Kantika, page 18
“We made tishpishti for you,” announces a woman who Rebecca will soon learn is Rachel, Sam’s sister.
“Wonderful!” says Sam. “And we have gifts for everyone from Cuba.” He lowers Luna down to her chair, straps her in and looks out the window. “Israel must still be parking—they had to circle the block. Corinne is down there with the luggage. I’ll go help.”
“I’ll come!” Rebecca says. Fresh air, a glimpse of sky and space.
“No need, mi kerida,” Sam tells her. “It’s heavy. I can make a few trips. Stay here and settle in.”
Sam’s mother’s eyebrows rise at her son’s use of the endearment, and before she can stop herself, Rebecca flashes her a look. She might tell Sam that she is built like a workhorse—in Spain, she transported bolts of fabric, carried her children, hauled pews around the temple—but the truth is that she feels dizzy and tired, if also longing for fresh air and to be beside her sister, even as she already suspects Corinne of avoiding these introductions to bypass witnessing the shock. Instead, she says nothing. Sam carries more authority here than he did in Cuba and is also distinctly less hers. This is his family, his daughter, his life she’s stepped into, but she is already longing for the moment when they can shut the bedroom door and fall into each other’s arms. His mother—a skinny woman in a faded apron and tight gray bun—comes forward with a glass of water as Sam starts down the stairs.
“Welcome to America.” She leans to peck Rebecca’s cheek.
Rebecca laughs thinly, accepts the water and returns the kiss. “Munchas grasyas.”
“I’m Fanny, his mother. This is his sister Rachel and his sister Sarah.”
Rebecca nods to each of them. “Enkantada.”
“Elmueeevonooviaeeermmoowzza,” drawls Luna from her chair.
Sam’s sister Rachel looks up from cutting the cake. “She says you’re beautiful: the new bride is beautiful.”
“Oh no, I’m really not at my best, but thank you, Luna! You’re beautiful, too. I … I like your dress.”
Then the child is saying something incomprehensible again and trying to lurch forward, though she is bound to the chair. Her grandmother is at her side, propping her head with pillows, shushing her, wiping her chin and telling her to be quiet—kayades, Luna!—and something else in what must be English: CAWMDOWN.
“She’s overexcited,” Fanny says.
“I understand. I am, too.” Rebecca suppresses a gag as a fetid odor fills the room. “I’m”—her vision swims—“a little dizzy.” She steadies herself on the back of a chair, spilling some water as she sets the glass down on the table.
“You need to lie down.” Rachel swoops in with a rag. “You’re white as a ghost.”
“I’m fine,” protests Rebecca. “Just tired from the trip.”
“You can go in there, but I need to change her first.” Fanny juts her chin toward an open door, through which Rebecca sees a low bed with a white nubbed coverlet. “I do it in there.”
“She’s faint, Mama,” says the other sister, Sarah.
“I’m fine,” Rebecca repeats, and it’s true; the room has come back into focus: the red-checked oilcloth, the bare walls, the dance—or is it a battle?—of women pushing, pulling. Already she is part of it, and she must stake her claim. Luna is silent now, watching with something like fascination.
Sam and Israel arrive with Rebecca’s trunk, and Corinne comes up the stairs with her two young daughters, carrying the sewing machine in its lacquered wooden case. At the port, where Rebecca’s line moved quickly because she had the prize of an American husband, she had rushed into her waiting sister’s hug, but now she can’t look at her, afraid of what might spill from her own eyes. Why hadn’t Corinne told her about the extent of Luna’s difficulties? “The child,” Corinne had written in her letter to Rebecca in Spain, “was born early with some resulting health troubles but has a strong spirit and loving temperament”—if not an outright lie, at least less than the truth, so that Rebecca again has a queasy sense of reliving what happened with Luis, when she was kept in the dark about his war injuries and poor health.
Corinne joins Rachel at the kitchen counter, where they busy themselves with arranging plates and cutlery for the cake. Fanny unstraps Luna and carries her to the bedroom, and in her grandmother’s slight arms, the girl looks bigger than she did in her father’s, her head large and bobbling, her legs dangling down, stick thin except for her kneecaps, which bulge out. From this angle Rebecca can see the white cloth of a diaper. Have they tried to teach the child to use the toilet? Have they taught her much of anything? Rebecca sits down to drink the water, though her hand trembles as she holds the glass, as if her limbs, like Luna’s, might start to fling and jerk. Fanny returns with Luna, having changed the child into an ordinary brown dress, and sets her on the floor, where, skirt hiked up and diaper flashing white, she heaves and hauls herself like a dogged inchworm in the direction of her father.
From his valise, Sam retrieves cigars, perfume and handkerchiefs, and, for each of the three girls, one of the topsy-turvy rag dolls, which had seemed charming in Havana despite their inflated price but now seem in poor taste for having no legs and two heads.
* * *
THIS, THE BEGINNING. Before it gets better, it will get much worse. A bureaucratic logjam, if not something more sinister, has stalled David’s and Berto’s departures from Spain, and it seems increasingly unlikely that other family members will be cleared to accompany them. Unless something shifts, the boys will need to travel on their own—but they are much too young, how can this happen?—and leave their grandparents behind. Corinne lives far away on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, on a tree-lined street in a roomy apartment with high windows. When Rebecca confronts her about her letter—how it underplayed Luna’s challenges and implied that Sam was a shop owner when in truth he’s just a manager, paid by the hour—she bursts into uncharacteristic tears, then tries to shift the blame to their father and Israel: They scared me, Rebecca. They said we had to get you out. Sam’s mother is predisposed to dislike Rebecca from the start because she comes from a higher social class but has nothing to show for it except (Fanny seems convinced) a snobby attitude, and comes—or will, after her sons arrive—with two more mouths to feed.
Rebecca plants the rue seeds from her father in a pretty blue-and-white pot since there is no garden here, and Fanny, who already has rue growing in a different pot, doesn’t try to hide her irritation—we’re short on space, why do you need your own? Fanny grumbles about Rebecca spending Sam’s earnings (in fact they’re her own, saved from Spain, and from the alterations she quickly takes on) on cut flowers and fabric for new curtains, and, after Rebecca learns about the great American invention called a rummage sale, on a secondhand oak stand for her sewing machine that she pays two boys to carry, along with two small paintings—lemons in a blue bowl, a stand of birch trees that reminds her of the poplars in the Anatolian countryside, one planted for each new child’s birth—to cheer up the apartment’s drab beige walls.
How much did you pay, Fanny will ask, though price tags still dot the frames. And later, to Sam, though she must know Rebecca can hear through the flimsy walls: She’s quite the shopper! Doesn’t she know you’re trying to save for your own store? As if it’s a crime to spend fifty cents on something beautiful. But you could fault a person for much less: the watery, flat taste of Fanny’s lentil soup, for instance, oversalted and underspiced, and her dense tishpishti cake, with its aftertaste of cheap rose soap. The small noises she makes in the cramped apartment above the store, aggrieved sighs, mutterings and gloomy, slippered shuffles, the world too much for her except when it comes to Luna; there she is all endless energy and sharp opinions, a guard bee circling the hive. The girl can move about with her own strained brand of nimbleness, relying on her buttocks and trunk more than her underdeveloped, wayward limbs, but no matter how often they sweep the floor, she gets dusty creeping around, which makes her wheeze, or she’ll bump into a table leg and emit loud grunts and groans, so Fanny doesn’t let her out of the chair for more than a few minutes at a time.
As for Luna’s toileting, the bathroom, shared with the neighbors, is located five steps down off a small landing at the top of a long, steep flight of stairs. This poses a challenge but not, to Rebecca’s mind, an insurmountable one. Did you ever think of teaching her to go in a pot for a start? she asks, but Fanny brushes her off. Spare in most ways, Fanny keeps an elaborate store of talcs and lotions and a stack of snowy white diapers and is forever crooning over the child, brushing her hair, wiping her face, feeding her with a baby spoon, the scene oddly familiar to Rebecca, though she can’t think why until one day it occurs to her: Fanny is like Djentil Nahon with her old mother, except that the mother was ancient and dying, and Luna, at almost seven, is a growing girl.
For an hour each afternoon, Sam gives Luna lessons, teaching her to sound out the words he writes on butcher paper and doing math with peppermints: Count to thirty and you can have one! Take away half, what’s left? Get it right, Lunita, and you can have one. In his teacherly bent, he reminds Rebecca of her father, though he is gentler and considerably more patient, and while Alberto’s instruction tended toward religion and philosophy, Sam introduces Luna to the natural world—the stars and tides, how clouds make rain, the layers of the earth. Luna’s speech is garbled, and at first Rebecca thinks Sam might be indulging in an elaborate charade where he supplies both question and answer, but she soon begins to decipher the child’s words and sees that Luna has a brain that is a throbbing railway station on the one hand, all chaos and missed connections, and a verdant, fertile valley on the other, with nothing like a clear path in between. At the end of the lesson, Sam often picks up an illustrated Grimms’ Fairy Tales, reading in English to teach it to Luna and improve his own but translating portions for Rebecca, who puts down her sewing or pauses in her housework to listen to the story like a little girl.
Luna has a knack for math and loves the fairy tales, but she is spoiled and quick to get frustrated, kicking, screaming and strategically soiling her diaper if she gets an answer wrong or doesn’t know it, or if her father withholds candy or pushes her too hard. Fanny doesn’t like the lessons. That’s enough, Sam—she’s tired and it’s time for her bath, she’ll cut in after half an hour, having come up from the store. Or please, Sam, no more school for today, she won’t eat dinner after all that sugar. But Sam, who gives in to his mother about most things, resists—just a little longer, Mother, go back down, please, I’ll get you when we’re done—and there is something almost sacred about his big, balding head leaning over his daughter’s small, dark one, his large hand guiding her tiny, overflexed wrist and stiff fingers along the block words on the butcher paper—CAT DOG OPEN SHUT SKY SUN. Watching them, Rebecca falls into a different, deeper kind of love with him and registers the stirrings of something like affection for Luna, even as she feels herself grow smaller, for father and child are an inviolable pair, a sealed world unto themselves.
* * *
“LUNA IS SMART. Why doesn’t she go to school?” she asks Sam one night in bed. “There must be one someplace in New York for her.”
America seems to have schools for everything and everyone. In their neighborhood alone, there is a school for driving and a school for hairdressing, as well as a large, forbidding brick elementary school where Rachel took her to inquire about enrolling David and Berto once they arrive. At the church around the corner, there is even a free program for learning English. Rebecca saw a flyer for it in Spanish on the church door and plans to sign up for the next cycle.
Sam runs a hand over her nightgown, along her hip. “There’s nothing close enough.”
“We could take her on the bus, or drive her. I could help. I want to learn to drive.”
He shakes his head. “Driving is dangerous here. Anyway, I went last year to see a school for handicapped children. It was a miserable place, full of feebleminded children, like a jail.”
“Are you sure they were all feebleminded? Forgive me for saying so, Sam, but people might think Luna—”
“No, they weren’t like her. You could tell. Even if some of them started out okay in the head, a place like that will do you in. I’m telling you, it was like a prison, Rebecca, with bars on the window. The children had to sleep there.” He shudders. “I’d never seen anything like it. I was so ashamed.”
“Ashamed? Why? It’s not your fault.”
“As a society, as an American.”
“Oh.” She tries to hide her surprise. An American? He’s a foreigner, isn’t he? A Jew, as she is. A Sepharad and Turk. They speak Spanyol at home, though Sam keeps an English dictionary on the kitchen table and reads the newspaper with it by his side.
“Then what about a regular school?” she asks. “She’s plenty smart enough.”
“Of course she is, but you have to be able to use a toilet and to walk, for fire drills.”
“What’s that?”
“Where they pretend there’s a fire and teach the children the best way out.”
“Really? What a good idea!”
In the shared city of their childhood, fires regularly tore through neighborhoods. Afterward, the survivors rebuilt their tinderbox wooden houses on the ashes of the old ones, clutched their amulets and prayed that next time the winds would take the fire someplace else. Even Rebecca’s father accepted misfortune with a maddening passivity—she still doesn’t understand why he couldn’t get his textile factory back—but Rebecca is not one to take trouble lying down, and America has a can-do attitude that appeals to her. She rolls onto her side and strokes the evening stubble on her husband’s face.
“Listen, Sam, I think I could toilet train Luna and work on strengthening her muscles. I’ve been watching her. She has plenty of willpower, and I have some ideas. In time, maybe I could even teach her how to walk. Then she could go to a regular school, like a normal child.”
Sam sits up and speaks in a sharp whisper. “Don’t get her hopes up—promise me. She has severe inborn limits and always will. They … I don’t like to speak of it, especially in front of Luna, but when she was born, they had to use high forceps on her head. Lika nearly died, and Luna came out blue. It’s a miracle they both survived.”
Rebecca touches Sam’s back, but he stiffens and she withdraws her hand. “I wish I could have helped,” she says. “I didn’t know. I just—Lika hardly wrote to me. She wrote once during her first pregnancy, the one before Luna, to say that if the baby was a girl, it would have Rivka as her middle name, after me. It was Corinne who told me what happened to that poor baby, may his memory be a blessing. Did Luna end up having Rivka in her name?”
Sam looks pained. “No, she’s Fanny Luna, but Lika didn’t forget you. She just, how to explain—she was damaged by losing the first baby, and then Luna was born and had such difficulties. It all … I guess it just broke Lika’s heart. She wasn’t well. Anyway, it’s over and done, may she rest in peace, but to give Luna false hope would be unkind.”
“It doesn’t have to be false.”
“You just got here,” Sam says sternly. “You can’t see the whole picture. I’m her father.”
“You married me. I’m her mother now.” Rebecca speaks to the ceiling, its surface striped by the moonlight coming through the cracks between the curtains. “If you wanted a dishrag for a wife, you picked the wrong lady. I won’t sit back and watch a life go down the drain. I wasn’t raised like that. She can control when she makes caca—she times it to get what she wants. She has enough willpower for ten children, but she’s spoiled and she doesn’t understand what’s possible. I can work with her, Sam, if you’re on my side and show her she can trust me. I can get somewhere with her—I feel it in my bones. You know how much dignity it would give her to use the toilet like other girls?”
“She’s not like other girls. The stairs are steep. We share the bathroom.”
“So she starts out with a pot, like I told your mother.”
“You did? What did she say?”
“She ignored me, of course, like I don’t even exist. Does she really want to be changing diapers her whole life? That’s not my plan.”
“So that’s what this is about!” Sam says, almost triumphantly. “My mother adores Luna and takes good care of her. Leave Luna to her, then. She doesn’t mind.”
“Did you hear what I said? You married me. I’m here now.” Rebecca’s voice comes out aggrieved. “What does the doctor say about her prospects?”
The previous week, she’d gone with Luna, Sam and his mother to an appointment at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, the waiting room filled with handicapped children, many in even worse shape than Luna, though a few could walk with the aid of braces and crutches. Next to the doctor’s office was a room where a little boy with blond curls like Berto’s and bowed legs walked with the help of leg braces and a contraption on wheels while a nurse observed from the sidelines, hands laced behind her back. Rebecca had stood on tiptoes and watched through the window in the door until the nurse spotted her and, scowling, swatted her away as if guarding the secrets of her trade, or perhaps the child’s privacy.
Later, the doctor, Dr. Carlson—a surprisingly young man, himself in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy—had examined Luna with the help of a nurse as she thrashed, screamed and soiled her diaper. What does she like? the doctor asked Sam over her cries, and Sam translated to Rebecca. Like? Yes, what does she enjoy? Sam had looked stymied, rattled by the whole encounter, so Rebecca supplied answers, which Sam translated. She likes candy, fairy tales, baubles. Her papa. A red coiled lollipop materialized, and the doctor started in on a story (in America, they all begin with Once upon a time). Luna’s screams slowed, then stopped, and the doctor examined her some more and told them they’d need to get an (expensive) X-ray of her brain. When it was over, his assistant gave Luna another lollipop to take home and handed Sam the bill. Then the doctor said a few more things in English, patted Luna on the head with his own clenched hand and sent them home.
