The Imposter Bride (11 page)

One more package had arrived from my mother by that time, bringing the total to three. All of them rocks. The most recent one had come to our new apartment, so Ida Pearl had been right about how smart my mother was. Or that she was smart enough, at least, to know how to use a phone book. The wrapping paper on the third package was green; one of the stamps had another goose on it, nesting this time. Both the
paper and the stamp went into the scrapbook and I also was able to add a line to the page about my mother’s likes:
Birds
, I wrote. Then I crossed it out and wrote,
Geese
, which was more specific.

The rock was as beautiful as the other two. This one had a fossil in it, an entire little skeleton like a mini-dinosaur embedded within it, as if a baby dinosaur had lain down on a rock for a nap one afternoon while his mother and father went out hunting. (For what? I wondered. What did dinosaurs eat?) And then when he woke up he was trapped inside his bed and nobody could ever get him out.

It was a sad rock, then, but also a very special rock that I was happy to have and would take special care of because it had something in it that had once been alive, so in a way it was almost like a grave, and I knew how important it was to take care of graves. (My father and Sol and Nina went to visit their father’s grave twice a year.) But I was also disappointed with the present. More disappointed than happy, I had to admit. Was it that I had thought at first that the rocks were the beginning of something, and now I understood they might not be leading to anything but more rocks? Was it that the most recent rock was, in fact, a grave?

The accompanying card said:
Oldman River, Alberta, 13:00, May 7th, 1956, clear, 58 degrees F, still
. The name was as evocative to me, in one way, as Gem and Rainy lakes had been. I immediately saw craggy rocks all around it, their faces like those of old men, with fossils embedded in them. (I would be surprised years later to see just how accurate my mental picture of that landscape had been.) But I didn’t see my mother in that landscape. I just saw the rocks and the river. And a bigger problem with the river was its location. There was no
doubt that Alberta was farther from Montreal than Manitoba or Ontario. Which meant she was getting farther from me, not closer. Which was another source of disappointment.

I pasted the index card into the scrapbook but couldn’t pretend the scrapbook was a project that was going well. Its pages remained mostly empty, and the ones that had something pasted in were not anything anyone else would find interesting: scraps of wrapping paper; stamps; index cards with place names, dates and weather conditions written on them; a page with the heading
LIKES
, and then three words below that heading:
Rocks, Lakes, Geese
. Four words if you counted
Birds
, which was crossed out. The Queen’s scrapbook, by contrast, was full to the brim with fascinating pictures and articles. Just a few weeks earlier I had added a photo of the entire royal family, Princess Anne looking particularly beautiful in a dress that must have been caught in a slight breeze at the moment the photo was snapped, because it billowed all around her in a swirl of light, cottony blue.

There was no question that my scrapbook about my mother was becoming boring to me. Even my fantasies about my mother had started to dry up. It was not that I was no longer curious about her. I was very curious. But curiosity does require something to feed it, and the pickings on that front were decidedly slim. I was famished. Hence my excitement when I felt the pulsing from the empty notebook that had once been my mother’s. Maybe it wasn’t as empty as it seemed. The thought came to me like a jolt. Maybe she
had
written in it. And maybe that’s why she had left it behind, because she had written in it, but in invisible ink, which she knew, somehow, that I would figure out.

The phone rang. That too hit me with a jolt. I wasn’t sure what to do. It was as if I had been caught doing something
I shouldn’t, even though it was just someone calling on the phone who couldn’t see me, and I wasn’t, in fact, forbidden to look at the notebooks. It was not only permissible for me to be doing what I was doing, but natural. (“It’s natural to be curious about where we come from,” Elka said.) But things that were natural could still be embarrassing, like being caught by Carrie’s mother with no clothes on when she came into Carrie’s room while we were playing doctor. And I wasn’t sure that the pulsing I felt from the book was the same kind of natural as the curiosity Elka had been talking about. So I put the book away before I went to the phone and by the time I got there it had stopped ringing.

It started up again almost immediately, and when I answered it Elka asked, “Where were you?”

“In the bathroom.”

“You gave me such a fright. I was about to send Uncle Sol over.”

“I was making a pee.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“What did you eat for your supper?”

“A cheese sandwich and a glass of milk.” That wasn’t much of a lie because I was really hungry by then and was going to go make myself my sandwich as soon as I got off the phone.

“I called your father to let him know you’re home. He said he’ll be home soon.”

It was six thirty. He was almost always home by seven on weekdays, except for Wednesdays, when he had supper with Melinda, who he was dating that year and who had a daughter my age, which we were both supposed to be excited about—Melinda’s daughter and I—but we weren’t, particularly.

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll come straight here after school tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then I guess I’ll wish you sweet dreams.”

“You too.”

“And remind your father to make sure he calls me as soon as he gets in so I know he’s home.”

“Okay.”

When my father came home fifteen minutes later I was on the couch in our living room, my empty plate and empty glass on the coffee table beside me.

“Call Elka,” I told him before he even had time to shut the door.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and he did that before he even poured his Scotch and got his little dish of salted almonds.

Once he was settled in his chair with the newspaper and the other magazines that had arrived in the mail he asked how my day had gone.

“Fine,” I said.

He looked at me for another few seconds to see if I’d go on. When I didn’t, he asked if I had any homework to do.

“Did it already.” Which was true. The following year Carrie and I would be switching from our school to the Young Israel Day School because it was better, harder and stricter, according to Carrie’s parents. For now, though, our homework didn’t occupy much of our after-school time. “That’s why I came home. I worked on it all afternoon.”

My father nodded. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that I might lie to him. Just like it may not have occurred
to him that my mother might lie to him, I suppose. And I didn’t think of what I was doing as lying. (Maybe my mother hadn’t either.) I thought of it as privacy. That new concept. It wasn’t just the door to my bedroom I was learning to shut that year, but other doors that guarded places deep within myself that were my own and that I didn’t want to share. So I didn’t tell him about learning to jump up onto a moving train. I knew that if I did, Carrie and I would be forbidden to cross the fence to the tracks and the field beyond. And I didn’t tell him about the girl from Saint Richard’s saying “Jew” as if it were a bad word, because I knew that he and other adults would make too big a deal out of it. And I didn’t tell him about the time I had spent with my mother’s notebooks, because the pulsing I had felt was something between her and me that other people wouldn’t understand.

“You know what I was thinking today?” I asked him.

“What?”

“How neat it would be to have a chemistry set.”

“A chemistry set!” The idea obviously pleased him. “What kinds of experiments do you think you might want to perform?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Litmus tests, maybe.” We had just learned about that in science class. “And stuff with ink. You know, invisible ink.”

My father nodded. Then he said, “I don’t suppose we have any baking soda in this house, do we?”

“Elka might.”

“Lemons,” my father said. He always had his tea with lemon. Milk and lemon were the two things we always had in the fridge.

He got up from his chair and we went to the kitchen, where
he sliced a lemon. We didn’t have a squeezer like Elka had, so he just used his hand and squeezed the juice into a little bowl.

“Okay. Now go get a sheet of paper and a Q-tip.”

I ran to get them. My father never cared if I ran in the house.

“Good,” he said when I returned. “Now I’m going to go back to the living room and you’re going to write a secret message using the lemon as ink. When you’re finished, bring it to me.”

What to write? I thought about writing my name, but he had said I should write something secret. I finally decided what it should be.

“Don’t forget to let it dry before you pick it up,” my father called, just as I was about to lift the dripping wet paper.

I waited a few minutes and when it seemed like the lemon juice had dried I brought the paper to my father.

“Ah. A blank piece of paper,” my father said.

It really did look blank. As blank as the pages in my mother’s notebook, except a little wavy now, from still being damp with lemon juice. My father held it up to the light bulb in the lamp by his chair and as he held it there I saw my letters begin to emerge in brown.
Mrs. Lazaar is mean
, I had written. Mrs. Lazaar was my ballet teacher, and just that week she had assigned our parts for the end of the year performance. I had hoped to be one of the swans but I wasn’t chosen for that. I would be a bulrush, Mrs. Lazaar had told me, a role that was just as important as a swan, she said, and one that would require lots of hard work because it wasn’t easy to learn to sway the way a bulrush does. But I knew it wasn’t as important or as pretty as a swan. Carrie would be a swan dancing across the stage while I would stand swaying in a corner being
a stupid bulrush. I saw my statement emerge in brown and then begin to fade as the rest of the paper also turned brown.

“It’s the acid in the lemon juice reacting with the acid in the paper,” my father explained.

He didn’t ask about Mrs. Lazaar, the way Elka would have. I don’t know that he even noticed the secret message I had written. He was more interested in why the heat revealed the writing and in explaining that to me. If I were to mix baking soda with water, we could do the same thing, he told me. And we could also use grape juice then, rather than heat, to reveal the writing.

I didn’t care that he hadn’t asked about Mrs. Lazaar. Or if I did, just a little. I could hardly wait to be alone in the apartment again, and as soon as I was I went straight to the bookshelf, pulled out my mother’s notebook and held it to the light.

Nothing.

I held it closer.

Still nothing.

I held it on the light bulb itself and the paper turned warm without revealing anything.

“
ROCKS
?” my aunt Nina asked.

We were all at Elka and Sol’s for the Passover Seder and I had told her about the fossil in the rock my mother had sent me. She hadn’t heard about any of the packages my mother had sent to me, probably because she lived downtown and we didn’t see her much.

“She’s sending her rocks?” Nina directed her question to Elka.

Elka nodded, and the look exchanged between Nina and Elka during that nod was not unlike the look exchanged among all the adults the evening the first rock from my mother arrived.

“What kind of rocks?”

“Beautiful ones,” I said. It was not that I didn’t know by then that there was something strange about my mother sending me rocks. I knew. But strange could mean many things, and since Nina and Elka’s exchanged glance was pushing its meaning towards nuts, I was pulling it back as hard as I could towards special and beautiful.

Nina jumped right on board with me. She asked me about the latest rock, and made admiring sounds as I described it to her. So much so that I felt encouraged to describe the scrapbook to her as well, as if I still thought it was a wonderful project, which I didn’t, but it became a little less boring when Nina took such an interest and said she absolutely must see it that very evening and was going to come right over to our house after the Seder.

She didn’t end up coming over that evening—the Seder went on longer than expected, as it always did, and by the time we had helped Elka clean up it was late and time for bed—but she told me that she would definitely come over soon to see it. On my birthday, for sure, which was just two weeks away.

I wasn’t to get my hopes up about Nina’s visit, Elka told me. It wasn’t that she didn’t mean to come. She did mean it when she said it, but often things got in the way for Nina.

“Yeah, like Nina,” Sol said, meaning that Nina was selfish.

That was what my father and Sol thought about Nina: that she only thought of herself. That that was the real reason she had gone off to Palestine right at the end of the war, when my father and Sol still weren’t home from the service and their
mother, Bella, who was a widow (not that Nina cared) was all by herself in Montreal. Not because she was an idealist or a Zionist or wanted to teach war orphans to read, like she said, but because she thought she could do whatever she wanted over there (“Must be nice to have no one to answer to,” Sol said), including trying to be an actress.

“Your aunt Nina’s a dreamer,” Elka told me, which was why I wasn’t to let it hurt my feelings if she didn’t come over to see my scrapbook on my birthday.

Which she didn’t.

“I’m so sorry,” she said when she called to tell me she wouldn’t be coming. She was a little breathless, as if she had just run in the door from something very important. And it turned out she had. A really, really important acting part had come up for her and if she didn’t take it her whole career might fall apart. (“What career?” my father asked.)