The Puzzle King, page 8
SNOWFLAKES THE SIZE of tears bounced against the windowpane as the train shuddered toward Westchester. Seema rested her head against the cool glass, hoping the chill of it would dull the ache above her eyes. Mount Kisco, Mount Kisco. The name played in her head to the rhythm of the train. Mount Kisco. Those were the first words she had ever spoken in English. Before she and Flora left Kaiserslautern, they would talk about Mount Kisco with Margot, each of them giving a different face to Kisco, who must have been a great enough man to have a mountain named after him. Seema had envisioned Kisco as tall and bony with a thick black beard and a slight hooked nose—exactly the kind of man she would never be attracted to now.
But oh the dreams they had about Mount Kisco. The Grossman sisters took a piece from every fairy tale they had ever read and came up with a Mount Kisco where the sun always shone, where the flowers were round and plump, and where the houses were as big as castles. Aunt Hannah would be beautiful, with long blond hair and cherry red lips. Uncle Paul would be handsome and suave like the king’s son in “Rapunzel.”
Seema tried to conjure up a vision of her thirteen-year-old self. Newly arrived in America, she was afraid to speak English and became convinced that the reason her changing body was betraying her in such confounding ways was because she was a foreigner. That was before she had any inkling about the way she really did stand apart from other girls. Sometimes older men would hold her in their gaze for a few moments too long, and she would look away, discomforted by their intensity.
Shortly after Seema came to Mount Kisco, Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul invited a couple over for coffee. Mr. and Mrs. Holt had a daughter who was Flora’s age and Mr. Holt owned the new furniture and carpeting store in town. Mr. Holt was about two heads taller than Seema and had brown stained teeth. She couldn’t remember how he looked, only the feeling of him as he came into Aunt Hannah’s kitchen to help Seema carry out the coffee cups and blackberry pie. When she picked up the pie, he stood behind her and put his arms around her. “That’s a mighty heavy load for a little thing like you,” he’d said as he pressed himself against her. She’d frozen in place while he took the pie from her and held it above her head. She didn’t know what had happened, only that it made her feel queasy and like she wanted to cry. After that, every time the Holts came to visit, Mr. Holt would find a way to be alone with her, and the same kind of thing would happen. Once, he came into her bedroom while she was brushing her hair. “Let me help you with that,” he’d whispered, taking the brush from her hands and running it through her hair. Just then, Flora walked in. Mr. Holt’s voice suddenly got loud and deep. “Seema was just using me as a guinea pig to show off her new hairstyle, weren’t you Seema?”
Because she and Flora were still new enough to the country to believe that everyone in America was touched with magic, Flora didn’t seem to find Mr. Holt’s behavior unusual. But instinctively Seema knew it was best to keep what she knew of Mr. Holt to herself.
The snow was falling harder now, and it seemed as if the train were traveling through a cloud. Seema pressed her thumb and middle finger to her brow. Her mind was webbed with so many secrets. She remembered a morning shortly after her father had died. It was cold and snowy, like now, and the windowpanes were opaque with frost. She, Margot, Flora, and their mother were huddled around the kitchen table. As her mother studied the three of them, Seema noticed the lines around her mouth, newly inscribed by her widowhood. She could still hear the hurt in her mother’s voice as she stared out the window up at the sky: “What kind of God leaves a woman alone with three children?” she said to no one in particular. “My days as a woman are over now. But you girls, you have it all ahead of you.” Then she went around the table and pinned a future on each of them. Flora, “my merry one,” would always have men dancing around her, “like a maypole.” It might take her “shy, peculiar child,” Margot, a longer time to find a husband, but when she did, he would be as “loyal and true blue as she was.” Then she turned to Seema. “My unknowable one,” she said harshly. “She doesn’t even bother to chew her secrets; she just swallows them whole.” It was the first time she remembered thinking how much her mother disliked her.
Now, as she replayed that morning in her mind, three things leapt out at her: Her mother was thirty-four when she declared an end to her days as a woman. She wondered if her mother had ever seen an actual maypole. And she knew that had she ever confided to her mother about Mr. Holt, she would have somehow figured a way to put the blame on her. What kind of God, indeed?
She thought about Flora, the merry one, with her clear brown eyes and the easy way she had of talking to people. No unchewed secrets in her history. What must that be like? She was such an innocent, and now she was getting married. “Shy and peculiar,” Margot had outfoxed them all by being the first to marry at eighteen, just two months earlier. That left Seema as the spinster in the family. Everyone assumed that she would marry soon. But she was in no hurry. She liked going to dance halls, meeting handsome new men. The way things were now, she understood what men wanted from her and, frankly, she wanted little more from them. A husband would expect her to wash his clothes, prepare his food, care for the children—all the things she was doing for the White family, but at least they paid her. She never talked about her life to her family, and she wondered what, if anything, they knew about her.
Her mother’s letters were brief and infrequent; she rarely asked about Seema. From time to time, Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul would make some comment about the bloom coming off the rose or fruit being too ripe, but then they’d turn it into some kind of a joke and they’d all end up laughing as if they were in it all together. And Margot? She couldn’t even imagine what Margot would think of the life she was living here.
She wondered what Margot was doing now. She imagined her puttering over the window box that overlooked the yard behind their house in Kaiserslautern. She could see the curve of her back as she bent over the bright red flowers, smelling their sweet leaves and cupping a blossom in her hand as if it were a soft-boiled egg. Margot kept the window box filled with geraniums, even during the coldest months. She doted on these flowers as she did on her collection of tiny porcelain owls and the assortment of hatpins she kept on the table by her bed. “It could be worse,” she’d say when anyone teased her about her quirky hobbies. “I heard about a man in Hamburg who kept two snakes in his room for five years before the police found him out. That’s what I call an eccentric hobby.”
SEEMA HAD THE GORGEOUS hair and sexy bearing and Flora had the curvy feminine body, but it was Margot with her winter-pale skin and long slender legs who was the real looker. She was the youngest, and as far as Seema knew, she’d never had any more unhappiness than the usual theatrics that play out in a young girl’s life. Yet even as a child, Margot was inclined to extremes. She collected stories from the kids at school and later from newspapers and magazines. The more bizarre, the more she favored them: the little Indian girl born with eight limbs whom everyone thought was the reincarnation of the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity, Lakshmi; or the man in Brussels who weighed 850 pounds and couldn’t get out of his house until the fire department came and broke down his door. Along with stories, she collected symptoms. God forbid any of them got a rash or a cold. Margot would become convinced they were on their way to malaria, pneumonia, or some other dreaded disease. From as early as Seema could remember, Margot had that hairline furrow in her brow, which grew deeper as she got older. She remembered how their mother would rub her finger on that spot between her eyes and say, “It’s a shame. You’re such a pretty girl, if only we could clear your head of all that nonsense and make your worry go away.”
When Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul first suggested that the Grossman girls come to America, there was never a question of whether or not Margot would go with them. She’d read about the hooligans in the Gas House Gang in New York and the Indian massacre at Wounded Knee, and that was all she needed to know about America. “No, thank you, it’s not for me,” she’d said.
Right before Flora and Seema left, Margot began to get violent headaches. Sometimes she would take to bed for days at a time and lie in the dark, a damp cloth over her eyes, her skin so translucent that her temples and arms were a map of veins. The merest sound made her flinch. Seema remembered how their mother would tiptoe into their room and whisper, “Would you like a bowl of soup, mein Schatz? Something to warm your stomach?” Margot was convinced she was going blind, which was another reason she gave for not going to America. Who would take care of a blind young girl except for her mother? No, she’d stay right here in Kaiserslautern.
Margot was the only one of them for whom their mother had a pet name. Maybe it was because Margot was the most like her and had inherited her nervousness and streak of melodrama. Whatever the reason, the two of them were emotionally tethered. One day, when the sisters were very little girls, a bird flew into their house and couldn’t find its way out. The bird was shiny with a black head and a black beak—a crow, Seema realized now. It swooped and zigzagged and made piercing caw-caw-caw cries as their mother chased it with a blanket. When its wing glanced Margot’s shoulder, she began to shriek, “A bat! A bat!” Someone at school had told her about a vampire bat in Budapest who had sucked all the blood out of a child while he was sleeping, and when his mother came to wake him up the next morning, he was dead. Seema shushed her and whispered, “It’s not a bat at all, it’s really the wicked witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and if you aren’t quiet right now she’s going to pick you up and eat you alive.”
Margot gulped back her tears and froze in place. The air went out of her and she crumpled to the floor. Her mother dropped the blanket she was using to trap the bird, turned on the balls of her feet, and slapped Seema across the face. “You are the cruelest child I have ever known,” she shouted, before kneeling down to hug Margot. “It is your job to protect your little sister, and if you ever do anything like this again, your punishment will be worse.”
Seema was glad her mother was thousands of miles away.
AS SHE GOT OFF the train in Mount Kisco, Seema rubbed her fingers over her right cheek, where she could still feel the fire of her mother’s handprint. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aunt Hannah, who was wrapped up in her brown wool cloak and hugging herself to keep warm. She was the only person waiting at the station on this frosty morning. Seema quickened her step and put a smile on her face as she braced herself for Aunt Hannah, a small but effusive woman with a big hug.
“Seema, finally you’re here. I thought you’d be on the last train,” shouted Aunt Hannah. She spread her arms, and the cloak billowed, making her seem twice her size as she swaddled Seema in her wooly embrace. “Now everyone’s here. Ruth and Lev came last night. Flora’s been waiting for you all morning. She looks absolutely radiant. Oh, you girls. You must miss your mother so on a special day like today. Uncle Paul and I want you to know that we are your family and couldn’t love you more if you were our own children.”
Seema tried to turn her face away from Aunt Hannah, afraid that the liquor was still on her breath. Their cheeks touched. Aunt Hannah’s skin was smooth and cold. She thought about the man last night and his stubble and the red scratch marks he’d left on her cheeks. If Aunt Hannah smelled gin or noticed any nicks on her face, it didn’t distract her from her chatter. “It’s so sad that your mother and Margot couldn’t be here. But, of course, it’s such a long and expensive trip. Oh, but let’s not dwell on the negative. There are so many happy things to talk about. Flora. What a dream she is in her dress. She even found some gardenias for her hair. And Simon. We are so lucky to have Simon in the family. He’s shy. A little hard to get to know. But a fine man, don’t you think?”
No, Seema didn’t think he was a fine man. He was quiet. Moody. Unassertive. Not the kind of fellow who could walk into a room full of people and make himself known. He was one of those pale Jewish types who lived in their heads. Seema hated men like that. By now, she believed she could size them up right away: soft damp hands, indecisive, always measuring their words. And worst of all, she knew that they would love her in a tentative, trembling way.
Not like the man from last night, who smelled of fine leather and tobacco and called her “sugar.” Jewish men spoke a jagged English or, like Simon, used oddly formal language when they talked, which, in his case, was hardly ever. The men she liked had straight noses and wore suits that were hand tailored. They didn’t dress in clothes that were too big for them or chew with their mouths open and smell of onions. When the men she liked made fun of the Jews with their hooked noses and stooped shoulders, she laughed along with them and never told them that she was a Jew herself. Why should she? No one ever asked.
Aunt Hannah kept talking about the wedding: the leg of lamb for fifty; the bottles of French wine Uncle Paul had stored in the cellar; how beautiful the synagogue looked, particularly the chuppa, which was decorated with gardenias to match the ones in Flora’s hair. Seema smiled secretly, imagining the look on the faces of all those men if they could see her inside a synagogue.
As they drove up the circular driveway, Seema could see Uncle Paul standing on the front porch, already dressed in his black tuxedo pants. When the car stopped, he ran around to the passenger side of the car and opened the door. “CeCe,” he shouted. “Let me take a look at you.” He grabbed her bag and helped her out of the car. “You are a sight for sore eyes,” he said, standing back and taking in the full image of his niece. “Quite a sight indeed.”
If anyone would notice that she was drawn and slightly hung-over, it would be Uncle Paul. He’d keep it to himself at the time, and then, maybe months later, he’d drop it into a conversation. For now, he just asked, “You working hard, honeybunch?”
“No,” she answered flatly. “I’m fine. I’m excited about Flora’s wedding, that’s all. Really excited.”
“Yeah, well, no one’s as excited as Miss Chatterbug,” he said. “She’s had us going since early this morning. Honestly, Simon must be a very patient man. Either that, or he has no idea what he’s getting into and he’ll be dead within six months. C’mon inside. Your sister’s eager to see you.”
For the past ten months, Seema had barely tolerated Flora’s giddiness. Flora the scatterbrain, she thought, was always in a tizzy about something and now it was this. But today Seema would exclaim about her sister’s dress and the gardenias, and she’d embrace Simon. And who knows, maybe she’d even manage a couple of tears at the ceremony. So she was taken aback when she opened the door to Flora’s room and found her sitting on her bed, dressed in nothing but her chemise.
“Hey Mrs. Phelps,” said Seema, sounding as upbeat as she could. “Finally, the big day. You must be so excited.”
“I am, I really am,” said Flora, crossing her legs and resting her chin in the palm of her hand. But her voice was anything but excited.
“So why the long face?” asked Seema.
“I don’t know if I can do this. It’s just so much.”
Seema sat down on her sister’s bed and put her hand on her knee. “What do you mean, so much? You love him, don’t you?”
“Oh yes,” said Flora. “It’s just that … you’re the only one who will understand this. I’m nervous about the love part.”
Seema squeezed her sister’s knee. “Oh sweetie, I know a little something about that. Don’t worry, it’s surprisingly easy. There may be some awkward fumbling at first, but you’ll figure it out. Everybody does. And once you get the hang of it, it’s not bad.”
Flora looked at her sister as if she were seeing her for the first time. “Noooo,” she shook her head. “I’m not worried about that part. It’s the love part. I mean the real love part. The thing is, you don’t just wake up one day and know how to love somebody. You have to learn it somewhere. Look at Ruth and Lev. From the moment they were born, they knew that Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul loved them the best, and every day they got to practice it. Simon’s been on his own since he was nine. I never really knew our father, and Mama is—well, I’m sure she loves us in her own way—but she sent us here when we were so young, she really didn’t have time to love us in that way. Uncle Paul and Aunt Hannah love us. But that’s almost like secondhand love, because they feel sorry for us, and they had to take care of us. And you and me, we love each other, but in a faraway kind of way. Neither of us has ever had someone who loves us the most and would do anything for us. What if Simon and I have children someday and we don’t know how to love them? It’s so awful, the thought of that.”
Whatever she said now would matter for a long time, so Seema thought hard before she spoke. Flora was right about one thing: Nobody had ever taught them to love. When their mother shipped them off to America, she told them it was because of how much she cared about them that she was making this big sacrifice. But to them it felt like rejection and abandonment. They both understood about survival, about being polite in order to ingratiate themselves to strangers. Flora, more than she, was charming and shrewd about appearing more helpless than she was so that people would want to help her. For her part, she knew about letting herself be admired. She understood desire. But love? The kind of love that meant giving yourself completely to another without expecting anything in return? That’s what Flora was talking about. What did either of them know about that?
Seema bit her thumbnail as she thought about these things. “You’re right, we’re not like Ruth and Lev,” she said. “Every love is different, even though I think they all require a leap of faith. You have to let yourself trust somebody even when it feels like the scariest and least likely thing to do. This is something I think is easier for you to do than it is for me. You and Simon already know how to make each other happy. You tell each other what’s in your heart, and I’m assuming there aren’t many secrets between you. You’re creating your own kind of love. You’re already doing it. I think that’s the best two people can do.”
