Dry Your Smile (6 page)

Somebody was calling to her. She called back to him. I was so sure I could do it, David. Triumph over the death camps, the goose-stepping armies, the neighbors who looted your family home. My singing could drown out every sound you'd been forced to hear between the last notes of a Beethoven sonata struck on your Bechstein until the evening your face showed such surprise that I could sing “Vissi d'Arte.” My body, “the Rubens nude with the Klimt throat” you call it, this body that's not marked by tattoed blue numbers, this body can wipe out the silhouettes of walking human skeletons. These eyes, “dark as the Donau flowing through the Wienerwald,” you say, my eyes can drown whole firmaments of yellow stars.
Il m'aime, il ne m'aime pas …

Dimly, she felt a hand on her forehead and opened her eyes. But it was Yetta, not him. It was a dry flat world, alien as the cavernous deeps of pain once had been.

“I didn't know about her,” she mumbled plaintively to her sister, “I didn't even know there was a ‘her.'” She couldn't stop babbling through these lips so cracked they must belong to somebody else, not the lips he'd kissed. But she had to make Yetta understand. “Somebody meant for him, pledged to him by family ties. Somebody of his own class and education who'd already got out of Vienna and was waiting in London for him to settle here and then bring her as his bride. I didn't
know,
” she repeated. “It never occurred to me …”

Yetta tried to cover her concern with a familiar harangue of harsh love. “Ach, little one, always you were arrogant. Always wearing blinders to what you didn't want to see.”

She felt her eyes fill again. Was this all they could ever do, accuse?

“I thought—I thought the letters with King George's face on the stamps were from friends who'd helped him in England. I thought he wanted to marry me, that we'd spend our whole lives together and die in each other's arms. I thought someday Momma'd have to admit I'd been right to defy her. I thought he just needed—time. To feel alive again.”

“You thought!” Yetta snorted. “Who are you to think?
Face
it, I tell you. You were a meal-ticket.” Exasperated at her younger sister, she tried to change the subject. “You want some water? You want to smell the nice flowers I got you? See? Whachamacallits.”

“Chrysanthemums.” Hokhmah turned her head away again, and heard Yetta withdraw to the chair. The click of knitting needles maybe meant that her sister would leave her in peace. How could you ever make anybody like Yetta understand? But then, she herself couldn't understand. Her mind kept circling round and round what even now she couldn't believe. He'd never
said
. He'd never said a word. Not until she'd told him she was pregnant.
Colla mia! O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!
Maybe she'd still have chosen to give and do for him and feel alive in doing it. That crooked, sad smile of his that ripped her heart with pity. Like she used to rip open a garment, seam by seam, to redo it. Working as a seamstress in the custom dress shop to support him. Oh yes, for him she'd dared to leave Momma, and quickly, break with everything, start in a new place, a real city, find a tiny apartment. Work in the shop all day, get groceries, cook, clean. Endure Momma's phone calls of hatred. Quiz him for his oral exams half the night and make love with him the other half. Hold him tight and sing to him when the Nazi nightmares came haunting. Then get up and do it all over again the next day. Maybe she could have fought for him, if only she'd known what she was up against. His parents' plans for him. His loyalty to them still rising in him like a plume of smoke from the crematoria. His clinging to the one person left who shared those childhood memories of the Bechstein and the Danube, the woman he'd already become engaged to at a banquet in the Hotel Sacher right in the teeth of war rumors. If only …

As if she'd been eavesdropping on her sister's thoughts, Yetta interrupted them. “Stop
thinking
about him, Hokhmah. Mooning over him won't change facts. You're no baby. You're a twenty-nine-year-old woman and you're gonna have a child. We gotta think what to do. You better make up your mind, you come live with me and Jake or you go to Essie. Maybe in time you find a
decent
man to marry you and be a father to your baby. Maybe one of Jake's friends. That Shlomo, he always fancied you. In the meantime, soon as the baby's big enough, you get a job, maybe at the dress factory …”

Yetta's voice droned on, bleakly outlining an intolerable future that roused every cell of her sister's brain and body to resistance. Maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe she could still fight that sick old world of his, those ghosts. With her peasant energy, her Klimt throat and Rubens body, her arias. She didn't have to wind up like Yetta and Essie …

Hokhmah cut through her sister's plans in a furious voice. “
No
. You'll never
never
understand. I'm not
like
you! I can't
live
like you do!”

Yetta's face grew ugly with an old envy and a still older fear. “You and your fancy education, Hokhmah! How
dare
you look down on your own family?
I'm
not the one lying there pregnant by some scum who abandoned me!” She lumbered up out of the chair again and stalked over to the bed. “
Grateful
you should be, down on your
knees
with thanks to Essie and me for standing by you! You got nobody else, you hear me?
Nobody else
in the whole world!”

“I've got
me!
And I've got my baby! What makes you think when his son is born he won't change his mind and realize he wanted to marry me all along?”

“Dreamer! Crazy stupid fool! Blinders again you're wearing! You're
nothing
to him! You were an affair, a stopping-off place! You were his
whore!
”

Hokhmah struggled to sit up in bed, rage and will lifting her above the wrench of bone and muscle.

“That's what
you
say, Yetta. But I know better.
You
can't
have
any kids. But I'm going to have a son. You've never known what it's like to feel—real passion. Well, I
have
. I always wanted to feel what none of you'd ever felt, and I
have
—a sweet wild loving you'd never talk about, a—a joy in the body you always whispered didn't happen for a woman, something beyond what Momma always said was bearing it and the reward being children and then—
what?
Getting fatter, getting older, fighting with each other in Yiddish, dying?”

Yetta struck her hard, in the face. She could feel her cracked lip begin to bleed, but she wore it in triumph, like a heroic wound. Yetta was screaming at her, the way Momma had, the only way they knew how to live. She reached out and grabbed the chrysanthemums from their vase and threw them in Yetta's face.

“Get out!” she yelled. “You're coarse and vulgar and ignorant! You'll never in a million years know who I am! I don't need any of you!
Get out!
”

To her amazement, Yetta obeyed. She watched her older sister, livid with insult, gather up her belongings and huff to the door.

“Momma was right to curse you, Hokhmah! You're a crazy woman, a—a
snake
, an ungrateful—”

“And
stay
out! Forever!”

She went. She actually went.

Alone in the room, Hokhmah felt an exhilaration of freedom thrill through her. Then the fear struck, harder than Yetta's hand against her face. And with it came the next sweep of pain, drawing her down into herself, into a dark world lit only by flares rupturing along every nerve, a world where now only her own consciousness, her own voice, could keep her from going mad.

Oh … It's fading again, thank God.

Oh
no
… oh
somebody help
, I peed all over myself in that last one, didn't even know it, couldn't even feel it.

God
this is so
humiliating!

Where in hell is that—

“Nurse!”

Why me?
Perché me rimunari cosi?
Why did this have to happen to me? Just because I wanted something different from them? Things they never even
knew
about me … In Mexico, that time … for Momma and all of them I left him. Strange beautiful man. Wanted to make love to me. Sent me flowers. They never even knew what I
could
have done, didn't, for their sake. And for Your sake, damn You, God.
Te amo
, he kept whispering to me, sitting there in that sidewalk café with those little mosaic tables and the candlewax dripping down the bottle. I didn't know what to say back to him. I could feel myself getting wet and I thought how funny I must've got my period early or something so I got up and went to the ladies' room but there wasn't anything except me being wet. What in hell did I know? I was seventeen. I wanted him to love me and I didn't want to lose him or make him mad at me. So romantic he was. It was like fire, like a brand, where he touched my elbow, steering me through the crowds. His handprint on my elbow, under my short sleeve … But I didn't. I remembered how I'd hurt her about the singing and so I didn't. He never even got mad at me, just such a pitiful smile when I told him I couldn't. I cried. He kissed my hand, gently. His lips were like moths. That's when he gave it to me, the turquoise bracelet. He took it out of his pocket, wrapped in bright red tissue paper. Wrists like a Mayan princess, that's what he said. These wrists, swollen like my ankles have been for months. These wrists.

How funny, there's tiny crescents, half moons in a row where the fortune tellers say the life line is. What
are
those, in my palms?

Oh, I know.

Just where I've been digging my nails in, making fists without knowing it, I guess, when the pain peaks.

That's why you've got to grip the bedrails …

There was a young crescent moon that other night.
He
was the
right
one, I thought. Not some half-Indian with a smile like … slow lava. But when
he
touched me with his surgeon's fingers and reached for me in the night like I was life itself, he could make my breath catch and hold and explode like—

Oh Momma, here comes the pain again!

Momma, Momma …

Linda
, the other one said
linda
it means beautiful but I never did it no I was the best daughter …

Momma make it
stop!

Ah … it's dying down.

Finally, ah …

My
hands
, so cramped, never dared let go of the bedrails …

“
Nurse
, goddammit, come
give
me something!”

Nobody hears, nobody comes. Maybe nobody remembers I'm in here. Maybe—

But the door—

“Who are
you?
”

Stands in the doorway, staring. A
schwarze
in a bathrobe, just like that, out of nowhere.

“Who in hell are you?”

“Don't flap your wings at
me
, honey. We're just two gals in the same boat.” She grins. “I could hear you from way down the hall, yellin' blue murder. Came by to say hello, see if I could help …”

I'm in the same hospital with a colored woman. A
schwarze
who says we're in the same boat, yet.

“No, I—I'm fine. I don't need any help.”

She shrugs.

“Sure sounded different to me. Sounded to me like you was one big talkin' bruise in here. And lonely like nobody but a gal in labor can get.”

“I need the nurse, that's all. I just need—”

“Pain pill? Don't hold your breath. That lady hoards them pills like they were goin' outta season. Probably pops 'em herself for ear-ache with the likes of us around all the time.”

Why does she keep comparing her and me? Her belly's not big. She's not pregnant.

“Yeah, well, I dropped mine yesterday. One of the worst. Now I'm just wadin' around. Don't believe 'em when they tell you it gets easier each time.”

“You—How many—”

“Four. This one's the fifth. And the last, no matter what I gotta do to be sure of
that.
”

Five times she's gone through this. My God, she must be nuts. How does she do it? Why does anybody do it once they know what it's like?

“I'll
never
have another one, never. Not me.”

“That's what we all say. Probably see you back here next year. Your man, he'll want more kids. They all do.
They
don't have to have 'em.
Or
raise 'em.”

My man. It goes through me like a knife. Even she has a man, the
schwarze
.

“Please … just leave me alone. If you want to help, go ask the nurse to come in. But just … leave me alone, will you?”

She shrugs again.

“Whatever you say. You pantin' like a racehorse. Just thought you might be lonely. Everybody's got a right. But whatever you say.” She turns in the doorway, then says soft, over her shoulder, “Yell your heart out, honey, if that's what you wanna' do. Least the sound of your own voice keeps you knowing you're still alive. You change your mind, want company, you yell out ‘Vi!' That's me, Violet. I'll hear ya.” She shuts the door behind her.

Everything quiet again. The room comes back. The smell comes back, the silence. Why did I make her go, oh …

No oh
no
, oh this is going to be a real bad one!

“
Help, Nurse!
I'm being torn in pieces!”

The little
demon
, I want it to
die. I hate you, God
. I want to hurt you the way this baby's hurting me!

Dear vicious God, God of my mother and my sisters, God David never believed in, God who let Cossacks and Prussians trample us under their horses' hooves and Nazis churn our filth into soap for their tidy Lysol-smelling unkosher kitchens, God who made me love David and try to fill his nothingness,
Your
nothingness,
pace pace, mio Dio
, God
it hurts it hurts it hurts
Hitler's inside my body testing how to make every nerve-end scream in pain!