If I Told You Once: A Novel (35 page)

Then there’s Sashie who always told me to behave, to walk with my spine straight and ignore the boys on the street. You’re special, she told me, you’re not like them, they’re rabble. Different blood runs in you. Hold your head up, for God’s sake.

She touched me sometimes but in an awkward way, as if she was not sure how to do it.

She had gray in her hair and arranged it in an upswept stiff way. She wore collars like doilies and always lipstick, lipstick that bled into the lines around her mouth.

Then there’s Ilana, whom I could not bear to call my great-grandmother because saying that word is like trying to shout across a canyon, across endless distance. And she did not seem far away at all, she gave me conspiratorial glances and told me secrets, and our hands when we pressed them together to measure were exactly the same size.

When I was small she made me a cape and a hood all in red, and I wore it for years whenever I went outside; and she told me a story about a girl who wore a hood made of a wolf’s hide.

She was reserved, not pushy like the other two. I had to seek her out.

I had to walk into the dark room that terrified me when I was younger, walk into the mess of dark ramshackle furniture, precariously stacked so it seemed it might fall any moment and crush you. There were spiders, and an unidentifiable scuttling that might have been mice, and a strange sickening dust that was soft and sticky as pollen. But if I braved the forest, I would find the treasure in the center of it: Ilana, with her knitting and her hands that were hard and at the same time soft like clothes laundered a thousand times.

I did not think it unusual, when I was younger, to have three mothers. I assumed everyone did.

*   *   *

Mara used to have a job in a hospital. She was not supposed to bring me but sometimes she did.

She was not a doctor, or even a nurse, though I think she would have liked to be.

She did a lot of cleaning: making up beds and mopping and wheeling carts around.

I liked to knock on doors and pay visits to strangers while she worked. I met a man with tubes in his nostrils and a blue cast to his face. He had a large beaky nose and the strong sunlight from the window shone through it, making it pinkly translucent, I could see the veins threading through it. He gave me the most beautiful smile when I came in, though his teeth were in a glass by the bed. We played cards all afternoon.

I saw the room where babies lay in rows, in glass cases, like meat at a butcher shop or expensive jewelry arrayed on velvet.

I met a woman who ate pills like candy, all different colors, and she offered me some. Her face was kind though her eyes moved loosely in two different directions.

I talked to a woman with very little hair. It was soft and downy like a baby chick’s. She told me she had had her breasts removed. I did not understand what she meant (I was much younger then). Removed? Removed to where? Where were they now?

I saw a dead person for the first time. I did not know he was dead at the time. I thought he was very shy and did not want to talk.

One time I was sitting in a waiting room with a man who was waiting for something. His eyes were leaking, and he was wiping his face with wadded tissues. First he was telling me about his wife, and what had happened to her and what the doctors said and what they were doing to her and about every asshole he was going to sue for malpractice if anything went wrong. Then he was snuffling into the tissues some more and drinking from a small bottle and sweating out of every pore in his face. And then he was sitting beside me and then he was wiping his face on my shirt and I sat very still and told myself he was only doing it because he had used up all his tissues. No other reason. Later on the bus ride home Mara asked me what I had gotten all over myself. I did not tell her. I did not want to touch it with my hands.

Mara left the hospital job not long after that. She told me she had quit.

But Sashie told me she had been fired for breaking the rules. She had been caught in the nursery, cradling other people’s babies.

*   *   *

At mealtimes all three of them would try to slip the choicest bits from their plates to mine. Take this, Ilana would say, it will make your blood strong. This will clear up your skin, Sashie would say, directing a forkful toward my mouth. Mara would say little, would simply transfer most of her meal to my plate with an expression of stern martyrdom.

Eat it, they all said. Eat it, I didn’t want it anyway. Really.

I
don’t need it,
I
don’t matter anymore, they seemed to say.
You’re
the one who needs to grow up big and strong.

Looking at my loaded plate and their bare ones was usually enough to make me lose my appetite.

Mother, I said sometimes, just to see the way all three raised their heads expectantly.

I was always pulled in three directions as I was growing up.

I was used to it.

But the spring I was fourteen it got much worse, so that I thought they would tear me to pieces.

It started when something happened to Ilana.

She came home one day with a wild light in her eye. Her hands shook as they stroked my hair. Hours after she had returned she was still out of breath.

Please tell me, I said, please tell me, whatever it is.

She told me then, about the three women whom she had left behind long ago, who had crossed oceans and years to find her again. She repeated her stories of how they cackled and scratched themselves and picked the fleas from each others’ hair, and how they spoke of things she did not want to hear but could not shut out.

How they unspooled the thread and measured it and cut it. How some lengths of thread were short and others long; and once the thread had been cut it could not be changed, neither the short threads made longer nor the long threads made shorter. No matter how much people might want the pieces to be different.

The threads had been cut. There was no hope of it being any other way.

She said: I have told you once and I will tell you again—I came to this country from a land far away because I thought here I might be able to cut my own thread as I chose.

She said that at one time she thought she had succeeded, but now she was not so sure. She was no longer sure if she was cutting her own thread, or if it was being cut for her.

These things sound strange. But I understood with one part of my brain.

She began telling me other things that she had kept inside a long time.

Sometimes she spoke a language I had never heard, and seemed surprised that I did not understand.

When Ilana began her telling, Sashie and Mara noticed and began their own. Theirs consisted of drawing me aside, whispering in my ear with their eyes rolling suspiciously all around. Mara even came in my room at night to mutter words over me when she thought I was sleeping.

They accused and denied, each told me she was telling me the truth and everyone else was lying.

I felt as if I were being courted, as if they were all trying to gain favor. As if I were some kind of sleepless king, and they were telling stories, desperately telling stories as if it was their last chance, as if they would die in the morning.

Their voices all sounded the same. Sometimes when they were telling their stories I closed my eyes and could not tell who was speaking. The same voice, in varying degrees of brittleness. The same inflections, same gestures of speech.

My mother, all three said, with a mixture of love and fear.

My brother, they said with adoration.

My daughter, they said, their voices fearful and uncertain.

Mother. Brother. Daughter.

If you did not look you would think it was the same person every time.

That is heredity, I suppose: passing along the same eyes and hair, the same tenacity, same style of speaking. The same voices.

My voice, I suppose, sounds like theirs.

And perhaps we all sound alike because Ilana taught Sashie to speak, Sashie taught Mara, and they all taught me. So that people tell me I have a touch of a foreign accent, something they can’t place, though I have never been out of this city. It is Ilana’s voice, passed down and diluted.

Our conversations must sound like a person arguing with herself.

Their faces looming over me, the features were all the same. Same but different. Sashie’s neck looked strained from constantly lifting her chin, her eyes tired from always looking down her nose. Mara’s face looked bloated, congested with secrecy, with suppressed thoughts and mucus and yearnings she could barely hold in.

And Ilana. Her face was covered with lines, not deep, the thinnest of lines like threads lying on the surface of her skin. And she had the mark I loved, a smear of red next to her mouth, that drew your eyes to her lips.

Sashie woke me in the middle of the night to tell me the things she had forgotten to mention during the day. Mara offered to braid my hair, and when I sat before her she wrapped her hands in my hair and held tight for hours, telling me more stories about my father, how fine-looking he was and how he loved her and how much she had done for him, with her breath hot and wet in my ear. Sashie came to my school one day, took me out of class and brought me to a museum where she showed me jeweled eggs and gloomy paintings. Once when Ilana was out, Sashie took my hand and drew me into Ilana’s room, showed me crumbling documents and told me about blood and nobility and a lost fortune. Her eyes shone, her spit flew. She dabbed at her mouth with a lace handkerchief.

Ilana’s tales were the only ones I wanted to hear.

How can you stand to listen to her? Mara said to me. It’s all lies and foolishness. Do you really believe all that? She probably told you she walked across the Atlantic in a pair of magic boots.

No, I said.

She can’t prove anything, Sashie said. She has no proof, all she has are these words and pictures in her head. How can you trust that?

I just do.

*   *   *

Ilana lived in the largest room in the apartment, and she kept it so dim you could hardly see its boundaries. Sashie’s room was smaller, the walls entirely covered with yellowed pictures of starlets from generations ago. Mara’s room was smaller still, it was the room that had once been my father’s and she slept there among outdated medical textbooks and pencils she allowed no one to use. My room was the smallest of all, it was encircled by the others, a windowless closet in the heart of the apartment.

The rooms were like a series of nesting boxes. Each could fit inside the next. They were like those hollow wooden dolls that can be opened to reveal smaller ones, which can be opened to reveal another. And so on and so on forever.

Rooms within rooms and stories within stories.

*   *   *

I did not have many friends at school.

I did not have any, in fact.

I did not mind, I had too much company already, with Sashie and Mara constantly hovering like vultures. It was a relief to go to school, push my way through the crowded hallways, read books, and ignore everyone around me. People spoke to me and I did not know what to say to them.

I stayed indoors most of the time, which kept my skin very white. And my hair was as black as Ilana’s. I wore black clothes all the time, just as she did.

When I was in elementary school the other girls had called me a witch, scratched me with their nails, giggled behind their notebooks. But now I was in high school and suddenly everyone wore black and had pale skin and cultivated a disheveled haunted look. Now I blended in.

Still I had nothing to say to anyone. They were like a strange foreign tribe, with their own catchphrases and rituals. I let my hair flop forward to cover my face. I felt safe in there, a black forest.

I met Vito by nearly stepping on him one day on my way home from school.

He was sprawled out across the front stoop of my building, blocking the way. He had his head tipped back, hands clutching his chest. I did not know if he was hurt or asleep or dead. I thought I should check his throat for a pulse. Then I thought I should pull down his T-shirt where it had ridden up to expose his belly. Then I thought I would just step around him.

He looked too young to be a homeless person. His clothes were too clean.

I raised my foot to step over him when he suddenly opened his eyes, sat up, and grabbed my ankle. Finally, he said.

I tried to pull away. Finally what? I said.

I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.

Why?

I’ve seen you at school, he said. Come sit here a minute, he said and patted the stoop beside him.

I shifted from foot to foot. I wanted to dash inside and up the stairs. But I could not stop looking at him, at the metal studs that pierced both his cheeks.

You go to my school? I said.

Yeah.

I’ve never seen you before, I said.

Well, you’re missing out, baby, he said and I saw the flash of a stud in his tongue.

What do you want?

Want to get to know you, he said. You’re one of those quiet types I bet, he said, look like you’ve got something going on. And I want to know what it is.

He put out a hand and tugged at my skirt. Sit down a minute and talk to me, he said. Little ol’ Vito isn’t going to hurt you.

I sat.

No one had ever expressed an interest in what I had to say before. People were always too busy making me listen.

He put his hand on my thigh. The nails were close-bitten. His hair was bleached a harsh, unnatural color and he wore a string of tiny red beads around his neck. I could see that he was just a little older than me, but his face already had the beginnings of creases around the eyes and mouth. Tired skin. His eyes were strange and dilated, but they fixed on me and stayed there and waited. I liked that.

I could not stop staring at the metal in his cheeks, on his tongue, piercing his eyebrow. I ached for him, the kind of pity you feel for a run-over animal in the street. I had the urge to protect him from whatever it was that had abused him like this, worn him down and punched him full of holes like a sieve.