Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

My mother explained with as much confidence as she could lie with that Regina would get music lessons and be a star. But mostly that she would be Hersh and Kayla’s child.

“How did you choose me?” Regina asked. The words were as thin and sharp as ice breaking.

“Your brother was here?”

“She will come to love them.”

“Regina is mine,” our father said.

Regina looked around her. She was sitting at her own kitchen table, her own brother and little sister, her own mother and her own father and her own feet and her own hands. This was her table — the legs, the surface, the dents and edges. This was her wide, foot-polished floor. She now felt an overwhelming allegiance to the white enamel washbowl she had never thought much about before. And above all else, the cabbage soup — the smell of her life, the taste of it. “I will be their child?” she asked.

“We’re all of us starting over,” our mother said. “The world is new. Everyone deserves to love something more than themselves.” The reasons, so passionate when Hersh had said them, were no better than soggy bread in Perl’s mouth. Her face flushed with blood. “Hope,” she tried, not knowing the meaning just then.

Our father gripped the table. “You gave away our daughter?”

His wife shook her head no and said, “Yes.” She said, “They have a piano. And the horses she’ll ride, and the bed of her own?”

Silently, Regina, as if in answer to her mother’s questions, put her hands into the bowl of cabbage soup, both hands, and began washing them in the warm mush, wringing them together. “What are you doing?” my father asked. I understood — this was the last supper of my sister’s known life. The soup, the same soup we had eaten every day, was a bath drawn of our mother, our home. Regina washed her hands in that broth as if it could bless her, make her permanent, mark her as part of this and no other family. We watched the dripping juice go up her arms.

We sat there for a moment, dumb. Then I put my own hands in my soup and washed. My mother dipped her fingers. My father and Moishe joined. Our dozens of fingers grabbed and wrung and squirmed. We rubbed the hot liquid up to our elbows. The skin came back pink from the heat, pulsing from the heat. Whether or not the soup had been holy before, we made it so. We were baptized together, a family born of cabbage.

“We’re just learning how to live here,” our mother said. “Everything is a guess.”

I felt faint, like paper dissolving in water. “We are sorry for everything we will do wrong,” I said, not knowing on whose behalf I was speaking.

“Sorry is only the beginning,” our father told us.

Since architecture was completely new to us, everyone felt proud of our early ideas for the temple — it seemed this came naturally. We would build up on the northern edge of the village, near the little spit of land that would have connected us to the rest of the planet had such a place existed. The main room would have a fifty-foot ceiling, vaulted. It would be a place for all the volumes we would write about the world, starting now and going on into the centuries. Leather bound, gilded edges, wrapped in a piece of red silk. The shelves, we figured: ebony. How do we know ebony? we wondered. We were born that way, and since we knew, we thought we should make use of that knowledge. Black wood bookshelves filled with the History of the World, and above, the vaulted ceiling painted with the constellations of the summer sky. Each of us would be his own planet in the middle of the universe.

We had many pages of drawings, measurements, lists of supplies needed. We would all have to contribute and we all would.

“The stranger is amazing,” the jeweler said to the butcher and the baker.

“She’s kind of odd. I find her a little scary,” the baker said. This was nonsense, absurd to the jeweler. What further loveliness could have been included in a woman?

“She is the best listener.” He sighed. “She listens and listens. Which gave me an idea…”

We voted yes on the jeweler’s proposal to station the stranger in the square as the interim recorder. She was neutral and she was the one who had thought of the idea to keep track of prayers in the first place. When the baker had knocked on the jeweler’s door to request the stranger’s approval, the jeweler retrieved her from the rocking chair with pride. She was to be the one. She would have the honor. “I found you a really good job,” he told her. “I think you are going to be great at it.”

We gave her a thick stack of paper, a nice fountain pen and a well of ink. “Do we know about ink?” the healer had asked. We have to, the butcher thought. There are things that do not need inventing — that just are. Blood and skin, ink and paper.

We strung a gray-and-white striped blanket up to keep the rain away. We had the stranger sit with her back to the square and anyone who came to pray so that he or she would not feel self-conscious. The stranger sat down and waited, hearing the voiceless quiet of this particular day for the first time in her life. It was good to have something to fill the time, for the days ahead not to be gusting, empty wind. For hours, no one brought her a prayer, so she brought herself some. “I pray that I do not disappoint you.” Her back began to ache against the chair, her feet were cold and damp. Doubt was a worm wriggling on the ground beside her, but the stranger stepped on it, leaving nothing but a pink smear on the stones.

I was the first to pray. “I pray for good and peace and enough of everything.”

“Hello, my fellow storyteller,” the stranger said to me.

I wanted to ask her something about herself. I wanted to make that small human trade — one truth from my life for one truth from hers. The reservoir was shallow, just a few days behind us. My question was too big and too small at the same time. “Are you all right?”

I heard her fill her lungs. I heard someone’s heels mark the distance between one destination and the next. She said, “Something was rustling around outside in the night, and at daybreak there were three small mounds of newly turned dirt. A fat gray bird used them to bathe, ducking and shivering as if the earth were water.”

“If I help stir the batter, I am allowed to lick the spoon,” I said, not knowing whether I wanted this to mean something.

The stranger’s laugh was a short gust of warm air. “That’s a good trade.”

My uncle’s proposal flashed in my head like a struck match. I did not want anyone to get traded, but I could not bring myself to utter that prayer, since giving voice to the idea only made it feel more real. Instead I prayed for unexceptional, everyday mercy, and the stranger’s pen scratched it down.

The jeweler, like a nervous parent, spied on us from behind the statue of the long-dead war hero. He sauntered past with a cup of tea, as if he just happened to be passing by with exactly what she needed. As I left, a line of others wandered up to take my place.

“I pray that we do a respectable job on this world. I pray that my Jonah is the tallest boy in town. I pray that I am more tomorrow than I am today. I pray that we discover riches hidden under our bed.”

“I pray that my house never sinks into the ground. I pray that my knee begins to hurt less and that I can once again help my mother into her bed at night. I pray that my wife is more beautiful tomorrow than she is today. I pray that the earth spills over with food.”

“I pray for the sick to get well. I pray that what we build remains forever. I pray for money, which I’ll take very good care of.”

“I pray that my mother appreciates how hard I try to take care of everyone.”