The Daughters: A Novel (16 page)

“We’ll want to see what you see,” I told Kara. At that moment her eyes were shut against their gentle bath, the warm water I stored for her within me. She saw geometric combinations, Escher portraits of the sounds on the other side of her swaddling wall. Or maybe she saw nothing, since she hadn’t yet the experience to know that there are shapes to name and colors to fill the shapes in and make them shine.

As I grew older, Greta’s cottage receded from me; the weight
of her hand on my own diminished. When Ada told me the stories of her mother’s life, all I saw was that they explained who I was supposed to be. I didn’t see the knots in the floorboards anymore or the mammoth iron mouth that was Greta’s cookstove. And I only had a faint, haunting memory of the last trip Greta and I took out to the forest, when she helped me climb up into a tree and together we hummed the river’s song. I had some notion of the person who happened towards us and, hypnotized, scrambled up the tree to sit beside us.

That person was, I thought, my mother, Sara, with her dark hair and her almond eyes. She took our hands in her own and lifted to each of our lips a crust of bread fresh from the oven, watched me chew and swallow and open my mouth for another. And she looked at me, looked so reproachfully, when from either side Greta and I leaned in to kiss her cheeks. I remembered faintly the way the color drained from my mother’s face and how her body fell like a rag to the forest floor. She got up and brushed herself off, walked away, but I could see that something was missing from her from that moment, and that I had taken it for myself.

“Now you’ll be strong,” Greta told me. “Like I was.”

I put my hand on my belly and could feel through the taut skin the basic outline of a foot. I inspected it for toes and searched for a heel, but everything was still too indistinct, too much a part of me. Kara was sleeping, soothed by who knows what. The sound of my heart? The thrum of my blood? Something nourished and protected her. Some piece of me that lay beyond my control.

Interlude

A
s I learned at the age of four—leaning my rib cage against the window sash and stretching my neck into the dirty Chicago air—sound is a product of its environment. Anyone can test this with a pop bottle and a small amount of embouchure control: flatten your lips and blow across the top of the bottle. When it’s full you get a whistle. As you drink the soda down, the sound deepens.

The principle is just as true inside your body as out in the world—a soprano is born, and you can see it in her silhouette. More often than not she’s small, like me. Her thin neck means that her vocal cords are slender and tightly packed together. They resonate at a high frequency when air rattles through them. Her jaw is strong, the mouth an echo chamber. Every tuck and fold a part of the instrument.

A
s a singer you have to be careful with your body the same way you’d be careful transporting crystal or glass. When the temperature varies too drastically, molecules shift and expand. Things shatter. The pen in my purse spills ink everywhere during altitude changes; and after plane rides longer than two hours, I need to avoid citrus fruits for a week, drink only herbal tea.

Travel, then, has always been dangerous for me. It can affect a performance in unexpected ways—hemming my voice in with static from the dry velveteen seats on the train into a new city, and desiccating it with the train’s hot, recirculated air. High elevation breaks sounds into brittle sheets of paper; the color and texture of grain bins in a city’s street markets bleed through into my tonal quality. Resonance comes from a barrel of smooth red quinoa seeds you can stick your hand in up to the elbow. Sharp color from hard, ridged bulgur wheat. Airiness from vats of flour that feels like silk when you lay your palm on top—if the frowning merchant will let you handle his wares so freely.

A voice is spongelike. It can absorb, and it can be wrung out.

When I step off a plane, I need to take a long walk in open streets to shake off the tin can aura of my transportation. Without the walk, without the wind to flush me, my lungs remain compressed and I can’t go onstage—I hear the atonal
ding
of the seatbelt sign when I should be hearing the key changes my accompanist is running through on the piano, and I become convinced that the audience in the recital hall will be populated by duplicates upon duplicates of my fellow airline passengers, shifting around their neck pillows and cricking their knees.

What I mean is this: sound is never described with the density or complexity that it deserves, because we imagine it as separate from the texture of the rest of our lives. Words like
crystalline
and
booming
,
full
and
sharp
, reduce music to decoration, something adjectival. When in fact it’s more like an animal. Living. Hungry. It sucks up atmosphere, emotion, experience. Pushes you to feed it by doing things you wouldn’t otherwise do.

It’s the whole of life, round and plump as a planet. Ample as a memory or dream.

M
ongolia held its first opera festival in Ulaanbaatar and unwisely scheduled the festivities in December to appeal to the singers’ sense of a snowy Christmas. At least that’s my best guess at their intentions. We arrived during what’s called the Nines of Winter: nine sets of nine days that each hold a special place in a hierarchy of bitter chill. The nine days when vodka freezes upon contact with the air. The nine days when you can walk up to a baby ox and crack its tail off in your hand.

I was not yet pregnant. Back then, I was only vulnerable in the ordinary ways. I descended from the plane already wearing silk long johns, lined pants, a sweater, a scarf, and my Chicago winter coat, but the weather hit me like a frying pan to the back of the skull. A man named Zhenjin met me on the tarmac and immediately wrapped me in a fur cloak the size of a bear. He grinned.

“You need to gain at least two inches.” His gloved hands indicated a bubble around his waist. “On all sides. Then you will be a proper Mongolian woman prepared for winter.” The bearskin, he explained, would stand in as my two inches since I didn’t have time to gain the weight
au naturel
.

I’d been invited to sing an aria from
The Snow Maiden.
Rimsky-Korsakov. Very Russian in its sense of tragedy. The maiden in question seeks human companionship, a communion of souls, despite being unable to actually feel affection. Then, when she does find love—having begged her enchanted mother to grant her the capacity—it kills her. Some versions of the myth have it that she, a girl made out of ice, tries to impress her beloved by jumping over a fire. Some just say that her ardor brings forth the spring. Either way, she melts.

Standing there, freezing in my winter clothes, I felt for the first time that she made the right decision: anything for a touch of warmth.

Zhenjin ushered me into a car that smelled like diesel on the outside but was reasonably clean within and did not stutter when he turned the key. I held my mittened hand over the nearest radiator vent and then retracted it sharply—the air blasting from the vent was arctic.

“Have to wait for the engine to warm up,” Zhenjin said, and then took my hand, peeled off the mitten, and cupped it in his own. He blew onto my skin. All this in a quite businesslike manner and with no hint of hesitation.

We sat that way for a minute or two, him occasionally switching my hands between his soft grip and my pockets. Finally the car heater coughed, and I felt warm air spill out over my wrist.

“Now,” my companion said, “we are ready.”

Ulaanbaatar is not a soft place. On the drive to the hotel, Zhenjin warned me not to walk around alone, especially at night, since many of the streets were still without proper lighting, and an unaccompanied white woman would be a target for muggings. Out the window I saw street merchants hawking yak-wool socks and camel-skin gloves, wearing what looked like felt booties over their shoes to insulate against the layer of ice on the
sidewalk. Many muggers carry knives, Zhenjin said, but they will use anything they have at hand: some throw bricks or, in the time-honored tradition of men, just use the weight of their bodies to throw you against a wall.

We pulled up to a curb.

“Okay,” Zhenjin said.

The hotel’s exterior appeared to have been wrought by a civilization long extinct.
If anything’s going to be dangerous to me
, I thought,
it’s this.
Stucco crumbled from the façade; bare patches of brick were visible where the siding had calved off slabs large enough to kill a man in falling. I looked at Zhenjin. Over the course of our twenty-minute car ride he’d become important to me, arbiter of street chaos and purveyor of furs. He smiled. “You’ll like it,” he said. “Inside.” He climbed out of the car and held a hand out to me, and we ascended the three steps to the door while the wind did its best to freeze off my ears.

With a cracking sound—icy rubber separating from icy rubber—the doors opened up and I let out a gasp. The interior of the hotel was a sea of marble, a pristine palace. I couldn’t have been more surprised if it was made entirely of cut gems. There were no windows, just a cavernous well of veined columns, and without sunlight the brass bell on the reception desk shone only beneath incandescent lamps. But the room was so grand I could imagine candles, could almost see the bulb light lick and flutter like a flame. The bell was polished to a high gleam and seemed to be waiting there for someone to ring it and magically summon back the hospitality of nineteenth-century travel—diplomatic cocktails and colonial balls.

I shook my head, feeling out of place in my animal hide. Disoriented and savage. A dark corner of my mind turned to lineage: Greta, Ada, Sara, me; beasts into ballrooms. Something always
lost along the way. I tucked my hand into Zhenjin’s elbow, and this alone seemed to keep me from losing my grip on time and place. First I’d stepped off a heated airplane onto the dusty snow of tundra, and then into a car that whipped through streets blooming with apocalyptic decay. And now this.

A
t the door to my room I waited for a moment, half expecting Zhenjin to enter ahead of me and clear it of any obstacles or danger. He could do that, it seemed. Keep me safe. Like a girl keeps safe her dolls, needlessly brushing their hair and caressing their cold porcelain cheeks. Brushing away an errant eyelash and saying,
Look, make a wish
. But he didn’t walk in and undress me, fold my clothes in neat stacks on a chair. He didn’t wash me with a soft, drenched sponge. Instead he bowed and walked away, his black hair wafting slowly against the back of his neck. His brisk steps those of a man acquitted of his duty.

I was surprised to feel a twinge of annoyance.
How dare he
, I thought. But then: how dare he what?

Once I’d showered I felt better for a while. More myself. At home I take two baths a day, and if I go swimming in the magnificent pool at the gym I might take three. As I stripped off layer upon layer of clothing, I began to feel giddy, unwrapping the gift of my actual form, scrubbing off even the thin film of grit and sweat. But when I was pink and dry, I made the mistake of tunneling into my bed to read through the libretto and then the score of the role I would be singing. I’m very susceptible to the instinct of hibernation when I’m touring. Things started well enough—I marked emotional shifts in purple, suggested breaths in blue, and used red to let myself know that a troubling passage was upcoming.
The blanket weighed down on me, melting over my shoulders and breathing hot air onto my back.

But the thought of getting up brought dread, increasingly. Especially the thought of Zhenjin, his low bow at the door, his antiseptic eagerness to please.
What are you doing
, I asked myself.
What do you want from him?
Not his embrace, his mouth on mine. I just felt that he was holding something back from me—that beneath his crisp shell beat a heart I could not reach. And that was a problem. At home I could count on John to feed me his intimate secrets and stories. But here, I would get out of bed and things would spiral out of my control. Instinct would take over, pushing me to show my good side for photographs, smiling with teeth as sleek as sculpted ice.

Zhenjin had warmed my hands in the car, held them very gently. But he also walked away instead of being asked to go. What if, then, I walked onstage and found myself without the strength to sing? Wouldn’t it be better to stay here, where I needed nothing? To jump up just briefly and lock myself in with the duvet curled around my neck? I could remain in the bed until the fire squad—if such a thing existed in Ulaanbaatar—came and axed my door to smithereens, dragged me to the airport. I could walk into the hall and discover I’d been transported home, that John was in the kitchen cooking risotto.

A knock stirred me.

“Yes, hello?” It was Zhenjin’s voice, polite and inquiring. “Am I disturbing you?”

“One minute,” I called.
Look at yourself
. I ran a hand over my face.
You’re just jet-lagged. Put on a sweater. Put on pants.
Slowly I pieced my outer shell back together and recovered my gown from the closet, where it had been transported from the car by unseen hands, still zipped inside the whispering black garment bag. I
inquired at the mirror—I was more or less composed—and threw open the door, nodding to Zhenjin.

“Good,” I said. “You can keep me honest.” I tossed the garment bag over his shoulder and buttoned my coat. “Let’s walk to the opera house.”

“We have a car.”

“No, I need the walk.” I tugged on my mittens. “It’ll bring me back.” I paused. “I mean, wake me up.” Zhenjin looked at me, stern, and I thought,
No, your job is to give me what I want
. I took his hand and pulled him down the hall, feeling the soft catch as his shoulder extended. Zhenjin made no move to resist, or hold tighter.

The festival organizers had planned well enough to book rooms in a hotel mere blocks from the National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, a pink Romanesque building studded with white colonnades. The Opera House, as they called it, was another surprise: an Easter egg shell filled with a Samarkand mosque. The doorways were embellished with gold filigree and the lobby was filled with arches and domes. Inside, I released Zhenjin and sent him, blushing slightly while he opened and closed his hand, to deliver my gown to the dressing room.