She breathed in deeply and then dared to say to him, “We should never have come.” It was the first time she had not run to apply a salve of absolution before she struck. The worst of it was that he knew she was right.
He looked back at her with a harshness she could see he was trying to contain and joined his hands together as if they could squeeze back words he did not want to say. Just as well: She would not have liked any response he could give her. Asher was the only one who saw her disappointment. The others would hate her for thinking herself superior.
In Zhitomir, everything lay ahead, in another country. She had had enough of the horizon. In Christa, she dreamed of the city. Why could she own not a single fine dress, so that she was condemned to wear her poor faded school dress to the Oratorical Competition? In spite of its difficulty, she had loved going to her school because each new thing she learned promised to be useful for her next step: reading those books to be diverted from boredom but also to lay down a road that she might travel.
She had bent her head over the times tables, each combination a different shape in her mind—for some reason, eleven times eleven amused her, twelve times twelve felt solid and round and reassuring. But chiefly, numbers would be necessary to calculate her way, some day, to independence. Pared to the bone by skimpy diet and endless labor, she could feel fury bubbling like a caustic, burning everything away but hope. She was going to correct the mistake that was her life as soon as the moment came clear. She had never before deliberately hurt someone. She was prepared for regret.
In the meantime, she woke up one morning with a plan: Passivity. Refusal, like a stone, many sharp little stones, in her palm, clutched but not thrown. She would grow calluses to blunt her pain. Against every instinct, she was going to render herself useless. If they would not give her what she needed, she would not give them anything at all. And if she became a burden, wouldn’t they expel her? Instead of pulling the peas off their spiraling vines and then shelling them into the pail, where the first layer made a pinging sound like rain against tin, she hid beneath the farthest tree in the orchard, reading Mrs. Dancy’s Fortune (another story of a girl who, finally, for all her early spirit, does as she must, as others demand, and smiles prettily in her arbor. Miss Singlet had wanted to lend her a very big volume called Moby-Dick, but wondered if she could manage it. She would make herself manage it).
She did not come when called. When her mother handed her a basket of laundry to take to the pond, she turned her back and walked away, hoping her desperation would finally convince them to set her free. She ate sullenly beside them meals she had not helped cook, and when the dishes were ready to be cleared and washed, she vanished without a word of apology, walked off across the low rows of green shoots she had not planted. She was appalled at her insolence, and thrilled by her daring.
Her mother called down a cholerya on her—cholera, an all-too-familiar curse—and prayed that her disobedient feet would wither. Chaya, clenched tight so as not to be too badly hurt, smiled to hear it. Her poison was working its way. She closed her eyes and let the stunning curses fall on her head.
They looked at her with contempt—no one understood what she was doing. Only Asher could console her. Sometimes their bond was uncanny. Chaya would think something and Asher, as sensitive as a leaf in a slight breeze, would respond. There were too many things that she wanted and knew she could never have, down in town, at the mercantile. In fact, the more she was denied, the more she desired; she suspected she was not alone in this. But whenever they went into town together, some one or two of these precious objects would appear in the burlap bag that Asher carried with him everywhere. When they were safely at home and out of sight, he would carefully unknot the shoelace that cinched it closed and, smiling, hand her his booty. Hair ribbons, a set of ornamental pins stuck through a little square of velveteen—one the sun, the other the moon—made out of mock silver. A belt that seemed to be a long chain of flower petals in many colors of leather she had never seen before, green and red and a bronzy gold. A Farmers’ Almanac that told her the dates of great events—the Battle of Hastings, 1066; the frequent eruptions of Mount Etna, with the probability that there would be another within the year—and predicted weather catastrophic and benign and warned, this year, that winter would be more harsh than usual, damp and windy. The little yellow book seemed full of threat because it made no comment, only promised, in the very same print that recorded events already past.
She had never mentioned these covetous yearnings to Asher. When they came to town, did he watch her eyes to see where they lighted? Did he monitor her breathing as it changed intensity in the presence of all that she coveted? Sometimes he couldn’t even wait until they were at home to give her his gifts. At Doreen’s Mercantile, he would stand close to her, press himself to her side, and, below the height of the counter she would feel his warm hand slip something into hers. The tiny cameo, bone-white against umber. The packet of ice-white buttons. Palm-sized surprises. One time she lingered over a length of water-blue ribbon, rubbing it beneath her fingers to enjoy its silky gloss, and in what seemed an instant he thrust a length of it at her, unsmiling, as if he were fulfilling a duty. Innocent-faced, silent, he was her little criminal and she was complicit, and no one in the family paid them sufficient attention to wonder how these fancy accessories had materialized or to ask to search Asher’s bag, no matter how lumpy.
If only she could know all that he knew without studying, she would not need school. Asher was blessed, his tongue sweet without costly sugar, and she was cursed. Sometimes she thought he did not really exist. In the dead, dark of the country night, lying beside him, listening to his sticky small-boy breath, she feared that out of her own need she had invented him.
5
AND THEN it all closed in on her.
Her mother, who should have known her better, abandoned her to an idea, and, already far from her best self, she had to fight to keep herself recognizable. Mother and her good friend Fraydl became conspirators to marry her off.
The boy was a recent arrival, Fraydl’s nephew, who showed up unannounced one hot August, having begged a ride with a neighbor who was heading past their turn-off in his wagon. With his eyes he raked the girls where they sat in the too-warm Commons in relative undress idly gossiping. Not that there was such a thing as undress, only the chance to suspend a few layers of bombazine and country cotton to roll up their sleeves and unbutton their collars.
Chaya had pulled her reddish hair back and tied it with a rag, uncaring. Though it was thick and usually rumpled, below it her face surprised with its delicacy. Her gray eyes seemed to be influenced by the colors she happened to be wearing; today they echoed the blue-green of her wash-worn shirtfront, tomorrow they might tend toward brown. Had she ever noticed that, she might have thought it an expression of her own irresolutions. High cheekbones and those forthright eyes, wide apart and deeply set, gave her face a gravity that matched her darkest moods, like the one she was entertaining on this airless night. Some wild man from across the Caucasus, she always imagined, had ambushed her great-great-grandmother—she liked to envision him lifting her onto his horse and fleeing across the icy fields—and left her unsanctioned descendants with a vaguely eastern cast. She did not think herself beautiful or even pretty; in fact, she suspected she might strike some people as odd and hard to place. Though saying that to herself did not entirely protect her from vanity, she knew it best not to think about it at all.
The nephew’s move to America had actually been trumpeted in a letter from Fraydl’s sister more than a year ago, and now that he had finally arrived, exhausted, from too many adventures, Chaya could see a dangerous look erupt like a sudden rash across Fraydl’s face. Reuven’s Fraydl was a milkmaid of a woman, rounded everywhere, pink and wire-haired, a sort of dray horse, sweet-natured but thick, and her sudden interest, which made her pinker than ever, was not subtle. How efficient it would be to fold this boy right into the batter, whatever he might or might not co
ntribute to its flavor.
He was a tall, pale, ghostly looking young man, Shimmie—Chaya had the feeling that she could run the palm of her hand right through him the way you could through a candle flame. His eyes were colorless, his skin the gray of fish just slightly too long out of water, his shoulders narrow and sloping: apologetic. Something about his frailty made her want to pinch him. How could he have done the things he reported? Possibly, she thought, as generously as she could, he had been starving and would, like a flower in dry soil, revive with a rain of attention. He looked famished for warmth and moisture, and for the sun, and there they sat, girls in their summer dresses, loose-haired, returning his gaze because they were so tired of each other’s. Their lives had slowed to a dull drip, nothing to look forward to, no temptations to regret taking or refusing. Bleak, bleak, Chaya was thinking, she who had loved the swaying grasses and the starry nights. Now the only excitement was the chance that, if you kept your head cocked back, you might see a dead star falling.
Shimmie had been five months in New York City. He had had every experience—had found good work unloading wagons, been robbed and beaten, had shaken the hand of the mayor, had even seen Sarah Bernhardt just returned from Paris. To the Fields of Zion, these feats were equally miraculous, all of them, they who had been whisked past the city without a minute to see it or even smell it. Had they not spent a day in the tumult of Castle Garden and a night on a parched lot on the corner outside the building, a city of tents and shanties, while they awaited their orders and train tickets, she would never have seen the awesome variety of people the world contained: women “from the East” with coins dangling above their eyes, and those eyes blackened and sooty, white-haired children, girls wearing vests wildly embroidered with flowers and birds in violent color. Their fathers would not allow them to wander into the city, though they cried and begged; they were not allowed curiosity, which was dangerous, which was tempting. (The mothers wanted to go up to Fifth Avenue, but they too were constrained.) The women and girls were stupefied with envy. Their husbands and fathers had been bent on delivering them to green fields and open air, and forbade them even a day to walk in this wonderland that might have made the crossing worthwhile. It hardly seemed plausible, now, that Shimmie, this long drink of water, had so much life in him, such memories of dazzle and tumult—maybe all he had was an imagination and the brazenness to lie.
He told his stories around the table late into the evening of his arrival, his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up on hairless arms and flaccid wrists that hardly looked capable of lifting a cup to his lips. (Unloading barrels off wagons? This was a puff of smoke, not a teamster!) “Sarah Bernhardt!” Gittl breathed and leaned her buxom chest closer. “What was she like?”
He answered in a quiet voice, as if all of it were too ordinary for comment, and shrugged. “Oh, she was nice enough.” His eyes lingered on her bosom. “She was more delicate than I expected of a woman of her reputation.” Either he was such a pirate of a man that nothing seemed exceptional or, just the opposite, he had no capacity for wonder. Both were repulsive.
But here was the worrisome thing: Chaya’s mother caught her eye across the room. Widened her eye a thousandth of an inch—less—a little glint of collusion, a twitch of possibility so miniscule she was not sure her mother would have acknowledged it to herself. But her daughter was seventeen, a bud about to open; she was fatally without prospects here in the middle of the alien Wisconsin corn, and she had become impossible to keep, her refusal to work an affront and a mockery, from which no amount of opprobrium would budge her. And at their rickety table sat a landsman, who seemed brave and honest, worldly but modest about his exploits and—this was what made all things happen for a reason, wasn’t it bashert?—destined?—that he had happened to arrive among them just now, and none too early, now and not too late? Her mother and Fraydl glowed at each other across the assembled heads.
Betrayal fouled the air, sharp as manure. The way things worked on the farm, if her mother suggested to her father that Chaya’s future had just arrived on a passing cart, dusty but intact—not even a stranger but vouched for by Fraydl!—and if he agreed that the boy had promise, she would not be consulted. There was no other girl, quite, of marriageable age just then—Gittl, for all that she was more zaftig than bird-thin Chaya would ever be, was younger, so was Rochl—no one to graciously pass him on to. She envisioned this frail, leafless twig tight against her, the two of them in their own little room off the Common, bundled under a quilt lovingly made for them by di veyber, required to lie close. Required to breed like the chickens in the hutch. Chaya did not dare to think she deserved a prince, but she saw her body pass through his like that hand through candle flame, and she believed she would sooner throw herself in their stagnant pond than let him near her. She did not know much but she knew enough—and if she shuddered, it was not because a sudden breeze had found her where she sat. There were no breezes there that night in the whole hellish state of Wisconsin.
And then he winked at her. One of those pale reptilian eyes creased in a coy flicker of greeting, as if she had agreed to something, and she could feel her hands becoming fists in her lap. Suddenly, then—it made so much sense that she gasped out loud—finally, finally, she understood that she had been waiting for this: She was going to leave the Fields of Zion.
Shimmie could stay to inherit the stricken fields of hope gone dead, good labor after bad, God versus Marx. If they had so little respect for her that first she was starved of the education she wanted, and then was considered communal property like Eyn and Tsvey, obedient cows, and their poor decrepit horse, an asset to be made the most of, she would inscribe herself in the debit column. Before she appeared as black ink in the ledger, she would quietly subtract herself. Let them write her name in red. And when she returned triumphant, a queen who could rescue them, let them try royal purple!
When they had all gone to bed, she sat on the doorstep imagining a life. She stacked all she could not wait to leave behind—the caught-ness like a dress snagged on a hook that bound her tighter every time she tried to move forward. She was too bitter these days, she could see it, to be kind to the children, she was harsh with the animals, short with her friends, and, ever since she’d been bereft of school, she had been a parasite on the community and a shrew to her mother. Everything disgusted her: They still lived in the Commons, waiting for—who? The messiah?—to build their own house for them. There was nothing here that was not chipped or cracked, soiled or deformed. Gouges in wood. Fetid flowers in a jar, in green and stinking water. Egg stuck to the wooden table waiting to be picked at with a fingernail. Dust bolls, sour cleaning cloths. Mordechai’s violin dead silent. Cow dung on her soles, yellow-brown in the cracks. Maggots in the outhouse. Coughing at night in the next room, Yankel and his endless catarrh. The taste of milk gone slightly rancid, the distant taint of onion on every dish. She had read—half, at least—of that Moby-Dick that her teacher let her keep for the long time it took to make her way through its forests of new words and elaborate sentences. She understood perfectly why that man called Ishmael said when he found himself following funerals, it was time to go to sea.
But, as if something had leaped out from behind a bush to frighten her, one idea made her chest lurch: How could she leave Asher behind? It would be a cruel abandonment, for her perhaps more than for him. For one thing, she was the one who had taught him to read and figure and she loved it that he seemed to swallow books in one great bite. Now she feared he too would be conscripted as a pair of hands, a back, a shoulder, his access to books curtailed, his mind turned to practical matters and none of that frivol and fuss they both so loved. She told herself (though she did not quite believe) that, being the boy he was, the lovesome, worrisome boy, he would object to leaving his mama and papa and the brothers who had ridden him around on the sweet saggy horse, or pelted him (as they did each other; it was never hostile) with fallen apples. Now she had to trust his ingenuity, his refusal to heel, and believe h
e would manage somehow without her help, though she was not so certain of herself.
She did not dare take one last look at him while he slept sprawled like a puppy in a litter beside his brother Beryle for fear she would waver. Instead, she lay in the dark, clenched listening to the breathing around her, some even, some disordered, of far too many of her unbeloved neighbors.
THE NEXT morning, so early the sun’s red fire was just beginning to lick the dark side of the barn, Chaya stood in the way of Henry—the girls called him Horny Henry—when he came to pick up the milk cans to deliver to the railroad siding. Every morning he propped them there to go to market on the 8:10. She had to seize all her courage to whisper her request to him because he had always half frightened, half disgusted her. Henry was cruel-faced because of a brutal scarring he’d received when he was just a boy working at the tannery. In fact, the edges of his scars looked terribly like leather themselves, thick and brown and impervious as hide, and he looked as though he’d given up washing around the same time. But he was as regular as the sun that revealed the barn each day, and she suspected he was hungry. She surely was.
So when he made clear the price for his assistance, she didn’t hesitate to pay it: one fast swipe of his shovel-sized hands across her breasts, and one pretended thrust against her where she stood with her back to his shaking wagon. Poor Henry. She thought of the dogs in their barnyard hurling themselves at the yelping bitches. But he didn’t steal anything from her, she reasoned, that cost her anything. She was still the same—a girl full of books and bitterness—when he was finished pressing against her, the first man ever to fit himself to her, mussing her dress. Her rough burlap apron must not have been quite the texture he had in mind. Cheap at the price, she thought, even though she knew she would have to yield this same favor again tomorrow, on the actual day when, her few belongings in a seed sack, she would hunker down invisibly between the cold silvery cans that chattered against each other in the rank body of his wagon.
The Lake on Fire Page 3
