Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  “My mother lives in Tel Aviv,” I said. “So does my twin sister.” I hesitated, unsure how to describe Aviva or the place she lived. Something had shifted within me when I’d stood on that chair, snapping photos of this family I loved. Maybe it was seeing my connection to them and also the distance I’d kept. Or maybe Mr. Suppowitz’s forgetting had pricked me, making me aware how easily the past could be dismissed. Or maybe it was the second glass of wine. “She’s profoundly disabled and lives in a ‘home for life’ in the Galilee.”

  Mindy turned to me. The disgruntled daughter said, “Your sister is institutionalized?”

  “It’s not an institution, where she lives. It’s beautiful. Before I went up there, I thought it would be a hellish place, a snake pit, and she’d be sitting in the dark, or stuck in bed.” My sister. The heat rose in my cheeks. “Her days are full of activities.” What a tender wound. I inhaled slowly.

  “Huh,” said the daughter, chewing.

  She wasn’t buying my description, so I went on, telling her about the images projected on the ceilings for all the residents positioned in such a way that their gaze was directed upwards, and the board beside the elevator, with textured panels glued to it, so during the wait, residents in wheelchairs could feel feathers and gravel and rubbery knobs. As I continued, I realized I’d seen aspects of Chaverim I hardly realized I’d absorbed. And still the woman seemed perturbed.

  “I’m sure it’s very beautiful.”

  Her tone put me on edge.

  “Yes,” I said, expecting a political objection. Are Palestinians there too? Why not? I didn’t know the answer and said, “It really is.”

  “Be that as it may, it’s still a step backwards.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you all the years it took, all the effort from lawyers and family members, to get disabled individuals out of institutions and into their communities. It’s been one of the great civil rights struggles of the twentieth century.”

  Mindy stepped behind me and rested her hands on my shoulders. “Rox didn’t even know about Aviva until a few months ago. She didn’t know she was a twin.”

  “A twin! Imagine that,” said the second Mrs. Suppowitz.

  Her disgruntled daughter eyed her. “I’m just saying there’s no such thing as separate but equal. We all agree on that, don’t we?”

  I was the one who broke the uncomfortable silence. “Obviously.”

  “Can I get a cup of coffee, hon?” the daughter asked Mindy.

  I excused myself and sat in the family room, where the TV blared on and the men once again were pecking away on their devices. Still stuffed from dinner, I reached for a bowl of mixed nuts and searched absently for broken cashews, as if to satisfy some primitive gathering instinct. I felt foolish and ignorant and angry with myself for having done such a poor job describing Chaverim. I should have told her about the concert by a visiting chamber music ensemble. I should have mentioned the new greenhouse, with its warm, earthy odors, and the fundraising plans for therapeutic horseback riding. Hardly an institution with doped-up inmates stuck in wards. I pushed the bowl of nuts across the table.

  Mr. Suppowitz poked in his head, and seeing that Stu had vacated the lounge chair, rubbed his hands together in a gleeful way, settling in with a long, satisfied sigh, adjusting the level until he was perfectly positioned for a dental procedure. I thought of the images projected onto the ceiling in the music room at Chaverim, animals and birds that seemed to be part of an endless parade.

  “Beach Haven,” he said to the ceiling. “Yep.”

  The TV was tuned to ESPN, and footage was from a game that had been televised earlier in the day. Life on the huge screen was brighter and crisper than anything I’d ever seen.

  “When I was a kid, being with your family was the best part of my life,” I said. “I adored Muriel. She was so loving toward me.” Like silk, she’d murmured, stroking my hair when I curled beside her.

  “Ah, those were the days,” said Mr. Suppowitz, with a long, musical sigh.

  I’d visited Muriel shortly before she died. She’d been tethered to oxygen and could hardly get enough air to form her words. “Come. Sit down,” she managed. “Tell me about your life.”

  I was married then, deeply in love, so unhappy.

  “He treats you well?”

  “Yes,” I had lied, unable to tell her otherwise.

  The couch rocked like a small boat as the disgruntled daughter settled herself beside me. “I missed your name,” she said.

  “Roxanne.”

  “Roxanne. Sue.” She dragged the bowl of nuts toward us and grabbed a handful. “I’ve been a social worker for nearly thirty years, so I’ve seen firsthand what it’s like when individuals get to live in their community.”

  “My sister has no community. My parents gave her up when she was a baby.”

  “That’s not so uncommon. Many individuals have stories like that. Generations of individuals who never had the benefit of family life.”

  Individuals. Such a bureaucratic word, a social worker word, on the ugly list with utilize and fungible. Everything clenched inside me. What’s wrong with people? I wanted to ask.

  “You don’t think she’d enjoy living in a neighborhood?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  She popped the nuts into her mouth one at a time. “What’s her functional level?”

  “I don’t know. Her medical records are in Hebrew.”

  “Is she verbal?”

  “She’s brain damaged and in a wheelchair. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t do anything. Not by herself, at least.”

  “They don’t do assessments in this place? They must.”

  “Maybe they do. I assume I’ll find them when I get the records translated. I just haven’t done that yet.”

  “So you don’t know if she’s had access to any kind of adaptive communication device?”

  “I’ll have to ask.”

  “First you need to make sure this facility does proper assessments, because these days, with the technology now available, the lives of so many individuals with communication disorders have been completely transformed. This one gentleman, Charlie, we moved several years back? Long history of institutionalization, where he was more or less shunted into a corner and dismissed as too low-functioning to profit from any training. No contact with the family. Transferred to an ICFMR when they shut the facility down. Then while we were looking for a placement for him in the community, we arranged for a proper assessment. Long story short: this young speech pathologist, a real determined gal, started working with Charlie. At first it was something simple, like a picture communicator, yes and no and some pictures of familiar objects and places. Food items. He really took off on it. We started to learn a whole lot more about our Charlie. He likes girls a lot. Chicken nuggets. Country music. He’s got a major thing for Shania Twain. He’s saving to go to Vegas.”

  She continued depositing nuts in her mouth, like coins in a meter.

  “She’s not shunted into a corner.”

  She—Aviva. Would I ever say her name without sorrow rising within me?

  Sue looked at her salty hands, as if she didn’t know exactly whose they were. “I was just saying, since Mindy told me your background.”

  “I think,” I said, hoisting myself up from the couch. “I think I need to make myself useful.”

  I found Hannah in the kitchen. While she was emptying the dishwasher, I donned the yellow rubber gloves, got to work on the turkey pan. I worked the steel wool into the baked-in grease in each corner and listened to Hannah tell me about the philosophers in her department and how she’d be WWOOFING on an organic farm in Chile—“woofing,” being what volunteers did when they were matched up with farmers through WWOOF, which she thought stood for “Willing Workers on Organic Farms.” The old aunties
came in to say goodbye. Then Adam and Stu wandered in, looking for drumsticks to gnaw, and praising the Steelers, as if I had a role in coaching the team. After that, the waves of conversation in different parts of the house grew softer, the TV was switched off, the rooms darkened.

  I went downstairs to the finished basement where I’d sleep, sat on the old plaid couch, and waited for three a.m.—ten a.m. in Israel. On the half-empty bookshelves were paperback spy novels, old psychology texts, and a well-thumbed book called Jokes for Your John. Next to it was More Jokes for Your John. The jokes did not distract me from Charlie and Aviva, the enormity of what I did not know, and a desire for answers that was so fierce that I called Chaverim before I’d figured out what to say.

  “A woman, a social worker, told me about a man.” This is how I began when Mrs. Silk got on the line. “Everyone thought there was nothing inside him but they gave him this device. And now he can tell them who he is. He can say what he likes. It’s like he’s a person with opinions and dreams.”

  The story poured out of me, with its gaps and digressions. Someone told me something and now I’m upset. I was too agitated to be embarrassed.

  I wanted Mrs. Silk to say, “Don’t worry. Aviva is not Charlie,” because I could not bear to think she had been locked in darkness for all these years, a thrumming, unexpressed self trapped inside her. It was too awful to think of her crying out in the dark and finding herself alone. Or worse, learning not to cry. She is not Charlie. Please say she is not. Just as fervently I wanted to hear that Aviva was someone, a real sister, just as I had pretended when I was young, whispering to my doll, lying to my classmates. Someone who could know me, who could share this puzzling life.

  “The newer technology is marvelous,” Mrs. Silk said. “Some of our residents have done very well with assistive communication devices.”

  “And Aviva? Could she profit from something like that?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Mrs. Silk tried to explain the ways Aviva’s brain had been damaged, but I was not relieved and I kept pushing. “Are you sure? How do you know? How can you tell what’s inside her? Have you done any assessments?”

  “Yes, of course. On a regular basis.” Then without a glimmer of impatience: “Have you had the chance to look at the sensory checklist?”

  “I have the name of a translator, but I’ve been really busy.”

  It was such a lame excuse I wished she would call me out. Busy —give me a break! But she would not do this because Mrs. Silk did not judge family members, even those who practically begged to be judged.

  “Let me know when you’re ready. We’ll set up a time to go over Aviva’s records, page by page. I can clarify whatever you don’t understand. The medical terminology and technical language can be quite dense.”

  “I’m sorry to be so annoying,” I said.

  “You aren’t annoying. It’s natural for you to have questions. You’re just getting to know us. You’re just getting to know Aviva.”

  “I’m not getting to know her. I live thousands of miles away and I don’t know how. I don’t even know what it means to know her. Is it something I could learn? Seeing her was excruciating,” I said, unable to hold back. “I understand why people turn away, but I can’t. I’ve been trying, but I can’t. I guess I don’t want to.”

  Sitting on the edge of a foldout bed in that recreation room in New Jersey, I felt the weight of my own words. “She’s my sister. I don’t know what that means or why it matters, but it does.”

  “Why don’t you start by reading the checklist. It might help make your visits more rewarding. I can’t promise this, but I know your father enjoyed visiting Aviva.”

  “Then why did my cousin tell me how much he cried?”

  “Leaving was very difficult for him. That he lived so far away. And all the secrets were a terrible torment. Even so, he got a great deal of pleasure from these visits.”

  “More than he got living with me,” I said.

  “No,” she said with conviction. “That isn’t so, Roxanne.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because I came to know your father very well over the years, and I knew how proud of you he was and how he ached for you, because he told me often.”

  I waited for her to go on, hardly breathing, and when she spoke again, it was as if a different person was on the other end, someone formal, who was encouraging me to call whenever I wanted, with any questions I might have, who assured me that the staff at Chaverim welcomed the involvement of family members.

  When I got off the phone, I paced in the dank room, waiting for the sun to rise, then made myself wait a while longer.

  The translator answered his phone. We made a date to meet in the back of the Coffee Tree in Squirrel Hill on Monday morning.

  How would I know him?

  “You’ll know,” he said.

  Everyone was in the kitchen by the time I rose from the basement, toting my overnight bag. Hannah, in oversize plaid pajamas, was leafing absently through Consumer Reports, while Adam and Stu once again gnawed on turkey parts. Mindy, putting away the last of the serving dishes, demanded I eat something before the long drive home

  While I sat with the others, Aviva, Charlie, and the untranslated documents expanded in my brain in such a way that I had no words to add to the easy conversation around me, no thoughts or opinions. Stuffed with the unspeakable, I thought.

  What a lot of effort it took to squelch what I could not say. Is this what my father had done, distancing himself from those who could have loved him, withholding his truest feelings, blotting out himself? Is this what I had done too?

  Mr. Suppowitz and his crew arrived and I started on my round of goodbyes. I slipped on my coat and Max, their old dog, hustled over with his leash. “I’m sorry, boy,” I told him.

  Baruch would have laughed if he’d seen my crouching before the dog, murmuring into his fur. “Sorry, boy. Sorry, sorry.”

  Nineteen

  The translator was right: On Monday morning, I walked right over to the pudgy young man in a small knitted yarmulke who sat alone at the back of the coffee shop. I said hello, placed Aviva’s file on the table, and settled into the empty chair. He hefted the envelope, as if he charged by the pound. “So,” he said. “You’ve brought me War and Peace.”

  Such long, thick eyelashes. Like Aviva’s. “It’s not literature,” I said. “I don’t care about beautiful. Accurate is what I need.”

  The translator, raised in Philadelphia and Jerusalem, was in Pittsburgh while his wife was finishing her PhD. She was a happiness researcher.

  “Is she happy?” I asked, though I suspected it was a tiresome question.

  “She is studying too hard.”

  “Maybe after she gets her PhD?”

  “She would say no. The PhD will only bring her transient happiness.”

  The translator picked up the envelope and bounced it in his palms. “So it’s not a book of poems. Then what?”

  “Medical records.” I thought of Disgruntled Sue, going on about assessments, and said, “Assessments. A sensory checklist. And something else.” Mrs. Silk’s words came back. Some of what you read will be disturbing. “Something I shouldn’t read alone.”

  I hadn’t intended to say this, but the translator had that gift of benign stillness that drew me close, and I went on. “I was in Israel this fall and found out I had a disabled twin sister. I think this is her story, in a way, and after I read it, I’ll understand her better.”

  And if she was a husk, a shell, with no soul, no awareness? How then would I build the next part of my life, now that I woke every morning and felt her inside me?

  The wet, boundless grief rose. I pressed on my chest, and the translator hurriedly uncrumpled a napkin, trying to flatten it on the table before sliding it to me. “It’s clean,” he said.

  I caught
my breath and let myself be distracted by a woman who joined the man at the table beside ours. Forties, maybe. Long dark hair and dimples, fitted wool dress. A first date, or second. Then I returned to business. “There’s so much here. Maybe you can skip the unnecessary sections and translate what’s important.”

  “You want me to make that decision?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”

  The translator asked when I expected the work to be finished.

  “How about around Christmas. Do you go away for Christmas?”

  He tapped his yarmulke.

  “What do I know? Maybe you’re a Jew for Jesus,” I said.

  His eyes widened. He said, “Heaven forfend,” and then informed me that Christmas was much too soon.

  I felt light without those files and glided across the lobby of the lime-green schoolhouse, thinking about the couple at the next table, and remembering a time when men were like flies, always buzzing around me. How tempting to say it was my youth alone that had attracted them, but that wasn’t the only thing. I was open, in those days, fearless, receptive, ready for a romp. I felt a yearning just then to unseal my lips, exhale all the unspeakable stuff, to lean across a small table and feel the flush of attraction. Yes, a date, I thought, so immersed in this vision that I did not see Harley slide into view from behind a column, dressed in a crisp shirt and gray crew-neck sweater, wool slacks, tie shoes. I hesitated then continued on. Harley blocked my path. His face was red and swollen. I stepped; he blocked, arms spread wide.

  “Why would you call my son and humiliate me that way? Why? Didn’t I look after you always? Didn’t I love and respect you? Why would you repay me by ruining my relationship with my kids?”

  The mail carrier stopped wheeling her cart to watch him block me at the base of the stairs. “You know what you’ve done? You’ve proven their mother right, given them an excuse to wash their hands of me. I can’t even face my own kids, and I don’t understand. When did you get so mean?”

  “Come on, Harley. Please.” I stepped to the side. He stepped with me. “You were talking about suicide. I was worried about you. And so was Tammy.”