If I Told You Once: A Novel (19 page)

I saw that the play meant something to her, in spite of the chintzy costumes and overblown speeches. It spoke to her somehow; these drunks and witches, and princes and scholars and bankers’ daughters were all real to her, more than real, they were larger than life.

She liked it, I think, because they acted out the things she felt inside but did not know how to express.

I did not see the ending of the play, did not even know if it was happy or sad. I was too busy watching my mother.

The room exploded with clapping and suddenly I was surrounded by bellies and back pockets because the audience had risen all together. The actors bowed again and again and my father got the biggest laugh when he bowed too low and fell drunkenly off the stage.

My mother and I stood outside in the street watching the people walking home arm in arm. The cold night air felt clean and good. My father came outside to join us for a moment. He put his arms around my mother, wiped her cheeks with his thumbs. Now he looked like my father again, the drunken glaze was gone from his eyes, he stood erect and graceful.

Was I that bad? he said.

Wonderful, my mother said, rubbing her eyes.

Still wonderful the twelfth time? he laughed. She had her hands on his chest.

Did you like it, Sashie? he said.

Yes, I said.

He left us then and went back inside to remove his costume and prepare the room for its daytime role as a classroom.

I walked home with my mother and she was silent, lost in her thoughts.

In a way, I think, the play was what was real to her and daily life was a pale charade.

My mother did not ask me to come again.

I would not have wanted to go anyway. It had made me uncomfortable to sit next to her in the audience. My mother was a private person, she usually kept her thoughts to herself. But during the play I had seen her face unfold like a flower, had seen her thoughts splashed plainly across her face.

It was a private moment for her. I felt I had been intruding, to sit and stare.

It was too much, just to sit there next to her was too much, my thigh touching hers.

Too much, too hot, too close.

I did not want to get too close to her.

I would not want her to see me naked and exposed with my heart splayed out, as I had seen her in the dark of the theater.

I was only a child then but I could sense what my mother was like; she was capable of anything if provoked, she was like a wild animal, fury-driven and ferocious.

I knew, somehow, that she could tear me to pieces if I let down my guard for a moment.

I did not want to get too close.

*   *   *

I dreamt a dream night after night that began like my favorite fairy tale and then turned sour.

The dream always began somewhere dark and close, like a forgotten drawer. There was soft slippery dust that clung to my lips and clothes and when I came out into the light I could not brush it away.

Then the dream was like a film set, with bright lights and director’s chairs, scaffolding, and cameras. I knew I was meant to play the princess, it was written in the script—but no one would believe me. They all laughed, they could not see past the gray film on my face and my dirty dress. You’re no princess, they said. There was a black coating on my hair but I could see out of the corners of my eyes that it was golden underneath, if they would only look.

Then my mother came toward me in satin hoopskirts with her face like a painted doll’s, and she did not walk, she rolled, as if she had wheels instead of legs. And behind her came my brothers, with ribbons in their hair, in pink and lavender dresses that strained across their chests and left their hairy calves and feet all exposed. When they saw me they pointed and laughed behind their hands, and simpered like evil stepsisters.

And then I realized what the story was, what their roles were and what mine was, and I felt relieved because the good parts of the story, the fairy godmother and the balls and gowns and glass slippers and handsome princes, were still to come. My mother handed me a broom and I swept diligently at the ashes on the floor and a thousand bright lights shone on us and many people, directors and assistants and technicians, seemed to be watching from the shadows. I swept and swept and my mother watched with her arms folded and I thought that the sooner I finished the task the sooner I would be dancing in the arms of the charming prince at the ball.

But the dust refused to behave, it rose up and stuck to my skin. I looked at my arm and it was covered with a gray linty fur that I could not scratch off. My brothers laughed and rolled in the dust, kicking up their legs so that I could see the enormous lace knickers they wore underneath.

The dust was coating my tongue now, crowding my eyes, I could not blink it away. I looked down and saw that I was entirely black and white and shades of gray like a newspaper photo though my brothers in their dresses were so gaudy colored they hurt my eyes. The cameramen pointed their camera at us and it was shaped like a cannon.

Then the fairy godmother appeared in a ball of light, and waved her wand and said in her flutey voice that her name was Glinda, good witch of the north, and she looked at me
so
kindly and seemed
so
familiar. But she was swept away by a horde of dwarves before I could remember where I had seen her before.

Where was my ball gown? And my dancing slippers and pumpkin coach?

It did not matter because we seemed to have skipped over that part of the story, and were already near the end. Here came the prince with the telltale slipper on a silken pillow. It was bright red with a low heel, covered in rubies with a bow on the toe. The prince’s face was bare and featureless as a plate but he had the most beautiful hair, a blond scroll of it like the jack of hearts in a deck of cards.

He knelt and I was glad that this silly charade would soon be over. All I had to do was put on the slipper and then everyone would know who I really was, the dust and rags would fall away and a royal crown would sprout from my head.

How could we have not seen how beautiful she was before, how could we have been so blind, the film directors and the prince and even my mother would say.

Printed on the label inside the shoe were the familiar blond boy and his dog, winking and beckoning me.

I drove my toes into the shoe’s mouth.

My foot would not go in.

There must be some mistake, I said.

The prince raised the flat blank front of his head to me, but he was no longer dressed like a prince. He was in a dirty soldier’s uniform and I realized he had no face because it had been blasted clean off in battle. He held his lost face, spread out on the pillow he held in his hands. An inverted mask, eyes like hard-boiled eggs and teeth laid out in a grin, a web of blood vessels holding it all together.

My brothers’ dresses had turned into uniforms, and my brothers now lay facedown and unmoving in the dust.

And now soldiers began raining from far above, they fell all around and their parachutes refused to open so when the men landed they collapsed, folded up like accordions with cracking snapping sounds. My mother wheeled about trying to catch them before they touched down; she held her skirt out in front of her to bag them, as if they were falling apples.

Pull the red cord, she called to the ones in the air but they did not seem to hear.

I tried again to jam my foot into the shoe but it would not go.

My foot bulged horribly all around, like a fat neck in a too-tight collar.

I somehow knew that if I could just get that shoe on my foot, everything would be all right.

I pushed and pushed as the men fell heavily all around, grunting as they landed.

My fat foot. The stubborn shoe.

I found a knife in my hand.

I sawed at my toe, hacked at my heel. Blood spurted, though I felt nothing. The little nubs of flesh fell in the dust. I tried my foot in the shoe and saw I would need to hew a strip off the side.

I tried again and the shoe finally fit, though it pinched sharply. I stood, I stamped, I clicked my heels together but the rain would not stop and my brothers did not rise.

I tried to turn them over, first one then the other, but they were stuck to the ground like scabs and would not budge. Men were piling up everywhere, arms and legs and limp useless parachutes spilling out too late and puffing up like blisters, and I drove my foot farther and farther into that shoe trying to make everything right.

The blood welled up.

I always woke with my left foot wedged between the bedpost and the wall.

The movie stars smiled comfortingly down at me. Trapped inside the black-and-white photographs, pinned to the wall, but they shifted and blinked and smiled all the same.

A trick of the light.

The first time I had the dream I told my mother about it. She listened, nodded sagely. I thought she would have some insight, an interpretation. But she said only: You should clean under your bed more often, maybe. And not eat fruit before bed.

The next time I had the dream I did not tell her. Nor the next time, nor the next.

The shoe never fit, no matter how hard I pressed.

In the dream I thrust my foot in, again and again, kicking my foot against the wall, night after night. I would kick and then wake to hear my mother calling from the other side of the wall: What’s that knocking? What is it? Is that you?

And before I could answer, she would always say: Shmuel? Is that you?

Lying in the dark, coming out of the dream, listening to her voice on the other side of the wall.

Hearing her say: You’re so late.

But I’ve been waiting up for you, she would say.

I would draw my sore foot back under the covers, try to catch my breath.

Be quiet, she would say then. Quietly, Shmuel. Don’t wake Sashie. If she hears you she’ll have bad dreams.

She’d say that and then I’d lie awake till morning.

*   *   *

My mother spoke often of my brothers. I listened to her stories and said nothing, but it bothered me that she was so wrong about them. She had missed so many things about Wolf and Eli, had never really seen them clearly. I knew them much better than she did, so it bothered me to hear her speak so authoritatively.

She could not see their flaws. I suppose she was blinded by her love, a fierce instinctive kind of love like what a mother animal feels for her young.

I did not correct her, I let her babble on. She was wrong about them. But then, she got a lot of things wrong.

The apartment seemed so empty with my brothers and father gone.

Echoes lingered, like week-old food smells caught in the curtains. I thought I heard their heavy footsteps, their laughter, my father practicing wedding music on his violin.

The emptiness, the silence did not go away as months and then years passed.

I tried to fix up the place, decorate, but the apartment resisted me, the very walls were stubborn. The pictures I tried to hang slid down the greasy wallpaper and fell on their faces.

My father and brother were the ones who had brought life and color into the rooms. Now all was dull and faded. I could hardly bear it. When I looked around I wanted to scream at the bareness, the peeling paint. The only break in the grayness was my mother sitting there in her mourning black.

With no men in the house, there was nothing to do. No one to please.

I went to school. I met some girls.

I grew, I suppose.

The months and years passed like a monotonous dream, like stitching an endless seam.

There is nothing worth telling about those years.

What is there to tell about a mother, a daughter?

My mother’s life had stopped when her husband died.

I’ve figured out that interesting things happen only when men are around.

Men make life interesting. Men make things happen.

Everybody knows that. All the songs say so.

My mother took in laundry and repaired shoes to make ends meet.

I was waiting, waiting, in those years, I did not know what for, but I expected it any moment to come and knock at the door.

Ilana

I knew I should not have let them take him away like that.

I knew he would come back to me if I waited long enough.

He came at night, his teeth glowing in the moonlight. I would hear his footsteps first, tapping on the floorboards, and then see his shadow thrown huge and wavering against the wall and climbing halfway across the ceiling.

He came and sat at the edge of the bed and I spoke to him though I knew it was useless. He had lost his hearing, after all.

I could never see him as clearly as I would have liked, and he never stayed long. I thought it was because we had never been made man and wife in law, as he had wanted.

I thought that if I had a marriage contract I would have more of a claim on him, could make him stay with me.

His parents and his sister were always snatching him back to the other side.

There were icicles in his mustache.

He only stayed long enough to remind me of his absence. Like the twinge of pain when you put your tongue in the tender hole where a tooth had been.

He left an imprint of his body on the white sheets, like a snow angel.

In the mornings it was gone.

Perhaps if we had had more children he would be more inclined to stay.

In the mornings I looked at the face of my daughter, at the mark between her brows already deep from frowning. She washed her hands, over and over as if to rid herself of something.

I did not want her to repeat my mistakes, I wanted to tell her to get the official papers when the time came with her name and his side by side, to get rings and promises, and to have children to seal the bond so that her husband would never have reason to go away.

But she stood at the sink and when I drew near she raised one shoulder as if blocking a blow. She rubbed her hands under the cold water, a muscle twitching in her jaw. She scrubbed and scrubbed at some stubborn stain that only she could see.

Sashie

It’s time I went and found a nice husband for you, my mother said.