Dreams of Bread and Fire (9 page)

Ani whispered, Did you catch the naked woman tattooed on Wiley’s arm? I think there’s something the matter with the short one. He looks like an ax murderer.

Will you please calm down? Asa whispered back.

Great. We’re in a boxcar with a couple of deranged derelicts and he tells me to calm down. What are you, some kind of
dahngahlakh
?

Asa said, I’m not going to let anything happen to you.

Thanks, Superman, Ani said.

Ani drew her knees up and closed her eyes. She pretended to relax, but actually she was envisioning Asa wrestling Wiley to the floor while Ray chased her around with a knife.

After a while, Asa and Ani moved to the boxcar door and saw a tunnel through the mountains looming ahead.

A lineman standing near the track waved frantically and shouted at them, Get inside! Cover your faces!

As they entered the tunnel, Asa and Ani lay on the floor with sweaters over their noses and mouths. Wiley and Ray pulled their shirts over their faces as well. It seemed like a long time that they were hurtling through the dark with thick, acrid air around them.

Asa drew her close with his free arm. Ani lay in his embrace, sure that their dead bodies would be discovered in the car when it arrived in Salt Lake. Her mother had begged Ani to take the bus. She claimed she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep until Ani called from Seattle. Her family would weep over Ani’s open casket. The Kersamians would forever curse the name of Asa Willard for leading Ani to an early demise. That ruled out joint burial in the family plot in the Ridgelawn Cemetery.

Finally, light and clean air flowed into the boxcar.

The four of them moved to the doorframe, where the clustered lights of small mountain towns passed by. Soon there were only isolated houses and then they were in the craggy wilds of the Colorado Rockies. The moon cast a creamy carpet of light over the angular peaks.

Wiley said, Me and Ray broke out of a work camp near Lubbock a few days ago.

What were you in for? Asa asked.

Picked up for vagrancy. Sent us out to the farm. Barbed wire all around. The foreman had a whip and kept at us from dawn till dusk.

To Ani it sounded like something out of a fifties chain-gang movie.

I didn’t think that kind of thing was legal anymore, Ani said to Wiley.

Wiley laughed. Honey, you wouldn’t believe the things that are legal in Texas.

Asa and Ani unfurled their sleeping bags on top of the cardboard and crawled into them for the night. It felt as though she had barely dozed when Ani was shaken awake by a length of bad track. As the car rattled from side to side her head scrubbed back and forth over the cardboard until her hair was matted in the back. Asa somehow slept through the lurching. Ani sat cross-legged by the door watching the sunrise. The red cliffs and mesas of Utah spread spectacularly for miles.

The train slowed as it entered the Salt Lake yard. First Asa tossed their packs out and then Ani jumped out after them. Asa was at her heels seconds later, with Wiley and Ray behind. They all shook hands farewell at the yard’s entrance.

Ani’s stomach was pinched with hunger. Down the road she and Asa found a pancake restaurant. It was Sunday morning and the restaurant was filled with well-groomed Mormon families breakfasting before church. Ani noticed that the family in the adjacent booth was inspecting them as though fearful of contagion. She imagined herself from their perspective: wild black hair, wrinkled flannel shirt, soiled parachute pants, and sneakers.

Sorry pair of sinners, we are, Ani whispered to Asa. But she was happy.

Missing Asa swept over her like an illness. Ani skipped class several days in a row and took long naps. Her dreams were long and complicated with casts of thousands. The boy who sat behind her in first grade—the one with the jug ears and the sloppy smile—was made to sit in the wastepaper basket by the teacher yet again. Dana Grimaldi chased Lucy Sevanian around the school parking lot while Ani stood on the hood of a car shouting for help. Then Ani was in a house by the shore looking for Asa. Curtains fluttered in the windows and sunlight streamed in silver white. Ani heard the sound of Asa and May’s laughter coming from a bedroom down the hall.

solitude suits only God

When Ani arrived in the dance studio’s dressing room, her new friend Odile was sitting on the bench pulling on her leg warmers. Ani unbuttoned the wool coat under which she was wearing dance clothes and a sweater.

Odile gasped. “
Tu n’as pas honte, toi
?”

“Shame about what?” Ani asked her.

“Of walking around dressed like that. What if someone should see beneath your coat?”

“Nobody’s going to see anything,” Ani told her. “Besides, I have no shame. I’m American.”

Odile laughed, showing small white teeth. She had a graceful neck and porcelain skin. Her fawn-colored hair was upswept in a loose bun.

Ani and Odile sat on the floor in the middle of the classroom with their legs in first position. To the left, to the right, to the center. And once again. A sea of arms moved in unison and legs scissored closed with a swish over the wooden floor. At a flick of the teacher’s palm, Ani folded down, resting her face on her knees.

She was six years old, climbing a narrow staircase with a black patent-leather bag banging against her leg. The changing room was aflutter with girls and their mothers, clothes strewn on benches along the wall. At home after the first class, Violet and Grandma quarreled in Armenian over Ani’s head, but she understood what they were saying.

Amot
. Shame, said Mariam Kersamian.

I’m not going to talk about it with you anymore, Violet replied.

My granddaughter is walking around before everyone with no clothes on.

I’m not listening. Violet walked out of the room.

The body is God’s temple! Grandma called after her.

Sitting on the back porch, Violet sewed silver sequins onto the edge of Ani’s tutu. Ani and Baba spread newspaper on the driveway and spray-painted the tap shoes silver. Grandma watched these preparations grimly without a word.

The day before the recital Ani modeled the whole outfit, including a silver tiara. She pirouetted around the living room, where Baba, Grandma, and Violet were sitting. Ani tied on her tap shoes and moved to a spot of bare floorboard between two carpets to make a series of clattering taps.

Grandma muttered loudly,
Amot.

Baba said, Those shoes sure make a racket.

Amot
.
Amot kezi,
Grandma said, a little louder.

Violet demanded, What is shameful about it? Would you tell me?

You let you daughter on stage in naked legs with his
vorik
hanging out? Grandma spoke in English so Ani wouldn’t miss her meaning.

Violet heaved a sigh. Ma, she’s six years old. All the girls are dressed like this.

How should child have no shame unless mother teach him? Mariam Kersamian asked darkly.

Ani puzzled over her grandmother’s sentence. What was the mother supposed to be teaching? That the child should have shame or have no shame? Was Ani’s bottom really hanging out of her costume? Ani suddenly felt like her torso was made of big, yeasty dough rising from the leotard in all directions.

She didn’t take another dance class until she was in college. The first day of the term she had arrived twenty minutes early to the makeshift dance studio on the stage of the old assembly hall. Stripping to her leotard and tights, she stood in front of the mirrors.
Amot. Amot kezi.
She shook her head, but failed to dislodge the whispering voice from her ears.
Anamot.
Shameless.

In the dressing room after class, Ani told her friend, “Don’t worry, Odile, I’m going to change out of this leotard. It’s soaked.”

Odile asked, “You have time for a coffee?”

Seated in the café, Odile talked quickly while her thin hands were as stately as swans. Her family would spend the upcoming holidays at their farmhouse in the country. She would be out of town for ten days. She and her boyfriend Pierre were throwing a party—
un boum,
she called it—at their apartment on New Year’s Eve. She hoped Ani would come. What was Ani doing for Christmas?

The Bartons had left for Connecticut that morning so Ani would be alone in the palace for two weeks. Christmas dinner would be brown rice and a chocolate bar. Ani cast around for a story.

“My friend Michael and I are going to Bretagne for a few days,” she lied.

Since the backgammon night, Ani had avoided Michael. She had even gone so far as to unplug the telephone. The day after her conversation with Odile, she arrived late to Sondage’s seminar. Michael, who was at the other side of the room, tried to catch her attention. Ani tucked her chin and scrutinized her notebook. After class he chased down the hall behind her.

“Come drink a coffee with me,” he said, piloting her by the elbow. “I’m taking the train to Munich in the morning. You want to go to the cinema tonight?”

“I can’t. I have to baby-sit.” She looked pointedly at her watch. “I’ve got to run or I’ll be late.”

“As you wish.” He gave her the Parisian
quatre bises.
“But we should talk after the holidays. I’ll telephone when I get back.”

Ani sat on the metro glancing at the people around her, their faces very French and inexplicably sad. Everyone seemed to be on the verge of tears. She put her head against the window and peered out at the dark tunnel.

During her final term in the college dorm a basketball player who lived in a single in the basement had died in his room. He had returned drunk late one night and thrown up, choking on his own vomit. After about four days, when the smell had begun to seep up the stairwells of the dorm—Ani had noticed it in the hall—a janitor had traced the odor to the guy’s room. His name was Bob. He was a friend of a friend, and Ani had once eaten lunch with him in the dining hall. She found it strange how people’s lives might intersect at one point and then, like billiard balls, bounce off each other and go in different directions. Bob had dropped into God’s side pocket.

It was while she was living in that dorm—not long after Bob’s death—that Ani and Asa had started going out. About a month into their relationship they had hitchhiked to Cambridge for the weekend. It was the first time she had met his parents. Peggy Willard, a thin fair woman with long copper hair tied back with a blue velvet ribbon, smiled brightly at Ani and warmly shook her hand. Ben Willard was tall and sallow with a handsome lined face. The four of them sat at a long oak table in a formal dining room with oak wainscoting and salmon-colored walls. Asa and Peggy did most of the talking. There were long quiet pauses during the meal that Ani didn’t dare fill with chatter. She observed Ben Willard refilling his glass with wine until the bottle was empty. He went to the pantry to get another.

Asa tells me you’re from Watertown, Ani, said Peggy. You’re Armenian?

My mother’s Armenian.

Ben returned to the dining room. You know what George Orwell says about Armenians, son? he asked, winking at Asa.

Ani’s breath halted in her throat for a few seconds while she waited for Ben to drop the blade.

Don’t trust them. They’re worse than Jews or Greeks. Ben Willard smiled.

Asa colored deeply. Dad, what kind of thing is that to say?

Ben, that’s not very nice. Peggy’s voice was edged with false cheer.

Can’t anyone around here take a joke? Ben asked darkly.

In the library’s stacks Ani had scoured Orwell for the line and found it:
Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.

She wrote the phrase in the small notebook of quotations she carried with her. But even before she copied it down she had committed it to memory.

As she passed the gilt café on the place Colette, Ani noticed couples leaning over small white cups. Long shadows striped the garden. Ani’s heels struck the cold stone arcades and then hushed across the runner in the hall. In the attic she swiftly turned the key in the lock, switched on a lamp, and opened a book. The room was silent but for the clock. Ani felt condemned by its small judgments.

the lid rolled and found its pot

Christmas Eve was a lost day. Ani stayed in her nightgown until late afternoon, when she threw on some clothes and headed across the river. In an austere macrobiotic restaurant not far from the university she treated herself to a meal of brown rice and vegetables. The only condiments were toasted sesame seeds and tamari. It was early, she was the sole customer, and the bald waiter gazed at her sternly as she chewed. She felt like a loser.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Christmas alone in Paris isn’t any disaster.

An unlucky star.

Baba said,
The star of some is bright, of others blind.