“I thought this might be a better way,” Ada whispered. Her breath a distraction, a hot intrusion in my ear. I twitched away from her, but she leaned in and lifted my chin to her face. “Now you understand.” Her voice was firm. “Presentation.”
She tilted my head back towards the stage, using her thumb and index finger.
“Presentation.”
When the song was done, my mother melted back into the curtains, barely moving them as she slipped through. And we all sent our hearts back with her.
Some of my memories are like this, half soft, half sharp. My whole small self leaning towards the stage, leaning towards the invisible whatever that lay behind it, hiding my mother. My mother, most beautiful, who is never in my mind without bringing her whole complicated self.
She is awash in connotation. She is transforming. She doesn’t exist. She is the only real thing in the world. How can I still feel this way when I’m a grown woman, with my own child? It was the hidden truth of my life for so long — this love, this longing. Ada knew better than to let me bring it too close; even the night of her great presentation she kept my love on a string. Led me with eyes closed, ushered me to bed before my mother stumbled home.
But now Ada is gone. And the doors she guarded are coming unlocked. Who was Greta, really? What did she mean? And where did my mother go, and why?
5
Greta and Saul married in late fall, in the middle of a rainstorm. Ada told me about it every year on the anniversary of their wedding — November 15. It was important, she said, to understand that Greta and Saul were in love in light of everything that came after.
The rain that day, according to Ada, was strange. It obscured the entire sky, including the clouds, with its sheer weight and its audacity. People huddled together inside, but the rain infiltrated after them. It slipped through their walls in the form of a mist and clung to their clothes, dripped on the floorboards. Outside the rain fell like sheets of needles, shivering, silver, and sharp. When anyone poked their head through the door to check for signs that the weather might yield, they saw nothing, nothing but those undulating waves.
Until they saw Greta.
If her guests were nervous about going outside, the bride was elated. No one could remember seeing an announcement, and certainly no one had been formally invited, but most of the town recalled catching sight of her, and once they did they were enchanted. Greta greeted the water like a friend and raised her nose to the mineral smell, the clean air each peal of rain left behind. With her white dress hugging her closely, she walked along the black dirt road and made no attempt to cover herself up in the face of the storm.
The pounding of the water on the earth was a drum, and Greta paced its rhythm towards the forest. She didn’t seem to mind that she was alone. The cottage Saul had built for them was at the edge of town, and that was where she knew she’d find him. People peered out their windows and watched her go by: a speck of light, a candle flicker in the gloom. The vision of her drew them like the scent of fresh fruit. They followed her hungrily from pane to pane.
For despite its obscuring of everything else, the rain revealed Greta. The cotton of her gown became translucent and sticky, luminous against her flesh. The townspeople could see the curve of her shoulder blades, feel their fingers aching to run keystrokes down her spine. They wanted to pinch her thighs, bite her thumbs, suck the water off her hair. They wanted to blow warm air against her belly and unbutton her clothes, feeling the pop of each release. Greta shook her head and shot silver spray in all directions, a halo of movement and mercury. People everywhere opened their doors and walked out into the storm, carrying flowers.
At the border of the woods and the road, Greta paused, halting the crowd that had formed behind her. Everyone was soaked, and solemn. Beyond Greta was nothing but the same gray water, hanging like a curtain that roared and reared. But then there came a light.
It seemed to those looking that Saul had opened a door in the very rain. Behind him glowed the warmth of golden wood, the scent of a cookstove. He stood, perfectly dry, in the doorway and looked out at his bride: a living wave. She bade him come forward and he did, the rain plastering his hair against his head and turning his clothes as dark as pitch. Standing in the space where civilization melted into the trees, he wrapped his arms around Greta and kissed her until she almost wasn’t there. The crowd’s ears were full of the howl of the storm, their stomachs gnawing with joy and envy. Greta pulled away and placed her thumb on the bruise of Saul’s bottom lip. I choose you, her eyes said. You only. And if it was a half-truth, still hungry for the child lost at the dance, it didn’t seem so at the time.
Saul picked Greta up in the driving rain and ascended the unseen steps to their home: just a rectangle of warmth in the storm, an outpost on the edge of the forest. When he closed the door, no one could see where the couple had gone, and they could only throw their flowers to the ground in the hope they’d be found when the sun reemerged.
All day I’ve been walking into things. My toe slammed so hard into the leg of a chair that I had to set Kara down and grab on to it — I was sure the nail had split, but it did no more than blush purple. I knocked another bruise onto my arm just walking through a doorway, and scraped my tailbone against the corner of a dresser drawer while picking out clothes after the shower. That one bled, red blooming through the flakes of skin as I bit my lip and contorted my spine to get a look. I can never resist inspecting an injury, although until recently I almost never had any to look at. Perhaps wounds have gravity, and draw their own kind. Like the sun draws the Earth, and the Earth draws the moon.
What would Baba Ada think of my sense of presentation today? I laugh even to imagine it, which hurts just a little below my navel. Yes, I put on makeup and blew my hair dry, but my face is only a veneer. I have no control over my body at large, the instrument I’ve spent my whole life honing. Did Ada know that giving birth would be so disastrous? She must have guessed, must have had some sense of it — after all, she herself was Greta’s only daughter, come after three sons and a number of miscarriages.
Proximity between birth and death runs in every family, but it seems to run especially close in ours. Ada didn’t like to tell the dark side of a story though. As far as presentation goes, that was her method, her modus. Still, I wish she were here now. I could tell her things that would make her hair curl, and she would listen. I could ask her what comes next, how scared I need to be that these little cuts and bruises aren’t the end of my troubles.
Old habits: I half look for her, my baba, perched on a chair or leaning against the door. But there’s only Kara, lying on a blanket on the bedroom floor. Burbling as she moves her head — it would be wrong to say she turns it, but it bobs a little, gives a healthy jerk. Her limbs move too, spasmodically. This is what she’s been doing all day, either in my arms or laid out somewhere. I almost resent her calm unawareness, the blank canvas of her. She doesn’t know that my heart skips every time the phone rings from the other room, as if it were always John, calling to accuse me. Kara could still be convinced to become anything. Anyone’s. Whereas my life is scribbled over, a garbled language with no one left to understand it. I miss Ada. Ada, who knew me.