Beyond the Ties of Blood (27 page)

They sat back down and waited while Mr. Bronfman cut and served slices of pink roast for everyone. Then Mrs. Bronfman passed around a bowl with sour cream and a small dish with tiny pieces of green onion. Laura wasn't sure what to do since she'd only eaten something like that on Inocencia's
quesadillas
. Marcie noticed.

“You put the sour cream and chives inside the baked potato,” she said. “It tastes pretty good, actually.”

Laura watched Marcie, then carefully imitated what her friend had done. She was concentrating so hard on getting it right that at first she didn't hear Mr. Bronfman asking her a question. She jumped when Marcie elbowed her in the ribs, right below the line of the table. When she looked up Mr. Bronfman cleared his throat and tried again.

“So. Laura. Do you know what part of Russia your father's grandparents came from?”

Laura took a swallow of water before she answered. “My mother told me it was from the city where the sailors on a ship rebelled.”

“Odessa!” Mr. Bronfman exclaimed, looking very pleased with himself. “Of course. It was Odessa. My mother's family was originally from there, too. Do you know what their last names were?”

“My mama has never told me that. She might know, though. I could ask.”

“I would like that. My mother used to tell me so many wonderful stories about Moldavanka, her old neighborhood. Everyone was Jewish, they had their butcher and their tailor, and everyone looked out for everyone else. These days we all live so far apart. No one can even see our house from the street. If anything were to happen to us here, it's possible we wouldn't be found for weeks. It wasn't like that in the old neighborhood, why …”

Laura felt Marcie kick her under the table and looked over at her. The other girl made an almost imperceptible gesture as she brought her napkin up to wipe her mouth, a finger across her throat that Laura took to mean they were about to cut it short. Then she heard Marcie's chair scraping back, and her friend stood up from the table.

“May we be excused, please? There's something I want to show Laura in my room.”

“But Marcie,” Mrs. Bronfman said, “we haven't even gotten to dessert. I picked up your favorite, a lemon poppyseed cake from the bakery.”

Marcie moved around the table and gave her mother a hug from the back. “I need to lose five pounds to fit into that new skirt I just bought. And I'm sure Laura's pretty full, too, aren't you, Laura?”

Laura had never tried lemon poppyseed cake, and it sounded really good. But she could tell from the look Marcie was giving her that she needed to agree. She nodded. “I'm stuffed,” she said. “Everything was so good.”

Mr. and Mrs. Bronfman laughed. “It's all right, Laura dear,” Mrs. Bronfman said. “I'll cut a piece for you to take home for you and your mother.” And with that, they were free to go.

“Why did you do that?” Laura asked once they were upstairs in Marcie's room.

“I don't know. I've just heard his story about Moldavanka a zillion times. And it always ends with a long lecture about the good old days, and how everyone looked out for each other then, and weren't so individualistic, blah, blah, blah.”

Laura sat down on the bed. “I wasn't bored yet,” she said.

Marcie sat down next to her. “That's because you'd never heard it before,” she said. After a short pause, she continued. “Does your mom repeat herself over and over like that? I don't know. My parents are getting more and more annoying all the time.”

For a moment the two girls just looked at each other. Then, almost simultaneously, they burst out laughing. Two hours later, when Mrs. Bronfman came up to the room to offer Laura a ride home, they'd tried on every possible outfit in Marcie's closet, and about half of its contents were spread across the bed. The new skirt that Marcie couldn't quite close looked great on Laura, and she was now wearing it. The two girls had also decided to meet the next morning and go to the discount makeup store.

When Laura woke up the next day, at first she couldn't remember why she felt so different. She got up and went to sit in her window seat, tucking her bare feet under her to warm them in her nightgown. The leaves on the big oak tree outside her window had turned a sunburned shade of brown. And all of a sudden she knew. She had a friend.

“Laurita! Laura! Are you up?” It was her mother calling from the kitchen. She could smell the fragrance of coffee and freshly toasting bread.

“Yes, Mamita! Do I have time to take a shower before breakfast?”

“No,
m'hijita
, just come to the table in your nightgown! You can shower later!”

By the time Laura put on her slippers and padded into the kitchen, her mother was already pouring the hot milk into their coffee. The bread, toasted and buttered, was sitting on dishes in the dining area, and the orange juice was already poured.

“You got up early today,” Laura said as she brought in the sugar and the salt and pepper for the fried eggs her mother was just removing from the stove.

“I woke up early and decided to get going,” her mother said. “You know, Laurita, I was thinking. It's such a beautiful day today, and I don't have any emergency work to do. What if we call
tía
Irene and see if we can borrow her car? We could go out into the countryside, the leaves are so beautiful right now. And I was thinking about last year, when we went out and found that pumpkin and carved it and everything. Would you like to do that again?”

Laura chewed her bread carefully, then took a slow sip of her coffee and milk. “I'm going out with Marcie. We're meeting at the shopping center, you know, the one right on the bus line. We're going to look at makeup.”

“Oh.”

“Are you upset?”

“Oh, no,
hijita
, of course not. It's wonderful that you're getting to be friends.”

“I'm sorry I didn't tell you last night, it's just that I was really tired and—”

“No, don't worry,
mi amor
. It's great. This way I can catch up on some work, get ahead of my classes for the week. And I might even have time to go visit Irene. No, no, don't worry.”

But the more her mother protested, Laura noticed, the flatter her voice sounded.

As Marcie and Laura became best friends, Laura began getting invited to parties. Since her mother didn't have a car, she was always having to bum rides from Mrs. Bronfman.

“At least I wish our moms could share more,” she said one day in school. “It's not fair that your mom is always having to stay up late to go get us.”

“Don't worry about it,” Marcie said. “My mom really likes you. It's been a while since I had a best friend, and I think she was getting a little worried.”

After that, Laura felt better about Mrs. Bronfman. She began to see, too, that even though Marcie had a lot of friends to hang out with, she didn't seem to have a lot of special ones to confide in. So it balanced out in the end. But she did occasionally worry about her mother. It was the first time she noticed that, unless
tía
Irene and Amanda came over to take her somewhere, her mother never went out. She began to wonder why her mom didn't have any friends of her own. It would certainly make her own life easier if she didn't find her mother waiting for her every time she got home, always eager to hear about how things had gone. For the first time in her life, Laura began to dread those middle-of-the-night conversations.

It was worse when she began hanging out with Jacob at parties. Everyone was pairing off, it seemed, including Marcie. At first, Laura felt the same old pain in the stomach—the sense of being the odd one out—that she'd felt when they first moved to Boston. But one night Jacob came over and asked her to slow dance. He took her hand and led her out into the open area that served as a dance floor. A lot of couples were dancing already, and once they got a little further out into the middle of the room she could see that others had begun making out on the couches, just outside the reach of the lamplight. She felt a warm yearning that made it hard to breathe. Jacob took both her hands and brought them up around his neck, then placed both of his on her waist. He put his head down onto the top of her hair and she settled into his chest.

That night when she got home, she was sure her mom would notice. What would she say in her own defense? Look, Mamita, I'm thirteen and a half. Don't you trust me? Do you think I'd do anything wrong? Everyone's doing it. Nothing sounded right. So she didn't say anything, and had a hard time meeting her mama's eyes.

After a while, she and Jacob began making out. They'd dance for a while, and then he would take her hand and lead her to a couch outside the circle of light, pulling her down onto his lap. When his lips moved along her jaw she found that, at least for a moment, she could forget where and who she was, and no longer felt out of place. But she began to worry that Mama would see the warm, burning spots he left along the sides of her neck. A couple of times she had to wear her hair down and a scarf because he'd left a bruise. A hickey, Marcie called it. Everyone got them, she said. She made it sound like it was something to be proud of.

When Laura turned fourteen, she and Marcie, Laura's mom, and Mr. and Mrs. Bronfman all got together for Saturday lunch at a local restaurant. Later that day, Marcie and Laura went out to the movies and for pizza. Just the two of them. They'd decided to go it alone, because they had both broken up with their boyfriends and were still feeling a little strange.

“I'm so glad we decided to do it this way,” Marcie said when they'd finished the pizza and she was drinking her third diet soda.

“Me, too,” Laura answered. “And by the way, thanks for the perfume.”

Smiling, the two girls got up and took their garbage over to the bin. Laura looked at her watch, a present from her mom.

“We only have fifteen minutes until my aunt Irene picks us up,” she said.

They began walking in the general direction, but the window of the electronics store caught their attention.

“That is such a cool sound system,” Marcie said. “It has extra bass and you can—wait a minute!” She interrupted herself, then reached over to poke her friend in the side. “Look! Your mom's on TV!”

The two girls stared, open-mouthed. The television was tuned to the evening news on one of the local stations. With the sound turned down, they couldn't hear what people were saying, but there was Laura's mother, dressed up in a nice grey pinstripe suit, being interviewed by one of the anchors.

“Wow,” Laura said. “She never told me she was gonna be on TV.”

It was a long interview. Even with the sound turned down, Laura could tell that her mother was giving long answers to the questions, and at one point she even dabbed a tissue to the corners of her eyes. It seemed to be something really dramatic.

“I bet Irene'll know what's going on,” she said, hurrying toward the front of the mall.

Irene and Amanda were already waiting for them in their blue Saab. Amanda rolled down the front passenger window.

“Hi, girls,” she called. “Go ahead and get in the back seat. Door's open.”

They climbed in. Laura scooted over, folding her legs behind her aunt's seat. “We just saw Mom on television at the electronics store,” she said. “The sound was down but it looked serious. What's up with that?”

Irene didn't say anything as she took several quick turns on her way out of the parking lot. Laura had to hold on in order not to be tossed around. Her
tía
had always been a bit dramatic behind the wheel. Whenever Mama mentioned it, Irene would only laugh. “You can thank General Pinochet for that,” was all she'd ever say. Now she didn't answer until they were at a red light about a block away from the mall.

“It started on Friday afternoon,” she began. “With your birthday celebration and all, your mother didn't want to take attention away from you. She arranged to record the interview after your birthday lunch. They promised to give her a video copy so you could see it.”