Precious

by Sandra Novack

  After the rain, there are four gorgeous days when the sky stretches, uninterrupted, and Natalia decides to leave. Seven months, she thinks, is too long to be away from family. She packs only a few items: a green silk blouse the doctor bought for her, two pairs of pants the color of cream, a clingy red V-neck, a few shirts. It’s a trick she’s learned in life. A light packing, one glance behind her as she walks away, but only one—and in that glance the old story is certainly proven false: We do not turn to salt, and no God proves us inexplicably wrong.

  There are so few things we can actually hold on to. Love, maybe. The remnants of it, our memories, the scraps of ourselves we hold on to, despite our journeying.

  She wonders if her home with Frank and the girls will feel the same now, after she’s been gone from it. She has no idea when things changed, when Frank became more distant, opting to spend days out under the car, which Natalia took to mean that he was somehow avoiding her. She could blame work, she supposed, the long hours, his need for quiet, but it still made her feel inconsequential and inept, left to the girls and the house all day. At times she wonders if it is only her own flaw: to never quite feel at home anywhere, to always be on the periphery of things, just enough to feel a nagging sense of displacement that exists on the edge of inclusion, on the fringes of love, to realize nothing is entirely familiar.

  Natalia has always been traveling. Her first trip to America was by boat. After the barking German shepherds (how their bared teeth frightened her, their alert ears, the saliva that dripped from one of the kutya’s mouths), and after the fences and barbed wire and the two headlights illuminated in the dark woods, the old German, Clara, a woman already in her early fifties, scrubbed Natalia’s face and body clean and put her to bed as if Natalia were a plaything. “I don’t mind that you’re a Gyp,” she said as she pulled up the covers. “I always wanted a little girl, a little girl just like you.” Although Natalia’s parents and her brother were dead, and although in one moment her life had changed for the worse, and then in another moment, changed for the better, she dismissed everything the second her face pressed against the pillow. She moaned with pleasure. She had survived. She was the moth that had flown over the barbed wire, unnoticed, suddenly freed. If she was cursed, that must have marked the moment the accusations were hurtled from graves: the second she drifted off to sleep, the second she forgot those left behind and abandoned herself to the care of strangers—without burden, without thought to their histories and rooms.

  Within months of that night, she made the journey to America. It was a terribly clear day. As they embarked from the port in Germany Natalia smelled salt water and fish. Her new father, a former messenger in the army (how he feared the occupation), was a man with a smooth face and gray eyes and legs that were swift, made for running. Clara, who was much heavier, less demonstrative with affection but competent with meeting basic needs—the bed, the fresh linens, the roasted pork and peppers on the table—looked back at her homeland for a long while and then whispered, suddenly, “Deutschland Erwache!” After they fled, it was Clara who always held fast to her reimaginings of history. She often spoke of her belief that the Jews and the Gyps had lied, spoke of her denial that people were turned into soap and ashes, their blanched hair sold at markets. Even if Natalia protested, even if she spoke of the stench that hung in the sky, Clara would hear none of it. After Clara’s beloved Dresden was bombed, she spent considerable time penning letters to Churchill, ones she’d send once a month, from a mailing address belonging to someone else.

  On the boat it was Natalia’s new father who held her closely so that she could see over the rails to the turbulent water below, and, in the process, he pinched her skinny sides and caused her doll’s head to press into her rib cage, up under bone. He danced with her while her new mother leaned over the railing and vomited with great regularity. Clara glanced over to them, her hand holding her stomach, her face yellow. She pleaded with the fates to give her a reprieve from motion. She hated it all. She hated having to sell her silver and rings, to barter for passage. She hated having to give up her servants and the house. In America, when they took up residence in their small house, she hated having to give up her language, a language Natalia had always thought too harsh, too guttural—a language of spit.

  Natalia didn’t hate America. She embraced it as best she could, with an always cautious distance. She told herself she was lucky enough to have a life, even if Clara did fret too much over her, afraid perhaps that what had been stolen might be stolen back. Years later, during their last phone call, she told Natalia that she prided herself on her care, on keeping Natalia safe and close, on teaching her to read. “I never took my eyes off you,” she said, and Natalia responded, “I know, that was the problem.”

  A young Natalia found comfort in the daily rituals: school, the predictability of afternoon chores—hanging out laundry on pleasant days, folding the crisp towels and sheets afterward—the need to please both of her new parents even as she quietly snatched provisions from the cupboard to store under her mattress, just in case. Her father would come home from work as a night watchman and let Natalia pick through his coat pockets for candy or change. “Gypsy thief,” he’d say, smiling, touching her under her chin. “My little Gypsy girl.” In school, she learned the language with the help of a well-meaning English teacher who tutored her over lunch until her accent gradually lessened, and then mostly disappeared. She later met Frank and married. After their boy died and Clara suggested the child suffered from weak blood, Natalia would stop talking to her parents altogether, even her father, whom she always missed.

  Now Natalia makes the second trip to America by plane, her ticket paid for with the doctor’s weekly allowance. She looks out the double-paned glass and tries to ignore the man next to her, whose fleshy sides spill into her seat. However tired she is, she can’t sleep. Below, the ocean stretches for miles and hours, under clouds too thin to hold anything. Eighty percent of the earth is made of water, she remembers from school. Also, eighty percent of a persons body A tear is salt water. A tear is an ocean. Once she heard that if you press deeply into a person’s stomach, you can unleash a flood of tears. Natalia always wonders if that is the place in our bodies where our histories and memories and hopes are stored. What in a person’s mind and heart and body holds on to what went before? What clings to the nagging ghosts—the memories of others, calling their shrill, ecstatic songs that speak of belonging and making everywhere a home? What parts of her brother and her mother and father, what parts of those people never known still passed through her, their blood coursing in her veins? What parts of Sissy and Eva? She tried to ask the doctor this once, but he shrugged and said, “According to science, very little.”

  Just as she teases herself into thinking the entire world is made of water, she spots umber and chartreuse and citrine-colored patches of land that stretch out like a grid below her, the tops of verdant trees and smooth mountain ridges, and then, as the plane descends, the roofs of houses, the bright blue pools and roads that scrape in every direction. America, a land that, unlike Florence, is always content to reimagine itself, a Gypsy nation.

  She leans back, her lips slightly parted, emitting the soundless words she might say to Frank: I’m sorry. It was a mistake, she will say, simply. I’ve missed you. And as she says it, she realizes it’s true. She has missed Frank. She has missed him perhaps more than anyone. He was, after all, the only one who knew her, the only one who knew the secret of the crease at her neck. He was the one who shared her history. She will say, The time away from you, the time away from anyone or anything loved is always a mistake. They are difficult things, families. It’s hard not to feel incidental. It’s hard not to feel forgotten about, eventually; I’m sorry, she mouths. It was a mistake.

  By two in the afternoon there is a tiredness Natalia attributes to jet lag, to the hours spent with her legs crammed against the seat in front of her, the conversation with the man beside her about weather and food, and the subseque
nt wait for the luggage and taxi. When they drive by the house, Natalia hesitates, struck by the stark clarity of the white paneling, the burnt-looking grass. “In the back,” she instructs the cab-driver. “In the back, please.”

  The cabdriver nods. He takes her money, makes change. He offers to help with her bag, but she declines politely, not wanting to draw attention. Even on a Tuesday and even at this time of day, there will be at least a few neighbors out walking their dogs, or chatting in front of the mailbox, or shredding up weeds with their gloved hands. She can’t bear the thought of announcing her return so publicly, that Milly Morris might know she is home before Frank, before her children, and that seeing her, a woman like that might march over with a disapproving look and demand an explanation, demand pay for extra hours of sitting. If that happened, Natalia would feel caged. She would simply slump and scream.

  Thank goodness the back door is unlocked. The knob turns without hesitation. Natalia puts her suitcase down by the kitchen table. Out of old habit, she sorts through mail that has been left to pile up on the counter all week: a water bill, a phone bill, an advertisement from Orr’s for the summer basement sale. She notices a new can opener fastened under the cabinet and notices, too, that the framed needlepoint she made years ago—a lavender-colored house with thin hearts stitched under it—no longer hangs on the wall next to the basement door. Frank, she supposes. He probably threw it into the trash.

  If the girls heard her enter or saw the taxicab in the alley as it drove off, they still haven’t come downstairs. There is no patter of feet, no onrush of questions. She walks down the hallway, cautiously, past her and Frank ‘s bedroom. In the living room, she pauses by the steps and places her hand on the cool metal railing, realizing (as if she hasn’t felt it a thousand times over twenty years) that the metal isn’t smooth but coarse and grainy. Unsettled suddenly, she listens, still unsure if she should call out. Her younger child, and certainly of her two the more open, would come rushing down the stairs like a tolerable breeze if Natalia did call. She would be easier, Natalia believes, if not a bit persistent, interrogating, probing in a way that would eventually exasperate even the Buddha. No doubt, too, Sissy would eventually become quiet and hypervigilant, burning a hole through Natalia’s back with her gaze, as if a sigh or a sneeze or a raised voice might be an indication of disaster, every minute gesture significant. Still, Natalia could withstand that. Eva would be harder, Eva who holds grudges like her father—relentlessly, with words that fall like glass. There has always been something about Eva, an unsettling assertiveness that has left Natalia on the verge of—dare she say it?— jealousy. Eva will lash out, as she often does when she feels wounded or angry. Eva will cast immediate judgment: cruel pretension, sharp disdain. Is it these traits she envies in her daughter, in addition to fearing them? Or does she simply envy Eva, her youth, her defiance that draws such attention, that moves so many eyes? Regardless, Natalia already feels that her nerves today are stretched to the point of elasticity.

  She listens anxiously and hears a hushed conversation upstairs, a murmur, then laughter from Eva’s room. Always on the phone. Across the hall from Eva, the television whirls with the rise and fall of cartoon voices. Natalia remembers the argument she had once with Frank, how she warned him that Sissy would spend all her days locked in her bedroom if she were given the old black-and-white. Frank relinquished to Sissy’s pleading, though, the television a compromise since Natalia didn’t want a dog. It all seems distant now, spent. Still, she misses those petty arguments and snubs. She misses her family.

  There is no other movement, no opening of doors. They do not know she is here, listening. They haven’t sensed her at all.

  She doesn’t call. She tells herself, Not yet. Just a moment, she thinks, to orient herself to the house again. Every house has its own vibrations, its own smells emanating from the kitchen, its own secrets hidden about, its own stories told at the table. She looks around, as if she expects everything might be changed, shifted out from under her. The living room rug shows the girls’ constant traffic. She can see the dirt, the dust on the edges of the throw rugs, the cobwebs in the corners, the smudges on the bay window and front door. The colonial blue walls appear less vibrant than she remembers, the wallpaper beginning to curl at the corner behind Frank’s chair. Discarded newspapers lie on the floor. The marble statue by the fireplace, a naïve-looking woman and man held together in an embrace, stands where it has for years. National Geographics are on the coffee table in disarray. A photograph of a tiger stares at her, angrily.

  At her bedroom, she breathes and closes the door behind her, gently, so that the girls do not hear. She takes in the room, the paneled walls and dim light, the painting hung above the bed of a boat on an ocean. She takes the ashtray from Frank’s nightstand, opens the window, and dumps the charred remains into the row of hostas below. She looks over to Mrs. Stone’s house, to the rosebushes planted years ago, a tangle of thorny blooms.

  Her hands shake, and it’s like a test, a foolish test that a child might think of as a game of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not. She debates, rubbing her thumb over the slight indentation on her ring finger: bare, smooth. She opens her jewelry box and rummages through cheap pearl necklaces and clip-on earrings and pins, until she finds the plain gold band. She doesn’t put it on.

  Under the bed, Natalia gathers Frank ‘s Playboys and Hustlers. They make her feel so outdated and worn, made invisible by time. She places them in Frank’s underwear drawer, under his boxers. Still unsure, still feeling as if she’s misplaced something, something beyond the room, something deep in herself, she sits on the bed and hears a familiar squeak from the springs as they sag, the same worn sound she always worried about when they made love—the walls in the house are so wafer-thin. Sex needed to be quick, silent. She lies down and turns her head onto Frank’s pillow. It would be within his right, she supposes, if, in her absence, he’d had other women in this bed, if Frank’s chest hair, ample and wavy, had pressed against another woman’s breasts.

  The pain caused by this thought hits her bluntly. She tries to dismiss it and tells herself she can rest peacefully for one moment without worry. She feels strange and heavy. There is something so tantalizing about being undiscovered. She closes her eyes. Just a moment to herself, a last moment before she takes to the children. Then she will call to them and persuade them and answer whatever questions they might proffer. She will hear about the months she has missed. Eva’s prom was surely successful. She could have had any number of dates, far more than Natalia might have had at the same age. Sissy probably still struggled with science and would never have a head for concrete facts. She probably also still refused to shower after gym class, even though she’d been told a hundred times she must. Natalia closes her eyes. She sleeps.

  To find someone suddenly gone, to see them one day and not know that this will be the last day you see them, to not have the moment register until hours, days later, or years, is never easy. How we catch ourselves as life moves forward, thinking about that last moment and about what we might have done differently, if only we’d known.

  For Sissy it is admittedly painful to remember a friend bicycling off, down to the park—to see her again, in the mind’s eye, standing on the bike pedals, bragging, as she always did. The new Desert Rose—bright gold with a blaze of red flowers curling down the frame—was startling against the houses and sidewalk as Vicki whizzed by, larger than everything. Sissy might have stopped her, after all. She might have kept anything painful from happening. It is difficult for her to remember that she silently leveled an accusation against Vicki, that she held her responsible for the destruction of Precious, yet again, that she blamed her for the subsequent chastisements, the yelling of the mothers, the confinement to her room, as if Sissy were wrong, as if Sissy deserved to be punished, when in Sissy’s mind she had been taunted to action. It infuriates her. Even now, after all these months, in the haze of guilt, she is reluctant to admit that as she saw Vicki disappear over the
hill, her thoughts weren’t Come back (as she now amends) but Good riddance. She refuses to admit she fantasized a hundred times about Vicki suddenly being gone, about Vicki being dead (what is dead?). Sissy had a goldfish once, the only pet her mother ever allowed, one that, over time, Sissy often forgot to tend to properly. She came home one day from school to find it gone, and her mother told her that she saw it grow wings, breathe air, and fly out the window and into a tree. “It perched there for hours,” Natalia explained. “Puckering its fish-bird lips.” Only Eva told her that their mother had flushed the fish down the toilet after finding it belly-up in its bowl, an egg smear of white over its upturned eye. Still, after that, and perhaps only to assuage her guilt, Sissy imagined death as a grand transformation—the body shifting to another shape entirely changed but certainly not gone forever.

  All of this is difficult for Sissy to reconcile. But in the harsh reality of the day, in a house that only knows stubborn realities, to see her mother sleeping exactly where she should be sleeping—in her bedroom, on the right side of the bed—to know that she, Sissy, has passed this door a hundred times and a hundred times has turned the knob, each time hoping against hope and seeing nothing, and then finally to see her mother—right here! corporeal!— is nothing short of overwhelming. Yet here she is, in linen pants and heels, her mass of hair, salt-and-pepper gray, pressed against a pillow.

  Sissy blinks hard, feeling suddenly that she cannot breathe. To breathe, she thinks, would destroy the moment, making her mother disappear. She inches forward, releasing the door without realizing. It drifts to the wall and bumps against it, a hollow sound. Her mother awakes abruptly—she has only been here a moment, only taken a five-minute nap—and sits up, collects herself. She says, dumbly, “Baba,” the name her real mother often called her as a child. “Hello.”