Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (29 page)

Split shades of pink and crocus-colored wax melted in pearls over the copper menorah they'd stuffed with birthday candles. They lit them and sang “Happy Birthday to You.” When it was time to sing the name, Carly said
Jesus
and Natasha said
Mr. President
and Lucy whispered
Face.
What had become of Face? She pictured her corroded Heart out in some field alone, covered in lacy snow. Maybe Face had been donated to medical science and was lying on an operating table, penetration through its piping. Maybe there was an unsentimental medical student, deciphering what had gone wrong with the Heart that had been born into Lucy.

M
athilde and Claudio's holiday was Groundhog Day. They stuffed the house with banners:
Go Punxsutawney!
They took garish bets on whether Phil would see his shadow. When their daughters were younger, they'd cast groundhog shadow puppets, trace them with crayons on paper. They'd have Bill Murray movie marathons.

Mathilde clandestinely felt bad for Groundhog Day, and that was the reason she fêted it. Growing up, she felt bad for the sneakers that never got worn, the ugly hangers hanging in her closet, the lunch she watched a classmate throw out instead of eat.

A few days after Groundhog Day, which had fallen on a Wednesday that year, Claudio was alone while his wife was at work. Mondays were his day off. He clipped down the homemade banners, unplanted thumbtacks. The Groundhog hadn't seen his shadow. Claudio didn't know what to do with himself. At some point, both Claudio and Mathilde had ceased to function best on their own. They were themselves best as a couple, which was emblematic of a dear marriage: a couple first needs only each other to love, and with enough time they need each other to live.

His sexy, small wife. His nightingale wife. Unlike their two biological daughters, who'd inherited Claudio's height (Natasha
at five-eight-and-a-half and Lucy at five-nine), petite Mathilde barely topped five feet. He loved her baby bones, alluringly undersized muscles. She'd played no sports in her life but still got injured a lot, spraining her wrists even from opening pickle jars. His darling wife, his emotional creature. Fragile in every form. Like a flute of champagne. Like a discontinued brand of Dreamsicle.

Claudio and Mathilde tried to role-play once, sexually and months ago, sort of after Lucy's transplant.

Let's try something new,
Claudio had said.
Something new in bed.

Yes, and when the girls go to college, let's also turn our basement into a sadomasochistic dungeon. It could serve two functions: love dungeon in the nighttime, Pilates studio in the daytime.

That actually sounds pretty fun,
said Claudio.

They tried that afternoon. Nobody could say that they hadn't tried. Mathilde was Little Red Riding Hood, and Claudio was the Woodsman. After two minutes, Mathilde said,
this is bizarre.
By
bizarre
she meant -
a smidge difficult. -

You're making it bizarre,
said Claudio.
It doesn't have to be bizarre.

Playing pretend gets people off?
asked Mathilde.

You say tomato,
said Claudio.

They kissed, and Claudio was just Claudio and Mathilde was just Mathilde.

But after they finished, as Claudio started to snore like a finely tuned locomotive, Mathilde buried her hand in her underwear and thought about Milla from
Textbook Case
and Frances from
Make a Living
and Liesl from
The Sound of Music
and imagined each of them having sex with her husband. A fanfare of women besides Mathilde. Claudio bent them over and loved each in a way that he couldn't love her. Milla needed to get fucked to stay warm. She'd satisfy Claudio in trilling ways. Desperate, greedy Frances would carry Claudio's child, and
their
child would never get sick. Liesl would always stay
sixteen. Claudio liked them young, didn't he? What man didn't love sluts?

Mathilde could be sick too. She could be a wolf of a woman, humiliating herself with ideas that would stun her husband. Who could conjure visions, the power to let herself disappear. Ghost sex. Interlude love. Injustices.

Her husband thought he knew the inner-Mathilde so well, emptied of all wanton theatrics. A common inflammation of insight. But how well can one know another person, really? She'd told him her darkest secrets, about the time she masturbated alone in the back of a cab and the shameful developmental stage she'd gone through faking a British accent to appear more cultured, but he still couldn't know all of her. And she could never know all of him. There wasn't enough time to.

What she had to admit, though, was that Claudio knew her own facial expressions better than she—both the ones she practiced in front of the mirror and her chance, authentic ones. They were as Mathilde as her signatures on checks. Mathilde would try to filter the latter into the prior when rehearsing for a show.
Jesus, kid,
said Claudio once.
Be careful. You don't want to turn into your character.

Every time they'd hear about an actor dying young, Mathilde would blame it on art (of course, there were also always drugs, but art fed drugs).
Look at Heath Ledger. He tried to become The Joker, and it killed him.
His cause of death was an access of his darkest parts, and an inability to achieve the delicate balance between his character and himself. Actors who (insert vice)d themselves to death were a dime a dozen.

Among the years, Claudio had witnessed his wife live through Heartbreaking cycles of violence against herself. One of the first things that had attracted Claudio to Mathilde was her vulnerability, before he learned of its danger, became weary of its strength. Her death urge contended with her life urge, and
they weren't always in equilibrium. Marrying her put Claudio in a complicated place. What if he enabled her? What if he could not help but be complicit? They were self-destructive in different ways: Claudio set flame to himself, but Mathilde only disintegrated.

S
tephen and Carly were on a study break, playing
The Sims 3
on Stephen's desktop, controlling the lives of their Sims, insipidly named Stephen and Carly. Stephen entered
rosebud !;!;!;!;
: the cheat that would give them more money in increments of a thousand simoleons. Their vicarious avatars spent all their time making love or painting together or moving up on the career ladders. They lived in their delightful big house together, cooking dinner and watching movies on their wide-screen TV.

Carly returned to her textbook. -
The worst part about the Holocaust was how organized it was. -
Her World History homework was actually on Westward Expansion, but Carly was reading ahead, to Europe and World War II. She wasn't trying to overachieve; she was only in the midst of this habit of forcing herself to mention the Holocaust at least once a day, as the magnitude of the word brought her troubles into perspective.

Her fixation began one month prior, when a Holocaust survivor spoke at a school assembly.
You are the last generation to hear about the Holocaust directly,
she reminded them. That stuck with Carly: this responsibility, this knowledge of a very bad thing. What could she do with it? -
I will always remember this moment. I better. -
She tried memorizing everything about the survivor, a ninety-three-year-old woman named Hannah, the
crash of her voice, the shape of her earlobes—eggy and free, like ultrasound waves.

Hannah survived three concentration camps and more surgeries than she kept track of. German doctors had used her body for their medical experiments. As a result, she was unable to have children. She also suffered from post-traumatic stress flashbacks every time she saw someone in a white coat, making any of her lifetime physical calamities all the more difficult. She lived.

Stephen nodded. He'd told her early in their relationship that he was Jewish. Only his mother was Jewish, which, he explained to Carly, made him a full Jew. The Jews were the Chosen People, carried down by heritage and lineage, always on the mother's side. Carly was one quarter Jewish, but on her mother's father's side, so it didn't count?

Concentration camp prisoners received tattoos at only one camp: Auschwitz. Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number, which was sewn onto their prison uniforms. Prisoners who were in the infirmary, like Hannah, or those to be executed were marked with their camp serial number across the chest with indelible ink. The prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered, receiving no tattoos.

As prisoners were executed or died in other ways, their clothing bearing the camp serial number was removed. Because of the mortality rate at the camp and practice of removing clothing, there'd been no way to identify the bodies after the clothing was removed. Eventually, the SS authorities introduced the practice of tattooing in order to identify the bodies of registered prisoners who died.

Why did they need to do that?
Carly asked. What sort of status could these bodies hold? What dignity? She read further.

Stephen said his grandfather had a tattoo on his left arm, which was the number he was assigned as he entered Auschwitz.
Stephen's grandfather had been a survivor of five concentration camps. He'd lived to eighty-six.

Stephen said,
Jewish law says no one with a tattoo can be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

That can't count,
said Carly.

Carly's only conceptual acknowledgment of concentration camps prior to that moment had been when she saw the movie
Harold and Maude.
Carly loved that one second in the movie that showed Maude's concentration camp tattoo and how it was never mentioned again.

People brand themselves every day,
said Stephen.
A tattoo is the most permanent form.

Branding, like clothing?
asked Carly.

Yeah,
said Stephen.
Clothing. Doctors and other medical professionals wear white lab coats. Nazis wore swastikas on their sleeves. My grandfather wore hats with floppy ears.

My grandpa wore handkerchiefs,
said Carly. Her mother had always talked about that.

So did mine,
Stephen said.

Everybody did back then, I guess.

It's funny. I remember, what troubled me the most during my grandpa's funeral was that I didn't know if he had a handkerchief in his pocket.
Jewish funerary tradition requires ripping a piece of clothing to profess one's grief. He'd rip up his own entire wardrobe if it meant knowing his grandfather was safe with his handkerchief. Not that it really mattered—of course, it hadn't been his grandfather anymore, just his body.

Stephen looked away, at the clock on his wall, squinting, as though he were trying to clutch time. Like he could say, hold on a second, and mean it.
He always wore a suit whenever we went to the theater. We'd all be wearing jeans and sweaters, and he would wear a suit.

Stephen told her that if the Holocaust hadn't happened, his grandfather probably wouldn't have moved to America and met
his grandmother.
I exist because of the Holocaust,
said Stephen.
I'd take it back if I could. I wouldn't be alive, but six million people would be.

Maybe that's why they say god doesn't interfere with free will,
said Carly.

Or there just could not be one,
said Stephen.

But who knows,
whispered Carly.

Right,
said Stephen
. What do we know?

C
arly started cleaning houses after school. She was first hired by her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Everstein, who wanted to clean out her basement. Carly became friendly with Mrs. Everstein's daughter, Dana, who chatted with her as she cleaned. Carly and Dana became Facebook friends, and some mornings before her job Carly would scroll through all of Dana's Facebook pictures. Dana liked to bowl with her friends on the weekends, enter silly names on the score screen, and then take pictures of the screen. Last year Dana had gone camping at a state park. Four years ago she had a boyfriend who looked cheerful in his profile picture and who did ethical pharmaceutical research at SUNY Stonybrook. She didn't seem to regret their breakup, if her cartoon
some-ee-cards
advocating singledom in a comically mocking way were any proof.
(I'd rather have a shitty boyfriend who forgets my birthday than a freezer full of Sixteen Handles, said no woman ever
.
)
Her favorite quote was
a girl should be two things, classy and fabulous.
But she had it misquoted, attributing it to Marilyn Monroe.
- People who call themselves classy usually aren't, -
Carly decided.

Two weeks after she was commissioned, Carly saw Mrs. Everstein cry after Carly discovered Mrs. Everstein's old Woodstock '69 poster huddled between two boxes of old fur coats. Carly felt the chronic sense of empowerment. She was using her hands to
make people happy. Cleaning had to be her art medium, since she could use it to reach more people emotionally, even though she was taking things away instead of creating them.

Carly cleaned Mrs. Everstein's basement after school for almost three months, until she was commissioned by the O'Connor family, who had eight children, ages two to twenty. Mrs. O'Connor, with the crepey decade-holding skin under her eyes, was due with another in April. -
Worn, torn, and forlorn, -
Carly thought.