Rudy Bernstein called on me at my family’s house. I had heard of him. He was a cousin—distant, you know. But one of my other cousins knew him because her brother went to school with him. She told me he was very handsome and very smart. He had studied Greek and Latin in school. She [...]
That’s what I learned: you always have to be ready and act fast. I guess I did that with everything that ever happened to me after that time. That’s how I married your father too.
We never looked directly at the people who sat down next to us. I thought all these girls must have that same core of loneliness I did, buried under the layers of wool and nylon. I could see it in the smudges of black liner gathered in on that little bulge beneath the outer corner of each eye on the ride home.
Carole was amazing. She was beautiful—curly jet black hair, a luscious little body and a fiery temper and wit. She was smart but she wasn’t all dried up like those college girls my buddies married. She was full of life and love—really sexy, not just dolled-up. She would talk to me about what was happening in her life. She needed someone to talk to and someone to appreciate her.
I am glad they are girls—they will help their mother. And I would hate to send a boy to war. Already Germans are talking about troops and guns so much–they hate Versailles. Things are a little better in the store. I am hopeful again.
I couldn’t afford the way memory ransacked my heart and left an airless cell pushing against my windpipe and the corners of my eyes.
So my memories turned to cold water, rushing in through the gash the iceberg left. An iceberg—there’s a devil. How wicked to hide, a towering city of thoughtless cold beneath the water’s surface–invisible and unknowable.
It is eight years since Carole left and we have to find her. First we have to get back to our home in Germany, but what a mess we go through. We must get across the Polish Corridor and then still so far, with everything miserable and broken. People die on the platform just waiting for the train;
Rudy: (Carole’s father, musing in 1937, Germany) Is a land in your blood, your bones, is it the safe feeling under your feet? Or is it the place your family has lived for generations—even after it strips away your rights and treats you hatefully? What identifies a person with a country? Is it the culture, [...]
Fifty-nine dead. Fifty-nine dead from one family. That’s a numbing loss, without even thinking about the zeroes that bear down from hundreds, thousands, and millions. Fifty-nine dead in my family, their not-breath filling the wind that cuts my cheek, not-lit candles at holiday dinners, non-hugs from grandmas and grandpas. Each missing member suffered immeasurably: torture; [...]
The life she crafts—unconsciously and with fierce determination—is Goddess at her core. She is that composite we never really see in our lifetime, that we often don’t trust to be there—that vast well-spring we might not even dare to be. But we are here, anyway, in spite of ourselves or with calculated assertion.