If I Told You Once: A Novel (40 page)

But is it possible to get
too
clean? I don’t think so.

They are coming. They are coming.

They do not like slovenliness. I must get up early, set my hair, polish my shoes.

I must be ready for them when they come.

Nomie

Where is she? says Mara.

What have you done with her? cries Sashie.

She can’t just disappear like this, Mara says.

You know, don’t you Nomie? I know you do, says Sashie.

You helped her, didn’t you? Mara says.

Why won’t you tell us anything? Don’t you want to help? Don’t you know your mother could be out there freezing to death in the snow right this second? squawks Sashie, not noticing her slip.

Your mother could be lying under a bus right now, Mara says to me.

They discovered her absence this morning. Her bed made, the room neat. The window open, curtains flapping, snow already piling up on the floor. It is the second freak snowfall of the summer.

They both leaned out the window. She couldn’t have made it down the fire escape, not at her age, Mara had said.

The apartment feels different without her. Unmoored. All of us feel it.

I go into the front room and look at the mass of furniture and it is just that, furniture. Nothing more. Chairs and tables and hassocks, a breakfront with its glass broken.

My hair keeps making this funny sound when I shake it, I say.

Mara shouts: Wash your hair, for God’s sake. And tell us where she is, you filthy girl.

Sashie says: Don’t speak to her like that. It’s not her fault mother’s gone.

She pauses, glances from Mara to me, and says: Is it?

They pace and mutter in the kitchen, their voices a disturbed cooing like anxious pigeons.

If she does not turn up soon they will have to forfeit her spot at the nursing home, allow someone else to take it.

They keep asking me where she is. They seem to think I helped her, perhaps arranged for a journey.

Could Nomie have done that, they wonder.

It is true that I spent time on the docks, among the sailors and coils of rope as thick as your arm. I have seen those great ships. I have seen deals being made. I have a bundle of money. I know the way.

But I won’t say anything one way or the other.

It doesn’t matter.

I know she is not coming back.

Mara

Nomie refuses to give up any information. But we will find my grandmother sooner or later. I know it.

We will find her and put her in a safe place.

My mother is useless, fluttering and fussing and pausing every few moments to listen at the window or the door.

Hush Mara, she says with one finger uplifted in her idiotic way.

Do you hear that? she says.

Just the usual noise, I tell her. I say: Actually it seems much quieter around here, now that
she’s
gone.

But my mother’s face is strained and tense, she is not hearing me at all, she is listening for something else.

I give up on her and go to my room. Here I find a sweater, neatly folded on my bed. How did I not notice this before? It is my grandmother’s work, I can tell. I shake it out, hold it up.

Foolish woman. Does she think this one little gift will appease me now, after I’ve had to endure a lifetime of her selfishness?

It
is
rather nice, though, beautifully soft, the yarn a mixture of black and gray with tiny threads of red and brown running through it.

And it is strangely cold today, what will all the snow. I will put it on, not because I forgive her, oh no, only because it is cold and all my other sweaters are packed in the bottom of the drawer.

I pull it over my head but cannot find the neck hole right off. I try to find the sleeves but they must have gotten twisted or tucked under in some way. I pull harder, waiting for my head to pop through the collar but it doesn’t happen and the sleeves have gotten turned inside out. The sweater is very warm, a little too warm and it traps my own stale breath next to my face.

I decide to start over, but now I can’t seem to pull it off. I turn around and the sweater shrinks tighter, pulls in closer.

I suddenly remember the sweater I put on years ago, and how I barely escaped from it with my life.

But I was a silly hysterical girl then. I was imagining it.

I turn about and turn about. The room is full of sharp corners I never noticed before. And the sweater has become so scratchy inside, like a pricker bush, it has little pointed teeth.

It’s getting damp now with my sweat. It is too warm in here. Not enough air.

It hugs me so closely now, as if it is a part of my own body.

I think I will lie down on the bed for a minute and collect my thoughts.

I can feel my heart pounding a quick panicky beat.

As if I were actually foolish enough to think I will never get out of here.

Nomie

A little while ago I went into Ilana’s room. It was cold, the snow was covering everything because no one had bothered to shut the window. I sat on her bed and was surprised to find her jeweled egg nestled beneath her pillow. I wondered why she had not taken it with her.

I held it in my hands. I thought: it should not be whole, it should have shattered when she left, it should have broken open to let all the wonders inside come flying out.

Then I held it up to my eye and looked inside at the castle and the lake and the darkly sparkling city, and I thought I saw, in among the crowds of finely dressed people, a girl with hair to the floor and a fiddler with his bow raised, and two young men leaning recklessly from windows, and a man the size of a horse rolling over like a dog, and a dozen children clinging to the skirts of a woman who in turn clung to a black-bearded man.

Then I looked again and saw that the egg was empty, the inside surface was all reflective, a curved mirror, and I was looking at my own pupil and inside it a thousand tiny points of light.

She is not coming back.

I remember something she said before she left. I had asked her where she wanted to go, what she would like to do.

She said that more than anything she wanted to lie down in the snow next to her husband, two black marks on a white page.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to Reagan Arthur, Leigh Feldman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Corporation of Yaddo, my teachers at Harvard and New York University, and to all the friends and family who gave their support along the way.

Also by Judy Budnitz

Flying Leap

Critical Praise for
I
F
I T
OLD
Y
OU
O
NCE

“Wonderfully wrought, with language as simple and straightforward as a fable, alive with a stunning metaphorical quality.”

—
New York Newsday

“Hauntingly written … Budnitz is the Amy Tan for Eastern Europe.… From beginning to end, this stunning, ambiguous story of mothers and daughters supporting and destroying each other will suggest questions without answers and answers without questions.”

—
The World and I

“Budnitz skillfully teases out the subtle tension between fact and fiction and also between varying perceptions of truth among different people.… She always knows which strings to pull.”

—
Time Out
(New York)

“A dark, wickedly funny, and poignant first novel.”

—
Library Journal

“Budnitz’s hypnotic prose, as tight as a coiled spring, dream imagery (both poetic and fierce), and instinct for the grotesque cast a weird light on familiar subject matter.… The novel has a haunting power.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Cleverly blends the ghostly grimness of fairy tales with historical fact and modern urban details. The result is an artful feminist spin on the kind of magic realism popularized by I. B. Singer and Bernard Malamud.”

—
The Baltimore Sun

“Lyrical and compelling, like a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales.”

—
The Austin Chronicle

“Mesmerizing … Budnitz uses her quirky imagination to vividly color the story.… A definite read for anyone bored by traditional tales.”

—
Seventeen

“Works its fantastic moments into a narrative firmly weighted with rich, realistic detail. This makes the novel’s fancies that much more lovely, as they feed into a thoughtful exploration of how imagination can shape memory and quotidian life.… An intelligent, tactful, and well-paced novel. Every page is a pleasure to read, and like a matrushka doll, reveals smaller and more intricate layers of beauty the more one takes it apart.”

—
The Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Entrancing … A fractured fairy tale in which the heroines can hear everything but one another’s advice, and princes are never problem-solvers.”

—
The Boston Herald

“Judy Budnitz dazzles with her first novel. Part dark fairy tale, part weird family history, it is altogether strange, inventive, and ethereal.… Wonderfully bizarre.”

—
The Washington Times

IF I TOLD YOU ONCE
. Copyright © 1999 by Judy Budnitz. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Budnitz, Judy.

If I told you once : a novel / Judy Budnitz.

p. cm

ISBN 0-312-20285-7 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-26751-7 (pbk)

I. Title.

PS3552.U3479134 1999

813'.54—dc21

99-22249
CIP

eISBN 9781466835658

First eBook edition: December 2012