Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  Kneeling on her chair at the kitchen table, squinting in the half-light of the television, Sasha laid out the ingredients for her meal carefully, the same way she had seen Mama do. She started by cutting the rye, crossed-eyed with concentration, one hand pressing the loaf down, produced two slices, pleased with her handiwork. The cheese, just as easy. With the sausage, she encountered difficulty – a thick rind around the meat resisted her knife when she pressed down, and the rubbery casing caused the sausage to slip away from her. As a solution, she gripped the kielbasa in her left hand and sawed away with the right.

  The blade on the down stroke sawed into the sausage, once, twice, and then right through, clean into her hand, stopped against bone.

  Her eyes opened wide to take in the intrusive, obscene gash in her skin – so clean and deep that it took a moment for the blood to well up and spread across her palm. She screamed, kept screaming as long as she could, but stopped when she grew hoarse and it became clear that nobody was coming.

  Sasha sunk to the floor and clutched her good palm tight against the maimed one and tried to think what to do. A scene from a movie came to mind; she crawled to the bathroom and pulled down a towel, which she wrapped around her hand several times. In seconds the material was soaked through. Her eyes were growing heavy. She prayed, because her mother had taught her that prayer is the first and last resort in all situations.

  When Sasha came to, Mama was hauling her into her arms, making soft cooing noises. Sasha was propped up in the kitchen chair, and she was acutely aware of the whole world, everything in sharp focus, like a radio dial finding its way – the pinging of hot water in the pipes, the screaming kettle, the sharp smell of alcohol as Mama poured vodka into a soup bowl and then dipped a darning needle into it.

  As she gently sewed up the gash in Sasha’s hand, Mama sang, a lilting, nonsense melody, drifting between Polish and English. Sasha felt no pain, just the sleepy night-time warmth of the apartment, and a sense of wonder as Mama cleaned the wound with a rag, wrung it out in the bowl of vodka, watched as the liquid in the bowl turned pink.

  When she was done, Mama kissed the cut, wrapped it in a bandage, slapped Sasha’s face so hard she fell from her chair and had to lie on the floor for a moment as the room reeled around her. Then Mama fixed her a mixture of hot milk, honey and vodka, and sung to her gently until she was asleep.

  Sasha wore the bandage for three weeks. When it came off she was dismayed to find an ugly, puckered scar across her palm.

  As time passed, she learned to hold that fist closed, self-conscious. Every time she met someone new her hand would shrink into itself, seek refuge in a pocket, or handbag, or behind her back, even long after childhood had passed, the scar had faded, and she barely remembered the deep jagged wound across the lines of her palm; life, love, and all the rest.

  Mama never explained what kept her from home that night. Mama seldom explained herself, even as her absences and absentminded behaviour became more frequent.

  A reason: Mama drank. If she came home tired and grumpy after work, she began to brighten from the moment she poured a few fingers of vodka over ice-cubes popped from a plastic freezer tray. She slipped out of her work clothes, musty from the deli, and changed into her house gown, an ankle-length polyester robe, white with embroidered roses climbing the lapels, so old it had taken on the sepia tone of an old photograph and was softened by a million ancient wrinkles that gathered as she moved through their apartment, through life.

  She belted it with a red sash, knotted so the tails swished theatrically as she careened about, vamping, dumping salads into bowls and boiling water for pierogi, shrieking along to Russian opera, which she pumped up so loud the glassware rattled.

  Each night, for dessert, Mama produced a slice of cake and pot of sweet tea for Sasha, then sat on the other side of the table and worked through a bottle of vodka – a shot, a slice of black bread spread with pâté, a bite of pickle – as she asked Sasha about her day. What was on television? Could she sing the song from Captain Planet? When Sasha started school, she asked about her classmates, asked her to bring her homework to the dinner table and sat with her while she did it. Her eyelids grew heavy while she alternated between explaining long division and railing against the mediocre academic expectations put on American children, which she refused to dignify by speaking English to Sasha.

  Polish, to Sasha’s ears, was a language that was always yelled; in anger, in joy, neutrally, while watching the television or admiring the sunset. A language that, no matter who was speaking, sparkled with the manic cadence of her mother cajoling a smile out of her.

  Mama never expected to live in America, was dragged abroad by her husband and then stranded there by the vagaries of the imploding USSR. She had never mastered much more than the basics of English, overtaken and lapped by Sasha by the time she was eight – so Sasha became the one to fill out forms, to answer phone calls from the tax office, to respond to letters home from teachers.

  Mama would talk to her daughter only in Polish, and for mass she took them to the Polish-language service at Saint Stanislaus over in Queens, an hour out of their way.

  Each Sunday, before they set out, Mama made Sasha’s favourite breakfast of fried eggs and kielbasa, with a tall glass of OJ decanted from a plastic bottle. She’d top up the rest of that bottle with vodka and stow it safely in her handbag. Then to church, where all through the journey on the bus to Queens, and all through mass and the Eucharist, Mama fidgeted with her bag, tapped her fingers rhythmically on the leather, fastened and unfastened the latch, eventually reaching in just to rest a hand on the bottle.

  After church, she’d take Sasha’s hand and lead her out through the great wooden doors, down the street past the iron gates and a respectable distance up the block, where she took out the bottle and glugged down half of it. Then she’d settle, her hands steadier, the tiny tremor that had transferred from Mama’s palm to Sasha’s all through church gone as they linked hands to set off to Manhattan for the afternoon.

  They took the L, always the L, even though it meant going all the way back to Brooklyn, and even though it would have made more sense just to take the 7 – it was right there. But Mama refused to cross the bridge. It was bad luck, it invited disaster to cross a bridge, no way she was taking her little girl across that rickety, snaking excuse for a bridge across the river. It was bad enough going under the river – at the point where the L dipped underground and Sasha could feel the change in pressure in her ears, Mama would grasp the cross at her throat and shut her eyes tight until the danger had passed.

  They’d spend Sunday afternoons exploring Manhattan – Central Park, the zoo, little galleries in the Battery, the Met, the Museum of Natural History – all those fierce animals frozen in the middle of a fight that would never end.

  All across the city, Sasha trotted after Mama in her Sunday frock and sensible shoes, yelling questions, her piping voice rising above the din of the city, echoing through dusty museums. Mama answered them when she had the answer to hand, but if not, which happened more and more as Sasha grew older, she found a staff member who looked authoritative and unleashed a barrage of questions on them in her ugly but workable English, listening to their response with her head cocked and nodding, already preparing her next line of inquiry.

  Sasha cherished this, the way that one question begat two more, that knowledge was a treasure that only showed how tarnished and shop-worn it was the more you accumulated. She loved that her mother understood this too, shared it with her, loved that she did not let shame at her poor English stand in the way of demanding answers from the world. Sasha wanted the answers to everything, and her mother would find a way to provide them.

  Sasha was gifted. Her mother knew it; she was certain that if nothing else good came from her wretched life, she had raised her daughter like a phoenix.

  Sasha learned by osmosis, by the irrepressible enthusiasm her mother had for maths, for music, for rolling up her sleeves and figuring shit out. S
he dreamed of going on scientific exhibitions to Antarctica, the Sahara, the bottom of the ocean.

  ‘You are special,’ Mama told her every night as they pored over homework. ‘You are an American girl, which is wonderful, anything is possible for you. Better, you are not lazy like Americans. You will do wonderful things one day. You will change the world.’

  Sasha played with her father’s watch, wound it, tried to parse the meaning of the dials embedded in the face. She invented elaborate games where she made believe she was a scientist, the watch with its ticking guts some arcane piece of equipment that, properly understood, would help her stop a tidal wave, an earthquake, a meteor.

  This was the stage of life where she could be wide-eyed and intelligent and come across as precocious rather than obnoxious – a luxury that did not survive to her time in middle school. The indignities of puberty, the rising awareness that, despite what she had been told about the American dream, success was not something that people wanted her to have.

  One summer day, when Sasha was thirteen, they walked through Greenpoint and passed two men, muscled but with receding hairlines, sprawled on a bench, legs spread. As they walked by, Sasha was licking a popsicle, didn’t even see the guys until one of them loudly said, ‘Atta girl. Practice makes perfect.’

  Sasha startled, reddened, but Mama just took her hand, walked on without breaking her stride. The men laughed, and one called out after them, ‘Don’t be a stranger now. Look me up in about two years.’

  ‘Naw, man, naw,’ the other said, loud enough to reach them. ‘Look at her mom. She’s a parachute girl, when she turns thirty, someone’s gonna pull her cord and . . . poof.’ He puffed out his cheeks, held his arms out and made wobbling gestures like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, winked at Sasha.

  Mama did not look back or acknowledge the men, but Sasha saw, just for a moment, a crack in her composure, quickly retouched.

  They walked in silence for a few blocks, then Mama turned to her, and said, seriously, ‘Those men back there. You must never allow yourself to be alone with people like that. Do you understand?’

  Sasha nodded. What other response could there be? ‘Yes, Mama.’

  ‘You get one chance, only one. If you are a woman . . .’ she waved her hand, made a disgusted noise. ‘Pah! A mistake, it’s all over. Even if it’s not your fault. For women, it’s always our fault.’

  Sasha nodded uncertainly, and Mama switched to English, to make sure Sasha understood her point. ‘It is nothing but trouble, the sex.’

  Sasha was embarrassed, the word so alien from her mother’s mouth that she was surprised she even knew it. She spent the rest of the day in a deepening furrow of anxiety. If she followed Mama’s logic, it inevitably landed on Sasha; she must have been Mama’s one mistake. It occurred to her, for the first time, that her mother wasn’t happy – in America or with the burden that Sasha’s existence placed upon her. The realisation filled her with dread.

  In time, the fact that she was the cause of Mama’s resentment gave rise to a new, reciprocal worry. What if Mama was being unfair? What if she was wrong? Sasha began to fret that perhaps those awful men weren’t completely wrong, that perhaps her mother wasn’t something to aspire to, an ungrateful thought that made her ashamed to her very core.

  The truth was that her mother had put on weight over the years, a little at a time. The fact was she drank, and drank, and drank, and maybe she was, after all this time alone, a little crazy? Was that something Sasha could tell her? Who else would?

  It dawned on her that her mother had no friends, no hobbies, never left the house except to work or to chaperone Sasha around museums and galleries. Her only interest was drinking and, the older she got, the more she drank. Mama drank with dedication, all through the day. She slipped a few soothing inches of vodka into her orange juice at breakfast and had a lovely iced bottle stashed amongst the schnitzels in the walk-in-freezer at work. In the evenings she filled a tumbler with ice then poured neat vodka over it, sipped it quickly so the ice lasted longer and she didn’t have to lower her feet from the pouf, shove them into her slippers and shuffle to the freezer for a refill.

  By then she would be so drunk that she’d passed through to the other side, to a kind of false sobriety. She’d long since stopped showing any sign of intoxication and unless you knew to look for subtle lags in the way her eyes followed you across the room, you would never know she had been drinking. At the end of the night she moved to the kitchen, deposited the empty bottle in the crate it had come from, and went to bed.

  Mama ran a tight ship. Although the apartment was cluttered with a million tchotchkes, they were all artfully arranged by a careful triangulation of aesthetics, mood and secret instructions no one else could hear. If Sasha picked up a knick-knack and put it down askew, Mama would notice the next time she shuffled by and reach out to put it right.

  Her diligence made the world shrink. The two-bedroom apartment seemed smaller to her than even the gloom or the clutter could explain. It was steeped in the claustrophobia of knowing that everything Sasha owned had been gone over, cleaned, rearranged, reorganised. In the living room every figurine, every seashell, every teacup, was precisely positioned. Since she was a child, the toys and books she left scattered about were collected, catalogued and carefully put away. She felt her mother’s fingerprints on everything, her touch everywhere.

  From early on, Sasha learned that the only way to salvage some privacy was to keep secrets. There were the little things, the things Mama wouldn’t understand; Sasha had discovered Wu-Tang, had discovered boys. And then there were bigger things. When her high school offered driving lessons, Mama decided the roads were too dangerous and forbade Sasha from getting her licence.

  This was an unworkable situation; it was impossible to live in Long Island without wheels. She forged her mother’s signature on the forms – easily done, she’d been doing Mama’s paperwork for years – and aced the test in secrecy, tucking the licence away in the very back of her wallet.

  That was the same year she started dating. She didn’t tell her mother, didn’t know where to start. She had sounded out the idea with a few off-hand remarks about cute boys on the television, in magazines, and Mama’s response was so intense that thereafter the very idea of discussing it sent Sasha’s pulse racing with familiar anxiety.

  Mama had been alone for so long, in such a fundamental way, that when Sasha began the process of teenage rebellion it left Mama bereft. Her daughter was her only friend – the one person who held back the tsunami of loneliness that had been roiling just above her ever since her husband’s death.

  Sasha intuited all this, so when she did start dating she was discreet. It wasn’t that she lied to her mother, more that Mama never asked, not directly.

  Each weekend Mama kept track of Sasha’s plans; required a detailed itinerary. Where she would be, whose mother would be there to keep an eye on things, where she could be reached by phone. Sasha provided the appropriate scaffolding of bent truths.

  She navigated a secret network of Polish school dates and alibis provided by her friends’ older sisters. As a group they would meet a friend, who knew a friend, who knew a group of boys, and then they drove to rendezvous in carparks, where they tailgated beer and wine coolers and paired off.

  She was educated in sex through a mess of misinformation gleaned from nuns, fumbling encounters in cinemas, parks and abandoned high-rise mall carparks after dark, and advice from friends, which was either deliberately or playfully misguided.

  ‘Why do they call it a blowjob?’ one older girl deadpanned when asked for advice. ‘Because you put your lips around his thing and then blow, just like you’re trying to blow up a balloon. Trust me. He’ll love it.’

  Disaster was averted when the polite boy she was making out with in the front seat of a Honda Civic put an insistent hand on the back of her head and guided her down and through the whole villanelle. Sasha’s jaw was taxed, her breathing confused, but before long she heard his br
eathing quicken and stagger, then the startling explosion in the back of her throat. There was a scramble to wipe up, then the boy cuddled her stiffly for a count of two minutes, and started the car.

  She found Catholic schoolboys impossible; she lost her virginity too late to earn the respect of her friends. But if that first time was awkward, she still enjoyed it – if only in the way getting her driver’s licence was pleasurable: pretty sure she had it in the bag, but still nice to ace it.

  A nice boy, forgettable, they’d been dating for a few weeks and, to mark the occasion, they went out to Frantonis, shared a pizza and a bottle of Diet Coke, then drove twenty minutes north to the Port Washington carpark, the nose of the car inches from the knee-high seawall. He reached across to gently lower her seat down. He tasted of cheese and pepperoni. Her hands rested on his biceps, her eyes on his forearms braced against the neatly detailed interior of his Ford; one on the back of the seat, one on the windowpane. Beneath her fingertips she felt the tick, tick of his pulse through his arm, and then the violence of his orgasm shivering through him. It didn’t hurt much. Her pride, maybe.

  She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but halfway through she couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t that different to being humped by a friendly dog – all that grateful panting.

  She met his gaze and saw him slowly return to his body, his breath calming, the eyes focusing again. His head whipped up to scan the windows around the carpark. There was nobody but the seagulls, wheeling overhead, and the boats bobbing on the water; there’d barely been time for the windows to fog up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Normally that lasts longer.’

  Their relationship lasted the length of time it took to exhaust the packet of Magnums he’d shoplifted. They were too shy to purchase a packet – they’d tried by disguising the box at the bottom of a shopping basket, under a pile of toothpastes and lotions and candy, but chickened out at the last minute, abandoned their groceries and fled, giggling, to the carpark.