Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

Did she still think of me as grateful? To be safe, I kept my eyes trained on the catalogs.

“I’d like you to start answering the phone for me.” My employer tapped her foot as if she were agitated by her own performance. “I’d like you to say, ‘Hillary Rice’s office.’ You should drop whatever you’re doing and answer.”

“Sure,” I said, on a level with her razor shin bones.

“Do you talk to Setta?”

Her shoes themselves were furniture. I tracked the white stitching in leather.

If the town had more or less “allowed” my mother to raise a child, and the McNamaras provided a stipend, then everyone had stayed silent on it — for my sake, it occurred to me — until my mother’s passing. Suddenly it seemed like a great gift, even though I knew it had been granted more out of embarrassment than benevolence.

Several times I turned my duplicate key in the lock of the Fifth Avenue apartment and found Hillary Rice standing, stunned, in the foyer, wearing her gentlemanly plaid pajamas, at once gaunt and dissipated. “Pardon,” I said. “I’ll come back later.” Her shoulders went up in a cringe at the sight of me.

One day she met me at the door dressed in a prune-colored pencil skirt and cropped black jacket. She flipped her bank of hair and blinked at me.

“You again.” She had never before been loquacious. “It’s too bad we’re not best friends, isn’t it.” She blinked again, as if instead of laughing. “Do you think it’s paying off?” She waved her hand and we surveyed the stacks of catalogs.

I didn’t say anything. I was waiting, just as I had with my mother, whose speech was so rare that even Setta McNamara (my employer had a point: Setta was in everyone’s business) had never heard it.

I thought of my mother sweeping her gnarled hand across the bedside table. The hospital phone that charged a fortune just to get a dial tone, the stiff-legged get-well cards, Dixie cup of water.

I couldn’t tell if my mother was reaching for something or if she meant to clear the little table. That was the way she had worked, too: sweeping the path clear so I could walk there. Reaching for a yellow rose behind a spreading buddleia, tipping into the air a dozen blue-cut butterflies.

It wasn’t my first family, and I don’t have “favorites,” but the apartment where they lived was closer to my old apartment than any other I’d worked in, and so I felt loosened, as if my whole body were the tongue of a sentimental drunk, susceptible to love and forgiveness. The mother, Ivy, was a civil rights lawyer, and the father, Wendell, was an artist. He was ten years younger than she — why should it matter? Because she wore the yolk of someone abused rather than amused by youth’s indulgences. She had a boyish build in contrast to her heavy harness, and from my position (I admit there is some dignity in distance), here was a mismatch with which mischievous fairies entertained one another.

New Yorkers do not like to venture too far west or too far east, their compasses set to the moral equilibrium of Fifth Avenue. Ivy and Wendell’s building, a narrow brownstone washed down like a bar of soap, was far to the west, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Chelsea, Wendell insisted, which even I knew was an affect used to both mock and elevate his circumstances. From the roof, accessed by a hatch Pollocked in pigeon droppings, you could see the Hudson River. I had been able to see it from the roof of my own first apartment. A sense of hope never failed me, walking west, into the sunset…although when I arrived for work it was always ash-gray morning.

Ivy and Wendell slept on a Murphy bed in the living room. It hinged precariously off the wall, reminding me of Russia: cheap construction and close quarters. Leah, age six, occupied the bedroom, with a ceiling as yellowed and cracked as heirloom china. She wore frocks that twisted around her pencil body and her ears pushed through her hair like snouts.

She read to herself, poetry. By our Russian giantess, Anna Akhmatova, Leah had read “Evening”; she had also read Tsvetaeva and Emily Dickinson.

“She read at three,” said Ivy, more dutifully than proudly, I noticed.

“Should I tell you the first words my parents discovered me reading?”Leah quizzed me. She had an un-modulated voice, as high as a sopranino recorder. In my previous life in the Soviet Union, I would have characterized such a voice as anti-social.

“Sorbitol,” she enunciated. “Hydrated silica.”

I suppose I raised my eyebrows.

“Toothpaste,” declared Leah.

By that same first evening, I had read aloud half of the collected Grimm’s Fairy Tales, cross-legged on the floor of the living room. When she was sure I’d finished Leah rolled over and her belly flashed: hard, green, like a slice of raw potato. “Natasha!” she cried. “I love to listen to your accent!”

Wendell did not like the modern children’s books, the ones where you could buy the lunchboxes. Fine with Leah. Besides poetry and Grimm’s, she loved lists of ingredients. She had something of a phobia — I use the term as a former professional — regarding compounds. She yearned for the simple.

“Bread and water sounds like a good diet,” she said mournfully. “But do you know how many things they put in water ?”

There were no doors on the cabinets in the kitchen, due to a campaign against the bourgeois in that house, and Wendell’s trumpeted belief in the art of the everyday object. Mismatched student pottery was dustily webbed to dog-eared cereal boxes.

The window in Leah’s room was on an airshaft with the diameter of a corpse. I considered all of this close to depravity…although in an unsettling way I wondered if I had brought it with me, imposed a film of sorrow and poverty with my very gaze upon Leah’s circumstances.

It was true, she was my first only child. My research, in the Soviet Union, had for a time argued in favor of single-child families. In terms of allocation of resources, at our stage of civilization, a single focused beam of light, of calories, rather than the messy breadth of competition, followed by dissipation among siblings and favorites. Well, according to the posters that slickered my home city, there were no Soviet shortages — of heart or of health — whatsoever.

Leah and I had walked down into the West Village, where she was to meet a friend in a slice of park between two angled, intersecting avenues. We both drew to a stop in front of the window of a florist. My English was excellent, but a bald spot in my vocabulary was botany. That spring Leah had found me out: I hadn’t known that ivy, her mother’s namesake, was that dark diamond creeper with tough stitches into cement and mortar.

“Natasha!” cried Leah happily. “I’ll tell you everything!”

“Leah Halloran,” I said. “Private tutor.”

I saw her smiling down into her sweater, which was a habit she had, and sometimes she’d come back up sucking the collar.

I stood at attention. We let a couple of young women bob past us.

“Lilac,” Leah pointed. “And hyacinth.” Smugly, “I call them poodle flowers, Natasha.”

Oh no, Leah Halloran was not a giggler. Her laugh was a serious matter, and as she pushed it out, now, I knew to remain silent.

The window glass through which we looked was as shiny and cold as chrome. Or, of course, a mirror. There we were. A small woman with short dyed hair beneath a boxy white hat, a triangle of wool coat, and a string of girl coming just to the breast of the woman.

Once Ivy said, testing the waters, “Did your mother work, Natasha?”

I didn’t immediately answer, and so she added, needlessly, “Growing up in Russia?”