The Daughters

by Adrienne Celt

  It wasn’t until I read her note that I realized I was hungry, and that I wanted pancakes. It felt important to follow my instincts in a house where everything was suddenly so indistinct. For a moment I considered tackling the cooking myself, but I was still sleepy and didn’t quite trust my eyes in the smog. It seemed all too possible that I’d end up knocking the pan off the stove, burning my hands and legs and face with hot batter.

  A few weeks earlier my mother had made me pancakes from scratch—a peace offering after our trip to the opera—adding cornmeal to give them grit and bite, trying to form each cake into the shape of a foreign country. They looked like blobs, failed mouse ears, but they tasted wonderful. She smiled at me and sucked on a cigarette while I ate.

  I thought, I’ll help. So I took down the grease-spotted Joy of Cooking from the shelf and dug through drawers until I came up with a few measuring cups, a Pyrex bowl, and some flour, butter, vanilla, and baking powder. I couldn’t remember exactly what went in the batter, but I figured Sara would tell me what to keep out and what to put away. Whispers of smoke hung around my head and followed my hands; it was starting to make me cough, but I didn’t open a window. The smoke didn’t seem like something I had the right to control.

  The day before, my mother and my baba Ada had gotten into a fight. I thought it was lucky that Ada chose to leave so early today: it gave us all a chance to calm down, forget what was said, and move on. Sara had been telling me about how Ada came to America: That she was pregnant and refused to name the father. That she left just before the Second World War reached her town in Poznań, so she wasn’t there to fight against the Nazis, to protect her family or hide the Jewish children who were being rounded up and sent to death camps. In death camps, Sara told me, a child might be picked up by the ankles and swung around in the air. Around and around, arms dangling in front of them.

  When I tentatively suggested that this sounded fun, Sara laughed, and asked if I thought it would be fun to have my skull crushed against the side of a brick building after swinging for a circle or two.

  Your grandmother was a coward, Sara told me. She abandoned her country and her parents and her brothers and ran away to live in America and never heard from anyone ever again. Her mother saved all the money they had to get Ada out of Poland. Her brothers signed up for the army to help pay. They died because of her. Everyone died because of her. She and Greta had no mercy.

  “And I suppose you’re sorry?”

  This is when Ada walked in, her face completely composed. She ran a hand over her hair, smoothing down invisible flyaways.

  “After all,” she continued, “who do you think I was pregnant with? Some stranger? Are you sorry we didn’t all die? That you didn’t die? That Lulu is here?”

  She stood next to me and put a hand on my shoulder. My mother grasped me on the other side. But neither woman looked at me. They had eyes only for each other.

  The red measuring cups stood in a row, lined up by size. Each one was full of smoke: a cup of smoke, a half cup, a quarter cup. In school sometimes on Halloween, the teachers filled a plastic cauldron with punch and dry ice which they doled out in single servings, and I had the urge now to pick up one of the measuring cups and sip from its billowing bowl.

  My eyes streamed tears and yet still felt like they were full of pepper. Maybe, I thought, if I lay down on the ground there wouldn’t be quite so much smoke and I could just go to sleep.

  I shook my head. The smoke backed away from me, made tentative by the sudden movement, but soon swirled back, ran its fingers through my hair. I scrunched up my nose and stretched the cotton from my pajama sleeve across my airways.

  “Mama,” I whimpered.

  It took longer than usual to get to her bedroom. Our apartment wasn’t very big, and on an ordinary day, if I was full of energy I could run around it at top speed and bang my fist on every door several times a minute. But today I kept getting lost. Every few steps I paused to get my bearings and found myself standing by an object that I’d never seen before. True, we had a hallway table, but did it look like this one? Was that our coat rack? Those abandoned shoes couldn’t belong to me, so did they fit some other, unknown child?

  When my hand found the knob on my mother’s bedroom door I nearly sobbed with relief. She would be irritated that I was getting her out of bed, but she would know what to do, how to clear the air and cook me breakfast. She would make some noise, put on high heels, tell me I was a real pain when I wanted to be.

  I knocked. There was no answer.

  This wasn’t unusual. More often than not, if I disturbed my mother’s sleep before ten a.m. she would throw heavy things against the door until I went away or started throwing things against the other side. I knocked again and leaned my cheek against the wood. I could feel the incipient splinters, and the resonant sound of my knuckles against the board.

  “Mama?” I knocked harder. “Mama, are you awake?”

  Still there was no answer. Since these were unusual circumstances—my coughs were beginning to come up caustic with phlegm and I kept hearing shuffling, scratching sounds behind me in the clouds of smoke—I turned the cold knob and fell into the room, planning to jump into my mother’s bed and throw the blanket over my head. If I was lucky, she’d wrap an arm around me and ask, thick with sleep, what on earth was wrong?

  But the room was empty.

  In my memory, Sara’s dresses bloom out of her closet like mushrooms, a living profusion of brocade and tulle.

  “Beautiful,” she would say when I wrapped them around my arms and shoulders, cinched them about my waist, and tried to sashay in place. “You know they wouldn’t look the same on anyone but me. They’re tailored to fit.”

  She wore a new dress for every performance, every booking at the Green Mill, even when she was hired to sing a jazzy radio jingle for Caramello candy bars. It didn’t matter to her that no one could see her clothes through the radio; her music and her beauty were linked inextricably, and she never left the house without lipstick and a freshly pressed skirt. Together, she and Ada were a sight to behold.

  Sometimes, if she lay in bed for long enough dipping toast into the wet yellow yolk of soft-boiled eggs, I was allowed a few precious minutes to throw myself into her wardrobe, with its immersive lexicon of sensation. Unlike the wedding dresses at Marshall Field’s, these didn’t frighten me so much as intrigue me. They smelled like Sara. They were built in the shape of her body.

  The fabric rustled in the closet of its own accord, even when I backed away and jumped onto my mother’s bed to join her underneath the twisted sheets. Looking at the dresses gave me a shiver—where did they come from? No one could sew that fast, buy that much. I’d learned that cats produced more cats, birds produced more birds, even if I was unclear on the particulars. Looking at the closet I saw no other explanation than that this finery too was self-duplicating, breeding rapaciously just out of sight.

  If someone had walked up and slapped me in the face with a cold palm, I could not have been more shocked than I was to see my mother’s empty bedroom. The white paint on the windowsill was peeling slightly and marred with sticky red circles of wine. I watched a dust bunny lift on an unseen wind and drift across the floor. I nudged a stray button with my toe: it was cracked, and left a thin scratch on the floorboards. My stomach filled up with ice water that flushed up my throat and dripped down through my veins, from my heart to my fingertips and toes.

  All the furniture was gone, right down to the bed frame, though I could see a faint line where each object should have been. Already the dust was beginning to explore its new terrain—everywhere—with no rug or table or stack of books to impede it. I walked into the closet and took a deep breath. Two thoughts hit me as the air hit my lungs. First, no smoke, and then, she’s gone. My mother’s room was completely unpolluted, the closet bare of dresses, hangers, and shoes, and the air as clean as evaporation off a glacier lake.

  Considering the comprehensive nature of her wardrobe, I’d always
assumed Sara’s closet to be immense. But emptied out, the space was surprisingly shallow—just a rectangular box with a bare hanging bulb and an extra bar shoved in to fit more hangers. Standing there I began to feel dizzy. The cold water in my blood mixed unpleasantly with the smoke in my head, and my heartbeat grew so loud in my ears that it seemed to echo in the hollow space around me. I closed my eyes, and for a moment the sound was so large I believed I’d been mistaken: that the closet was big enough to hold a very empire of dresses.

  Then the dizziness overtook me, and when I lay down on the closet floor I couldn’t even stretch my limbs enough to straighten out my elbows or knees.

  It was dark by the time Ada came home from Marshall Field’s, and she found me exactly where I’d set myself down hours earlier. I could barely account for the time. My nose was running, a small puddle having collected on the floor by my head. It seemed probable that I’d fallen asleep, but I didn’t remember any dreams save the image of our apartment on a mountaintop suspended in clouds.

  The smoke that had haunted my movements all through the morning was gone, and I know Ada would have called it a dream too if not for the scent that lingered over our upholstery and curtains. All the cooking equipment I’d set out remained on the counters, the butter long since softened but everything else completely unchanged. Baba Ada trod around me delicately. That my mother could have removed every scrap of hers from our home between the time when Ada slipped out for work and I awoke stretched plausibility. It spoke of a desire to flee so swiftly and so unimpeded that my knees grew weak just thinking about it. She didn’t want to say good-bye.

  “Was there a loud sound, lalka?” My grandmother sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a mug of hot chocolate. “Any sort of bang or clang, or a voice maybe?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Just the smoke.”

  We both quietly gripped our mugs and avoided looking into each other’s eyes.

  “She thought I was cursed,” I said. “That’s why she hasn’t been getting so many shows.”

  “No.” Ada looked intently into her chocolate. A film of marshmallows melted on top and she dipped a finger in, bringing it up coated in white. “She thinks she is cursed.”

  “By me.” My voice cracked. “Same thing.”

  “Oh darling, she didn’t say that to you, did she?”

  Ada came and picked me up out of my chair as easily as if I’d been two years old. I wrapped my arms around her neck and my legs around her waist, crossing my feet at the ankles to stay secure. I could feel that I was too big for this, but I also felt that if Baba Ada set me down I would fall to pieces on the floor. An arm here, a knee there, fingers scattered under the refrigerator.

  “She didn’t have to say it,” I mumbled into Ada’s shoulder as we careened into the living room to sit on the couch. “That’s what she thinks. That Greta cursed us and she’s dead and I’m bad luck.”

  “No,” said Ada. “No.”

  But she did nothing else to contradict me, just stroked my back with her fingernails until I fell into sobbing and began to cough. I ran into the bathroom and up came balls and balls of dark material. They hit the toilet with sickening plops. I cried and spat, sick at myself, as if I were contaminated with something I couldn’t define. As if the smoke had gone inside me and turned solid, and only by hacking my throat red raw would I ever get it back out again.

  17

  If events begin long before they seem to, does that mean that the future and the past are linked? In fact, it must. A small move, a kicked stone at the top of the mountain leads the landslide into the houses below. Slip of the rock, slip of the shoe. But take the argument one step further: if the past must exist just so to cause the future, then doesn’t the same principle suggest that the future also causes the past?

  What I mean is, was Ada’s death my fault? Was it Kara’s? She’s so light in my arms, her skin so sweet-smelling, that I think it can’t be so. But what about Greta and her boys? All those baby girls born blue, who never breathed air, never felt the sun on their skin. Never had skin, some of them, to speak of. What about the children dead during one of the rehearsals for Kristallnacht, lying in the street on beds of window shards? What about a girl on a table being given a shot of poison slowly, into her spinal column? And another shot of poison, and another? All those girls. Did we reach our hands between their ribs, between the sinew of years and bones, and take their heartbeats for our own?

  If they had to die so we can live, then yes, right? Somehow we did.

  Today is the day of Kara’s baptism, when she becomes John’s child officially enough that nothing is likely to change things. A festive atmosphere is called for, despite the fact that Ada is missing, and my husband is being so cold to me that sometimes I forget I haven’t told him about Finn at all. Despite the fact that I haven’t sung in weeks, but today am meant to open my mouth and sing Kara welcome as part of the choir. At least it’s funny, so many problems at once.

  Under a sky the white of dirty cotton, I step into a cab with my husband’s hand gripping my shoulder. Kara is curled against John’s chest, wrapped up in as many layers as an onion. Beneath the ergonomic blue baby carrier, and the fleece blankets, and the pink hooded coat adorned with kitten ears, is a dress as frothy as egg whites whipped up for a meringue. She has been alive for ten weeks, her soul in ostensible jeopardy for all that time.

  “Christ, what time is it?” John stretches his elbow upward to try and get an angle on his wristwatch without removing his hand from the baby’s backside. “We’re going to be late, you know.”

  I slide into the taxi, which is cold beneath me, the gray vinyl squeaking. I’m not in a hurry, and I’ve gotten used to John’s tone. Proprietary. Wounded.

  “Well, damn,” I say. “Then they’ll just have to christen someone else. Who do you think they’d choose? Out of everyone?”

  John looks at me blankly. Another joke. That we can do anything, choose anything, without consequences. He situates himself beside me, peeking at Kara under her hood.

  “Remind me again why we’re doing this?” he asks.

  I hesitate, then lean against him. He lets me, and I’m grateful. It’s been so long since we touched easily.

  At the christening, a baby is given her name. She’s made a part of the world, and she is announced to it. Past and future. Ada never met Kara, not really. But she planned this event, and so we’ll go.

  “You really have to ask?” I say.

  John looks helpless.

  “We don’t even go to church,” he says. “It’s not such a crazy question.”

  It isn’t, for him. The language of institutional faith is foreign to my husband—seductive, maybe, but incomprehensible. He was raised with Sunday morning cartoons and trips to the swimming pool on summer weekends. John’s parents told him he could be whatever he wanted to be, as they zipped him into a rain jacket and walked him to the museum. Cathedrals were pointed out to him in terms of architecture and design, the glint of stained glass and the turn of a spandrel.

  The first and only Communion he ever took was with me, one afternoon in Sacré-Coeur not long after we met. It had been five years since my own last confession, when I’d admitted to the sin of vanity and decided that I could presume that sin for myself going forward. Instead of going through the fuss of attending Mass and asking forgiveness, I began saying preemptive Hail Marys each week from my bedroom at home. But ignoring the rules is not the same as forgetting them.

  We met in Paris, both of us twenty-three and singing our first roles at the Palais Garnier. The city’s new modern house, L’Opéra Bastille, had opened several years before, but the director of our show wanted what he called “an antique feel” for the sound.

  “An imperfect feel, he means,” John said. He wore a blue vee-neck sweater with a hole at one elbow over a crisply ironed button-down shirt. He kicked stones as we walked down the street, and spoke in importunately loud English. I liked him because his shirt had soft pink stripes, and
because he was blunt and a little bit proud of it. “A crappy feel. A boxy feel.”

  “You have no sense of history.” I bumped him with my shoulder and he bumped me back. We tottered along through Montmartre this way, bobbing together like buoys in a tide. Both our voice coaches had somehow double-booked the afternoon, and our sudden freedom elevated us up off the street, almost out of our shoes. “Spaces carry memories! Singing in the Palais is like singing with Maria Callas!”

  I flushed. The air was cool, but spring cool. Sorbet. Chilled grass.

  “You know what?” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  His hand felt soft and dry, the palm littered with an embarrassment of lines and wrinkles.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  I tugged him forward, keeping my eyes on the street signs, because I suddenly knew that if I looked back at him, my happiness would overwhelm my sense of purpose and we would fall into kissing against a wall and never leave. The possibility filled my head with soft bees, grumbling against one another and tickling me with their wings. Though he couldn’t see it, I smiled.

  “Wait and learn.”

  At the top of the hill that houses Sacré-Coeur, we both leaned, breathless, over our knees. It takes a special kind of fitness to run up so many stairs without getting winded. While trying to straighten up I stumbled into a stone barrier, and when John laughed at me, I pushed him to watch him wobble back and forth, and to feel the warmth of his chest underneath his sweater. We both giggled in between deep ragged inhalations until we heard the gong of bells and fell solemn.

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you believe in God?”

  John searched my eyes, as if to measure which answer was more likely to impress me.