by Beth Helms
I was reading a book upstairs one night when Kate came clattering up after supper, breathless. She swung back and forth on the edge of the door and said, “She’s bloody gone.”
“Who is?”
“Who do you think? The Canadian. Your friend. She’s actually buggered off somewhere, run away.”
Kate did not know this for a fact, and she had no details, but she’d gleaned bits and pieces. Her parents had been talking loudly, without discretion, over running water and dirty dishes.
“It’s supposed to be a secret. Simone’s off her rocker. Mum heard the whole thing from someone at church.”
Kate tore open a chocolate bar—she had an endless supply of them hidden under her mattress—and licked the brown, sweating inside of the wrapper. “It’s bloody marvelous. It’s absolutely the most excellent thing I ever heard.”
“I have to go home,” I said. “My mother’s come back early.”
“That’s a bloody lie,” she said. “But I don’t care. Do what you want. I’m tired of you anyway.”
I told her mother a fib and left Kate’s house. I walked all the way home and made the kapıcı let me in. He lived in the basement and I had to bang on the door for a full five minutes before he appeared—heavily mustached, wiping his nose with his sleeve and very irritated by the interruption. For a long moment, as he decided what to do with me, the whole wild impulse hung in jeopardy. Finally he tossed a burning cigarette over my shoulder into the hallway, wrestled his ring of keys from his belt, yelled something to his wife and trudged up the stairs in front of me, speaking incomprehensibly, angrily, under his breath.
I had been alone in the apartment many times, but never once overnight. I opened the windows and the kitchen door that led to the balcony. I ate cold borek from the refrigerator and sat in the living room, playing my mother’s records. I did not have quite enough courage to build a fire or pour a glass of brandy, though both those things seemed entirely appropriate to the occasion.
Later, my father telephoned and I picked it up in the hallway. I was thrilled to hear his voice, even the sound of the miles buzzing between us. Had he known somehow that I was alone? I wouldn’t have been surprised, he had always seemed that powerful to me. But he said nothing about it, and so when he asked for my mother I didn’t bother to make an excuse for her. I made my voice cold and casual, saying I hadn’t the faintest idea where she’d gone, that she’d left in a taxi, with her makeup done and a weekend bag. I had no riding lessons scheduled either, I mentioned into the echoing hum of the telephone connection, for coincidentally, Ahmet too had gone away.
We stayed on the line in silence for a few moments. “Where are you?” I said finally. “When are you coming back?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, “but I can tell you one thing, it’s damn cold here.”
He said goodbye then and the line disengaged abruptly.
Afterward, sitting in the quiet alone, I imagined I was Catherine and that it was my hand that John held, leading me down the staircase, my fingers curling inside his. I saw the taxi he called waiting, the hurry in his step because I’d finally agreed but might yet change my mind. As I imagined moving through that morning, I carried Catherine’s blue wool coat, her white gloves, a book.
I’d often imagined myself as Catherine: in her skin, her clothes, in the hollows of her bones. Sometimes, I even wore the jewelry she’d given me to hide, the sparkling little pieces from John. Once, Paige spied the bracelet on my wrist and swung me around in her kitchen—where did that come from? She pried back my cuff, bent her powdered face and her blue-caked eyelids, down close to it. That’s a lovely one. Where did you find it? Alone in Catherine’s room on a thousand occasions I touched her belongings—trailing my fingers along them the way we had done in Simone’s bedroom. But I wanted to carry it all away with me—her calm and her undeserved beauty, all her terrible advantages.
In September—it seemed years ago—we’d walked home from school once with a boy who rode our bus. In the center of the construction site near my apartment building was an enormous pile of bricks; every day the men wheeled barrows of these around to various spots. This activity—and eating, and smoking—was the entire extent of any progress we’d seen made there. Passing the site that day, the boy, Marcus, casually lifted a stone from the ground and lobbed it in the direction of the brick pile; it landed squarely, to our amazement, and shattered several. They broke with a surprisingly musical noise, a kind of tinkling: it made you think the bricks were flimsy to begin with and poorly made. A worker was bending over a trough of cement with a shovel and he paused at the noise, lifting his head and turning it slowly, taking in the situation: the boy, the girls, the bricks, and the offending rock, still bouncing across the dirt. Without a word he straightened and lifted the shovel, holding its load of sloppy cement, and flung the contents toward us where we stood, rooted, on the sidewalk. Marcus ducked. But Catherine stood stock-still and the cement hit her full force: it landed on the side of her head and made its way, dripping clingingly, down her cheek, her shoulder, onto her schoolbooks and the tops of her patent shoes. The boy fled; I saw his back, the worn soles of his shoes as he flew the rest of the way down the street and disappeared around the corner.
Upstairs, I put her in the bath like a child, peeling the clothes from her, dropping them on the floor. The cement had hardened in her hair; a tear caught in the gray sludge on her cheek and quivered. There was one bathroom in our apartment, green and ugly; you could in no way compare it to the steamy, scented paradise of Simone’s invention. Sometimes, in her absences—stolen minutes, each counting as hours—we had bathed there together, pouring into the steaming water ever less conservative capfuls, heady mixtures of her oils and salts and lotions, until the room was suffocating in steam and competing scents and Catherine and I lounged opposite each other in curving ceramic corners, smiling and drowsy and quite breathless with danger, our lips smeared with lipsticks we had swiped and swiped again in the mirror, sugars and corals and deep-deep darks, applied in thick, vampish smears.
But in my family’s bathroom, cheap, too-dark panty hose hung like disembodied legs from the shower rail and the wringer washer squatted in a corner, primitive and unsightly, a heaped basket of neglected ironing to one side. I ran the water scalding hot and put Catherine’s head under the faucet. She was suddenly pliable, as easy to move as a doll. She sat with her head flung back, shoulders pearly in the steam, elbows braced on the edges of the tub, the toes of my mother’s stockings, with their thick, oversewn seams, trailing over her collarbone and cheeks. From time to time she pushed them from her eyes absently, like bangs grown long. For over an hour I pulled cement from her hair. We didn’t speak; my fingers grew puckered and white ridged in the steam. When we heard the front door I slid out of my own wet clothes, quickly, quickly, and eased my body into the water, hands pushing the small globs of cement to the bottom, trapping them under my feet. For a moment we faced each other, knees drawn up to make way in the too-tight green tub—it seemed sudden, that fit; had we grown? I noted for the millionth time her carved features, her smooth skin, the sleek dark curtain of her loosed hair. Then she closed her eyes tight, shutting me out, and it was as if I were suddenly alone in the cooling gray water. The door opened and my mother stood there, surprised but not especially intrigued, then went away.
Sitting alone in the living room that night, having turned on every light in the apartment, I thought of John and Catherine, of my mother and Ahmet, and then suddenly of Angie, the little girl I had played with on Olson Loop. I remembered the hot sticky tar of the driveway and the long yellow curls she twisted around her finger. One night she had slept at my house and then, late and in the dark, when my parents were downstairs with the television going, she had lifted her legs wide in the air and taken my hand and pushed it deep between them. I thought of that, and the vast toy store of her bedroom, the deep shag carpet littered with Barbie clothes and little plastic shoes and cars and furniture, the ovens cooking
miniature cakes with lightbulbs, the snap-together train tracks winding through perfect plastic towns and deep green forests. And again, it’s that blistering day and across the street my mother is locked away with Edie and there will be nothing for lunch and Angie is standing in front of me in her red playsuit and her white socks and she is running the wheels of her wagon back and forth and somewhere a dog is barking and a bicycle bell is ringing and the sun is hitting her golden hair from behind and I look down at the complex, glistening pattern of tar beneath my dirty sneakers and suddenly I want, I want, I want—I want to see her there. And my hands fly forward and strike her shoulders and she falls backward onto her fat bottom and then gets to her feet, her face too stupid with surprise and that isn’t good enough at all so I push her again and she falls forward onto her plump knees and then there is bright blood and screaming and then, only then, am I satisfied. Perfectly, perfectly satisfied.
3
January 1976
18
THE ISTANBUL APARTMENT IN THE SULTANAHMET DISTRICT BELONGS to the consulate and is kept for important guests and state visitors: Paige, ever influential, has arranged it for the holiday weekend. She’s described it to Grace in detail: the quiet, tree-lined street, the views of the river from wide windows, and in the distance the six minarets of the great Blue Mosque. Close to shopping, she said, and lovely little restaurants.
“If you manage to get outside.” This said archly. “If not, don’t tell me.” She’s given Grace a list of attractions she must visit, shops they must look in on, using her name. “Lie to me,” she says. “The bartering. The sights, the food. In descriptive detail.”
But they do leave it. Early mornings and late at night, when the city is at its fitful rest, they creep into the streets and buy groceries and fresh bread and pastries from the bakery and then, roughhousing and laden with packages, they climb back up the staircase to the light-filled rooms and sink into their temporary domesticity—their hours of food and tea and sex and temporary intimacies. At night they walk the quieted streets of the bazaar and squint into the darkened windows of the shops: here is where she might buy a rug, he tells her, on another trip. She should remember the address. And at this place, she will find the kind of puzzle rings that children like; here, the sort of copper that is beautiful but cannot be used for cooking. But to her small and unstated dismay, they shun the city’s daylight pleasures. Ahmet does not care for the crowds, the tourists, all the common, well-frequented sights.
And try as she might, Grace cannot draw him into any conversation of a future between them. He will not comfort her in this way. She only wants him to say he wants it, not that he will do it. She’s not sure she even wants it herself, only this feeling and to pretend it might not end. But Ahmet is a man who does not like talk of imaginary, impossible things: these are ephemera, frivolous and unsatisfying, and they do not intrigue him.
Lying on the floor, overlooking the river, as the sun sets and that suspension bridge of light she has seen in photographs and books suddenly connects one shore, and one continent, to another, a new feeling creeps up on her. Grace thinks of Bahar, who has left for Europe with Firdis’s child: she imagines the meeting between her two friends, in a city once so familiar to her. She can see the wet cobbled streets and the arching lamps overhead and she imagines them in a café or a gasthaus, sitting across a table from each another, while one and then the other jiggles the dark baby on her lap. What will they speak of? She is fleetingly jealous of these women together: she imagines them making little jokes at her expense, speaking of her in light, disparaging terms. It is what she is occupied with when Ahmet presses his hand against her bare stomach and offers a few million lira for her thoughts.
“My friend Edie,” she tells him. “This baby business.”
Ahmet sighs and rolls away on the carpet. His back is pale and lightly freckled; naked, his age is more apparent.
“Sorry,” she says. “I know you don’t want to think of it.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t want you to think of it. This is why I agreed to come to Istanbul this weekend. To distract you from these arrangements.”
Is this true? Grace does not have the courage to press him. She makes a joke of it instead and jollies him until he turns and gathers her up once more in his arms. But it gives her something else to think about, to imagine that she has been capitulated to like a pouting child.
She went to Istanbul seeking peace. But despite her hopes for the trip and all the superficial pleasures it undeniably holds, Grace begins to feel that something intangible has slipped from her fingers.
Ahmet gets up now and moves to the window. He takes his shirt from a chair and buttons it over his chest. Then he lifts his wallet from a table in the corner and tucks it into his pocket. He turns to look at her for a few seconds before leaving the room; Grace watches him go without saying a word.
The room is quiet: just the murmur of water traffic on the Bosporus, the closing of a door in the hallway outside, the gentle whir of the ceiling fan pushing a breeze from the windows. Lying on the floor, Grace is surrounded by the remains of the afternoon—the stained wineglasses and heels of bread, the crumbs of cheese and scattered pillows. She sits up and rests her head on her knees. A sepia-toned photograph on the wall catches her eye: a wedding picture of some old-fashioned strangers, a beaming young bride in white posing with a stiff young man in a dark suit. He is trying so hard, she sees, to look somber and adult but has succeeded only in looking terrified. There is something intensely sweet about the picture, something hopeful and lovely and brave.
It makes Grace think of her own wedding—had she ever felt that way, had it ever shown? She remembers a small stone church in the middle of a once familiar city, her demure ivory suit and tight, borrowed shoes, and the sight of Rand at the end of the aisle, in his dress uniform, surrounded by his army buddies, their faces a childish mixture of alarm and propriety. Later there was cake in someone’s drab apartment, and champagne in snap-together flutes, small gifts elaborately wrapped—an enormous lollipop etched with the words “To our favorite sucker,” which Rand had mugged with, absurdly, a little grotesquely, for the camera.
Rand had shipped out to Baghdad right after the wedding, with Grace in tow like a new piece of luggage, her packing skills wholly inadequate for the challenge. That would change. A girlfriend had given her a book as a wedding gift, The Officer’s Wife, and even then it had been a gag. They’d turned the pages together, giggling at the stilted language and the straight-faced suggestions, the rigid politesse of this new life she was embarking on. But it was one she was certain she could triumph over armed with nothing but her modern thinking, her youth, her fine complexion, her handsome husband. It had seemed laughably easy: a lark, a girlish scamp. She hadn’t known at the time that she was already pregnant.
But even so it had gone on that way for nearly two years—the pregnancy was easy, and Baghdad was a whirl of exotic scenery and locales, men in uniforms dipping over her hand at parties. Then one morning there was a telephone call from the embassy telling her to pack and pack quickly. One small suitcase, the baby’s essentials. Leave the rest, the official on the phone instructed. She was not allowed to speak to Rand, who was reportedly occupied.
Suddenly, bombs were exploding in the city and smoke rose in plumes over the Tigris. They came for her in a convoy, and the truck was filled with other women and their children, women she knew from parties and coffees and the makeshift little church on the American compound. It struck her that she had never seen them without makeup; it was early morning and some still wore house-coats and curlers. Others wore slacks—forbidden in the streets but suddenly those protocols seemed irrelevant. Some, like Grace, carried sleeping babies and fistfuls of diapers, their pockets stuffed with oddities: eyeliners and jewelry, a wooden kitchen spoon, baby booties, wedding photographs folded into squares. A few wept and clung together but for the most part they huddled silently along the hard benches beneath the canvas tarp and turned t
heir faces away from one another, as though they had been caught together in some embarrassing, potentially compromising position. As they drove through the city that morning they saw pitiless young men, wild-eyed and glancing behind them, running aimlessly in the streets, and shouting, looking for a melee or a mob to throw themselves into. Coming across a dog these boys would surely kick it bloody, leave it half dead and broken in the street: such was their great, pointless, uncertain hurry.
But the trucks carrying the women left the city swiftly, turning from the main roads and striking out toward the desert and the border with Iran. Young men with rifles leaned out from the edges of the trucks, clinging to the sides and the frames, their baby faces hardened into soldierly masks. If it hadn’t been so terrifying, Grace might have laughed at the thought of them under the protection of these uniformed children. As the trucks met the desert, the women spoke in whispers of their husbands and eventually, as they calmed, of more commonplace valuables, their china and evening gowns and family cookbooks, bedding and cabinetry and photo albums.
Most of them had lost track of their men for the first time. Days passed without word, with only ambiguous briefings from tired officials, who gathered them in dreary rooms and met their questions with statements read from file folders. Later, in a safer country, they would reunite in an airport hangar, the men climbing down from fat-nosed green aircraft and trudging toward them, their clothes smelling of the unknown, their skin gritty and their hands roughened.
Perhaps other men recounted for their wives the events of those six lost days. For his part, Rand was mute and distant, his features remote and his manner terse. Those days seemed to stand between them, and their separate experiences of them: for Grace, the dusty caravan of women and children, the bawdy joking of the soldiers, the cold, fear-filled desert nights, the sick babies and the low, nervous chatter they relied on to pass the hours were insurmountable objects grown up suddenly in the rooms they now shared. The air grew close with their silences and they deliberately spoke of inconsequential things, of their left belongings and goods. They waited nervously for their new orders to arrive. There was no talk of returning to that city, to the little house with the garden and the lemon trees, to the wide streets and boulevards, to the arched doorways and cool tiled floors of their first shared home as a married couple.
