Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  The aide, a tall man with lively eyes and a missing front tooth, spoke in Hebrew to Aviva and then to me. “Hi,” I said, in a high, bright voice that I hardly recognized as mine. “Here I am.” Her affect did not change. “Your sister. From America.”

  The aide tapped Aviva’s shoulder and spoke to her in Hebrew. Still nothing in her eyes. I said, “Oh well,” as if my disappointment was trivial. We laughed, the aide and I, then parted.

  Mrs. Silk was sitting at her desk. I sank into the soft chair meant for guests and said, “I failed.” The walls of her office were crowded with photos of arid landscapes. Along her windowsill was a collection of small cacti—fuzzy, prickly, gnarled.

  “You’re here,” Mrs. Silk said. “You’ve come to see your sister.” She handed me a bottle of water, nudged a box of tissues close, claimed there was no such thing as failure. “There are so many ways to know another person,” she said. “Once you spend time together, you’ll start to understand her.”

  “Can I arrange to spend time with Aviva another day?”

  “You can visit whenever you like. You can see her here or take her out for the afternoon. You might want to stay in one of the family houses here in the community, which your father always did. Whatever is best.”

  “Was my mother ever with him?” I asked.

  She touched her throat, ran her hand down to the pearls, and fingered each one, as if they were rosary beads. “Your father was always alone.”

  “And it didn’t disturb you that she never visited her daughter?”

  “I try to support my families. There’s no sense in judging. People do the best they can.”

  “What does that mean, ‘people do the best they can’? I hear it all the time and never really got it.”

  “You don’t know what your mother’s life was like when Aviva was born. It was a different time. Perhaps she had severe postpartum depression; in her day, it was brushed off. Minimized. Dismissed. She might not have had the emotional or physical ability to take care of Aviva.”

  Mrs. Silk handed me a folder. “I made copies of her medical records as you’d asked, starting with the ones we received when she moved here. There are progress reports, notes on therapies and day programs, a copy of the sensory checklist. There’s a great deal more, hundreds of pages, but I didn’t want to overwhelm you, so I chose what I thought was most meaningful. Everything is in Hebrew, though. Can you get someone to help with translation?”

  “I’m sure I can,” I said.

  When I stood to leave, I noticed what looked like pebbles in a small plant pot on her desk. “That’s my Lithops. It’s a succulent from South Africa. Some people call them ‘living stones.’ Aren’t they marvelous?”

  I agreed they were marvelous, though I didn’t think so at all.

  “I’ll learn more about Aviva after I read this?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And please—you can ask whatever questions you have and meet with her therapists. We encourage family to take an active role in decision making.”

  “She was smaller than me at birth?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Roxanne. What did your cousin tell you about Aviva?”

  “That I shouldn’t visit. She didn’t even know her name.”

  “Some of what you read in the medical report will be disturbing. Can someone sit with you when you go through these papers?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I could not imagine who.

  The mountain air was cold and crisp. I took it in deeply and thought of the Man Who Likes his Job in the pool with Aviva. His big, somber eyes, and tuft of chest hair, the limp woman in his arms, the song he sang. I had never seen anything like this before, and yet this strange scene was full of familiar pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle of a monument in a distant city. As I walked to the parking lot, some of the pieces fit together: the blue sky, the ancient stones dappled with moss, the tiny flowers that found root in the crevices, and for a moment, it again seemed as if I knew every piece of what I had seen and nothing at all. The song this man sang, his big, somber eyes, my sister’s hair, her feet. Had they ever touched the ground? Had anyone ever slipped shoes onto her feet? She—each time I heard this pronoun, a shiver went through me, a shock I did not feel when I heard her name—Aviva. She, there was something about it, something feminine. She, a girl, a woman. Her hair, her hands. And all that went along with it, even, or especially, in the house where I was raised, where there was no conversation about what girls could do, because girls grew up and did it. She, getting her period. She, at a party; her dress. Her kiss at twelve, the surprise of a boy’s tongue in her mouth. Her dreams. Her room with two beds. Her sister beside her.

  “Next time you come…” Mrs. Silk had said.

  I had smiled and nodded and thought of my suitcase in the rental car. I could drive to Ronit’s, where Galia’s room had been set up for me, and fly home from there, or knock on Dina’s door, sit with her while she looked at men, pretending to swoon over the plump, pale-faced ones, then cross the hall to my mother’s apartment, chant, “Aviva! Aviva!” and go home.

  Or I could go to the nearby spa Dina had recommended, which had a long massage menu and the most delicious food. Maybe I could get a hot stone massage. Or maybe, like Harley, I could sleep in the car.

  I was standing in the parking lot when a tall, thin man in a leather jacket hurried by. His stride was long and his hair was in disarray. Someone familiar, I thought, trying to place him. Merchant, neighbor, passerby? The sky had grown dark. I watched him zip his jacket to the neck and realized it had gotten cold. Maybe that was why I was shaking.

  He pulled out his keys and his car let out a yip of recognition. Its headlights winked. I thought of those Japanese pets that gave their owners comfort—toys that blinked, inflatable dolls. He got into his car, backed up and around. A whole world of people satisfied by robotic voices and soft contours.

  The man pulled up in front of me and lowered his car window. “Are you okay?”

  Now I saw that it was the Man who Likes His Job, with his sad eyes and cheerful demeanor. For a moment, I was silent, afraid if I opened my mouth, an ocean of sorrow might spill out. “I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks. I’m all right.”

  “You know where you’re going?” His English was excellent.

  “I have a map. I’m okay.”

  He pulled away.

  I’m fine!

  I was so lost. I hadn’t turned the key in the ignition and already I was lost.

  I followed the signs for Rosh Pina, where I would find the spa. The roads were narrow and curving, and the oncoming cars, with their bright headlights, seemed to be coming straight at me.

  The desk clerk, finding I had no reservation, told me they were full up. I asked if she could recommend another place and she turned to make a phone call.

  The guests padded around the lobby in their slippers and terry robes, as if this was a sanatorium. I hadn’t tired of watching them when the clerk returned with the name of a nearby guesthouse with a vacant room. When I arrived twenty minutes later, I felt like the first person who’d stumbled onto the grounds in decades.

  My room was spare—a desk, a hard-backed chair, a second chair, on which were three thin neatly folded towels. Above a chest of drawers was a watercolor of cypress trees. I walked across the cold tile floor and studied the photographs on the wall. One was a portrait of a slight man in small wire-framed glasses, with a black medical bag beside him. In the second, a large group of adults and children posed in front of a lake. The captions were in Hebrew.

  I slid beneath tight sheets and fell immediately to sleep, and when I opened my eyes it was light. Does she wake of her own accord? I wondered. Was it noisy where she slept, the way it was in a hospital, where clanking carts and conversations announced the dawning day? If she was roused by activity, did she think morning and anticipate all that was in store for her?—nourishme
nt, an aide with strong arms, sunlight, music. If language did not shape this anticipation, how did her body register the cycle of daily activities? How did her body signal the pleasure she felt when the metal shades were raised and daylight brightened her room? Or her impatience as she waited to be lifted from her bed and taken from her room to experience the company of others? How did she ask or signal her despair or call out if someone was hurting her? Mama! That sound that sprang from the lips of babies worldwide, useless for orphans whose cries went unanswered for so long they learned not to cry.

  I thought of the dog waiting by the door for her friend. I thought of the baby, Roxanne, curled beside a sister in embryonic fluid. I thought of them sleeping together in a crib. To have this sister, this twin nestled beside me and then to have no one? What happens when you lack the words to explain an absence, a state of being without? Had I stopped smiling? Lost my appetite? Was this primal heartache the reason I could not work with numbers—two take away one, and no one to explain the answer? If I grieved silently, failing to thrive, who might have noticed? Would my father have been able to hold the remaining baby, knowing he’d sent the other one away? Nothing in my dim memory said yes.

  The floor was icy. Some of what you read in the medical record will be disturbing, Mrs. Silk had said. More disturbing than what I’d seen? I opened the shutters, thinking I might have a view of the lake in the photo on the wall. Instead I saw a barn and a series of stalls. The old-fashioned key was on the bureau. The hotel name in English as well as Hebrew was on the plastic medallion dangling from the chain. Paradise, it said.

  

  In Paradise, breakfast was served in a cold room with low ceilings and long tables. On my first morning, the only guests were a young couple in the far corner. They sat with their elbows on the table and their opposite arms clasped, as if they were about to arm wrestle. A swarthy young man with a shaved head set a plate in front of me with brown bread, soft cheeses, and a salad of tomatoes and cucumber. There was no coffee in Paradise, but there were fresh herbs for tea and halvah made with honey from local hives. Also wireless, two outdoor hot tubs, and a specialist in the Alexander Technique.

  Outside, the sheep bahhed in their odd phlegmy voices. I wondered where Aviva was right then and what she felt or thought. What was the purpose of her life? What was the purpose of mine?

  I’d found a website once that promised to lead me to that answer. Not your job or your goal, but your real purpose, it said. I was instructed to ask myself, “What is the purpose of my life” and then write whatever answer came to mind and keep writing until all the false answers got pushed aside. I would know when I got to the correct answer because it would make me cry. That was my true purpose.

  What would the server say if I asked him that question? And the young woman, clasping the hand of her lover across the room? Would she say, “To get married”? When I was young, I thought marriage and children were the sad wishes made by women without ambition. I’d had no interest in babies, never held one, felt no ease with my friends’ kids until they grew older. Then I’d gotten pregnant. Tom had been overjoyed. His eyes filled with tears, and he loved me more than ever and told me so, pulling me close, reassuring me. You will be fine. You’ll be a wonderful mother. It was spring. I let those words sink into me. The cherry trees were in bloom. Everywhere daddies had babies strapped to their chests, and pairs of laughing mothers strolled with their little ones. Adorable toddlers peered from backpacks and bounced on subway seats. The desire to be a mother grew. Our baby, I thought, in a tentative, hopeful way. Then the miscarriage, these cells, this protoplasm expelled, but not the dream of the baby, not the yearning to hold, to touch, to tend. My empty arms ached.

  When I visited my mother, I knew not to tell her about the miscarriage, because speaking of it would make me cry, and crying was forbidden. My crying was over nothing; it was being spoiled rotten, it gave her a headache, all that wah wah wah. I had everything handed to me on a silver platter, knew nothing about sorrow. But she was my mother, and when I saw her, the words came out. “I was pregnant,” and though I covered my face, I could not push the crying back inside.

  I felt her sit on the couch beside me, felt her breathe. “You will live through this,” she said. Her voice quavered. I felt her helplessness. My crying grew wilder, until I thought something inside me would rip. For the lost baby, for me, for my mother, with her own unspeakable losses, who I could not ever seem to comfort.

  Across the room, the young couple kissed.

  To be productive, I’d written, after reading the website. To distinguish myself from the balabustas and balagulas.

  It had not made me cry.

  Paradise had been a health farm, established at the turn of the twentieth century by the German doctor whose photo was in my room. For all I knew, the spartan rooms had been part of the plan, the icy floors thought to have a salutary effect. I stayed for three nights, saying nothing more than “boker tov” and “todah.” I worked in the mornings, and in the afternoons, I wandered through the pastures past the dairy cows and unlatched the gate to the cool stalls, where the goats, and sheep with tagged ears, were resting. The painful memory of those miscarriages kept returning, that my body had rebelled, that my husband had lost interest.

  On my first day in Paradise, the voice that castigated me was louder than the others: Why is everything about you? it asked. Why is it your loss, your miscarriages, your horror upon meeting this sister? By the second day, the voices had receded. No expectations hung heavy in the air—that every mother loved her children; that every sister was bursting with joy at finding a lost sibling. There were no platitudes about love or loyalty in Paradise, no rush to stamp an experience with the expected sentiment, only the knowledge that I had become the guardian of her name—Aviva. That was all—Aviva.

  In Paradise, the eggs I ate were from the chickens in the nearby coops. The cheese was from the milk of their goats and sheep, the vegetables from the garden, the flowers from their greenhouses. I liked to crouch beside the sheep in their cool stalls and let them run their fat tongues across my palms and bring carrots to the donkey, who quickly learned I had treats and began meeting me at the gate. If I stroked her muzzle for too long she became impatient for her treat and lifted a lip, showing off her huge square teeth. The cows swished their tails and looked at me with their big wet eyes. Empty eyes, I would have said before this trip, though now I wasn’t sure.

  Aviva’s vision was within the normal range, Mrs. Silk had told me. So was her hearing. In the packet she’d given me was a “sensory response check list” filled out by the aides and therapists who worked with Aviva, over a hundred very specific questions about her likes and dislikes, the ways she was oversensitive, the ways she needed to be stimulated.

  The document was in Hebrew, so the pages of questions were as beyond my understanding as my mother’s decision to move back to this country, where there were no kin except the grown child she had left behind, whose name she could not remember, whose existence she had denied. It was as if she’d been driven by some primitive instinct that she, herself, no longer recognized. I wondered if she dreamt of Aviva, if the name flittered through her consciousness like a moth.

  I would bring her to Chaverim. It seemed important to do this. Maybe it would unearth something within her and she would tell me the pieces of this story that still were hidden. I tried not to hope for any great emotional release. I’d just tell Sunny we were spending the day together. Then I’d pull up in front of her building, cut the engine, wait. Sunny would bring my mother down. I’d help her into the passenger seat. I haven’t the foggiest idea where I am, she would say when I fastened her seat belt.

  Neither do I, I would tell her.

  Fifteen

  As soon as I reached the second floor in my mother’s building, I saw the new lock Sunny had installed. Just as I had asked, it was too high for Mom to reach. But the door was ajar. I walked right in,
pausing in the spotless kitchen. Magazine photos had been tacked onto the fridge with magnets, and on the small table near the window were two pomelos in a bowl and two round polka dot placemats. Sunny had a son in the Philippines she had not seen in five years; he lived in the house she still owned. I knew I needed to talk to her about the door but when I thought of all that she’d left behind and all she tolerated from my mother, I hated complaining about anything.

  I called “hello?” and stepped into the living room, where the remainder of my mother’s bagged possessions were piled against one wall. “Shalom?”

  They were in my mother’s small bedroom. Sunny was arranging a floppy-brimmed hat on Mom, pushing up the front and then experimenting with the sides. I watched my mother step closer to the mirror, turning her head to one side and then the other, regarding herself with pleasure. When Sunny noticed I was there, her eyes widened and she said, “Ohhhh,” like a drowning woman.

  Sunny put her hands on my mother’s shoulders, turning her from the mirror to the doorway, where I stood, and I found myself facing a small happy lady in a white sweater, powder blue pants, canvas sneakers, with a silly hat on her head.

  “Oh, hello, dear,” she said, as if she’d seen me the day before. There was no surprise in her greeting, only a kind of ordinary pleasure. I took her hand, felt her loose skin as she withdrew from my touch.

  Sunny helped get Leona dressed and into the car. Like Harley, her veneer of good cheer overrode my mother’s confused resistance. Oh, Leona! Going for a nice ride. With your daughter. Ohhh, it is so happy, the mother and the daughter together!

  Sunny waved as we drove off. As soon as we were out of the city, my mother’s head drooped. I busied myself reading signs and paying attention to the road until we were north of Haifa, where small towns dotted the arid rocky land. Then I found that when I looked to one side, it was the Jewish homeland, a dream realized after thousands of years of yearning, and when I looked to the other side, there were Palestinians uprooted from their ancestral homes. I wondered idly if the best I’d ever be able to do would be to look one way and see a neglectful mother, and look the other way and see a woman who’d been a victim herself, isolated and alone at the end of her life.