by Hilary Zaid
Anya’s lips, often turned down in her half-smile, half-grimace, twisted horribly, like a bone out of joint. But she fixed me in her slitted eyes; in them, I saw something like defiance. Then she was holding the photo once again in her hand. All the tension had gone out of her face, out of the room, out of the rest of the day. The little sitting room was dark, and I looked around, switched on the light.
Anya held out the photo in her open hand, an offering.
Carefully, I took the photo, cradling it. To peer into it was to peer into a looking glass and see the dead. Two girls. One of them, dark and intense, stared straight into the camera, her school bag slung over her shoulder. Dark skirt, white blouse, pure teenage attitude. The picture was old, taken from a distance; even so, you could see that her eyes were dark, sultry, and indescribably sad. In the photo, the other girl looked at her, laughing. Blond hair, drawn straight back behind her head. The other young face was turned a little to the left—Anya’s face. I looked at Anya, willed her closed face to open up, to tell me something about what I was looking at. “This is from before the War,” I commented.
Anya’s mouth folded shut more tightly. She gave a single curt nod. I studied the picture again, the school clothes, the backpack. I wondered again why Anya had kept this photo from Wendy, why she was showing it to me now.
“From Kovno. From school. A friend.” Anya paused, a silence in which the word bloomed into something ripe and whole. A friend. How strange this phrase sounded in relation to everything else Anya had described. “She came to the ghetto with me. My friend.”
At the end of the phrase, a silence of complete finality, of emptiness, the silence of a hundred other silences coming to rest, like a sigh.
Holding it by the edges, I handed her back the photo.
Anya smiled the beguiling smile which, finally, was utterly mournful. I had so many questions. But she wouldn’t tell me any more.
( )
I needed to tell someone about my meeting with Anya, but I had already convinced myself I couldn’t tell Francine. Francine and I were slowly but surely moving into the next phase of our life, and telling Francine would drag us back to a past we were freeing ourselves from. She would worry about me. She would tell me to stop. To Francine, this would seem like a much bigger deal than it was.
So, I decided to tell Jill. Petite, half-Chinese, half-Indonesian, with hair the color of lava rock and fierce, dark eyes the burning black of a Javanese god of love or war, Jill had been coming to the Foundation every second Wednesday morning since the fall, reviewing warped manuscripts in her small, tapering fingers. A graduate student at Stanford, she knew more about Babi Yar than possibly anyone on Earth besides Dina Pronicheva. (Formerly of the Kiev puppet theater, Pronicheva had managed to leap into the Kiev ravine before being shot, lay for hours among the thousands of corpses, under the groaning wounded, and remained silent when a suspicious Nazi kicked her breast and trod on her hand until the bones cracked. Then she dug her way out.) Which is to say, Jill was on the track to a very hot tenured position at a place like Princeton or Yale, the kind of places to which my own tepid academic ambitions had not led me. But there was a natural sympathy between us, the knowledge that what I cared about, she cared about, which made me feel like entrusting the secret of Anya to her instead of Francine was somehow not a terrible, unforgivable thing to do.
I was rushing from work to an airport shuttle coming for me at home when I finally ran into Jill at the elevator bank. Smooth and prescient as a Jakarta dukun summoning a pain-relieving charm, Jill asked me, “Need a lift?”
Jill’s car, parked in a ten-dollar lot off of Market, was small and graduate-student ancient, a little white hatchback she probably bought from an emeritus professor for a thousand dollars. The doors shook audibly when we pulled them shut. Almost immediately, we got stuck in a line of idling cars trying to cross Market. “Presidential motorcade?” Jill suggested. Bill Clinton was back in town, milking the big cash cow of Silicon Valley.
We were jammed in the middle of the block between a Roadway eighteen-wheeler and a moving truck when I asked her, “Have you ever gotten drawn in by one of your subjects?” Jill didn’t work for the Foundation. Whatever I told her wouldn’t get back to Wendy. “There was this woman. At the Foundation. Well, not exactly at the Foundation . . . ,” I started.
Even though I told myself that nothing had “happened,” talking about it made me feel guilty. But Jill overflowed with empathy. And empathy can be very enticing. “It’s impossible to explain to other people,” she gazed at me with her dark and thoughtful eyes, “how the lives of the people I study move me. It’s so much more than intellectual, isn’t it?” She blinked at me. “It’s a kind of passion.”
Passion. Had I ever noticed that Jill’s eyes were almost completely black? Smoldering, actually. It was hot outside, the smoggy, still heat of early summer. The little white car fidgeted. In twenty minutes, we hadn’t moved an inch. I cracked my window, took a huge whiff of diesel smoke and cranked it back up again. As Jill talked more about this shared passion for the things we both cared so much about, I stared straight ahead at the moving truck and wondered what was happening to me. I’d let my boundaries down with Anya and now all my boundaries seemed to be dissolving.
Jill was smart, and garrulous in a way that always made me feel like I had a million things to talk about. For reasons I rationalized as the infrequency of our meetings, I’d never mentioned her to Francine. Now, suddenly, huddled against the worn velour in Jill’s flimsy hatchback, walled in by looming eighteen-wheelers, shuddering diesel engines pressing in on all sides, I felt there might be a different reason I hadn’t. Jill’s hand, smooth and shiny as polished wood, rested on the gearshift just inches from my arm. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to, as that I felt an overwhelming, elemental force—like nuclear fusion—pulling the atoms of my body toward the atoms of hers. The air in the car felt alive with charged particles. Together in the close, tinny vehicle, I could smell the honey and sandalwood smell of Jill’s skin; I could feel the heat rising off her arm.
Jill cleared her throat. “I think I’ve gotten you into trouble.”
“Huh?” My ears scorched. If Jill could read my mind, I was in deep shit indeed.
Jill nodded at the unmoving truck. “We haven’t moved more than a car length in the last thirty minutes. If you don’t run, I’m afraid you’ll miss your shuttle.”
I grabbed my bag. “Right.” I slammed the tinny white door with a clap. You don’t even know if she’s GAY! I yelled at myself and fled toward the BART station as fast as I could.
( )
My parents picked me up at LAX, my mother immaculate in a crisp linen suit, my father sporty in his tennis whites, a beautiful couple to whom I was, as always, the awkward third wheel. After the usual pleasantries, I sat in the back, staring out the window, while my mother talked about a new acquisition in confidential tones with my father. “You would not believe this piece of lace. Point D’Angleterre lace with crowns in each corner.” My parents loved me in their own way, but their lives had sealed up over my absence like water over a stone. I had never fit in.
Darkness had dyed the Western sky a rising fade of blue by the time my father turned off Sunset Boulevard into the gated, rustic silence of Dunsmuir. From the time I was born, my family had lived in the rustic nook of West Los Angeles incongruously named the Dunsmuir Estates, on the eponymously named Dunsmuir Drive. All the streets in the neighborhood bore the names of Scottish castles and cloudy lochs; recently, huge faux thirteenth-century stone castles with ice-cream cone towers and their twentieth-century counterparts in boxy concrete, brushed steel and glass, had risen up on the chaparral ridge of the Pacific ocean, on the old Spanish land grants where red-tiled Mediterraneans and low post-War ranch houses had once clustered. Ours was one of the original ranch-style houses, which my father, despite his professional interest in real estate, and my mother, despite her personal commitment to impeccable taste, had never bothered to upda
te. I guess it didn’t matter now.
As always, after a very light dinner in which lettuce was served along with some leafy greens and the thing that was grilled was me, we retreated to our corners.
Since I’d left, not much had changed in my pink bedroom, either, except for the emptying of my grandmother’s closet. That night, standing in front of the closet doors, I felt the same anxiety and dread I’d felt standing outside the closed double doors of the cardiac ICU, staring through the glass into the blinking warren of monitors, diodes, EKGs, bodies swathed in blue and white. Between the flaps of her gown, a long, knobbed ridge bulged from the center of my gramma’s chest, a thick, bursting seam stitched together with fish wire, jagged as a zipper. Her mouth was taped shut around a tube. Alone in my old bedroom, I stared at the dark seam of the closet’s shut doors. But why should I feel dread? This was where my Gramma Sophie had stood in the breastplate of a brassiere she wore to go out, a straightjacket with a thousand eye hooks, and shucked it to the floor.
I touched the door handles. The house was dark and quiet. My parents, in their bedroom down the hall, had shut the door behind them. I opened the closet door and pulled on the light.
The closet I had once shared with Gramma Sophie had become, in our absence, my mother’s auxiliary, packed wall-to-wall with sheathed dresses, floor-to-ceiling with boxed Italian shoes. I had to push aside the curtain of dry-cleaning bags to find my old Victorian dollhouse, hidden behind the heavy undergrowth of hems. Three stories tall, complete with a widow’s walk, it was a fantasy of my mother’s that went along with “my” antique doll collection, but had met with rougher use. From seventh grade through our senior year, I’d stuffed it with my high school love letters and padlocked it shut. (My sister Rebecca had a habit of going through my things. It wasn’t just the usual little sister stuff. If she found anything revealing, she delivered it straight to my mother. The terms of their intimacy depended, in that way, on me.) Now the lock hung from its slack chain, broken.
A tiny orange armchair upended in the center of the living-room floor, the dollhouse looked like a house someone had fled in haste years before. I pushed my fingers through the torn curtains. I’d once imagined hiding a tiny Stuart Little family in there. Now, ransacked, the dollhouse felt like a preview of things to come on Dunsmuir Drive. It had been stripped bare—except for an old photo stuffed into a corner of the attic: a picture of Liz. She had bared her teeth brightly for the camera, always ready to put on a public face.
Before I knew Liz, Fiona and I called her “Miss Priss.” Fiona and I had just started middle school at Ferngrove; we hadn’t discovered that our social lives would have little to do with each other. “There goes Miss Priss,” Fiona gestured toward the library, whose jutting corner Eliza Beth Williams was just rounding in her blue uniform jumper, her nose tilted up, her blond Peter Pan haircut blowing off her forehead.
Was Eliza Beth really a prig? A goody two-shoes? I knew she spoke with a Southern accent. She was probably the only twelve-year-old who really knew what irony meant. She practiced good posture. She wanted to run for student council. She was articulate. Politic. Also, the first girl to suck my nipples, stick her tongue in my mouth, pull my face between her legs. Irony.
Tall, blond, smart and Southern, Liz was never quite popular, exactly, but she had ambition, and that took her far. The thing that saved her from real popularity at Ferngrove was a strong Southern sense of propriety without a properly Southern thrill for sin. Maybe because she had only been born there.
Back in the seventh grade, Liz and I quickly began to spend all of our free periods together, wandering down the long steps of the terraced hillside behind Ferngrove’s huge, endowed classroom buildings. We walked slowly in our penny loafers, holding hands. It didn’t mean anything. We were only twelve years old. Then one day, a senior girl with a hemline, Liz said afterward, “straight up to her pubic bone,” saw us coming up the steps. “Don’t get caught going down in the fern grove, girls.” Her friends sat on the long path beside the grass with their skirts hiked up over shorts, tanning their legs. I turned, baffled, to Liz. The color had risen up in her face, so red that the blond hair on her cheeks stood out white. (Swarthy myself, I found her transparency fascinating.) Liz dropped my hand. Her drawl gathered up like bunched crinoline around the words, “They’re vulgar.” It was her strongest indictment.
We attracted attention, the two of us. We were emitting signals neither one of us could read, a high-frequency Morse code of mutual attraction to which we, ourselves, remained willfully deaf for years, until rumor and innuendo helpfully pointed them out.
Ferngrove was old, by West Coast standards, and the school had elevated its age to a status symbol through the unbroken observance of the fussy and antiquated rites that had been performed there since its inception in 1901. The Junior Gown ceremony commemorated the rising of the first Ferngrove junior class in 1906, in which the senior girls handed down their yellowing antique linen and lace commencement gowns. (I suspected the lace gowns were possibly the real reason my mother had sent me to Ferngrove.) It was a gesture of recognition, continuity and—most of us thought, eyeing the antique linen—grateful casting off. (We thought they looked like our great-grandmothers’ nighties.) The ceremony itself took place on Ferngrove’s wide lawn in the inevitable, broiling June sun. Fiona gripped the bodice of her gown and fanned it, melodramatically, over her sweating chest. Then, after tea sandwiches on the terrace, the seniors gave us their real present: an unofficial, unchaperoned off-campus party with a DJ to which, in one of those queer, old-fashioned Ferngrove throwbacks, boys were never invited.
The seniors had rented out the Wellbourne Estate, an old mansion up in the Bel Air hills where the streets were wide, white cement patched here and there with dark asphalt veins and canopied with trees. The name didn’t have any real provenance; it was just what the real estate agent (one of my father’s professional enemies) had decided to call it.
Liz found me that night at one of the tables near the dance floor in the ballroom, which had been strung overhead with leafy vines and white twinkle lights for a “Girls’ Wild Night Out.” A DJ was playing Yaz, and I watched while Fiona whooped and shimmied with a knot of seniors, half of them stripped down to their bras. I was staring intently at the bottom of my paper cup, tapping my foot, when Liz’s fingers alighted on my shoulder. I looked up, relieved—Liz never danced at these things, either—but Liz’s face was grim, pale and knotted. “I need to talk to you.” She’d changed from her gown into a white summer dress, long and gauzy and sleeveless. “Not here,” she hissed.
I followed Liz out into a long, paneled hall, past girls lounging on leather divans, into a dark parlor whose French doors led into the garden. Liz tested a handle and swung the door out into the night. Trailing her was like trailing a phantom; her white dress and blond hair floated in the gray gloom past tall pruned hedges and huge blooming flowers that looked, in the grainy black and white of the evening, vaguely man-eating. When we had gotten far enough from the house, she stopped to let me catch up. We walked side by side through the lane, turning at a break in the hedge, and then another. Then Liz snatched at my fingertips and pulled me into a little alcove at the base of two trees, closed in by trained vines, a dark bower at the nighttime garden’s dark heart. Our rough breath made the only sound.
Liz cleared her throat. Her face was a pale oblong, blurred but aghast. Something tickled my face and I started, beating at the air. A tendril. “I was in the sitting room,” she murmured, “with Ginny. And then,” the words caught for a second in Liz’s throat. I had become aware of a deep, pressing sweetness in the air, thick around us. “Out of absolutely nowhere, Ginny said, ‘You should probably know, people think something’s going on between you and Ellen Margolis.’” Liz perfectly mimicked Ginny’s Valley-girl cadence, capriciousness married to deadly gravity. I thought she was done, but she went on in Ginny’s voice, “‘Sara Masters says a girl saw you two kissing in the bathroom.’” Even in th
e dark, I could see Liz was trembling. I could feel the heat off her skin as she flushed furiously. Or maybe it was me trembling.
I stumbled back against the base of one of the trees, my head racing. We had never done any of those things. Maybe we were more affectionate than some girls. So what? Inside the bower, it was dark, and cool. Liz started to shiver. I put my arms around her bare arms. We stood like that in the close little bower for a long time, until Liz drew back, her face blurry. All around us, the deep balm of sweet pea soaked our skin like a salve.
“What would I do without you, El?” Liz drawled. Then she leaned in, lightly at first, and kissed me, lightly, on the lips. My heart, which had finally slowed, just about stopped. The green vines and the dark covered us. I hesitated. Then I leaned toward Liz and kissed her back. This time, her mouth opened, and her tongue, sweet and wet and tasting slightly of rum punch, darted in to touch mine. Then she stepped toward me, right under my toes, pressing my back into the base of the tree.
I’d been kissed before, kissed by Mosswood boys with slow rolling tongues the texture of garden snails. But kissing Liz wasn’t about tongue, teeth, lips—parts. Kissing Liz—from the rising tingle at the roots of my hair to the slow, blooming heat spreading across my chest and thighs—this was the moment I first believed the old stories of wood nymphs, dryads, lovers, their limbs entwined, turned into living trees, could be true.
From a distance, we heard voices. Someone had opened the French doors. “Ginny . . .” Liz started.
“Ginny’s an idiot.” My words disappeared in the swallowing silence of the thicket.
“We didn’t know.” Liz held my elbow.
“No,” I agreed. “We didn’t know.”
“This is just between us,” I assured her, my arms around her waist.
