The Imposter Bride (7 page)

While Mitchell was busy trying to figure out how to chew the big wad of bread in his mouth, and Jeffrey was leaning into her chest sucking his thumb, Elka looked at me and asked how I would like to have my own room with flowered wallpaper. The last time Elka had talked to me in such a babyish way had been two and a half years earlier when she asked me how I would like a beautiful little baby girl cousin, a few months after which Mitchell had been born.

“I already have my own room.”

“I mean at our house.”

There were only two bedrooms in their part of our duplex, so I had to share a room with Jeff and Mitch when I slept over.

“Sol and Elka have bought a new house,” my father told me. It was on Alpine Avenue in Côte-St-Luc, not very far from where we lived now, but newer, better. I was supposed to be happy, I knew. That’s why we had gone out for dinner, because it was a special occasion, and the new house was what was special.

“And we’ll stay on Cumberland?” I asked him. I didn’t want Sol and Elka to move away, but I could stand it, I thought, as long as we stayed where we were. I knew all the kids on the street. My school, Talmud Torah, was just a few blocks away on Chester. There was a willow tree in the back that Sol had planted when we moved in, and we had a swing set and a jungle gym. But most of all, paramount to any other thing: my mother knew how to find me there.

“No. We’re moving too,” my father said. Into an apartment on Côte-St-Luc Road a few blocks away from Sol and Elka.

“A really nice apartment,” Elka said. “Way up on the tenth floor with an elevator to ride up and down.”

“What about my jungle gym?”

“We’ll take that with us,” Elka said. “And the swing set. It will all be set up in our yard, which is much bigger than the yard we have now. And you’ll come over every day. Just like you do now.”

I thought about that for a while.

“You’ll like it, you’ll see,” Elka said.

I thought about it some more, stabbed one of the giblets in my chicken fricassee with my fork and put it in my mouth. “I’m not going,” I said.

I saw the adults exchange glances.

“I know it’s not the same as living in the same house all together,” Elka said. “But it’s really not far. You’ll see. And you’ll still come to our house every day straight from school, like I said. And you’ll still eat supper with us. And Carrie lives right down the street.”

Carrie was my best friend. We saw each other every day at school and had never had any problem going over to each other’s houses after school while I lived on Cumberland, where my mother could find me.

“I’m not going,” I said again. I stabbed something else in my stew, some indefinable part of a chicken. “I don’t want to live in a stupid apartment, with a stupid elevator, with stupid flowered wallpaper.” The flowered wallpaper was actually going to be in my room at Elka and Sol’s, not at my father’s, but that was an irrelevant detail at that point. “I’m not going!” I shouted.

“Keep your voice down,” my father said.

I saw Elka rest her hand on her belly, where the new baby had probably just turned or given her a kick. The stupid new baby, who would probably be another boy and was probably the whole reason we had to move. “I’m not going.”

“You
are
going and you’re to calm down right this minute.”

That was my father, and I noticed Elka laid her hand on his for a minute as if he were the one who needed calming down.

“I’m not going. I’m not going!” I shouted, my voice getting louder and more hysterical with each repetition. “I’m not going, I’m not going, I’m not going!” I cried hysterically as my father lifted me from my chair and carried me out of the restaurant.

THE MOVE TOOK PLACE
over a weekend in the middle of March. It was decided that Bella and Ida Pearl would take me, Jeffrey and Mitchell for that weekend. To make things easier. Ida Pearl and Bella lived in adjoining apartments in the building on Decarie Boulevard that Ida Pearl had bought just after the war. Her jewellery store was on the ground floor, along with May Flowers, and she rented out the two storeys of apartments above. Until Elka got married Ida Pearl lived in a duplex in N.D.G., like we did, but not in such a nice one as ours—older, smaller. Once Elka and Sol got married, though, Ida Pearl moved into one of the apartments in the building she owned, and Bella moved into the one next door.

I spent a lot of time at my grandmother Bella’s, but not at Ida Pearl’s, because Ida Pearl worked all day at her store and she didn’t really like me. I don’t mean in the more general sense
of her not really liking children. Bella didn’t really like children either, but in her case that general distaste broke down when a specific child that she loved was right in front of her. Me, for example. Bella regularly overcame her distaste for noisy, snivelling children to grab me in a big hug, or read a book to me, or tell me stories about being a little girl in Russia and getting buried in a snowdrift or some other such disaster. Ida’s distaste for me was something different, more particular. I sensed it, though she was never actually unkind to me in any way. It was her coldness, I think, the lack of pleasure she derived from seeing me. “You’re too sensitive,” Elka told me, tousling my hair. Which was different from saying there was no truth in what I was sensing.

I assumed, of course, that if Bella and Ida were taking care of us for the weekend, I would be sleeping at Bella’s, but that was not the plan. It was Jeffrey and Mitchell who were going to Bella’s. I would be going to Ida Pearl’s.

“Ida Pearl’s?” I asked when I heard the terrible news. It made no sense. But I couldn’t say outright to Elka that her mother hated me, so I put it another way. “She’s not even my grandmother.”

“She’s as good as one,” Elka responded. Because she was Elka’s mother and Elka was as good as a mother to me. That’s what Elka meant.

“But she doesn’t really like me.” It had to be said. I’d been pushed to the wall.

“Don’t be a goose,” Elka said. “This is a perfect chance for you two to get to know each other better.”

Elka, though, obviously had her own concerns about the bonding weekend ahead. As she got me ready she scrubbed my face so hard that my skin hurt, and she pulled my hair so
tightly into pigtails that she caught half my scalp in the grip of the elastic bands, and all the while she kept reminding me that her mother didn’t like a lot of noise and fuss and that I was to eat whatever was put before me and to remember to say thank you. But whatever nervousness Elka felt couldn’t match my own as she deposited me at Ida’s door, flowered suitcase in hand.

Ida greeted me with a brisk hug and ushered me into the den, where she had made up the couch to serve as my bed. I placed my suitcase on top of the blanket, then worried it was the wrong place—the bed was so tidily made up, the blanket pulled flat as a skating rink—so I removed it to the floor. Then I worried that might also be wrong, so I cast about for the place that might be right, and while my mind was occupied with that I peed my pants. I had not peed my pants for years by that time, not even in sleep—I was eight years old, almost nine—and my mortification as I felt the spreading warmth was compounded by fears more specific than the heavy but vague sense of dread that I had felt about the weekend until then. I worried that Ida would yell at me, that Elka had not packed spare clothes and I would have to spend the rest of the weekend bare-bottomed or in my pyjamas. But Ida wordlessly extended her hand and led me to the bathroom, where she stripped off my pants and underwear and lifted me into the sink as if I were as light and small as a three-year-old. And when I was clean and dry and had a towel wrapped around my bottom half, we returned to the den to decide together what would be the best outfit for our next activity: tea in her living room, a room that I had never been invited into before, the den and kitchen having been designated as the only domain appropriate for a child.

When Ida opened my suitcase—whose proper place turned out to be the ottoman beside the couch—I was relieved to see that Elka had packed several changes of clothes, including my favourite yellow turtleneck that went with my favourite black stretchy pants with the stirrups that went under the arches of my feet, and my favourite skirt: a green plaid kilt that was held together with a gold pin. The mere sight of these familiar things lifted my spirits, and Ida must have sensed that, because she patted my hand as I patted my yellow turtleneck and said, “Sometimes things can feel like friends.”

A few minutes later, dressed in my green kilt and yellow turtleneck, I made my debut in Ida’s living room. It was a formal room, decorated in shades of blue, with scallop-edged blinds behind layers of drapery, and lace-scalloped lampshades and a gilt-framed mirror hanging over the powder blue sofa that Elka referred to as the Louis Quinze sofa and that didn’t look like anything I should be sitting on but was the only object in the line of Ida’s pointing hand, so I sat there as she had indicated I should, hands folded on my kilt, and waited for her to bring in the tea. She brought it in on a large silver tray that was crowded with pots of various sizes, placed it on the coffee table in front of the sofa and poured out two cups. She poured the tea from the largest of the teapots, placed a slice of lemon in one cup and poured in some amber fluid from a smaller pot, then stirred a spoonful of raspberry jam into the other cup and handed it to me as if it hadn’t crossed her mind that I might spill the scarlet-tinged liquid onto her powder blue sofa. As if I were no longer the same girl who had peed her pants ten minutes earlier.

“
L’chaim
,” she said, lifting her teacup to me in a toast.

“
L’chaim
,” I echoed back, and she smiled.

She threw back her tea unmindful of its heat, poured herself another cup and smiled at me again, as if my presence suddenly pleased her.

“So I hear you don’t want to move,” she said.

“No,” I said. I wondered if she had also heard that I had been carried out of Green’s Restaurant screaming and crying like a four-year-old.

“You like your house. You like your street.”

I nodded. I had not told anyone the real reason I didn’t want to move, not even Carrie, and I was not about to make Ida Pearl my first confidante.

“You think that if your mother comes back for you she won’t be able to find you if you’ve moved.”

Now I was afraid. Ida could obviously read my mind. But I was amazed too. No adult had ever voiced my deepest wish. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid if I nodded she would tell me I was being silly, that my mother was not coming back. But if I shook my head she would know I was lying because she could read my mind.

I gave a little nod. Ida nodded too, as if she had, in fact, known my answer and was just waiting to see if I’d admit it.

“She’s a very smart lady, your mother. She’ll be able to find you.”

“You know her?” It was hard for me to piece together the chronology of things. On the one hand, my mother had left before Elka and Sol were married, so Ida Pearl hadn’t really been part of our family yet at that time, so how would she know my mother? But on the other hand, Ida Pearl had been the one who came over right away and showed the policeman the full quart of milk.

“Not well, but she came to my store once.”

“She did?” An image formed in my mind of the inside of Ida’s store, which I knew so well, Ida standing behind her display counter, her loupe hanging from a chain around her neck. And there on the other side of the counter, a woman in a long black coat, wearing a black hat with a little half-veil. My mother. “Was she pretty?”

Ida smiled, but then she thought for quite a while before answering. It was a pause that confused me because the question I had asked wasn’t exactly difficult.

“A woman can be beautiful without being pretty,” Ida finally said.

I nodded as if I understood what she meant.

“You have her eyes,” she told me.

“I do?” My eyes were my best feature, my aunt Nina had told me. When I got older she was going to show me how to make them up to take advantage of them. I glanced instinctively towards the gilt-framed mirror on Ida’s wall now, and saw my mother’s eyes looking at me.

“What’s her hair like?” I asked Ida. Mine was brown and wavy, though in the summer it was more frizzy than wavy.

“I don’t remember her hair.”

“You don’t?”

“She usually wore it pulled back.”

“In a ponytail?”

“A bun.”

“A bun?” Now I was disappointed. Buns were what old ladies did with their hair.

“A twist,” Ida elaborated.
Tveest
is actually how she would have pronounced that word—she was from Poland—but I didn’t notice her accent very often. Hers or my grandmother Bella’s or my teachers’ or that of the parents of half of my
friends. I was used to it, used to the
v’
s where
w
’s should be, the
ee
’s for
i
’s, the
r
’s that made my name sound like something they had to dislodge from somewhere deep in their throats. “A French twist.”

I didn’t know what a French twist was, but it sounded more like the sort of arrangement a beautiful woman like my mother would decide on than a bun.

“Why don’t we have any pictures of her?” I asked Ida.

Another long pause, but this one didn’t confuse me because the question I had just asked was actually a very hard one. No one seemed to know the answer. (“Sometimes when people are very, very sad they don’t like the way they look,” my father had told me, which made no sense at all. “Not everybody likes to have their picture taken,” Elka said, which also wasn’t an answer but the lead-up to another question, “But why don’t they?” which led straight to the dead end of “I don’t know.”)

“There are some people who believe that a camera can see what the human eye can’t.”

“Really?”

Ida nodded.

“And can it?”

“Of course not. But maybe your mother had that belief.”

I thought about that as I sipped at my sweet red tea. “What was she afraid the camera might see?”

And here Ida smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. It was as if something about me had finally pleased her—the question I had asked, the fact that I could understand the conversation we were having—but there was no happiness in the pleasure. “Who she was inside.”