Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

You can see my photos for yourself, anyway. I’m sticking a few in the envelope.

I can only describe the sensation of reading Leah’s letter as a welling up — was it self-satisfaction? I had done nothing to deserve it, and it certainly wasn’t a feeling of completion. No. If anything, such a welling up (never would I have been so sloppy in my descriptions as a psychologist!) was a sensation of business un finished.

I do like my work, although I have been harsh, perhaps, in my description of Virginia. But I find it so demanding in its requirement of vigilance, that it would be unusual for me to allow a moment to feel “self-satisfaction.”

What I felt was more like hope — already — that Leah would keep writing.

I finished the letter, and read it all over. I’ve received Christmas cards from a few of my families, Happy Holidays, the Xs, no more, and I’ve never expected it. But now I was absurdly, uncontainably excited. How could I rush through time and space to reach Leah?

All capital letters, slanting strongly toward the right-hand margin. Now I was almost sure I’d had a dream — Monday? — about Leah. Could I have predicted, or even willed the letter? How many dreams, I wondered, go unremembered if they are not fulfilled , somehow? How reliant are we on the world — I wondered, wildly, euphorically — to supply a coincidence to trigger our memory?

I searched my dream and it seemed, perhaps obviously, that the dream Leah was not the child I remembered (whose dreams are photographic?), nor was she a sort of projection, one of those artist’s renderings of a kidnapped six-year-old, now grown up, and likely still tied up in a psychopath’s basement, of what I would, in a lucid state, think an eighteen-year-old Leah would look like…

Perhaps I’m expressing myself clumsily.

It’s one of the Russian poets who said this: Dreams ensoul lost love, for the fleeting lifespan of a flower.

You know, Natasha. I was just thinking — this may sound strange — but you were my mother’s conscience. I don’t mean my mother felt guilty about you — that you were an immigrant, or underpaid (right?), or the whole women-riding-on-other-women’s-backs theory. I mean that she couldn’t do two things at once, so she split the one thing off for you, (me), and along with it, her conscience.

Well no, she didn’t turn evil or something when you left us. She was bereaved. I guess you should know that.

She’s more or less famous now, as in people recognize her in restaurants. Certain restaurants. She still won’t take my old bedroom.

Apropos of nothing, I’m going to Italy with one of my professors and her family for the summer. My mother is really upset about it. She wanted us to hang out on the scenic Hudson for August. I almost couldn’t decide between Tuscany and Eleventh Avenue. My professor — sculpture — has two little boys, Roman and Felix. So I’m their nanny. Any advice for me, Natasha?

How I wished she’d sent a picture. Although her black-and-white photographs of local Vermonters seemed to me perfectly proficient, I wanted to see Leah. Regardless of my dream, at eighteen she must be tall and skinny like her mother, veering around somewhat absentmindedly, peaked skull, an adolescent crone with arms all wrist, legs all ankle. I admit, I can’t imagine her beautiful. I always thought she was rather too shy to be a body. She used to have to hike up her saggy underpants. It galled me, the way it was constant, and that Ivy wouldn’t go out and buy her fresh white ones with new elastic. Is that what Leah means by her mother’s conscience?

All afternoon I anticipated writing, and my little boys, Jack and Colin, were revivified by my anticipation. They sat at their little red table clubbing their pale chunks of dinner and I was overcome with tenderness. Colin, the baby, called me Nata. His father joked, Nada ? I even laughed along with them.

And suddenly it seemed to me that all my past successes as a nanny were thrown into relief, even exaggerated in the light of my new status. Leah had found me, and my good fortune seemed to radiate out so that any number of other human beings in the world were now also assured their reunions.

I was so eager to write that I skipped drying the pans after dinner (wondering how I ever have the patience to do it) and went straight to the attic.

It so happens that I am also taking care of two boys, I started. What are the ages of Roman and Felix? Mine are one and three, too young to travel to Italy!

I stopped. I looked around my attic room as if I hoped to describe it. For Leah’s sake, was it a Grimm’s fairytale garret? The view over the street trees…I suddenly remembered the ring of lamplight on Leah’s squirrel-gray pate, the crown of a gentle princess.

The single bed was too soft, a Goldilocks hammock. The walls were steep and ran right into the ceiling.

The little boys here are very good, I began again, although now it was some time later.

In the Soviet Union I might have become a prominent psychologist.

I wrote, My present family is very demanding.

Then I stopped for such a long time that I lost my train of thought, my intent, entirely.

Several days passed, although I was composing all the while. I almost felt like my own biographer. I wasn’t so foolish as to flatter myself it was for my sake Leah found me, but even more, then, I felt a considerable pressure.

Once, I started: The little boys here have plenty of spirit! In fact, these are my first children who receive medication.

Or better this way? The little boys I take care of now can be very difficult.

No. She’ll think I have allegiances, favorites, and she’ll wonder how she stacks up against them.

Are you planning to major in sculpture?

All the children I’ve ever cared for are good children, Leah.

I laughed at myself harshly. Sometimes I dream they’ve been snatched — from the park, from the market, it’s like a parallel life, really, the fear of it — and then I realize, in the dream, that it is I myself who have vanished.

Dear Natasha,

If you sent me a letter at school, I missed it, so now you’ll have to spring for the stamps to Italy. My mother gave me a pack of condoms as a farewell present. Watch out for those Italians. Disturbing? Uh-huh. You know my mother. She’s all about fairness to the point of being blind to human nature!

Emmie, my professor, says time zones are cathartic. We hope for rebirth when we travel. My God, we run ourselves straight into the knives of jet lag, whispers Emmie at takeoff.

It’s probably obvious I have a crush on her. Ah! Not just her art but her whole life is talented. Her husband. And her children. Roman is three and Felix is one. Any tricks of the trade for me?

I have never allowed the maudlin aspect, but suddenly I remembered Leah’s little sack of bones on my lap, her cinder hair beneath my nose, the Murphy bed latched high up on the wall above us.

Emmie hasn’t bought a seat for Felix, so he’s tethered to me by an orange seatbelt looped to my seatbelt. Roman effortlessly unclicks his life or death and stands up to regard the folks in the row in back of us. I peek through the seat crack to see if the trio of passengers is receptive. A nine-year-old boy (I’m guessing) encased in electronics is flashing and flinching on some other planet. His mother has newly plucked eyebrows. She might have done it with unsterilized tweezers. She clings to her paperback like it’s one of the seat cushions that doubles as a life raft. She does a tiny wave at Roman and then closes her eyes against a death’s head. The third passenger is a business droid with a newspaper complexion and goggly eyes like a housefly under a microscope. He says, Do you like flying? Roman falls down as if he’s been shot. Are these flying types really ubiquitous or is it my own perception that lacks variety? Sometimes I really just hate growing up. Not just, oh, things used to be so simple, but things used to be so original. Now everything, absolutely everything, is a repeat.