Precious

by Sandra Novack

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Lies?”

  “Exaggerations.”

  “I see the way the boys look at you. It’s hard not to notice you.”

  Eva grows quiet, thinking about how she sometimes desperately wished people wouldn’t notice her at all, that she could become suddenly invisible. Outside she hears a car engine start. “I don’t want them to notice me.”

  He laughs. “Spoken like a pretty girl. It’s always the pretty girls who say they don’t care to be noticed, and they say it because they know they always are.”

  “No one notices things that matter.”

  “Relax,” Peter says. “You don’t need to be huffy.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “I meant it as a compliment, anyway. Truthfully, I would be jealous if you and Greg were together.”

  “We’re friends,” Eva says. She gets up and glances out the window. Her father sits in the car, letting the engine rev. “My dad.” She watches as her father shuts the car off. He walks to the shed and reemerges, a few moments later, with his toolbox. She breathes. “Do you get along with your dad?”

  He pauses for a moment. “We didn’t used to. When I was younger, we didn’t get along at all. He wanted me to go into business, but I didn’t. He thought teachers didn’t make enough money, that they didn’t get enough done, and that anyone who had the summer off was lazy. I disappointed him.”

  Eva twists the phone cord, listening, wanting him to say more. It is the secrets that she most wishes she could share, things she might speak only to him. Who else does she have to talk to? Greg? Sissy? Still, she hesitates. She wants to tell him about that night after Christmas, how upset she was, how confused, just barely awakened from sleep. If she told, would he think something bad about her? That she was the one to blame? Was it even real? She was so sleepy. She felt as though she was floating, and then yelling, the screams and more afterward. And yet despite any confusion, despite any disheartened doubt, she has changed since that night, regardless; the house itself has changed and she has felt broken, within it. “Peter?” she asks quietly. “Do you get along with your father now?”

  “We talk now,” he says. “It happens.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “After a while you learn to forgive most things. After a while you learn to talk.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “I don’t know,” he tells her, shifting again. “Until you wake up one day not wanting to feel angry anymore.”

  Outside, Frank breathes slowly, taking in the smell of oil and grease. He shuffles back under his car and squints, his eyes adjusting to the pronounced difference in light. He turns on a fixture that is clamped to the underside of the car; it beams with sudden radiance. He checks the newly positioned jack to make sure it is holding. It calms him to have the world reduced to machinery—fixable, unlike people and situations. At least metal doesn’t shrink away from you, he thinks. He turns a bolt. It gives with a squeak. Sometimes parents can do stupid, idiotic things that they then regret for a lifetime. He knows this. Still, there was a moment when, listening to Ginny he wanted to tell her that perhaps she shouldn’t have been drinking, that booze can only lead to a succession of problems. It was like that for him when he was a child, when, as a young boy, his parents would leave him in the car while they ushered each other, wide-stepped, gait askew, to the local bar with its dim light and crimson walls. The blood room. That was how he imagined it, with all the fights that erupted across the stools and in the dark corners. Sometimes he would crack the window and listen to the explosion of voices coming from the door each time someone entered or exited. While he waited, he would eat chips or pretzels that his parents left him and lick the salty residue left on his fingers. Sometimes he would fog the cold windows with his mouth and draw circles and trees, or crawl up to the front seat and pretend to drive, put the pedal to the metal. His mother would check on him every hour or so, less as the evening wore on. She would check to see that the doors were locked, and the more she drank, the sweeter she became, cooing and kissing his head and calling him by her pet name, her little Cracker Jack. How he still remembers her leaning over him, remembers the smoke that clung to her skin and masked the smell of talc. He regarded her with such affection. He waited for her voice to soothe him with its thin register. But then, at home, his father’s temper fueled by drink, there were maddening arguments. Once the old man took a sledgehammer to the door and split it in two. Once, he hit Frank’s mother, cracking her nose and causing Frank himself to intervene with a yawp and tangle of fists. Frank seldom thinks of this. If asked about his parents, he would say, simply: They were fine; they did what they could. He knows there are many parents who are fine—good, decent folks who take their kids to Walt Disney World each summer and check on their children each night before bed. He knows the world isn’t filled with bad parents. But of his own, he says little out of respect. And with Ginny he wanted to tell her, for her sake, for her girl’s sake, to lay off the booze.

  He might have told her then about his own downfall, that night in December, that moment that meant nothing but that caused irreparable harm. He doesn’t like to think about that entire week after Natalia left, the terrible approach of the holiday, the necessity of planning for Christmas when no one in the house felt like celebrating, the explanations given to neighbors who dropped by with soaps that smelled of lavender and oranges, gifts born of neighborly obligation. There was Ginny’s offer to help shop, which Frank politely refused. In the end he settled on quick hard cash. He stuffed money at the bottoms of knitted stockings, under bits of frayed yarn and chocolate and candy canes. When it seemed to him the tree looked markedly bare, he made a last-ditch effort and shopped on Christmas Eve, bringing home food baskets filled with cheese, sausages, crackers, and small jars of marmalade. The next day, Sissy received hers with a look of desperation but took quickly to opening the sardines, inserting the key and rolling the metal back. She sniffed and quickly discarded them, and then took to the sticky cheeses. She sat patiently, licking the foils, waiting for Eva to open hers. But Eva only shook her head and said, “This is unbelievable.”

  He had done what he could, he wanted to say. He’d looked at clothes but had had no idea as to sizes. He’d browsed through the record and eight-track-tape selections but hadn’t had a clue what Eva or Sissy might like. Eva left the basket of food unopened. Frank sat down in his recliner. He rubbed his temples. He folded his large hands while Sissy announced that she could retrieve the real presents from the closet. Without waiting for a response, she bolted upstairs and returned with packages wrapped in Sunday comics. “You didn’t know?” Sissy asked, going back for a second round. He responded irritably, “If I knew, don’t you think I would have had them under the tree?” Eva fell silent through the opening of dolls and cosmetics and clothing and nylons and new purses. Within the hour everything was opened and stacked in piles, and there was one gift left, for Frank: a bucket of fresh apples.

  In the following days Frank contacted an attorney, determined to get everything he’d worked for, but when the day of his appointment came, he didn’t show up and called his buddies from work instead. They drove across town, to where the row homes were stacked on top of one another and all the alleys smelled of rot and trash and plummeted sharply downhill. They drove past the old house that was his childhood home, sold long ago and then later condemned as this part of town grew dilapidated, worn out like rusted metal. They drove to the same bar his father used to go to—”The Ho-Ho,” they called it, “to drink, to get smashed, to get toasted, to toast that bitch farewell,” they said. There they sat under the dim lights, eating peanuts and hammering back shots of whiskey. Afterward, they drove around, looking at the girls who lingered on the streets, their legs bent, their skirts hiked up stockinged thighs. His buddy Jimmy, the young kid from work, laughed and said that the last order of business was for h
im to get laid. Frank grinned, knowing that none of the men would actually go through with anything, even drunk off their asses, and he was right: The jeering escalated first but then diminished to silence. He came home, finally, at four in the morning, still hammered, still reeling, the world spinning around him. In the dark, he bumped into the mahogany table in the hallway, knocked over the figurine there, a statue of a man piping a flute, and Eva, hearing the ruckus, hurried downstairs, her white nightgown hanging eerily over her. “Dad?” she whispered in the darkness. “Is that you?” She turned on a light in the living room and stood, watching as he staggered forward again and then finally leaned against the wall for support. How surprised she seemed to see him that way—slurring his words, practically in tears. “Here,” she said, reaching forward. She looped her arm around his waist and helped him to bed. In his room, when she turned to go and he saw the length of hair swaying as she walked, he thought of Natalia. “You look like your mother,” he said, and, without thinking, he moved toward her. He placed his hand on her shoulder, kissed her neck, felt the warmth of her body— how inviting it seemed in one moment and then, the spell broken, she pulled away, wrenching, her entire body reacting like a bird suddenly caught. He stopped, realizing his error. “Don’t you ever,” she said, her hand up at her neck. “Don’t you ever do that again.”

  He regrets this moment more than any moment in his life. He regrets that night when he saw Natalia everywhere, in everyone. He doesn’t want to think of it, though Eva will not let him forget. And why, he thinks, should she let me? He has offered a thousand quiet apologies—all unanswered.

  He feels around the ground for a wrench and unscrews another bolt. He hears rain, a sudden downpour hitting the hood of the car.

  Upstairs, off the phone and thinking about Peter and all that she wished to say, Eva sits by her window smoking a joint. Rain pounds the sidewalk, splashes in the empty pool. In the living room, Sissy closes her book. She opens the front door and peers out, expecting, in an irrational and fanciful way, to see her mother. When she doesn’t, she turns and runs upstairs. “Rain!” she yells.

  Mr. Morris, outside enjoying the day, calls in to Milly He dances for her like a child, tapping in puddles.

  It lasts only a few minutes. A few moments, yes, but some moments can seem endless to the heart and make it leap and skip beyond itself And, in the space of the heart—invisible, silent, surprising—something rises. Ginny, who an hour before took the phone off the hook and poured a tall glass of gin, who just a moment ago was thinking that it isn’t really a question of what would drive someone to lay out a row of pills—the world offers a thousand reasons, a thousand losses—leaves the pills on the table and steps outside. “Vicki,” she says into air made fresh and new again. “Is that a sign from you?”

  By mid-July the afternoons are impossible to bear. The doctor generally sets about drinking Scotch at three, then takes to talking about his ex-wife, Katherine, and how much he absolutely loathes her and how abysmal it is for a woman who never commandeered a boat to obtain, in their divorce settlement, the doctor’s yacht that he had christened his Little Baby before sailing it on the Caribbean four years ago; and isn’t Katherine such a mean-spirited bitch, to strike at him that way all over a little indiscretion, and isn’t it wrong, he’d always say, that it was done through letters, those prepared by her four attending lawyers, and really, isn’t Katherine such a homely little whore on top of everything else?

  “Why,” he asks today as he and Natalia sit on the veranda, listening to the rain, “did I ever love that wretched woman?”

  Natalia leans back and thinks again how conversations too often grow repetitive, the mind always circling over the past, to times that no longer exist. She stares out to the cobbled streets of Florence and takes in the aroma of bread that drifts from the bakery across from them, the old stone building with its windows always blank-looking, open to cool the heat from the ovens. In the people here there is a tiredness as old as the city, and in Natalia there is a growing tiredness, too. This life is not her life after all, nor could it ever be. This is not her home. She considers first her circumstances, which she dismisses in her mind as too painful to think about or discuss: her children back home in the States, left to Frank, his moods. In twenty years of marriage he hasn’t even managed to cook a decent meal; the children would be reduced to bones already, no doubt, probably living off pumpkin paste and canned tomatoes. When she thinks about Frank and the girls, she feels a heat rise within her and she grows irritated and finds all the doctor’s talk distressing; but when she sighs in an effort to indicate that he is being a colossal bore, and then sighs again when he stops his reverie but won’t look at her directly, he only asks her to pass the ice bucket—black, trimmed with silver. He adds three cubes to his glass, and that seems to settle whatever disagreement between them there is, if any.

  “Silence between people,” she says after a while, listening to the rain hit the terra-cotta roof, “is its own story, isn’t it?”

  The doctor says nothing. A maid mills into the room to refresh the ice, a young girl, no more than twenty with sleek black hair cut at the line of her jaw. Natalia notes her full, tender lips. When the girl takes the doctor’s drink to refresh it, he smiles, and Natalia nods as the maid leaves.

  Finally, he says, “We’ll make this a good experience yet, my dear.” He tells her, “Take note of it,” reminding her that she is, after all, still his secretary. “It’s been difficult to forget,” he says, apologetically. “Especially about the boat.”

  She makes no note at all. There has been rain in Florence for five days, and down the street the flowers set in buckets hang their heads, and the women hurry by blindly, their heads also hung. Watching them, Natalia remembers women in the camp, that time when she was only a child, and she can no longer say she is sure of her own footing. She inhales, feeling a familiar hunger, wanting to stuff her mouth with bread, wanting something in her complicated heart to take hold and rise.

  She chastises herself for her whimsy and childish belief in starting fresh again, one that moved her to forsake everything. How foolish, she thinks now, to believe that I could leave things behind. At first, when they arrived in Florence, there was a steady succession of activity: trips to the market for vegetables and bread, bright smells that bloomed in the air. There were decorators who furnished the space the doctor had rented— a finely woven rug was laid, fused with gold and black thread that fringed on the edges; pillows were placed on a leather seat in the main room, the seat squat and boxy, with its ends curved, like cupped hands. There were daily walks through the city, a newness to everything that made Natalia forgetful. She and the doctor discussed the architecture produced in the Renaissance, the dome of the Church of San Spirito, the pre-Baroque style of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, the voussoirs of the Palazzo Strozzi. He was versed in all this, articulate in a way Frank never was. He’d chat happily as they walked narrow streets and meandered between the buildings, thrilled to be released from his practice. Natalia admitted that she, too, was happy to be away, that she had always held an irrational fear of hospitals, but that she’d ended up working for him anyway because, of the twelve applications she’d completed—the doctor’s done in desperation—he had been the only one kind enough to offer Natalia a job at all. Still, she told him, every time she entered the building, she would cross herself and kiss her fingers.

  After a few months in Florence, though, Natalia found she no longer listened to the doctor’s musings and banter. Instead she listened to the voices of people lifting from the streets, language that was fluid and unknowable as it drifted by her. She remembered reading once of two brothers who spoke the same dying dialect—the brothers were the only ones left in the world who shared the language, the only ones left of their kind—but they hadn’t spoken after fighting over the same woman. Their language went dead within them and was lost entirely. To her surprise, she often thought of Frank then. She thought of the girls, too. She’d ex
pected that after she settled in with the doctor she would bring the girls to her, but that hadn’t happened. She wrote to them once and, at a loss for words, told them only about simple things: the trips to the market, the crumbling buildings, the fading sunsets.

  Her efforts to enjoy the time dwindled. A certain incompatibility grew then between her and the doctor. Petty disagreements arose between them. Natalia didn’t like the arrangement of the living room and didn’t see the practicality of a white leather sofa that she could never sit on; he didn’t like a dress on her and thought it the wrong color, unpleasing to his precise eye. “Gray,” he told her, “makes you look foppish and, if I might add, slightly malignant.”

  At night, too, Natalia began having nightmares that startled her from sleep, the subversive maneuverings of the mind, the firing synapses of the brain sneaking up on her like silent soldiers. Some of the dreams had a quality of old habit: She and Frank were young again, childless, and they drove down a stretch of abandoned road to a region of coal, to a town that had an underground fire burning in the mines. How eerie that town was to Natalia with all the empty houses, the windows boarded, businesses closed up, bicycles abandoned, the residents having fled quickly, and yet the houses and buildings still marked the traces of those very same people. In her dream, the sky was unnatural like sea glass and there was a tranquillity that Natalia sensed was easily broken. Up the road it turned dark, and a crack of thunder sounded like a shotgun. Rain pelted down on the windshield, but Frank stubbornly refused to turn on the wipers. She looked over and told him, “We need to go back.” He turned his head and calmly said, “You’re on fire, Natalia.” And she looked down at her blouse; it peeled from her skin and broke apart, floating around the car.

  She’d wake with a start. Although she seldom thought to seek comfort in others, she would turn to the doctor and nudge his mottled back. She would begin to speak, but he’d shift and settle into his own dreams without argument or care. Natalia would lie awake for hours, breathless, waiting for light to bobble through the window slats.