Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  There was so much else we talked about in this long conversation that neither of us wanted it to end: it wasn’t just the range of topics, but the intimacy of our conversation, the questions we mulled but could not answer—who should we care for? How much of our lives should we spend looking after others? When do we turn away to protect ourselves?

  When the wind picked up, we got up to move into the atrium, and the journal slipped off my lap, its pages splayed. When he retrieved it for me, he asked, “May I look?” and though I felt some reluctance, I said, “Sure.”

  He was amused by the naked baby’s face. “That’s Shelley,” he said.

  “It didn’t start out that way,” I said, taking the notebook back.

  “How strange. And remarkable. To be able to take in the world that way.”

  “We aren’t calling each other remarkable, remember? I think you’re going to have to stick with strange,” I said.

  “In a good way,” he said. “As in ‘not banal.’ Unique.”

  “Not familiar?”

  “The drawings aren’t at all. You are, in a way.”

  “Yes,” I said, brightening. “You too. As if we’ve met before.”

  It was an electric moment that we held then broke in synchrony as we moved inside.

  We found good chairs in the atrium and continued to talk until he glanced at his watch. “I really must get going. I’ve arranged to hike in the Banias with a companion.”

  He retrieved a wallet from his back pocket and asked to borrow a pen, and I watched him position the card on his knee and write his contact information on the back in neat block letters, wondering about this companion—male, female?

  “I see Aviva whenever I’m here,” he said, handing me the card. “Whenever you like, I can give you a report.”

  I looked at his handwritten name and cell phone number then slid the card into my bag, sorry our conversation had come to an end. When he rose, I did too, following him down a corridor to a set of side doors that parted for us. “If we had met in San Francisco and you’d asked me about my background, I would have said I was nothing. No siblings. Not Christian, not Jewish.”

  “And now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Ask me the next time we meet.”

  We walked together down the long sloping drive to the parking area. His car was parked next to mine in the nearly empty lot. I said, “When I saw you swimming with Aviva, I thought of you as the Man Who Likes his Job. You looked so…joyful in the water. Thank you for swimming with her, for looking out for her. And for stopping to talk to me.”

  He took out his car keys, and his car made its affectionate yip and lit up. “You know, I am a man who likes my job,” he said.

  “I can tell,” I said. “What would you do if you were me? Aviva and I have been separated our whole lives. When I think about the way my family tried to erase her existence, I feel this urge to defend her, but it’s not like I can change her situation. And it’s sentimental to imagine my being here means something to her, isn’t it? She doesn’t care one way or another.”

  “What about you? Did you ever think that in time you might find that Aviva means something to you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It might help if you didn’t view Aviva as an all-or-nothing problem. You know, when you’re here, you’re here and it’s good, and that’s what it is.”

  I stood in the lot, knowing I should let him leave. “That day, when you were swimming with Aviva, and I walked toward the pool, what did you see? I mean, since you study faces?”

  “An honest expression of sadness.” Then he explained—eyelids droopy, inner corners of the brow going up, lip corners pulled down. He’d been taken by the purity of the emotion on my face.

  “Could you tell I was Aviva’s sister?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “So I also looked like death?”

  “That I don’t see. And when you begin to spend time with Aviva, you’ll experience her in a different way, too.”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine,” I said.

  He opened his car door and strapped himself into his seat.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you late.”

  “Ah, sorry, sorry,” he said.

  I watched him drive away, then walked back up the hill to the building and thought about Baruch’s early work with mothers and infants. Infants as young as two months respond to their mothers’ expressions, he’d said. In one of their studies, they’d videotaped two groups of three-month-old babies. The infants in the first group faced mothers who acted in a flat, depressed way. These babies mirrored the blank gaze of their mothers, unlike the babies with cheerful, expressive mothers: these second pairs responded in symmetry. Infants could cope with a brief “still face” by attempting to get their mothers’ attention, but if it continued, they became withdrawn, disorganized. In later studies, even when depressed mothers got better, the infants did not. Their behavior problems continued. They suffered socially, were clingy and anxious, did not separate from their mothers as readily as the others.

  I entered the building, passing the birds in their enclosure and the visiting families.

  I thought how distressing it was to try to interact with someone who would not return your gaze. My mother. Harley in his chair. Aviva.

  I met up with my sister in the greenhouse, a bright space, where trays of seedlings lined the wall, and in the center of the room was a large wood table, where on this day, sprigs of fragrant herbs had been set out. When the pretty young aide sitting with Aviva saw me, she gestured for me to take her place at the table and left the two of us alone. I turned Aviva’s wheelchair from the table to me. “Hello,” I said.

  Boneless twin, with eyes that did not seem to take me in, thick eyelashes, long hair that someone had braided. Peach-colored fleece sweater, zipped high. Slack mouth. Cool fisted hands. Turned-in feet with the toes touching, sheathed in booties. Wasn’t I supposed to feel love, seeing all the ways we were alike—ears, brow, hair, chin? Shouldn’t love simply rise?

  What a myth I’d created by imagining I’d sprung from the soil and not from the loins of my wounded parents. Sitting woodenly beside Aviva, I felt all the ways I was of my mother.

  She breathed. So did I.

  The loamy, earthy smell was comforting. I touched her hand. Does it matter to you if I don’t come back? I knew it didn’t.

  A group of three walked and rolled past. I waited for them to arrange themselves around a wooden workspace.

  May I kiss you goodbye? Our mother does not like to be kissed. I did. I feared all the ways I was like my mother, but in this way, I was not. I loved kisses of all kinds, velvet lips and clever tongue. I loved the casual friend’s peck on the cheek, Mindy’s hug and double kiss, the first on the cheek, the second on my forehead.

  “I’m going to kiss you goodbye.” I glanced around, feeling foolish to have said this aloud.

  Flawless skin untouched by the sun, fair down on her cheeks, unplucked brows. Scented lotion. My lips against her skin. My hushed goodbye.

  Seventeen

  This time, I returned to an empty house, no Harley hiding in the basement, only his voice on my answering machine. How are you, babe? It’s been too long! While I let the messages play, in case someone else beside Harley tried to reach me, I scooped up the mail and magazines fanned out on the floor and threw my dirty clothes down the chute. I dashed upstairs to prop Baruch’s business card against the lamp on my desk and returned to hear Harley say, “Give me a call so I know you’re okay.” A year had passed since we’d lived together, and still he was asking, “Where’ve you been hiding, hon?”

  Later, while I was sitting at my desk, Mindy called, and when I tried to describe Chaverim, I said it was horrible and that I wished I’d never known about Aviva. As soon as I stopped speaking, every
word seemed inadequate. Chaverim was beautiful, too, and I had known about Aviva, in a way, her name and existence made tangible what I had felt for so long.

  When I got off the phone, I touched the raised letters on Baruch’s card, and saw his eyes, the deep pools of sadness, his half-hearted smile. What can you do? Eyes closed, a half nod. Why argue? What’s to say? An expression that sometimes seemed to suggest powerlessness and other times a rueful accommodation to life exactly as it was.

  When I recalled his kindness, I let my head fall against the wooden desk. Wasn’t I supposed to feel better? I did what I was supposed to do—flew to Israel, held my sister’s hand, returned to say goodbye, expecting nothing in response. And now it was worse. Now I could see her face. Now she was the ache beneath my ribs, and I knew I would carry her with me always.

  Even alone, I was ashamed of my sorrow. A punitive voice kept emerging to say, It’s not all about you. But it was about me—my grief, my acknowledgement of Aviva, which left me so weak, I could not lift my cheek from that slab of wood.

  My desktop was a cold hard mother. I know you well, I thought.Then later: Selfish! Wipe your foolish tears, pull yourself together and go to work!

  And so I did, just as I had been trained. At dawn I rose, showered, dressed. Before this trip to Israel, I had worn jeans to work unless we were scheduled to see clients. Now I dressed with inordinate care, but knew as I did so that I was crafting a veneer. Scrutinizing myself in the mirror, I thought of my mother, who loved fashion, though she would deny it, disguising her passion by speaking of cut and tailoring and the quality of cloth. Now, when I thought of her buttoning her mauve silk blouse, stepping into her slip with its lacy trim, adjusting the tweed wool skirt with its invisible zipper, and the jacket with its handmade button holes, when I thought of her choosing the lapel brooch, the tiny watch on a chain, when I saw her smoothing her sheer hose and slipping into her buttery Italian pumps, I saw how many layers it took to cover the soft, private self.

  And then she steps outside. My father is warming up the car while classical music plays on the radio. She settles into the passenger seat for the short ride to work. What did they talk about? When she wanted him to pick her up; what needed to be purchased, repaired, renewed, or paid. They did not talk about Aviva. It would have been impossible. I knew this, though I had no proof. My father’s job was to keep her steady, to buttress and protect her.

  I chose an eggplant-colored shirt, a soft cotton knit, and buttoning it, wondered when they had entered into this silent accord. It must have taken considerable effort at first. What did they say to each other on the night they decided to give her up? And the night after that? Who held Aviva as they drove her to the institution? They did not yet own a clapboard house that needed to be furnished and painted, carpets steam-cleaned, shrubs trimmed, grass cut. They had no car with brake pads to replace and tires to have rotated and balanced, no retirement portfolios, accountant, or housecleaner. My mother had no conferences, my father no periodontal appointments, not then, not in Israel. I knew what it was like to have the hours surrounding my workday crammed with the chores that allowed me to function as a responsible citizen.

  I arrived well before the others, unlocked the door, and sat on the sofa, studying the high ceilings and wood floor, grooved and marred with age. When Kayleigh switched on the lights some time later, she was so startled, she gasped, grabbed her chest, and said, “You scared me! How are you?”

  Then she sank onto the cushion beside me. Her hair was piled up in a pretty, haphazard way. Gold rings lined the cartilage in both ears; on her feet were gold clogs.

  “I’m fine,” I said. And I really was, just then. “I’m okay. Those clogs are amazing.”

  She tapped her toes against each other, waited for me to speak, and said in a soft, hesitant voice, “Do you… look alike?”

  I felt compelled to show some enthusiasm, though the only image I could muster was Aviva, limp in her wheelchair, chafed face, blank gaze. “Our hair is the same. And our nose.”

  Kayleigh touched her heart and said, “Awwww,” and I said, “It’s okay,” to ease her discomfort.

  When Les arrived and saw us sitting together, he shed his leather jacket, and said, “What’s up?”

  “I’m here!” I said and watched him shift his weight and cough into his fist. “It’s okay. It’s fine.” Just what I’d always said when telling people my name. Roxanne Garlick. It’s okay, it’s fine. You can laugh. This time, I didn’t say: You can laugh.

  Then there was espresso, projects to review, tasks to delegate, and some silliness about their lunch with the new tenant in the space beside the yoga studio, an environmental not-for-profit run by a guy who was totally retro, with a little gray ponytail and wire-rimmed glasses. “So, so sweet,” said Kayleigh, and Les said, “Total pothead.” Listening to them lifted and delighted me, and then hours passed, and I did not think about Aviva even once.

  Aviva was in the interstices. She appeared when I crossed the columned lobby of our building, when I called my mother, when I saw a possum split open like a ripe fruit, her shiny entrails on the asphalt beside her, when I stood in front of the mirror, absently brushing my teeth, when I saw four small roses leaning against the trellis outside my house, the buds just opening and I knew the frost would kill them that night or the night after. .

  Her name rose from the darkness. Aviva. Like the rustle of trees. Tires on a wet pavement in the distance. Sister. A train chugging slowly on distant tracks. Me, not me, me. In-the-water dreams I had most every night.

  I took the envelope with her medical records and drove to a cluster of stone buildings in Squirrel Hill that had been a Catholic church, school, and rectory until the 1990s, when a Jewish school bought the property. The summer before the crosses had been whittled from the tops of the buildings and the cornerstones sanded, the site was used as a movie set for an American remake of a classic French horror film. Every night the whole corner was lit up like a stadium. Neighbors wheeled their sleeping babies, toted their older kids, set up canvas chairs at the periphery to catch a glimpse of the movie stars.

  I parked the car and waited for the crossing guard in her day-glo vest to wave me safely across the street. Approaching the complex, I saw that after all that whittling and sanding, after incantations and signage with bright blue Stars of David, the structures still looked like a Catholic school and church with the crosses mysteriously missing.

  In the former rectory, I was given the name of a translator. I tucked the slip of paper in my wallet and went to work. On my way upstairs, I saw Les standing standing in the hall with a yoga mat beneath his arm. Nomi, as elegantly formed as a praying mantis, stood beside him, attentive, listening. There was a softness in Les’s stance. He looked so vulnerable, though maybe in part it was because he’d shaved his little beard.

  He seemed offended when I asked if he was going out with Nomi.

  “She’s my teacher,” he said solemnly. “We’re doing a private. I’m learning how to breathe.”

  “You didn’t know how to breathe before?”

  “Not in a healthful way.”

  “She’s very pretty,” I said.

  He bristled. “I don’t think of her that way. She’s a wonderful person. Very wise. Look what she’s done against all the odds, starting this beautiful school with all these classes? It was just voted best yoga studio in the city, not that she cares about these things. I’m just saying she’s a remarkable woman.”

  I spent that Sunday working on a tiny lobster trap, an exact replica of the real thing, with coated metal sides and a mesh opening designed in such a way that the lobster is enticed to enter and then can never leave. It was a birthday gift for Les, whose greatest fear was that he’d take some woman’s bait and get stuck forever in her house. It was so easy to chuckle at other peoples’ fears and call them irrational. Just do it! I wanted to tell Les, in this time when I was living with
such heaviness. Just ask her out!

  To grow, a lobster must shed its entire exoskeleton. Beneath that carapace is a soft, vulnerable body. In the period before a new shell grows, when it is completely unprotected, it tries to hide beneath a ledge.

  As for the untranslated files, every morning for the next month, I picked them up when I left for work and threw them in the back seat of the car. At the end of each day, I carried them back into my house. In the morning, I scooped them off the hall table and took them to work, threw them in the back of the car.

  “Not this year,” I told Mindy when she asked me about Thanksgiving.

  When I tried to explain why I wouldn’t drive to her house this year, though I always spent the holiday with her family, she said, “Oh, come on; the kids want to see you. And Mr. Suppowitz will be up from Florida.”

  This was a joke we shared. While Mindy’s mother had always been “Muriel” to me, her father, a paunchy, introverted engineer, with an immaculate workshop in the basement, remained “Mr. Suppowitz.” Three years ago, after he’d been widowed, he’d moved to West Palm Beach, met Doris in Century Village and reinvented himself so thoroughly he became Mr. Suppowitz to Mindy, too. It didn’t pain her that he’d taken up with Doris, a nice enough woman. Rather that he’d forgotten everything about their family life. “Gone,” she’d said. “Irretrievable. And it’s not dementia. The man is as sharp as ever.”

  “You don’t want me at your table,” I said, as if I were a nasty microbe.

  “Rox,” she said. “I always want you at my table.”