Even we found it a little unnerving to look at each other. So that’s what I looked like when I lost my front teeth. So that’s what I’ll look like when I’ve entered adolescence. And yet this resemblance was also the only reliable and reassuring thing in our lives. There was the sense that we would always have each other. There was, to be honest, a never-articulated belief that we actually were each other, just at different stages of a single life. When our mother called us for bedtime stories and we arranged ourselves at her blanketed feet, each of us heavy-lidded, Vee and Delph lolling their heads against Lady’s arms, we must have looked on the outside as we felt on the inside: a single creature, strange and many-limbed, and in desperate need of a good night’s rest.
Of all the stories our mother told us when we were girls, the story about Lenz and the snowflakes and the sky was our favorite. We were children ourselves; we empathized with a little boy’s failure to understand an adult’s message. We got why his misapprehension was cute and silly, but we also got why it was wonderful, why his was a glorious way to see the world: not reduced to one of its component colors, but broad and encompassing and mystical, and the whole thing revolving around little old you.
As time went on, though, when we requested this story our mother began adding new details. When Heinrich and Lenz left home, they were led through the city streets by an eerie light that was an iridescent silver like mother-of-pearl. When Heinrich looked up, it was because a clap of thunder or shooting star or roaring voice had called his attention to the horizon.
In these new versions, on the day Heinrich caught the snowflakes in his palm, he understood at once that they weren’t snowflakes. (Snowflakes in May, our mother said. Did you actually believe that?) He knew immediately that they were Rudi Alter’s essence, fragments of Rudi’s very soul making their way to his brother on that day: Rudi’s deathday. Heinrich Alter had no way of knowing his brother was dead at the time he saw that indigo slash. But, said our mother, Heinrich Alter knew.
Eventually even the punch line was no longer a punch line, Lenz’s conclusion no longer the funny misunderstanding of a little boy but a genuine revelation. In these new versions, when Heinrich pointed upward and proclaimed, “That’s ours!” he did mean the entire sky, he did mean everything the human eye could see. He meant everything the human eye couldn’t see too.
Soon, when our mother told us the story, she was no longer looking at us, her purported audience, but gazing upward with confusion and wonder just as her great-grandfather and her little-boy grandfather had done all those years ago. Perhaps she was addressing the faces that we, too, could see in the swirls of ceiling plaster when we softened our vision. Perhaps she was talking to someone only she could discern. Maybe it was the ghost of one of her gone-by relatives: her mother Karin, her father Richard, her great-uncle Rudi. Or maybe it was Lenz, who she’d known briefly when she was a very young girl, her grandfather Lenz who told her some of these bedtime stories before Hitler came and the family fled. Or maybe she thought she was talking to Der Alter, that is, to the God she’d always told us did not exist.
“What does it mean?” our mother asked the ceiling or the ghost or God. “If my great-grandfather owned heaven and my grandfather inherited it from him, what does that mean for me now? Shouldn’t it be mine? Isn’t that the law?”
At first we tried to persuade ourselves that she was clowning, trying to amuse us. She wasn’t, though. Wasn’t clowning. Wasn’t amusing.
Sometimes it seemed as if the ceiling was responding to her. For us it was like listening to one side of a phone call. “Yes,” she’d say, and then a long pause. “Well, yes,” and another silence. Finally, “I understand your argument, but I think some of your basic premises are incorrect.”
Sometimes she remembered that we were sitting there, and she frowned as if we’d interrupted or voiced disapproval when we hadn’t said anything at all. “Don’t worry,” she’d say with exhaustion. “When I die, it will all pass to you. No one’s going to deny you your potage.”
She never said this with passion or conviction or joy. She said it as if she were recalling one more tiresome chore on her life’s to-do list. She managed the jewelry and cosmetics department at Woolworth’s, and if we never were well off, we always had rent money and food and a substantial supply of lipsticks and plastic clip-on earrings. She took care of us as best she could. If she said she’d get us our potage, we believed her. Of course, we thought potage meant porridge, and we wanted no part of it. We made faces. She chafed at our lack of gratitude. “Don’t look so stricken,” she’d say. “This is the good news. It’s the only good news anyone unlucky enough to be part of this family’s going to get.”
Other times she said nothing, just smiled wearily. This was worse than her conversations with the ceiling. We dreaded her smiles. They were time machines that carried her away, transported her to the distant past or the faraway future, left us with only her body, a hand with a cigarette dangling off her bed, hot ashes wafting down to the carpet fibers like snowflakes in Breslau, like cherry blossoms in a Japanese park. One night she came back from one of those trips and said, “If God owns heaven and I own heaven and there’s only one owner of heaven, what does that force you to conclude?”
It took us a moment to realize she was talking to us.
“That you’re God?” Vee said.
Our mother nodded as she considered that answer — hers had been a genuine, not a rhetorical, question — but Vee, upon reflection, glowered. “I thought we were atheists,” she said.
“I thought we were humans,” Delph said.
“We are atheists,” Lady said. “Which means, if (a) there’s no God and (b) Mom’s God, then (c) Mom’s nothing. That’s called the transitive property.”
Our mother looked at us as if we were all very wise, and being wise was a terrible burden she wished she could have spared us. Her eyes filled with tears. She drew on her cigarette, blew the smoke up toward the faces in the ceiling. She tried to be careful about us and her smoke.
“They’re right,” she said to the ceiling, tears dribbling down her face. “I’m God and I’m just some old bag of bones and I’m nothing, all three at once.”
God, bones, and nothing. Lady calls this the Alter version of the holy trinity. Delph says it’s the best definition of mortal man she’s ever heard. We are, at all times, all three.
Vee thinks that from God to bones to nothing is also a pretty good description of life. It’s sad, she thinks. It’s the opposite of the way she wishes life worked. From nothing to bones to God — that’s what she longs for, that’s what she wishes for — the fantasy, the fairy tale, the capacity for faith. But Vee can’t go there. None of us can.
CHAPTER 4
When she got home from Riverdale, Lady dropped the blue screwdriver on the kitchen counter — because, as bad as she felt about everything, she hadn’t relinquished it, she’d held on to it, clutching it the whole train ride home as if it were a wand or scepter; she has it even now, today, in a drawer in her bedroom — and not bothering with the switch plate, she headed straight to the bathroom for a drink. For many drinks. She sat on the tiled floor and she pulled her T-shirt up over her head, and she thought about how unhappy she was and how unloved and unlovable and how strange and, now, how violent, and she drank from the bottle, one glug, then two, and she called it drinking from the bottle. From time to time the phone rang, and she had another drink or she turned on the faucet to drown out the sound. She stared up at the peeling paint of the ceiling. And when the ringing stopped, she had another drink.