Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 38

When I was two years old,

(she began, her body tensing from toes to tip in a movement that he felt along the length of his body, portending the time when lovers close their eyes and open their mouths and utter the secrets that they hide from everyone, even themselves)

When I was two years old, my wings were the size of a cherub's, and they had featherlets that were white as snow. I lived with my "aunt," an old Russian lady near Downsview Air Force Base, a blasted suburb where the shops all closed on Sat.u.r.day for Sabbath and the black-hatted Hasids marked the days by walking from one end to the other on their way to temple.

The old Russian lady took me out for walks in a big black baby buggy the size of a bathtub. She tucked me in tight so that my wings were pinned beneath me. But when we were at home, in her little apartment with the wind-up Sputnik that played "The Internationale," she would let my wings out and light the candles and watch me wobble around the room, my wings flapping, her chin in her hands, her eyes bright. She made me mashed up cabbage and seed and beef, and bottles of dilute juice. For dessert, we had hard candies, and I'd toddle around with my toys, drooling sugar syrup while the old Russian lady watched.

By the time I was four, the feathers had all fallen out, and I was supposed to go to school, I knew that. "Auntie" had explained to me that the kids that I saw pa.s.sing by were on their way to school, and that I'd go some day and learn, too.

She didn't speak much English, so I grew up speaking a creole of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and English, and I used my words to ask her, with more and more insistence, when I'd get to go to cla.s.s.

I couldn't read or write, and neither could she. But I could take apart gadgets like n.o.body's business. Someone -- maybe Auntie's long dead husband -- had left her a junky tool kit with cracked handles and chipped tips, and I attacked anything that I could get unplugged from the wall: the big cabinet TV and radio, the suitcase record player, the Sputnik music box. I unwired the lamps and peered at the workings of the electric kitchen clock.

That was four. Five was the year I put it all back together again. I started with the lamps, then the motor in the blender, then the toaster elements. I made the old TV work. I don't think I knew how any of it *really* worked -- couldn't tell you a thing about, you know, electrical engineering, but I just got a sense of how it was *supposed* to go together.

Auntie didn't let me out of the apartment after five. I could watch the kids go by from the window -- skinny Hasids with side-curls and Filipinos with pretty ribbons and teenagers who smoked, but I couldn't go to them. I watched *Sesame Street* and *Mr. Dressup* and I began to soak up English. I began to soak up the idea of playing with other kids.

I began to soak up the fact that none of the kids on the TV had wings.

Auntie left me alone in the afternoons while she went out shopping and banking and whatever else it was she did, and it was during those times that I could get myself into her bedroom and go rooting around her things.

She had a lot of mysterious beige foundation garments that were utterly inexplicable, and a little box of jewelry that I liked to taste, because the real gold tasted really rich when I sucked on it, and a stack of old cigarette tins full of frayed photos.

The pictures were stiff and mysterious. Faces loomed out of featureless black backgrounds: pop-eyed, jug-eared Russian farm boys, awkward farm girls with process waves in their hair, everyone looking like they'd been stuffed and mounted. I guess they were her relatives, because if you squinted at them and c.o.c.ked your head, you could kind of see her features in theirs, but not saggy and wrinkled and three-chinned, but young and tight and almost glowing. They all had big shoulders and clothing that looked like the kind of thing the Hasids wore, black and sober.

The faces were interesting, especially after I figured out that one of them might belong to Auntie, but it was the blackness around them that fascinated me. The boys had black suits and the girls wore black dresses, and behind them was creased blackness, complete darkness, as though they'd put their heads through a black curtain.

But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. I noticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I looked for it, I could just pick it out in the other photos. Eventually, I hit on the idea of using a water gla.s.s as a magnifying lens, and as I experimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out of the old pictures.

The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They looked like they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenir pillow on Auntie's armchair in the living room, which had whorls of paisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and tried to reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.

And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappeared behind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different water levels in my gla.s.s to bring up the magnification, and I diligently sketched. I'd seen a *Polka Dot Door* episode where the hosts showed how you could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid on a sheet of blank paper and then copy over every square, reproducing the image in manageable, bite-sized chunks.

That's what I did, using the edge of a nail file for a ruler, drawing my grid carefully on the paper bag, and a matching one on the picture, using the blunt tip of a dead pen to make a grid of indentations in the surface of the photo.

And I sketched it out, one square at a time. Where the pattern was, where it wasn't. What shapes the negative absence-of-pattern took in the photos. As I drew, day after day, I realized that I was drawing the shape of something black that was blocking the curtain behind.

Then I got excited. I drew in my steadiest hand, tracing each curve, using my magnifier, until I had the shape drawn and defined, and long before I finished, I knew what I was drawing and I drew it anyway. I drew it and then I looked at my paper sack and I saw that what I had drawn was a pair of wings, black and powerful, spread out and stretching out of the shot.

She curled the prehensile tips of her wings up the soles of his feet, making him go, Yeek! and jump in the bed.

"Are you awake?" she said, twisting her head around to brush her lips over his.

"Rapt," he said.

She giggled and her t.i.ts bounced.

"Good," she said. "'Cause this is the important part."

Auntie came home early that day and found me sitting at her vanity, with the photos and the water gla.s.s and the drawings on the paper sacks spread out before me.

Our eyes met for a moment. Her pupils shrank down to tiny dots, I remember it, remember seeing them vanish, leaving behind rings of yellowed hazel. One of her hands lashed out in a claw and sank into my hair. She lifted me out of the chair by my hair before I'd even had a chance to cry out, almost before I'd registered the fact that she was hurting me -- she'd never so much as spanked me until then.

She was strong, in that slow old Russian lady way, strong enough to grunt ten sacks of groceries in a bundle-buggy up the stairs to the apartment. When she picked me up and tossed me, it was like being fired out of a cannon. I rebounded off the framed motel-room art over the bed, shattering the gla.s.s, and bounced twice on the mattress before coming to rest on the floor. My arm was hanging at a funny angle, and when I tried to move it, it hurt so much that I heard a high sound in my ears like a dog whistle.

I lay still as the old lady yanked the drawers out of her vanity and upended them on the floor until she found an old book of matches. She swept the photos and my sketches into the tin wastebasket and then lit a match with trembling hands and dropped it in. It went out. She repeated it, and on the fourth try she got the idea of using the match to light all the remaining matches in the folder and drop that into the bin. A moment later, it was burning cheerfully, spitting curling red embers into the air on clouds of dark smoke. I buried my face in the matted carpet and tried not to hear that high note, tried to will away the sick grating feeling in my upper arm.

She was wreathed in smoke, choking, when she finally turned to me. For a moment, I refused to meet her eye, sure that she would kill me if I did, would see the guilt and the knowledge in my face and keep her secret with murder. I'd watched enough daytime television to know about dark secrets.

But when she bent down to me, with the creak of stretching elastic, and she lifted me to my feet and bent to look me in the eye, she had tears in her eyes.

She went to the pile of oddments and junk jewelry that she had dumped out on the floor and sorted through it until she found a pair of sewing shears, then she cut away my T-s.h.i.+rt, supporting my broken arm with her hand. My wings were flapping nervously beneath the fabric, and it got tangled, and she took firm hold of the wingtips and folded them down to my back and freed the s.h.i.+rt and tossed it in the pile of junk on her normally spotless floor.

She had spoken to me less and less since I had fixed the television and begun to pick up English, and now she was wordless as she gently rotated my fingerbones and my wristbones, my elbow and my shoulder, minute movements, listening for my teakettle hiss when she hit the sore spots.

"Is broken," she said. "*Cholera*," she said. "I am so sorry, *lovenu*,"

she said.

"I've never been to the doctor's," she said. "Never had a pap smear or been felt for lumps. Never, ever had an X-ray. Feel this," she said, and put her upper arm before his face. He took it and ran his fingertips over it, finding a hard b.u.mp halfway along, opposite her fleshy bicep.

"What's this?" he said.

"It's how a bone sets if you have a bad break and don't get a cast. Crooked."

"Jesus," he said, giving it another squeeze. Now that he knew what it was, he thought -- or perhaps fancied -- that he could feel how the unevenly splintered pieces of bone mated together, met at a slight angle and fused together by the knitting process.

"She made me a sling, and she fed me every meal and brushed my teeth. I had to stop her from following me into the toilet to wipe me up. And I didn't care: She could have broken both of my arms if she'd only explained the photos to me, or left them with me so that I could go on investigating them, but she did neither. She hardly spoke a word to me."

She resettled herself against the pillows, then pulled him back against her again and plumped his head against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Are you falling in love with me?" she said.

He startled. The way she said it, she didn't sound like a young adult, she sounded like a small child.

"Mimi --" he began, then stopped himself. "I don't think so. I mean, I like you --"

"Good," she said. "No falling in love, all right?"

Auntie died six months later. She keeled over on the staircase on her way up to the apartment, and I heard her moaning and thras.h.i.+ng out there. I hauled her up the stairs with my good arm, and she crawled along on her knees, making gargling noises.