The Sweet Relief of Missing Children
Read The Sweet Relief of Missing Children Online
Authors: Sarah Braunstein
Sarah Braunstein
W. W. Norton & Company
New York · London
For Anna Braunstein
and Norma Garson
This girl I know, she's a Cadillac stunner
This girl I know, she's a nuclear reactor
I tell you she's supersonic, quadraphonic
This girl I know, she's here and there
This girl I know, she's split
She's gone to pieces
She's everywhere
â“Pipe Dream,” Roger Ranger
T
he girl had received all her immunizations. She had been inoculated. She had been warned in school assemblies and by her mother and father and several aunts. One of these aunts had a serious-looking mole on her cheek, a sharp chin, a stern, pale mouth, and she wore no jewelry except for a black-stoned ring on her middle finger, all of which gave her the appearance of a witch or intractable schoolmarm. The girl took these warnings seriouslyâthe aunt's most of all. She knew to watch her back. She knew to avoid slow cars driven by men in sunglasses. She knew, at home alone, to say to the stranger on the phone, “My mother's in the shower now. Shall I have her call you back?”
She would never say she was home alone, nor take the shortcut through the alley. All these warnings, all this advice, the real message was: You are precious. You are precious but you are not free. You can't be both.
Did anyone get to be both things at once? It was unlikely.
The girl knew her family's code word. If someone unfamiliar tried to pick her up from school, he had to know the code word. He had to say it aloud. If he didn't? She was to go to the principal's office. She would have. She was staunch, confident.
She bore an obligation to the future to remain safe. The future was the tiny spray you feel on your face when you peel an orange, a simple promise.
The code word wasâ
It was not something she told anyone.
As a baby, she had been fed iron-fortified rice cereal and homemade purees; she had worn a pink satin headband. The headband, the booties, the yellow-haired doll propped in the corner of her crib, the expression of awed, nervous delight on her mother's face, all this said:
A girl! A girl!
Later, vast quantities of vegetables: peas, succotash, lima bean soup. Her parents rarely served dessert. Occasionally a graham cracker, maybe a small bowl of vanilla ice cream. No sugar cereal, no candy bars. When she had a cough, her mother squeezed lemon and honey into a mug of hot water. The girl ate and drank whatever was put before her. She dried the dishes with a gingham cloth. She obeyed.
Early on her mother taught her about the wage gap, the suffrage movement, the sheer poverty of certain minds, some of whichâbut not allâwere male. It was never too early to illuminate the harsh truth of the matter for a girl. Boys could play, could treat the world like a junkyard to be rummaged through, but girls needed a different set of eyes. Girls needed to be wary and strong and curious but not too curious. “Say âfeminist,'” the mother coached, and the girl, as a toddler, said it. Still, she was given the traditional things, babydolls and pink. Her hands mastered the rhythms of needlepoint. Her mother knew how to accept a paradox: a girl could be anything, could shatter the glass ceiling, but she was still a girl. Girls liked lace; they loved bows. Give a girl a pink something, give her a doll that tinkled in its pants, she'd be happy.
She was happy, this girl.
Even when the sadness of life pressed up against her, even when she learned about the wage gap, corporate greed, the fact of death. This last truth, death, came one afternoon in the back of a taxicab. The girl, her mother, and her aunt were going to a museum. The mother said, “Hildegard passed away last week. From Meals-on-Wheels. The German? Her daughter's coming from Florida to collect her things.”
“Godspeed,” the aunt said.
“She was ready, I suppose.”
“Passed away?” The girl was maybe four.
“Died,” her mother said.
A silence.
“Death,” her aunt said forcefully, and patted her lap like she was beckoning a puppy.
“Oh,” said the girl, but she wasn't sure exactly what it meant.
The aunt raised a dark brow. “Like the end of days. On a personal level. Like, you knowâ” But she just snapped her finger.
“It means the body goes to sleep,” her mother said gently.
“Not sleep,” the aunt chastised.
“No, that's right. Not sleep. Not exactly.”
“The body stops working,” said the aunt. “Lights out.”
“It rests,” her mother added.
“Rests?” The aunt scowled. “Not really.”
“Rests, sure.”
“That gives her the wrong idea.”
Her mother said, “Who
doesn't
have the wrong idea?”
“It goes to the cemetery. It's buried,” the aunt said.
The girl pictured a hole in the earth. In the hole was a white bistro table with two chairs and, above it, to block the sun, an umbrella with crisp stripes of red and white.
“Everyone dies,” the aunt said.
“Someday, yes,” the mother agreed in a softer voice than usual. “Hildegard was very old.”
The girl pictured rheumy Hildegard in her flannel housecoat on a bistro chair. Sometimes she'd accompanied her mother to deliver the woman's meals.
“We
hope
it happens when we're old,” her aunt added, “but there's no saying.”
“Everybody?” the girl asked. Nothing was true for everybody: her mother had said so.
“I'm afraid so,” said her mother.
The cab jerked to a stop. The girl felt cold. She had not known it would end. She knew she would grow up, yes, but hadn't realized there would be a time when her body would stop. Her mind placed another person at that underground table, across from Hildegard, strange Hildegard who kept a dozen spare flashlights in her apartment, a flashlight on nearly every surface. The other person at the table was the girl. Her! She was wearing her favorite pink nightgown.
They got out of the cab. Briefly she was frightened, wished she hadn't asked. Isn't it better to be confused than to know? Her mother and aunt had changed the subject; now they were talking about a woman so desperate to have a baby that she advertised in the newspaper. The girl was frightened but not for long, because soon they were in the museum, standing before a painting of a fat gentleman in a festive tricornered hat. He was holding a bottle of beer. The hat, the beer, the expression of wicked, heaving delight on the man's faceâ
“Is he dead?” she asked her mother.
Her mother read the placard on the wall. “He lived two hundred years ago,” she said. “He's certainly passed on.”
His face was red and happy. He was making the most of it. He made the girl feel better, and her sense of permanence returned. Later they bought postcards of paintings from the gift shop. The girl spun the rack, looking for that man with the beer, but couldn't find him, and she was too shy to ask.
So she learned about failed fallopian tubes, about Cambodia and Medea and illiteracy and toxic shock and still she was happy, still she dried the dishes obediently with a gingham cloth. “What a happy girl!” people said, and she was proud to hear it. It was her duty to be happy. It was her duty to be curious but not too curious, to be pretty. She understood that you could be too curious but you couldn't be too pretty.
Was she pretty? You wonder, even if you don't ask. Either she was or she wasn't. It's a detail, one of many, but it's everything. Three stitches to repair a cut on her chin. These were sewn by a geniusâa plastic surgeon, highly regarded, whose face conveyed the taut smoothness of plasticâto ensure there would be no scar, or just the slightest scar, a tiny pale
c
like a baby's fingernail clipping, noticeable only in a particular light if, say, you tilted her head back, tilted it as a lover might with his thumb when he meant to kiss her. But she was just a girl. No lovers tipped her head. Her parents paid the plastic surgeon because, yes, she was beautiful, and beauty has no price.
Soon a brother was born. He was cute for a while, around his second year, with that pudgy, incurious, pink face. Later he was just a boy, not handsome, not ugly, the poor kid. How could he compete? The girl possessed calm confidence, concern for the lower classes, a dimple in her right cheek. The girl had an innate, stately grace. Sometimes she peed her pants when she laughed, sometimes she tripped, and isn't this the finishing excellence in a perfect girl? A touch of clumsiness. It reassures.
The girl knew her family's code word, the word a stranger would have to know for her to trust him. She practiced what to say when a man failed to speak the code word, practiced the purposeful stride back to the schoolâshe would not run, would not show fear, would simply stride into the principal's office, would say to Mrs. Levenson, “Excuse me, but I believe there is a man who means me harm.” Her voice would be stern and calm. She liked that phrase: he means me harm. It belonged to another time.
The brother forgot the code word. He knew he was safe. He could take a stick and drum the tops of strangers' garbage cans all the way to school, and if someone stuck a head out the window? He'd run. If some creep tried to abduct him? Screw the code word. He'd knee the dude in the balls.
But she was a pretty girl, raised in a religion of immaculate self-protection. She rubbed lotion on her elbows and heels. She practiced walking with a book on her head. She loved rags-to-riches stories, loved that show
Lauren Rules the West,
about a clever orphan girl who becomes mayor of a small town. She loved hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of her building, loved her brother, loved celery with peanut butter. She felt sure that the world was vast and exotic, full of light and darkness both, and maybe one day she'd go to India? Maybe one day to the Wailing Wall? The Grand Canyon? She wanted to see great places. She wanted that feeling she got when she climbed the stairs inside the Statue of Liberty, that rising heat in her chest that meant:
We are littler than we imagine, but together we make something bigger than we believe possible
. Light and darkness. She was a Libraâshe felt the presence of two scales inside her. As she saw it, it was her duty to forget about death with one part of her mind while thinking about nothing but death with another. How did you do this? She wasn't sure. She was working on it. In the meantime she wanted to fix things, to be a social worker, a nurse, someone who tends to those who are not pretty or raised in brownstones, those who do not sleep beneath a shelf of good-luck charmsâpolished stones, onyx, jasperâwho do not read books about gifted animals or have mothers singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as they tuck their children into bed. No one got to be precious and free. Everyone died. It was her duty to remember this, to remember and forget at the same time, to teach other people how to do the same.
She loved Crackerjack. She loved the home team with all her heart.
She was twelve; her name was Leonora; she would disappear.