by Anna Solomon
“Thank you for everything,” Minna said.
“Just dip them in the creek,” Ruth said, “and hang them across the door. Promise me you’ll try?”
“If we didn’t need them to sleep on.”
“You can borrow!”
“You’ve done enough. Thank you.”
“Oh. My pleasure.” Ruth smiled cheerfully, then regretfully, then cheerfully again, and clutched Minna’s hands. “The weather won’t last,” she said. “If the snow comes early, I may not see you for months.” Her blinking slowed, as if she might cry. And this was the problem, Minna thought—no matter how close she came to liking Ruth, she could always find something overly dramatic about her. Now, for instance, as she stared into Minna’s eyes and said, far more loudly than necessary, “You’ll be with child by then. God willing.”
Leo nodded. He set a hand on Max’s shoulder and winked. “A little girl, maybe, for this handsome groom to spoil?”
Minna’s hair burned against her scalp. Max hovered nervously beside her, aware, no doubt, of the jabs in Leo’s question. The idea of a child seemed as ludicrous this morning, as impossible as the idea of snow. Ruth believed it was the answer to her unhappiness and Minna guessed it could be so, she guessed there might be a reward that she could not now fathom, but she wondered, too, what she knew of mothering. She was not patient, or soft, or particularly gentle. She had deserted Rebeka. The round of Ruth’s stomach appeared to expand as she watched, and Minna felt nothing toward it but a quiet curiosity—something akin to what she’d felt as a girl when she’d once come upon a turtle laying eggs at the edge of the woods.
“God willing,” Minna said. But this must not have been convincing because Ruth and Leo were silent and in their silence it seemed that they doubted Minna’s suitability, too. To have them doubt her was worse.
“Well then, we’re off!” Minna cried, and clapped her hands the way she’d seen Ruth do—no palms, just the flats of her fingers, sharp and stiff. She felt how such clapping could work to one’s advantage, make one’s whole person feel more capable. Near the wagon, Jacob was running the children in dusty, barefoot circles, holding out his Indian warhead then snatching it back. “First they’ll kill you,” he panted, “then they’ll peel off your skin!”
“Jacob!” Minna’s mouth opened automatically. “Put your boots on. We’re going.”
Jacob skidded to a halt and spun toward her. His mouth curled into the edge of a grin, but just the edge—it was hard to tell if he was truly stunned, or if he imagined himself to be playing along with her. The latter, most likely; still, he walked over to his boots and sat in the dirt to tie them and Minna felt a quake in her chest—vanity, terror, a new territory entered. Then she saw Samuel, standing off to the side of the wagon, hands folded behind him, watching—as though he were merely a passerby who’d found their group curious enough to warrant a stop. Minna searched his face for admonishment and found nothing. His mouth was set in a sufficiently agreeable line. His eyes, as usual, seemed made to see but not to be seen. To do nothing before them felt like defeat, so she called: “Samuel!” But once the word was out, there was nothing to add. His boots were on, wrapped as tidily in their rags as they’d been last night. It was as if he’d never taken them off, as if he’d waited awake all night for Minna and Max to finish their rites—did he imagine Minna wanted to? Did he imagine her at all?—so that they could get on already, and go home.
Yet he didn’t even look impatient. He stood calm as a post, his face as neat as his rags.
THE horse and mule, hitched together, formed a maimed, listing beast. The wagon limped along behind. The whole outfit might have appeared in one of Samuel’s farming magazines, if they featured a “How Not to Travel” column. But soon enough they were out of sight of Ruth and Leo’s house, and there was no one else to witness their comic struggle. The land rolled ahead. The sky pulsed with sun. Sweat pooled at the corners of Minna’s mouth. She felt slightly drugged. She needed a hat. All the men had hats, and Ruth had her bonnet. Why had no one thought to give Minna a bonnet? She squinted, then heard Galina warning her, your face will stick that way, you’ll grow old young, and shrank lower on the bench, trying to find shade between Max and Samuel. Everywhere they brushed her seethed with heat. She shrank lower. She would rather have been in back, like Jacob, stretched out among the jars and sacks.
“I wonder,” Samuel said, “if we wouldn’t be better off with just the horse.”
“And waste the mule?” asked Max.
“And let the mule haul rocks, like it’s meant to.”
“That’s assuming God created us with only one purpose in mind.”
“He’s not talking about us,” Jacob called. “He’s talking about a mule.”
Minna felt a curious ease come over her—the wooze of sun through her brain, perhaps, or the familiar course of their debate.
She didn’t listen to the words so much as she watched them skip across her eyes, which watered and stung. She had determined, this time, to pay attention to the route, to note every rise and dip and form a map in her mind. She should know something, she thought, of where she lived on this earth, even if it was only in relation to the Friedmans’ house. But as the seconds and minutes and hours slogged on, Minna knew that she was failing. Every signless junction looked the same: two strips of dust meeting and parting again. Each lone tree was stunted and black against the sun. Even the two houses they passed were square and colorless, wood or sod. She would think them abandoned if she didn’t know better—if there weren’t figures in the distance, moving across the fields. These glimpses of industry seized her with panic. “Bohemians,” Jacob said, pointing at the second house. “Not a word of English,” he added, as if the fifty words she knew put her above them, and Minna supposed this should somehow make her feel better, but she could only think of the Bohemians shaking their heads as they watched the wagon pass with its limping animals and its dandelion tails dragging behind and its people packed together like more animals on the bench. The sun topped the sky. The horse and mule clomped each other’s feet. The sun started its descent. Yet the day only seemed to grow hotter. They saw no birds, heard no insects. The dandelions broke off. Jacob sang from time to time, high wordless tunes that seemed to vaporize as they were released, so that from one second to the next Minna thought she might have dreamed the last note.
Hill like a wart, she noted fuzzily. Another landmark she would soon forget. Then she saw the tin chimney canting out from the top. Home. When Max cleared his throat, you could hear the whole day gathered in it, the heat built and erupting like a long, dry burp. “You’ll call her Mother now,” he said.
If it was possible, Minna’s temperature rose. She felt the weight of Samuel’s arm against her own. Blood rushed up her legs, into her tongue. “Max,” she said.
“Understood?” he asked, and looked back at Jacob. Then he leaned heavily across Minna to gain Samuel’s attention and Minna twisted around the other way, hoping Jacob might save her. Which he did, by making his voice that of a child and squeaking, “Mother? Mother, are we almost home?” And though he was teasing Max, Minna let herself laugh. She wanted Samuel to hear, to know: she had no desire to be his mother. She wouldn’t be his mother if he begged her.
“Yes, nakhes’l,” she warbled. “We’re almost home, nakhes’l.” She pretended to ignore the tension behind her on the bench, but she could feel Max gripping his knees, and Samuel gripping the reins. Had he heard her? Did he understand that it was a joke? It was a joke. She was laughing!
The wagon swung abruptly as it made the turn onto the rocky path, lurching Minna into Max. Max set her upright as one might a lamp. “Sender,” he scolded.
Samuel lifted the reins to slow the animals. “My apologies,” he muttered. Then he commanded the animals in English, which his father understood only insomuch as he experienced its effect: quickly, smoothly, the wagon reached the door. The horse stopped with a whinny, the mule with a grunt, and Samuel jumped down to hold th
e reins as Minna and Max climbed out.
FIFTEEN
THE bed was not sized for two. One and a half, maybe—as if Max had tried to convince himself of the promises of a double, but only half succeeded. Minna lay on her side, face to the wall. To make room for Max, she straightened her knees, though Max told her not to: he told her to make herself comfortable, please, not to worry, he could sleep on a log, he could sleep in the creek. Whispering, as if a whisper would convince her of intimacy, though Jacob and Samuel weren’t more than six feet away in their hole. Or maybe he whispered because he was lying. Max was a terrible sleeper. Whenever Minna woke, she could hear him not sleeping; she could feel his shallow, uneven thought-breaths against her neck. What his thoughts were of, she couldn’t know. Kotelnia? A synagogue? Childhood? The beautiful Lina? This last possibility would be a relief, to know that Max allowed himself such ordinary fantasy. It might even make Minna jealous, which—according to Galina—would help her want him more than she actually did. Max’s breaths smelled like hunger, or yogurt, the only dairy she dared make in the heat. Or they simply smelled like a bottomless gust of man-made dew. In time, she thought, her neck would smell the same. Her skin would start to mush. Sometimes, when she woke to his hardness at the backs of her thighs, she thought it was already happening.
Max advanced only in the middle of the night, or later, close to dawn, when the insects outside had already begun their chirring. He must have decided that the boys slept deeply then, and Minna pretended this was true. She listened for their breath as he pulled her toward him—as he lifted himself up to make space to turn her onto her back—as he turned her onto her back. The boards creaked, reminding her of his bony knees. The cave was cooler, at least, than the air outside. She listened for inhalations, exhalations, from the hole. They were steady, she told herself, though this wasn’t necessarily true, though she might have been layering the chirring over the breaths. She knew by then the particular sounds her stepsons made going in and out of sleep, which were the opposite of their daily ways: Jacob’s manful groan; Samuel’s fitful, almost violent tossing of limbs. But they were asleep now, she told herself, because she had to. Max tugged her gown up past her hips, spent a couple minutes tickling and brushing and fretting the hair there, then entered her. Where he learned the hair bit, she didn’t know, but it embarrassed her more than anything else. It was like what girls did to dolls. She pitied him this the way she pitied his insomnia, for his sake and for hers. She counted. She held her breath. When she held her breath and counted at the same time, it was almost like a contest.
And then it was over, and that was all. The chirring softened, the sun rose, Minna made breakfast, the men went out into the world as if it was going to be new and found it exactly as they’d left it: piles of rocks on the ground, millions more rocks in the ground. The freshly tilled fields began to look like a strange, crude graveyard. Samuel and Max argued at night in their useless, agreeable way, Samuel suggesting once again that they should be haying instead of plowing, and that if they were going to continue hauling rocks they should at least haul them out to the perimeters and give them the makings of a boundary, and Max responding, there wasn’t enough time, no time. Sometimes Minna thought she heard him pat his side, where he kept his watch, as if to say he knew, he knew about time. Yet he was the last to rise—she had to climb over him to start the fire—and the first to come in to supper. And during the day when she looked out she found him, without fail, in the same immobile stance, hands resting on his shovel, staring off at what she didn’t know. She wondered how long it would be before he sensed her and wheeled around to catch her staring. If Max were a man to wheel around. What would he do? Stare back? Turn away? Be angry that she’d caught him doing nothing? She imagined him stomping across the broiling expanse between them. If Max were a man to stomp. And then what? Would he defend himself? Would she scold him? Sometimes she thought she would like to scold him. Or maybe she just wanted to talk, to have a “discussion,” like the one he’d promised the night she arrived. What they would say, she didn’t know. It was too late, perhaps, to introduce themselves, or explain. There might be nothing to explain, once you were stuck together like fish in a desert.
SHE gave up watching Max. Which is how it happened, one morning, when Samuel turned toward the house, that he saw her watching him, instead. She couldn’t make out his eyes—at this distance she could barely tell the difference between hair and skin and cloth—but she knew they were pinned to her, under the tree in the yard, as surely as she knew that her dress was basted onto her body.
She realized that she must look as idle as Max, and as dumbstruck. He would think she spent her days staring at him, when really she spent much of her time trying to avoid exactly that. Also, of course, working. She spent her time working! She was no longer the girl on the ship hiding in her bunk. She’d given up trying to turn wheat into fire. Couldn’t he see that?
But before she could pick up her bucket of milk, which she’d set down for a moment, or change position in some way so as to indicate that she was moving on, that her stillness was not in fact sloth, that perhaps the distance between them, and the heat—the heat!—had distorted her image, that she didn’t intend to rest under the tree a second longer, that it was a rangy, watersucking old stump barely worth its meager flecks of shade, Samuel had turned away, and begun his digging again, down up, filling the air with chunks of earth.
Minna felt suspicious, suspected, on guard. She felt, sometimes, like a maidservant. Which was almost funny. Which was easy, in its way: to feel put upon, taken for granted, came with certain privileges. There was freedom in the lack of freedom; there was the right to dissatisfaction, and resistance. She told the boys she’d haul the family’s water herself and began a daily habit, at the creek, of sliding down the bank, kneeling low, taking off her clothes, and lying on her back. This was the only way not to be seen, and to cool off, for the water was even lower now, a series of silver rivulets in the gray sand. She craved it anyway, craved it more; she pressed herself into the sand like a palm into dough. She listened to her breath, amplified by the water against her back, until it slowed to match the pace of the creek. Above her was the sun, oppressive as ever, yet somehow from here, like this, she could see its beauty. She could almost see how someone might choose to come to such a place, and try to make a life. Hours passed, days, years, in the few minutes she let slip by before she sat upright, dried herself, and dressed. Then she tipped a bucket down to collect from the deepest pool so that when she stood again, if someone was watching, she would appear to have done what she was supposed to be doing.
Minna’s great, infinitesimal insurgencies.
Yet she had, was the truth of it. She had done what she was supposed to do. She had fetched water. Fetched. Just as she had performed all her other small uses Jacob had taught her names for. Walk. Milk. Feed. Wash. The familiar motions, and the words that went with them, brought her some comfort. She squeezed, scrubbed, tossed, tied knots. She carried the water back to the house. No one ever seemed to care that her hair was wet in the back, though she must have looked as if half her head had been dipped in ink. They were too far away, or if they were close, they were paying attention to something else, Jacob to his archaeological finds, Samuel to the repair of tack, or tools, Max to the sky. Later, Minna would reach up to scratch an itch and discover sand embedded in her scalp. But Max never touched her hair. And if he did, he might not notice—or if he noticed, he might not want to know and so pretend he hadn’t. It was a fine line with Max, one Minna hadn’t yet deciphered, the border between abstraction and delusion. He’d also never asked about the ragged bedsheet she’d arrived with—torn to make Moses’ bandage—though by morning its frayed edge had often ridden up around his neck.
ON her back in the creek, she allowed her eyes to slowly flutter. Open: the cottonwood leaves, flitting silver and green. Closed: their murmur. Open: the sky, broken by leaves. Closed: her breath, cool water along her neck, down her sides, aroun
d her heels, a slight shiver up her back. Then one afternoon, open: and there was Samuel, looking down at her, not peering or gazing or leering or measuring, but looking with such simple curiosity that for a long moment she did not think to roll over but looked back at him. He might have been observing a flower or rock he found of interest; she had never seen his face so undefended. She hadn’t noticed before how strong his legs were, so that they nearly filled out his trousers above the knee, or how, when he placed his hands on his hips like a surveyor, two veins popped out at his wrists. He was far enough above her that his head appeared smaller than his waist, and this warping made her see a deviance in him. Then he seemed to recall her, as a woman, or girl, or however he would have named her naked body lying there flat and unadorned so that the thin places must have looked thinner and the hairy places hairier. He glanced away, and shoved his hands in his pockets, though the heat defied the gesture. Minna rolled over; she knelt and reached for her dress. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, but Samuel shook his head, not in the way of forgiveness but in the way of refusing her the right to apologize; in his face was a sudden ugliness. Jacob’s voice came, Sammyyyyy!! Samuel jumped. He turned and shouted, “Wait! Wait there! I’m coming,” then he looked back down at Minna, who was holding her dress up to cover her front and trying to sit in such a way that he couldn’t see her backside. She watched him attempt to compose his face, like one might hang a rumpled cloth—she could picture him, suddenly, as a young boy at the yeshiva. “Don’t let me see you like this again,” he said, and took off running, and for a few seconds she could feel his light, fast footsteps in the sand wall of the creek, which she’d leaned into like a pillow.
