As John spoke, Sara and I glanced at one another askance.
“Sure,” I said. “Who wouldn’t?”
But John wasn’t really listening to me. “And then you’ll have to break his heart. But he’ll tell you that his love was just for your singing, and send us magnificent presents until his untimely death at age sixty-seven, since he can’t be close to you, but his gifts can direct the course of your life.”
“Will he send gifts to you?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.” John splayed on the couch, watching my mother pat Kara’s belly and help her scissor-kick from her back. “He’ll actually send me the best ones. He’ll think we have a bond, and then eventually we will. Because I will be forever bonded with the man who buys me a really fine Swiss watch. A silver watch. Because gold is a little, you know”—he pursed his lips—“too too.”
I squinted at him.
“Do you need me to leave you alone with these fantasies? Because we girls could just step out for a minute, if you like.”
“No,” he said, swatting at a fly. “But just, you know. Tell him I am partial to those watches with moon dials in them. Those are pretty nice.”
I felt a little ill, but when I looked at him he was smiling. He was inside the story, it seemed. Nowhere else. It is my job to believe that is possible.
The sun is hot on the back of my neck, and I loosen my hair from its elastic band so it can provide some shade. I sweep Kara up into my arms and fish around in my pockets for some money. A couple of quarters and a five-dollar bill. I give Kara the bill, closing her fingers around it. She is not to be trusted with change yet. It always goes immediately into her mouth. I am forever making spitting faces—pew pew! — and sticking out my tongue to get her to mimic me.
She sniffs the five-dollar bill and rubs it against her cheek, but I’m successful in maneuvering her towards the rabbit. The soft puppet hands clap together around the money and then the rabbit bows. The top of its head brushes Kara’s arm. She gasps and grabs at it, but it easily eludes her, as does the snake. I wonder how the puppeteer can see beyond his curtains. There isn’t any evidence of a peephole or mirror.
Soon I’ll be on a plane, shrugging and squirming to try and find a comfortable position. Then pulling out my headphones and falling asleep listening to Verdi and maybe Puccini, for fun. And when I step off the plane, I’ll stretch my arms wide to open my lungs, wide enough that I can inhale the whole of existence. All the Italian exhaust fumes and espresso oils and the musk dabbed behind women’s ears. Pomade on men’s hair. I’ll walk briskly to baggage claim and let a kind stranger with my name on a placard pick up my things and place me in a car.
Kara will stay behind and learn things and I will scramble to catch up when I return. Not her first words, her steps, but maybe her first taste of mashed pears and the thoughtful way she considers them. Sometimes at night she looks up as if yearning for stars, and I wonder what it is she sees. The sky is mostly blank in Chicago — too much pollution, too much light. But if her vision is still blurred by newness, maybe the streetlamps and headlights look to her like distant suns. A motorcycle rocketing by, like a meteor.
This has become my wish for her, though she is daily more delighted by Mozart and Handeclass="underline" that she sees things I cannot. The more she looks like me, her face resolving into my own baby pictures, the more I dream she will grow up to be blond and blue-eyed and inscrutable. I imagine her leaning over a microscope, a telescope, handily bandying a screwdriver or pipette.
I imagine her dreaming about Greta, huddled by the stove in that warm wooden kitchen while the scent of bread dough intermingles with cook smoke. Or about Ada, the great-grandmother who will perhaps loom larger in her childhood imagination. A foreign princess exiled in an unfamiliar land. A woman whose hair was soft and dark until the day she died, who knew just how to lay her hand on my cheek to help me fall into sleeping.
I don’t try to keep Ada alive through storytelling. But she does come up almost every day, in my words, in my thoughts. The soft sock I feel in my gut when I hear her name. When I speak it.
Tomorrow I will put on a purple gown of silk that has been steamed smooth, so the skirt flares liquid like the arms of an octopus. I will use my lips and tongue and teeth, my lungs and belly and throat and spine. I will bend into notes and make the very windows shake. Make women and men in the audience cry.
And someday Kara might wear scuffed sneakers. She might sneak out to watch meteor showers and trick me into learning the names of false constellations. Come home from science camp bursting with data about skeletal formation and the sound wavelengths in various parts of my chest. Blood thumping through my arteries carrying chain upon chain of unreadable DNA.
When she is ten she might run ahead of me in the park, the soles of her shoes flashing white-white-white as she goes. Jump up and tumble into the grass to pinch clover flowers into a necklace, a chain. And if I turn my back she’ll scramble up into a tree. Her toes finding secret purchase where the bark puckers. She’ll sit on a branch several feet above my head, swinging her legs and leaning her weight on her palms, laughing at me as I stand resolute below her holding out my arms.
Acknowledgments
Immense gratitude to Peter Turchi, Mike McNally, Melissa Pritchard, and Tara Ison, who saw this book through many strange permutations, and always offered generous guidance and love. Thank you for being my teachers.
To Branden Boyer-White, always my first reader and mind-twin: I have no idea what I would do without you, and I never want to find out. Appreciative adoration also to Angie Dell, Rachel Andoga, Lyndsey Reese, Sarah Hynes, Laura Ashworth, Sam Martone, Corie Rosen Felder, Beth Staples, Mairead Case, and Molly Backes. I am lucky to have such brilliant and talented friends.
To Katie Henderson Adams, an editor whose value and charm cannot be overstated. Your careful insight and infectious enthusiasm made this a much better book, and I cannot thank you enough. Much gratitude to everyone at Liveright, especially Cordelia Calvert, Will Menaker, and Peter Miller.
To Emma Patterson, a true friend as well as a wonderful agent. You have been a delight from the very beginning, and I look forward to working (and emailing) together for many years to come. Thank you for being my work’s greatest advocate — even to me, sometimes. Thanks also to Sarah Cornwell for bringing us together.
To my coworkers at Google, for their unflagging support—
To the Ragdale Foundation and the Willapa Bay AiR, for providing time, space, friendship, and sustenance (of every variety)—
To the Jewish Studies Department and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, for awarding me fellowships that allowed me travel to Krakow, Warsaw, Singapore, and Montreal in pursuit of this book—
To Caitlin Horrocks, Kevin McIlvoy, Antonya Nelson, and Andrea Barrett, for their generous readings and advice—
To Kara Hitchko and Lucia Ballard, for the use of their names, and for their friendship—
To the friends whose emails and phone calls I doubtless neglected while working on this book—
To my family, for believing in me and loving me always—
Thank you.