Precious (9 page)

“Eva.”

“What?”

Sissy tries to form the words for the day, for all she hopes for and all she questions. She wonders if Eva believes in heaven, or God, or if there is another place people go to, another world just out of reach where they watch, wanting to be remembered. She threads Eva’s arms around her instead. Finally, she says, “Never mind.”

“Go to sleep, Sissy,” Eva says, yawning.

“Tell me a story first.”

“I don’t know any,” Eva says. Try.

Eva thinks for a while. “When you were little, I used to carry you around and pretend you were mine. I’d sing to you.”

“That’s not a story,” Sissy whispers. “That’s just something you remember.”

“Once when you were a baby, I dropped you.”

“Really?” Sissy turns.

“You landed on the carpet but you didn’t cry.”

Sissy pulls the covers closer and thinks about this. “Knowing myself,” she says, “I have a hard time believing that.”

“Well, you didn’t cry,” Eva says, nearly drifting off to sleep. “You didn’t cry at all—you laughed, actually. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

As so often happens, each of the girls, as well as Natalia, would remember the incidents around Natalia’s leaving differently, and they would conjure their memories in the days and months afterward but would never compare, never use the other’s recollections to temper the emotions. Eva would think about events despite not wanting to, always with a feeling of dread that first left her numb and then turned to anger. For her, the entire exchange was brief, fleeting, and reminded her, as did the incident after Christmas, of how quickly things could change. That day snow fell earlier than expected, a snow that would, over the days before Christmas, shut down businesses and blanket the town and gradually recede into ice. If the record shop where Eva worked part-time hadn’t closed early, if elderly Mr. Matthews, her supervisor, hadn’t been worried about Eva driving home, she might have missed Natalia’s departure entirely. Once home she was quick to assess the situation: the open bags, her mother’s plane tickets to New York City on the table. She’d
known of the doctor as the elderly man who’d hired her mother the year before, a man with a dry sense of humor and a love of sailing. Her mother had spoken of him not with fondness but with simple gratitude. Everything seemed to fall into focus: the late days at work, the low-cut dresses. It was last minute, Natalia told her, not bothering to look at her daughter directly as Eva stood on the other side of the bed, dumbstruck. When Eva’s demands for an explanation turned into frantic pleading, when her mother denied Eva the possibility of going, too, Eva felt as if her world were suddenly fracturing. This grew more pronounced with each blouse Natalia pulled from the closet and with each pair of high-heeled shoes she placed on the bed. Even the worn, brocaded suitcase lying open on its hinges seemed to indicate that things were resolutely over, the dissolution of marriage inevitable, the loss of a mother absolute. Eva might have forgiven her mother for leaving her father. Her father, everyone knew, wasn’t an easy man. He was prone to stoic silences, outbursts of anger. He was complicated by the sheer fact that you might never know what he was thinking, and yet he always had expectations for the girls, for Natalia. Leaving her father, Eva might have understood. But that Natalia wasn’t taking the girls—that she could be that sort of woman—was something Eva couldn’t fathom. There had been fights, of course, made worse by her mother’s return to work and her father’s complaints that the children, particularly Eva, needed more guidance, less leeway and freedom.

If the truth were known, Natalia herself felt that, in just over twenty years of marriage, she had taken care of others so well that she had no space for herself anymore, no sense of what she might have wanted if asked or given the simple opportunity. Natalia might have said that she caught sight of herself one day—her face longer, the network of lines, the downward turn of her lips—and that she didn’t know where the time had gone to. This realization produced in her an inexplicable irritability with Frank, with the girls. A feeling that everything was wrong often came over Natalia, a need to run ahead and leave everything behind her.

“It’s not you,” Natalia managed to say, though in that moment she felt as though saying anything might cause her to change her mind and stay. She stopped, realizing her error: Eva stood, red-faced, the skin over her chest suddenly blotchy, a desperate look shadowing her normally smooth face.

“It is, isn’t it?” Eva asked. “Because you fight about me?”

“No,” Natalia said again. “You’re too young to understand what it’s like to lose things.” She knew that whatever she might try to frame with words would fail and be subjected to Eva’s scrutiny. Her older daughter, like her youngest, was versed in scrutiny. She loved them both, but Natalia had to admit that she often felt burdened by the girls, too, by their needs and problems, their worries and fevers, their desire to be at the center of everything, and by their questions—why a beloved fish had to die, why God would let that happen, why someone might leave. Because, she’d say, things die. Because God lets everything in the world happen, bad and good. Because God’s eye wanders like a Gypsy, and bad things pass by. Because that’s the way life is.

Children only ever wanted more. They had no sense of mercy. They had no need for it.

There was never a good way to say “I’m leaving,” never a way to make it not hurt. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. In that moment, she remembered a day long before, when she had been only a child and new to the country. That woman who was still a stranger—her new mother—had made Natalia stand onstage and repeat words she’d learned from
Hansel and Gretel,
words coated in such a thick accent no one listening could understand. Natalia, only eight or nine, stood still when the lights came on, thinking first not of English or German but Hungarian—
“Az erdö mélyén élt egy szegény fávagó, a feleségével és két gyermekével”
“Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children.” She fell silent. The performance was a spectacle. Such a spectacle, as if the world were turned suddenly upside down. Crying, she’d marched offstage, away from the lights and people.

It was like that with Eva, too. An awkward silence, a terrible dread. There was nothing she could translate—no emotion, no truth. To compensate, and because she hated silence, and because Eva, on the other side of the bed, was already indignant, Natalia said, “Make your own choices; at least you can try to do that in life, whether people understand or not. At least the choices are yours.”

Eva said nothing.

There is always more to say,
Natalia thought.
Always those things that can never be said.
If she told Eva she loved her, would it ever convey what she needed it to, fully? “I’ll write,” she said instead.

“That’s great,” Eva said, wiping snot from her nose. “You’ll write.”

“I will.”

“What about Sissy?”

Natalia concentrated on the shirt she held, the slippery texture, the creamy sheen. She indulged the thought of turning over the suitcase and letting all the clothing fall to the bed and ground. “Sissy? She’s with Mrs. Morris.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Eva crossed her arms. “It’s almost Christmas.”

“She’ll be fine,” Natalia said, though she was no longer certain of anything. “She has you.”

“And what about me?”

“You and Sissy have each other. And your father—”

“You don’t even care.”

“I feel shame when I look at myself,” Natalia said suddenly. She looked up. “But I’ve never been the type of person to cry and sob and scream, if that’s what you want. You can’t know a person and know what’s inside them. A person’s heart doesn’t shed itself like a tree in winter; it doesn’t bare itself just because you want it to.”

It was true, after all. It wasn’t that Natalia didn’t feel pain at the thought of leaving. For days she had turned in sleep and felt her stomach grow sick with worry. For days, her chest had grown tight, constricted,
every time the girls or Frank was in the room. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel the terrible wrenching away from her own life, the prying away from family like one pulls away skin.

The moments dripped. Natalia zipped the suitcase.

“You lie,” Eva said finally. “You don’t feel anything, not even shame.”

With that, Natalia felt her resolve take hold. “A few months, and I’ll send for you and Sissy. I’ll get you both.”

But Eva turned her head, and Natalia knew that she’d never be forgiven.

If with Eva it was a full-blown argument, then, earlier in the day with Sissy it had felt subversive and deceptive, simply by virtue of age, a task made easier by lies and stories. With Sissy, Natalia acted as if everything were normal, that the day were just like any other—the two of them in the kitchen, the afternoon sun invisible behind clouds. Frank was at work, as was Eva. Sissy prattled on, happy for Christmas break, happy for the reprieve of getting picked last for basketball in gym, while Vicki Anderson got picked for captain. She was eager for snowballs and the cold on her tongue.

Sissy noticed but ignored how her mother often looked over from the sink, watching her as she sat at the table, peeling off the crusts of her sandwich. If Sissy noticed her mother was dressed up on her day off— slacks and a creamy cowl-neck sweater, hair up, a pin above her right breast: gilded holly leaves with red-beaded berries—she didn’t seem to think it odd. Down the hall from her, in the living room, the plastic tree was shored up against the bay window, the lights on since nine in the morning, the silver tinsel draped over the long branches, the trinkets, made by both girls, hanging from wires—cutouts of children, little bells, beaded and sequined balls—the pointed, severe-looking star crowning the top of the tree.

Natalia couldn’t bear to think of the holiday, and so did not think of it at all. She had tried, earlier, to read the bottom of her cup, but she saw only a mess of garbled tea leaves and nothing more. The house was clean, at least, short of the dishes, which tired her to look at, for it
seemed life was an endless succession of small tasks, a repetition of simple rituals.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Natalia said. She sat down at the table, searching for the similarities between them, the lines of recognition, the lilt of the brow. She leaned in. “Are you ready to hear something shameful?”

Sissy beamed. How she longed for access into the adult world, into the hushed conversations and suppressed laughter of women and men, into their secretive languages that unfolded over drinks and games of pinochle and Parcheesi. How often Sissy tried to sneak into the room, to pass unnoticed. How often she lingered at the top of stairs when there were arguments about Eva. Was it possible that her mother was finally willing to grant her entry to this world? Was it possible that, in sharing, she would learn some terrible secret, something
shameful
? Her heart delighted. She sat up straighter and scrunched her nose, anticipating. “A secret, really?”

“A secret.” Natalia whispered, “Your father can’t touch his toes.” She leaned back in her chair and drummed her hands on the table.

“That’s it? That’s the secret?”

“That’s it. I said it; it’s true. Your father, Sissy, is too fat.” It was a cruel remark, but she was still feeling cruel, remembering that the night before Frank had told her, plainly when she’d asked, that yes, she was looking older by a good measure, weren’t they all. She had told him that if she were old, at least she wasn’t fat. “What do you want?” she’d asked bitterly. “For me to be a girl again, like that, poof, magic?”

Sissy took on a look of disappointment. Did it matter if her father could touch his toes or not, or if he loved butter too much? She didn’t care particularly what time did to bodies. Unlike Natalia, she never thought how time increased the burdens of some and lightened those of others so that, as they walked down the street, some seemed tethered to the ground while others, conversely, seemed to float and drift apart from everything, like leaves, like feathers. To Sissy, her father was normal enough—a stomach, yes, but flesh that seemed lived in and worn, like a favorite chair.
Does it matter that he might be fat?
Sissy wondered.

Judging from the seriousness that marked her mother’s face, she concluded it did matter and that, in fact, it was of grave importance. She responded plainly: “I can touch my toes. Want to see?”

“I’ll take your word,” Natalia said. “Sometimes I think your father has never been happy and that’s why he can’t touch his toes. When you’re not happy, your body crunches up on you.” She sat up straighter and breathed deeply. “You see? I’m crunchy too, these days, but at least I can touch my toes.”

Sissy stretched her legs absentmindedly under the table. She kinked her head.

“You’re nimble. You could probably run a marathon.”

“When I run in gym,” Sissy said, “I get cramps.”

“Well, if ever that happens again, try some vegetable juice. It might help.”

“We could give some juice to Dad,” Sissy said.