Читать книгу Evening - Nessa Rapoport - Страница 12

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INTRIGUED BY WHAT IS HIDDEN. As a child, I would stand behind my mother in the kitchen, forcing her to turn by crying out, “I want to understand everything.”

Although I like to pretend I have sprung from the head of Zeus, unshackled by my family’s idiosyncrasies, as soon as I come back I feel the press of my ancestors, demanding tribute for my neglect of their claims. My mind begins its speculations about how we came to be the way we are, unchastened by my mother’s refrain, “No one can understand everything. Not even you, my darling.”

Nana’s answer was more opaque. “Some stones are best left unturned.”

I begged her to tell me which ones she meant, but I already knew the tenacity of her closed face.

On the steps outside my mother’s house, I falter. An intuition, a warning pulse, stops me from crossing the threshold. I take a shuddering breath of conifer and cold. The door is ajar; I will myself to enter.

My parents sit apart in the middle of the living room. Between them, one low seat awaits me. My mother’s chest and mine bear a pin of torn black ribbon, symbol of heartbreak. But Nana and my father have done it the old-fashioned way. The lapel of Nana’s impeccably tailored jacket is ripped, expressing, I suspect, not only deference to tradition but fury. My father’s white dress shirt is conspicuously gashed.

The air is redolent with perfume, tuna fish, and boiled coffee, while visitors swarm about us, talking to each other in the hushed, excited manner that premature death invites.

When he still lived with us, my father was pedantic about closing the curtains as night fell, although, since we saw no houses beyond the garden, presumably no one was watching. One of my mother’s pleasures is to keep the curtains open through the night. I am distracted by the windows’ twilight reflection—masses of people in the choreography of a party.

The long buffet near the kitchen holds ziggurats of food. A communal busybody with pleated cheeks asks me officiously if I would like her to make me a plate.

“Can’t eat,” I say, and look around to catch Tam’s eye.

The sonorous voice I have been trying to quell makes its callous declaration: You will not speak to her again.

All those who approach loom over me. I greet their knees, subduing my panic, an inversion of the times my parents allowed us to mingle with the company for the cocktail hour.

My mother’s oldest friend, Marly, steps even closer. “Sweetie, you look exactly the same. I can see you, toddling after Tam. Eve the rebel,” she says to her husband in an indulgent non sequitur.

No wonder Nell went to New York and married in a weekend, I think mutinously.

“Tam never had an angry word for anyone,” Marly continues, her face crumpling. “She was so good. And she loved you more than words can say.”

Marly’s hackneyed paean to my sister is superimposed on Tam’s own words as our fight unfurls.

“You want it as much as I did,” Tam said. “You just don’t know how to work for it.”

She was lying in the hospital bed, looking up at me.

“Tam,” I protested. “I love my life.”

“What life? Teaching obscure women about obscure women? You’re in love with the past,” she accused me. “What about Simon?”

“He’s in the present,” I countered.

“It’s pathetic. You’re jealous of me,” she said suddenly.

I looked at my sister, her body emaciated and bloated, her destiny written on her skin.

Pity felt worse than rage. “I work hard, too,” I ventured.

“I’ve always believed in you,” Tam said. “But you’re still teaching night school.”

“Continuing education.”

“You keep saying you’ll move on, but you don’t.”

“Such a wonderful mother,” Marly intones. “I loved watching her with Ella and little Gabe. Oh”—she cries out—“how will we manage?”

While I try to speak, Marly’s voice does what I cannot do and breaches my mother’s grief. At last she reaches out to me.

Immediately, I want to crawl into her arms as I did when I was little, wrap myself in her scent and amplitude. Until this moment, her arms have hung slack at her sides; she has worn the same dress for two days and no perfume for the first time in my memory.

One of Tam’s gifts, inherited from our mother, was her embrace. For a methodical, conscientious sort, Tam had an exuberant hug, a homecoming in itself. I basked in that hug at airports and outside trains. Now my skin needs touch as an animal craving, instinctive, essential. But I cannot curl into my mother. Many people have come to see us, and I’m meant to welcome them with dry-eyed dignity.

“Eve,” my mother proffers in a whisper. “You might do something with your hair.”

I am stupefied.

“It’s just—” She looks around for help; none is forthcoming. “You’re allowed to,” she explains. “Your father once told me that an unmarried woman can even wear makeup during shiva.”

I can tell that I’m gaping at her.

“Don’t look so wild,” she says.

If Tam were here, she and I would be snorting vulgarly. “Can you believe Mummy?” she’d complain. “Trying to find you a husband on the day of my funeral.”

A gnarled old man, renowned for his appearance at weddings and funerals to cadge a meal, materializes before me, mumbles the requisite solemnities, and heads for the food.

“Maybe he’s the one,” I say to my mother.

My mother and I were standing side by side before the mirror in the lounge of the East Side restaurant she preferred, while Simon stayed at our table, choosing the wine. It would be their first meeting, and I was not optimistic. For my mother, the eros of reading was a personal affront, as if my riveted gaze were a pronouncement to the world that she was not sufficient. Syntax and meter, the furnishings of Simon’s professional dominion, did not tempt her.

“To be honest,” she began.

“He’s spectacular?” I said. Nothing positive has been known to follow this introductory phrase.

“He’s so—”

I fortified myself.

“—unattractive,” said my mother.

What I was not able to parse for my mother is that a man’s most seductive organ is his brain. When Simon starts to talk, I’m entranced. His speech is like a fingerprint: the unique pattern of him. From his mobile mouth, Simon releases effortlessly words like “withering” or “sibilant.”

“Say anything to me,” I’ll goad him. “Say something banal.”

He laughs, and that’s another winning aspect of Simon. His finding me funny is so much more valuable than beauty.

Simon is slight—make that scrawny—with black eyes and the pallor of someone who spends most of his life in a library or basement. He looks like Franz Kafka on a bad day. To quote him, “I’m a poster boy for the kind of Jew Hitler couldn’t wait to exterminate.”

Occasionally, I’ll interrogate him about how much he must have suffered in his public school, where I know from British memoirs that rugby was the currency and being Jewish and intellectual a near-fatal combination.

But Simon loved school. He was such an obvious genius that everyone left him alone. As a result, he is a more subtle type of insufferable. Simon’s view of himself is an accurate estimation of his strengths.

“Why don’t you begin with the assumption that I’m right?” he once asked me.

“Why would you want to be with a woman who thinks you’re always right?”

Which rendered him wordless, for once.

Simon’s mind works in such an oblique way that I cannot anticipate him. Long ago, Tam and I distinguished between men who are interesting and men with interests: Is there anything worse than hearing someone drone on about opera or golf or the minutiae of his fixations?

Simon has infinite obsessions, but no need to share them. If I’m in an elevator with him, he might say, “That’s the worst Schubert I’ve heard in a decade.”

Then, of course, I have to know which Schubert he heard ten years ago. Being Simon, he can tell me.

Our banter is like a game of chicken neither of us is willing to call. Since he’s in England for half the year, we do not see each other routinely. “Besides,” I inform him, “I cannot live in a rainy climate.”

“Noted,” he says. “Writing her dissertation on British writers. Cannot live in Great Britain.”

We are neither here nor there, immobilized on an Iceland of relationship, decisions adjourned.

No situation on this earth was more likely to drive my sister crazy. For Tam, indeterminacy was a moral failing.

In my mother’s living room, the brief day is shuttered, sky waning to ambient light, when the arbitrary murmurs coalesce, a melody in a minor key. Someone thrusts a prayer book into my clenched hands.

I do not follow, but when my father and my mother stand, I stand. And then: it is our turn to recite the fearful words.

Naked, I mouth the syllables of the kaddish in a monotonous trance. I cannot believe we are now the ones speaking aloud into the silent, receptive community.

I’m too proud, I think, as the service ends and people take their leave.

“Eve, we want you to know how—”

“It’s hard to believe that—”

“We’ve been thinking of you so—”

Inevitably, I flee.

Above everyone, the hall is an airy refuge. Portraits of Nana and Grandpa gaze at each other pacifically across the landing, as if to say: We made this family. We did our best. But such a matter is beyond our province.

I pass my mother’s room, evade Tam’s childhood door. Beside the laundry chute is the entrance to the third floor. My fingers are adept at disengaging the latch. I cannot remember when I was last in the attic, and yet I know exactly where to place my foot on the first steep stair. When I close the door behind me, I find myself in absolute blackness.

Slowly I ascend, placing each foot with care. At the top, a thread of moonlight outlines the wood ledge.

Turning the glass knob, I am in our old playroom, unadorned, toys scattered where Ella has left them. Here is the tiny dormer room where once—Tam and I were enthralled to discover—a maid had lived at the century’s turn.

On this flowered window seat I would lie until dusk, reading the books that are still piled beneath the hinged lid: lives of nurses in the Crimean War, siblings who journey to faraway lands by sail, wand, or potion. Here, when I was dropping out of high school, failing every class but English, Tam held me while I cried and told me she was certain I would be like Margaret Mead, intrepid, singular.

“With a PhD as good as Nana’s,” she insisted.

“But not in chemistry.”

We agreed it was unlikely.

My mother’s decorating habit has not extended to the attic. On this braided rug, I lay under Laurie as he kissed me. If I turn quickly enough, I might catch a ghostly glimpse of him.

I breathe in an essence of dust and wood oil. In the crooked closet where Tam and I had our clubhouse are a couple of wire hangers. The attic’s emptiness is not sorrowful but confers a perfect peace. Alone in the dark, I feel my body shed its carapace of grief.

Through the bathroom’s doorway, the ancient, footed tub beckons. I used to stand before the circular stained-glass window, pretending to be a captain at the helm, steering the great old house to safety. Now I unfasten the hook, and the window swings open.

The winter air charges my skin. When I close the colored glass, I can hear the reassuring thrum of the heat. In the linen closet are the worn beach towels we took to the cottage every year. I feel the ridge of Tam’s initial, and hers is the one I take as I slip off my skirt and pull my sweater over my head.

It is bliss to be by myself, bare. Mapping the length of the room, I notice the slap of my feet, iridescent in the low radiance of the filtered night sky. When I turn the clover-shaped taps, the water rushes out in a glistening coil. Rummaging around the back of the closet, I find it: Ballerina Bubbles, Tam’s much-coveted Chanukah present of decades ago. I lift off the torso of the pirouetting girl and pour in all the powder that remains.

Mounds of froth erupt. I skim the surface with my toes and then step in, molding my back to the curving porcelain until the steaming water is scant inches from the top.

The silence, when I close the taps, is complete. I am going to stay here through the night, I decide. No harm can befall me.

In a second, I am twelve, stretched out on the dock of Nana’s cottage, the sun glazing my back where I lie, dreaming of love, lulled by the lap of water against wood, a minnow flicking between the slats, the far-off drone of a motorboat signaling the particular indolence that only a dock in summer can impart.

I am trying to imagine kissing, picturing the tongues I have read about, hours of turning faces and someone’s passionate hand. In my renewed innocence I am almost asleep when I sense rather than hear the opening door.

“Eve?”

I know Laurie’s voice immediately but do not seem capable of speech. Instead, I sink further into the water’s delicate embrace.

Laurie is too circumspect to turn on the light.

“You may sit,” I say regally.

He perches on the hamper.

I can decipher his face and the two glimmers of his hands. Lacy shadows waver over him.

When I was in love with Laurie, I was maddened by the wait between his sentences. Now, hypnotized, I do not care. The quiet lengthens steadily; neither of us will intrude upon it.

I am savoring a rare placidity when Laurie says, “You cut your hair.”

“It’s growing back,” I assure him, as if everything else will be as it was.

“Remember those nights we stayed up late?” Laurie says. “Eating the sugar cookies your mother kept in tins?”

I listen.

“You and Tam sat across from me, howling over something that set you off, an inside joke you never could explain.”

Stillness.

“Is it warm in there?” says Laurie.

“I’m in the womb,” I tell him dreamily.

But the bath is cooling. I would like to add hot water, feel heat stream beneath me in prickly currents, but I will not sit up. Suddenly, I am as self-conscious as my primal namesake, innocence dispelled, wondering how she got herself into this predicament.

“Do they miss me downstairs?” I ask.

He pauses, and the room’s encompassing history reasserts itself: What is the present day? I have been here long before you, and I’ll be here when you’re gone.

“I’ve missed you,” comes Laurie’s reply.

I do not want him to break this spell by moving toward me.

But I have forgotten Laurie’s grace. He raises the towel heaped on the floor and holds it like a screen in front of him. I walk toward the pale square until it is all that is between us; I cannot see his face. When I turn my back, Laurie’s arms envelop me.

I feel his clad body behind mine, not with desire but with innate sympathy, two night creatures taking each other’s measure. I want to stand like this, enfolded in him, Tam’s towel damp against my skin, forever.