by Beth Helms
Kate invited me home for lunch. Hers was a real house with a walled garden in a neighborhood some distance from ours. Directly across the street was a public school behind a chain-link fence. The schoolyard was dirt and there was no play equipment, not a bit more comforting than the orphanage. While we walked from the bus, she yelled obscenities at the boys who ran to the fence and clung there, their fingers and toes jammed between the diamond-shaped links. Girls jumped rope frenetically behind them, singing out rhymes. Like the orphans, and the children on the sledding hill, the boys who had killed Pasha, they seemed to us like children of a different species.
Kate’s mother, the headmistress of our school, made us egg and chips, the oilcloth on the table stained with vinegar droppings and dehydrated egg yolk. At an upright piano in the other room her younger brother banged out the first bars of “Eleanor Rigby,” over and over again.
Kate, as ever, was fierce and fearless. She proudly showed me her bra—undoubtedly a hand-me-down, grimy pink with a thousand escaping nubs of elastic. When she pulled up her shirt in the back to show me, I saw her underwear coming out of her trousers: it too was dingy and less than new-looking. Inside, the house was dirty and wild. Her mother—so sedate in the classroom, moving around at the pace of a luxury liner—banged pans and swore, slung dishes on the table and cuffed her children with great, swatting paws. Everyone ignored her.
After lunch Kate took me into the garden behind the house and we climbed into the low tree that grew against the wall.
Kate leaned back against the trunk, her legs straddling the crotch of the tree, fingers plucking at her eyelashes. Freckles splotched her face and arms. “So tell me about that odd girl you’re friends with,” she said. “The Canadian? Catherine, her majesty.”
I shrugged. The bark rubbed at my back, my feet were slipping from the tree limb I had been given to sit on, a flimsy one; Kate took the sturdiest.
“Miss Priss,” said Kate, and made a sour face. She lifted her feet an inch or so and pointed her toes; she fluttered her hands around her face. “Pas de who cares,” she said. “She makes me sick.”
In the garden that bordered Kate’s house a dirty sheep was running around willy-nilly, butting at the stone wall, bleating. “Shut up,” she yelled, and snapped a branch from the tree we were sitting in and hurled it, hard, over the wall. It bounced off the sheep’s back and skittered across the dirt.
“Are you still friends? I thought you two were like this.” Kate twisted two of her long fingers together, like a vine against a tree. “Bobbseys.”
“Not really,” I said. “Our mothers are friends.”
“That’s good,” said Kate. She mimed smoking a cigarette, holding a twig to her mouth, drawing it away, breathing out like a stage actress. “I hate her.”
The noise of the school across the street was buffered by the house between us. The wind scuffed leaves across the garden floor. A door on Kate’s house banged loudly. Through a cracked window I heard her sister, Josephine, screaming obscenities at her brother.
“Do you know why that sheep is yellow?” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s piss. It sleeps in its piss. Shit too. If you want to come back at Kurban Bayramı they’re going to kill it. Everyone says they run around like this afterward.” Her index finger made lazy circles in the air. “I can’t wait.”
I took a breath. “I could tell you some stuff about Catherine.”
I FOUND my mother sitting at her vanity table holding a scrap of lilac lace in her hands, turning it over and holding it up as though thinking about its fit, considering measurements. My mother and Simone were about the same size but Simone was taller and my mother wore more demure and matronly underthings—full slips and satiny nightgowns that buttoned at the neck.
Firdis had uncovered some small items of Simone’s and they’d begun turning up around the house—on the china cabinet, on my dresser, in a kitchen drawer—wherever she thought they best belonged. I had not thrown these things away as I’d threatened Catherine I would.
“Does this look at all familiar to you?” my mother said. The room was quite dim, with only the bedside lamp illuminating the dark mahogany and the polished floor. The white bedspread gave off a pinkish glow. “I found it in my drawer.”
I shrugged, shook my head. I was standing in the doorway, my feet angled for escape.
“Really?” she said. “It’s not at all mine.”
I made a noise of disavowal, gathered myself for motion. She was still carefully studying the lace-trimmed camisole.
“Wait,” she said. She dropped it ostentatiously on the dresser top and turned. “How are you?” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Fine, thanks.”
There was a pause; she was waiting for me to elaborate, but even her interest made me uneasy.
She sighed heavily. “Fine,” she said. “Be uncommunicative. It isn’t like I’m not used to it.” She put her hand to her head. “Do you like my hair like this? What do you think?”
I looked and noticed that she’d had it cut: it was quite short, probably stylish.
“It’s okay.”
For a moment it seemed she was thinking. Then she threw her infamous silver hairbrush hard across the room. It skittered on the floorboards and disappeared under the bed.
“It’s funny,” she said, after the noise subsided. Her voice was flat, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “I used to think it was your father’s job that made him this way. But maybe he was like this all along. Maybe it’s genetic.”
Any mention of my father piqued my interest; I stood shifting in the doorway.
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” she said thoughtfully. “I guess you come by it honestly.”
“Come by what?”
She began arranging her hair, backcombing it, moving one short piece from side to side, examining the effect. She waved a hand. “You’re very like him, you know.”
“Like him how?”
“Oh,” she said, “lots of ways. Sneaky, secretive. Always up to something furtive. I live here too, you know. I’m not blind.”
She lifted the camisole with her smallest finger and dangled it. It settled against the air, faintly shimmering. “How do you think this got into my drawer?” she asked.
“Firdis?” I said. It must have been, anyway. How it got into the apartment was another question.
“The two of you,” she said. “You and your father. You’re always against me. I don’t think you’ve ever once been on my side. I’m your mother, for heaven’s sake.” She looked past me with distant eyes, as though cataloging these betrayals.
When I was smaller I would sometimes—rarely—come upon my parents standing together in an embrace, my mother’s head tilted back, smiling up at him. I would hurl myself frantically between them, wrestling into the middle of the hug, grasping my father’s legs with my arms, using my body to lever them apart.
“How you presume,” my mother said, studying herself in the mirror. “You always have. That I’ll always be here for you. That nothing will ever change. But people’s feelings change all the time. For no good reason. Mine change for you too.”
She began to cry softly then, bare shoulders shuddering. The strap of her slip fell from one shoulder. How I despised her when she did this; I pivoted and left the room. Her voice followed me down the hall.
“You think it’s easy for me? This is not fair to me, any of it. And I’m so tired. I’m just so goddamn tired.”
THREE DAYS later, when my mother was out on an errand—to the Old City, she’d said, for some sahlep to send to Edie—Firdis was rearranging her drawers. (I had already removed Simone’s trinkets from the apartment—the ones I could remember and locate. I’d given them to Kate, who secreted them somewhere in her untidy room. I had the impression that virtually anything could be concealed in that household—people, animals, medium-size explosions.) Firdis had the drawers turned upside down on the floor and was squatting there, her broad hands refolding
nightgowns and underthings. She’d made several piles on the bed and I saw that a thin sheaf of papers sat between two stacks of silky polyester.
It was his handwriting I recognized first; I’d seen it so often. And the paper, torn from a pad, with the heading ANKARA HUNT AND SADDLE CLUB. These pads were everywhere in Ahmet’s office, and one always poked from his breast pocket: he took notes on them and made lists of things that needed ordering or replacing. The papers were bound together with a bit of silk ribbon. I picked them up and skimmed them. Some were completely benign; you would wonder why she’d kept them. Tuesday? said one, and nothing more. But others were more incriminating.
Firdis, looking up at my expression from her place on the floor, said, “Okay? Tamam? Hasta mısın?” Yes, I was sick. I had never felt quite so sick.
I left carrying those letters. For days I moved them regularly, from inside my pillowcase to under my mattress, from the pages of a book to the interior of my right winter boot. For a while I could not think of a place in the apartment where Firdis did not go, or a thing she did not interfere with. I hated her for it, for her relentless exposure of our secrets.
But in the end, the place I settled on for the letters seemed safe as houses.
I HADN’T stopped seeing Catherine entirely. Some afternoons I would still wander down the hill and climb the stairs to her apartment, but the distance between us was widening. When I was around her I felt oddly detached, as if perhaps she were something I’d been sent to study and I would later report back to my superiors what I’d learned—albeit embellished and darkened.
One afternoon Kate and I put into motion a plan we’d hatched sitting in the tree in her backyard. We invited Catherine to play with us at Kate’s house after school. I’d approached her at lunch above the cricket pitch several days before, my heart speeding, my stomach churning. I felt a quick surge of pleasure when she agreed: she seemed so hesitant, so grateful. She’d shaken her hair, nodded her head—and she looked, at that moment, more like the girl I used to know. So, on the designated afternoon, we sat on the bus together, the three of us, talking intermittently. Kate was full of plans, the games we were going to play, the things she would show Catherine. She was so false and friendly; I admired how guileless she seemed.
“We’ll have sweets,” Kate said. “I have tons. I’ll show you how to play something on the piano. Maybe you can stay for supper.”
Catherine nodded slightly; her hair swung. “I’d have to check,” she said.
“Grand,” Kate said. “It’ll be grand.”
The streets slid by. Behind us, boys hissed and fought in furious whispers. Kate grabbed my hand beneath the seat and squeezed it hard. I saw Catherine’s face in profile, she sat on the edge of her seat, turned slightly backward toward us; her mouth looked carved and what I read there, in the brief moment I studied her, was a cautious hope.
When the bus arrived at Kate’s stop, we hung back as Catherine climbed down. We stalled, pretending to struggle with our coats and books. From the window, I saw Catherine on the sidewalk, adjusting her book bag, leaning down to straighten her tights around her ankles. She looked up for us, her eyes scanning the windows.
“I’m not getting off here today,” Kate called to the driver. “Keep going.”
Kate and I sank back into our seats, squeezing each other tight, collapsing, gasping, with laughter. The doors wheezed closed and we left Catherine standing on that strange Ankara street corner, a long, terrifying distance from home.
Of course, I’d told Kate about Catherine’s terror of the city, of the confusing streets and too-similar buildings and neighborhoods; her fear of the crowds and the dogs, the flea-bitten animals and plaintive beggars, the guttural language she seemed unable to master. I had made fun of all this, sitting in the tree in Kate’s backyard. I’d exaggerated it for her benefit. But I hadn’t exaggerated by much.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in alternating states of horror and joy; Kate and I would look at each other, put our hands to our mouths, and simply fall apart laughing.
“Maybe she’ll be eaten by dogs,” said Kate, “or kidnapped by white slavers.”
We were standing on the balcony of my apartment, where we had ended up, looking down over the alleys Catherine and I used to frequent. Kate was peeling an orange and a film of rind and pith grew under her already dirty fingernails. She dropped pieces onto the ground below the balcony and leaned dangerously far out over the railing, spitting seeds in the general direction of a tattered stray cat.
In truth I had not thought much beyond the moment when the bus pulled away and Catherine’s figure had receded, then disappeared. How would she get home? She had never been to Kate’s house. In my mind I drew a little map: right down this street and left at the hill, past the corner grocery that carried Tipitip gum and then up to the far side of our hill, where she would have to walk along the opposite side of the buildings Kate and I were facing and then climb the long, wide steps to get to my street. Would she know this? Would she figure it out?
All evening I was jumpy and irritable. Once Kate had gone home—strolling easily down the street in her too-short trousers, her stringy hair flattened against her back, swinging her mannish hands—the thrill of the episode dissipated entirely. Through dinner and homework and bedtime I waited for the phone to ring, for Simone to call, telling my mother what we’d done. She would ring looking for Catherine, wondering if she had come home with me from school, or worse, declaring her missing, lost or savaged. I thought of Pasha in the alley, what had happened to him. Catherine was no savvier, no more suited for those streets than he was: she could easily have been eaten by dogs or kidnapped by white slavers.
But that isn’t what happened.
12
GRACE IS IN THE CLOSET, PUSHING AMONG THE HANGERS FOR AN evening dress. She’s studying things she knows all too well, wondering if one or another might take on miraculously different properties this particular evening. Disheartened by the row of stale dresses and seeking distraction, she kneels for a moment and snaps open the latches of Rand’s suitcase. It’s an old habit, looking inside this suitcase, as if she might learn something about her husband that she doesn’t already know. The locks are finely filmed with dust and it surprises her: to realize he hasn’t traveled despite the story she’s told. In fact, her husband has been altogether too present of late. It was an enormous relief to have him finally return to the embassy, to go off in the mornings as men should, leaving the house a breathable, habitable place again.
The heavy lid of the case flies upward and Grace peers into it a little absently, her mind on the upcoming party—Ahmet will be there—with no particular expectations. Inside is the usual masculine assortment of toiletries and pressed shirts and laundered underwear, which always return, she knows from experience, in exactly the same order and condition in which they left. What this signifies, she’s not quite sure. But what she finds now—lying alongside the carefully folded shorts and undershirts, his stack of handkerchiefs, a tin of shoe polish—is a complete surprise. She lifts the notes from Ahmet and holds them lightly; she leans back on her heels and thinks.
But she is not as horrified as she might be. She doesn’t really believe Rand has looked in there lately. The question is, who is responsible? There are only two possibilities: her daughter, or her maid, both of them given to the same kind of prying and ransacking. They are both competent poachers and trespassers. Those items she believes are Simone’s, for example, that have recently turned up around the apartment. Some of them she easily recognizes: that camisole was most certainly Simone’s. She knew that well before she questioned Canada about it. And it doesn’t really bother her that Simone is missing her things. In a way, she thinks, it rather serves her right. Is she becoming a little more permissive of late? Grace senses in herself a new willingness to cut everyone some slack. She assumes Canada’s light-fingeredness has something to do with her new friendship with the headmaster’s daughter; perhaps a kind of passing adolescent
rebellion. It’s also possible, she supposes, flipping through the incriminating little sheaf of papers, that Canada intended her father to find these letters, but Grace finds this neither alarms nor shocks her, not really.
She gets to her feet, taking the letters and leaving the suitcase open. She wanders down the hall to the bedroom and pulls open the top drawer of her vanity. She drops the letters inside—exactly where they’d been—and pushes the heavy wooden piece back into place: it slides in reluctantly, with a muffled little shriek. She doesn’t bother to seek out a more secure hiding spot. There had been a time in their marriage when she might have wanted Rand to find her out, but she is no longer such an ingenue. Some years earlier, in another foreign country, she’d swallowed a fistful of pills—enough to make her dopey, but certainly not enough to do harm—and staged herself on a chaise under a sunny window. She had spilled a few tablets onto the coffee table and taken care that Canada was elsewhere. Rand had come in three sheets to the wind that evening, evaluated the room for a moment and then sternly instructed her not to be so dramatic. He’d called her, if she remembers correctly, childish and inconsiderate.
She leaves the letters in the bedroom and returns to the closet to examine the dresses—the view, the selection, is exactly the same as when she left it. Disappointing.
STANDING IN Paige’s kitchen, swiping ineffectually at a sticky countertop, Grace listens for Ahmet’s arrival. Simone’s houseboy slinks about, opening the refrigerator and closing it again, fetching things from cabinets, acting perfectly at home. He detaches one of Paige’s cats from a curtain and tosses it none too gently out of the room. Paige herself is engaged in making drinks—using a blender and salt and a counter’s worth of exotic ingredients. She is consulting a book propped against the toaster.
