The Place Will Comfort You (5 page)

“What else?”

“For the fire we'll just make noise.”

She says, “We'll figure it out as we go.”

Never was homework so alive.

Red on the corners of the counter. Red at the base. This I will not forget. Grain meal whispering while pouring, as she waves cold cuts in the air. (She likes the way I can control the sandy stream. She nods. “You should fill your hands of it,” she says.) The sensation of the meal grains passed in the thousands, hand to hand. (She drapes the cold cuts on her shoulders like a pair of epaulettes. “Now hold still.”) The grains sopping the weight of drops and cleaving to each other, then to the creases of the palms. (“Mingle,” she says, twisting the oil cap.)

We mingle it until our fingers turn the coarse dough gray. Our hands had looked perfectly clean.

We push the matter into different shapes, then scoop and pound it into a sturdier stock and start over with an animal theme. We try again with the idea of a whole landscape, which needs a base. Salami is a natural choice. Fish sticks make good trees. Some of the plums in the jam are entirely whole, only shrunk and hollow. One contains part of a pit.

Now, when the clock's tin hand shudders, it's no longer punishment to me. I don't fill with the early sorrow of my favorite show coming and passing, unseen because unearned. The time draws close and I have earned the time. The sound of struggle is a prize.

The solid foods come away easily. The sauces must be given a quick wipe. The meal-dough clings in the crack.

“It's a good match,” the orphan says.

We pat some more in, lick our fingers, smooth the edges, level
the ridge. This day proceeds from good to best. My mother will be extraordinarily pleased.

The orphan says we should correct the ceiling, too.

She climbs up on the counter, stands with one shoe on each side of what is no longer a crack. She stretches her thin neck. “Go get some bleach. You have some on the spinning shelf that's on the dryer.”

She leaps down, runs off on a separate path. I return with bleach, she with a toilet brush and my father's spare glasses. Both she hands to me. She takes the chemical. Under the kitchen sink my mother keeps a pair of rubber gloves. We each get one. She puts the stopper in the sink and pours the bleach inside, closing her eyes. I shield mine with the glasses while pushing off my shoes. She stays down while I go up. She dips, I scrub.

“A little more,” she says. “A little more.” Until a key turns in the door. Immediately I jump down to the floor and hide the brush. Exactly how the job was done shouldn't be what my mother sees first; I hang my gaze on the improvement we've begun. Where the stain was there is still a stain, except not beet-red anymore. It's blue. The orphan dunks her gloved hand in the sink and pulls the stopper. Bleach gurgles away.

My mother is surprised. First thing she does is get confused, which brings in her a dreamy look. A lot of moods try out her face. Something is different, she can tell. She can't tell what, or what to do.

She says, “It's strongest here,” then drops her purse and slaps her forehead, bellowing to wake the prophets in the hills, if they know English. “You get over here!” She yanks my father's glasses off, sniffs them, drops them. One lens cracks. “Go! Keep going. Move. Run!”

She chases after, a grown lady, not a person who moves fast. This is emergency behavior. Soon I'm naked in a bathtub, on my knees, my mother pulls my head down by the hair to save my eyes, hosed water flushes over me, the current walling off her shouts. We have
come to a time like others I have known. The roughness of the treatment shows her fear for me. The fear is how much I am loved.

The pipes squeak. We're both coughing.

“Go open every window in the house. Stop! Use your—oy a broch—your head. First put pajamas on your skin.”

I'm in my bedroom wearing just a pair of panties when the orphan tiptoes up. “What does she think of what we fixed?”

“They itch?” my mother shouts, her voice approaching. “Don't you touch them. Pop 'em wide and let the tears come.” Standing in the door she sees the orphan. “Oh.” She switches language: “Ah. Sweetness, back in school so soon?”

“It's my first day in school a orphan,” says the orphan.

My mother lifts off, adrift again, but now her dream is fogged with tears. A smile cuts through, for the orphan. For me there is only a scolding: “Did you offer your friend a drink?”

The orphan shakes her head. Their silhouettes merge in the hallway as my mother leaves instructions, walking off. She says to finish covering up, and not forget to open everything. Both I accomplish swiftly, even with a towel knotted on my head. Still, by the time I've thrown open my way to the kitchen, the orphan has shoved my station aside. She has planted herself on my stool. Where my documents lie stands a new glass of squash. In the place of my pencil, my father's cracked glasses peer from a plate. My mother digs at the counter with a knife.

She and the orphan both are turned away from me, quiet, absorbed, my mother in her task, the orphan in my mother. A sorrow greater than my own does not exist. I see the clock.

“It started!”

The orphan turns to peer at me, pink tongue slipped in the glass. There is no time to wallow in an ugly sight. The show is a room away.

The sound and motion are delayed only by a twist of the power knob, and a channel switch:

Doug Henning is surprised. He doesn't handle the emotion like my mother. The magician wears expressions like he wears his clothes, a suit of starlight and skintightness. On the stage beside him rises a great cage. An elephant shuffles inside. The shimmer of a lake-wide cloth floats down just at the high point of a gesture from the animal. A dark trunk waving drowns. Doug Henning's broad teeth flash. This year's ambition is clear, and what a notion! What a thing to do! And what a place to allow it. This is where I came from.

“Remember,” says Doug Henning. “The utter glory of the world! The utter wonder of it, is totally available to—”

Poof, stillness and dark. One dot of light hangs in the middle of the screen.

“Is it not obvious you've sacrificed the privilege?” My mother has cut off the show.

“No. No! Check my homework!”

“Your achievements in my kitchen I already saw. Your reckless self-endangerment I won't address. Not yet. The property destruction. Your uniform in ruins. I noticed perfectly good fish sticks in the garbage. Plum jam was consciously applied to my cabinet doors.”

“It was the orphan.” A yellow head pokes from the kitchen doorway. “Her. She made me do it.”

“You ask a friend home, you're responsible.”

“I didn't ask! She came all of a sudden from the pharmacy.”

“Okay. Before we get absurd.”

“You can't! You can't you can't you can't you can't!”

“Why's that?”

“He comes on only once a year.”

“In other words he'll come again.”

“Who knows? What if not? Or what if he comes over there, but we don't get him here? The first time I don't think we got him. He's not from local programming. He's from the States. Like me.”

She says, “That man is a Canadian.”

The television crackles off spare electricity.

“Sweetness!” my mother says, but not to me. The orphan comes, still chocolate-smeared. My mother takes the towel off my head and with it wipes that dirty face. An orphan squints with pleasure while a mother lets her daughter's eyes drip tears. “Your friend would like to see you safely off.” The orphan mentions dinner. “Next time we'll plan for it.”

The elevator sinks. I count each floor by every jolt as we fall, eyes on the door. The orphan breathes behind.

Six. Five.

“You look gorgeous,” she says.

Four.

“Really cute. It's like no style anyone's seen yet, like of a real star. You'll get loads of attention. You'll feel very proud. But people will be jealous, and for that you will have to be strong.”

Two. I whirl around to face the mirror and the news catches up. Gold yellow stains me like a melted crown. Sorrow comes gushing up again, cascading over me. She rushes to dive in with an embrace but I keep her out. I finger-wag, telling her this: “I only came to represent the class!”

“I know you came!” she says. “That day the people brought good things. For dinner I had marble cake, the best I ever had. Did you get a piece? Did you taste the herring?”

“You lie.” I realize this now. “How many best cakes can there be? So about me helping with your party: I will not. Just celebrate as usual with that shit-breath cat.”

The words are fuller of my feelings than what usually gets out, but she is so crammed full of hers that mine don't make a stir. She only tweaks a dainty portion of her cowlick. “Zeessie washes herself eighty more times a day than you do,” she says, “if you wash yourself once.”

Ground. Though I hold the door open she stays inside.

She says, “Wasn't that fun with homework? We could think of more activities like that. Remember how I helped you all the way home? How we ran! We're good friends. If we made a mistake today tomorrow we'll make it right.”

“You
made it.”

She keeps harvesting that tuft, busily pulling nothing up. “You never said stop.”

“I can't see my own head! You can. You didn't say one word. Why?
That
was your mistake. You make mistakes on purpose. You think no one will figure it out.” She only looks at me, her hand continuing to work. I have given her something to think about. Here's more: “Your father's broken. The way you're going you'll break him worse. Your mother caught her sickness off your cat.”

Hairs snap. She flicks them, radiant and short, quick fallers, in the air between us. Wordless, she walks out.

The next day is full of troubles from its earliest thought. A sun hat will cover it best. The weather worries me. It's not so sunny. Questions will come, and how to explain this: My mother has written a note to show the office. The hat stays on indoors.

But the trouble I expect is never first to come. The orphan sits on the stoop outside my lobby. Beside her rests a plastic crate, gray, capped with a board of wood which is secured with rope. She pushes herself to her feet. She comes behind me, helps my book bag off, and slips it onto her bare back.

“What kind of sandwich did your mother make today?” she says. “Salami? Jam.” She bends and hoists the crate, as well, joggling it to reckon with a moving load. Gold eyes peer through the slats.

Who will decide the destinations between home and school and back? The orphan takes too big a part in her own scheduling. Like she won't do the same in mine? She leaves the group without a parent
or permission. Last spring, Amalya Blatt had an appointment for a cavity at noon, and saw the orphan on the sizing bench at Ivgi Shoes, alone, being measured. On a field trip to Nili Street, she snuck into the bakery and bought napoleon cake for a smile. And, summer break, I think I saw her in another city. I was traveling with my summer camp to see the ships in Haifa. On the docks a girl like me sat on a milk crate, thin legs folded Eastern-style, skirt tucked like a diaper. A patent leather lady's purse was hanging down her side, nobody watching her as she played dress-up in the shadow of the cranes, while men in foreign sailing clothes arrived and went.

A blue-green truck rolls past. It pauses at the stop sign on the corner, flashing left, left. Women sit in the open bed, cloth covering most of the heads. The olive pickers, hiding their contempt. The orphan ducks behind too thin a trunk.

Why go on? I should have abided by the conduct in the grieving home. I could have completed the assignment with the lawful words.

The truck turns. Children of other buildings run out in uniforms of different schools.

“Sometimes she's with me all day long,” the orphan says.

She sidesteps the ficus and starts to go, her crate leading the way, my schoolbag following.

“Would you have guessed?” she says. “I never told anyone till you. We'll leave her in the bomb shelter. At break we'll sit with her, I'll open up the crate and for the first five minutes she'll stay close. We'll take our shoes off. She will lick every single toe. You're going to get to know her really close. Cats are tigers. I can work her into it and out of it. I know her a long time.” She hands the crate to me. The heavy load does not like being passed.

The orphan dips her hand into her collar.

In the locket she pulls out, young Zeessie looks more like a fawn. The face is miniature, but the eyes and ears full-grown. The red furred torso is stocky, the legs tapered and long, lengthening as she
stretches up out of a catnap on a washcloth, spine strained like a bow, hamstrings taut. Pointed head the arrow, baby eyes the shine, she's ready, aiming to advance her education in the world.

The orphan clicks the locket shut. It doesn't look fake. The metal is handsome in all its stages, as much where she has polished it as where she has neglected. I did not think the orphan would be carrying a thing so good.

The Verse in the Margins