from Rehearsing
A woman wanted to send a very large sum of money to her son and daughter-in-law, who lived across the ocean and were expecting their first child. This was many years ago, when it was not so very easy to make a phone call or send an ample nest egg across an ocean, and what’s more, the woman was in a serious predicament.
She had come into her wealth as a girl of sixteen by marrying an esteemed general, and for a time the couple’s prosperity had bloomed, enabling seaside vacations and their son’s enrollment at a university thousands of miles away; but then a series of calamities had upended everything, not least the regime that employed her husband, and whether this was all to the greater good or an utter catastrophe was up for debate, though the woman herself had no time for such questions, having suddenly had to go more or less into hiding, tasked with safeguarding the couple’s modest and, as some would have it, misbegotten fortune, while the general was well and truly in hiding, with a baroque, French-sounding pseudonym, in a neighboring country.
A few discreet inquiries led her to the jeweler. His dry, decisive tone and the charts and certificates he produced inspired trust. She sewed a pouch into the shoulder of an old sport jacket and stitched it closed, the purple-pink diamond tucked inside. The letter written on sheets of onionskin paper was handed to a confidante, one more dear friend whose time to make her getaway—the woman pictured her on the back of a strange man’s motorcycle, a dark blur streaking through snake-infested desert, hair whipping everywhere—had come.
When the first package arrived, the son was in laboratory dissecting a cat’s brain. Admiring the quaint postmark and the colorful stickers affixed to the box, his wife set it in front of the mantel where a Christmas wreath hung, there among the packages her own parents had sent. The son, being superstitious, had not yet told her about the letter or the carefully encoded instructions it contained.
That evening she lay on the sofa, legs covered by a quilt, and watched him pull items of old clothing from the box, one ragged shirt after another, like a magician extracting a never-ending scarf from his sleeve—only, instead of focusing on the trick at hand, he was laughing with his eyes squeezed shut, and soon she too was laughing, though she wasn’t at all sure why.
Finally, he explained to her that the box and the clothes were a decoy. They weren’t even in his size. He sat at the edge of the sofa, rubbing her swollen feet, and told her that two more such packages would arrive, that number three was the one that mattered. While he talked, the wife was imagining a house with clean, bright rooms, a backyard flanked by raspberry bushes and a wooden swing set painted blue. She had yet to meet her mother-in-law but could already picture her seated in a wicker armchair on the front porch, sipping tea with honey from nearby wildflower fields, the route to which the child would learn by heart.
As the days passed the son’s excitement grew, along with a string of nagging doubts. Even if the diamond arrived as planned, there would still be the matter of having it appraised again, since his mother couldn’t risk sending the existing certificate and it would mean nothing in this country besides. The couple would have to present a convincing story; it would be better, he decided, to speak of a vaguely aristocratic ancestor, an heirloom recently bequeathed. They would have to hold eye contact and appear, the two of them, as authentic as the stone itself. He asked her to help him rehearse.
At first, the wife took his proposal for a joke; for days she tried earnestly to dissuade him. She bargained and sulked and finally found herself rummaging through her closet for an outfit that would suit the role. It already seemed unreal, at nineteen, to be married and living in this loud, perplexing city, in a body she didn’t quite recognize, her stomach growing more and more unwieldy each day. She had a good ear, it was true, and he’d taught her to say a few things in his language, mostly bawdy and nonsensical phrases that to her might as well have been poetry. By the time the third package arrived, some weeks later, she had fully given herself over to the logic of the plan.
The man popped a menthol and coughed into the back of his hand, gesturing for the girl across the desk from him to continue talking. Interpreting, she’d said, for the boy who had not removed his peacoat and kept his voice low, though there was no one in the office but the three of them, let alone anyone who might understand him. The man considered these two, the skinny dark boy who spoke no English and the blond girl, rosy in her houndstooth blazer, who had flushed a deeper pink when he’d winked at her belly. She flushed now too as the boy spoke in one mellifluous stream, his gaze fixed on the stone in its velvet box open on the walnut-stained desktop. Bare, round-cut, faintly violet-hued—or was it brownish.
A great-great aunt, the girl was saying. A seminoble bloodline, an unexpected inheritance. She had a slight Midwestern twang and a tiny chip in her right front tooth. The man, the appraiser, noticed such things. He had always had an appraising eye and a certain zest for sniffing out the spurious. Even today, bone-tired and phlegmy and thinking of the matzo ball soup at Greenblatt’s, nose and eye were on the alert. As for the boy, well, he had the gaunt, startled look of a baby owl just flung from the nest, nothing in him of the mean-mouthed men in the newspapers, the ones who were wreaking all sorts of black chaos in the place where he claimed to be from.
Let’s have a look then, he said.
The boy sat up slightly; the girl’s face went blank.
The daughter looked down into the glass display case and pointed at a hunk of something deeply veined. Celui-ci, she said, la moitié. Unclasping her quilted coin purse, counting out exact change, holding eye contact for the one, two, three seconds it took for the cheesemonger to hand her the pungent half-hunk wrapped in foil. To feel the pressure of the line at her back—the buzzing of a teenager’s handheld electric fan, the Aussie couple debating how to pronounce “crottin”—to turn and nod and move along, absorbed on a sunlit Saturday in the flow of a crowd that could care less about her life, was a comfort to the daughter, who until one month ago had been a wife, une femme, and was now une femme only in the most boringly evident sense, a thirty-three-year-old woman walking through the market alone. Are you eating? her mother had asked on the phone. Yes, yes, not to worry. She’d bought heirloom tomatoes and small, tender plums, blackberries and dates and a poppyseed loaf. Things that could be brought to the mouth unthinkingly, with bare hands.
Bare—not quite, not yet. She wasn’t sure why she’d kept wearing it, that gold flea market band, a bit tight for her finger, in which they’d had the diamond set. She knew the right thing would be to give it back, not to him but to the grandmother who’d called her husband your chéri and used her AmEx to ship them silver they’d never unboxed. The story went that the stone (an unusual color, deep lilac or heliotrope, maybe) was supposed to have paid for a nicer house, or her college tuition, she couldn’t remember which—only that a lot of fuss had been made for what turned out to be worth a fraction of the expected value. And yet, she’d felt other women eyeing it on the metro, in the waiting room of the employment office; even the teenager just now. She still pretended not to notice, just as she tried not to register the confusion on people’s faces when she swallowed an odd vowel combination or said pleure again when she meant, of course, pleut. It was the trying, she knew, that made the tongue go rogue. Her brief married life had been no different.
The daughter walked past stall after stall to the end of the market and crossed the street. Not to worry, she’d heard herself saying and saying and saying to her parents in their separate homes, in their adjacent time zones, in the days after the last in a series of small calamities had upended everything. Have you eaten? her father, too, had asked, as she lay on her side on the apartment’s tile floor, phone pressed hard to her ear. In those days she had curled up like a shivering fawn inside their concern, had felt for the first time in how many years?—completely, essentially theirs, their little one. Even her grandmother, swiping the phone away from her father, her grandmother who nightly smooched the portrait of her long-dead grandfather swaggering in uniform, even she had cooed into the receiver it nothing my darling, you find better one.
Passing bistro terraces, the daughter thought about stopping somewhere for lunch but remembered how exposed she’d felt the last time, dining alone, how she’d blushed when the waiter came up to her table and trilled dis-moi tout. At the place where the street widened into a square, she found an empty bench by a horse chestnut in bloom. On the next bench over, sharing the tree’s dappled shade, an old man in a green corduroy jacket played with a black cat, chuckling as he lifted it up and placed its paws on his shoulders. The cat emitted a low growl, clawing to be released. A leash was coiled around the old man’s forearm, a little plaid harness resting beside him on the bench. The daughter looked away and pulled her phone out from her bag.
She could call them now, first one and then the other, as had become habit, hers and theirs, these past few weeks, though at some point she’d started leaving longer stretches between calls. Two, three, four days. Everything okay? Yes, yes, not to worry. She opened the messaging app and reread his last text, which referred obliquely to the thing she had done that had provoked the upending; and then the one before that, apologizing for how he’d twisted the flesh of her arm, but not for the things he’d said. She opened her banking app and checked her balance, then quickly set her phone face-down on the bench. Sunshine slipped through branches, the diamond refracting the light. She glanced over at the old man, who now held the cat on his lap and was scratching between its ears. It purred avidly, dozing. June was coming to an end, the days already growing shorter; before long the city would empty out.
The thought surfaced again: she could pawn the ring. It wouldn’t buy anyone a home, but it might buy her some time, a few more weeks to request extra tutoring hours with the agency, a month to find a smaller studio, a chambre de bonne—and if none of it worked out she could cut her losses and leave. Of course they’d tell her not to pawn it, what an idea, of course they’d want to help her through this difficult patch, but she didn’t want to exaggerate the trouble she was in. Dis-moi tout was all she heard now when she called them, the wasp that buzzed around the edges of every conversation: how, why, what now. But the daughter could not interpret this for them, just as she could never have explained to them kissing whiskey-breathed on the airplane while she peered over his shoulder at clouds, or walking through Le Printemps together, still jet-lagged, buying cornflower blue sheets they couldn’t afford, or how that feeling had so quickly warped into its aftermath, and how she’d lived inside that, too, not knowing when or how to betray it, until she did.
Or else maybe, she thought, listening to the cat’s fierce purring, tilting her head back to take in the tall spires of pink blooms, maybe she would buy new clothes. Maybe she would stay.
Katie Shireen Assef is a writer and translator of French and Italian living in Marseille. Her translation of Valérie Mréjen’s novel Black Forest was a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year, and her shorter translations can be found in publications such as Blue Arrangements, SARKA, The Dial, and The Kenyon Review. Her fiction has appeared in La Piccioletta Barca, 3:AM Magazine, and Tiny Molecules.