The Imposter Bride (10 page)

What I liked most about the move, though, was that Carrie lived just down the street on Bailey, which was by the train tracks. Most afternoons she and I climbed the fence behind her house so we could play on the tracks that ran behind it or in the large empty fields that had not yet been developed into tracts of apartments and single-family housing. In colder
weather we trudged through the snow drifts pretending we were explorers trying to reach the North Pole, setting up forts along the way so that our competition—usually the kids from Saint Richard’s—couldn’t claim they had been there first. As the weather warmed we would lay our ears and pennies on the tracks and thrill to the vibrations of the trains we could hear from miles away and to the flattened images of the Queen after a train had rolled over her.

One afternoon one of the girl’s from Saint Richard’s taught us how to hitch a ride on a slow-moving freight train that was coming through. “It’s easy,” she said. We just had to know that the train was moving faster than it seemed, so we would have to run along it as fast as we possibly could to get up enough speed and momentum to land correctly when we jumped. We had to grab hold of the metal handle exactly right and if we got it wrong we would fall under the train. It had happened to another girl from her school. She’d lost both her legs. “I was there and saw the whole thing,” the girl assured us. “The blood was”—she dropped her voice a little—“terrible.”

My terror made it all the more enticing and exciting. I looked at Carrie. I don’t think fear was even part of her mix. She had just heard that someone else had failed at something, so she was going to succeed. I’m sure that’s what the gleam in her eye was about, though I wouldn’t have put it that way then. I only knew, at that moment, that she was too competitive. That’s what Elka thought. “Winning isn’t everything,” Elka had told me at supper one night after I hurt my back trying to jump over a skipping rope that Carrie had kept tying higher and higher between two trees in our yard. (“It’s not going to hurt her, Elka,” my father had answered.)

So we ran exactly the way the girl had instructed us and
grabbed hold of the metal bar and hauled ourselves onto the train.

“Well done,” the girl said. I felt a glow of accomplishment and external approval beginning to warm me. “For a couple of Jews,” she added with smirk.

I was a bit stunned at first. We lived in an almost entirely Jewish world. Our school was Jewish, our neighbourhood was Jewish—so much so that some people called it Côte-St-Jew—and I had not encountered that sort of comment before. I had heard of anti-Semitism, of course, but it was from somewhere else (Russia, Europe, the part of town my father, Sol and Aunt Nina grew up in) and another time (before I was born). My first thought was how stupid the girl was. I hadn’t quite moved to my second thought when Carrie hit her. More than hit. She punched her right in the stomach. It looked to me like a hard punch, the sort of punch that, if there were an audience and they weren’t on a moving freight car, would have led to a fight. But they were on a moving train and there was no one else around to witness any loss of face, so the girl just gave Carrie a funny sort of grin that was different from her smirk and then proceeded to jump off the train. We followed quickly, automatically, but though we knew to push as far out away from the train as we could, we had no sense of the physics of the thing, and both had hard falls followed by some rolling.

“You okay?” the girl from Saint Richard’s asked. She had also rolled, despite all her experience, and we were all lying where we had come to a stop, not far from one another, at the bottom of the rise of the tracks.

“I think so,” Carrie said.

“I think so,” I also said. I was lying on my back looking up
at the sky. I felt more than okay. I felt wonderful. The ground was cool and damp against my back—it was spring and the earth hadn’t warmed yet. The sky was a pale and gauzy blue with white clouds moving across it. I had just escaped certain death, and the thrill of it was pumping through my veins.

“What happened?” Jeffrey asked when I came into the yard. He had been playing on the jungle gym, but jumped off when he saw me.

I already knew my face was bleeding, because Carrie had told me.

“Carrie and I were attacked by some Indians,” I told him.

His eyes widened. “You were?” It actually came out as
you wuh
because he hadn’t quite gotten the pronunciation of his r’s down at that point.

“Yeah. By the fields behind Carrie’s house. But it’s okay. We fought them off.”

“You did?”

“There were just two of them. Not big ones,” I added. “But don’t tell your mother. I don’t want her to worry.”

Jeffrey nodded, eyes still wide. He wouldn’t tell her, I knew. He might still be a baby, but he didn’t want to be. He was almost five and would rather be in my camp than be grouped with his little brother Mitchell, and his baby brother, Chuck, who had been born just a few weeks after the move the previous spring.

“I’m going to go home to wash up before she sees me,” I said.

“I won’t say anything, Wootie. I pwomise.”

“Scout’s honour?”

He nodded solemnly.

I went home—to my father’s home—and looked in the
mirror. The damage to my face wasn’t too bad, nothing that would require much of an explanation, but I didn’t feel like going back to Sol and Elka’s that afternoon. I wanted to stay where I was, alone in the quiet of the apartment I shared with my father. I’d never spent time alone and that afternoon, for the first time, I wanted to. I called Elka.

“Hi, hon,” she said. “You at Carrie’s?” Quite often I called from Carrie’s at that time of day to ask if I could eat supper there.

“No, I went home. To my dad’s.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, I just remembered that most of my stuff for that science project is here, so I thought—”

“I don’t like your voice. Did you and Carrie have a fight?”

“No,” I said.

“What then?”

“I want to stay by myself today.”

“By yourself?” A long silence. “You mean for supper too?”

“I can make a sandwich.” I was almost ten already. Just two more weeks. Elka knew I could make a sandwich.

“You’re not afraid?” she asked. She had been left alone so often in her childhood that she swore her own children would never know the meaning of the word until they wanted to. I wanted to now and she could tell, I thought. Or maybe, on that particular afternoon, she was just so tired from her own three kids and her Passover cleaning that there was some relief in having one less child at the table.

“Okay, sweetie, but if you change your mind you call right away. Uncle Sol can drive up to get you.”

It wasn’t true that I wasn’t afraid. I was, a little. Not of anything happening to me, or anyone coming in to kidnap
me. It was the silence of my home. That was what I found unnerving that first afternoon and evening. I felt very small within that silence. But also a little bit excited. It wasn’t still, the silence. It seemed as I sat there on the leather couch in the living room that it moved in and out, sort of like an accordian, compressing and expanding around me. I stayed on the couch for a while, nervous about what might happen if I got off it and walked around, but then I did.

I started with the living room. We had already lived in that apartment for a whole year by then, but it felt different exploring it alone, without my father home. There was his chair, a recliner, in black leather like the couch. I ran my hand along the leather. And there was my father’s little table right beside his chair where he piled his newspapers and magazines and where he put his glass of Scotch and little dish of salted almonds when he got home from work. I went through the pile of papers—
The Montreal Star
from the day before,
Time, Life
. Then I moved on to the cabinet where we had our hi-fi.

Sol and Elka’s hi-fi no longer sat in their living room but was downstairs in the newly finished basement that was now the family rec room. They had a TV, too, which we didn’t have yet. It sat right beside the record player on a special piece of furniture that took up half the wall and that Sol called the entertainment centre. Their records were mostly Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and the Barry Sisters, though they also had Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies and Brahms’ Symphonies 1 and 2 and
Kiss Me, Kate
, which was a musical they had seen when they went to New York City for their honeymoon. And Chuck Berry, of course. I say “of course” because one night the previous spring, soon after the move, we were all in the rec room, where Sol and my father were setting up the ping-pong table bought specially
for the new house. Elka put on a song she said she had heard on the radio and it had reminded her so much of Sol that she had to run out and buy it. It was “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by Chuck Berry. As soon as Elka put it on, it made her want to dance, she said. It made me want to dance too, I said, so she pulled me off the couch, where I had been wiggling to the music, and she started teaching me how to jitterbug.

“Careful, Elka,” Sol warned her. She was in her ninth month of pregnancy then.

“Don’t be such a square,” Elka said, and she pulled him away from the ping-pong table to dance with us.

He laughed a little but then he started dancing. Then Jeffrey started dancing and Mitch also—though his version of dancing was just to stand in one spot turning round and round and round, laughing the whole time. My father didn’t join the dance but he leaned against the wall smiling as he watched us. And then Elka said, “Ooh” in a sharp sort of way and put her hand on her stomach, and Sol said, “What? Oh my God.” And she said, “It’s okay, I’m just going to sit down for a minute,” which she did, with Sol standing beside her going, “What? What?”

When the song ended Elka was still sitting with her hand on her stomach, though Sol had stopped saying “What? What?” by then.

After a little while she said, “You know, I think we’d better go to the hospital.”

My father and I stayed at their house to take care of the boys until Ida Pearl and Bella could get over, but even before Ida and Bella arrived we had a call from Sol that the baby had been born. It was that fast.

“Good thing they left for the hospital when they did,” I
said, to which my father smiled, tousled my hair and agreed, “Good thing.”

They were going to name him Chuck, my father said. After Chuck Berry.

“They are?” I asked, and we both laughed.

He told me then about how his mother wanted to name him for the ship he was born on.

“She did?”

“What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “You don’t like the name Vedic?”

I told him I liked Chuck better, and we laughed again.

Ida Pearl, though, didn’t think naming a baby was something to laugh about. (Not to mention that it was bad luck to tell the name of a boy before his
bris
.) “Chuck?” she asked as soon as she and Bella arrived and heard the news. “What kind of name is that?”

“I think his official name will be Charles,” my father said, which seemed to help a little. We didn’t tell her about the Chuck Berry part.

My father’s record collection included Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies and Brahms’ First and Second Symphonies just like Elka and Sol’s. (There had been a period of time a couple of years back when Bella was giving records of symphonies for presents.) He also had records by Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald and Artie Shaw and Art Blakey and Charlie Parker and a whole lot of other jazz musicians. And then there were the two records of Israeli folk songs and
Peter and the Wolf
, which were mine.

On the bookshelf beside the record player was my set of Childcraft encyclopedias, my father’s
siddur
, the Soncino book of the weekly Torah and Haftarah portions, and some art
books that had been a present from a lady named Joyce that my father had dated for a few months when we still lived on Cumberland. (She was very nice when she came to dinner—it was she who had given me my records of Israeli folk songs—but after a while she stopped coming.) On one of the lower shelves there were a few novels from when Elka had signed my father up for the Book of the Month Club. My father didn’t read novels—he read newspapers and magazines—so I wasn’t sure why Elka would have signed him up unless maybe there had been a two-for-one deal when she joined herself. And beside the Book of the Month Club selections, the notebooks.

They had always been there, the notebooks. In plain view, in the centre of our living room. It was an odd place for them, in some ways, but where else was my father supposed to keep them? In a box at the back of his closet as if they were something to be ashamed of? There was nothing about my mother anybody needed to feel ashamed of, Elka had told me, and my father obviously agreed, so her notebooks sat in plain view, in the middle of our living room, in broad daylight (light that was slowly damaging them, though I wouldn’t know that until years later when I studied conservation).

There were two. The older one had once belonged to a girl my mother had known in Europe. And right beside the girl’s notebook, my mother’s.

The girl’s had a soft leather cover that had been fawn-coloured at one point. You could still see the original colour deep inside the seams when you pulled it off the shelf and opened it, which I did now. But the outside was mostly stained and discoloured. Inside, its pages were filled to the very edges with handwriting, Yiddish words so tiny I could barely make them out, a crowded mess of words that I couldn’t understand.
I closed it, put it back on the shelf, and pulled out the other one. This one was my mother’s. She had bought it not long after she and my father were married, but she had not taken it with her when she left. It was also leather-bound and was in good, almost perfect condition. And it was empty.

Why hadn’t my mother written anything in her book? I wondered. Why had she left it behind? (“I don’t know,” my father had said. “Maybe she couldn’t think of anything to write,” Elka said.)

I had never been alone with my mother’s notebook before. This was very different from looking at it with someone watching me. I opened it and ran my fingers along the empty pages, wondering if my mother had run her hand along those same pages. I ran my fingertips along the pages and then the surface of my whole hand, wondering if I was touching where my mother’s hand had touched. I closed my eyes to see if I could feel anything unusual, and I thought maybe I did, but I couldn’t tell what, for certain. I did it again, and, yes, there it was again, a strange, pulsing feeling. It was a bit like when my aunt Nina had brought over her Ouija board and we sat with our fingers on it (lightly, Nina warned me) and then all of a sudden, it began to move a little. I sat for a long while with my fingertips resting on the first page of my mother’s notebook, and there was definitely a pulsing coming from it.