thimble patterned with flowers and tendrils. The silver was warm in my hand.

  “It belonged to my grandmother. I kept it knotted in my belt during the deportations.”

  I felt tears filling my eyes. “I can’t take this. It’s all you have.”

  “I have her ring as well.”

  The ring was for some other girl. I would keep the thimble. “Thank you,” I said.

  He stood to go. “May the light be with you always.”

  “And with you,” I murmured. I wanted to give him something, but what did I have to give? My dented tin cup? The mirror from my Turkish mistress? The Bible from the Patriarch?

  “Moses,” I called after him. He turned toward me, his face filled with sadness. I approached with my hand extended. He grasped it, and we shook in the American style. It was an aching relief to feel his warmth and the solid bones under his skin. We should not have touched at all, because this brief meeting of bodies filled me with longing for what I couldn’t have.

  I pulled my hand back. I said, “I wish you good fortune in
all you do….” He bowed his head slightly and continued on his way.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have been happy with him. What if I had met him first? What if I had been an early widow? What if he had asked me to run away with him and go to Worcester, which seemed half a world away? It did me no good to think like that. I was married to my life by the baby inside me, by my sense of what was right, by my feeling of gratitude to Toros, who had after all given me a home and a family that was mine. Never mind that his mother was a circling buzzard. I was young and foolish enough to believe she couldn’t live very long.

  That night I handed Toros my pay envelope, as I had each week, and the bonus envelope as well. He took one look at the five-dollar bill and returned it to me.

  “Keep this. Use it to buy what you want for the baby, or for yourself.”

  For Toros, this generosity was an act of love. I slid the note into my pocketbook. Also in my pocketbook, knotted in a handkerchief, was the thimble. The five dollars, which was more money than I’d ever had before, should have made me feel like a wealthy woman.

  There was the baby to think of. I would buy white satin to make a small jacket. And I’d sew a matching bonnet, with a ruffle. The stitches would be finer than an eyelash.

  Toros bought a two-family house on Walnut Street, on a double lot that fronted on Lincoln Street as well. It was one block from his market. He rented the first-floor apartment to the Kalajian brothers, who worked at the B. F. Goodrich Factory down by the river. Vartanoush did most of the packing and unpacking for the move, with lots of loud grumbling.

  Finally, I would have my garden. The people who had lived there before us had spent a great deal of time and care in the yard. Red roses grew over a trellis at the bottom of the walk, and at the top of the walk, pink roses climbed over an arched gate. There were two kinds of pear, a peach tree, and a rose of Sharon bush. The annual beds and the vegetable plot were left fallow that year, because the house had been for sale. My first day in the garden, I sat on a low border wall, yanking up weeds in the herb plot. The sight of dirt under my fingernails made me happy.