Bertrand Court (3 page)

Amy cut her off by clapping her hands. “Number one. Hannah ate a cherry tomato in the grocery store without paying for it.” She laughed, but the sound that came out of her was sharply edged, not her bleat that everyone said was contagious. Hannah gave her sister one of her bemused smiles. “Are you done?” Okay, now they'd safely resumed their assigned places at the family dinner table of life.

“Not yet, angel.” Amy reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. Nobody smoked in this zip code. Leon hated it when she lit up. She tweezed out a cigarette and tapped it against the arm of the chair. “Number two, Hannah removed the tag from her new mattress.” Amy noticed Becca and Maggie looking at each other with “There she goes again” expressions. Yeah, there she goes, right to the fire. Amy got up and leaned into the pit, the heat fogging her glasses as she brought her cigarette to the tip of a flame and breathed in.

“Jesus, Amy,” Becca said. “You're going to burn your face off.”

Amy took a long drag. “That's Hannah. Boring, boring, boring,” she said as she exhaled, blowing smoke up toward the moon.

“Okay, time to give your sister a turn, Amy,” Becca said as if she'd just settled a squabble over who got to ride shotgun in the Solonsky family car. Hannah always rode in front despite the fact that Eric was older and Amy was the only one in the family with a sense of direction.

“You'll have to forgive Amy,” Hannah said.

“Now, that's a line we've never heard before.” Amy flicked ash on the grass.

“Number one.” Hannah put her bottle down on the grass. “I gave my in-laws food poisoning the first time I cooked Thanksgiving dinner.”

Lie. Amy yawned. The dinner turned out perfectly, of course. She was there.

“Number two, I had a crush on a Wiggle.”

“Ew, she did. It was Murray.” Amy took one last drag on her cigarette and tossed the butt into the fire.

“Don't interrupt, Amy. That's cheating,” Maggie said.

“Not like I was interrupted or anything,” Amy muttered under her breath.

“It's okay.” Hannah sighed deeply. She shrugged off the Pashmina. She and Amy had inherited their mother's lovely collarbones, but now Hannah's protruded out of her body like wings.

Amy snorted. “Drum roll please.”

“Number three.” Hannah spoke so softly that the women leaned toward her.

“Number three, I stole a sterling silver baby spoon from my dead Aunt Sylvia.”

Hannah's truth hung suspended in the air, like a wrecking ball in repose.

Amy was the first to speak. “What
spoon
? Why?”

“For another time, Amy.” Hannah continued to stare into the fire, and Maggie and Becca glanced at each other but said nothing.

Only Amy looked at Hannah. “You robbed the dead?” she whispered.

Hannah rubbed her eyes with her fists, like a baby, and when she removed her hands, a mascara-stained tear ran down her left cheekbone.

“Holy shit, Hannah,” Amy said.

“Yeah, holy shit,” Hannah said.

Becca stood up. “Game's over, ladies.”

Amy watched from her chair while Hannah and Maggie silently folded their shawls into neat squares, handed them back to Becca, and walked through the dewy grass to the kitchen and their sullied serving dishes. Amy had no platter to claim, so she stayed outside by the fire, wondering what the hell was happening to the Solonskys. Their mother, a stoic German Jew, was weeping into Hannah's phone eight times a day, Eric the atheist had joined a synagogue where he said kaddish every morning before work, and Amy was burning quiches for a love interest. How well did Amy know her family? How well did she know herself? How well do you know anyone until you've seen them grieve?

The flames faded while the cicadas whined and an airplane passed over Bertrand Court. Amy eased herself out
of her chair. A shovel lay behind the fire pit. She grabbed it, scooped up the embers, and spread the ashes evenly before she sprinkled them with the last few drops of Hannah's wine. It was time to take her sister home.

SYLVIA'S SPOON

Hannah Solonsky, June 1992

I
steal a sterling silver baby spoon from my great-aunt Sylvia while her body, barely cold, rests under a blanket of disheveled earth at the Beth Shalom Cemetery. I do it in her kitchen, on impulse, while I'm looking for a teaspoon to stir my chamomile, seconds before my family begins reciting the mourner's kaddish in my aunt's living room.
Yisgadal ve yiskadash shema rabah, amen.

My mother, loud and tone-deaf, can't even finish the prayer she's so weepy. We all are. She enters the kitchen to put a handful of used Kleenex into the trash, and I slide the spoon further into my pocket. I run my fingers around the tiny bowl and up along the skinny handle to the tip, which is inscribed with the Hebrew letter
hey
. My name, Hannah Solonsky, begins with a
hey
; this piece of flatware is my destiny. Besides, finders keepers.

I imagine that this spoon has survived pogroms and a long passage to Ellis Island, and I want to siphon its fortitude for my baby. I'm thirteen weeks pregnant, my new record for not miscarrying. Every morning I pray from
The Jewish Women's Guide to Fertility
, a book I would have snickered at two years ago. I suffer the indignity of progesterone suppositories — the added hormones make me throw up in my office trash can — and I avoid foods I ate and clothes I wore while unsuccessfully carrying babies one through three. I take pregnancy yoga classes to manage the stress from keeping it all straight.

Danny can't win. If he's enthusiastic about the baby, I tell him not to jinx things. If he's cautious, I interrogate him — a man of reason, not instinct — about his “true gut” on this pregnancy. My parents are no help; my mother worries so much that I end up comforting her, and my father changes the subject but then emails me the cell phone numbers of his old med school buddies who specialize in fertility. My siblings have always leaned on me, and they wouldn't get it anyway. Eric is trying to mate, and Amy is consumed with being Amy. Most of my friends are reveling in their fecundity. I cling to this spoon and the hope that my dead aunt is taking care of my baby somewhere out there in the ether.

On the flight home from the funeral, I watch the Milwaukee homes, adorned with pink flamingos and aboveground swimming pools, disappear into a puff of clouds, and I sip lukewarm orange juice out of a plastic cup. I like the way my aunt's spoon rests against my thigh. Aunt Sylvia used to laugh at my knock-knock jokes and hang my art projects on her fridge and look the other way when I pinched pieces of meringue from the top of her icebox cake. I feel more hopeful than I have in weeks.

The plane is hovering over the Potomac when I kiss Danny's cheek, breathing in the familiar scent of Dial soap. “Let's name our baby Sylvia.” As soon as these words leave my lips, I want them back.

Danny gives me the wan smile he's cultivated. “Let's just see what happens.” He strokes my arm.

“Oh God, Danny. Don't tell me you're too superstitious to name the baby,” I say, when in fact I cling to
superstition like Velcro. I lean my head back and close my eyes, signaling that the conversation is over. My hand rests on my mildly distended belly as I daydream about my little Sylvia. It will be a warm spring day, and she'll sit on my lap licking vanilla icing off a cupcake, wiping her sticky fingers on my knees. She'll smell like baby sweat and sugar. I'll smooth her tangle of ringlets — auburn like Danny's — away from her eyes. I can practically hear her giggle. Fear forms in the back of my throat and swells into my esophagus like a hive, as it always does when I allow myself to hope that this baby will survive.

Later that night, shortly after eleven, I feel like someone is yanking my abdomen shut with a drawstring. Shit. Cramps turn into nausea, and I beg my baby to stay put. Danny pages the obstetrician while I stumble to the bathroom, clutching the spoon. Talisman in hand, I negotiate with God. No deal. Before the sun rises, I deliver my baby.

I rest my head against the side of the toilet and gaze at the emptied contents of my womb. I try to capture the clump of blood and tissue with my aunt's spoon, but my efforts only loosen it into a spray of red and greenish gray that dissolves into the bowl. I let my fingers linger in the cold red water before I close the lid. Aunt Sylvia appears to me: the slightly bulging gray eyes and the lisp and the sad smile pasted on soft, pink lips.

Danny mops my forehead with a washcloth. I stand up slowly and rinse off the spoon, turning the faucet on full blast in a futile attempt to drown out the sound of the flushing toilet.

One week later, Danny lounges on our bed staring slack-jawed at ESPN, as he has done for each of the past six nights. Who gives a damn about the Cardinals?

I forage in our pantry for Tylenol. We're out of cereal. A jar of homemade raspberry jam, our annual holiday gift from Robin, sits next to a bottle of capers; the colors remind me that I did get to see my actual baby, instead of just a black sonogram screen devoid of the pulsing light the size of a thumbtack. We disposed of those babies during tidy office visits followed by written instructions to call if there was too much blood. There's always too much blood.

I dump four tablespoons of jam and eight capers into a bowl and then retrieve the spoon from my purse; I use it to mix the concoction and ladle it into a small Ziploc baggie. Sylvia.

By the time I return to Danny, baggie and spoon in hand, he's asleep on our bed, his face bathed in the blue TV light, his mile-long eyelashes, blond at the tips, fanning the tender skin beneath his eyes. He looks like he's eleven years old. A fresh soul. The foot rubs and the phone calls from the office aren't working, but at least he's trying. I can't muster up the energy to comfort him. Before the miscarriages, I would have cheered him up by taking him bowling or seducing him or renting a Monty Python movie; we'd sit in front of the television drinking cheap beer and eating potato chips, laughing — Danny at John Cleese's ridiculousness, me at Danny — until we could barely breathe.

It's hot for June, and the breeze from the air-conditioning vent chills my toes. I turn off the light, pull my T-shirt over my head, and crawl into bed beside him, cradling his smooth back against my breasts. He mumbles something and reaches over to grab my hip. I move slightly, and he rolls over and runs his hands through my dirty hair. We don't make love — too raw, too soon. Sleep finds me still clutching the baggie of raspberry jam and capers and Aunt Sylvia's spoon.

The next morning, I cancel my nine o'clock staff meeting. I was scheduled to fly to Boston the day after I miscarried, so now the whole office knows what happened, compromising my status as den mother of our “little nonprofit that could.” I'm going to have to face my coworkers. Best to get it over with, so at noon I stop by the office to pick up some files, and they treat me like I've got a raging case of pinkeye, except for Valerie, the stripper turned receptionist, who has a six-year-old son. She greets me with a homemade loaf of banana bread she's been keeping in her desk drawer for me. I almost cry.

I go home and try to nap. Nothing doing, so I pull on an old pair of shorts from my Bucky Badger days and walk two blocks up M Street to a coffeehouse that doesn't sell anything beginning with the letters “frap.” Danny wants to move to Bethesda, but the thought of living in the suburbs without children thoroughly depresses me.

A cell-phone-blabbing mother spills her latte on me; the hot liquid burns my thigh. “Watch where you're
going,” she says, and her brusque words crack me open like a walnut. Instead of crying, I find a table and rub my iced tea against my leg.

A man with kind eyes and a thumb ring sits down next to me and asks to borrow a pen. I reach into my purse, and the baggie falls to the table. We both examine it.

“Must have been a hell of a sandwich.” He laughs nervously.

“Keep it.” I slide a pen at him with more force than I intend and snatch the baggie from the table. These days, I go nowhere without my spoon and baggie; they make me feel close to my Sylvias. Strange, I know, but they comfort me when nobody else can. One miscarriage and you get “Seventy-five percent of women miscarry during their first pregnancy.” With the second, it's “My sister/cousin/hairdresser had two; you'll be fine.” Three begets “I know of a fertility clinic out in Gaithersburg.” I'm on number four.

I return to our apartment and go straight to the guest room I've been avoiding since I lost Sylvia. A stack of pink, blue, and yellow hand-me-downs from Robin provides the only color against the oatmeal carpet and white futon.

Danny's shoved the teak wooden cradle into the corner. We bought it at the Georgetown Flea Market last summer, a few days before our first miscarriage. I remove the spoon and the baggie from my purse and lay them in the cradle. With the edge of my thumb I rock the bassinet back and forth so gently that the spoon and the baggie barely move.

The day folds into itself. At five, I'm massaging a chicken breast with olive oil when Danny calls. “I have to show a house tonight, sweetie. Can I pick up some Ben and Jerry's on the way home?” He sounds both anxious and relieved to take a night off from our grief. I don't blame him. I call my mom in Milwaukee. Just because.

“Whatcha doin'?” I try to sound like that plucky girl who beat the entire sixth grade class in an arm-wrestling tournament, who trotted off to Mali to run an AIDS program, and not the hormonal casualty I am.

“Thinking about you, honey.”

“No need.”

“We spent today at Aunt Sylvia's house, sorting her things.”

My cheeks flush, and I feel like I did when I was eight and my father caught me stealing a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from Winkie's. “Did you find the spoon?”

“The one from your great-grandma Hannah from Minsk?” My mother sounds amused; she's a fourth-generation German Jew and often disparages her mother-in-law's Eastern European ways.

“Yeah,” I mumble.

“No sign of it. Right before your grandma Goldie passed, when her dementia got really bad, she went on and on about that spoon and some handkerchief that I've still never seen.”

My heart quickens as my mother tells me about a feud between my grandmother and my aunt over this spoon. She's fuzzy about the details, but my grandmother was mad as hell that barren Sylvia kept their mother's baby spoon for herself instead of letting her have it.

I sleep fitfully. I dream that a pregnant Aunt Sylvia eats Neapolitan ice cream with the baby spoon while Grandma Goldie sits in her favorite chair and watches a toddler with braids stand alone on a grassy knoll playing Captain, May I? Raspberries stain the girl's white overalls, and her eyes bulge slightly. The images crash into each other like scenes in an MTV music video.

The next morning, I'm shampooing my hair when I retrieve a memory of the spoon. I was five and a half when my parents let Eric, Amy, and me stay with Aunt Sylvia while they went to the Cayman Islands. She ran us bubble baths and wrapped us in towels that she'd warmed in the dryer. Cocooned in our bathrobes, we curled up on the sofa bed and ate Jiffy Pop. She packed Hostess Ding Dongs in our lunch boxes, and I watched her polish her silver until it sparkled. Only after she finished the candlesticks and kiddush cups did she shine the baby spoon.

On the last day of our stay, I asked her if I could feed my doll with the spoon, which, even as a child, I knew she didn't want me to touch. I also knew that she couldn't say no to me. She nodded toward the spoon, and I grabbed it greedily.

“Here, my little Melanie.” I placed the spoon gingerly against the doll's plastic mouth. “My little baby, my baby.” I rocked Melanie back and forth. I could feel my aunt watching me, so I hammed it up. “Mommy loves you, Mommy loves you so much.” On some level, I knew I was making Aunt Sylvia feel like I did when my brother waved his extended bedtime or gum-chewing privileges in my face. My aunt never polished her silver in front of me
again. A year later, I tortured my grandma Goldie with questions about the spoon, but she told me nothing.

To rinse this memory away, I stand under the shower until the water turns cold. I leave a message for my boss telling him that I'm taking off a few more days. I pop my wedding video into the VCR. Danny breaks the glass, and then we kiss as we'd practiced: affectionate but not too much tongue. I fast-forward to Aunt Sylvia, who is fingering a stray rose petal when the camera zooms in on her. She fumbles with the microphone and holds it to her lips, recently touched up with a fresh coat of lipstick. Pink Velvet. Revlon. Funny the things you remember. Her large eyes dart around the room, and she clears her throat several times. “Like someone pulled them off the top of a cake, this bride and groom.” She giggles nervously and continues. “My wish for my Hannah is that she know every kind of naches life has to offer.” Her laughter fades.

I replay the clip over and over. My aunt is smiling, but her eyes are slightly watery. How could I have missed this? Maybe she suspected that I wasn't going to be able to have children. Maybe she was mourning Uncle Irving. No, he was an asshole; this has to be about me. What possessed me to swipe a fertility totem from a barren woman? How could I have stolen my aunt's birthright?

Tears are forming somewhere in my skull. To stave off another tidal wave of grief, I drive around the Beltway thinking about my aunt.

“Call me Aunt Sylvia. All the kids do,” she told Danny seven years ago when I presented him to her in a dry run for the later round of family introductions. She motioned to a wall of framed photos of my grandmother's progeny while I poked around in her fridge for a Pepsi. She loved to brag about me: “My bat mitzvah…voice like an angel…captain of the volleyball team.”

I joined my aunt and Danny in the dining room, where they were laughing at one of his corny jokes. And when I recited the blessings over the candles later that night, I surprised myself with my silent prayer that my walls be filled with photos of my own children and grandchildren.