"They don"t know about each other!" Laura said. "One is in the sea forever, and the other has to be on land forever."
"That"s why there are zoos," I told Laura. "The fish and elephants see each other there."
Laura stood up. "The zoo is dead!" she shouted.
"Dead" was the word Laura sometimes subst.i.tuted for "closed."
Last year, the Prague Zoo had drowned in the one-hundred-year flood, along with a rhinoceros and an elephant. The flood had touched nearly everything in the city.
"Emily," Ester said, struggling with the painting. She placed it on the floor. "I need your help."
Ester was in front of the French doors guarding the balcony. She was red haired and beautiful with large threatening blue eyes, and stood still only with purpose. She was always and suddenly in a rush to notice everything-Laura wasn"t wearing underwear today, my father had been coughing up a sick green storm all morning, I was getting home too late at night (what was I doing? What could I possibly have been doing?) and so was my father. "Where does he go?" she asked. I shrugged, as if I already understood the larger truth. "This is what it"s like with him," I said. And that whole time, Ester"s feather earrings hung as still as the red hair around them, like peac.o.c.ks stashed in a maple tree.
"Shouldn"t you have art handlers helping you with that?" I asked her.
"It"s ony an imitation," she said.
"Well, shouldn"t you wait for my father to come before you hang it?" I asked. We both looked at the front door.
"French doors," I had told my mother over the phone after I first arrived.
"And a balcony?" my mother asked.
"Of course," I said. "And a bay window in the bedroom."
"Well, that"s just fine," my mother said, and changed the topic.
My mother was doing better now with her new fiance Bill. Bill was richer than we had previously thought. It turned out that his dead wife had invented MazelTof! when she was pregnant during Pa.s.sover. MazelTof! was matzoh dipped in chocolate and toffee. Her factory was in Brooklyn and she made four million dollars a year off the product until she died of cancer ten years ago. Bill inherited the company, sold it, invested all the profits, and bought a plane.
"I"m barely home anymore," my mother said like there was a direct ratio between time spent at home and unhappiness. "Bill flies me everywhere. It"s marvelous, Emily, you wouldn"t believe. So nice to just get out of Connecticut. I thought this place was going to kill me."
Ester measured out a decent s.p.a.ce for the painting on my father"s wall, which I could now see was a da Vinci painting, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne. "No need to wait for your father," Ester said. "You"re the expert. Where should I hang this? Where would be the most feng shui?"
I stood up. For every one of my movements, Laura made four.
"Directly above the fireplace," I said. "It will make the living room a conversation s.p.a.ce. If that"s what you want it to be, of course."
I was studying for my master"s in interior design, and somebody always a.s.sumed this meant I knew something about feng shui. But I had never learned a thing about feng shui, not in graduate school, and not in college. In college, it was always and simply, you have to meet this poet-art-installation guy who felt my b.r.e.a.s.t.s last week, and you have to meet this singer-songwriter-actress person with amazing legs, not to mention the best homegrown weed, and come see my dining hall, come to Waterfire, yes literally floating fires sent down the river that cuts through the city and makes your eyes gla.s.sy with their pa.s.sing, and my flip-flops they are disgusting, yes, but that is the fate of a flip-flop, some woman in Indonesia made them from the rubber of recycled automobile tires, yes, my flip-flops were once the wheels of a sedan stuck on 95, and now they are growing mold, and yes, my roommate is disgusting too, she lets cheese sit out on her desk for days but guess what? She has white, sterile nipples.
My father called me in the middle of my senior year and said, "Honey, I miss you. n.o.body here understands my jokes. Why don"t you come out and live with me in Prague? You can meet Ester."
"Who is Ester?" I had asked. "And why would I want to meet her? And why is Ester not laughing at your jokes?"
My father"s other girlfriends were brief things he only mentioned in pa.s.sing, as if he got a new credit card or something. Jana with the forty tennis rackets, Radka, whom he met at a cafe, Petra who had a daughter named Hanka, which was short for Hana, despite having more letters. But Ester was not Czech, and mostly from Delaware. She loved Delaware. She said loving a place like Delaware was as complicated as fondly remembering one"s unhappy childhood. She said it was as complicated as her faith, which was Roman Catholic. She inherited the religion from her crazy mother, she said, and she was always paralyzed by the limitations and the freedoms of it. When she was younger on a camping trip, she accidentally got a nail jammed in a girl"s forehead. "Don"t ask," she said. The nail gave the girl brain damage and Ester had been going to church ever since. "Church offers forgiveness," she said, "but only if you always feel guilty. So I"m just not sure." She moved far far away from Delaware and became a psychologist in Prague.
The closer Ester came toward me while holding The Virgin and Child, the less blue her eyes appeared. The front door swung open. My working father had returned from work.
"Hi. Bye," Laura said to him. "Guy!"
"Hi, girls," my father said. He put his bags down and went to the wine rack. "Sorry, I"m late." He opened up a bottle of wine. "The trams were so packed with all these Christian teenagers singing Jesus campfire songs that we literally could not fit."
"I"ve seen them," I said as I held up a nail to the wall. "Red and blue sweatshirts. The teenagers who look like they are afraid to be naked even when they are alone in the shower."
My father laughed.
"Did you guys know that this painting is unfinished?" Ester asked, not hearing us. "That Leonardo da Vinci"s other hobbies distracted him, and he stopped painting it?"
My father poured the three of us gla.s.ses of wine, and I hammered the nail into the wall.
"No, I didn"t know that," I said.
The air came through the half-opened balcony door like a leak, stiff and cruel in its persistence. Ester was waiting for me to say, well, what hobbies? But I tried to look bored, just hammering a nail.
"Geology," Ester finally said.
"Understandable," I said. "Layers of sediment."
"Are you being sarcastic?" Ester said.
The nail was in.
"Try not to be so sarcastic, Emily," my father said from the kitchen.
"We believe it to be a sorry defense!" Laura said, mimicking Ester.
"And do you see Mary"s arms? She"s trying to protect Christ from the cross. Do you see?" Ester asked.
"No," I said. I walked away from the painting that was now leaning against the wall. "I"m not being sarcastic. I really don"t see any cross."
"Come on," Ester said, pointing to the painting. "Look! Mary"s arms are freaking outstretched!"
I looked. I laughed. Ester smiled.
"The Virgin Mary shouldn"t be "freaking" anything," my father said, approaching with the gla.s.ses of wine.
"Don"t be so Victorian, dear," Ester said. She took her wine. "At the core, this painting is about a mother loving her child. It makes me miss my mother. Is that weird?"
As soon as she asked, it suddenly felt like it was weird. Ester was thirty-nine. She should have stopped missing her mother a long time ago. We couldn"t go on missing our mothers forever, could we? It was even weirder that n.o.body asked, "Why would you miss your mother-where is she?"
"But it"s not just about a mother loving her child," Ester told me. "Freud thought it was the result of some kind of suppressed h.o.m.os.e.xuality. See, here, the shape of a vulture?"
Standing in front of the painting, Ester turned all her statements into questions. This bothered me, but it felt shameful to be upset about something stupid in front of something masterful. It was shameful to be this upset in general. I was twenty-two, with a college degree and long brown hair and thighs that looked more like my mother"s every day. And yet every day, it seemed, I was discovering new ways to feel fourteen again. Every day, there were new ways to be disappointed by the conversation, by the weather, which according to the television was partly sunny, temperatures steady in the midsixties, a light breeze, particulates good.
"Da Vinci once had a dream about sucking a vulture"s tail," Ester said, continuing. "Or maybe it was a kite?"
The more she talked about the painting, the less I understood.
"No respectable psychologist references Freud," my father said with a smile.
"Freud"s all pseudoscience," I said. College was all about calling everything a "pseudoscience."
Ester"s eyes flickered away in disappointment. n.o.body wanted to share in her discovery, not even Laura, who had lost interest and picked the dog up over her head.
"Be careful with the dog," my father said.
"The dog, the dog, the dog," Ester said. "Always the dog!"
Ester didn"t want the dog, and even less so when it turned out the dog had epilepsy. But she was too refined to ever express disgust; she just looked at him distantly as his lips curled back and his limbs went stiff (the first phase), and then he started chewing the air (the second phase), and then urinating all over the floor (the third phase). She looked at him like the dog was an empty thing, a leaking coffeepot, while my father monitored him, like the vet told us, see it through until the end of the seizure and take notes. Ester couldn"t stand the smell of his urine, so she walked out the door and went to the movies. "Take notes," she sometimes laughed. "The urine is yellow."
Sometimes, I went with her. On the way, Ester complained about our faucets, which were striped with red rings of rust. And the water. It was a dingy brown for the first thirty seconds in the morning, and my father kept forgetting this, Ester said, kept forgetting he was in Prague, cupping his hand to bring the cool drink to his mouth before opening his eyes.
"At least he wears an undershirt," she said. "That"s one thing I can say for the man."
The men on the street rarely wore undershirts so their thick chest hair lurked like shadows behind their shirts. On the tram, a pack of American boys argued over who had been wearing the same pair of underwear the longest. The man who gave us the movie tickets had what I thought was a leper lesion on the back of his hand.
At the movies, the popcorn sat flat in gla.s.s cases. The Czech children were in various groups listening to each other speak, and American men were stooped over water fountains. There were bigger hands in littler hands, flashing golden tickets. I sat in my seat and the movie was usually not good, not bad. It was usually about a (black) woman and a (white) mother and another woman with a (s.h.i.tty) mother who knew another (taller s.h.i.ttier) woman and when the (black white s.h.i.tty) women visited some kind of waterfall and looked at the water rolling over the edge of the cliff, they compared the dropping movement to liberation and I could feel the dog falling down the stairs back in the apartment. I could feel the dog falling off the couch. I could feel the dog falling all the time, and I could feel Laura"s stomach drop every time she saw the thing she loved most shake on the ground. Everybody thought I was always on the brink of despising Laura, scared that at any moment my hatred for her would fly forth and break all of our hearts. But the truth was, I felt incredibly sad for Laura. There was a sadness to her that she seemed to be born with. When the dog shook for the first time, my father, Ester, and I closed in around the animal asking, "What"s it doing? Why"s it doing that?" and Laura walked over to Raisinet and said, "Figures." She held him tight around his torso and I loved her for this. Laura was always on the n.o.ble mission to just love the dog. She was just a little girl who believed she could control the world with her own strength; she was my sister, something I never thought I would have. She combed her hair about fifty times a day, and I felt purposeful when she looked at me across the room and stared at my b.r.e.a.s.t.s until I felt compelled to hide them or explain them. She acted out imaginary scenes from imaginary plays and pa.s.sed out imaginary playbills after dinner, asking the dog for imaginary feedback, while we stood in a circle, trying to decide what was wrong with it.
22.
Your father is the only man I know in all of Prague who goes to an Italian restaurant most nights of the week," Ester said when we were settled into the cab. My father smiled. He was proud, like he was moving us toward something better.
"I will show you the best Italian food in all of Prague!" he shouted. Sometimes, my father was always shouting.
"Sometimes," Ester said, "your father will go to a Spanish restaurant in Prague and order the only Italian dish on the menu."
While we ordered, my father told jokes in Czech that n.o.body understood, except the waitress, who laughed, and to whom my father said, "Hey, here"s a woman who likes my jokes!" as if this kind of woman wasn"t always sitting across the table from him, mouth open. Ester laughed too, as if to say, No, here"s a woman who likes your jokes, Victor. Ester squeezed my father"s arm. My father didn"t notice. My father told me later he was placing a bet with the waitress that 50 percent of the women in the room would order a limoncello for dessert.
"Ano!" the waitress said, and slapped his arm playfully. "Grappa!"
I looked around the room. Everybody was either talking in a different language, or bored, or drunk, or p.i.s.sed off, or all things combined. Conversations in Czech naturally sounded angrier. The words barely had any vowels, just hard consonants and exclamations. Laura tried to strike up a conversation with Ester about something benign like the mating habits of clams and Ester waved her off with a quick, "Yes, mhmm, I heard that too."
Ester was threatened by Laura. Even though Laura was four feet tall, she was the tangible product of my father"s infidelity, sitting across the table from her smiling. She was complication, a sign of my father"s weakness that needed to eat, and drink, and be tucked into bed.
"Str prst skrz krk!" Laura shouted at her.
"What"s with that, honey?" my father asked. "Why do you keep saying words that make no sense, pumpkin?"
"It"s Czech! It means, "Stick finger through neck!"" Laura said. She giggled. Ester looked appalled. "My teacher told me it"s the only sentence in Czech with zero vowels."
"Honey," he said. "Don"t go around saying that, please."
My father was sickeningly sweet toward Laura. Laura was Honey and Pumpkin Face, and when my father was drunk off three gla.s.ses of wine, a Sweet Pea. I suspected his syrupy behavior was a product of guilt, his way of compensating for offering her a broken life from the very start. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. It was hot in the bathroom, and my skin felt coated. I splashed water on my face, looked in the mirror, and whispered, "Relax." When I walked back to the table, Ester leaned into the crevice of my father"s shoulder, and he pulled her into him. Her long red hair covered parts of his arm. Laura kept asking the waitress for a crayon.
"Cray-on," Laura said. "Like a marker. But not."
"I do not understand," the waitress said.
"She doesn"t need one," Ester said.
For the rest of the night, I couldn"t think of anything to say to anyone except the Russian cabdriver, who smiled and said, "You Americans so quiet because you Americans don"t know anything for real. You know your gas prices, you know your baseball numbers, but do you know that no piece of paper can be folded in half more than seven times?"
Even though we all had our own bedrooms, Laura ran into mine at night.
"I"m scared," Laura said. She got under my covers. Her bangs were stuck to her forehead with sweat.
"Don"t you want the breeze?" I asked her, lifting up the comforter. Her eyes shone in the cave.
"No," she said. "The moths are coming inside the house. And they sit on my nose."
"That"s right," I said. "To come and kiss you good night."
She started crying.
"No," she said. "They are coming in to touch everything. They are going to crawl in my nose."
"They won"t," I said. "I"ll swat the moths before they reach you. Just fall asleep."
I put the comforter back down. "Wait!" she cried, poking her head out.
"What?"
She looked around the room. "Ummm, str prst skrz krk."
Laura fell asleep quickly after that in my bed and snored like a kitten when it had a cold. I pushed her bangs off her forehead and traced her hairline with my finger, and she shifted toward the wall. I closed my eyes, but couldn"t sleep with Laura next to me. I couldn"t sleep on the couch either. The leather was too sticky, like Saran Wrap on my skin. So I left the apartment. I went to the nearest bar, called Alcohol Bar. It was a bar for tourists, with a New York sensibility, where businessmen, or me, or anybody in an outfit, really, strolled in with a headache from being awake so long. They took off their jackets arm by arm as if to say, I hate the day. They wore thick lipstick and messy hair. They all sat on steel stools drinking malt whiskeys or Kruovice.
"Becherovka," I said to the bartender. "With tonic." A man named Patrick was loud and Irish in my ear, wearing a hooded sweatshirt backward so the hood was directly under his chin.
"Why are you wearing your sweatshirt like that?" I asked him.
"I"m just trying to make a statement," Patrick said.
"I don"t get your point," I said.
He told me he was just kidding; he didn"t know why he was wearing his sweatshirt backward, honestly, it just felt like the right thing to do at the time. I laughed. I took a sip of the Becherovka. I was embarra.s.sed at how rude I was to a man just as accidental as I was, who was very attractive, with proportional features and brown hair that reminded me of Charlie Brown and suddenly turned me soft.
"Do you know how American you sound?" he asked.
"Do you realize you are not p.r.o.nouncing your th"s?" I asked.
I asked him to say other things. "Ask me how I am," I said.
"How you getting on?" he asked.