Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

“It’s a song about bullfighting,” Hersh told me.

“Bullfighting?” I asked. This was not happening. It could not be.

“A man fights a bull, with a cape,” he tried. “Like this,” and he held up by imaginary corners a cape, which he dodged and waved.

“Stop doing that,” Kayla told him. “That is not a good place to start.”

“We were dancing,” he said. I stood completely still.

“You can unpack in peace,” Kayla said. “We leave you to it.”

I opened the suitcase, a square leather thing with two sturdy brass buckles, and took out the dresses folded inside. One was yellow checks and the other was a solid, faded blue. The dresses belonged to my sister and were too big for me. I remembered seeing her wear them many times — while digging for earthworms, teaching Moishe and me a song, helping my mother carry full bags home from the shops. Underneath them was a note: Dear Regina, This is how I love you. You will know that someday if you do not know it now. I will always miss you. — Your Perl . Between the two words in the signature there was a large space where the word Mother might have been, or the word Aunt , but instead the space was inhabited by a clean, bright hole. I put the note in the bottom of the drawer, the bottom of the drawer it had been in that morning when it had spoken to the correct child. The dresses had been unpacked yesterday by Regina, put away just as they were being put away now, and then carefully folded back up again. “She was just here,” I whispered to myself. “My sister was just in this room.” That was a fact; my own presence here was much harder to believe.

I walked over to the bed, pulled the covers back and kneeled on the floor. I put my face to the bed and tried to smell my sister there on the rough cotton sheets. Tried to smell her sleep the night before, what must have been an uneasy sleep. I tried to smell her dreams. Was she happy to be here? Was she glad she would get to be an opera star? In the morning, when she was told she was not the desired one, was she sorry? The bed smelled clean, undreamed in. Kayla was hardly gone a minute when she returned to fetch me. “Come out and be my daughter,” she said.

I sat down in between my aunt and uncle on a hard red velvet couch. They placed a crystal bowl full of candy on my lap, brightly colored packages piled high. Kayla touched my hair, examined my scalp, ringed my ankle with her fingers.

Kayla noted that her new daughter would have to be fattened up. She said, “Life gets better from here.” I noted that my aunt did not need fattening at all, that her ankles came over her short leather shoes like bread over the top of its pan. I noticed how her wedding ring divided her finger into two distinct provinces. Hersh, on the other hand, was rangy. Everything about him was tall — even his earlobes looked stretched. His forehead was an expanse and his chin looked curious and adventuresome, as if it might wander off his face into the great, unknown mountains.

Hersh asked me where they should start and I shook my head.

“Well, do you want to know about your grandparents? Do you want to know about your great-grandparents? Do you want to know about when I was a boy?”

“And what about me?” said Kayla. “I have a lot to tell you, too.”

“So, tell,” I said, carefully unwrapping a yellow candy and rolling it in my mouth. I remember vividly how much each motion of my hand mattered to me that day. I could reach, I could pick up, I could unwrap. The rest of the world was dizzy, but these things were known. I sucked the candy hard, and a sharp edge cut my tongue. The taste of lemon mixed with the taste of blood.

Hersh started to tell me about his parents, who were silk traders from the sea. He was excited and proud to show my ancestry off to me, but I reminded him that those had always been my grandparents. Hersh looked disappointed. Here he had given me a gift and I said I already had the same thing in another color. I tried again. “Thank you,” I said politely with a small nod. How was I the one trying to offer comfort? I looked at the room with all its upholstered furniture and oil paintings. The woodstove had a ceramic horse standing stately and ready to gallop atop it. The rug at my feet was soft and richly colored with a repeating pattern of square deer. Everything in the room looked important and breakable.

“Your father is in the saddle business, did you know?” Kayla asked.

“My father?”

“Hersh here, your father.” Kayla took my little hand and placed it on Hersh’s knee. His pants were scratchy under my palm. “You should be proud of him. He is a very great man.”

“I see,” I said.

“Can you say it for me? ‘I am proud of my father.’”

“I am proud of my father,” I said, picturing a man in a cabbage field, but looking at a man with a pair of glasses glinting around his eyes and a mustache that hid the dark holes leading into his long nose.

On the seventh day, we rested. Men put their feet up and looked out the window at the rain that had not stopped falling. Children ate honey on slices of bread. Mothers rubbed a little butter on their dry heels. We looked back at our first week of life, our plans and accomplishments, and most of us felt proud. The trees applauded with their green, green leaves.

The stranger, prayer-ready and shivering, tapped her foot in the mud puddle below her rootless chair. The jeweler brought her bread for breakfast and cheese for lunch. He brought her tea on the hour every hour and dried her feet with an old towel.

When Hersh and Kayla collapsed in a parenthood-induced nap, I slipped out the door and went to the stranger. “Help,” I said first. “Help,” I said again. She waited for my prayer. I asked, “Is this real? Am I still me?”

“You know that smell, when you put your nose up to a pine tree?” I told her I did, perfectly. “No matter how long it has been, you always will. Like you are storing part of that tree in your own body.” Was this a gift or a sacrifice? Had I given up my entire body to storing a sliver of every single object on earth? I said that I hoped there was a little room left for myself, just a small cave somewhere between the imprinted feel of walking across wet grass and the precise tension of an apple giving way under a knife. “You are thinking of it wrong,” she comforted. “Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change.”

Until a long time later, until I was a mother myself, until I lost everything, until it found me back, I did not believe the stranger’s words. Everything stays true . Now I know that. Now, it’s all I know. And knowing it saves my life again every time I wake up.

That night, I stood up in my lightless room. Blackness seeped into anything with an opening. I pulled the drawer handle and let the dark inside and released the smell of crushed rose petals and dust. I opened the music box and let it sing to the darkness, the darkness got in close to that little spinning dancer. I took the note out and lit a candle to see it by. Dear Regina, Dear Regina, Dear Regina . Outside my window, the tree branches pointed me in all the wrong directions. They yelled to me, branch by branch, this way, up, come in, turn back. I ripped Dear Regina off the note and tore it into bits. I undid the lock on the window and pushed the two sides apart. Cold air and a mist of rain swept across my face. I threw the shreds of my sister’s name out the window, where the moon made them glow and the endless rain smashed them into the earth. I closed the window. This is how I love you, the note said to no one in particular.