Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  I reached Sunny on her cell phone after I cleaned up. When I told her my mother had been standing on the street alone, she was upset and promised to have a second lock installed. She did not say, “What kind of daughter are you?” Instead we talked about Eema, who was so strong, walked faster than Sunny, ate like a man. Sunny could increase her hours; she thought her sister, also a home healthcare worker, might be able to work on weekends. We agreed someone should be with Eema every day.

  Two of them arrived an hour late, after a lengthy commute on two buses: Galia, big and solid like Ronit, same curly hair, though she was stormy-looking rather than morose. And Yael, with her dark, inquisitive eyes, olive skin, full lips, luscious in the way of beautiful young women. Broad shoulders, braless in her soft, loose V-neck sweater. She had an elaborate tic that involved twisting her long black hair with a finger, sweeping it onto one shoulder and then the next. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and neither could Galia, who rubbed elbows with her, scooched low in her chair so her toes reached Yael’s ankle.

  Galia had brought me a present from Ronit, a photo of my parents from around the time of their marriage. They’re standing on a rocky ledge, no trees or greenery in the background, my mother in a blouse and shorts, ankle socks and oxfords. Her hair is in braids. She has a finger to her lips and in her free hand is a large branch, which she uses to prod my father in the rear. They’re so young, in this single frozen moment, playful, in love, something I’d never imagined, certainly never seen.

  Now, though, as I lit a half-dozen candles and set out an elaborate dinner for six, having expected “friends”—grilled trout, rice with chickpeas and pignolis, etc.—I was overcome by an urge to call my mother, to say, “I just saw this wonderful photo!” (As if, what? After all this time I would get a different mother?) The sadness I felt was like a pebble in my throat.

  The two young women, who’d been eating at the food court in the mall since their arrival, scarfed up every morsel on the table. They were willing to answer my questions about their sales techniques at the mall—no man could resist Yael, it seemed—and their time in the army. Though they were not especially enthusiastic raconteurs, I did learn that Yael had served in southern Sinai as a radar operator and Galia had been arrested twice, once for leaving a document in a copier, another time for bringing pizza to the base on Passover.

  When the serving plates were empty, I went to the kitchen to refill them and thought of my mother thousands of miles away, alone except for Sunny and her sister. Back at the table, Yael had propped her leg on Galia’s lap. Galia was singing into Yael’s pretty toes, as if they were a microphone.

  As soon as the girls were stuffed, they grew as drowsy as puppies, leaving me to generate more polite questions, first about their travel plans—after their stint at Ross Park Mall, they planned to sell jewelry in Rio or work at a ski resort in Colorado; San Francisco and Kyoto were also possibilities. I inquired next about the wellbeing of Galia’s family, and then in some desperation—for they seemed as uninterested in conversation as they were in leaving—I asked Galia if her mother had ever talked about our summer together as teenagers.

  “She was very popular with the boys,” I said, remembering her dancing on the sidewalk outside the Irish bar in Inwood.

  Galia snorted. “She has become very small-minded. Everything with her is a scandal. A secret. I don’t like secrets. They are chains.” She held up her arms and rattled her invisible handcuffs.

  She and Yael began to speak in Hebrew. It was as if I were a kid at my parents’ table, listening to them quarrel in a language I could not understand, alert to tone and facial expression, asking, “What? What are you saying?” Getting a morsel, or a lie, which I could feel in my gut, though no one would ever confirm it.

  “I hadn’t realized you knew my father,” I said.

  “A very nice man,” Galia said. “And always with the presents from America.”

  “Really?” I said. “What did he bring you?”

  “The Walkman. So fantastic.”

  “What else?”

  “Chess. His favorite. He loved it more than anything. And the card games.” She rolled her hand to remember. “Parcheesi.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said, trying to imagine this description of my father, so unlike the man I’d known.

  “No, no. Poker. That’s what I meant. And the other one…”

  “You knew my mother too?” I asked.

  Galia picked a pine nut off her plate. “How could I? She broke from the family before I was born.”

  “Do you know why? I never heard the whole story.”

  Yael picked up a candle and let the wax drip into the center of her palm. Galia watched until Yael replaced the candle and then said, in a matter-of-fact way, “Your mother and my savtah were enemies. Everyone knew this. There was the fight with the baby, and Savtah wanting to keep her home instead of sending her to that place in the north. She was very emotional, my savtah. Like your father. Every birthday, every holiday, every time she sees me, every time I leave, she’s a waterfall, with the crying. And babies! You know, I turn sixteen she starts asking when I’m giving her a baby to hold. I’m a kid; I’m still in school. But, Savtah, you know, she loved babies more than life.”

  Yael murmured to Galia in Hebrew. Galia said, “She has a friend who is also a twin, and this brother of hers, wherever he is, anywhere in the world, she can feel if he is hurting. Always she knows if something is wrong. She wants to know if it’s this way for you.”

  “How could it be? She’s dead.”

  It was very still, as if we were in a chamber beneath the earth. It was what my mother had told Dr. Berenbaum.

  “Maybe,” said Galia.

  “Why do you say maybe? If she were alive, wouldn’t your mother have told me?”

  “My mother believes what is easiest for her to believe. She will not trouble herself with the truth if the truth is difficult. You want to know what I think?”

  “Sure,” I said, torn just then between wishing Galia would stop talking and wanting to shake her until every speck of information came loose.

  “Your father died so they let themselves believe that she died also. But your father was old. His time had come. You are not so old.”

  “And? Go on.”

  “Why should you accept what my mother says? Maybe your sister is still in that place. Who’s to say no?”

  My sister. Even hearing those words was alien.

  Yael looked at her watch.

  “Don’t leave.” I felt like a baby, naked in a dark room. “I have tea and cookies.”

  I put the water up to boil and watched my hands as I retrieved three mugs. They were steady. I observed this with pride. Galia, I thought. Every time I’d seen her she’d been riled up about something. She and Yael were speaking softly in Hebrew when I placed the mugs on the table, neither glancing up.

  I found the bakery bag, tore it open, arranged the almond macaroons and lemon squares on a plate. I thought of my mother, standing on Nordau Street, glancing around, seeing the market, the taxi stand, the hotel, recognizing these places, but no longer knowing where she was. It was what I felt just then, what I tried not to feel.

  Galia leaned over and wiped a grain of rice off Yael’s face with great tenderness. I set the cookies on the table and took my seat.

  “I must have had a few words of Hebrew before we moved here, but all that’s left are a few tourist phrases,” I said. “What does ‘Vered’ mean?”

  Galia gave me a bug-eyed look. “Vered is your name,” she said.

  It was late when they piled into my car with a shopping bag full of leftovers in plastic containers. The sky was clear, and across the river the tracks of the inclines were lit with small red lights. I chattered on about the days when industry was all along the river and there were eleven of these inclines to take the workers, who lived high up those c
raggy slopes, to the mills that lined the river’s edge. Then I saw Galia’s head resting against the passenger window and Yael slumped in the back, and I abruptly stopped. I was so gullible, so easy to fool. Always. Hadn’t I believed the boy during hide and seek who’d said, “Don’t come out until I say so,” and waited in the bushes, shivering, long after the others had run away? Hadn’t I believed Harley all the times he’d promised to move? Hadn’t I trusted Tom, my former husband, until the evening when his lover called me, sobbing, to say, “and now he’s cheating on me!” So many women, so many years, every word and gesture, every plan we’d ever made, all our history a lie. Up ahead the road forked. I found the directions I’d printed out earlier and could not read them in the dim light.

  “Don’t go to sleep!” I said.

  Galia’s chin jerked up. “Ma?” She began to drift.

  “I need your help,” I said, changing lanes carelessly, startled by an angry horn.

  Galia straightened. “Why are you so upset, with the shouting?”

  “I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve never been out this way.” I gave Galia the directions.

  “Okay, okay.” She looked at the road signs overhead, pointed straight.

  I wondered if either of them would thank me for dinner or for driving them home. It made me feel small-minded to think this. I’m not like that, I thought. Maybe there was no single self, no solid core, but an evolving way of being.

  Galia told me where to exit. Two turns took us to the complex where they were staying, a series of attached units with vertical siding and slanted roofs. Even in the dark you could tell the construction was shoddy. Yael took the bag of leftovers. At the doorway, while Galia searched for the keys, Yael turned and waved.

  When they were inside and the light above their door went out, I backed out of the parking area and made the two turns that got me back to the highway. I didn’t like being alone with Galia’s words and shook my head like a dog shedding water, as if I could unhear what she’d told me. At the traffic light, her question expanded in my empty car. I tried to list the most outrageous of Harley’s lies, chronologically, and when it made me drowsy, I opened the windows to let in the wet, cold air. Outside was an auto body shop, a big new Rite Aid, a furniture rental store, a Wendy’s, a tower with a tall empty frame where once there’d been a sign. I could have been driving on the outskirts of any American city. I felt the sharp edges of Galia’s words in my gut, tried to hear the nurses’ cheerful voices, to estimate the mileage home and the time it would take to get there, to remember all the words to “American Pie,” but I was stuck, like the Chevy at the Levee.

  Up ahead the road became dark in a way I did not recognize. All the lit-up detritus of urban life was gone and in its place along the road were occasional houses. In a panic, I realized I was lost.

  No, not lost, I tried to tell myself. Not lost, just driving in the wrong direction. Turn around. That was all I had to do. Just turn and it’ll all be fine.

  My house was completely dark, except for a single candle in the dining room, flickering deep within its waxed walls. I cleared the table, arranged the plates in the dishwasher, washed the serving bowls and tall crystal wine glasses by hand. The perfect balabusta I’d yearned to be, I wiped up the counter and sink and ran the cloth over the faucets so they shone. My guests had eaten heartily and drank little. I corked the half bottle of remaining wine and took the empty bottle by the neck to dispose of it.

  On the way to the recycling bin, I passed the powder room, where the light still burned. The switch was beside the mirror, and though I did not mean to look, I caught sight of my own face, with its dark eyes and pursed lips, and terror washed over me. This shell that held the self was not mine, not me, because there was no me, no bottom to this sea. Just these silent words—I cannot—before the mirror shattered and fell into itself like a building imploding. I saw the broken glass and my own arm drawn back, smashing into the space where the mirror had been, until the jagged edges around the frame, and then the bottle, broke into pieces. And only I cannot. I went upstairs and switched the light on in my bedroom and tried not to remember the first weeks when Harley and I were together, when I would curl beside him in this bed, the sound of his heartbeat, his arms holding me close.

  I took the scissors from my desk and cut the bed sheet in half, then covered the mirrors in my bedroom and bathroom so I would not have to see my own image. I was not really Jewish, and yet I knew this was done during shiva so mourners could turn from their vanity and self-consciousness to the family and friends there to console them. Now, though, there was no family or friend, no body or soul, no funeral or burial, no handful of dirt thrown in the coffin, no impossibly blue sk—the sign of an uncaring world—no bitter rain as metaphor, no history. No sister. No self. Only my father leaning across the dining room table, asking me a question; my father losing his language, dying before I had an answer.

  For him, no mirrors were covered, no one sat shiva. There’d been no funeral, only an itinerant rabbi at the gravesite, a woebegone stutterer in an ill-fitting jacket who looked as if he’d been nabbed from a residence for homeless Jews, and my mother telling the rabbi she was an atheist, with no use for his primitive incantations. The only emotion I recall was the pity I felt for the rabbi, whose services my mother had harshly rejected. I did not wonder what my father might have believed. Even in death I hardly thought of him as more than an accessory my mother toted everywhere.

  And now, sitting on the edge of my stripped bed, I did not know what I was mourning or how to do it, and when I tried to unearth something that explained Galia’s words, there was only the same thing as before—my father saying, “Wasn’t there another one?”

  Only this time I can say, “Yes, Daddy. There had been another one.”

  Thirteen

  Mindy would take me in. This is how I got through the night. Mindy would say, “Come stay with us.” If she was out, she’d tell me where to find the key, direct me to the frozen leftovers and the cookies she hid from her husband. And so in the morning, I stepped over the shards of glass and called. Outside, dusty-looking snow flurries were blowing, and while the phone rang, I considered going to work instead, work, where I could lose myself. I was mulling over the irony of my instinct to lose myself when at last Mindy answered the phone.

  “Are you okay?” she asked when she heard my voice.

  “I’m fine,” I said. It was what I always said. “No,” I said. “I’m not fine, but I’ll be okay.”

  Getting to Mindy’s meant driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the oldest, narrowest highway system in the country, with treacherous S-curves, tunnels that had been blasted through the mountains and semis, driven by sleep-deprived, drug-addled truckers, barreling inches past my tiny car, filling me with a clanging fear that I would be sucked into one of those trucks, which my mother had explained was an actual, verifiable phenomenon known as the Venturi Effect, and not an illusion.

  In this vast rural center of this seemingly endless state, the radio was full of evangelical Christians, enticing me to take Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior. No-o-o-o! I cried, switching off the radio and trying to focus on Mindy’s house, her door opening, the warmth of her rooms. How full of righteous judgment I’d been in the years we didn’t speak. I thought of her as clueless, couldn’t understand why someone so intelligent would take up with some zhlub she met in her freshman year of college (granted, in comparative anatomy), at eighteen already beefy and middle-aged, the kind of local guy who’d never leave the town where we were raised and would end up working in his father’s industrial lighting business.? “Watch,” I’d said, to the mutual friend who’d told me. “She’ll get knocked up by this loser and be saddled with his babies.”

  And she did. She got pregnant. Instead of entering the clinical psychology program at Penn, she married Stu and they moved to a split-level a half mile from our parents, a fixer-upper with a linoleum
kitchen floor that peeled at the edges, cabinets with a halo of smudge around each pull, and a dropped ceiling with fluorescent lights Stu’s father installed as a gift. Another baby, then the PhD. At a backyard graduation party, Mindy schlepped her gigantic self around the yard with one kid attached to her ankle like a prison monitor, one on her hip, and the third dropping in her uterus as she ate a hot dog grilled by Stu.

  Mindy was not a self-righteous person who trumpeted the “we” of the long-married couple and used this togetherness as a barricade and moral example. I knew they’d struggled. Stu let his father boss him around. His feet stank. He was a Neanderthal; his idea of a great movie was Nightmare on Elm Street. Mindy and Stu bickered and threatened to split up, then got older, began to accommodate, curling in each other’s arms.

  Max, their aged lab, greeted me at the door by jumping on me with his leash in his mouth. When at last I worked my way past, I found my friends in the kitchen, quarreling over takeout, Mindy gesturing with the phone, and Hannah pulling out menus from a junk drawer. Dark-haired last time I saw her, Hannah was now a platinum blonde who wore heavy black glasses perched low on her nose. It was an adorable new look, and they, my friends, looked plump and affluent, and once again I wondered exactly what had offended my youthful sensibilities—that Stu had no ambition greater than earning a reasonable living, enjoying his family and hanging out with his friends? A happy, angst-free man in his ancient Rutgers sweatshirt, with only one driving question on his mind just then: “What do you want? We’re ordering in.”

  Max put his head on Mindy’s lap, and I said, “Anything. I don’t really care.”

  “We need you to care,” said Stu. “We need a tiebreaker.”

  “Okay, Thai,” I said, settling in while they haggled over choices.

  I took the glass of wine Mindy offered and said, “Love the hair, Hannah.”

  Mindy: “It’s too blonde.”

  “I think it’s great,” I said. “So tell me about school.”