it alone now, but I want to say that it seems important, you know—”
He put his hands up. “Nora. Please. Let’s say we’ve come here for your mother. It makes me remember how much your mother enjoyed it. Is that good enough?”
“Of course, Dad.” I sighed. I sipped my tea. “So the third-grade play this time was The Fir Tree. Do you know it? From the story by Hans Christian Andersen …”
From my father, then, I tried to take the WASP’s advice to live as if. As if the Fun House were real life. As if I enjoyed things I didn’t enjoy. As if I were happy, and as if I hadn’t been abandoned by the people I loved.
Didi wasn’t buying it. Three days before Christmas, at the busiest time of year, she left the shop in the hands of Jamie, her employee, for two hours, and took me to tramp through the snow around Jamaica Pond, smoking pot and sipping hot mulled wine from a thermos.
“What’s eating you, doodlebug?” Her cheeks were ruddy from the cold, her vivid hair blowing from beneath her cap. She has big feet and took big strides, planting herself with each step.
“What are you talking about?”
“Vegas, Vegas. What happens here, stays here. I won’t even spill to Esther, I promise.” She always said that and I never knew wholly whether to believe her. “You’re miserable about something.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’re wearing makeup. Sure sign. Spill it.”
“There’s nothing to spill.”
“Flirtation in the corridors? A tasty new science teacher? A fireman who waves when you pass the station each morning?”
“Ridiculous.”
“Somebody’s maligned you? School politics again? That Shauna bitch?”
“She’s not a bitch. She and I don’t always agree, but she’s not a bitch.”
“Do you think the FBI has us bugged? What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“So that’s the problem.” She stopped marching and looked straight at me, straight through me. “It’s the studio, isn’t it?”
“What about it?”
“It’s that woman, and the studio. It’s your work. It’s about your art. I can tell.”
“What can you tell?”
We walked on a stretch in silence. She knew when to wait. It was like shucking oysters: a skill.
“I’m not working,” I said. “Not at all.”
“But that’s crazy—it’s vacation week. You don’t have the brats, you don’t have to travel. What’s going on?”
“I can’t bring myself to go there.”
“Is it a process problem? Are you stuck?”
“No.”
“It’s a personal problem. It’s the Siren. Let me guess: She takes up too much space? She doesn’t stop talking? She smells bad!” Didi giggled a dopey giggle, and then caught herself. “Are you crying?”
“No,” I said, but there were tears behind my eyes and even as I blinked I saw her see them. “It’s nothing.”
And then, I tried to explain. I explained about the weeks of work and conversation, the autumn in which I’d come somehow to feel that Sirena and Reza were mine, were my family almost, my secret; and then the strangeness of meeting Skandar, and the greater strangeness of my dream, that it made me self-conscious even to recall; and I told the story of the attack, the hospital, being in their house; and then the silence afterward.
I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head—in my memory, in my thoughts—was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes; shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said.
By the time I finished the telling, I was desolate. The cold of the wind and the snow on the path, the rimed, graded ice of the pond, it was all inside me, and my heart, small and shrunken, was without.
“Don’t you feel better for talking about it?” Didi said, her giant’s hand gently on my shoulder.
“Not really,” I said. “I think I feel worse.”
“So you’re in love with Sirena, and you want to fuck her husband and steal her child. Have I got it right?”
“Not one bit.”
“You summarize, then, in twenty words or less. How would you account for it all?”
“It’s like waking up, you know? At school, each year, I take