Girl Unwrapped Read Online Free Page B

out the answers: “She was taken,” or, “She perished,” or, “She was swept away.” Then Lisa’s body quivers as it does when she’s about to give Toni a smack for being saucy, but instead her hands ball into fists and her lips form silent words meant for Grandma alone. They speak to each other all the time, a conversation that goes on just beyond the range of Toni’s ears.
    Where did they take her?
    That too must not be asked. Toni knows Grandma was killed, but it was not an ordinary sort of killing as on cowboy shows when the outlaw in the saloon gets a bullet in the chest. Her dying must have been more like when the bad guys tie up and gag the schoolteacher, so that all she can do is roll her eyes and make strangled sounds. “Gag” is what happens when you’ve got to throw up but can’t, and you feel like you’re drowning from the inside out.
    The Kaddish drones on. The flame winks, flows, changes shape, transforms itself every instant. Toni remembers a scene from a Walt Disney film where a single flame with an innocent, smiling face swayed on the end of a match. The flame split, became two laughing faces, then they divided and divided again and soon hundreds of wild, cackling flames, their eyes slanted upward with evil, danced all over the forest.
    After she died, Grandma’s soul floated straight to heaven . Whenever Lisa says this, her jaw clenches and she glares down, as if Toni were giving her an argument. Grandma whispers warnings, advice, hovers at the ends of Lisa’s fingers when she lays out rows of cards on the kitchen table and turns them over one by one to tell fortunes. Julius has nothing to say about heaven and he pooh-poohs the fortune-telling cards. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, visions, conversations with the dead. What moans through the cracks in the walls and between the floorboards is mere wind, he’ll say. All that exists are the solid things you can hold or touch—the floor, walls, the antique books he collects—or what science can explain—that fire, for example, is a mix of fuel, heat, and air, nothing more. One candle flame is pretty much like any other.
    “… aleinu v’al kol Yisra’el, v’imru amen .”
    Lisa’s fingers prod Toni’s shoulder, prompting a loud “Amen.” Toni turns her head and blinks away the tears that blurred her eyes after so much hard staring, but Lisa continues to gaze intently for some moments, lips moving, muttering in German, while the flame answers her in a series of winks and nods.
    A terrible wonder holds Toni to the spot as she waits for something to happen: an outburst of anger, a torrent of strange words, upraised hands that command the heavens to do their bidding. In the Disney movie the wizard stood on the mountaintop while lightning flashed, bats whirled, trees bent double in the wind. Lisa sucks in her breath. Is it possible that instead of grand anger will come tears? But her mother never cries. If I cried, I wouldn’t stop.
    “Bring Grandma’s photo,” she now says, lowering herself onto a kitchen chair.
    Toni dashes to her parents’ bedroom to fetch the pewter-framed photo of Grandma Antonia that stands on the bureau. She wasn’t a grandmother then, Toni remembers, just a thick-waisted lady in a dark, sack-like dress that came to her ankles, pearls around her neck, her hair done up in a tight bun. Lisa distends her lips like a fish and blows mist on the glass and wipes it clean with a cloth. She admires the photo as if for the first time.
    “ Mutti was our rock. She took care of everyone, never complaining. She was wise, clever with her hands, industrious. You bear her name.”
    Now the stories flow. On Yom Kippur, Grandma kept several of her famous homemade bread sticks in her handbag. At the end of the long fast day, coming down from the woman’s gallery to the outside steps of the synagogue where Grandpa Markus stood waiting, she slipped him a few for sustenance. Otherwise Grandpa might have fainted from hunger before