I presented my tongue and accepted the host. I had swallowed so many of these tasteless wafers that one more should have made no difference, but it called to mind every Communion of my life with its unflinching sameness. The priest blessed me and turned to the woman behind me in line. Across the altar John closed his mouth on his own bit of Eucharist, holding his lips in a pinch as if to keep the wafer protected by a buffer of air. He looked around but didn’t see me, turned a whole circle before starting for the exit. I watched him watching the rise of the walls, the eggshell sheen of the dome above us. The river of bodies moving up towards the front of the Basilica to receive a bit of that same bland bread.
I followed him at a small distance. Outside I took a deep breath and stretched, letting the wafer melt into glue on my tongue. Then I walked up behind John, the shivering entirety of him, and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Now,” I said, “how do you feel about God?”
He turned, and if I could not read his smile, I still fell into his arms as he lifted me into the air by the waist.
“Let’s go sing with Maria Callas!” he said.
Because I wanted to, and because I was distracted by the pressure of his hands sliding onto my hips, I felt that I had been understood. We laughed and ran down the white steps of the Basilica, laughed all night as our bodies knocked together and we reached our fingers towards each other’s faces. I laughed as John fed me vanilla bean ice cream, as his arm got stuck in the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt when we tried to pull the shirt free from his body. Laughed when his mouth brushed my belly, my ribs, because I realized this was what it meant to share a secret. We would look at one another in rehearsal the next day and smile and no one would know why. No one but us two, and the God who saw us take Communion unpurified by anything but our new love.
The question that nags at me is: was I understood though? Really? It makes a difference to me whether John saw what I meant, felt what I felt. Jumped into that passion with the same resolve and abandoned himself to it. It is a question of the possibility of faith.
The problem lies with Rabbit, you see. His false dog. The future, causing the past to crumble. It’s a good story for getting a girl to fall in love with you: the mistakes you’ve made and how you mourned them. But when I found out it was not true, it became something different to me. A fable that explained why John thought a girl — any girl — might fall in love with any boy. A pretty package with nothing inside it but tissue, tissue. Layers of tissue and air.
I wanted to laugh it off and forget. But instead I peered backward at all the things about John I’d believed. There are many such things, when you’re in love. Each day, new ones — a favorite flavor of tea, or a dislike for getting up before seven in the morning. He always told me he thought granola bars were tawdry, the downfall of a civilization too lazy to prepare real food.
Was that true or did he just say it because he thought I’d agree? And was there any one truth that I could pull away without the rest crumbling down around me? If too many tourists pocket white pebbles in Montmartre, after all, the city will be made naked of her temples.
18
“Where’s Mama now?” I asked Baba Ada. For months after Sara left I pestered Ada with this question.
“I don’t know.” Ada, curt, looked at her watch. “Who knows. It’s only ten o’clock. Wherever that woman is, she’s probably still sleeping.”
“Don’t you think”—I wrapped my hands around Ada’s wrist—“she’s probably wearing a dress as dark as the ocean? Don’t you think she’s walking through a long hallway that’s only lit by fireflies?”
“Don’t you listen, child?” Ada shook me off. “She’s in bed somewhere. That bad bed she always insists on keeping, with those terrible pillowcases she never remembers to wash. They smell like they’re fermenting.”
I sat down on the living room couch and pressed my knees together hard, so the inside skin of each developed a distinct patch of red.
“If Mama was in some kind of maze, she might not be able to find her way out.” I peeled my knees slowly apart and pressed the red spots, leaving momentary white fingerprints. Ada didn’t seem to be catching on, but this was important. “Say it was a really tall maze made out of bushes.”
“A hedge maze.”
“Yeah, a really tall hedge maze. Maybe there are flowers in there that she’s allergic to, and she sneezed so many times she had to fall asleep.” I considered. “Or else someone poisoned her. It’s possible.”
“Is it?” Ada rubbed her face with both hands. “Listen, lalka, I need to do the laundry.”
“No.” I crossed my arms. “Tell me a story.”
“What kind?”
“A story about Mama. A Sara story.”
But Ada just sighed.
“You already know everything about that woman that you need to know.”
In spite of Ada, I didn’t stop imagining stories about my mother. It was a habit too deeply ingrained to let go. Her disappearance smacked of Greta — both were great queens, kidnapped somewhere, asleep. Or scheming. Both were dangerous and powerful and full of misbehavior. Both were missing, and in neither case did I understand quite why.
At night, after Ada left my room, I lay with my eyes closed and imagined her still there, holding my hands and telling me this:
“When your mother left here, she went to live in a castle, and all around her were battlements and gargoyles spitting hot oil and men with guns. She brought in women from all over the world to brush the hair off of the deer in her bestiary and card the fur into usable material, spin it into thread. Sometimes they spun thread from shining gray cats instead, or thoroughbred horses. Sometimes they plucked feathers from tropical birds and snipped them to pieces and wove that into the fabric, so the colors were always changing under different angles of light.
“Her dresses were golden and brown and littered with white spots, and sometimes she wore one that had a long tail. Not a deer’s tail, but a lion’s tail, which switched back and forth while she walked through her castle’s stony hallways to a great room filled up by an admiring audience. They listened to her singing and threw roses at her feet.
“When she had sung, the fawn most recently born in her forest would be walked into the great room on trembling new legs, a lead of silk around its throat. Sara stroked the animal’s head and slit it open from belly to sternum so that its organs scattered on the floor and mingled with the shining silk. The servants struck up a fire to roast the animal’s body, and when Sara had feasted on tender deer meat and fruit and fine wine, she would recline onto the piles of pillows that her servants carried into the room, and people would ask her about her beautiful daughter. She would smile.
“ ‘My daughter is so small that she can stand on my thumb, but her voice is as big as a cloud surrounding a mountain. It wraps around your body and shields you from the world, so you can’t look out and no one else can look in — not while she’s singing. Of course, a voice like that is a dangerous gift, and she can’t completely control it, not yet. Sometimes it will lash out and tie a man or woman up with its cords, and before my daughter knows it that person will be choked blue, as still as a statue forevermore.