What You Don't Know by Tristan Seifer
My apartment building loomed grey across the lake. That's where we'd been headed finally to drop me off. Luna's husband had expected her home hours earlier. I watched as the surface of the lake cracked with the fevered swirling lights of the ambulance, the police cars and fire truck. "Hey," I said, standing. "Here I am." The lights switched my bare legs, my skirt molded in pleats around my upper thighs. My mouth was sore, my head felt large. I touched my body delicately, my breasts, stomach, legs, remembering Luna's hand against my ankle as I pulled free of the car. I glistened, undamaged.
Sometime later they found me; two men on either side of a gurney lifted me gently into the air. For a moment I was my mother: white sheets chafed me, strange hands guided my body. "Close your eyes," they told me. But it was too much like floating. My hair pulled me down, each long strand a deadweight stretching my scalp. I imagined Luna's cropped black hair lifted by the water into a spiked halo. Through the angle of an arm and body flashed the dull red paint of her car, a solid spot of blood.
We drank. That's mostly what we did together. Then one night I found myself dog-paddling toward shore, my heavy kicks and breath hollow echoes in my head, muffling what I took to be the sound of swimming behind me. I thought I heard, "I'm right here." When my feet could tread silt, head craned above surface, I turned and understood I was hearing the slap and sway of the car as it sank. The rest of the lake spread out calm, bevelled glass. On the bank, on my knees, I prayed, vomiting water and blood, bourbon.
It's disappearing time, a familiar voice behind me says, and I turn, and it is my mother. She is wearing the simple cotton dress she'd chosen to be buried in, and her face, though darker olive, is mine. I am shocked to see how well she looks, the suppleness of her skin as it was before her illness, her eyes focused and bright, her body restored. Even her hair has grown back and gleams wonderfully in a long thick braid. As a child I'd wrapped her hair around my hands, my face, its sensuous fluidity a gift.
Mama, I cry, but she does not seem to hear; and yelling, I found myself awakened by my own voice.
"Hey Sleeping Beauty," Robbie said, stroking my arm. I shook my head, leaned against her. My eyes closed again. "It's okay," she told me. "Sleep. I'm here. It's okay."
A dream of my mother had been until then a silent movie, as if even in sleep I was afraid I could not remember her true voice. Her smell I was able to recall easily, a combination of earthy, accessible things, paprika and yeast and the smooth sweetness of White Shoulders, which she had let me touch to the hollow of her throat and wrists on those rare occasions when she and my father went out for an evening. I would refuse to wash myself those nights before going to bed; I wanted to sleep with my hands against my face, breathing my mother in. In the morning, my mother, unlike the baby-sitter, would demand that I wash. It was not that voice I wished to recall, but the voice of bedtime stories and off-hand assurances.
My mother's dream words, spoken in a sober, straightforward voice I knew as her own, were words Luna said to me several weeks earlier, the first time she offered to drive me home from the writing class we both were taking--"It's disappearing time," as she flicked the classroom lights off and on, then led me to her car.
The front passenger seat was littered with papers, cassette tapes, assorted hair ornaments and combs. "My daughter's mess," she said. "Just throw it all in the back." The back seat was surprisingly clean and empty, so I instead gathered everything together on my lap. I rubbed my thumb over the blunt teeth of one of the combs.
"Pretty," I said, noticing the small starfish in the wide lucite handle.
Luna bent toward me to see what I held. For a moment her right hand lingered on top of mine. "You can have it if you like," she told me. "Sometimes I forget it's a living thing." She laughed, and her hand settled again on the steering wheel. "Was, I mean," she said. "Take it. Go on." I slipped the comb into my jacket pocket and thanked her. Her smile curled her top lip nearly to her nose, her whole face lifted and expanded, though a network of tension seemed to worry the cheery surface, as if such facial generosity were new to her. When her face flattened again, I noticed for the first time the deep lines zigzagging from her eyes and mouth, across her cheeks. It would be several more weeks before I learned she had just ended months of chemotherapy and radiation; that both of her breasts had been removed; that her prognosis was not good.
"Would you like to go for a drink?" she asked. "Any suggestions? We old marrieds don't get out too often. My darling husband prefers that I do my drinking at home."
"Do you want to see how the other half drinks?" I asked her, keeping my eyes on the yellowed arc of light guiding us. She had mentioned earlier that she wanted to discuss the characters in my stories. She said the women intrigued her, their lives, their choices. When she blushed I understood that what she wanted to know was if I was the women in my story, if I was a lesbian.
"I'm driving without direction here," she said, and I told her to turn on Congress. Then I asked her to remind me to call Robbie. "I don't want her worrying about me," I said. Robbie and I weren't living together then; there was no need for me to call her. But I meant for Luna to understand that I was off-limits, involved; and that, yes, I am the women in my story.
The nurse held my hair out of the way as Robbie stretched a tee shirt over my head. When my face emerged and the shirt was smoothed against my skin, Robbie kissed me. It was the first time we kissed like that in front of anyone, not a sisterly quickness but her mouth fully on mine, lips parted, her breath warm inside me. My face ached, but I stopped myself from pulling away.
She drove me to my apartment in a borrowed car, full stops at each intersection, cautious yieldings to cars far enough away. As we came to the lake's bridge she started to sob; she had to pull over for a few minutes to hold me.
"I remember flying off the bridge and then swimming," I told her. "And then waking up to you."
"Whoever called from the hospital thought we were sisters," she said. "I told him I didn't have a sister, but he insisted I did, as if I'd just forgotten." She kissed my nose. "I didn't know I was your emergency contact," she said. "Thank you."
"Silly thing for you to be thanking me for," I told her. She smiled, and leaned back against the seat, put her hands on the steering wheel. "Don't go yet," I said. The arc of her jawline was perfect, a graceful curve connecting chin to earlobe. I traced the back of my hand against it. "Is the offer still open?" I asked. "May I move in with you?"
She didn't look at me for a moment. Then she asked, "Are you just not looking forward to the view of this lake from your window, or do you really want to live with me?"
I wasn't sure what to answer; in truth, I knew it was both. "I love you," I told her. She placed my hand on her thigh and began to drive.
"That's not what I'm after," I told her, too harshly; I could see her reaction, a quick tensing of her eyebrows, a momentary holding of her breath. I'd been thinking of Luna's words, my mother's dream words; thinking of my foolishness in letting Luna drive. Even in the bar her movements had been exaggerated, wild. Of course she'd been drunk. I should have driven. Of course I'd been drunk too.
"I'm sorry," I told Robbie. "I know I'm being weird."
"Weird," she said. "Crazy Janie." She continued to wrap the plates. Then she said quietly, "The troubled older woman and you."
I walked toward her and placed my hand on her shoulder. "Robbie," I said, "she needed a friend, you know that. She needed company."
"Why, I thought she kept herself company with liquor." She gestured toward the lake. "I guess chemo and drinking weren't fast enough, though."
I inhaled heavily, then let my breath out in a long thin stream. "That's horrible," I said. "I really don't think she wanted this."
Robbie watched me for a moment. "Well," she finally said, raising both hands, palms up, "we'll never know, will we? I just wonder what made her think she could take you with her."
I walked through the bedroom into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. In the dark I found the sink, poured cool water over my wrists. With my shoulder I nudged the light switch, turned slowly toward the mirror. My forehead and right cheek were somewhat mottled, but the cool water and the hospital's ice packs had kept the swelling down. My hair sprang out straight, a sheaf of rusted steel wool. Lovely, I thought. Alive. I opened a drawer in search of a brush or hair band, scissors even, before remembering that everything had been packed. I was going to live with Robbie. I felt suddenly anchor-less, standing in my emptied apartment, not yet convincingly tied to her.
"I'm sorry," she whispered through the door. "I know she was your friend, Janie. I know you'll miss her." She sighed, and I knew one hand would be against the childhood scar on her neck, a lock of hair would be in her mouth. I wanted to believe that she was right--that I would miss Luna, that what had been forged between us was friendship.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "But I'm glad you're finally moving in with me."
I opened the door and leaned against the frame. "Finally?" I said.
"Well, three years," she told me. "Dyke-lore has it we should have moved in together after three days."
I smiled at her. "Right," I said. "I am glad too, you know." I moved toward her, and she caught my wrists in her hands.
There is a photograph of me in that dress standing next to my mother outside the synagogue. It was a brittle, winter-like day, early November; it had snowed that morning, and the stark sunlight reflected off the thin white blanket. My mother and I squinted at the camera, at my father, who said something about welcoming me to womanhood. I blushed; I hadn't begun menstruating yet, and I believed that only then would I be a woman. A few blessings and incantations in Hebrew (which I could only sound out, not speak or understand) were a poor substitute for the blood and inner regeneration that would mark my rite of passage. I felt fraudulent, embarrassed, but I couldn't say anything; I'd gotten all my information about sex and maturation from the filmstrip shown in school. As it was, my mother thought I was too smart for my own good; Curiosity killed the cat, declared the pillowcase she embroidered for me after she found a school health pamphlet in my bedroom. What you don't know, she was always telling me, can't hurt you. Now, taking my hand for the photograph, You're still my little girl, she told me.
My father remarried three times after my mother died, moving into progressively smaller apartments as each relationship ended. Boxes of photographs and record albums and clothes had been left behind, given away; proof of memories lost. Sometimes I imagined that one day I would come upon a yard sale offering up my past for cheap. I might find that photograph in its worn wooden frame. Perhaps in my mother's eyes, in her posture, in the delicate way she held my hand, I would be able to discern the cancer that was already probing her breasts, aching back toward her lungs, her lymph nodes, cancer which within three months would take her quietly from me.
At the funeral home I stood close to the door, prepared to slip out, quick, should anyone approach me. I wore a navy blue dress Luna had admired, and was relieved to see others had dressed similarly. After making their way past the coffin, everyone gathered around an older man in a loose black suit--Luna's husband. She told me he kept her from herself, seeing her only as devoted wife, loving mother. He'd forbidden her seeking work outside the home; ridiculed her studies and writing. He drove me to drink, she had said.
Even as I remembered, I knew the memory to be false. Luna had never said any of those things, not directly. Instead, she'd had her characters speak them, her own self thinly disguised as women breaking away, leaving their families behind for freedom. Which is what I seemed to represent to Luna. I was no conventional wife, and most likely would not give anyone life; another woman could never enslave me, Luna thought, the way a man could. The way she--each of her characters--believed her husband had.
I imagined Luna's husband's large hands cupping her shoulders from behind, directing her around obstacles, through difficulties. I tried to conjure up the sight of his face behind hers, dark with malice, self-righteous justification. But I couldn't. I saw instead that though his broad shoulders were held straight, his face was grey, drawn, and his chest fell and rose in short sharp arcs.
He turned his head and smiled wanly as a girl in a black cocktail dress moved through the dark circle toward him, slipped her arm through his. Her dress was too small; the dull material smashed her full breasts wide and flat, strained across her hips. Someone else must have picked out the dress, someone who hadn't noticed the girl had become womanly. I thought of my bat mitzvah dress, turned back at my mother's funeral into a little girl's dress by virtue of its color.
The girl leaned against her father, mutely accepting people's hands on her, a multitude of hands pressing the girl's arms, her shoulders and back. She turned stiffly to be kissed, whispered at. I felt those hands on me, those dry lips and words against my cheek, the crook of my father's arm supporting me. The girl offered herself up. I recognized Luna's high cheekbones, her smooth narrow forehead. She had Luna's eyes, too, wide and dark, dry, somnolent. I wanted to slip my hand in hers and take her outside where in the crisp daylight I would be able to see Luna more clearly in her face. But I didn't know how I could make her understand I hadn't meant to leave her mother behind.
"You're the one she was with, aren't you?" Luna's daughter stood in front of me. The sun was behind her, mottling her outline with bright white. I couldn't see her face.
"Would you like to sit down?" I asked, slipping over on the bench to make room. I realized I couldn't remember Luna ever mentioning her daughter by name.
The girl shook her head, her arm lifting slightly toward the funeral home. "Not here," she said.
We walked a block toward a small diner she seemed to know. She knew the waitress, though obviously not that well; the waitress teased her for dressing so fancily in the middle of the afternoon. The girl shrugged as she led me to the farthest booth, wide green vinyl seats, the back of the seat rising to the ceiling. We were the only customers.
"I should call my friend Robbie," I told her, looking for a phone. The waitress handed me a menu then pointed toward a blue sign across the restaurant. The phone was hung on the wall between two bathrooms; I pulled the cord as far as it could go into the Ladies' Room and leaned against the closed door.
"What are you going to say to her?" Robbie asked. "Your mama was a closet-case? A drunk? She hated her life and wanted out?"
"I'll tell her anything," I told Robbie. "She just has to know the right questions."
"The right questions?" Robbie said. "Tell her she doesn't have to end up like her mother. That's what she needs to hear."
The girl and I sat for a while in silence, speaking only to place our order. The waitress seemed to understand now that something serious was going on; her face was solemn, her responses muted. She took our menus and disappeared behind a wide silver door.
"I go to school with her twin brother," the girl told me. "She's younger than she looks."
She seemed to be studying my face. I wondered what she saw. I hadn't worn much make-up, remembering that during mourning mirrors were covered, though the most I ever wore anyway was mascara, maybe lipstick. That morning Robbie had tapped my face lightly with a powder puff trying to conceal the wide sallow bruises. The girl must have known who I was by the state of my face. I touched my cheek briefly, patted my hair, which though unwashed was pulled back into a french braid. I hoped I didn't look crazy, careless. It was strange how this felt like a blind date, with its threat of complicated intimacies and revelations.
The girl leaned forward, tapped the underside of the table once, twice. "I'm fifteen," she told me. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-six," I said.
"Are you in school?"
"No. Well, yes. I mean, I'm done with college. I work in offices. Typing, answering phones. Temp work, you know. But I take night classes sometimes. What grade are you in?"
She bit her lower lip, the first sign of hesitation I'd seen in her. Then she said, "That's where you met my mother, then. Night school. Is that right?"
"That's right."
"In that English class?"
"Writing workshop."
"Tell me about it," she said.
I explained the structure of the class, how each student brought in a story, the teacher read it aloud, the other students critiqued it. I started to make up some nice story to attribute to Luna, but the girl's face closed for a moment, her eyes went dark, her mouth, tight. She asked me if Luna always drove me home after class.
"Sometimes," I told her. "Not every week."
"But most weeks."
Yes.
"But first you went somewhere, right? A bar or something?"
"A bar," I told her, nodding. The girl nodded too, as if something between us had finally been understood, some connection made for her.
"She was drunk," the girl told me. "The newspapers didn't mention anything about drinking. Did you notice that?"
I told her I hadn't read the newspaper accounts.
"My father has connections. You're not even mentioned. We've been telling everyone Mother always took late night drives alone, to clear her head. It was an unfortunate accident; that part of the road isn't well-lit."
"It was an unfortunate accident," I told her, and she shrugged.
"Yes," she said.
The waitress came with our order then, setting down each item carefully between us. "The plate's hot," she told us. "Don't burn yourselves." She brought us a pitcher of ice water and two plastic cups, then disappeared again.
"She's very circumspect," I said. "Leaving us alone like this, I mean."
The girl angled her head toward the silver door. "The cook's her lover," she told me. I thought how wrong that word sounded, neglecting all but the physical realm. Robbie and I never settled on one way to refer to the other, girlfriend, wife, significant other, partner. Pardner, she'd sometimes call me in a cowboy accent. Luna called the woman she'd taken up with her friend, the accompanying subtle, private smile betraying vast intimacies. I'd met her the night of the accident, a married woman who labeled herself, as Luna had, bi-curious. She hadn't shown up at the funeral; I wondered if she knew.
"The cook's a woman," the girl told me, shaking her white paper napkin out over the table. Her hands were rounded, a child's, though her nails shot out sharp and brightly painted. Somehow I knew what was coming: "Is Robbie?" she asked. Still, I felt my face flush, and I took a moment to tell her, Yes, Roberta.
"I thought so," she said. Her voice sounded small, constricted.
"You have to understand," I told her. "Your mother and I. We were just friends."
She sat back heavily. "It doesn't matter now, does it?"
I told her I thought it did. She leaned toward the aisle and it seemed she was leaving; then I saw that her napkin had fallen to the floor and she was retrieving it. Her profile could have been her mother's. I wanted to tell her that her mother loved her, but I couldn't be sure of it. The girl had been mentioned to me only as a nameless burden. I looked down, then back at her. She was sitting upright, the napkin clasped in both hands. It seemed as if her gaze had never lifted from my face.
"If it makes you feel better," she told me, "I believe you."
We settled down into eating, root beer floats, a large platter of onion rings I'd ordered to share. We were careful not to reach for the pitcher of water, an onion ring, at the same time.
"My mom died when I was thirteen," I told her, though I was wary of venturing onto unstable ground--I didn't want to encourage further questions about her mother, and I didn't like exploiting my own mother's death to find an inroad to the girl's sorrow. Still I went on: "I didn't know this at the time," I said, "but she knew she was dying for months. She told me only that everything would be taken care of, and I thought that meant she'd be okay. But then she died. A week later, after we'd sat shiva and my father's family left, I went into the freezer looking for something to make my father for dinner that night. And there were all these white paper packages neatly stacked, each labeled with what it was and defrosting and heating instructions. Casseroles and kugels and chicken dishes; I guess anything that would freeze well. My mother had known she was dying, and she spent whatever good days she had left cooking for us, my father and me. When I found those packages, all labeled by hand, her handwriting--it was almost like she wasn't gone at all."
The girl didn't look up from her drink. Through the blue striped straw she sucked assiduously at the globe of ice cream suspended in the root beer. I was sorry I'd told her that story; it was as if I were comparing mother-love, and it made it seem that my mother had loved me so much more, providing for me in a way Luna never had for her daughter. When the girl pushed the glass away her lips were stippled white.
"I can cook just fine," she told me. "Even Daddy's good with salads." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand harder than seemed necessary as if she were trying not to cry.
Back at the bus stop she shook my hand formally and was half-way down the block before I thought to offer my phone number, the suggestion that she call sometime if she needed to talk. I resisted calling after her though, as I felt I had nothing more to say. I stood against the hot metal wall of the bus shelter and watched her walk, the slightly awkward roll to her hips intimating a newness to them, an unfamiliarity; her shoulders collapsed under heat and sorrow, anger. When she reached the corner she stooped down and removed her shoes, then turned and ran back to me. Her stride was foreshortened and made ungainly by the tight grasp of her dress hem; she looked as if she were a toddler discovering her walking legs.
"Wait," she said. "I want you to know something." She crossed her arms on her chest and her shoes swung against her hip, hard. "You didn't have to tell me about her stories, because I already know what she wrote. She wrote about how awful her life was, her awful husband and bratty daughter. Isn't that right?"
The girl took in a deep breath, held it for a long moment. She slipped her shoes back on, then stood staring at me. I realized that I'd been wrong--her eyes weren't her mother's at all. Still I felt the need to make an offering.
"It was an accident," I told her foolishly. "Your mother loved you."
"Maybe," she told me, beginning to cry as her voice rose high above us. "Maybe it was an accident. But she probably didn't mind it. She probably didn't care."
My father had found the lump in my mother's breast; it took her a year to go to a doctor to determine its nature. My father told me this several years later. He blushed and turned away from me--the thought of his hand on her like that. My parents had been shy about sexual matters, terribly discreet, kissing chastely only two or three times in front of me. I imagine my mother resisted his suggestion that she place her hand under his, to feel it, the lump; if indeed he had been able to suggest it at all. The year before she died, before she knew of the cancer, I came only to her chest; leaning my head against that softness seeking comfort, she would indulge me for a brief moment before nudging me away.
I wonder at my father's terror, finding in my mother what would kill her. What you don't know can't hurt you; I am certain my mother believed that. And so knowing, she said, Fine. Okay. Just let me take care of a few things first.
Place frozen in a 375 degree oven for forty-five minutes, she wrote, her handwriting stark, surreally perfect, as if stencilled on the white paper package she then set in the freezer. These vegetables go well with this dishŠPierce in the center to test for doneness. Preserve its juices.
The last of my mother's days spent providing for us. As if food were all we needed, that's all she contributed to our lives. Food to sustain us, her husband and child; gifts wrapped in white paper, flags of surrender.
Here, Robbie says in my dream. Here, and here, and here, she says, pointing at photographs of my inner breast toward a spattering of darkness, black masses consuming light.
At night before we go to sleep, Robbie and I take turns combing each other's hair. The starfish looks dull under the yellowed lucite; the sweep of the comb is soothing to my tired head. I never want to believe that Luna meant to take me with her; her hand against my ankle, meant to pull her toward me, or me toward her--had I imagined it? Though I've come to think that her daughter was right, and I imagine both my mother and Luna in a silky underwater grave, hands tucked beneath the seat belts across their chests as if in prayer.
Here.
An opened hospital gown, a lead blanket over my mother's belly. As she leans her breast onto the x-ray shelf she smiles for the camera, doctor's orders. I think of the lovely arc Luna's car made as it flew off the bridge. I think of my steady swim toward shore.
...................... 
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