Unravelled (11 page)

"That's great," Mrs. Reilly answered as she struggled to balance her children. "I'm sure she's very happy."

I nodded and closed the heavy door to our San Francisco home. I took a deep breath as I heard her heels click away on the pavement. Indeed, Mother was happy. But I wasn't quite sure how I would even begin to react to a cousin who had faced such a horrible past. So far, my biggest upset in life had been my father's frequent leaving, but at least he was still alive and still called every Thursday at seven. The second worst upset had been the death of my cat, Earl, when I was nine years old. What would I say to a little girl who had been through so much? What could I do for her? I swallowed hard and put my head against the doorframe, as if bracing myself for the oncoming impact.

11 CHAPTER eleven

✪

January 1947

Over the next couple of months, Mother and I arranged the guest room to suit a little girl's tastes. We went through all of my old things I had stored in boxes in the back of my closet, taking out teddy bears and dolls with thinning and wrinkling hair. Mother even sewed a new bedspread and curtains out of loud fabric with huge clashing flowers all over. I thought they looked ugly, mismatched and dowdy, something you would find in a 70-year-old woman's home instead of a girl on the cusp of her teenage years. I swallowed my protests and assured my mother Aliz would love her new room, nonetheless.

Little by little, we received letters about Aliz, describing her personality and behaviors. They were always short, written in Polish with loose English translations next to them, dotted with sentences that weren't finished or obviously misplaced or misspelled words. We tried to get a picture of this girl we had never met. She would be turning eleven the week she was to arrive. She liked the color pink. She had a talent for math. She didn't speak much, if at all. She spent weeks without a word exchanged and showed little interest in learning English. She spent hours rocking back and forth in her room, sometimes tearing at the walls or her own skin. She had developed "obsessive coping mechanisms", in which she repeated movements, like washing her hands, over and over again until she seemed satisfied. She sometimes scratched at her tattooed number until it was red and bloody, as if in trying to remove it. Written on the bottom of one of the letters in unobtrusive, broken English; "Recommended that Aliz institutional."

Mother shook her head upon reading the words, putting the letter on the table. Institutions were crowded, filled to the brim with soldiers who sat staring out the window in a daze, or women who had gone to serve as nurses and come back so anxiety-ridden that they had to have a lobotomy, sometimes making them nothing more than vegetables. It was a place to put those who had been severely scarred away for life. Mother toured one of these institutions once with her Jewish women's group. It was supposed to be a mitzvah, a good deed, to bring some cheer to these "unfortunates". Mother spent the rest of the afternoon on the edge of tears. The memory of the place was enough for her to emphatically state that Aliz would only be sent to one as a last resort. 

Word spread through school that we would be taking in one of the little refugees. I was far from the only one in school with a relative scarred by the war. Many of my friends had older brothers who were now amputees, or sitting silent in institutions. Others had lost friends, relatives, and cousins. My math teacher, Mr. Pritchard, had lost his son in Japan and was prone to bouts of running out of the classroom to wipe his eyeglasses which had fogged with tears. Pictures of fallen soldiers who had attended my high school lined the walls in frames and tributes, with hand printed, "We will miss you!" and "Thank you for your service." curled underneath them. I didn't know most of these boys, but the ones I did know were so hard to picture dead. The last time I had seen them, they were so alive, so vibrant.

"I heard you're bringing in one of those kids who was in a German concentration camp!" Bobby Jones, a boy with exceedingly long legs and big ears whispered to me during a group project on
The Scarlet Letter
in English class. He bent toward me so closely that I could feel his hot breath on my neck. It made me shudder.

Judy Green, the dizzy girl who had been placed in my group sat next to us, doodling in her notebook and leafing through
Look Magazine
as we tried to come up with ideas for our impending presentation on Hester Pryne. Paused on a picture of Carey Grant, she straightened up at the mention of my cousin.

"I heard they didn't even have toilet paper there," she spat, and then blowing a bubble covertly, popping it before our teacher looked over. "Can you imagine going without toilet paper? Or going longer than a week without washing your hair? How gross!"

"They shaved their heads, Judy," Bobby countered, as I pretended to busy myself by finding quotes about Hester in our book. I absentmindedly began circling things, random sentences.

"That's even worse!" she spat, sitting straight up and blowing another bubble. Without a beat, she turned to me and pointed to the picture of Carey Grant, his suave smile brightening up the glossy magazine page.

"Isn't he cute?" she asked. I shrugged.

But it wasn't that I could blame them for their reactions. I, too, would have been curious if I had read about these camps, printed in magazines and seen them in newsreels at the movies. Classmates would ask me in passing about the new girl, wanting to know when she was coming. Some girls offered to give her their old dresses and shoes, which I graciously accepted. My best friend, Eva Stein, whom I had grown up sitting next to in Temple, offered to come over and help my mother and me bake Aliz a welcome cake. Most of my classmates just ignored it. The war had touched everyone, virtually every family. This was just one of many situations families were dealing with. 

Amid the small gestures of kindness, there seemed to be an overwhelming sense of awkwardness, of not knowing what to do or what to say. People were concerned with the Jews, but many waved their hands proclaiming that others had suffered just as badly. It was as if America wanted to shut its ears, pretend that Hitler and Auschwitz had never happened. Reporters spoke on it and newsreels pictured it up to a point, until people became tired with it. The subject became almost taboo, a stunned silence, something you only brought up with your closest, most trusted friends. Maybe it was more not knowing what to say or do than indifference, but on the whole, the world seemed ready to move on, embarrassed by this black mark on humanity.

It had been Eva's idea to bake Aliz a cake, one that my mother whole-heartedly supported. She probably hadn't even had cake in a long time, my mother reasoned, and it would be her eleventh birthday the week she arrived. As the three of us made our way to the Piggly Wiggly, Mother wondered aloud whether Aliz would prefer chocolate or vanilla. After all, she reasoned, they hadn't reported her preference. We made our way through the aisles of the supermarket, collecting ingredients and placing them in our small basket, before coming home to begin the cake-making process. Mother had ultimately decided to make two cakes, a vanilla and a chocolate so that Aliz could decide which one she would rather eat.

"What should we put on it?" Eva mused as the three of us sat down on the kitchen table, my hands smoothing down the red and white checkered tablecloth. The baked cakes sat in between the three of us, their haphazardly frosted white and brown sides resembling more a third grade science fair project than a confectionary delight.

"How about just 'Welcome Home'?" I suggested, tracing small circles with my fingers.

"Or we could put 'Boldog születésnapot' and then 'Happy birthday' underneath." Mother nodded, standing up to begin mixing the frosting we would use for decoration.

"What in the-" Eva started, her mouth slack at the long string of Hungarian words.

"It means Happy Birthday in Hungarian," I told her, feeling proud that I could at least recall that.

Mother had spoken Hungarian to me as a small child, but had given up by the time I reached first grade. It all stopped with the Peeing Incident. As I sat in class on the second week of first grade, I felt a familiar tugging at my bladder. I raised my hand, but in the midst of the new school and new surroundings, my words had gotten stuck in my throat and I spit out my request in Hungarian. Not understanding, my teacher simply gave me a confused expression and moved on with her lesson, and I ended up with a sopping wet dress. My father shook his head and told my mother I couldn't afford to get mixed up like that anymore, and with that, my Hungarian lessons were over.

"Should we draw anything on it?" Eva asked, watching my mother flutter around the kitchen like a trapped butterfly. "Like maybe a Magen David?"

I put my finger to my chin and thought about it for a moment, painting the identifying Star of David on her cake.

"That might be a nice idea," I nodded, standing up to grab the frosting bag so I could begin the decorations. "Maybe with some flowers on the sides or something?"

Eva nodded enthusiastically, my mother a whirl of excitement as she funneled the red decorating frosting into the bag so that we could squeeze it onto the cake.

"Is Dad coming back?" I asked Mother, licking a piece of stray frosting from my index finger. Eva had already begun decorating the vanilla cake, hunched over the way the French man who owned the bakery four blocks away did, as if she were painting a masterpiece instead of confectionary flowers and leaves.

Mother shifted from one leg to the other, watching Eva intently before drawing her red lips together and then breathing out a sigh.

"Yes," she nodded. "In a couple of months."

"He's leaving us here alone for a couple of months? With Aliz?"

Mother shrugged, as if the disappearance of her husband hardly affected her anymore. It was like they were standing on either side of the Grand Canyon, speaking to each other only occasionally from across the gorge.

I suppose my parents were in love at one point in their lives. At least they were enough for Mother to drop everything in Hungary and come live with him over 6,000 miles away. Old pictures of them proved a testament to the fact that there had been something between them, their eyes locked on each other in the sepia moments stolen in time. But as I grew, the shine of their love had begun to grow dull. Father took me to the theater, baseball games, the movies and dance lessons, anything to show me that their rift hadn't been my fault. As the war grumbled on, growing closer to home, forcing San Francisco families to practice blackouts and brown outs in case the Japanese or Germans flew by, my father seemed to be on a totally different planet. He was sent to a training camp just a few weeks before the war ended, having been one of the last men remaining in the neighborhood.

He hadn't seen action, but he remained aloof and quiet, just like the boys in our neighborhood who had been in the frontline trenches. He spent days shut up in his office, furiously typing away at a novel or a book of poetry. Dad had worked at an ad agency before the war and was offered his job again, this time requiring him to take frequent trips to Los Angeles to monitor their Southern California offices. At first he would go for a few days at a time. Then, he began going for weeks. Once, he left for six months. He called and wrote me religiously during his time down there, phoning our home only to talk to me. When Mother picked up, there would be a mysterious click at the other end of the line and the voice of the operator telling us we had lost our caller. They communicated by writing letters and very infrequent phone conversations, Father sending us a Western Union with money in it twice a month or depositing it in a letter.

Mother sucked in her lips and began painting the vanilla cake, turning its blank canvas into a field of red flowers.

"Do you think she'll like it?" Eva asked, sucking in her lips and looking over her creation, which boasted a large Star of David with the word "Welcome" written underneath it, a little haphazardly. The "m" had blended with the "o", making it a little difficult to read.

"She'll love it," Mother answered with confidence, as if she knew anything about the child. Mother claimed she had talked to Aliz once on the phone, her high-pitched voice sounding innocent and far away through the telephone wires.

Moments later, the phone rang, making Eva jump so that she accidentally smudged the leaf she was putting underneath one of the flowers.

"I've got it," Mother nodded, placing her bag of frosting on the table and moving gracefully over to the telephone. She picked it up with a click, her voice intermittently flowing into the kitchen.

Eva and I took the opportunity to begin giggling right away, discussing whether or not we thought our classmate Mary Jenkins had been sent away to her aunt's house in Idaho because she had gotten pregnant.  She had been looking suspiciously plump in the past few days, her cheeks rounded out just a little bit, not to mention the frequent trips to the bathroom during class. And, we concluded, as if it were concrete proof, all of the etchings under the desks that read, "MJ is a whore," probably sealed the deal.

As Mother tiptoed back in to the kitchen, she turned her dark brown eyes to mine, locking them on me. She stood for a few moments before saying anything, clearing her throat and wiping her hands off on her off-white apron.

"That was your teacher, Mrs. Booth," Mother nodded, clearing her throat again, something she habitually did when she was uncertain. She shuffled her slippered feet on the floor and moved a hand through her up-do. "She says she has your recommendation? Recommendation for what?"

I looked at Eva who opened her mouth to say something, then quickly closed it. For so long this had been my sweet secret, but I eventually shared it with Eva and Mrs. Reilly quietly and coyly. I chewed on the bottom of my lip and scratched the corner of my mouth.

"Nothing," I shrugged. "Just, like, this, um, class I want to take next year. It's an advanced English class."

"Oh," Mother nodded approvingly. "Good for you."

It was a lie. A bald-faced lie. And I didn't even know why I was so adamant about covering it up, either. My parents had never told me I couldn't go to college, but I knew through their words and actions as I grew up that they hadn't really expected me to go either. Father was always talking about how tight money was, and it would be more so after paying for Aliz's trip. Mother was always going on about how I'd make a good wife someday and wondering why I didn't date more. But the truth was, I wanted to go to college. And not just college, I wanted to go to college and become a lawyer, defending those who were unable to afford their own attorneys. I don't know when this fascination struck me, perhaps it began when Eva's cousin was falsely accused of robbing the YWCA. The culprit had been a tall, Asian man, nothing like Eva's short and stocky cousin, with a mass of curly hair crowning the top of his head. He had served time anyway, for a crime he didn't commit, all because Eva's family couldn't afford to hire a good defense attorney.