Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  Harley, who hated parties and had declined all invitations, including those to more intimate events, was alone on the deck, holding his phone. I left him there and hurried back to my mother, startling the Scottie who rose on Emmy’s lap, a low rumbling in the back of his throat. “It’s Rox-anne,” she cooed, pressing on Mackie’s back. “Stop that nonsense immediately.”

  I extended my hands so the dog could sniff me and know I meant no harm, then lowered myself and said, “I come in peace.” He sprang from Emmy’s lap and sank his teeth into my hand, and I pulled sharply back, rising, until his front paws lifted from the floor. Byron rushed over and kicked Mackie, and when the dog relaxed his grip, a geyser of blood spurted from my hand.

  Byron said, “I’m going to shoot that fucking dog!”

  “I’m okay!” I cried, as shocked by the blood as by Byron’s ferocity. “It’s fine, everything is fine!”

  The house went silent.

  Byron followed me into the kitchen, where I grabbed a dishtowel to stanch the flow of blood. “Show me that hand,” he said. I turned from him and keep turning, and he persisted. “Give me that hand. I want to see that hand.”

  Blood bloomed, coloring the cloth. “It’s fine,” I said, and slipped into the powder room.

  “Sue me!” Byron called through the closed door, while I was wrapping a hand towel around my thumb. “You’re going to need surgery on that hand! I want you to sue.”

  I did not yet feel the pain that would wake me in the dark, the throbbing like a message I might understand if I lay very still. All I wanted was for the bleeding to stop so I could sit with my mother and spend time with the guests who’d gathered to celebrate what they thought was my birthday, and when someone, Byron, I assumed, knocked on the bathroom door, I cried out, “Everything’s fine. Don’t let anyone leave!”

  Harley squeezed into the tiny room and began to whisper fiercely—honey, babe—and pull at my arm so he could see the swaddled hand and whisk me to the emergency room. As I was begging, “Please! I’m fine,” I wondered how many hours had to pass before I could remind him that he’d sworn on his son’s life he was buying that condo, given that he had arranged this party and flown my mother in from Tel Aviv—on business class, I would learn.

  I edged out of the powder room as soon as I could, and Mindy drew me into her soft, perfumed bosom. “I’m so glad things have worked out after all.” She kissed my cheek. “He’s such a sweetie.”

  It was the worst thing she could have said.

  The guests gathered around the dining room table and filled their Styrofoam plates with pink cold cuts, potato salad, and sad, limp pickles. Harley brought Mom a plate of food, and Mindy pulled a chair beside her. I watched my mother hold court, and though her manner was familiar, she was so changed, so distressingly unkempt, with her wild hair and ill-fitting clothes, that I found myself thinking she would have been ashamed had she known. Had she known. I listened to the hum of conversation and felt very far away, no longer of mortal flesh, just an unseen spirit watching, thumb throbbing so regularly it was as if my heart had migrated to my hand.

  I went into the dining room to get some sparkling water and heard my name broken into two syllables. “Rox-anne? Where is she? I want to go home. Tell her to take me home!” Mindy was in the kitchen, arranging candles on a huge baking sheet full of cupcakes, so I asked my mother to stay a few minutes longer. Mom walked past me to the door and rattled the doorknob, as if we’d locked her in the house. “Someone take me home.”

  Harley hurried across the room with her coat held open. After she worked her arms into the sleeves, he whisked her off to the place that she was calling “home,” a downtown business hotel, identical to those in countless other cities, right down to the “art” that matched the décor and the nailed-into-the-walls headboards, as if they were a favorite of souvenir seekers now that ashtrays were hard to come by.

  A few minutes later, Mindy brought out the sheet of cupcakes, each glowing from the flame of a small candle, and I made my wishes.

  Even now, I cannot reveal them, since I hold onto a childlike belief that wishes can’t come true if they’re spoken aloud. All I can say is that they were modest as I inhaled slowly and deeply, then broadened until my wishes radiated like a pebble thrown in water, the rings widening, touching others everywhere. There was so much I wished for myself and for the people I loved, and for my struggling city (what a shock!), and for my country, misled by short-sighted politicians (who knew I was patriotic!), and for the Middle East (Arabs and Jews, Bedouin and Druse), then outward from there, until, with a great exhale, my own wind extinguished every flame. And still I wanted more—for the earth to be protected from asteroids crashing with such force that humankind is thrust into nuclear winter for all eternity. This last I can confess, since I forgot to wish that such a thing would never happen. So many wishes I forgot to make. A reason perhaps that everything got so much worse.

  Six

  My mother in Pittsburgh! Oh, I could not sleep, could not drive, either. Backing the car out of the garage was no problem, but to execute a three-point turn with only one hand was looking for trouble, something this same mother had accused me of doing. If only I could tell her: Ma, you were right; I looked for trouble and I found it.

  Many buses went downtown. Before walking down the block to catch one, I called her hotel room.

  “Who?”

  “It’s me. Roxanne.”

  “Who put me here?” She was very distressed.

  “Harley,” I said. “He meant well, Mom.”

  I couldn’t believe I was using that loathsome expression, toted out to excuse someone’s insensitive behavior. Harley meant well and thus bypassed my house and the many fine hotels nearby, including a restored Victorian bed and breakfast with lilac Jacuzzis.

  I said, “Listen, Ma, I’ll check you out this morning so you can come stay with me.”

  “Where’s my ticket?” she said. “I want to go home.”

  “Your return flight isn’t until tomorrow,” I said. “How about if I come downtown now, and we’ll figure out plans over lunch. There are lots of—”

  “Lunch?” As if I’d just proposed throwing back some beers at the local strip club. “In a restaurant?”

  Eventually she explained that all she ever ate midday was cottage cheese and a banana, and because I was of my mother, I had these items, which I packed in a paper bag.

  On the half-empty bus to the hotel, a large unwashed man with dozens of ID tags strung around his neck sat beside me. He placed an assortment of bulging plastic bags at our feet. I edged away, patted the brown bag to make sure the bananas were not being crushed. The man smelled like a subway tunnel, of stale beer and dried urine. The bus crept forward, and when we neared my stop, I imagined my mother rising when she saw me enter the hotel lobby, hurrying toward me with outstretched arms. Tsatskeleh, look at you! So gorgeous! Your hand, my god!

  At Grant Street, my seatmate rooted around in his bags and withdrew a crushed Pirates cap. I worked my way over the shopping bags and got off. The hotel was up the block. I didn’t really believe that my mother would turn and say, Tsatskeleh, darling! But I had the modest, if fervent wish that we might sit together with our bananas and cottage cheese, and I might have the chance to say: It was so great that he flew you here, but living with him is killing me.

  She was sitting alone beneath an immense, hive-shaped chandelier in the massive lobby of this old hotel, the square shoulders of her burgundy suit jacket sagging, white canvas sneakers on her feet. When she saw me she said, “Hello, dear.” I slid beside her and kissed her cheek, and she shivered and said, “Ooh, your nose is cold. Don’t you have work?”

  “I’ll walk over later. It’s not far from here.”

  Four jolly men passed, name tags clipped onto their jacket lapels. Thinning hair, all of them, freshly-shaved cheeks. Aftershave. Loafers.

 
“You’re going like that?” Mom asked.

  That—my jeans. “It’s my place, Ma. I’m the boss, and I say no dress codes. Would you like to see where I work? We can get a taxi; it’s very close. You can meet my partner Les and see some of our projects. We’re doing really well, Mom.”

  “When are you getting married?” asked my mother.

  “I tried that once,” I said, deflated by the question. “It didn’t work.”

  She pushed at the air. “At your age, you’re lucky you have someone.”

  “Maybe I don’t want someone.”

  “Let me tell you something. It’s no fun being alone. From my world, they’re all gone. Dead. Everyone. My husband. Before his mind went, he did everything for me. He cooked. He paid the bills. He chauffeured me everywhere. My secretary, Dottie, when she saw him, she always said, ‘Morris, you don’t happen to have an unmarried brother, do you?’ He was a terrible cook, but I never complained.”

  “Well,” I said, “you did.” Then I softened and put my hand on hers. She withdrew quickly. “The party was nice, wasn’t it?”

  “Never in my life have I been so ignored.”

  “No, Mom! Everyone talked to you! Mindy did, and Stu.”

  “Who?”

  “Stu. Mindy’s husband.”

  “Mindy?”

  “My best friend? From New Jersey? Her mother, Muriel, had her hair done where you did. You thought she was smart. I remember you saying ‘somewhere under that nest there’s a brain.’ Those were your words.”

  This was after Mindy and I had peered into the window of the beauty parlor in town one Saturday and saw them sitting side by side beneath the hair dryers. We plotted furiously to fix them up, certain our mothers, one a part-time dance instructor, the other a physicist, could also be best friends.

  Now my mother said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re going on about. There’s too much noise. Take me home. I want to go home.”

  Abruptly she stood, and I did too. “I brought some lunch.” I opened the paper bag, showed her the separate portions of cottage cheese, napkins, plastic spoons, bananas.

  “You need to fix yourself up and go to work. Take me back.”

  I lifted a banana from the bag. “No flecks!” I said. “Come on, Ma, please. Your flight’s tomorrow. Let me show you our office. The work we do isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t just matchbooks either.”

  “Stop pushing at me. I’m not myself.”

  For the first five floors, we rode alone in the shimmying car. Then a waiter with a smooth Mayan face wheeled in a service cart with the remains of someone’s dinner. Mom said, “You used to be a good-looking girl.”

  The waiter flashed a consoling “whatever” gesture.

  I flushed, stunned. Did she not remember screaming, You’re ugly. No one will love you! It was a judgment no lover or friend could ever erase.

  “Why are you so obsessed with looks? You, of all people, who broke through every barrier. You were a feminist!”

  “I was no such thing. Stop pushing and leave me be. You’re late for work.”

  “Okay.” I leaned close to kiss her cheek. “I love you, Mom.”

  It was not a lie, but an unpleasant fact of life, like a sore that would not heal.

  My office was a mile or so from the hotel. I walked briskly, trying to shake free of the sadness. A yoga class had just let out. From a block away, I could see a group of women with rolled-up mats standing in twos and threes outside our building. The arrangement looked beautiful to me, these women in their hats and puffy jackets all part of a “we.”

  I paused at the corner and waited for them to disperse. Our office would be warm. Upstairs, I would find award-winning creative solutions for our long-standing clients. All I needed was to say “excuse me,” climb a single flight of steps, and open the door to our suite. Les would turn: close-cropped bristly hair, tight black T-shirt that showed the edge of a complex tattoo, black jeans, black boots, a show no mercy expression on his face. He’d say something snarky—Nice party!—because he was not a man who wasted time with maybes. One date was enough for this single guy. One evening gave him all the information he needed. “I thought you and Harley broke up,” he might say, because he’d said this before.

  It was frigid, standing out here. Damp. The last of the yoga students embraced and parted. What did I want from my mother? Hello, goodbye. That was all.

  It wasn’t all. I wanted her to pause, let her gaze linger on my face. I wanted her to be someone she had never been, and I knew this, forgot it, knew it again, continued to forget.

  I walked back to the hotel. Outside the entrance, a uniformed bellman breathed into his hands. I called my mother’s room from the lobby and when she did not answer, I knocked on her door. A tray was on the floor outside the door beside hers. A white rose in a bud vase, two plates, two half-eaten croissants, two coffee cups. A story was there, and it sat like a rock in my chest.

  She never answered.

  Harley was sitting on the edge of the bed when I opened my eyes the next morning, holding a rolled-up newspaper and a large coffee, which I instinctively took. Creamy shirt, pressed trousers. Why was he in my bedroom? Still woozy, I tried to string together some words. Before I could speak, Harley took my wrist and set my wounded hand across the crease of his trouser leg. “I know you’re worried about your mom,” he said. “Don’t be.”

  He turned my hand over, stroked the back where it was not injured, and asked if he might drive my mother to the airport. As a favor. The events of the previous days felt like scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: the pink cold cuts, the lunging dog, Mom beneath the beehive chandelier in tennis shoes.

  I sat upright as he stroked the back of my hand, my wrist, my arm, and tried to bring myself into the fullness of this situation, to move away from this gentle man, with his soft gaze, to our sad history together, with its silent dinners, and his nights in the dark, and the relief I felt once he was gone.

  “The party was nice,” I said. “Flying my mother here was extravagant. But we broke up. I need to hear that you understand that.”

  “What are you doing, babe?” Harley said, his voice tender and concerned, as if I were a toddler, still sweaty from a tantrum. “Everything is fine.”

  “Everything is not fine,” I said, working hard to conjure up the Harley who was so deep in his own dark place most evenings that I could draw a knife across my wrist and he would not see the blood. “What’s the story on that condo? Are you buying it or not?”

  I waited. Asked a second time.

  Harley nodded sadly. Yes, he said. They accepted his offer for ten percent below list. And now he was only asking to get the chance to spend a little more time with Mom. Quality time. He’d never met anyone like her. “She’s a great lady. A truly unique individual. It’s a shame she lives so far away.”

  He unrolled the newspaper and spread it across my lap, and when he crossed the room, elegant and loose-limbed, I flipped through the sections of the paper until a headline stopped me. “Mother of Dead Baby Charged with Murder.” The mother in the photo, Amber Chatsworth, looked like a teenager. Her expression was somber or sullen—it was hard to say. She’d slapped her baby in the face “frustrated that the girl was difficult to feed,” grabbed her from her high chair and “threw her against the kitchen wall and then onto the sofa.” Amber was “deeply disturbed,” with a long history of abuse, according to the public defender. “Truly she is not a monster.”

  I got out of bed and put the newspaper straight into the recycling pile, as if that might bring the baby back to life.

  Mom said, “Ech, don’t bother,” when I called to tell her when I’d be at the hotel.

  “It’s not a bother. And anyhow, I’m taking you to the airport.”

  “No,” she said. “Your friend…Harry is taking me.”

  “Harley,” I s
aid.

  “Harry. It’s right here on the notepad with his number.”

  She read his number to me, and I said, “Fine. Harry can take you. But I’d like to see you. It’s been a really long time, you know.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I need to get showered.”

  “You’ll be in the shower all morning?” I asked. Then I gave up. “Okay, fine. Have a safe journey.”

  I missed Tom, who otherwise I did not miss at all. If I’d told him about this conversation, he would have laughed. He might have said, “That’s a cold tit!” But Tom was somewhere, married with kids, so I called Les to tell him I could make our morning meeting.

  Two hours later, while Harley and my mother were on their way to the airport, Les and I were sitting in the loft of a dreadful woman I had named “Sweetness” and her husband. There on their long, smooth bark-sided Nakashima table, Les spread out colors like Tarot cards while the husband prepared ginger tea.

  I’d dressed for this meeting—fitted jacket, pencil skirt, heels. This outfit seemed not to meet with the approval of Sweetness, whose real name I repressed. She fastened her eyes on me, sharing her look of frank disdain. Pursed her red lips. Flipped her hair, showed off her splendid cheekbones. I thought of the mother of my youth, with her thick black hair, the lipstick she left on cigarette butts and coffee cups, the kisses she bestowed on others’ cheeks. My mother in the car with Harley. In short-term parking. Harley opening the door for her, holding out his arm. Mom taking it without hesitation.

  The husband served tea in glazed mugs that had a curved lip that made it impossible to sip without dribbling. I was too old to be struggling with my mother and felt that this dilemma and my inability to solve it was a sign of a fundamental design flaw. If I’d been made properly, I’d be married with children. I’d know how to be there for my mother in her final years.