The Appetites of Girls (20 page)

Mama had set out cream of potato soup and special knishes kosher for Passover from Hoffman’s deli. I had expected that, at home, Mama would insist I eat, that she would want to see me nourish myself with something
other than what she called “institutional slop.” But, too preoccupied, perhaps, with work for the upcoming holiday, she did not even offer the food, only left it out for anyone who wished some. So it was easy to avoid the heavy snacks I knew were not recommended in my condition. I took a few small spoonfuls of potato soup, a mere bite or two of knish. When Mama cleared my plate, I waited for her to fret over what remained, but she cleaned the dish without a word, seemingly unaware of how much I’d left behind.

What made it even easier to turn away food was the queasiness that for the past several days had been nearly unceasing. “Morning sickness,” I remembered Aunt Helena whispering to Mama once as they peeled carrots together at the kitchen sink, Helena’s face ash white and beaded with perspiration, her belly stretching her paisley dress. But what I had lasted into the afternoon and evening, the odor, even the mere sight of certain dishes enough to make my stomach churn. What I craved were things I thought Mama would snap her tongue at: plain crackers, bananas, soft vegetables. In her opinion, these did not constitute a meal. So at lunches and dinners, I conjured up excuses for when she would confront me, my ears rushing with heat throughout several meals as I awaited the argument I knew would follow.

But Mama appeared not to see what I discarded or to notice that, shortly after some meals, I dashed to the hallway bathroom, one hand cupped to my mouth. I discovered tricks to hide my sickness: ran water from the sink to muffle the sound of my heaving; scrubbed the toilet rim, my hands, my mouth; sprayed the air with the freshener Mama kept beneath the sink. When I reemerged, I found my family at their usual pursuits: Poppy flipping the pages of a
National Geographic
magazine; Mama with her crossword puzzle, sections of newspaper spread across the kitchen table; Sarah and Valerie giggling in their shared bedroom over some mutual friend. How many worlds of things I knew now that they could never imagine; and the thought of my new separateness sent shivers
along my back and made me tense my fingers across my middle where my secret grew.

The Friday of Passover was particularly mild for early spring. Poppy opened every window in the apartment to allow in outdoor air, the damp, pollen scent mingling with the matzo balls and spinach kugel and baked chicken Mama was cooking. When our guests arrived, Mama placed on the table the silver engraved plate she used only for Passover, with the lamb bone, roasted egg, bitter herbs, and haroset spaced equally from the center. Beside this went the tray of matzos and the traditional cup of wine, which would remain untouched. Once we were seated, Poppy read and sang songs from the Haggadah. Then Mama, her brows arched in a manner I knew meant she was working to hide her pride, carried in platter after platter of steaming food, each one greeted by louder sighs of satisfaction than the one before.

The adults talked of our new president, George Bush, of Yitzhak Shamir and the recent general election in Israel, of the plane bombing over Lockerbie just months before. They talked of their work, and of the Kramers, who had not been able to join us this year. But after a time, Mama turned the conversation to the recent accomplishments of children, delighted, I knew, that with Sarah and Valerie making honor roll again and my acceptance to Brown, no one at the dinner outdid us. “Ruth took European History last semester. You should have seen her textbooks—heavy as boulders. I don’t even know how she carried them! Right, Ruthie?”

“Right, Ma.” I nodded my agreement. But the mounds of food, the ringing laughter, the heat from the kitchen and from so many warm bodies made my head spin and my stomach toss; and more than once before dessert, I had to push out my chair from between Cousin Joel’s and Aunt Bernice’s and excuse myself from the table.

Despite her many distractions, this time Mama must have noticed my absences and the pecan chocolate cake, which I usually gobbled greedily, still untouched on my plate. “Something wrong, Pea?” she asked, her eyes
narrowed with concern as I helped her carry cups of tea and coffee from the kitchen.

“No, nothing, Ma,” I lied, trying to smile cheerfully. But for the remainder of the meal and for hours after, as my uncles and aunts and cousins lounged on the living room couches and chairs, I sat in silence, unable to concentrate on anything but my fear of what I knew must come, the enormity of what I hid, and the strange realization that the people in the room before me could be the family of some other girl for all they knew of the truth.

That night I lay awake in my childhood bed long after I had turned off the lamp. From the kitchen I could hear the shush of running water and the clink of china and silver as Mama rinsed the last of the holiday dishes. Poppy must have dozed off in his favorite living room chair, for I could hear the whistle of his exhaling in sleep. When the phone rang, Mama answered it, her words too hushed to distinguish, but I listened to the rise and fall of her voice, a rhythm I knew as well as my own breathing. So many familiar sounds of home, they should have lulled me to sleep. But I could not stop the hum of thoughts in my head, so when Mama, with rushing footsteps, threw open the door to my room, allowing it to crack against my corner shelves, sending two wooden dolls clattering to the floor, I shot up but was already wide awake.

“What is it, Mama?” I began to call, but the words faded in my throat before I could finish them. In the haze of the hallway light, I could see that her eyes were swollen from crying, her mouth contorted in a strange expression that made me draw my knees to my chest.

“That was Bernice on the phone,” she said as she walked to my bedside, standing over me. “She said she heard and saw things while she was here. Things—” Mama paused, her voice so choked I did not know if she would continue. “Things a mother should
know
about her own daughter. Things I never dreamed I would have to ask of
you
! So! So, do you have something to tell me, Ruthie!” Mama knelt at the edge of my bed, her lips
curled so tightly against her gums I thought for a moment she might strike me. But instead, she buried her face in my blankets.

“Mama—” I reached for her, but the sight of her crying and her mention of the secret I had carried for these several weeks made my throat ache with sobs. I wiped at my eyes with my nightgown sleeve, but the tears came and came. After some time, Mama drew me into her arms, stroking my hair as she had done when I’d scraped or bruised myself as a child. “How many weeks?” she whispered in a tone so low I almost thought I had misunderstood.

“Four,” I said, my heart hammering at the sound of the word spoken aloud for the first time. And I knew, as I’d known all along, even as the word came out, what had to be.

“Good, good.” Mama was rocking me now. “Four weeks is still early.” She began rocking more rapidly, as if there were something we needed to catch up to. “Tomorrow we can call a doctor for an appointment. Yes, early tomorrow. So who needs to know? I won’t tell your sisters,” she hissed in my ear. “Not even Poppy.”

I nodded slowly but for some moments said nothing. I knew what the doctor would do. Opal had gone with two of her friends to the clinics. Yes, I knew what had to take place, but still I asked . . . “Mama . . . Mama, how old were you when I was born?”

“Ruthie, what are you saying!” She clapped hands to her ears as if shutting out my words. “Have you gone mad? Do you want to toss your whole life away? You’re only a
child
!”

What I had thought to say next was that for the last few days I had had a sense, a premonition, that the tiny life inside me was a girl. But I could hear that Mama’s breath was coming faster and faster until she was almost wheezing, almost gulping for air. Never before had I seen her so panicked, and my own throat began to tighten with dread over what I had done. Oh, how I had wanted to be strong, like Francesca and Setsu and Opal. But this was a thing so large, far larger than even the things they took on. And was it even strength? Or was it weakness? Which were my fears and which
were Mama’s? So I stuttered all the promises I could think of. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’re right, Mama, it was just a foolish thought. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow we will make the appointment.”

•   •   •

O
nly a few extra days off from school were required for me to have the procedure. Mama explained my lengthened stay to Sarah, Valerie, and Poppy as the result of mild stomach troubles. Early, on the day before my appointment with Dr. Sicher, Mama stepped out to see Sarah and Valerie off to school. Seconds later, the kitchen phone rang. One ring, and then a second. My heart jumping, I ran to it. But the woman on the line sounded nothing like Setsu. Nothing like any of my roommates. And why had I thought the call was for me at all? What was I hoping for anyway?

On the morning of the procedure, I was allowed to eat nothing, so the night before, once the rest of the family had retired to bed, Mama made me a special meal. “To give you strength,” she said as she spooned onto my plate two poached eggs, a browned potato pancake, three salted slices of tomato. In the last days, my nausea had only increased, and the smell of the cooked eggs, the pulpy juices from the tomatoes left me with no appetite. But I saw Mama watching over her shoulder as she scrubbed dishes at the sink, waiting as each forkful hovered over my plate. So I managed somehow to swallow one bite and then another and another until only crumbs remained.

The room Dr. Sicher showed me to was frost-white. The walls, the counters, the trays of silvery instruments gleamed as if they had never been touched. Mama, instructed that she would have to remain in the waiting room, squeezed my hands. “I’ll be just on the other side of this door,” she whispered, smiling despite the dark lines marking her brow.

I was given a mint-green gown with ties at the waist. It left my lower legs and upper back bare, and I shivered in my sockless feet as a
bony-wristed nurse scribbled notes on a pad of paper. “The doctor will be back in a few minutes, dear.” She smiled, revealing discolored front teeth. “He will go over every step of the procedure with you. All right?”

But when the doctor asked if I had questions, I said I had none. I heard nothing while he gabbed about what the equipment was for, not a word of what would happen while my body went numb. If only he would stop. If he would stop talking, stop repeating and reminding, I could endure what was to follow.

When it was over, the nurse puffed my pillows and offered me ice chips from a hard plastic cup. Someone called to Mama to return to the room, and the nurse handed her a list of things I could and could not do while I recuperated. Mama nodded silently as she read the directions. I could see that the peachy powder on her cheeks was streaked from tears. When the nurse excused herself, Mama pressed her forehead to mine.

“Ruthie, Ruthie, it’s all over now. You didn’t want to grow up so quickly, did you? And throw away everything? You are meant for better—” Her voice thickening, she paused to kiss my cheeks and hands. “In just a few hours we can go home. I’ll make veal and dumplings if you like. Your favorites.”

But Mama’s words seemed hardly to penetrate my ears, her kisses to dissipate before reaching me. I was aware of only one thing—a new lightness, a hollowness where my body had once been solid. From my high school biology class, I knew that at four weeks of pregnancy, a woman carried an embryo no larger than a kidney bean. Gazing at my arms and middle and thighs, I could see that my plumpness from earlier in the year had not disappeared, yet my only sensation was of shrinking, of lessening. I was weightless. So weightless that with the tiniest push, I would float away.

(Setsu’s Story)

•
Sophomore Year
•

F
rom the beginning, Ruth and I had understood things in each other our suitemates never could. Not things we’d confessed, simply things we’d recognized. That first night in our suite, I had seen it in her wide-open eyes, the questioning tilt of her head, heard it in the pauses as she spoke: her self-doubting, her eagerness to please. We made no grand revelations to each other, only shared small details from our pasts, our homes. But these were enough. She had always been obedient, but once, her sophomore year of high school, Ruth said, she had cheated—checking her answers on a math exam with those of the boy at the neighboring desk. “Such a stupid thing!” she’d said. She’d known the answers; it was just that her eyes had seemed drawn to his paper. How could she explain it? When she’d been caught, she had received a “Fail” on the test. But what had been unbearable—what she would remember for as long as she lived—was the way her mother had looked at her when she first
learned the truth, as if something had broken between them, as if she were seeing a girl who was not her own. Our stories differed, but we feared the same losses, knew the same longings. I told her how Toru had liked to play tricks: sprinkling my sheets with plastic spiders and centipedes that made me scream, or, for years, hiding Anabelle, my favorite doll, in the clothes hamper or washing machine. But I had never tattled, knowing, if I did, even the small moments of attention he allowed me would be withheld.

•   •   •

I
had known Ruth would not judge me for letting the violin go without a fight. And so I had told her the whole story. How, when Toru was fifteen and I thirteen, he had quit our shared lessons with Mrs. Dubois. Through a professional pianist friend of our father’s, Toru had learned of Mr. Levine’s reputation for coaching the most gifted students in the Washington region. Mr. Levine was far stricter, far more demanding of his pupils than Mrs. Dubois had ever been. Not infrequently, Toru had returned from an afternoon in the city to show me his knuckles, red from having been rapped with Mr. Levine’s conducting wand.

“Ohh, Toru!” I gasped. But he only smiled and swept his hand through the air as if to say these were the things a serious musician, a musician who had begun to enter competitions, had to endure.

For some time, I continued to visit Mrs. Dubois alone but soon began to wonder if her offers of juice and chocolates were a bit babying. Her repeated compliments, which had once made me glow with pride, now made my feet squirm in my penny loafers. And when she clapped her hands or embraced me at the end of a session for my “excellent, excellent progress!” my cheeks burned at her coddling. So when a few of my lessons were canceled because Toru had joined a youth orchestra and needed
chauffeuring to weekly practices, I did not mind so terribly. And soon, as my school workload began to increase, I found reasons to miss even more. Honors history and science, advanced algebra—my nightly homework left me little free time, but weren’t my sessions with Mrs. Dubois just for fun? So during the summer I turned fourteen, I told my parents I was too busy to keep up my music studies.

“Are you
sure
, Setsu? But music has always been so important to you.”

“I guess I have changed,” I said. And then I waited for their arguments.

“If the universe is kind enough to give you a gift, it is yours forever,” my father had told me once, the first time I played “Silent Night” for him. But now they only said, “We can’t pretend we are not disappointed, Setsu, but you have reached an age at which you should decide these things for yourself.” And that was all. Nothing more.

So I tucked my violin in the back of my closet, behind my snow boots and a faded stuffed giraffe, and tried to imagine what they would have said had it been Toru instead. I thought of the afternoon the month before when Toru had been told he could not attend an additional orchestra practice because it conflicted with my scheduled lesson. “I’m sure Mr. Mann will understand,” our mother had said. “And isn’t there still plenty of time until the concert?”

“No! No, there isn’t
plenty
of time!” Toru stared, his eyes narrowed as blades, as if he were carving this moment into memory, the details of how he’d been wronged. Then I had seen the wave of panic that moved across our mother’s face before she could smile it away. And I’d heard it in the tone of our parents’ whisperings late that night—“He really is so dedicated. Yes, maybe more than we realized”—their fear of Toru. Their fear of upsetting him. And I wondered if there was some part of them that was relieved by my choice.

“No more music lessons!” I planned to announce to my best friend,
Allison, on the phone that evening. But my tongue stuck dryly to the roof of my mouth, and a loneliness came over me, like the old loneliness I had felt as a child when, in bed late at night, I pretended to remember my birth mother’s face, the sound of her voice, the softness of her hands. And I found I could not speak the words.

•   •   •

F
ollowing his senior year of high school, Toru left home in order to attend the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. I had helped him pack his bags, folding his shirts and sweaters in even piles, separating them with sheets of tissue to prevent creasing.

“Thank you, little sister. You are a gazillion times neater than I would be!” he’d said as he rifled through his music books and cartons stacked with now yellowing sonatas and concertos he had played over the years, sorting what would go with him. “I guess I’ve outgrown most of this, but it seems a shame to throw it all out.” He dropped one of the cartons with a noisy thud. “Who knows, maybe when I am famous, it will be worth something. Right!” He laughed, tossing his head, shaking a strand of hair from his eyes. “What do you think?”

Since his acceptance to the conservatory, Toru had begun to make references to his big break, his future fame. Always his words were followed by a laugh, but his eyes flickered with excitement, glistened with visions of the successes awaiting him.

“You’re welcome to what’s here.” Toru had tapped one of the boxes, shrugging his shoulders.

I smelled the familiar, musty scent of the sheet music. “Oh, thank you anyway, Toru,” I said, hoping he could not hear in my voice the lump of longing I felt rising in my throat. “No, you keep it. Maybe someday you will want it back.”

“Yes, well, I guess it’s no longer of use to you, eh!” For some reason,
the fact that my violin now lay in its case untouched, and had for the past two years, seemed always to tickle Toru’s funny bone. Whenever the topic was raised, his eyes twinkled. This time he’d even jabbed jokingly at my ribs.

“No, no use at all,” I said.

•   •   •

D
uring Toru’s first two years at the conservatory and my final years of high school, we saw him only when he came home for Thanksgivings and Christmases, for weeklong holidays in the spring. Over suppers, he showed us photographs of his adventures in New York—posing with friends on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, dining in Little Italy, attending a symphony at Carnegie Hall. His descriptions of the city’s fast-paced days, its long, glittering nights made our Maryland town seem sleepy and unsophisticated. And he seemed to have little patience now for idle time in the suburbs; during vacations he would disappear to see performances in Washington, visit museums, join the throngs on the National Mall.

As soon as Toru returned to college, the house would be oddly quiet again, the only music coming from the recordings of Brahms lullabies and Strauss waltzes my parents played at low volumes on their stereo, soft hums in comparison to Toru’s forte scales and études. And meals we finished in near silence, making only small dents, it seemed, in the enormous quantities my mother had grown accustomed to preparing.

“Just who was supposed to eat this?” I had not been able to stop myself from saying one evening as I helped my mother clear plates from the table. She had prepared rice with egg and deep-fried pork, one of Toru’s favorite dishes. It was a small thing, a silly thing, but as I’d watched her fill large plastic containers with the leftovers, seemingly oblivious to the
fact that there were, once again, only three of us, I had wrapped my arms around my waist in irritation.

“So what did your mother say to
that
?” Ruth had wanted to know—her voice rising as it always did whenever she was excited or indignant—when I’d told her the story. “Was she angry?”

“No, no. Maybe because her mind was too full. Too full of thoughts of Toru to understand my complaint.”

“Then you should explain yourself. Tell her how you’ve been overlooked.” We were sitting side by side on Ruth’s nubby tan carpet between the end of her bed and the elephant ear plant in its green plastic container that she had picked up at a street fair just the week before, two large leaves already browning. She had kicked off the fleece-lined slippers she usually wore with her peach plaid pajamas in the evenings. Cotton balls were wedged between our toes as we coated our nails with the same petal-pink polish, alternating turns dipping the brush into the enamel. “You and I share the same weakness, you know. We are too willing to keep our own wishes buried.” Ruth leaned against the hard coolness of the wall, smiled at me then down at her feet, wiggling her long, thin toes—“The only part of me that doesn’t need a diet!” she’d joked once.

How strange it was. Ruth’s home, her family were so different from mine, but the same thoughts, the same feelings seemed to live in us. I wondered what she had been like as a very young girl, if she had once felt stronger or bolder, if she had once trusted her own hopes.

It was hard to change what had always been, but college, we agreed, seemed full of people remaking themselves. We saw examples of it every day—students trying new wardrobes, new groups of friends, new attitudes. Here people changed all the time. Or maybe they were discovering their truer selves, what they were always meant to be. Why couldn’t we do this, too? So we made a declaration, a resolution I could not have shared with anyone else: no longer would we allow our own desires to go ignored.

•   •   •

I
n late December of my first college year, I returned home for the winter holiday. Toru was home from school as well. After dinner the first night, my mother filled four glasses with sparkling cider to honor our all being together once more—the same kind she had bought the previous spring to toast my acceptance to Brown. But on that occasion, Toru, at the last minute, had changed his plans for the weekend, wanting to attend a band concert with friends instead.

My father raised his glass. “Toru?” He took a sip. “Do you ever come across people with connections to Brown? I imagine, because of its fine music department, you might now and then—”

Toru had not tasted the cider. Instead, he reached for the teapot my mother had set on the table. He shook his head and shrugged, pouring a generous serving of milk into his cup. The year before, when I had first shown him my letter of admission, Toru had blinked blankly, as if I’d received nothing more significant than a grocery-store coupon or a clothing catalog. Now his mouth twitched with amusement. “Ever get a little bored on the campus of the liberated and grungy? Is there anything to do there but join rallies for inane causes? What are you all protesting these days? The conformity of bathing? The existence of men?” He laughed. But this time I did not smile agreeably at Toru’s teasing. I thought of Ruth and kept my eyes on the cloud of Earl Grey seeping from my teabag.

My father went on, he and my mother ignoring, as usual, the jokes Toru made at my expense. As he talked about Brown’s fine academics, its distinguished professors, its renowned collection of books, I watched Toru slurp from his cup, giving only slight nods to prove he was unimpressed. I poked and stirred the granules of sugar that had settled at the bottom of my tea, my spoon clinking angrily against the sides of my cup until my father stopped talking and I could feel three pairs of eyes on me.

My voice was almost no louder than a whisper, but I made myself heard: “Why do you insult me, Toru? Again and again!”

Toru laughed and let out a huff of annoyance, then for minutes no one spoke. My hands were quaking, hard enough that I could not replace my spoon to my saucer without it rattling. But I had done it, and when we returned to school, I would recount to Ruth this small triumph.

I had been the one to answer when Ruth’s call came, just days after she had returned home for Passover. She would be back in about a week or so, she said. And I knew from the dried-up sound of her voice the choice she had made.

“We miss you, Ruth,” I told her. “We’re thinking of you all the time.”

For a while she was as silent as the evening mist dampening the campus beyond my window. “Thank you.”

Then her mother’s voice came from some other part of her apartment—“Who is that? Are you on the phone?”—not flat like Ruth’s but fluttering and sharp, a mother bird protecting her young.

“It’s only Setsu, Mama.”