Free No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel Page B

now, and then carefully folded back up again. “She was just here,” I whispered to myself. “My sister was just in this room.” That was a fact; my own presence here was much harder to believe.
    I walked over to the bed, pulled the covers back and kneeled on the floor. I put my face to the bed and tried to smell my sister there on the rough cotton sheets. Tried to smell her sleep the night before, what must have been an uneasy sleep. I tried to smell her dreams. Was she happy to be here? Was she glad she would get to be an opera star? In the morning, when she was told she was not the desired one, was she sorry? The bed smelled clean, undreamed in. Kayla was hardly gone a minute when she returned to fetch me. “Come out and be my daughter,” she said.
    I sat down in between my aunt and uncle on a hard red velvet couch. They placed a crystal bowl full of candy on my lap, brightly colored packages piled high. Kayla touched my hair, examined my scalp, ringed my ankle with her fingers.
    Kayla noted that her new daughter would have to be fattened up. She said, “Life gets better from here.” I noted that my aunt did not need fattening at all, that her ankles came over her short leather shoes like bread over the top of its pan. I noticed how her wedding ring divided her finger into two distinct provinces. Hersh, on the other hand, was rangy. Everything about him was tall—even his earlobes looked stretched. His forehead was an expanse and his chin looked curious and adventuresome, as if it might wander off his face into the great, unknown mountains.
    Hersh asked me where they should start and I shook my head.
    “Well, do you want to know about your grandparents? Do you want to know about your great-grandparents? Do you want to know about when I was a boy?”
    “And what about me?” said Kayla. “I have a
lot
to tell you, too.”
    “So, tell,” I said, carefully unwrapping a yellow candy and rolling it in my mouth. I remember vividly how much each motion of my hand mattered to me that day. I could reach, I could pick up, I could unwrap. The rest of the world was dizzy, but these things were known. I sucked the candy hard, and a sharp edge cut my tongue. The taste of lemon mixed with the taste of blood.
    Hersh started to tell me about his parents, who were silk traders from the sea. He was excited and proud to show my ancestry off to me, but I reminded him that those had always been my grandparents. Hersh looked disappointed. Here he had given me a gift and I said I already had the same thing in another color. I tried again. “Thank you,” I said politely with a small nod. How was I the one trying to offer comfort? I looked at the room with all its upholstered furniture and oil paintings. The woodstove had a ceramic horse standing stately and ready to gallop atop it. The rug at my feet was soft and richly colored with a repeating pattern of square deer. Everything in the room looked important and breakable.
    “Your father is in the saddle business, did you know?” Kayla asked.
    “My father?”
    “Hersh here, your father.” Kayla took my little hand and placed it on Hersh’s knee. His pants were scratchy under my palm. “You should be proud of him. He is a very great man.”
    “I see,” I said.
    “Can you say it for me? ‘I am proud of my father.’”
    “I am proud of my father,” I said, picturing a man in a cabbage field, but looking at a man with a pair of glasses glinting around his eyes and a mustache that hid the dark holes leading into his long nose.

THE SEVENTH DAY
    O n the seventh day, we rested. Men put their feet up and looked out the window at the rain that had not stopped falling. Children ate honey on slices of bread. Mothers rubbed a little butter on their dry heels. We looked back at our first week of life, our plans and accomplishments, and most of us felt proud. The trees applauded with their green, green leaves.
    The stranger, prayer-ready and shivering, tapped her foot in the mud