The Face Tells the Secret - Softcover

Bernstein, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1947548786 ISBN 13: 9781947548787

Verlag: REGAL HOUSE PUB, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Everything has been hidden from Roxanne G.—her birth name, her sister, her family history—until her “boyfriend” tries to ingratiate himself by flying in her estranged mother from Tel Aviv. That visit is the start of a tumultuous journey, in which she first learns about a profoundly disabled sister who lives in a residential community in the Galilee and later begins to unearth disturbing long-held family secrets. The process of facing this history and acknowledging the ways she’s been shaped by it will enable Roxanne to forge the kinds of meaningful connections that had for so long been elusive. In this way, The Face Tells the Secret is the story about a woman who finds love and learns how to open herself to its pleasures. The Face Tells the Secret is also a story that explores disability from many angles and raises questions about our responsibility to care for our kin. How far should Roxanne go to care for the wounded people in her life—her mother, her sister, the man who professes undying love? What should she take on? When is it necessary to turn away from someone’s suffering?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane Bernstein is the author of two novels, three memoirs, and a children’s book she cowrote with her daughter. Her essays, which have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, and many other journals, have been anthologized in such places as True Stories Well Told, Love You to Pieces, and Best American Sports Writing 2018. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Fulbright Fellowship and is a member of the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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The Face Tells the Secret

By Jane Bernstein

Regal House Publishing, LLC

Copyright © 2019 Jane Bernstein
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-947548-78-7

CHAPTER 1

I was too young to remember our journey to the U.S., so life, as I recall it, begins on a cold morning, in the back of a garden apartment in New Jersey, not far from Bell Laboratories, where my mother worked. The sun is bright overhead, and I'm wearing a new wool winter coat, double-breasted with brass buttons, and breathing, or rather, teaching myself to breathe by inhaling deeply through my nose and exhaling through my lips, practicing, as if without this practice, I would not know how to do it. Though I recall no adults nearby while I am breathing, someone has teased me for standing with my mouth open, "catching flies," which is why at four, I am trying so hard to do it the right away.

And now a year or so has passed. It's late afternoon, a raw runny-nose kind of day, and I'm alone in a playground at the back of this garden apartment complex, a dusty square with three creaky swings, a seesaw, and a small slide. I avoid all of this equipment, but the slide is what I fear most. I'm afraid of climbing the metal steps, of reaching the top and having to extend one leg and then the other, of having to loosen my grip on the railings enough to slide to the bottom. But now I've come here by myself, determined to conquer this fear. It feels as necessary as learning how to breathe. I can't say how it is I'm alone at dusk on this bristly afternoon, only that I never could have made myself go up that ladder, awkwardly reposition myself at the top, let go of the railings just enough to stutter down slowly, again and again if anyone were with me. I know this, just as I know this is not a photo I am "remembering." We had no photos. Nor was it a family story. We had no family stories. Now it seems that it makes no difference if this memory, like the one in which I teach myself to breathe, is real or manufactured. They are of me, these pieces of experience, and when they return to me, I am surprised by the clarity and emotional truth of each.

My mother, Leona Garlick, was a physicist. She worked in psychoacoustics and eventually became the first woman department head at Bell Labs.

She was different from the other mothers — we were different. She said this proudly, which lead me to believe that "different" was a more polite way of saying "better." Certainly she was more beautiful than the other mothers, with thick black hair, dark eyes and full lips she colored red, and she was a scientist, "not the least bit maternal," a descriptor, like "different" she used with great pride; "maternal" being something that described housewives, while she couldn't "waste her time on such nonsense."

Her words, her expressions, live in my brain.

I cannot remember her in everyday life — at the dinner table, watching a show on TV, wearing pants. Only waiting for her, knocking on the door of the office she'd set up in the house my parents bought near Bell Labs, pink from my bath, teeth brushed, dressed in pjs. Her office was a sacred room, completely different from the rest of the house, which was tidy and well-furnished and spare, with no tchotchkes at all. Her space was cluttered with books and journals, towers of stacked trays, and gifts she'd been given over the years: a red-tasseled scroll from China, a netsuke from Japan, a ceramic burro, a brass clock, inscribed with her name. Knocking softly. Daring to open the door an inch. She might swivel in her chair, might lean over, might let me put my lips to her cheek, carefully; even then I knew she did not like to be touched.

Also a treat was being allowed to sit on the edge of her bed while she dressed for an evening event, to watch the faces she made in the mirror when she dabbed on eye shadow, applied her lipstick, blotting the excess by placing a single square of toilet paper between her lips, pressing hard, then scrutinizing herself from each angle, close up, from a distance. Or sitting on the top step when the scientists came over, where I could see her in the wing chair, waving her arms languidly while she spoke, cigarette between her fingers, legs in sheer hose. The way the room went silent while she spoke; the way they waited to laugh until she did, these men. And they were all men, in those days, and she was the queen.

Once a visitor from another country wanted to say hello to me, and my mother had called warmly from the bottom of the stairs. "Roxanne, come and meet our guest." She escorted me into the living room and let me stay until nine o'clock. I know because she said, "All right, upstairs. It's nine o'clock."

On another night, I raced downstairs after the company had left, crying, "Mommy!" and was stopped by her angry visage. "Aren't you a little old to call me Mommy?"

How old had I been? — Six, seven? After that, I had not known what to call her and was too shy to ask. Mommy was too babyish. Mom was like a dumpling caught in my throat. Mama was too European. Mother was the name used by the scrubbed, well-mannered children in the stories I loved, when Nanny escorted them into the drawing room to say goodnight.

Because my mother had important things to do, the girl picked me up from school, gave me milk and cookies and sat with me until my father, a math teacher, came home. The girl was an older black woman, with shiny hair that looked to be of one solid piece, and long slender fingers. She held my hand when we walked home, brushed my hair gently, making a neat part, letting the comb tickle my scalp, and tying my hair in two pigtails. I cannot recall her face, only those beautiful hands with the long fingers and oval nails.

Then there was the Polish girl with grayish skin and moles on her cheeks; "beauty marks," she called them. She ate cookies with me, three for every one I was allowed because she was bigger, she said. After the Polish girl was a high school student with blonde eyebrows and long blonde hair. She wore pink lipstick, and one of her arms was short and hung loosely. This girl was determined to ignore me. Something about her willful lack of interest made me act in a different way with her than I had with the others. I followed her from the kitchen, and when she picked up the boxy phone and carried it as far as the extension cord would go, I trailed behind and talked at her, while she talked into the phone, traveling, phone in hand, trying to turn away from me, the cord twisting around her.

"I hate her," I told my father. Unable to explain why, I asked why her arm was like that, and he breathed heavily, which he did when he was disappointed, and said I must never be cruel. "She's a human being just like you." I was ashamed and did not know why, only that she continued to ignore me as if it was her official job, and I continued to follow her everywhere, until at last she quit.

After that, I wore a house key on a chain around my neck and let myself in through the back door.

Branches scratching the windows, voices, a stranger ringing our bell; the moan of the siren, which meant someone's house was on fire. These were the daytime sounds that made me rigid with fear. At night, I was jolted awake by crying, screaming; angry words in a language I felt but did not understand. Trembling in bed, I was unable to move. Though I could not say it was her, my body was heavy with the knowledge, and in the morning I watched, waiting from a distance, careful not to get too close. If I felt the tension abate, I might hum and twirl into the kitchen and be very cute, and sing, "Bar-rump...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: REGAL HOUSE PUB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1947548786
• ISBN 13: 9781947548787
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 315
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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