The Bigness of the World (3 page)

Thus, when Martin insisted that we could not visit Ilsa without a gift, I did not argue, for I trusted Martin about such things. We turned and ran back home, re-entering through the window, and Martin went into the kitchen and put together a variety of spices—cloves, a stick of cinnamon, and a large nutmeg pit—which he wrapped in cheesecloth and tied carefully with a piece of ribbon.

“That’s not a gift,” I said, but Martin explained to me patiently that it was, was, in fact, the sort of gift Ilsa would love.

Fifteen minutes later, we stood on the porch of Ilsa’s cottage, waiting for her to answer the door. We had already knocked three times, and I knocked twice more before I finally turned to Martin and asked fretfully, “What if she’s not home?” To be honest, it had never occurred to us that Ilsa might not be home, for we could only think of Ilsa in regard to ourselves, which meant that when she was not with us, she was here, at her cottage, because we were incapable of imagining her elsewhere—certainly not with another family, caring for children who were not us.

“She must be at the pound,” I said suddenly and with great relief.

But Ilsa was home. As we were about to leave, she opened her door and stared at us for several distressing seconds before pulling us to her tightly. “My bunnies!” she cried out, and we thought that she meant us, but she pulled us inside and shut the door, saying, “Quickly now, before their simple little minds plot an escape,” and we realized then that she truly meant rabbits.

“Martin,” she said, looking him up and down, her voice low and unsteady, and then she turned and scrutinized me as well. Her hair was pulled back in a very loose French braid, and she was not wearing a hat, the first time that either of us had seen her without one. It felt strange to be standing there in her tiny cottage, stranger yet to be seeing her without a hat, intimate in a way that seemed almost unbearable.

“You’re not wearing a hat,” Martin said matter-of-factly.

“I was just taking a wee nap,” she replied. I could see that this was true, for her face was flushed and deeply creased from the pillow, her eyes dull with slumber, as though she had been sleeping for some time.

“We brought you something,” said Martin, holding up the knotted cheesecloth.

“How lovely,” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together clumsily
before taking the ball of spices and holding it to her nose with both hands. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, but the moment went on and on, becoming uncomfortable.

“Kikes!” screamed a voice from a corner of the room, and Ilsa’s eyes snapped open. “Kikes and dykes!” screamed the voice again.

“Martin, I will not tolerate such language,” Ilsa said firmly.

“It wasn’t me,” said Martin, horrified, for we both knew what the words meant.

“I think it was him,” I said, pointing to the corner where a large cage hung, inside of which perched a shabby-looking green parrot. The bird regarded us for a moment, screeched, “Ass pirates and muff divers!” leaned over, and tossed a beakful of seeds into the air like confetti.

“Of course it was him,” said Ilsa. “The foul-mouthed rascal. I saved his life, but he hardly seems grateful. His name is Martin.”

“Martin?” said Martin happily. “Like me?”

“Yes, I named him after you, my dear, though it was wishful thinking on my part. I dare say you could teach him a thing or two about manners.”

“Why does he say those things?” asked Martin.

“Martin ended up at the pound a few months ago after his former owner, a thoroughly odious man, died in a house fire—he fell asleep smoking a cigar. Martin escaped through a window, but it seems there is no undoing the former owner’s work, which made adoption terribly unlikely. They were going to put him down, so I have taken him instead.” She sighed. “The bunnies—poor souls—are absolutely terrified of him.”

Martin and I looked around Ilsa’s living room, trying to spot the bunnies, but the only indication of them lay in the fact that Ilsa had covered her small sofa and arm chair with plastic wrap as though she were about to paint the walls. “Where are the bunnies?” I asked. I did not say so, but I was afraid of rabbits, for I had been bitten by
one at an Easter event at the shopping mall several years earlier. In truth, it had been nothing more than a nibble, but it had startled me enough that I had dropped the rabbit and then been scolded by the teenage attendant for my carelessness.

“I should imagine that they are in the escritoire,” she said, and Martin nodded as though he knew what the escritoire was.

“Come,” said Ilsa. “Let us go into the kitchen, away from this bad-mannered fellow. We shall mull some cider using your extraordinarily thoughtful gift.”

We huddled at a square yellow table inside her small, dreary kitchen, watching her pour cider from a jug into a saucepan, focusing as deeply on this task as someone charged with splitting a neutron. “How are you, Ilsa?” asked Martin, sounding strangely grown up. She dropped the spice ball into the pan, adjusted the flame, and only then turned to answer.

“I am positively exuberant,” she replied. “Indeed, Martin, things could not be better here at 53 Ridgecrest Drive.” She paused, as though considering what topic we might discuss next, and then she asked how we were and, after we had both answered that we were well, she asked about our parents. We were in the habit of answering Ilsa honestly, and so I told her that our parents seemed strange lately.

“Strange?” she said, her mouth curling up as though the word had a taste attached to it that she did not care for.

“Yes,” I said. “For one thing, our father is home every day when we arrive from school”—Martin looked at me, for on the way over we had agreed that we would not tell Ilsa this, lest it hurt her feelings to know that our parents had lied, so I went on quickly—“and our mother is gone until very late most nights, and when she is home, she hardly speaks, even to our father.”

“I see,” said Ilsa, but not as though she really did, and then she stood and ladled up three cups of cider, which she placed on saucers
and carried to the table, one cup at a time. She fished out the soggy bundle of spices and placed that on a fourth saucer, which she set in the middle of the table as though it were a centerpiece, something aesthetically pleasing for us to consider as we sipped our cider.

“I may presume that your parents are aware of your visit to me?” she said, and we both held our cups to our mouths and blew across the surface of the cider, watching as it rippled slightly, and finally Martin replied that they were not.

“Children,” Ilsa said, “that will not do.” This was the closest that Ilsa had ever come to actually scolding us, though her tone spoke more of exhaustion than disapproval, and we both looked up at her sadly.

“I shall ring them immediately,” she said.

“They aren’t home,” I told her.

Ilsa consulted her watch, holding it up very close to her eyes in order to make out the numbers because the watch was tiny, the face no larger than a dime. Once I had asked Ilsa why she did not get a bigger watch, one that she could simply glance at the way that other people did, but she said that that was precisely the reason—that one should never get into the habit of glancing at one’s watch. “Please excuse me, my dears. I see that it is time to visit my apothecary,” she said, and she stood and left the room.

“What is her apothecary?” I asked Martin, whispering, and he whispered back that he did not know but that perhaps she was referring to the bathroom.

We were quiet then, studying Ilsa’s kitchen in a way that we had not been able to do when she was present. There was only one window, a single pane that faced a cement wall. This accounted for the dreariness, this and the fact that the room was tiny, three or even four times smaller than our kitchen. When I commented on this to Martin, he said, “I think that Ilsa’s kitchen is the perfect size. You know what she always says—that she gets lost in our kitchen.” But his tone was defensive, and I knew that he was disappointed as well.

“There’s no island,” I said suddenly. Our parents’ kitchen had not one island but two, which Ilsa had given names. The one nearest the stove she called Jamaica and the other, Haiti, and when we helped her cook, she would hand us things, saying, “Ferry this cutting board over to Haiti,” and “Tomatoes at the south end of Jamaica, please.” Once, during a period when she had been enamored of religious dietary restrictions, she had announced, “Dairy on Jamaica, my young sous chefs. Meat on Haiti,” and we had cooked the entire meal according to her notions of kosher, though when it came time to eat, she had forgotten about the rules, stacking cheese and bacon on our hamburgers and pouring us each a large glass of milk.

From the other room, we heard a sound like maracas being rattled, which made me think of our birthdays because our parents always took us to Mexican Village, where a mariachi band came to our table and sang “Happy Birthday” in Spanish. We heard water running and then the parrot screaming obscenities again as Ilsa passed through the living room and back into the kitchen. She had put on a hat, one that we had not seen before, white with a bit of peacock feather glued to one side.

“This has been an absolutely splendid visit, but I must be getting the two of you home,” she said. “Gather your things, my goslings.” But we had come with nothing save the spices, which now sat in a pool of brown liquid, and so we had no things to gather.

When we arrived home that afternoon, our father was already there, waiting for us at the dining room table, where he sat with the tips of his hands pressed together forming a peak. He did not ask where we had been but instead told us to sit down because he needed to explain something to us, something about our mother, who would not be coming home that day. “You know that your mother works for your grandfather?” he began, and we nodded and waited. “Well, your grandfather has done something wrong. He’s taken money from the bank.”

“But it’s his bank,” I replied.

“Yes,” said my father. “But the money is not his. It belongs to the people who use the bank, who put their money there so that it will be safe.”

Again, we nodded, for we understood this about banks. In fact, we both had our own accounts at the bank, where we kept the money that we received for our birthdays. “He stole money?” I asked, for that is how it sounded, and I wanted to be sure.

“Well,” said my father. “It’s called embezzling.” But when I looked up embezzling that evening, I discovered that our grandfather had indeed stolen money.

“And what about our mother?” Martin asked.

“It’s complicated,” said our father, “but they’ve arrested her also.”

“Arrested?” I said, for there had been no talk of arresting before this.

“Yes,” said my father, and then he began to cry.

We had never seen our father cry. He was, I learned that day, a silent crier. He laid his head on the table, his arms forming a nest around it, and we knew that he was crying only because his shoulders heaved up and down. I sat very still, not looking at him because I did not know how to think of him as anything but my father, instead focusing on the overhead light, waiting for it to click, which it generally did every thirty seconds or so. The sound was actually somewhere between a click and a scratch, easy to hear but apparently difficult to fix, for numerous electricians had been called in to do so and had failed. I had always complained mightily about the clicking, which prevented me from concentrating on my homework, but that day as I sat at the table with my weeping father and Martin, the light was silent, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly silent.

Then, without first consulting me with his eyes, our custom in matters relating to our parents, Martin slipped from his chair and stood next to my father, and, after a moment, placed a hand on
my father’s shoulder. In those days, Martin’s hands were unusually plump, at odds with the rest of his body, and from where I sat, directly across from my father, Martin’s hand looked like a fat, white bullfrog perched on my father’s shoulder. My father’s sobbing turned audible, a high-pitched whimper like a dog makes when left alone in a car, and then quickly flattened out and stopped.

“It will be okay,” Martin said, rubbing my father’s shoulder with his fat, white hand, and my father sat up and nodded several times in rapid succession, gulping as though he had been underwater.

But it would not be okay. After a very long trial, my mother went to jail, eight years with the possibility of parole after six. My grandfather was put on trial as well, but he died of a heart attack on the second day, leaving my mother to face the jury and crowded courtroom alone. Her lawyers wanted to blame everything on him, arguing that he was dead and thus unable to deny the charges or be punished, advice that my mother resisted until it became clear that she might be facing an even longer sentence. Martin and I learned all of this from the newspaper, which we were not supposed to read but did, and from the taunts hurled at us by children who used to be our friends but were no longer allowed to play with us because many of their parents had money in my grandfather’s bank and even those who didn’t felt that my mother had betrayed the entire community.

We missed her terribly in the beginning, my father most of all, though I believe that he grieved not at being separated from her but because the person she was, or that he had thought she was, no longer existed, which meant that he grieved almost as though she were dead. There was some speculation in the newspaper about my father, about what was referred to as his “possible complicity,” but I remain convinced to this day that my father knew nothing about what had been going on at the bank, though whether it was true that it was all my grandfather’s doing, that my mother had been nothing more than a loyal daughter as her lawyers claimed—this I will never know. Martin was of the opinion that it shouldn’t matter, not to us,
but I felt otherwise, particularly when he came home from school with scratches and bruises and black eyes that I knew were given to him because of her, though he always shrugged his shoulders when my father asked what had happened to him and, with a small smile, gave the same reply: “Such is the life of a fairy.” My father did not know how to respond to words like
sissy
and
fairy
, nor to the matter-of-fact manner in which Martin uttered them, and so he said nothing, rubbing his ear vigorously for a moment and then turning away, as was his habit when presented with something that he would rather not hear.