Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  Hannah scrunched her nose, said, “It sucks,” and pushed the heavy glasses higher.

  “Don’t listen to her. She loves her art history class,” Mindy told me.

  “Thank you, Mother, for once again telling me how I feel.”

  Dinner arrived in plastic containers. Hannah scarfed down a plateful of food and got up from the table. Mindy shifted in her seat, as if to call out to her, and Stu put his hand on her shoulder. Mindeleh, he sometimes called her in jest. My beautiful Jewess. She softened, sighed heavily.

  Stu loaned me his ski jacket after dinner, and Mindy and I left to walk the dog in a nearby park. I pulled up the hood of Stu’s jacket and listened. Hannah wanted to quit school. Mindy didn’t know if it was a broken romance or something more serious that would not heal on its own. All Hannah would say was “leave me alone,” and Stu was doing his Mr. Mellow thing, which was no help at all.

  “Eighteen,” I said, thinking of my first year of school, how lonely and disoriented I’d been. “It’s a tough time for some of us. Maybe not for you.”

  Max squatted on the grass, his blunt snout held high.

  “Oh, please,” she said. “All that angst and self-loathing.”

  The deep, warm pockets of Stu’s parka were full of small items I studied under the street light while Mindy cleaned up Max’s mess. Coins, screws, PVC fittings, the fibrous pieces of peanut shells, the crimped edges of candy wrappers—ordinary domestic detritus. When I was single, I was always finding folded bills in the back pockets of my jeans. Also, single earrings, ticket stubs, subway tokens, phone numbers scribbled on cocktail napkins. Once I borrowed Mindy’s robe and found Lego pieces and a doll shoe in the pocket.

  I held out my hand to show her what I’d found and said, “I think the contents of a person’s pockets tell you everything you need to know, and mine are empty.”

  “No, they’re not,” she said.

  They are, I thought, on the way back. My pockets are empty.

  By the time we returned, Hannah had gone out and Stu had drifted into the family room to watch basketball. Mindy made tea and we sat on stools in her kitchen, recently redone, with glass-fronted cabinets and brushed metal appliances. On the fridge were photos from Mindy’s son’s graduation, a shopping list, a calendar with cartoons about dieting, a magnet that had been a bagel before someone had pasted on googly eyes and embalmed it.

  Our conversation jumped in time and place and tone in a way that was so comforting and familiar, it took a while before I told her about my dinner with Galia and Yael. When I got to Galia’s speculation, “Your father died so they let themselves believe she died also,” I could not figure out what to call her—baby, sister, twin? Her, I said when I was ready to continue.

  We listened to the squeak of sneakers and the blat of horns in an arena far away. “I’m thinking your cousin has more to tell you,” Mindy said.

  “Why aren’t you surprised by anything I’ve told you? Do you know some of what I’ve just said?”

  “I feel like I heard something.”

  “What kind of something? Why wouldn’t you have told me?”

  “Because it’s only now, listening to you, that I vaguely recall overhearing something I didn’t understand. It was a long time ago, when we were kids.”

  “Like what?” I asked. “I need you to be totally honest. What do you remember about us, Min? What were we like to you?”

  “Well, you stole everyone’s heart, you were so adorable. Even my mother liked you better than she liked me.”

  “No, she didn’t,” I said, though I was more her type of child than her serious, self-sufficient daughter.

  “Us,” I said, remembering what it had been like to enter a stranger’s home and feel a kind of malevolence in the air. Had our house felt like that? “My family. Our house.”

  “It was super neat. Nothing out of place. Compared to ours, which was a sty. But we were never there, Rox. You practically lived at my house.”

  It was true. I’d walk in without knocking, follow the haze of smoke from the cigarettes that would kill Muriel, and fall into her arms. Come here, doll. Come, tsatskeleh.

  Stu groaned loudly in the family room. Mindy said, “I was a little scared of your mother. But you know that. She didn’t like me. It was kind of a shock, given what a goody-goody I was.”

  “She didn’t dislike you,” I said, as if this could soothe the hurt Mindy had felt all those years before.

  “You really want to know what I remember, Rox? Those peach loafers you bought for yourself, and your mom being furious because they were impractical, and you wearing them until they got all gross and turned out. I mean, you were making your own dinner when you were thirteen. Buying your own school clothes. Muriel would get all bent out of shape about the way you were neglected, but if I said something negative, I’d get a huge lecture. How I had no right to judge after all your parents had gone through.”

  Unspeakable loss of such proportion there was no room for other sorrow in our house, no room for fear or desire, for failure or heartache. I didn’t say this to Mindy, couldn’t have explained that I had breathed this air as a child, and even now, fully grown, as I sat with my oldest friend, drinking tea, listening to a basketball game playing in the other room, I breathed this same air, lived by these same words. You have no right…

  It was after midnight when I followed Mindy upstairs. I slid into Adam’s narrow bed. Posters of well-oiled women in thongs and tattooed basketball stars still hung on the walls and stick-on stars glowed dimly on the ceiling. Staring at the stars above my head, I remembered how, as a child, I’d lose myself in screaming fits, tear posters off my bedroom walls, pound on doors until I punched holes in the thin wood, no one to calm me until I learned to calm myself. But I had learned. I hadn’t been that child, that teenager, until Harley came along, his dead eyes making me as frantic as I’d ever been. I rolled over, thought about calling Ronit. Throwing my voice into the void, the awkward shalom, hello, asking what she might tell me about her.

  I gave up trying to sleep and got up. My boots were by the front door. I slid into them, found Stu’s parka, and went outside. Soft snow clung to the bare boughs of the sycamore trees and turned the yards into what looked like desert, with undulating waves of sand. I am Florence of Arabia, I thought, for a moment reluctant to ruin the solemn beauty of the creamy-looking drifts.

  Once I’d told Harley my parents had started leaving me alone at night when I was seven, and he refused to believe me. I was misremembering, he insisted. But I wasn’t. We had just moved. Everything was new—my school, our house.

  The afternoons were not bad, since my father was often back from teaching an hour or two after I’d gotten home. During my short time alone, there were no flash cards to study, no arithmetic problems I could not understand, no sound of my father’s heavy, disappointed breathing. I colored and drew and when I got older made maps of imaginary towns with names like Pleasantville that had pet shops, RR crossings, and penny candy stores. Ye olde swimming hole was a blue crater in the center of each one.

  The evenings were different. My father set out dinner for me before he escorted my mother to a banquet or professional engagement. If there was leftover chicken or flanken, he put my dinner on a plate covered with waxed paper. Sometimes there was a sandwich he knew I liked—salami and mustard on rye bread; cream cheese, olive, and tomato on pumpernickel. Milk in a glass. Three Fig Newtons. A stern reminder not to answer the door for anyone.

  You remember that, right? Don’t answer the door.

  I ate dinner right away. Then the sky would darken and I would hear someone walk toward the house. Someone knocking. Or footsteps. The screech of tires. Car lights shining on the wall. Something coming for me in the night. Fear gripped me. I became paralyzed, unable to move. My body shook as if with fever. My teeth chattered in my head. Hours could pass between the sound I heard and t
he purr of the car engine as my parents’ car crawled up the driveway. Hours, when I was stuck on the couch or on the floor of my room or in the closet, bones shaking, the fear never abating. Sometimes I was stuck for so long that I wet my pants and left dark stains on the rug or couch. The first moment was pleasure, a relief to release the warm urine I’d tried to hold in with the heel of my foot pressing hard. After a while, my pants became clammy and stiff, and still I could not move. It was only when l heard my parents’ car pull into the driveway that I could get up, quickly change my clothes, turn over the couch cushions, throw my wet clothes in the garbage.

  I never thought to push them to the bottom of the trash and was always surprised when my father confronted me with the garment between his fingers—cotton underpants. Jeans.

  “You throw in the trash good clothes we buy for you?”

  I said nothing.

  Then I learned to say to my father, “They’re ugly. I hate them.”

  Eventually I learned to say, “I hate you.”

  

  Hannah came home while I was sitting on a bench by the back door, working off my muddy shoes. Though I’d seen her earlier that evening, I was still surprised that she was no longer the little girl who’d seen me in their family room with the comforter drawn over my head, and said to Mindy, “Mommy, she looks like a dorf.”

  Now she gave me such a strange look that I said, “Hey, are you all right?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?” she said, with a furious unzipping of her jacket. “I don’t know what she told you but nothing is wrong.”

  Her arrival had woken Max the dog, and when she lowered herself to the floor, he backed into her, and sat in her lap in what looked like the most uncomfortable position for both of them. Hannah put her nose in his fur, and I said, “She’s your mom, and she’s worried.” I was struck by how inextricably “Mom” was linked with love, tenderness, and concern, no questions asked, even for me.

  “Then she needs to back off and stop acting like I’ll end up selling pencils on a street corner if I take some time off. Really, Mom? Like that’s going to happen if I take a leave? I mean, you quit school.”

  “I am not a good role model,” I said.

  “Shut up! You have this fabulous business; you’re doing what you want, unlike my father, stuck inside that stupid factory.”

  She pushed Max away, and I said, “Hannah. Your father is the most content man I’ve ever met.”

  And she said, “Uch. He’s fat.”

  I thought I’d slip out the next morning before anyone was awake, but when I came downstairs, Mindy was already perched on a kitchen stool in a hooded gray robe, dark hair tucked behind her ears, glasses low on her nose, Sunday Times crossword on her lap. When she heard me, this friend, who had sheltered me without judgment, looked up from her magazine, with such affection in her gaze that I began to cry. It stunned me, the suddenness and physical ache. I was so far from understanding love in its fullest, did not yet know the satisfaction one could feel from offering comfort, in coming forward, in the laying on of hands. I kept my face hidden, ashamed of the ugliness of my grief, unable to open myself wide enough for all the comforting I needed.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said when I could speak.

  I didn’t know what she thought. I didn’t know what I thought either.

  On the way home, I drove through the town where Mindy and I had grown up. Our street was part of a development of split-level houses constructed in the early 1960s. In recent years they’d been snapped up by Russians, as if these clapboard houses, like cars with fins, remained an image of American prosperity in the imagination of émigrés. Even bare of leaves you could see how big the trees had grown. There were additions on several of the houses and the manicured shrubs had been replaced by prairie grasses. I had forgotten how quiet these streets could be.

  I knew this neighborhood better than any place I’d ever known and could still point out the house with the mother in curlers, the house with the mother who fed us any time of day, the one where the mother made her husband and his friends play poker in the garage. Then Mindy’s house at the corner, with the unmade beds, the TV droning, the freezer full of frozen dinners. The mother, Muriel, was a chain-smoking blonde who talked like an airhead, embarrassed Mindy by wearing hot pants in the summer and flirting with the boys, and was as smart and big-hearted as her daughter. When company was over, she’d draw me close and tell her guests, “This is my other daughter. The artistic one.”

  Muriel took me to the Guggenheim and the Whitney in New York. While Mindy sulked in the gift shops, we meandered through the galleries. If my work hung at the library or local bank, Muriel would stop by and kvell over a favorite piece. She’d been dead for five years. Standing in front of Mindy’s house, winter wind biting my cheeks, I felt as if I was just now beginning to absorb it.

  At the other end of the street was the house where we’d lived from the time I was seven. What do you remember? I asked myself. The math lessons, the languages I did not know, the silence, the fear, the sense of what I could not say, the forbidden tears, the way I needed to escape so I could breathe, the way I did escape, but not fully, even now.

  I walked through the snow to the back of the house, looked at their deck with its tilted-over chairs covered in green plastic, and a fierce desire came over me to see if the map I’d drawn on the closet wall was still there. I looked through the storm door, saw the cabinets, the artwork tacked haphazardly on the fridge. I could probably get in. It was something I used to do when I was in high school—cut classes and walk into peoples’ houses. I looked at their clothes, opened their jewelry boxes and desk drawers, studied the contents of their medicine cabinets. I did not steal anything. Objects were sensate to me—the glass apples and soapstone ducks, the Danish bud vases and Hummel figurines—they had feelings. The Kiddush cup, bronzed baby shoe, crystal candy dishes, pewter coffee set, Christ on the cross, and the lamb in the manger—I liked to touch and examine them, as if I would absorb something of the life that went on in a house. I always left them as they were, as if they’d be unsettled, devastated if I took them from the places they belonged.

  You were so alone. Mindy taking me in with that liquid gaze.

  So I bought my own clothes, I answered silently, standing in the snow. So what compared to all they’d suffered.

  A boy’s high voice came from the distance, and the scrape of a snow shovel. I thought of the therapist I’d seen, a soft-spoken man with round cheeks, who composed himself just as I began to speak, pressing his fingers together, pursing his full lips, the room full of clocks and kachinas and tissue boxes, and I heard myself tell him: “My mother does not love me,” and it seemed so ridiculous, the line a Borscht Belt comedian might utter—her muddah didn’t love her!—that I began to laugh and could not stop. The clocks ticked. The kachina behind the therapist’s head had bulging eyes, a toucan beak, feathers bursting from his crown, and the laughter hurt, though I could not make myself stop, and just as I was gaining control, I saw him clench his lips, trying mightily not to join in. Mindy was horrified when I told her this, but even then I knew that the harsh, weird noise I made was not about humor, that neither of us was amused.

  Still, how could the therapy have been successful when I came to that room like a stick figure on a sheet of white paper: wavy lines for sloppy hair, a triangle for a dress that marked me as a girl, sun in the upper corner. No path to lead me out of that blankness. No true name, no sister, no history, no mother who could not love.

  

  When I got home, I swept the glass into a box and ran a damp mop over the bathroom floor and hall and continued into the kitchen. As soon as the floor was dry, I called Ronit. On the fourth ring, I got someone’s disembodied voice, waited for the beep and said, “Ronit? It’s Roxanne from Pittsburgh. Vered.” It was the first time I’d used that odd name. “Would you please retur
n my call?”

  A splinter of glass pierced my sock, and I mopped again. I knew that no matter how many times I swept the floor, I’d keep finding slivers glinting in the corners. Broken glass like memory, seemingly swept away, but there, nonetheless, despite your efforts.

  Ronit returned my call on Monday. It was nearly two o’clock, and I’d been picking at the innards of an unrolled wrap I’d gotten for lunch. “Vered,” she began.

  My stomach tightened when I heard her deep, blunt voice.

  I knew what she was going to say. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Please believe I did not know before now.”

  I looked at the mess spread out on waxed paper, smears of eggplant and half-circles of squash. “Okay,” I said. “I believe you.”

  “I have everything you want—the name of the place where she stays, a person there who can tell you more. But, Vered, don’t go. There is nothing left.”

  Nothing left, as if this sister had dissolved in a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West? I’m melting! I’m melting! Oh, what a world!

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “She will not know who you are.”

  “I want to see her anyhow,” I said, though I could not imagine another trip, so soon after the last one.

  “It broke your father’s heart going to that place. Don’t go.”

  “You haven’t told me her name,” I said.

  “Aviva,” she said.

  “Aviva.” I felt my teeth against my lower lip. “Aviva,” I said again.

  “I did not know, Vered. This is the truth. I never thought to ask.”

  “I understand,” I said. In a way I did. Because Aviva had been a problem, not a person. She had no identity. Her name was so seldom used, Ronit had not even known it until I had pushed her to find out.

  I hung up and cleaned the mess off my desk. I listened to the hiss of the espresso machine, and The Flaming Lips, singing. Her name is Yoshimi—she’s a black belt in karate…