The Imposter Bride (37 page)

Her deep, familiar laugh. “I get out more than you do.”

It wouldn’t be hard. My workday involved entering a climate-controlled room to restore old documents corroded by
the highly acidic ink with which they’d been written.

“It’s certainly not a Jewish name,” she said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“So?” Carrie asked.

“So what?” I asked, thinking she was still on the fact that my mother had a non-Jewish last name.

“You think you’re ready to give up being motherless?”

I WROTE TO HER
that evening. It was not a difficult letter to write, perhaps because none of it felt quite real to me. The most difficult part was deciding what to call her.
Dear Ms. Eglitis
, I wrote. That was part of what made it feel unreal, perhaps. I was not a person who could possibly have a mother called Ms. Eglitis living in Thunder Bay, Ontario. I identified myself to Ms. Eglitis and told her I had reason to believe she might be my mother, and wondered if she might have any interest in meeting me. I could come to Thunder Bay at her convenience. I didn’t offer further explanations. If she was my mother, she wouldn’t need them. If she wasn’t, it didn’t matter what she thought of the letter.

I signed it,
Sincerely, Ruth
.

I had a response within a week. When I came home from work I saw the envelope lying on the floor in our front hallway, just as I had seen the first package as it had fallen through the mail slot. I saw the handwriting, the only part of her that was familiar to me.

Dear Ruth, Thank you for contacting me. I would like to see you whenever it is convenient for you. Yours, Yanna Marissa Eglitis, née Chorover
.

She certainly wasn’t gushy. In that, at least, my lifelong fantasies had been accurate. But then, my letter hadn’t exactly been spilling over with long-repressed love and longing either. As for the formal awkwardness of the signing-off, I sensed that had been the hardest part of the letter for her to write. How does a mother sign a letter to a daughter she abandoned thirty-five years earlier? What does she call herself? Especially when the name she had been using at the time of the daughter’s birth was false? She’d packed a lot of information into that sign-off: that she was in fact Jewish, had been born with a Jewish surname, in any case; that she had remarried since leaving my father. And in that
yours
—not
sincerely
, as I had written—I read that she still felt herself, in some way, to be mine.

I decided I would go right after the month-long cycle of fall holidays that begin with Rosh Hashana and end with Simchat Torah. I would take the bus.

“Why would you take the bus?” Reuben asked. “That’s two days and a night’s travel each way. A flight will have you there in two hours.”

“I don’t want to get there in two hours,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I needed the trip to take more time than that. Did I imagine a slow shedding of the accumulated layers of myself as the bus tediously covered each of the miles that would take me to my beginning? Maybe I did, and maybe Reuben sensed that—feared at some level just what I might slough off along the way. Certainly he had his own set of concerns about the trip I was about to make. I knew that, which was why I could forgive him the next comment he made.

“It is the very beginning of the school year,” he said. He didn’t add anything about how busy his practice was, or about
how much the kids needed me to be around just as the school year was gearing up. Not out loud.

“I have to go,” I said.

“But do you have to go now?”

“Yes, now,” I said.

He didn’t argue with that, but neither did he convey the encouragement and support I had expected. I could have interpreted his reticence and hesitation as a sign, just as I had interpreted Paul’s generosity to be one, but decided not to.

“You’ll be fine,” I said.

His answering expression suggested he might not be. He was a man with a medical degree and a thriving practice as a pulmonologist, but he obviously thought it beyond his capabilities to read the instructions on a package of spaghetti. And making a bed also seemed to require higher spatial and physical skills than he believed he possessed.

“How long do you think you’ll be gone?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“I think you need to have
some
idea,” he said.

I understood that his concern was not only for himself and how he was going to manage the household and children, that he was worried about me, about sending me off alone into the emotional abyss that was my mother, but I couldn’t attend to his worry at that moment.

“Well, I don’t,” I said.

I DID TAKE THE BUS
, and Reuben and the kids accompanied me to the station to see me off. When we got to the station Nina was there, and then Sol and Elka showed up. And then,
just as I was about to board the bus, my father and Sandra arrived. We all stood for a few minutes, trying to act casual, talking about how long the trip might take, with all the stops along the way, and if the weather would hold and if it was possible I might see snow once I got past Sudbury, even though it was still only the middle of October. I suspected that if Jeffrey hadn’t been living in Palo Alto, and Mitch and Chuck in Toronto, they also would have booked off work that morning to stand around talking about the weather and bus route.

Finally Sol said, “Okay, go already,” and took me into one of his bear hugs, and I kissed each of them in turn, Reuben last, though it was the feel of my father’s hand on the side of my head and ear that lingered as I boarded the bus. I felt a bit like a child leaving for summer camp, a mix of dread and excitement in my gut as I smiled bravely and waved at the family I loved receding behind me. And like a kid I tore into my lunch as soon as we hit the highway, though it wasn’t even nine in the morning. I ate two cheese sandwiches and all the cookies that were supposed to last for three days, which left me feeling nauseated—but that smothered some of the anxiety I had been feeling. It also made me sleepy. I slept for a few hours and when I awoke I was alone on what felt like a great adventure.

I didn’t think about what was ahead, didn’t worry about what was behind. I just sat with my face to the window, watching the endless boreal forest. Many of the trees had changed colour, but under a low, grey sky the golds, ochres, reds and oranges of the dying leaves, interspersed as they were with dark evergreens and ragged outcrops of grey rock, looked more bleak and foreboding than pretty. A sign? I hoped not. At every stop, I stepped outside for air that was fresher and crisper the farther north we drove. It didn’t snow.

Once my sandwiches and cookies were gone I barely ate again. I drank coffee and water, bought a banana at one of the stations along the way. I wasn’t consciously fasting, but I enjoyed the slightly altered state produced by an empty stomach, interrupted sleep and no one but myself for company. It had been many years since I had been alone. The only time I was not in the presence of people whose love for me was both a comfort and a demand was when I sank into the warm bath at the end of each day. I wanted the life I had made, a life that padded me from the sense of separateness and difference from everyone around me that I had felt as a child. I had constructed it every bit as consciously as Elka had constructed hers, but it was bracing to be alone, bracing to have an empty stomach and empty mind and to be travelling along a ribbon of road cut through a vast and unforgiving wilderness.

We arrived in Thunder Bay in the early afternoon of the following day. The sun had come out and the water of the lake sparkled blue in its light. The trees were also suddenly beautiful, glowing like living fires in the sun. I had thought I would go to my hotel, check in and unpack when I arrived—I had promised Reuben I’d call. But instead I took a taxi directly to the address Paul had given me.

The taxi ride took longer than I had expected. “It’s on the outskirts of town,” the driver told me. It was a quiet area with ranchers and wood-frame houses set on large lots, most of them tidy and well tended. The taxi stopped in front of a one-and-a-half-storey, white clapboard house with black shutters and window boxes filled with orange flowers.

“This is it,” the driver said. I realized we had been sitting for more than a few moments outside the house and I had made no move to pay him.

“I’m sorry,” I said, fumbling in my purse to find my wallet. I paid him, and he got out to retrieve my suitcase from the trunk. I had forgotten about my suitcase. I should have left it in a locker at the bus station, I thought. It was heavier than I had remembered as I half carried, half dragged it up the front walk—a walk lined with leafy plants, none of whose names I knew, in various shades of autumn golds and reds. Someone was an attentive gardener. My mother?

I had told her what day I was arriving, but regretted now that I hadn’t called ahead from the bus station. I stood at her door for a long time, unsure what to do. Finally I rang the doorbell, but I heard nothing from within the house. She could well be out, and then what? I had sent the taxi away and could not make it back into town with the suitcase I was carrying. But as I thought about what to do, where I might temporarily stow the suitcase, I heard the approach of someone on the other side of the door.

The door opened and there she was, a flesh-and-blood woman in her early sixties, with white hair pulled smoothly back to reveal the high Slavic bones of her face, and the eyes like mine that were set within it.

She looked at me, I looked at her.

“Oh my,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears, and her hand came up to touch my face, almost as if to check if I were real.

I made no answering touch. I was mesmerized by her face, its angles and planes, the brimming blue eyes, the mouth that was both wide and thin, and that had to have once brushed itself against my skin. I was looking for myself in its structure and expression.

“Will you come in?” she asked, and I stepped into a warm space that smelled of coffee and baking cake.

I left my suitcase by the door, and sat where she indicated I should, on the sofa facing a fireplace where a low fire was burning. She perched beside me on the edge of the sofa, her hands on her knees, her body half twisted so she could face me. She looked almost birdlike, perched as she was, peering at me closely but also poised for flight. There was no excess in her, not so much as a thin layer of fat between the pale, smooth skin of her face and the bones just beneath it.

I had not taken off my jacket and was suddenly too warm. As I started to remove it, she made the self-deprecating gestures of negligent hostesses the world over. The
Here, let me take that from you, what was I thinking asking you in and not taking your coat?
was unvoiced but understood as she took my jacket from me and went to hang it up. Was that how she had acted when she came out of the kitchen that day to tell Elka that she had to run out and buy milk, and that of course she wouldn’t allow Elka to run that errand, that she wasn’t the sort of hostess to invite a guest over and then send her out to buy her own milk? And as I wondered that, I noticed again the inviting smells of coffee and cake that were the exact smells that must have filled our home the day she left me. I had never imagined that part of the scene before now, the brewing coffee and baking cake that Elka must have smelled when she walked into my parents’ living room, that must have hung in the air after my mother had left and Elka sat there with me, waiting for her. Was my mother also aware that she had filled her home with the same smells that had engulfed us the last time we were in each other’s presence? I wondered. It was thirty-five years later and a different living room, yes, but with the same smells in the air it could have been the same moment, and it was possible to imagine that in the next moment she
wouldn’t tell Elka she had to go out and buy milk, but would pick me up and kiss my belly, and time and experience would unfold along an entirely different line of life.

“I’ve made coffee. Do you drink coffee?”

“I do. Yes. Thank you.”

She disappeared into the kitchen and I remained on the sofa. It was a small house, and the living room had just enough room for the furniture it held: the sofa I was sitting on, the coffee table between me and the fireplace, the two armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The window was on the wall behind me, the door to the kitchen somewhere off to my right, as was the stairway leading to the upper floor. The floor was wood, with a large round woven rug covering the area between the sofa and the fireplace. Beside one of the chairs was a basket filled with wool and an unfinished sweater or scarf with knitting needles sticking out of it. Beside the other chair was another basket filled with magazines. That’s where they sat at night, she and Mr. Eglitis, on those two chairs, my mother knitting, her husband reading. Maybe he read out loud to her as she knit. On the mantelpiece: a framed photo of my mother and the man I assumed was Mr. Eglitis, and beside it, another photo of a young handsome man that I knew had to be their son, smiling proudly in his cap and gown. Scattered around the base of those photos was a handful of rocks.

She came out of the kitchen with a tray heavily laden with coffee and cake and all the accompanying trappings. I jumped up to help her.

“I’m all right, thank you. Sit. Please.” She put the tray down on the coffee table, pulled up the chair I had already identified as hers, and sat down facing me.

“I should have called before coming. I’m sorry,” I said.

“I knew you were coming,” she said. “I was waiting.”

She poured the coffee. Her fingers were longer than mine, more tapered, but stronger. She had the hands of someone who had used them for work all her life, very different from the gloved elegance Elka had described. My own seemed pudgy, in contrast, soft, suburban. She cut the cake, and as she did so she extended her index finger to press against the entire length of knife. It was an unusual way to hold a knife. Had I grown up with her I would have seen her do that all the time, I thought. It would have been just another one of the ways my mother’s essence found expression in the countless little tasks of everyday life. I would have incorporated her particular way of holding a knife into my overall sense of her without ever really noticing it, the way I carried within me the particular way Elka brushed her hair, and twisted her mouth when she was thinking, and held her hand on the small of her back when she was tired. She handed me a plate with a piece of cake on it.