No One is Here Except All of Us (10 page)

Objects Proven to Be Lucky: 3

Refutes to That Proof: 4

Concerns of Being Forgotten: 102

Recurring Dreams of an Explicit Nature, Treasured but Never Told: 42

At Kayla’s insistence,
time sped up. Over the next months, I learned to crawl over the knotted wood floor and then to walk. Hersh and Kayla set themselves up on chairs at opposite ends of the kitchen and sent me back and forth like a ball. I wobbled a little for them. They gasped and giggled and grabbed at me. They took me into their arms when I made it, triumphant, and kissed me on each swath of skin. I was spoon-fed potatoes, mashed carefully, chunkless. I was never again given my aunt’s dry breast. At the end of each day I said my small prayer for the right thing to happen, and I told my real mother and father, “This is how I love you.” I was marching in the right direction, back toward my true self. I knew I would not get all the way there—even at eleven and a half, I would still be living in the wrong house—but progress was progress.

I learned to eat with a fork. I learned to tie a shoe. I learned the difference between a palomino and a cricket. I learned to write my name and the word
love
. I learned to take my napkin from the table and unwrap it on my lap. The music teacher was rehired. The barber’s sister was hired to teach me how to walk with several books stacked on my head, because my mother had heard this was important. The house was a flood of learning and teaching. If there was a thing that you could learn to do, I had a teacher for it. Kayla wanted me to learn languages, even when Hersh reminded her that other languages might have come from other places, and there were no such things. “I don’t care where they came from or didn’t,” Kayla said. “People know words, and I want Lena to know them, too.” I already had a lot of Russian and Polish, and so it was that the jeweler began to teach me English, the butcher drew flash cards for me in German, Hersh taught me the fundamentals of Italian, and the sheep shearer set out to make me understand French.

Kayla sat at the table every morning with a list of all the lessons she needed to teach me about love and loss and God and potatoes and churning butter and crushing pepper and washing decent linens and better linens. Lessons about making lace, covering a wound, throwing a ball and untangling a knot. I needed to know how to pray well, how to sit straight, how to write a heartfelt condolence letter and a gracious invitation. I had to become proficient at keeping clean, mending a dress, buttering my bread like a lady and knowing which cuts of meat were which.

Kayla filled hundreds of sheets of paper this way, papers that gathered in the house like snow, dusting everything at first and then getting swept into corners or under the furniture, where they sat in banks waiting their turn. Kayla scolded herself for time lost coddling and swooning when she should have been teaching. Hersh tried to remind her how much she loved being the mother of a baby, how sweet those days had been. He did not say how hard he had worked to make such sweetness possible, and how much he himself had loved it, too.

True to the original deal, every few weeks was a year of my life: I was four, I was eight, I was ten again. We had little birthday parties, Kayla’s and Hersh’s faces aglow with time’s miraculous passage.

But it did not stop as Hersh had planned.

Kayla rushed me along, right past myself. I was eleven, and then I was twelve. I was thirteen. I was suddenly meant to be complete. At night I peered into the oval-shaped mirror that hung above my dresser. I saw my face, which was pinkish, surrounded by dark brown curly hair. I looked unremarkable to myself. Like a person, a girl, no one in particular. Day by day, I checked for differences, and to my surprise, they started showing up. The same freckles on my forehead, but a different shape to my jaw. The same inward slant to my front teeth, but a new pitch in my voice. I climbed on a chair and took the mirror down, its cool frame in my hands, and passed it down my body so I could see what my chest looked like, my belly, my legs. I found the long, straight line of a girl was curving a bit, rounding at the hips. Strands of hair had begun to appear. My nipples peered tentatively out, bigger and softer than before.

That night, I spit all over the bed again. I rubbed it in. “I am alive here,” I said to myself. “I know what I know.” I tried to smell myself on the pillow—my hair had been there, I could tell. There were strands left, long brown snakes reclining. “Bullfight, rain, horse, saddle, hunger, hair, life,” I said to myself, trying to hold all of it. But it wasn’t those things I worried about forgetting—those things were presented to me each day, a list of activities and lessons and facts about the world. What I could feel slipping off me was my original life. Even while I aged at impossible speeds, the years piling up around me day by day, I could feel myself getting smaller, getting thinner, losing words, losing the memory of my real house and my real family and the smell of cabbage in the kitchen. “Cabbage,” I said, “cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, cabbage.”

I wrote the word down on my list, underlined it. “My house smells like cabbage. My house is one room. My mother is not my mother. My father is not my father. Is this how I love them? Am I alive in this place?” It was getting easier and easier to think of them as Perl and Vlad, the way everyone else did. For this I pinched myself hard on the arm until my nails left two moons.

Mine was an instant decision. I did not think about what would happen after, or how long before someone dragged me back. I was going home. I would sleep the night in my old bed with my old family around, and I did not care what happened next. I put my shoes on and slipped out the back door. I pressed my fists to my eyes for a minute, and when they came away the shimmer of darkness moved aside to reveal a milky, moonlit path toward home. My nightgown fluttered. It was not raining at that moment but the town had its misty coat on. I felt wonderful, walking alone in the right direction.

My cheeks filled with blood when I saw the house, and then the door. The door with its brass handle, wet under my hand. But when I turned it, my hand only slipped. The door was locked. I repeated it to myself in disbelief. “The door is locked.” Had one of my parents always slid that latch, keeping me and the others safe inside? Now I was one of the people being kept out. I put my ear against the wood but I could not hear my family inside. I did not knock. I had wanted to appear there, to slip back in unnoticed. Not to be asked inside like a guest. I lay down on the stoop and listened to the breeze flip a dead leaf over and over across the ground. It was a treeless leaf, an orphan, caught on an instant breeze. Something invisible carried it. I kissed the brass doorknob on the big blue door, and I stood up to go.

I was truly
no longer the cabbage picker’s youngest daughter. They had locked the door behind me. In order to grow, to become the Lena that my new parents invented, I ate my way through the stale heels of bread and dry bits of cake under the bed, left over from my days as a hungry baby. I even ate the ants, who feasted despite imminent danger. I felt them walking the hills of my tongue, trudging through the wet cave. I stopped chewing and paid attention to their needle-feet. I swallowed them whole. I thought of them in my stomach, continuing to eat, the food prechewed for them, readily enjoyable. I ate the food until it pushed out against me. I ate the food until it hurt. I closed my eyes, full of bread and ants. From outside came the sound of dogs howling to track each other in the dark, calling out the difference between one dog’s home and the other’s. Inside the room, exhausted, I tried to stretch out the hours of peaceful night before the sun threw light down on me again, woke me up into another day of growing.

The next morning, I sneaked out early and went on two missions. First, I visited the stranger. “Do I survive this?”

“Yes,” she answered, firmly.

“How?”

“You just do.” I told her it was a disappointing answer, but thank you anyway, and I left her alone. I found the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It doing their dawn mapping in the bakery. I pulled them outside into an abandoned shed. “Quickly,” I said. The shed still held a few rusted old spades. Mice and bugs must have happily lived in the walls, but they did not skitter or scratch. The wood smelled rich and ripe, full of the sweet butter of near-collapse.

“Measure me,” I demanded, knowing that the next new moon, the next measuring day, was weeks away.

“Okay, okay, no need to be rude,” the greengrocer said. This was a dutiful committee and they began at the bottom. Toes, feet, ankle to knee, knee to hip, hip to shoulder.

“That looked like more than one and a half fingers to me,” the greengrocer’s wife nagged. The barber inchwormed his finger along my forearm again.

“It’s exactly one and a half,” the greengrocer said.

“I wouldn’t say
exactly
.” The greengrocer’s wife scrunched her nose.

I asked, “Am I bigger than before? Am I smaller than before?”

“It’s the first time we’ve measured you,” the baker said. “How old are you?” I shook my head. “Sure, kid, you’re bigger. You’re growing, just like you should be.”

The greengrocer’s wife whispered into my ear, “Let me know if you need help with how to fasten a brassiere. We also sell other items.”

My heart fluttered its wings, but did not manage to escape my chest. It was contained in the prison of my body. “Am I supposed to be older or younger?” I asked the greengrocer. “Am I supposed to be thinner or fatter? Am I supposed to remember or forget?” He put his hand on my cheek.

“You’re a sweet girl,” he said. “What you’re doing is not easy. Growing up never is.”

I looked at the committee members with begging eyes.

“Look,” the greengrocer’s wife said. “You’ll grow for a while and then you’ll shrink again. I used to be able to see over the fence in the yard, now I have to look through the slats. Your size doesn’t really matter.” The promise of this comforted me and I saw a tiny, frail, shaky-legged version of myself—either very old or very young—toddling down a wide street, going unnoticed by the world around me.

I took the barber’s warm palm and placed it over my heart. “Count,” I commanded.

“Your heartbeats?” he asked. I nodded. The two of us closed our eyes and concentrated. The greengrocer and his wife were quiet. “That was twenty beats,” the barber said, and then, because my face must still have been full of questions, he added, “Very strong. Very healthy. You are doing fine.”

The shed seemed to lean a little to the left, like a sleeping person shifting for comfort. I opened the squeaking door and released the committee back into the light of that day. I imagined not just stepping out of the shed, but stepping out of my own skin layer by layer, leaving shells of myself everywhere, crisp and translucent, until I was just a tiny pink snake of a girl, hidden in the shade of a small stone.

The widow never
became a better voice teacher. She came and she sat and she drank her glass of vodka and she scolded and then she fell asleep.

After the teacher left, Kayla said, “Let me hear you sing.”

I hedged. “Later. I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

So Kayla said, “What a fabulous idea, a surprise concert! We will invite everyone.” Then a look of stunned excitement passed over her face. “Your coming-of-age ceremony!” she said, staring at the wall. Kayla saw a vision of me in a starched dress with flushed cheeks, and around me a roomful of admirers, their complete attention on the young woman. “Young
woman
!” Kayla squealed. In the crowd of admirers there would be young men, appreciative young men, hopeful young men, potential husbands. “A husband. A
wedding
.” Kayla sighed.

“A what?”

“Don’t act like you aren’t ready for a husband soon. It’s only natural,” Kayla snapped. She got a faraway look in her eye. “Oh, oh, yes,” she cooed.

I tilted my head down, headed out into a strong wind.

That weekend,
everyone gathered in our sitting room. The baker, the doctor, the sheep farmer, the chicken farmer, the weaver, the banker, his wife and their small army with Igor at the head, the stranger and the jeweler, who insisted on sitting close to her and unwrapping candies for her to suck on, the gossips, the mothers and the fathers, the man with no left eye, the healer, the children, the butcher, the axe maker, the sheep shearer, the grandparents and the babies, the wives and husbands, everyone. It was pouring outside and the kitchen held a dozen stacks of heavy coats, puddles forming beneath them.

Sitting in the front were Perl, Vlad, Regina and Moishe. I had anticipated this meeting. I had torn my list of known objects into four pieces. They were secreted away in my pocket, waiting.

“This is a celebration of Lena’s life,” Kayla announced, everyone’s fingers dusty with sugar from the plates of cookies. “Our little Lena, who is a woman now.”

They looked at me as if they did not exactly see a woman, though they did not see a girl, either.

“Kayla,” Hersh said quietly. “Do we know what we think we know?”

“My husband the philosopher,” Kayla joked. “Lena is a woman now. I raised her myself, of course I know.” No one said anything different. “Think of your sons. Will they be looking for a good wife?” She passed around a dish of Linzer torte baked by me and asked that everyone please be silent while they enjoyed the confection. “Focus,” she told them, “focus on the cookie.” Then Kayla told me to demonstrate my horse-riding skills by trotting around the living room.

“Trot?” I asked. “You want me to pretend I have a horse?” I looked for the stranger, who knew how to become what others needed. She was waiting for my eyes to find hers. Her signal was a short, decisive nod. She was trying to offer a fact: you are you. You still are. I was red with embarrassment, but I trotted. Hersh tried not to look upset. He loved his wife and I knew he wanted her to feel supported. And me, too, prancing as if I were a horse, as if I were a girl and a horse at the same time. Was this right? Kayla stopped me and everyone clapped. My next trick was to count to ten in all of my languages. This was the thing I was actually proud of.