The Daughters: A Novel (13 page)

As I stalked out the door to what felt like another banishment, I heard her say to Basia: “. . . can’t know what she’ll make of it.”

Basia just laughed and said, “Well, it’s no better to hide.”

To which my baba said nothing at all.

W
hat I didn’t understand was that Ada’s two sides—her dignified sense of style and her position as a day laborer; her self-assured domination over our home and her bonhomie at work—were quite inextricably linked. She was able to bring home clothes deemed beyond repair and work them over into sleek statement pieces for herself or else cut them down for my mother or me. And the women at Marshall Field’s—most of
them immigrants too—provided a community that neither family nor church could give Ada when she first left Poznań.

Despite my certainty that my baba deserved better, the store still drew me with the childish appeal of a factory floor. I marveled at the fact that a bolt of cloth could become a pair of pressed slacks, that a tear could be mended into invisibility. And when they were all collected together, the seamstresses were a captive audience. Why they viewed me as a performer and my grandmother as nothing more than
one of the girls
, I couldn’t quite grasp. But it seemed to be what Ada wanted.

I was generally not allowed in the big back room where the women sat with lamps bent towards their handiwork, fingers running nimbly over bobbins, belts, and treadles. It was thought I would be in the way, and I was. On the few occasions Ada capitulated to my whining and snuck me along with her, I raced up and down the aisles between sewing machines and stood in the hallway singing “Amarilli, Mia Bella” until all foot pedals stopped and all hands applauded. Probably Ada and Basia prepared the rest of them for me, those women with their hair tied back, with their sensible dark eyes and occasional arthritic protrusions in their fingers. But as far as I knew they lived their lives there, bent over careful hemming and hypnotized by the constant grinding mumble of the machines. When I ran through the door—shoes making their
slap-slap-slap
against the floor—I pictured myself as a refreshing, avenging wind blowing misery and monotony out the window with my laughter.

After a song or, if I was lucky, two, Ada would give me a handful of Frango mints and tell me to go play quietly by myself. This was the hard part; I was not naturally still. But Ada told me it would be good practice for being a singer when I grew up: sometimes I would have a single aria nestled amid two full acts of opera. I would need
to be able to wait in the wings for my moment of glory. That my taste for glory came from Ada too would not occur to me for some time.

The alteration room was on a floor that wasn’t open to the public. So when my fists were full of chocolates and I’d been dismissed from the sewing quarters, I was generally able to wander around the hall and find a place to sit all by myself. Any clothing waiting for the clever attention of Ada’s ladies was piled in a mountain of fabric in one room; women would come by as they completed projects and peel a new one from the stack, with instructions for hemming, mending, or taking in pinned to the front.

The finished clothing was treated with more reverence. Several of the rooms on the alteration floor were no more than giant walk-in closets with low lighting, as though they housed art that required preservation from the elements. Racks of suit jackets hung beside rows of starched blouses; wool skirts organized by length were suspended beside coats, which were trimmed with mink or rabbit depending on the price. One room was always reserved for wedding dresses sheathed in thin sheeting—the plastic muted the dresses’ blinding whiteness and made them glow as they might have in the light of the moon. Often the dresses swayed when I entered their lair; they looked very much like a cadre of sleeping ghosts all hung by the shoulders, effluvial tails dragging gently on the ground.

I dared myself to stay among them. It was a challenge: eat a pile of chocolates in a room of white clothing without leaving any fingerprints. Sit in a quavering pool of spirits without awakening one and raising its ire. I chose a point in the middle of the room and shuffled a few hangers aside to duck between so the plastic closed back around me when I leaned against the wall. I was afraid of the ghosts, but if I closed my eyes I could convince myself that the
shushing
sounds of the swaying dresses were really coming from leaves rustling together in the wind.

The only risk to this tactic was that sometimes I would fall asleep, and then my dreams might take me anywhere.

I remember the last time I ever visited the ghost room, how I pinched my eyes shut and concentrated on the sound of my own breathing because it blocked out all other distractions—a creak in the corner or a suspicious lowing of conversation from the floor below. As with any dream, I can’t recall the moment that it began, just that there was a woman roaming in a forest with her skirt brushing against her knees. Daylight leaked through the nearly bare tree limbs, but it was a bleached light, bone-white and arctic. When the woman—for I was the woman, though then again I wasn’t—looked up at the sky, she could see a cold bulb dangling there as if from a wire.

Something was following her. Maybe more than one something. The woman picked up her pace but her path was obscured; thorns pricked her shins and left thin scratches on her arms that turned into messages she couldn’t read. Lying on the floor of the room full of wedding dresses, I felt the rough carpet rub against my cheek and I tossed in my sleep. The woman felt a tug on the hem of her skirt, but when she turned around there was no one behind her. Just bushes and trees.

Dark clouds rolled over.

They rolled back.

I felt something pulling me forward, away, but the woman either couldn’t hear me or wouldn’t listen. She paused to look around herself, and I thought,
No
.
Go faster.
My heart broke into a run. It was stuck inside the woman’s body, though, and she was curious about the patterns in the tree bark that appeared and disappeared, changed colors. Changed shapes.

“
Greta-ah-ah-ah.”

We heard the voice, and her blood froze for both of us. There
was another sharp tug on her skirt. A sudden wind scattered a pile of leaves and the woman jumped. Somewhere far away my body was tossing and turning, itching to wake up. But around us issued the soft crunch of footsteps; out of the corner of my eye—or was it hers?—I saw shadows ducking in and out of view.

“
Greta-ah-ah-ah
.”

Closer, the voice splintered into many voices, a hollow harmony that encroached from all sides. Hairs stood up on the back of the woman’s neck, tiny follicles prickled on her cheeks. A third tug came, the waist of her skirt pulling away from the skin and snapping back into place. This time when the woman looked down, she saw a beautiful little girl with thick dark hair who took a step backward when she realized that she’d been spotted. Her hands were folded demurely behind her back.

A circle of little girls surrounded the dream woman. And though some of them were larger and some were smaller, they were clearly identical in design—they would grow into the same woman. If they were given the chance to grow.

“We’re here so you can eat us.”

“Eat us.”

“Eat our hearts.”

The dream woman spun around and I spun somehow in the other direction so we saw them in stereo, their mouths moving in tandem. Each set of small brown eyes was serene. The voice of the dream woman trembled.

“I don’t understand. I don’t want to eat your hearts. I was just out walking . . .” She trailed off as she realized that she didn’t remember how she got there or why she began strolling through the woods in the first place. I shifted around on the floor of the wedding dress room, feeling like the driver of a runaway car.

“Oh,” said the little girls. “
Oh
.
Oh. Oh.
” They stepped forward,
their knees knocking together. “Well, then.” The sound echoed:
well well well
. “We will have to eat your heart instead.” They stepped forward and grabbed the hem of the woman’s skirt as though they were her children trying to keep from getting lost.

The first girl, the tallest, reached up and put a hand on the woman’s arm.

“Don’t worry.” She stroked the woman’s arm lovingly. “Everything will be better when we’re done.”

I awoke screaming beneath a row of white dresses with my baba Ada shaking my elbow. Her skin was pale paper, crumpled slightly and pulled back tight by the set of her mouth. For a moment I couldn’t stop my screams—the dresses brushed back and forth around me like branches and the plastic wrappings clung to my skin. Ada grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out into the center of the room, dragging a couple of wedding gowns off their hangers behind me. Standing on my own two feet, I was able to bring the room into focus. I took a few gulping breaths, feeling the hash marks I’d scratched into my throat by shrieking.

“What is it?” Ada kept hold of my shoulders and searched my face as if she would be able to see through it. On the word
it,
she gave me the tiniest shake, so slight I’m not sure she was aware of doing so. “What’s the matter?”

A whispering drew my attention to the doorway. There, several seamstresses leaned their heads together, sneaking occasional peeks in my direction. A sick feeling followed: they were talking about me, their eyes full of pity. I tried to straighten my spine. What I wanted more than anything was to burrow into my
babenka
’s arms, feel her cradle and soothe me. But the women were watching. I tried to imagine what they’d say if I told them what I’d dreamed—they’d think I was crazy.

And what would Ada think? It wasn’t so much the disruption
that made me feel guilty as the fact that my dream had turned Greta somehow sinister. It populated her landscape with threats, which was the opposite of what Ada wanted. My
babenka
didn’t always tell me the truth. But when she chose not to, it was because she wanted to let me believe something better. Or because
she
needed to believe something better. She could give that to me, and I could give it to her, too.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m okay. I fell asleep.”

Ada looked at me with a terrible little wrinkle in her forehead. But then she straightened up and turned towards the doorway with a shrug that scattered the women who’d gathered there. When they’d gone, Ada picked up one of the wedding dresses that had fallen to the floor in the confusion—it draped heavily over her elbow like a lady in a pose of supplication, arms wafting hopelessly down.

“I’m going to have to press this again.” She spoke quietly, inspecting the few almost imperceptible new lines in the fabric. “Maybe you could go sit in the main room with the girls? I think you left a book with Basia.”

I nodded tightly and walked down the hall, trying to keep my footsteps quiet. Trying to be good. I’d bitten my tongue thrashing around inside the nightmare, and for the rest of the day my mouth tasted like blood. I found it sitting on my teeth at the gum line and felt myself swallowing it, my stomach filling up with iron.

I
try to walk slowly and keep myself calm as I move away from the graveyard, but the weather won’t let me. The weather, and the tight fist of my heart. There are too many people on the street, all of them guarding their faces from the wind but still, somehow, seeming to watch me. When I see a bookstore I
duck inside, because it looks empty. In the heat of the store, cold fingers of snow melt off my hair and drip down my neck, and I watch the sleet outside, leaning with one hand on a stack of old books with cloth covers. They smell like little museums.

I turn away from the window-paned door and start to gather myself. Or at least I try. What actually happens is that the baby sneezes, and an older man behind the counter looks up and says, “God bless you.”

I begin to cry.

“Hey now,” says the man. He’s half hidden behind piles of merchandise, the corners of his mouth turned down in a frown. “No need for that.”

I want to explain myself, but where to begin? Kara has begun whimpering too, and taking a ragged breath, I shush her. Brush a few drops of water off her cap where snowflakes melted. The bookstore man watches as I dry myself off, digging in my purse for a napkin that I use to wipe my eyes and blow my nose, after first dabbing Kara’s face. When it seems like the danger of my bursting into renewed tears has passed, he looks down at the open book in front of him and the sheet of paper beside it, which is filled with tabulations. He jots something down with a pencil, but then looks back up at me. I’m still there.

“Is there someone I can call for you?” he asks. I shake my head.

“Actually, if you don’t mind me using my phone in here, I can call.” I pull out my cell phone and show it to him, as if to prove I’m not lying, and he looks around us at the empty store.

“Not like there’s anyone to bother.”

He turns back to his book, flipping through the pages and skimming, now and then licking his index finger for traction. I seem to disappear, which suits me fine.

In the back of the store, behind a tall bookshelf, I find a
chair—faded upholstery tacked onto unpolished cherrywood, with curling armrests like cat paws—and I sit, gratefully. Kara lies against me. A store like this would be a nice place to take a sleeping baby sometime. I could pick titles off the shelves and read long passages in this very chair, waiting to see if the words lived up to whatever price the man had penciled into his books. An ordinary world—what must that be like?

As I arrange myself, the chair lets up puffs of dust. The cushions seem too skinny for that, but apparently they have unseen depths. Like everything.

I know what to do. Who to call. I flick through the numbers on my phone, trying not to think what a strange portal it is, a sort of witchcraft. The phone, like the chair, feels thin and insubstantial. But it can bring me all the way across the world. Take the dust of my voice to an ear so far in my past that, by rights, it should be as deaf as stone.