Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  Sometimes, cheerfully, I thought of myself as the typically developed sister and narrated all I was able to do: retrieve a newspaper, design a logo, a T-shirt, a poster. The typically developed sister could draw but had never been able to learn by rote. She needed to take information into her cells. To know where her body was in space, she needed to feel the ground beneath her feet.

  I’d underlined the words in the medical report I knew but did not fully understand—proprioception, vestibular, cortical, subdural, axonal—and when I set out for my run, I felt the slant of the road, the sun on my eyelids, whistle of an overhead plane, the wheeze and clank of a distant compactor crushing garbage and experienced the way this sensory information from my inner ear, joints, and muscles told me who and where I was.

  Aviva did not get and use input from these systems because of damage to her brain; information from the other systems—vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell—was also impacted.

  When I climbed the long diagonal path to an upper trail in the park, a memory might emerge—the samovar in Mindy’s house; the taste of brass when I licked it, blindfolded, playing a game; the coins stamped onto the sides, Russian words. Running in the park, the metals returned to me: brass, copper, silver, gold, their hue and sheen, the taste of each. I recalled Muriel’s husky voice—tsatskeleh, come!—her unmade bed, the smell of cigarettes, Mindy and I snuggling beneath the sheets like puppies, then love.

  Aviva—when I wrote her name in big, blocky print, emotion filled me, like ink drawn into the reservoir of my pen.

  Aviva, who walked beside me in my vivid, fractured dreams, sat in my desk chair, wearing nothing beneath her old-fashioned raincoat, who smoked a cigarette, and, oh, I was furious and lunged for it, and when I woke I was upset that I’d been so out of control, and at the same time hated to lose these moments that had felt so real.

  I could dream (could she?), could read and write, could conceive of a three-dimensional object and hold that image in my mind, the way I could hold images of the man, Baruch, who sat on the bench beside me. In casual conversation, I could be rueful, ironic, snippy, demanding, flirtatious, droll, doleful, negative. I could allude, pun, digress. I could bring to mind a raccoon, looking up at me in a bold, belligerent way from his hollow in the park, where I had once seen such a creature. Symbols rang in my ears. Metaphors flowed like water.

  I had no control over the dreams, but I resisted calling these emotions “Aviva” or “Baruch,” and yet, I would not dismiss all this as nothing. This was what Ronit had said of Aviva—nothing is left. In this time, nothing had been cracked wide open, revealing a world of sensations, of pleasures and unhappiness, textures I’d lacked the sensitivity to understand.

  And what of the warmth of his gaze? I could remember it, could feel it, could distrust it, could turn around and doubt my distrust. This typically developed twin was capable of so many high-order functions, and still she did not know. What was real? Who could I be to Aviva? Who had I been to my mother? To Harley?

  She doesn’t know me, I thought when I got off the phone with my mother.

  He doesn’t know me, I thought, reading the note Harley had dictated to the florist.

  Maybe for him, I was the ticking clock, wrapped in a blanket.

  Maybe for me, he’d been the terrycloth monkey.

  When Dr. Berenbaum called, I was standing on my front lawn while prospective buyers wandered through my house with their realtor. The couple’s car was on the driveway, and in the driver’s seat, their large, anxious dog scratched at the window, as if with enough effort she could dig a hole in it. The kids across the street were hanging an inflatable buck-toothed bunny from the limb of a tree beside the one they’d decorated with Easter egg ornaments.

  “Your mother has pneumonia and was taken to the hospital this afternoon,” he said.

  “How is she now?” I asked.

  “At the moment, her condition is stable, but she’s quite frail.”

  I listened to the rest of what he had to say about my mother’s health, and then I said, “Do you remember her telling you she had another daughter, and that I’d known nothing about it? She did have another daughter. Her name is Aviva, and she lives in a place in the north called Chaverim. We’re twins. If it hadn’t been for you, I never would have known.”

  The dog’s scratching grew more furious. She whimpered, drooled on the glass. Let me out!

  I said, “That’s not exactly true. I knew something. Just not that I had a sister. Or her name or the nature of her disabilities, or that my father visited her four times a year and my mother never did.”

  Dr. Berenbaum interrupted me. “Has your mother made her end-of-life wishes known?”

  “Is she dying?”

  “She’s not actively dying, but she doesn’t have long. You shouldn’t delay your visit.”

  “No feeding tubes. No breathing tubes.” The words were harder to speak than I had imagined. “I’m sure she wouldn’t want that.”

  “Then I will continue with the antibiotics?”

  “Yes, but no machines. No heroic measures.”

  “And I’ll arrange for hospice to come to her apartment?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Then Dr. Berenbaum said, “Our attitudes have evolved considerably since the days when your sister was born. Your mother might very well have been following the advice of a doctor who told her to forget this child was ever born. This is the way it was done at the time. Parents with children like your sister were told to give them up for the sake of the family. There was a great deal of pressure put on mothers to do this.”

  “I know,” I said. “But still…”

  “Would you like me to have a shomer stay with your mother?” he asked.

  Having a shomer in attendance when her soul departed her body was a custom among Orthodox Jews, he explained. Though he knew my mother wasn’t religious, it wasn’t uncommon for a person facing death or members of the family to have a change of heart. Being a shomer, a guard, was considered a mitzvah, so it would be no trouble finding someone to sit with her in these final hours. What did I think she might want?

  The soul? I imagined my mother saying, “What you call the soul is billions of neurons firing.”

  “Have a shomer stay with her,” I said.

  The realtor walked outside, followed by the young couple—a giant, pregnant blonde in spike-heeled boots, her dark doe-eyed husband. After they pulled away, the little girl across the street hurried across the road, uncertain in fancy flip-flops. “It’s going to snow,” she said accusingly. She put her hand on her hips, and big, beaded bracelets clanked on her skinny wrists. “Are you moving?”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “Then why do you have that sign?”

  “I thought I would, but maybe I won’t after all. Who told you it was going to snow?”

  “It just is,” she said.

  No travel advisories were posted when I went online. I booked a flight to Newark that left late the next morning, and from there a connection to Ben Gurion Airport. As I threw some clothing into a bag, I wondered if I would flourish after my mother died, released at last, or crumple, as if my tormented relationship with her gave me the friction I needed, the spark that lit my fire. I took Baruch’s business card off my desk, though I did not know if I’d call him after all this time. But Aviva—the desire to see her bloomed.

  Branches from the giant ginkgo scratched my upstairs windows. When I finished packing, I stepped outside. The snow flurries were like dryer lint. Nothing stuck. But the wind had picked up. The buck-toothed bunny was blown upward, as if he were riding a magic carpet.

  All night it snowed, and by morning I had to shovel the driveway so I could pull out my car. The magnolia had been stripped bare, and my neighbor’s inflatable bunny had blown onto their driveway. I felt offended by the snow. Why now, of all times? The season was over.
Look, the flowers are out. You’re wrecking them! Who was I talking to?

  Each time I checked, my flight was listed as “on time” so I set out for the airport. Now the snow was falling in thick diagonal sheets. Only a few cars were on the roads, fools, hardy souls, crawling forward, all of us. I knew it was pointless to drive to the airport and drove anyway, staying in the right lane, clutching the wheel. It was pointless to get a ticket for long-term parking: I got a ticket, parked in the half-empty lot. I knew it was ridiculous to wheel my bag through the snow and rush on the moving walkway, which did not move: I wheeled my bag through the snow and rushed on the moving walkway. After a journey that felt endless, I found myself in a terminal silent in a post-apocalyptic way. There were only two of us—a woman in a navy baseball cap and T-shirt, who walked past with a dustpan and broom, and me. All flights were cancelled.

  All this is the downside of not done, I knew. The chicken without a head. The body, my body, moving in a senseless determined way. A nameless fear blazed in my heart as I stood alone in the airport, and then when I started off on the long scary voyage home.

  I drove slowly through the slanting snow. A truck with flashing lights threw salt on my windshield. Like a faux-atheist in a foxhole, I prayed. Oh, please, let me get home safely. I tried to concentrate on the white lines that marked my lane, and when they vanished, please rose. My car swerved on a downhill stretch of the road. I tried to brake and there was only the grinding sound of the anti-lock brakes as the car slid. The tires had no traction. The car seemed to glide into the left lane, toward a truck that was barely moving. It skidded slowly and inexorably. This elastic moment stretched out, giving me time to relax my shoulders, loosen myself for the impact, knowing there was nothing I could do. As I slid closer to the back of the truck, a single thought slipped through. I don’t want her to be alone. Then the tires grabbed hold and I steered slowly back into my lane.

  I made it safely home. Parked the car. Rose from the driver’s seat. The snow was thick and beautiful. I stood in my open garage and watched. I made myself believe my mother would wait for me, that she would not die until after I could reach her. Wait for me, I whispered.

  But the she, the her, in my rawest moment was Aviva.

  Twenty-One

  Candles are burning when I open the door to my mother’s apartment, one near her bedside and the others on the windowsills and the bureau top. The shomer, a young man with a yarmulke and fuzzy cheeks, dozes in the corner, near a window left open a few inches so that the soul, upon leaving her body, can escape the room. When I step close to the bed, I hardly recognize the woman propped against pillows. Only the nightgown with the lace yoke and violet nosegays is familiar. She’d worn it on the mornings when she stood in my kitchen in Pittsburgh and cried “help!” as if she were wounded. “Where’s my juice?” Now she is sleeping on her back, with her hands arranged on top of the sheet, one slightly crossing the other. Her pale skin looks unlined and her hair, completely white, has been combed straight back. It’s wrong, not the way she’s ever worn it, so it takes a moment before I can see that she’s clean and well-tended. Someone has put lotion on her skin and moisturized her lips.

  Someone has tidied her apartment. The kitchen gives off an unpleasant chemical tang of industrial cleaner, and the refrigerator door is covered with magnets—Benny the plumber, embracing a toilet; Avi the exterminator, bashing a huge googly-eyed waterbug with a rubber mallet. A baby animal calendar is on the wall, turned to April, which features seals, with their winsome doglike expressions. The bags are gone from the living room, and a blue canvas cot has been set out for me, with linens and a pillow folded neatly at the foot. When I open the wardrobe in the small bedroom, where the person on duty sleeps, the overflowing bags expand. I have to press my whole body against the door to get it to latch again. It’s as if Sunny is now Leona’s daughter, and I’m a stranger snooping through drawers.

  I sit on the edge of the bed and listen to the motorbikes and cars on the highway outside. Strangers care for my mother, paid companions. The shomer rouses and begins to softly recite prayers, and my mother opens her eyes and seems to take me in. When she begins to speak, I lean close to try to make out what she’s saying. “What?” I ask, and hear cars shifting gears, the blare of horns, the fan clicking on, blowing heat into the chilly apartment until at last I realize it isn’t English she speaks, but one of the household languages I never understood. “Ma?” I whisper. “Mama?”

  I take my mother’s hand and stroke the soft loose skin, and it is enough, all I need. Her eyes stay closed, so after a while I get up, move my suitcase into the corner of the living room, and stand out on the small balcony that faces the sea. When I close my eyes, I find myself walking through the rooms of my childhood home, feeling the nubby upholstery on the couch, the gold embossed titles on the leather-bound books on the shelves, my father balancing their checkbook at the dining room table, carrying her purse, warming the car for her, buying cheap paper towels and the wrong kind of sardines, absorbing her anger, muttering when she was in ill temper, never flinching. The time she went to the hospital for gall bladder surgery, and when I stopped by my parents’ house, I found my father, who’d managed the household all those years, so undone he’d been unable to open a can of soup for his lunch. “Your mother is a fireball!” he’d cried. “She’s a fireball!” Only then had I seen how much he’d needed her. Now, on the balcony, I turn that moment over and over as if it will yield, and I will know something that’s been withheld.

  Sunny sits on the edge of the bed, washes my mother’s face, puts lotion on her hands and feet, changes her position. Her morose sister tidies the house, does the wash, buys food. All of us move slowly around the apartment. We whisper. We drink tea and eat the burekas Dina brings, warm pastries filled with potatoes or cheese. The shomrim come in shifts from a service that provides them, all of them young and religious, with their yarmulkes, loose white shirts and tzitzit.

  And then she rallies. When Dr. Berenbaum stops by the next morning, he says her respiration has improved. I ask if I can go home, and he looks at me blankly, as if nothing can surprise this man, and tells me she will not live much longer. It could be a week—maybe two—he cannot predict.

  At the airport, I’d seen the kind of chocolate my mother loved—extra dark, Belgian—and I’d bought two boxes for the Sunnys. After Dr. Berenbaum leaves, I take one from my suitcase, slit open the plastic, and bring it into the bedroom. My mother seems to watch me slide a chair beside her bed.

  “I brought you some chocolate,” I say. “Would you like a piece?”

  I turn her hand and put the small wrapped square in the center of her palm. At first she seems to be holding it, saving it for the perfect moment. After a while it seems as if the chocolate simply fits into the fold of her palm. She makes no effort to turn it over or unwrap the foil. I take the wrapper off the chocolate, and when she parts her lips, I slip it into her mouth. The chocolate melts and begins to seep from the corners of her lips. I blot her mouth and chin with a cloth.

  I am grateful for these others who can do what I cannot—sit, wait, pray, knit. I am restless, sit beside my mother for short periods of time, get up, wander around the small apartment, wonder when I can rent a car and drive to Chaverim, when I will be able to go home.

  Hello, this is Roxanne. Aviva’s sister. I did not rent a cell phone and the only phone is beside my mother’s bed. Nonetheless, several times a day, I imagine calling him. Shalom, this is Vered. Then late one night, I slip across the hall to return Dina’s plate. She opens the door, looking glazed and unkempt, as if she’s survived a terrible storm. “Roxanne, I am such a slut,” she murmurs in a woozy voice. Behind her is a short, bald man, arms folded across his hairy chest.

  The next morning, when Sunny arrives, I leave the apartment. Instead of crossing the street and heading down to the beach, I turn the corner onto Ben Yehuda and walk past the corner cafes, with their outdoor seats
all taken, the salons and little shops with wedding gowns in the window, and the grocery stores, the bins of bright fruit visible from the street. I stop to look in the window of a shoe store, where flats in bright-colored perforated leather are displayed. Pretty summer shoes, one pair deep pink, another a rich yellow and blue. I step inside to see them up close and when a skinny young salesman approaches, I search for the words to tell him I don’t speak Hebrew—Anee lo medaberet ivreet—and before I can get them out, he says, his English barely accented, “Can I show you something?” I can’t read his smile, can’t tell if it’s dismissive or friendly.

  My mother is dying and I want shoes. I look at my watch. “I better come back later,” I tell him.

  On the street, I wait for guilt to descend. When it doesn’t, I think: Maybe this is the way you’re supposed to live. Disaster looms, and you hold onto your desire for shoes.

  Then Dina goes to work, and I do call, and he answers the phone on the second ring before I have time to hang up. “Hi, this is Roxanne Garlick, Aviva’s sister. We met briefly at Chaverim. Some months back.”

  “Yes, of course,” he says.

  “So I’m here in Tel Aviv. On Nordau Street.”

  “Splendid,” he says. “Are you free this evening?”

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  He gives me the address of a nearby restaurant, “famous for cheese,” and I walk back to my mother’s apartment, where Sunny is knitting a tiny yellow sweater, and a fat redheaded shomer rocks in the corner. My mother is in bed, her eyes open, her mouth slack. There is no one to ask—would it be okay? But that’s not it, not really. I don’t want to ask. My desire to see this man has ignited in a fierce and adolescent way. I go over Dr. Berenbaum’s words—a week, maybe two, maybe tomorrow. She is not alone. The shomer is here. Sunny, her sister. It’s foolish to be sentimental when I know my presence means nothing to her, and anyhow, I won’t be gone long.