I can’t explain the timing but it doesn’t seem like a coincidence. My parents were insistent. The doctor adjusted his yarmulke to peer into my mother’s uterus. What day, did you say, that you tried the first time?
–
I waited, like a surfer perched at the edge of a set of waves, like a baseball player, considering stealing second base. When my sister was born she also made a calculation. I believe she was looking for me, which made sense. I was hiding. After roaming the stratosphere for years, she hovered above Brooklyn, held up her telescope and spotted me: a seemingly innocent baby, crying with colic in my crib.
During her time in the stratosphere, she encountered many mysteries and beings that held relevance: a dog she swore had the spirit of our father, a tiny buzzing gnat whom she sensed she would know later, an old man sporting hands with the caring finesse of those who know exactly how to brush hair without tugging, and a ten-year-old girl with the same caricatural eyes of an unchanged half-sister she felt she’d known for centuries.
* * *
The dog was small and insecure with a lot of strength that he did not seem to comprehend. Made obvious when during a rousing game of tug-of-war he sent my sister flying across the room with a flick of his jowls. This dog had a spot like a bull’s eye and a habit of picking a fight. It seemed as though every other dog that crossed his path either wound up with a bite mark, or escaped just quickly enough to dodge his ever-visible incisors. What nobody knew, what he kept hidden: was that he had lost something very important to him when he was just a puppy. My sister sensed in him a sweetness, and despite his seemingly evil temperament, she kept him as a pet. The dog had a love for dry-aged meat and the taste of lemons. A desire for sour flavor is rare for canines – but after a long day of conflict, knowing he’d have an upset stomach afterward, he would sit at my sister’s feet and beg for a slice of gabagool and a bowl full of sweet lemonade. Not one to say no, she acquiesced all too often, and afterwards, he would lay around, panting with the pain of indigestion.
The buzzing gnat had his work cut out for him on the day he met my sister. He was stuck inside a kitchen that he had no business being in and could not seem to find his way out of. A fruit fly had convinced him that his presence was needed for a rotting banana heist; and it was one of those obligatory situations where you are quite tired when you agree to the plans in the first place and only wake up to your own stupidity when you have already arrived. It was not that the gnat thought they would get caught, it was just, well– he didn’t much care for bananas. Darting around in a panic, he heard a screen open in the next room and flew, swiftly, out the window. Shortly after that very moment, when he met my sister, he was glistening with the sweat of escape and unaware of his attractive deep-set dark eyes which flickered when he said hello.
The old man was filling in for his daughter at her hair salon. Though he had retired long ago, he enjoyed sputtering around the waxed floor of the salon, sweeping up hairs, refilling shampoo bottles, and standing in the sunlit doorway. If he was being honest, he thought he had more of a knack for cutting hair than his daughter did, anyway. When customers would come in, at first they’d be disappointed to find that his daughter was out of town, but there was something in the way his hands motioned for them to enter, about the gentleness with which he hung up the phone, placing it in the receiver, that made them acquiesce. My sister was not someone who trusted hair stylists. Her hair was curly and no matter what, she felt the process invasive, as though something was taken instead of given. Alas, she let this man cut her hair – a choice concocted in part from her agreeable nature plus the intuitive sense that he would do a good job. When he parachuted the cape around her shoulders, tying it at the nape of her neck, a chill ran up her spine. Though he did not have long acrylic fingernails painted red, when he slid the scissors from their protective case and began to separate her strands, she thought of her mother’s fingertips, crimson nails caked in batter, pressing breadcrumbs into chicken cutlets.
The ten-year-old girl was someone my sister babysat during her years as a nanny. The girl’s family was wealthy and she went to private school, but in the dark moments of the droning afternoon she would lift her fingers from the piano and ask my sister completely unanswerable questions about life. My sister was not a particularly philosophical person but she enjoyed what these questions did to her mind and was moved, watching, as the young girl’s eyes stayed curious, focusing on something invisible, for hours after she’d proposed the question. It was surely the girl’s eyes that were recognizable; they were not large, per say, but they were cartoonish – they signaled, even with very little gesture, exactly what she was thinking.
* * *
During her time in the stratosphere, my sister inhabited different bodies, though her soul remained unchanged. One day, as I walked down a tree-lined block on a wind-filled summer morning, a Hasidic man hurriedly trotted down the steps to his front door, stepping onto the sidewalk in front of me. When he lifted his arm to adjust his dark large brimmed hat, the wind blew and I caught the unmistakable scent of musk oil. Through the loop his arm made as he reached up to adjust his hat, he turned and peered at me so that our eyes locked as his scent entered my nostrils. I recognized this perfumed musk oil from the memory of an Aunt who was always up to no good. Aside from inhaling chestfuls of musk oil in her embrace, it lingered everywhere she set foot. She’d be in the attic and yet, in the basement’s laundry room, where she’d been folding clothes the day before, I could smell her powerful musk. Our Aunt claimed this scent transformed depending on who wore it, like a spell taking the shape of the cursed. Mystified, as soon as she was old enough, my sister would douse herself in this fragrance and it was so far-reaching that the dog would start barking as she approached, he could smell her from a few blocks away. Thus, when my path crossed with the man, in his dark suit and hat, whose smell wafted in on a breeze, whose eyes were familiar in the way they held mine, I knew he must have been Carina.
A few eons later, and a few blocks over, I saw her again. This time, she was in the body of a bricklayer. He had just finished building a beautiful brick wall around the perimeter of someone’s yard. As I rounded the corner, I watched in the diffuse morning light as he carefully ran his fingertips across the cement and clay, pausing at each fault to calculate any mistakes. I thought then, of Carina’s tattooing – the way she would drag the needle carefully through the invisible pores in my skin, with the same meditative focus for each line, as she patiently calculated the various ways to adjust for a falter. The same way that she rounded the outline of a picture on skin, the bricklayer joined the two corners of a wall. The border of anything is meaningful, and they hovered, similarly, in the space between the outside and inside.
There were some moments where I thought that I was Carina. A song came on one night that held a particular significance. A sad song about becoming, which was popular during our time in high school. As I sang the lyrics, everything I’m not made me everything I am, I considered the resonance to our situation and felt, as if struck by lightning, that Carina and I had instantaneously merged. And so began this strange miracle… for I felt that mortar, aside from binding brick, was also welding us, and that her finding me all these years later, was no coincidence at all.
* * *
After the disco, and the wedding, the honeymoon and the fall, the doctor with the yarmulke performed the ritual.
Carina caught me in my crib. I didn’t know I was being watched but my crying intensified, rousing my parents from their sleep once again. It had been decades since I went into hiding, but in mere months, she was born into the family where I was currently dwelling.
When she arrived, and I realized she’d found me, instead of feeling exposed, I was relieved. Though drawn there by an unnameable magnetic force, I had found myself in a household where I desperately needed company. Upon my arrival, it seemed I’d erred; it seemed, I’d been tapped on the shoulder with a baseball inside a mitt before my feet crossed home; that I’d excitedly caught a wave, and found myself tumbling to shore, disoriented.
As babies we had the innocent privilege of lolling around only slightly aware of where we’d wound up. Around us we heard a specific accent in which long words were cut short and tone was forthright. The smell of garlic frying in olive oil wafted through the house. Through the mail slot next door, a Jewish woman peeked out, casting curses on those she did not like. In the car, a screen to block out the sun made the street outside look polka-dotted and when we arrived elsewhere, all four of our grandparents reeked of smoke and parmesan cheese, their china cabinets painted with patterns of gold.
We stood out as we aged, but nobody could say why. One could not trace a clear line between who exactly we looked like, or why we didn’t seem to fit in. Our becoming was haphazard, we would take off a favorite shirt to go to sleep and in the morning it would no longer fit. The fish in their tanks would swim away when we approached, as if they were trying to tell us something.
Our father had the roof cut off our garage, so that it still looked the same from the outside, but from the inside, you could see the sky. A neighbor walking by would never know that there was no storage in the garage, since the facade was unchanged, but behind the gate, there was cement facing sun, where we could ride bikes in a circle or peer down the drain.
There were birds and basements and cracks in cement. Lots of potato chips and round swings made of tires. A cousin who held us down dribbling spit in our eyes and another who played horror songs on piano. Violent neighbors and beams in the sky, block parties and dunk tanks. Years passed in this family, full of garlic and oil.
* * *
Has your mother ever told a lie? And was it big or small?
Secrets have the strength of a construction crane, lifting pursuits up and out of view, sentenced to dangle just above us, out of sight.
Our mother has told a few large lies and kept some secrets. Since they are secrets, we are unsure of the depth of each or how many there are. Debra does not see them as deceptions, so devout is her commitment to each fable.
A great many days passed during our life — 10,817 — with a buried treasure beneath our feet. The secret was a paternoster, transporting me; and arriving on each floor, I found a silvery clue. At the top curve of this ferris wheel, I faced my mother. I looked Debra in the eye but I could not speak, for perhaps I did not want to know. My sister spoke for us. And in the gusts of wind that only endure at great heights, she shouted, What have you done? How did we get here?
Upon the voiced question the wheel stopped, cranking to a halt to let other passengers on. Hearing the grate of the ride, even at such a distance, I awoke from my sleep and propped up on my bed. I strained to hear the answer to my sister’s question from so far away. I braced myself for the blueprint in the orange map of my childhood bedroom and eyed a tissue on the floor. Tears would come eons later; the tissue would disintegrate by the time it was needed, but at the top of the jaunt, in the high wind, I simply used the edge of my sleeve.
Stuck there, in the future, wavering on the edge of a ferris wheel in a metal blue cage, I took stock. Ocean to my left, city and train to my right, the Verrazzano, tolls costing a fortune, with its two metal archways leading to the dreaded Staten Island, where the buildings stop and the land runs out and there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide!
Below, confetti lights from the array of amusement rides, their colors purposely dizzying. I thought of the 1920s, when this amusement park first had lightbulbs, the electricity rendering mortals breathless. Kids were yelping, beer was being gulped, the buzzers to games rang incessantly in the summer breeze, clown mouths filled with water, the clouds crawled out to sea.
There were a few people, well, there were a great many people, but a few stuck out – specks though they were from our great height – walking along the path, past the haunted house and towards the sandy beach. The white foam of the waves was barely visible in miniature but I saw it clearly through its thunderous sound. Watching this group of people, and calculating their direction, I guessed they must have been headed to take off their shoes and socks and dip their toes in the trick-blue Atlantic. I knew that once this group had dipped their toes in, the sand would stick to their wet feet, but it was summertime, and I doubted they would mind, perhaps they might even enjoy all the odds and ends tickling their hooves.
I turned back to focus on my mother, she was whale-eyed, and Carina was rolling hers and letting out a deep sigh. We all began to understand the truth, sitting way up there on our beloved threshold. The group of people below was now running full speed toward the ferris wheel. I do not know how I could possibly have recognized them from so high up in this large a crowd, but I could. They approached, skipping, and boarded the ride.
A moment later, we cranked into motion. The horizon tumbled to eye-level and soon we were pitched forward towards the confetti lights and waterlogged clowns. I tipped the ride operator with a crisp $20 and we stayed put, watching as he slammed the metal cages shut on the new passengers. Now, the group I had spied from up above must have been at the top of the ferris wheel. I wondered what they might have been talking about.
Carina, Debra and I began to climb high above the amusement park once again. I could not speak so instead I nervously smiled. Carina narrowed her focus and parted her lips, breathing in oxygen and salt, wind, and atmosphere so she could pirouette it into a sentence, a question, a statement; the truth.
I thought back to when she had found me in my crib, to our feigned innocence at our green eyes. We’d whispered it then, we’d known all along.