Kantika, page 19
“Her prospects?” says Sam. “She’s severely limited. She always will be. You don’t need a doctor to see that.”
“Why does she have leg braces?”
“To try to keep the bones from curving.”
“But then why doesn’t she wear them?”
“They’re heavy and uncomfortable, especially when she’s having a growth spurt. We tried, and we might try again, but the doctor says her comfort is more important for now. Her legs will never be normal, Rebecca, but she was blessed with a sharp mind. I try to keep her engaged. It’s not easy for me—I told you, I had hardly any schooling, it’s my biggest regret—but I do my best.”
Rebecca nods. “I know. You’re a wonderful teacher for her, but she also has a body.”
“Yes. So do I.” He turns to face the wall. “Mine needs sleep. Enough of this, please. I appreciate your concern, but your hopes are too high. She’ll never walk. She doesn’t have the bones for it. Good night.”
But Rebecca cannot stop. “My grandmother designated me a healer, Sam. She taught me some of her kuras de kaza. I think maybe I can help Luna, at least a little, but your mother doesn’t let me near her. It’s been over a month. The way she treats me, you’d think I’d never raised a child.”
“Keep your voice down please,” Sam murmurs. “She could hear you.”
The closet-like room where Fanny and Luna sleep is on the other side of the apartment, separated from the bedroom by the kitchen, though it’s true that the walls are thin. “Luna doesn’t even call me Mama anymore,” Rebecca says more quietly. “Not since the first few days.”
Sam turns around and takes her hand under the covers. “What does she call you?”
“Nothing. Ever. She’ll”—she shrugs—“maybe grunt in my direction. That’s all. I understand, these things take time, but she wants something from me. Her eyes are always on me, following me around. Nothing is lost on that child.”
“I know,” Sam says proudly. “She’s really something.”
Outside, a dog barks, a sharp, lonely sound, and then again. For a long time, no one speaks.
“When she was born,” Sam whispers finally, kneading Rebecca’s hand so hard it hurts, “they told us to leave her there to die or … or put her away in a place for throwaway children—that’s what they call them, children you toss away like … trash. We were ready to do it. Lika was sick from losing too much blood, and Luna had come too early. They had to feed her with a dropper, like a bird. Everybody said to let her go—Lika couldn’t hold her, couldn’t even look at her—she was covered with hair and the size of a doll—but when I went to say … to say goodbye, Luna just”—he sniffs—“she stared at me, Rebecca. She stared and stared. She could only open one eye, but I’m telling you, she saw into my very soul. We’d already lost one child—maybe our blood was too close from being cousins, and Lika wasn’t built for giving birth. They’d said not to have more, but Lika wanted it so, and it … well, it happened, and then they said they’d cut the baby out, do a surgery, but Luna arrived first on her own, before they could. She looked at me, and that was that.” He releases Rebecca’s hand. When he speaks again, it is with a rare anger. “My father abandoned me. I’d never do that to a child. I’m far from perfect, but I do my best.”
“Of course you do.” Rebecca, crying freely now, strokes his cheeks to find them dry. “You’re a good man, Sam. Why do you think I married you? But love can blind, and so can fear. Look at me. I’m a good example. I should have found a school in Spain for my children, but David had a terrible time with the nuns, and I got … I just got scared. I should have brought them with me to Cuba, but I thought what if it doesn’t work out with this stranger, this Samuel Levy? What if the ship goes down along the way? I’d already taken them all the way to Adrianople only to find their father dead and gone. So now again? Like jumping off a cliff into a fire.”
“You did the right thing leaving them with your parents while you came ahead.” Sam kisses her wet face. “Sometimes being cautious is the right path.”
“It wasn’t, though.” She sits up in bed. “Now they’re stuck in Spain. What kind of country keeps a child from its mother? They say be patient, Mrs. Levy. I sit around, waiting and waiting—I’ve never felt so helpless—but maybe I can help Luna, I can try. Your mother won’t take her outside because she’s afraid of the stairs, and that people will stare. So, all right, let’s find a first-floor apartment and teach Luna some manners. Let the sun put color on her cheeks. So maybe people stare a little until they get to know her. So what? Be my guest! They stare at me. Who is this strange, foreign lady come into the neighborhood? Did I tell you I tried to buy a chicken the other day but asked for a keet-chen? When we figured it out, I burst into laughter, and so they laughed, too. Stare all you want.” She bugs her eyes out. “I’ll stare right back.”
Sam shakes his head. “They stare at you because you’re beautiful. They stare at her because she’s not.”
“She’s beautiful, too.”
“Really?” he asks hopefully. “Do you think so?”
She nods. “She has Lika’s eyes, and thick hair and the prettiest skin, but she needs to learn how to drool less, and to say please and thank you and hold her head up. To be proud. Give me an hour a day to work with her, Sam. Tell your mother to let us be. She can go to your sisters’ or sit in the park, do something nice for herself.”
“I can ask,” he says doubtfully.
“Don’t ask. Tell.”
“She won’t like it.”
“The last time I checked, you were the man of the house.” She sends her hand beneath the covers along the furred skin of his belly and down his undershorts.
“Is that how it works?” He laughs. “I’m the man of the house if I obey my wife?”
“Of course. You didn’t know?”
Then—so much for exhausted—he is kissing her collarbone and neck, her jawline, temple, the pathways of her ear, and pushing up her nightgown, and before long they are both naked and he has entered her. A wife is supposed to feel burdened by her husband’s urges, but Rebecca mostly finds their lovemaking a pleasure, the only place in America where she feels at home. Tonight, though, her thoughts stay on a separate track, because what if she can’t help Luna, and where will her sons sleep when they finally arrive from Spain, and when will they arrive, and what about the rest of the family? And how will her boys adjust to Luna and to learning a new language, and to a new grandmother with no room in her heart for them, who never sings?
Rebecca has never thought of herself as a nervous person, but she has a recurring dream that David and Berto have caught Luna’s illness (though she knows it’s a birth defect and not contagious), and another in which her parents speak at a rapid clip in a language she can’t understand. When Sam is asleep and snoring, she reaches for her nightgown, needing the protection of a second skin, and lies fitfully awake. It is later in Spain, or earlier, depending on how you think of it, the wolfhounds stirring, the sun coming up over the shards on the garden wall. Has the cock crowed yet? Are her babies still asleep, reaching for their mother but finding only each other, or maybe Avuela, in the night? Did they have a bath before bed, emerging pink and scrubbed?
Did they get her last letter with the drawing she made: two smiling boys in a boat, in sailor suits like the ones she sewed? Be good boys. I’ll see you soon. Send me a picture. Kisses from your mother who adores you. Have they—she both wants and mourns it—grown? In a frame on her bedside table is a photograph of her flanked by David and Berto in those same sailor suits and, on the reverse side, her first attempt at writing in English, undertaken a few weeks after she arrived. There in Spain my dollings. Sam had pointed out the misspellings when he saw them, and though Rebecca shrugged off the correction, it had stung.
Later, in the bathroom, she will clean herself with a soapy cloth, and although she doesn’t know it at the time, this is the night that Jacob—to be called Jack once he starts school—takes hold, her only redheaded son, a beautiful (sin ojo) infant and the first of her children, if you don’t count Luna (Rebecca will and she won’t) to be Made in America, but high-strung and fussy from the start, for being born to a nerviosa mother on nervous soil.
II
NEWMOTHER IS AT THE DOCTOR for the baby in her belly and Papa is at work and Luna is hungry but they’re out of bread. How about an egg? asks Nona, but Luna says no. How about yogurt, offers Nona, or kashkaval, but Luna wants a sweet roll, the kind with white icing stripes and a plump dot of apricot jelly at its center. Also she wants to go outside—it’s sunny out the window and she hears children playing on the street—but she never can unless Papa is home to carry her down because Nona is scared of falling with her on the stairs.
Luna bats her lashes, her eyes one of the few body parts she can control at will. “Please, Nonita? Pleasepleaseplease, can we go out?”
There’s an Italian bakery down the street, and Papa is at the store. He’ll smile when he sees her; he’ll give her licorice. Her red wagon waits in the supply room behind the store. “Every child needs fresh air,” Luna adds, quoting Newmother, and Nona snorts but then takes her hat from its peg and bends by Luna’s chair to work socks onto her feet and buckle her patent leather shoes. Then a bow in Luna’s hair, a wet cloth circling her face, the stove turned off. Nona’s purse, Nona’s house slippers exchanged for her brown lace-up shoes, Luna’s bow adjusted. Nona’s stockings pulled up from the outside, her hands making expert laddered pinching motions on her skirt. “What I do for you,” Nona says finally, which is what Newmother says, too (Papa never does; she is his sun moon stars), and, bending from the knees and staggering backward a few steps, Nona lifts her with a groan.
* * *
THEY ARE BARELY ON THE LANDING when Nona trips and falls down the long, narrow staircase with Luna in her arms, a lurching, forward tumble, Luna’s jaw slamming shut, the dusty, splintered scent of fear. Luna closes her eyes to a spangled blur, clinging to Nona, who clings to her, as they fall head over heels, then bump along sideways at a twisted angle, the next stair down, the next and next until they land in a tangle at the bottom.
For a long moment, Luna can’t breathe. Everything goes quiet, white and still. Then her breath returns, and she coughs violently, as if expelling salt water from her lungs.
“Lunita,” Nona gasps, sitting up partway, then flopping back with a thud. “El Dyo have mercy, are you all right, are you alive?” and Luna says, “I’m alive, Nonita. Are you?” which might even be funny because of course Nona is—she just spoke, didn’t she?—except Nona doesn’t answer; she is whimpering now, an awful sound, and Luna can see her own bent arm and Nona’s brown shoe sticking out beneath her leg and the wall with its smudge of fingerprints, but Nona isn’t where she should be; she’s twisted here and there, the angles wrong, and Luna cannot find her face.
Nooooonaaaaaa? No-NAH?
Nothing.
FANNY, Luna tries.
A low, vibrating groan.
Nona? TALK, Nona, please! Nona, are you hurt? Can you talk?
But her grandmother has gone still and silent. Is she dead? Luna tries to pray (Newmother has been teaching her the Shema), but the words won’t come. “Papa?” she calls into the air. “Papa! Ayuda!” but her father, though only next door in the store, may as well be miles away, and even if she could move, she is afraid to because any motion could hurt Nona if she isn’t already dead, and if she is dead, then the worst thing will have happened, and Luna is lying with a corpse.
Nona groans again. So she’s alive! A fly buzzes close, then circles away. Somebody? Anybody? Help? What to do? As Luna lies there, it occurs to her that she and Nona might die together at the bottom of the stairs, which might not be so bad; she could be laid out like Snow White and mourned by an owl, raven and dove, and her prince would come and she’d wake up a princess or something even better—a bird that can fly like the pigeons that land on the windowsill, where Newmother has started a flower box because “my Papa taught me how to garden when I was a girl like you and sent me to America with seeds,” and so that Luna has “something to see and something to tend.” Each morning, Newmother hoists her up (“Guay de mi, Rebecca—don’t let her fall!”), and they water the seedlings and leave crumbs for the birds, who gather like rats but have feathers like rainbows and fold their knobby pink feet to take off into the sky (they lift, and Luna’s heart lifts with them).
She tries to separate her limbs from Nona’s, but her left arm springs out and whacks Nona in the chest, which makes her yelp. Imsorrynonaimsosorrynona. Luna is crying now, her limbs still jabbing and poking, a random firestorm. A familiar antipathy rises in her for her body, which is dead set against her even as it’s her closest companion and full of hungers—for compliments, sunlight, sugar, touch. She tries again to pray—shemayisraeladonaieloheinu—and this time her limbs start to settle, the sounds rerouting her in a kind of sidelong trick.
Baruchshemk’vod. Her leg slides out from under Nona’s.
Vahavtaiadonaielohecha. She tries to lift—she lifts—her arm.
* * *
FREE AT LAST, Luna scooches to the door and bangs on it with the crown of her head, the prayer still looping through her mind. It will be several years before she learns what the Shema actually means—“When you are home and when you are away and when you lie down and when you rise up”—the recitation by then a daily habit. Now she says the words anyway as she bangs her skull on the door, yelling and headbutting, until finally the door swings open and a lady in a hat peers in—“Holy Mother of God, child! What happened to you?”—and, abandoning a plaid shopping caddy on the sidewalk, rushes to the store, where Papa is.
Briefly, Luna is a hero—you saved the day, you saved your nona, you got help!—and her elbow heals, but Nona’s hip is broken, and she will never again walk without a cane. Nona blames Newmother for the fall, for planting ideas in the child’s mind, but Luna knows it was her own fault for being greedy, wanting a sweet roll and wearing Nona down, and Newmother, who has eyes in the back of her head, also knows it but doesn’t say so, the silence almost worse than being blamed.
When Nona gets out of the hospital, she goes to stay with Tiya Sarah, who lives a few blocks away in a ground-floor apartment. Newmother makes Nona a silky coral bed jacket and a pot of chicken soup with lemon and egg, then turns to Luna with something like victory in her eyes and gets to work.
* * *
NEWMOTHER TORTURES HER. For the past month, she has been taking her through a set of exercises for an hour a day, but with Nona gone, the hour becomes two, then three, divided into one grueling session in the morning and another in the afternoon. Luna must lie on the rug and lift, drop, lift her limbs, first one at a time (she can do it, though it’s hard), then two arms together (harder), then arm with opposite leg (ahCAN’T! She kicks, screams, arches her back, flaps her hands, pees in a warm release) to the count of ten. Newmother makes her heft cans of soup and grab at fistfuls of slippery uncooked rice and drink a glass of water with no straw or lid and don’t get upset if a little spills (it does, she does).
Newmother knots a dish towel around Luna’s neck and gives her a cup of creamy chocolate milk—her favorite drink—and when it spills, forces Luna to clean up the mess herself with a rag cut from her favorite outgrown nightie, white flannel dotted with blue sprigs. When the lesson is over, she offers Luna chocolate milk again, this time with a lid and straw from the store, but Luna sucks up a mouthful and spits it out, spattering (whoops!) all over Newmother’s white and yellow gingham dress. Newmother unbuttons the dress down the front with her quicksilver hands and steps out to reveal a satin slip and lace-trimmed pink brassiere, a far cry from the practical, severe underclothes that Nona wears. Her stomach sticks out; there’s a baby in there just starting to show. She turns away for a moment, hand on her middle, and draws in her breath, and when she turns back to Luna, she has a big, fake smile on her face as if it were all a joke, but it is no joke; Luna wanted to ruin that dress, even more than she wanted to be the person inside it, a beautiful lady with beautiful clothes, a cold heart and Papa’s love, a wicked stepmother in a fairy tale.
“We can wash out the stain,” Newmother says cheerfully, like she’s proposing an outing to the park. “Soap and vinegar, a magic potion. Set yourself up at the sink while I change, and I’ll show you how.”
Years later, when Luna is working as a ward clerk at the New York City Department of Hospitals, she will receive a birthday gift from an office friend of a wooden paddle toy with two geese who peck each other when you pull the string, and in the endless staccato bow and stab of the little carved birds, she will remember herself and Newmother in those early days in Astoria, when they were each marking territory and fighting, though in different ways, for their lives. Lie down lift up one two three, I can’t, you can, I won’t, you will, you’re hurting me, I’ll tell on you to Papa! Go right ahead, tell away, Luna—you think this is fun for me, the way you carry on? Your papa knows I’m doing it for you.
Sometimes she pretends to cry, theatrical, loud wails, and then she really does cry, choking on her own spit until Newmother thumps her back and begs her to stop and kisses her face all over—cheeks, forehead, chin, it’s all right, Lunita, shhh, shhh—and once in a rare while, she makes Newmother cry, too, and for a fleeting moment, she feels her sadness, how she is without her real children, far from her mother, far from home, and they rest, depleted, in each other’s arms.
The reprieves never last long.
“Nice girls eat with a spoon, Luna—you’re not an animal in a barn.”
“Nona says it’s all right how I do it, that I can eat like this.”
“Well, I say no, and I’m your mother.”
“My mother is dead!”
Then a scream with no words. Luna puts her all into it, crying holy hell.
