Sacred Time (34 page)

All Ida knows is that my cousin died as a girl.

Early in our marriage, at a family dinner, when Ida asked my mother how Bianca's death happened, everyone stared at me; and in that brutal moment—that brutal and eternal moment without sound—it came to me that family is the most violent unit, and I felt certain that retribution would come from within my family.

Aunt Floria was the first to glance away. Her daughter's death is one huge ripple—a tidal wave, rather—that seized all of us and flung us down in strange formations from where we've struggled to come back to what once was familiar. It was different for every one of us. There was no clarity, no common focus, only conflicting angles of vision, colliding and aligning in a mosaic, chaotic and orderly, shifting whenever one of us seized upon some measure of guilt to keep us linked to Bianca: for my mother that it happened while I was alone with Bianca in the kitchen; for Aunt Floria that she wasn't in the kitchen to prevent it; for Belinda that she hid the onyx giraffe.

For me, of course, it's that last minute by the open window.

Sometimes I dream the story of my family, the dream-story in which Bianca is still alive. Most of it is without texture and color, as if I were watching shadow dancers through a translucent curtain, flat shadows that shrink or loom depending on how close they come to the lights, one suddenly twice as large as the other, the way people will loom inside your mind when they fill your thoughts. When one of the dancers moves in front of the curtain, she's suddenly her regular size, three-dimensional, and wearing colors: red and yellow and purple. In my dream-story, the only moment that stands out like that—sharply; vibrantly; irrevocably—is when Bianca climbs from the chair to the windowsill. Countless times I have touched that moment just as those dancers touched the gauzy curtain between them, when it looked as though the dancer in front were reaching up toward the hand of the shadow giant behind the curtain, who was reaching down. Countless times I have revised that moment when Bianca stands up on the windowsill, and I usually manage to freeze her the moment
before
she flies away.

I can. As long as I cease to want anything. As long as I remember this: wanting is a reason for not having. I practice not having many things. If things accumulate, I give them away.

I'm so consumed by the effort of keeping Bianca there, on the windowsill, that sometimes I wish I could let her fall, hear her scream as she plummets to the ground, stand by her grave, and watch her coffin sink into the ground. And live through that.

No one asked me: “How did you trick her into flying?” And because no one did, I could not assault my family with the truth, could not trade confession for atonement. My penance: to keep my family braced with my silence. At first I kept the silence to protect myself. Then to protect my parents. Then Aunt Floria. And now my son, although I suspect that what continues to harm long beyond the act of violence is the silence. No one mentions Bianca when I'm around. Still, I'm sure any conversation that breaks off when I enter a room has to be about her. I believe they want me to forget Bianca ever existed. But I want her to exist. And some days, I manage to persuade myself that she flew off on her own. That I was only teasing her. That we both heard the long-drawn sighs of an accordion. That she said, “There's Papa.” And that I tried to stop her.

When I offer to pay for cabs to my mother's class, she refuses and continues to walk from her apartment to Jerome Avenue to catch the Woodlawn IRT to 149th, then walk across to the Hub. And that's while it's still light. To think of her coming back after dark by herself makes me sick with worry.

“I like to walk,” she tells me.

“As far as I'm concerned, that class is the most dangerous thing in your life.”

She assures me the students hold vinyl bolsters between them when they team up to rehearse their kicks and punches.

“That's not what I meant, but even that could injure you. Some of those types must be twice your weight. At your age—”

“The only bad thing so far is a rash on my feet.”

“What if one of those types followed you from that neighborhood?”

“The carpets there…But now I wear socks.”

“You told me your legs were sore.”

“Only the muscles in my calves. It means I'm getting stronger. Now, quit skutching me, Anthony.”

I search the
New York Times
instead of skimming it. Suddenly there are more reports of blood and violence in the world, stimulating further violence.

Wednesday evening, I call my mother to make sure she's back from her class. But no one answers. Ten minutes later, I try again. Nothing. By now, Ida will have tucked Joey in for the night. It's what I miss most when I stay at the apartment, the ritual of saying good night to my son, turning his reading light so we can cast shadow animals against the illuminated wall, asking him, “Are you quite settled?” and hearing him say, “Quite settled, Daddy.”

If only I could keep him at this age, where he's content to find the shadows of animals in the configurations of his hands. Whenever it's Ida's turn to live in the house with Joey, I call frequently, because the apartment feels bleak after the bookstore and café downstairs have closed. I make plans with Joey to ride bikes or go to Yankee Stadium. I get us good seats, though somehow I still like the cheap seats in the top bleachers.

Traces of Ida are everywhere in this apartment. In our house, too, but at least there I'm with Joey and don't need Ida quite as much.

At nine-forty-five I finally reach my mother. “Tell me something—”

“Hold on, Anthony. I just got in.”

I hear her setting down the phone. A man's voice in the back. Something clunking. I'm ready to call the police.

A click. “Can you hear me?”

“Is someone bothering you?”

“Yes. You.”

“What was that noise?”

“My shoes. I kicked them off so I can sit on the bed and put up my feet while I'm on the phone with my son, who—”

“I also heard a voice.”

“Now,
that
is low-budget movie stuff, Anthony.”

“I can hear someone there with you.”

“Probably just the television.”

“It doesn't sound like television.”

“Oh…you must have heard James Hudak. He's replacing some wiring.” She has always felt sorry for James—used to feed him dinner now and then during those months my father stayed with Elaine. After James' grandmother died, he took over her lease, and he's lived on the first floor since, never married, working as a waiter a couple of days a week, trading repairs for my mother's cooking.

“Make sure you lock up after James. I fretted about you all day at the café.”

“You should just cook.”

“I can cook
and
fret.”

“You're too good a chef to piss it away with fretting.”

Next I call Ida, try to win her back by getting her to fret with me about my mother. “I can already see my mother crouched by a dumpster, bleeding from a knife wound in her belly. Or in a coffin, her lips painted a vulgar pink that—”

“Pink is not her color,” Ida interrupts.

“I have visions of my mother kicking and punching four hairy bikers who take a broken bottle to her face.”

“After she gets out of the coffin?”

“A different scenario. Altogether. You're not taking me seriously. All that
could
happen to her. I have visions of her in a coma that has lasted years, hooked up to machines, her skin the color of salt. I see her, Ida. I hear her. Even in my dreams, I see her. And now she wants me to attack her.”

“Joey told me.”

“Fighting with words isn't enough for her anymore, she says. Do you think she's maybe…you know, maybe getting senile?”

“No,” Ida says firmly. “Leonora is very clear and determined.” Ida loves my mother. Admires my mother. Once a month, the two of them swim in the ancient basement pool where Riptide Grandma used to do her one mile every morning after mass.

“She used to talk about plays she wanted to see, about her friends. Now all she talks about is that class. I think she likes the danger.”

“I'm sure she does.”

“Really?”

“Leonora needs a bit of an edge.”

“I've offered to help her move to a building that has security. That old neighborhood used to be great, but now it's claustrophobic. The noise, the dirt—”

“It's been her home since she was a young woman.”

“Still, I don't understand why she stays there.”

“Because people identify with neighborhoods they've lived in for a long time. Leonora knows where everything is. People know her. Most of the shopkeepers have changed, but some are still the same. She's also near the subway, can get to Macy's or Rockefeller Center in thirty minutes on the D train.”

“Yes, but—”

“All that obviously means something to her. Besides, the apartment is rent-controlled.”

“Something is always breaking. Whenever I'm there, James Hudak is repairing stuff. She's living in an oasis of a different time, when we had our windows open and could hear violin lessons from the courtyard. Saxophone lessons. When the neighborhood was a little village and the children played in the street.”

“You're romanticizing the years before you got air conditioning.” Ida's voice is dry. “It was like that where I lived. We got air conditioning and closed the windows, and when we walked up the stairs, we heard the air conditioning, not music lessons.”

“It isolated us…changed our entire neighborhood.”

“And made us more comfortable.”

“We could no longer hear the sounds of other families.”

“Thank God for that.”

“You win.” I laugh.

“It's not about winning, Antonio. Unless…”

“Yes?”

“Unless first prize is that you'll let me go to sleep.”

To lure Ida into staying awake, I beget words. Mimic feelings. Open myself to her, bit by bit. Let her reel me back into language, reel me back into existence, all along knowing I don't deserve her or Joey. During fourteen years of marriage, Ida and I have spent more days alone than together. The first time she left me was before Joey was conceived, when it still was just the two of us, and though she came back after forty-one days, and though we made and raised this child between us, I expect her to leave again.

“We all have that darkness,” she told me last winter. It was evening, we were on the subway to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and I felt so cornered by her that I wondered what it would be like to court her with my darkness. Just then, a man in a dirty coat stumbled past us in the aisle, arms like flippers, and I thought, My God, that's what it's like for me, too, day to day, marked and isolated. Where did it go in him, the dread and the fear? And then I knew. Because it broke through as he heaved himself atop an empty seat and stood up, his flipper arms thrashing the air while he shrieked, “I am the devil. I am the devil.” I said to Ida, “That's me. That's what it's like to be me.”