Your Duck Is My Duck Read online

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, and hung up.

  I dialed again and again he answered immediately. “My cousin died,” I said.

  “Your cousin?”

  “Cousin Morrie. The violinist.”

  “Did I ever meet him?” Jake said.

  “No,” I said. “You never met him. Though you once saw a letter he—but wait!” My heart started to thud around clumsily, like a narcoleptic on a trampoline. “Why are we talking about you? This is about my cousin.” I started to read: “‘Morris Sandler, violin virtuoso, dies at sixty-six. Sandler was known as—’”

  “‘At sixty-six,’” Jake said. “At sixty-six, at ninety-three, at fourteen, at seventy-eight—at sixty-six what? Those numbers just aren’t the point, are they.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “I’ve been working. I’m at the lab. I’m sorry about your cousin. I didn’t remember that you had one. You weren’t close to him, were you?”

  I held the receiver away from me and stared at it.

  He sighed. “Listen, do you want me to come by?”

  “No,” I said, though I did want him to come by. Or I fiercely wanted him to come by, but only if he was going to be a slightly different person, a person with whom I would be a different person—a pleasant, benign, even-tempered person. “I’m sorry I called. Again. I’m sorry I called again.”

  “I wasn’t being flippant,” he said. “It just really suddenly struck me how primitive it is to measure the life of a human being by revolutions of moons and stars and planets. Anybody who still believes that our species is the apex of creation should—”

  “How do you suggest we measure the life of a human being?” I said. “By weight? Would that be less primitive? By volume? By votes? By distance commuted? By lamentations? By beauty?”

  He sighed again.

  “Sorry,” I said. I glanced around the room, the fading traces of Jake, still floating starkly against his absence. I love you, we still said to each other, but after a year and more of separation it seemed less and less likely that either of us would want him to move back in, and a vacuous, terminating, formal tone of apology clung to that word, love. It was like a yellow police tape at a crime scene. “Jake?”

  “What?” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  I hung up again, tossed the omelet into the trash, drank up my wine to the accompaniment of the ringing phone, poured myself another glass, Friday night, why not, and flopped down on the couch with the newspaper as the ringing of the phone broke off.

  * * *

  Judging from the photo, Morrie, my only cousin, eventually came to look just like his mother, Adela. But as he seems to have had a wife at some point and was apparently a respected collector of original classical scores as well as a technically peerless musician, the resemblance—despite my mother’s gloatingly doleful predictions—must not have demolished him entirely. He was obviously something of a mechanism—evidently he had amassed an enormous collection of train timetables in addition to the scores—as my mother always claimed, but that is unlikely to have been the consequence of having inherited his mother’s nose.

  As it happens, when I was five or six and Morrie was seventeen or eighteen, he still had blond curls and a flat face with an expression I interpreted as soulful—a plaintive, baffled look, as if someone had just snatched an ice cream cone from his hand, and I had private hopes that he might be an angel, though by the time I was able to formulate the thought, I had the sense to refrain from asking my friend Mary Margaret Brody, who could have told me for sure. In any event, at some point I commit the faux pas of announcing in the presence of both my mother and Aunt Adela that I will be marrying Morrie when the time is right. “Well, it’s your life,” my mother says, “but don’t blame me when your children turn out feebleminded.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” my aunt says distractedly to my mother. “Did I forget to mention? Morrie is graduating summa.”

  My mother snorts. “You did not forget.”

  Later, when we are alone, my mother adds that in civilized parts of our country only criminals marry their cousins, and furthermore, she expects me to do better than someone in that family. Despite Adela’s boasting, she says, despite the grades and the honors, Morrie has an exceptionally mediocre mind. It would be a miracle if he did not graduate summa from the tenth-rate college he is attending. The only reason he gets all those good grades in the first place is because he is able to memorize a freakish number of pointless facts. Naturally Adela finds this remarkable, as she can’t even remember where she put her head.

  “I expect you to outshine Morrie by far,” my mother says. “You have much more to offer—much more. Your problem is that you don’t apply yourself.” Morrie’s capacious but un-nuanced memory was acquired from his father, who was so rigid himself that he toppled over and died at the age of forty, my mother tells me. Her impersonally disapproving gaze is directed, as she speaks, at a pair of stockings she is inspecting for runs. “And remember,” she says, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.”

  * * *

  My aunts are the frequent topic of discourse when I visit my mother in her bedroom, where she sits in her big chair, her feet in a basin of water cloudy with salts and potions. The feet are lumpy, whorled, fish white, and riveting—trolls’ feet, the toenails thick and yellow, mottled with blue. A fungus, she says. Blue and red graphs of her suffering run up and down the suety legs, which her hiked-up dressing gown exposes all the way to the thighs.

  A slice of cucumber sits over each of my mother’s closed eyes to reduce puffiness. And as she talks, I concentrate on spreading out my substance, making myself spongy to absorb the puffiness into myself, to absorb the pain radiating through her feet and legs and back. She works nights in the cloakroom of the club, standing all the time, and that’s what accounts for the conspicuous veins that I find so fascinating but which, she explains to me, are disfiguring.

  A familiar cold metal hand closes around my heart and squeezes: my mother is on her feet hour after hour, day after day, so that I will someday go to college. What an abundance of opportunities lies before me, for failure! Sitting on my mother’s dressing table is a framed photo of a lovely girl. In this photo a heap of shining ringlets somewhat obscures the shape of the girl’s head, but there are the distinctive, long, shiny-lidded eyes, their pale, nearly transparent disks of irises plausibly green though represented in black and white, with tiny, shocking dots at their centers. The expression, too, is well known to me, though the girl’s suggests a mischievous rather than a malevolent irony.

  It is hard to believe, but there is the evidence—always building to the same, ringing summation: a lack of advantages ate the lovely girl alive and emitted in her place someone shaped like a melting pyramid, on which is balanced a head—as wide and oval as my aunts’ heads are long and oval—adorned at the ends with little frilly ears and topped now with a careful display of durable-looking, reddish curls, someone whose feet must sit in a basin.

  I reach for my mother’s hand and hold it tightly.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she says, but she allows my hand to stay clasped around her fingers, even though it is clammy and disagreeable.

  Flower to fruit to bare branch, sun to wan star—who am I to complain? The laws are the laws. I shake my head and clear a way for my answer. “Nothing.”

  * * *

  “Your cousin Morrie was a beautiful child. My first thought when I saw him with Adela was to wonder if he wasn’t adopted. Ah, well—no one in that family need worry about being loved for beauty alone,” my mother says, impressing upon me the power of euphemism. In fact my aunts, with their coarse black hair, narrow faces, huge, vivid features, and long legs extending elegantly from their bell-shaped furs, look nothing like the other people in our little city—the Polacks and Litvaks, my mother calls them.

  * * *

  “What is this ludicrous obsession with aliens from outer space?” my mother says. “I am not taking you
to Women of the Prehistoric Planet, so you can just forget about that.” Aliens from outer space, she tells me, are, like Santa Claus, the invention of people too fey, too shallow, or too fearful to grapple with reality, or who stand to profit.

  Still, I reason, surely there’s no way to be 100 percent certain, especially because any aliens who came to our planet would take care to look as much like humans as possible, though it would be logical that they would get things just a bit wrong.

  Also, it would be rash to judge the intentions and purposes of aliens. There could be aliens among us who were sent only to observe, or even to help, not to meddle. Or—and these are the contingencies that seem most likely—aliens who escaped to the refuge of our planet from the terrors of their own or, conversely, who had been expelled, as a punishment, from the haven of their planet and condemned to the terrors of ours.

  What is certain is that my aunts’ house, which is draped in the shadows of the massive trees that surround it, has a stagey, provisional feel, as if it were an illusion produced by powerful, distant brainwaves, and I can’t shake off the thought that the house dematerializes at night—its own form of sleep when its inhabitants are sleeping. I understand that the house is made of brick rather than brainwaves—it just has to be—but still, I brood about it: Hypothetically, what would the point of the illusion be? It would be . . . to get you to think that some particular thing was real, or else to get you to think that some particular thing was not real.

  I once tried to describe to Mary Margaret, who had just gotten two great big, pretty, rabbity new front teeth and did not look entirely convincing herself, the way the house always appeared to be quivering in a twilight of its own and how you had to climb through shadows just to get through the door. “Do they have human sacrifices there?” she asked me, wide-eyed.

  “Of course not!” I told her, looking frantically around for a receptacle, as I sometimes throw up when something unexpectedly upsets me. “My aunts would never do anything like that—they’re so nice!”

  But I always tingle with anticipation at the thought of the house, of parting the veiling shadows to explore its mysterious interior, and also because Aunt Charna might give me a present when I next visit.

  “Fortunately,” my mother continues, “beauty is not the only thing in life. Your Aunt Bernice and your Aunt Adela are honest and hardworking. And we have to be grateful, because they’ve taken trouble over you. Your Aunt Charna has some style, at least. That one wouldn’t be half so homely if only she’d do something about the nose!” She looks sharply at me and then sighs.

  * * *

  Sometimes my mother takes me to the club where she works, and even though it’s exhaustingly dull to play in the cloakroom all day, I can bring my paper and colored pencils, and there is a lurid appeal in the ambiguous suggestions of adult life: the soft, luxurious coats and scarves, the interesting muddy marks of huge shoes on the thick carpet when it’s been raining, the great big men who linger and talk with my mother and who smell—and even look—like cigars, and the pretty little basket that the men put change and sometimes dollar bills into.

  When we finally get home, my mother and I shake ourselves out and imitate the men we’ve seen that day, strutting and braying, until I get the hiccups from laughing, and then my mother makes me hot milk with honey in it so I can fall asleep.

  * * *

  My mother heaps scorn on the men who come to the club, but she heaps pity upon her sisters-in-law as if it could put out a raging fire before it consumes her heart, though it seems to add fuel instead. She argues their case over and over, taking first the prosecution, then the defense. I understand this sort of weighing and measuring, the adjustments and bartering, very well. When I go to church with Mary Margaret, I pry my mind open so that God’s dragon breath will smelt the impurities from my thoughts and I will be in an advantageous position to ask that my mother be relieved of pain and live until I’m so old that I don’t care about a thing, even her death.

  * * *

  Her head is tilted back to keep the cucumber slices from slipping off her eyes. “More water, please,” she says, flapping her hand toward the electric kettle on the dresser. She huffs with pleasure as I add hot water to the basin, and I feel in my own feet the pain loosening its grip.

  My aunts have undeniably beautiful legs—long, slender, and shapely. Showgirl legs, my mother says—incongruous, considering. She lifts the cucumber slices from her eyes and hoists herself up a bit to take stock of mine. I note with anxiety that the puffiness is not yet much reduced. “Good heavens—why are you wearing that thing?” she says. “Isn’t that the same dress you were wearing yesterday? It makes you look like an orphan!”

  I hang my head. The dress is my favorite, a hand-me-down from Mary Margaret, who is big for her age as well as two years older but who spends time with me because, as she says, she lives next door. Or because, as my mother says, she’s limited. I have been wearing the dress all week. Its length and amplitude, in my opinion, cloak me in a penitential holiness, as though I were being led to the stake.

  “I seem to remember that you were wearing it yesterday. Do I have to tell you again that’s not nice? Go change. And be sure your underwear is clean, too, in case you’re run over.”

  My mother is generally attentive to detail—my shoes are to be polished, my hair braided so tightly sometimes it hurts, my nails scrubbed, my handkerchief fresh, the clothes in my closet pressed and hung up or folded neatly, my bed made with square corners, but she has spent the last few days in her darkened room with a wet cloth over her eyes, which accounts for the lapse concerning my dress. When she is stricken with a migraine or when the phone rings and she must work extra at the club, either I am to fix my own supper and breakfast or else I am packed off to my aunts’.

  “Best behavior!” my mother orders. “It’s no easy thing, no matter what they say, to have a child underfoot, and I want you to make as little trouble for them as possible. No pestering, do not, under any circumstance, leave a ring around the tub, no prying, no personal questions, if your aunts offer you a gift, politely decline it—you have an unbecoming acquisitive streak and they can’t afford to throw money away on foolish extravagances; moreover, we do not want to be beholden to them. Try not to get the hiccups, they’re unattractive and could be interpreted as a bid for attention. Morrie has always been well behaved, and the coven will be brewing up reasons to find fault with me.”

  I protest—my aunts always say nice things about her, I tell my mother. “Hypocrites,” she says.

  * * *

  My aunts live at a convenient distance from us, close enough so that I can be parked with them whenever my mother is indisposed or out late into the night but far enough away so that we don’t run into them at every turn, as my mother puts it. My mother’s high standards in pastry, however, sometimes cause us and one or another of my aunts to collide at what my mother says is the only acceptable bakery—or patisserie, as my aunts call it—in our small city.

  My mother keeps her back to the door as we sit at our table in the bakery, but when one of my aunts happens to enter, I jump up, elated by this demonstration of destiny. “Aunt Bernice!” I cry out.

  “Hello, doll face,” says my aunt. My mother dispenses an icy smile toward which the impervious intruder returns a sweet, vague wave, and I sit back down quietly, eyes lowered. My mother rewards me absently with a little pat.

  * * *

  “Affected,” my mother instructs me later. “Intolerably pretentious. Still, you have to be sorry for them. Their lives never amounted to anything, they’re too weak to fend for themselves, they have no resources of their own, and they don’t have the self-respect or drive to develop any. You’re timid and morbid yourself, so I hope you can at least feel some sympathy.” She looks sternly at me and I nod. “A bad habit, timidity. You have to learn to take the initiative and act decisively. But it’s no wonder those three are so helpless and wool-brained. The mother was a tyrant. Be glad she died before yo
u were old enough to remember her. Patisserie! All you ever heard from that old witch was Petersburg, Vienna, Krakow. Petersburg, Vienna, Krakow, my hind end! They were smuggled out of some sewer in the Ukraine, the parents. They ate slops.”

  Petersburg, I know, is Saint Petersburg, the place where people drank tea dispensed from the beautiful machine called a samovar, one of which I’ve marveled at in my aunts’ house. Aunt Adela inherited it, as she’s told me, from her own dear mother. “She brought that samovar all the way from Saint Petersburg. I don’t know how she did it, the way they had to travel, poor things—the wagons, the boats, the vicious border guards . . .”

  I look at my aunt. Where to begin? “Yes, darling,” she says. “We mustn’t dwell on it, but we have to be grateful. We have to be grateful.”

  The beloved item sits on a little marble-top table in the parlor, much the way the electric kettle sits on my mother’s dresser, similarly a comfort and reminder of her own ancestral home, Great Britain. “My poor father’s passage over . . . ,” my mother says once, bleary with painkillers, and she trails off, dabbing at a tear.

  “To heaven?” I ask after a few moments.

  “What?” she says.

  “To heaven?” I ask again.

  She sits up and looks at me. “What are you doing here?” she says. “It’s way past your bedtime.”

  * * *

  What mustn’t we dwell on? Well, everybody knows that, really: we mustn’t dwell on what came before. Schoolmates and teachers have always asked me, for example, what my father does. Does?

  I myself know better than to go around asking annoying questions. My mother does not tolerate such questions for an instant, not for one instant! And at school I feel perfectly entitled to answer questions of that sort as I see fit—my father has been a doctor in a leper colony, a bank robber, and a rodeo cowboy—which earns me a little reputation for unreliability. But by the time I’m nine or ten, I’ve learned to smooth over those awkward moments by just clamping my lips and walking off.