The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Page 5

  So it was a shock, of course, after he had left me, when I heard he and Anna were trying to get pregnant. All of our semiannual examinations, in which we probed each other for a sign of that disease, the little tumor of desire, and he had always said that he felt nothing, that he loved our life and did not wish to trade it for another, those nights finishing the bottle and toasting our barren home. It was untrue, or at least partially untrue. Nathan had wanted a child after all. He had simply never wanted one with me.

  HE CAME TO me, the little boy, on tiny sheep-white socks. He threw himself into my arms, and I was overcome by the softness of him, the scent of sour milk and jam, the slight crackle of his ironed green romper, embroidered in a wigwam pattern across the front, with its stiff white collar and sleeves so that he was Pilgrim and Indian all in one. He embraced me as completely as his small arms could handle, then wriggled in a playacting of joy. “Careful of Mommy’s arm!” When Daddy said he was already late for work, but that Mrs. Green was here to help Mommy, his face looked as if he had been slapped; a freak thunderstorm of tears commenced; Nathan looked to me and I understood that I was to take over now. He had been the good husband for long enough, and carried this extra burden, but I understood that the parenting belonged to this Mrs. Green and to me. I felt this world attaching itself to me, merging me with the Greta who had lived in it so long. I held him in my arms, that little squirming stranger. My son.

  “I’ll be back a little later than usual,” Nathan told me, though he needn’t have said that because I had no idea what it might mean. A kiss on my brow and one on Felix’s, then it was on with his hat and trench coat (military hat and coat, doctor’s insignia), and out the door. I watched his departure with a shiver of regret, for I knew something he did not: that in my world, he did not love me anymore.

  For our first game as mother and son, we played hide-and-seek. “Go hide!” I told Felix, and off he went in a flash as if he knew precisely where was best. This was my chance to examine how this 1941 apartment differed from my own, and from the one I had visited the night before. The hallway, with its silhouettes of strangers and madcap shelves of pottery horses, had to be the doing of my husband, not my forties self; I could not believe I would have chosen each bland little item so carefully, and assembled them like the statues buried with the pharaohs. The bedroom I had already examined. The little nursery, off the hall, was a surprise; in my ordinary life, the wall had been plowed through to expand the master bath, but here was a tiny prefecture that was my son’s own. A trunk in the corner revealed a set of worn tin soldiers (swords bent into plowshares). In a small drawer of the trunk, a crow’s cache: pebbles, scraps of silvered paper, and torn useless dollar bills. Most touching of all were a few baby teeth, tinged with dried blood. A box labeled FROM UNCLE X contained a bottle of talcum powder that had been relabeled INVISIBILITY POWDER.

  In the living room: a ghost—no, once the cigarette smoke cleared, I saw a fiftyish woman in a dark green dress putting something into her purse. She had a small face that grew pinker toward the center, an astounding bosom glistening in velvet, and a round topknotted hairdo whose blond had been salted with white. This must be Mrs. Green. “Good morning, Mrs. Michelson, how are you feeling?”

  “Better, thank you.” Mrs. Michelson!

  “Dr. Michelson said you had a bad couple of days.” Her accent was distinctly Swedish. Her manner was old world, friendly; she had the distant helpfulness of a stewardess.

  “Yes, yes, but I’ve recovered.”

  “Very good, madam.”

  As she talked, she pointed with her smoking cigarette. She had a look of efficiency and kindness and I somehow felt very sorry for her. I could not tell if she was regular help or someone brought in just for this emergency, this “accident” that had broken my arm and mind. Mrs. Green and my son would be of no help; I had to find my aunt Ruth.

  “I’ve given Fee his breakfast,” she went on, “and was about to take him to the park. I thought maybe you still needed rest.” She told me a few details about my son, which I had trouble understanding, but nodded at anyway, and information about a half-baked chicken pot pie in the icebox that I might want to put in the oven.

  “Yes, perhaps that’s best.”

  “So I’ll do the groceries and speak to the laundress; do you have any errands?”

  “No, no I—,” I began, glancing at the bedroom. And yet there, in fact, just at my bedside table sat an appointment book such as a doctor’s wife would keep.

  “Madam?”

  “Yes, I’ll rest. I’m still dizzy and forgetful, you’ll forgive me.”

  “I understand, you’ve been under strain. Leave it all to me. What would you like me to get for dinner?”

  “Whatever you think best.”

  “I was thinking lamb chops, potatoes, and a jellied salad.”

  “Very good.”

  “And is your son dressed?” she asked.

  “No, no. In fact, he’s hiding somewhere.”

  “Hiding?”

  “We were playing hide-and-seek.”

  At last she allowed an expression to play over her face, and instantly I felt I had done everything wrong. She said nothing, perhaps because it was beyond her imagining that a mother would play hide-and-seek in the hour when a child should be dressed for the cold and the park. Perhaps the earth might now split in two.

  “I’ll find him,” I told her. She smiled as if I had accidentally rung her “call” button, nodded her head, and went to the kitchen. I could not tell if I admired or hated her.

  I found my son in the bathroom, shrieking with real terror when I pulled back the shower curtain to find him squatting there, then collapsing in hilarity at his own cleverness. I delivered him to Mrs. Green, who had brought out the pie herself, and whose gray eyes took in first his soiled clothing, and then his delinquent mother. She led him away to change him. It was then that I crept over to the appointment book.

  “Mrs. Green,” I shouted, running into the nursery. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  She was in the midst of pulling a struggling Fee into a pair of woolen knickers. He seemed as forlorn as an animal made to wear human clothing. Mrs. Green stared at me with those eyes, and I nearly crept back, but I was determined. “I’m going to take Fee to the park. You do my errands, and heat the pie; we’ll be back for lunch.”

  “I see,” she said plainly. “But are you sure? It isn’t our habit to—”

  “I’m sure. Get him dressed, we’ll be off in a minute.”

  “I see.”

  Then I headed to the bedroom, my ridiculous robe falling in anemone ruffles around me. I glanced at the clock: nine thirty. Just enough time. The open page of the appointment book read, in my own handwriting:

  Felix at Hudson Park at ten.

  BUY VICTORYBONDS

  Gone was the prison of 1918, and the desperately ugly el line on Sixth, but war bonds posters still effaced every shop window and the men in uniforms smoking everywhere were hardly different from that other world. “Flowers!” an old Italian lady shouted from the sidewalk, bent over from the weight of her basket of violets and sweet peas. “Flowers! Flowers!” A blond chorus-girl type, in long, red Chinese trousers, was walking her Pekingese and throwing her smile everywhere when she tripped and one of her slippers fell off into a puddle. I retrieved it for her; she flashed me a smile and a wild look: “Geez, now I can’t take these back, can I?” A Pekingese bark of a laugh. She fit her little foot back in and went off, once more, among the hot-blooded sailors, behind twitching.

  And then we were west of Seventh Avenue, at Hudson Park, on a block I didn’t recognize; I certainly didn’t recognize the park with its strange sunken garden and memorial to firemen. It didn’t exist in my 1985 world. It looked like a drained fountain, and not particularly made for children; it seemed made more for a Victorian mourning set. I let Fee race into the playground, suddenly unleashed from his love of me, toward some more immediate desire among the boys in short pants and caps.
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  My mind went back to the house, mentally climbing the stairs, heading to the living room, parting the veil of cigarette smoke to find Mrs. Green still standing there gazing upon me with a look of efficiency and kindness. I wonder—no, I know for sure, that she saw, to the very core of me, the thing that everybody knew. Of course, it had to exist in this world as well as any other. The thing that everybody knew. I thought: Perhaps if I fix this, it all will end; the curtain will fall in a dustheap and life will be restored, and sanity. Perhaps that was my purpose here.

  Then something rash and ridiculous occurred to me. I put my purse on my lap—a funny lumpy piece of leather—found the catch, searched through its handkerchiefs and lipsticks, and there it was. A pack of Pall Malls. I pulled one out and lit it with a match, and enjoyed the taste of death that no one here suspected. Oh, I deserved that little pleasure. What a wonderful world I had entered!

  My little Fee sat talking with a blond boy, trying to get him to wear his knit cap; he seemed willing but big headed. I made out whom I assumed to be his mother from how she stared at me. Scandinavian, youngish and leggy despite the length of her shadow-plaid coat. I wondered how she did it: managed her life in this strange age. I knew there would be a war, but that we were not in it yet. I knew women would soon go to work by the masses, and man the machinery, and build the nation rivet by rivet while our hems rose to save cloth for uniforms, and our nylons went to parachutes for young men falling into the Pacific. But none of this had happened; it was about to happen; could this woman feel it?

  “Hey, bubs, here you are, what’s hoppin’?”

  And there he was. Alive, again. In ridiculous shamus hat and coat—another world, another Felix.

  “TELL GREEN I’M coming over for her chicken pot pie,” my brother said, sitting beside me and bumming a drag from my cigarette. I had already held him for a minute, and at last released him, seeing the baffled expression on his face.

  All I could do was say, as always, “I missed you.”

  “I’m kidding, kiddo! I know, no visitors. Green would shoot me.” He laughed, this third version of my brother. Dressed so unlike himself, in a baggy brown suit and tie, with a knot as big as a peach, and a dented fedora on the back of his head. His red hair was combed with pomade, and his classic nose was marred by a small cut. The mustache was gone, but the few freckles were there; the bright blue eyes were also there, some of their mischief diluted in the gray light of the day.

  “Why no visitors?”

  “Doctor’s orders,” he said.

  “My old friend Dr. Cerletti,” I said. I noticed the wedding ring on his hand. I stared at it for a long strange moment. Felix Wells, married man.

  “If you say so.” A radio from a parked car played brash swing music and the wind carried a woman’s laugh to us. He shook his head: “The tourists are ruining everything.”

  “How’s Ingrid?” I asked boldly.

  “Ingrid? Busy with the baby. Busy with me; I’m a poor husband.” Another laugh.

  “The baby,” I repeated. The sky above us opened its coat and flashed a patch of blue, showed the shape of its clouds.

  “I came to check on you, bubs.” His voice was softer now, which in Felix meant he was not kidding, kiddo. I felt a warmth of recognition; he kept giving me the things I missed, the things I’d lost.

  “What did the doctor say? They didn’t tell me.”

  “The doctor? That you’d healed but were . . .” His whole face crinkled in worry. “Well, that you’d been very sad and were getting . . . help. A procedure. I wish you’d told me, bubs.” He reached over to take another drag, closing his eyes, and I heard the tobacco smolder in its minor fire.

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t remember anything. What happened to me?”

  His eyes went from me, to my son, to the woman sitting across the way watching us. Then returned to me with that look I knew so well. The crackling music played from the car window, where the driver drummed his fingers. What was the thing that everybody knew? “Are you all right, baby?”

  Where was my ally in this particular dream? Where was Ruth? “Felix, I need your help.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “What happened? There was an accident.”

  “We don’t have to—”

  “Jesus, just tell me, they won’t tell me.”

  He looked at me with the intense pain of someone watching something burn to the ground. I suppose it was watching his sister, who had always been stable, normal, ordinary, and good, fall apart in front of him.

  “There was a car accident, you and Ruth. It wasn’t your fault. You were badly hurt and shaken . . .”

  “Where is Ruth?” I asked him.

  We sat there on the bench, each regarding the other with such pity and envy, the way that siblings do. “Greta,” he began.

  “She died, didn’t she? In the accident,” I said. “She’s dead.”

  He nodded slowly. Golden leaves turned in the wind around us.

  “Oh, Ruth,” I said, letting my head fall into my hands. I felt the tears starting and I let myself sob a few times; I felt my brother’s hand on my back. That was when I felt it again: the sensation that I was not merely visiting these worlds. For I felt her death keenly, though I could picture her in turban and beads, alive in other worlds. I wept and wept into my white gloves. I was not borrowing these other Gretas; I was becoming them.

  “I’m so sorry, Greta. I thought you remembered.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Oh God. And I need her here so much. Poor Ruth. What am I going to tell—” But here I stopped myself.

  “That’s why Nathan found a doctor. You fell apart, Greta.” He leaned over and put his hand on my knee. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  I sniffed and wiped away my tears, then drew myself up tall. “I have to tell you,” I said. “I’m not myself.”

  He winced in pain once again. I felt my hand begin to shake with some surge of emotion; I dropped my cigarette. I was not used to it. Surely in this life, like the last, I was always playing the sober sister. And now—to be the one to break down. It was unbearable. I was reminded of a scene I had once passed on the highway, of a small sports car with a chain attached, slowly and carefully pulling an old truck out of a ditch.

  The thing that everybody knows. For Felix, it was of course that his sister had lost her mind.

  “There are things,” I said, “that you might be shocked if I told you. That you wouldn’t understand. I’ve seen things . . . I’ve gone places that—”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  He took my hand and we were both so cold.

  “Felix,” I said. “I’m not who you think I am.”

  He looked at me for a long time, taking in the words that I had said. The light changed all around us, glowing on each person in the park, my son, the woman, as if lighting a cast of characters. Then at last he spoke: “Me neither, baby.”

  And in those words I heard my dead brother at last.

  Then Felix stood up, shaking off the moment. “I have to go,” he said, gathering his coat, then turning. “I want you to meet someone. I want you to come over for lunch next week, Ingrid will be off at her parents’. I have to go.” He looked up with a halfhearted smile, his cheeks flushed with color. “Bubs, I would understand anything you told me,” he said. “Anything.” Then he slipped on the coat, turned back. “Plant you now,” he said, winking. “Dig you later.”

  What is it to lose a twin? My brother was not just the boy I grew up with; he was my entire youth. I have no memory without him. From the get-go we were allies in the world, with our own language (a combination of family German and babysitter’s Spanish), our own monsters and deities and doors to other worlds. I understood everything he did, and why. I knew his body and his bravery and his foolishness. Older and older, and nothing was different, no parting, no change. When he said he liked boys, it made so much more sense—after all, I liked boys. So should Felix. We liked eve
rything together. Spaghetti and bratwurst and ketchup. That we could now talk about boys was an enormous relief. And to lose him.

  I watched my brother as he walked away through the park, tipping his hat to an old woman in a bright green shawl. Lost to me, again, lost in a brand-new way. But I remembered his words. And, as in a drop of water, within that “anything” a world revolved.

  THAT NIGHT, I assumed that I was saying good-bye to that second world, and treated myself to the possibility that I would awaken in yet a third! And so I held each moment with tenderness. My son kissing me a sloppy good night. Mrs. Green packing yarn into a purse. Nathan brushing his teeth. Strange to see people going about the daily motions of life, when you are the only one who knows it is good-bye.

  That night, for instance, as I watched Nathan undress. Undoing the buttons of his trousers—an old-fashioned gesture—and hanging them on a wooden valet as he stood in his high-waisted underwear. Sitting there, nearly naked now, unaware that he should not be doing this, should not be with me, and yet I could do nothing to stop it that would not seem insane. I could not say, “Stop, this is wrong, in my world you don’t love me.” I could not say, “Please don’t torture me.” So I sat there as he removed his undershirt, his undershorts, and stood nude until a pair of striped pants covered him and he slipped into bed beside me, yawning as if nothing had happened at all. A good-night kiss, a “Good-night, love.” And as I closed my eyes, I felt as guilty as a Peeping Tom.

  And yet, I awoke the next day to that same narrow face—“Good morning, love”—and saw the same billboard out the window. No shift, no travel. Of course it was the procedures that sent me traveling at night, and I had to wait a week until the next one, but at the time I considered I might be trapped there forever. Waking each morning to have a little boy peeking in at the door, running to me. Sleeping each night with Nathan beside me. And would it be so bad?