If I Told You Once: A Novel (30 page)

I’m serious too, he said.

I could tell he was hardly listening. I told him: You need me.

Of course I do, he said smiling. You’re my sister.

No, I said, you really need me.

And then I reminded him of the thing we never spoke of, and he finally stopped smiling.

You see, years earlier I had taken his entrance examinations for him for medical school. The examinations then were not regulated as strictly as they are now. It was a simple thing for me to take the exams and sign our last name. He could never have passed them himself. I love my brother dearly, but his mind is like a sieve.

Since that time I had helped him with his classes whenever I could, prepared him for exams. Occasionally, in a show of pride, he would reject my help. But I was certain he would never be able to finish medical school without me. I reminded him of this.

I thought he would give in when I delivered this blow. But he only looked at me strangely, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

He wanted to marry her immediately, but then he was invited to spend a month training with a famous doctor in another city. He decided to seize the opportunity, and he would marry Chloe as soon as he returned. He set about preparing for his departure; he was very excited; it was the first time he had ever left home.

The day before his departure he came to our mother and asked if Chloe could stay with us while he was gone. She could use his room.

Apparently she had been turned out of her apartment suddenly and had nowhere to go. Apparently she had no family close by.

It will give you a chance to get to know her, my brother explained.

The whole situation seemed suspicious to me, but no one else seemed to notice.

My mother agreed enthusiastically, my grandmother crocheted and said nothing.

My brother left. And the strange girl Chloe moved in.

Now I had no peace. She seemed to fill the apartment. My initial impression of her was not disproved, no, it was heightened by the close quarters. My mother enjoyed her company, she suspected nothing. The girl was crafty that way.

Her smell, the cigarettes, a nauseating lilac perfume—she permeated the apartment. And her eyes never lost their cold amphibious stare. Even while chattering to my mother or arranging her hair before the bathroom mirror, I would see in her eyes a deviousness, a secret intelligence.

I knew why she had come. She wanted my brother, she wanted to wrest him from me. She knew I was the only one who understood what was happening and would stand in her way. She was plotting and planning, trying to catch me unawares.

I could not eat. I could not sleep, I feared she would come and smother me in the night with a pillow. She was like a cat, a cat who rubs against your legs, purring, in the day, and then lies on your face as you sleep to drown you in the night. I would not meet her eyes, I knew if I did she would hypnotize me without a word, lead me to jump from a window or swallow my tongue.

You see, I understood who she was. I had found her out. She was one of those dark sea creatures who lure men to their deaths for sport, like the mermaids that call out to sailors in the moonlight and then drag them to the ocean floor trapped in their long scaly hair; like the sirens with their irresistible yammering.

I knew she was one of these underwater beings, with their strange bodies and cold blood. I knew because of the way she took long baths, every night she stayed with us. I watched her through the keyhole, luxuriating in the water, smoking a cigarette. I could not see all that she did; there were strange sounds, strange smells, I knew she was metamorphosing behind the door, growing fins and scales. I saw her hair floating in the steamy air, undulating like seaweed moving with the current.

I knew.

I knew because of her teeth: rows and rows, needle sharp, like a carp’s.

I knew because of the way she first came to my brother: through the water, silent, unsuspected, darting like a snake past the pale innocent pregnant women wallowing on the surface like cows in deep grass.

I had to save my brother, but I did not know how to get rid of her. I wanted to ask my grandmother, she was considered an authority on these matters. But she would know nothing about a sea creature like Chloe; my grandmother knew only the imps and goblins of the old country. She claimed she knew how to drive out the household spirits that extinguished cookstove fires and soured the milk, said she once brought a stillborn baby to life by blowing in one ear, causing the angel of death to flee out the other. Her little rituals involved candles, hair, whispered words. I had never truly believed in her stories, but it did seem that whenever I displeased her in some way I would later find myself afflicted with indigestion, chancre sores, hangnails, sties, dreams of falling, menstrual cramps like a crochet hook in the belly.

So I spoke to no one, I watched and waited, I listened at night as Chloe splashed in the bathtub, I knew she was thinking of my brother, my brother swimming, perhaps she was imagining his head suddenly appearing, rising up dripping and disembodied from the bathwater between her legs, his head held between her hands like John the Baptist’s on a plate. She churned the water about, gurgled; steam crept beneath the door and drifted through the cold apartment, advancing and touching and recoiling like a live thing.

The days passed, soon my brother would return. Soon they would be married, out of reach. I heard Chloe tell my mother: a small wedding, I’m an orphan you see, I have no family, so just a ceremony for us, and afterward we’ll take a trip to the seaside.

I knew I had to act. I thought of my brother, my poor brother, his body lying on the ocean floor plastered with starfish and sea urchins sucking out his juices, hermit crabs creeping in and out of his eye sockets, eels gliding in and out of the secret grottoes of his body.

There came an afternoon when I heard an incredible sound: silence. My grandmother’s relentless hook had stilled; it slipped from her grip and clattered to the floor. She was asleep, enveloped in her latest creation: an afghan, white and blue, large enough for a double bed. She was nearly finished with it, nearly buried by it. All I could see of her were her crabbed fingers, and a hank of her hair, greasy jet-black: she dyed it herself with her own secret concoction.

I watched her sleep; her breath hissed in and out with a regular ticking in the throat, like the click of a valve, as if she were made of machinery inside. Softly, softly, how the floorboards moaned, I reached past her, opened the door of the glass-front cabinet and took one of her forbidden bottles.

It was a square bottle, heavy, the dust on it an inch thick. It was filled with a dark, viscous liquid, dense and shiny. I knew Chloe would like it. You know how fish are so oily. She could use it on her scales. I put a ribbon on the bottle, presented it to her that night.

It’s for your bath, I said.

She took it and thanked me, but I did not dare look at her, for fear my eyes would give me away. We stood in the narrow hall together for a moment, toe to toe. I was aware more than ever before of her smell, a rank fish-market smell. My brother would be coming home the next day.

She said she was sorry we had not become better friends. She said she knew we had one thing in common: we both loved Jonathan very much. She thanked me again.

Her voice sounded perfectly natural, but I knew it was a ruse and she was growing more and more monstrous even as she spoke. I would not meet her gaze, it would turn me to stone. I said good night, walked down the hall, waited until I heard her start her bath, and then turned back to watch her through the keyhole.

I watched her pour the black liquid into the bathwater, saw it froth up. The bathroom was already filled with steam. I watched her step into the tub, one foot then the other, then she lowered herself into the water. I saw her face, damp with sweat, cigarette between her lips, eyes closed. I held my breath.

I thought my gift would drag her down the way oil spills can smother seals and fish and waterbirds. I thought she might thrash around and slowly sink down like the weary dinosaurs in tar pits. But she did not.

I waited, blood pounding in my ears and the doorknob pressing into my forehead. I saw the speck of ash linger at the end of her cigarette, quiver, fall. A spark. The bathwater burst into flame. A roar of air, and the fire shot up; the shock of light and a blast of air made me fall back and lean against the wall. It was so beautiful. I couldn’t see anything for a moment; then I saw beautiful green flowers blooming against the backs of my eyelids. I warmed my hands.

Later, later I stood on the sidewalk in front of the building, hugging my mother and grandmother to me as we stood among sirens and flashing lights, and handsome firemen offered us blankets and hot chocolate. Our neighbors huddled around us in their nightshirts. They all clutched their valuables: jewel boxes, insurance policies, tiny yipping dogs with bows in their hair.

Afterward everyone said the worst thing about it was the scream—the piercing, keening shriek of agony and despair that woke them all from sleep. They all agreed it was the most horrible thing they had ever heard, like fingernails on a chalkboard the size of the sky, yet a human sound, the sound of a child being dragged under the wheels of a train, a sound that made their hearts shrivel up and die inside them.

Of course they were exaggerating. The sound was not as bad as they said. It was a sound you may have heard yourself, if you are familiar with seafood. If you have ever cooked a lobster.

Ilana

I should have known this would happen.

Mara. It was inevitable.

I had watched her view of the world narrow and skew like a fun-house mirror over the years. I’d seen her crash into corners of furniture, and try to place her foot on a phantom stair as if she lived in a house invisible to the rest of us. I had watched her feelings for her brother sharpen and bloom into jealousy.

But I did not think it would come to this.

I never thought she would act.

I feel it is my fault. I should not have left my things where she could get at them.

You see, I had grown careless. I thought she was not interested in my work, so I had not guarded it carefully. She had always laughed at it, called it quackery and superstition.

But apparently she believed in it enough to use it for her own purposes.

I had found the bottle, uncorked and empty in the smoky apartment. I knew what she had done.

There’s a streak of violence in her. I see it now. Sometimes she can barely contain it.

Where did she get it, I wonder?

Mara

My brother returned from the distant city; he went to see Chloe in the hospital; he came home speechless and heartbroken.

I tried to comfort him. I knew it was upsetting for him to finally see the true Chloe, as I had seen her all along. I had glimpsed her myself in the clean white hospital bed, her hair singed off, her eyelids and ears gone, her body covered in stiff, shiny scales. The webbing between her fingers and toes. I thought she looked beautiful, so pure and natural.

My brother would not be comforted.

Our apartment was intact, though damp and smoky. No one could understand how the fire started, and everyone praised me for helping my mother and grandmother to safety.

My brother moved back into his room. I thought everything would return to normal. I had never been so happy.

But my brother abandoned his medical studies. He visited the hospital but spent most of his time in the apartment. All the starch had gone out of him. Slumped shoulders and a bruised face like a defeated boxer. He did not speak to us, or wash himself. He shuffled around the rooms in bedroom slippers, staring out of windows, jingling the change in his pockets.

He sat for long afternoons with our grandmother. Close together in her dark corner. I cannot imagine what they had to say to each other.

He wandered the apartment at all hours, oblivious to the weather outside. He brushed past me in the hallways without a word.

I knew what he was feeling. I have always known, without him needing to tell me. I knew he would come to me. In time.

One day I found him at the living-room window, holding the drape back with one hand.

It’s raining, Jonathan, I said.

What?

It’s raining, I said.

Yes, he said, sunlight reflecting on his glasses.

The next day he ran away to sea.

My mother and grandmother and I, we all missed him dreadfully. We waited, days and weeks, for some word from him. I was certain he would come for us, any day now he would come, with a pirate ship and a chest full of treasure.

My grandmother’s afghan, the double-sized one she had nearly finished, was destroyed in the fire. She was very agitated about it, glaring and silent for days. Then she took up her hook and began something new.

What is it going to be? I asked her the other day.

This one, she said, is for you.

She looked at me, her eyes were very clear and measuring. The hook wormed its way into the wool.

*   *   *

Sasha.

That was my mother’s name. All her life she’d wanted an American-sounding name; as a child she’d chosen Shirley. I can imagine her then, pinning her hair in curling papers, prissing up her mouth in front of the mirror, begging: Shirley, call me Shirley, mother.

For years my grandmother ignored her, played deaf; nights she whispered
Sashie
in my sleeping mother’s ear; days she wrote
Sasha
with salt in the bread before she baked it.

Eventually my mother gave up.

When I was born (or so I am told, and I have no reason to doubt it) my mother was determined to give me an American name. The most American-sounding name she could think of.

Mary. That was what she wanted to call me.

Blond curls, little lambs.

My grandmother went livid at the news: You can’t name the child that! You can’t name her after the mother of the Christian god. We’ll be cursed forever. You’ve already cursed the child by giving birth with all those men watching. Why do you want to make it worse?