11. Not Believing

NOT BELIEVING

The boy was silent when I finished talking, the kind of silent that if you didn't know better you might mistake for lack of interest or comprehension.

Neither of those was the case. He was interested. And he understood more in that short snippet than he ought to have. He knew what it was like to lose a mother, even if his hadn't died. He knew what it was like to live with a relative who didn't want him. And he knew what it was like to be provoked, how terrible that could feel, how it was like the outside world agreeing with every bad thing you knew to be true about yourself. And most of all, he understood that impossible was to Olka what opportunity was to him. No wonder she'd called Joseph a mean name , he thought.

He didn't say any of that, of course. The boy may not have been mute for five years, but he was not the talkative type. He did have one burning question, however, that he simply could not hold in. I had been mending a sweater as I told him the story, but I'd had my eyes closed, because only in memory could I truly see. How was it possible, he asked me, that I could sew without seeing?

The answer was easy. Something you taught me.

"You sew with your hands, not with your eyes," I told him.

"What took you so long?" Julio complained when the boy returned to the kitchen. "Mr. Lippincott called down three times asking where his meal was."

"It's not my fault!" the boy said. "That one old guy in room 206 kept me in there talking for ages."

"Mr. Kravitz?" Julio asked. Twice a week for the past five years, I'd visited Julio in the PT room, where he had done his best to keep my atrophying muscles from disintegrating. But we had never exchanged a word. He'd seen my file, which claimed that I had stroke-induced mutism.

"I think you are confused. Mr. Kravitz is nonverbal."

Confused. The boy thought about you, then—yes, a few minutes into my story and you, Olka, had already burrowed into him—and how maddening it was to have someone say you were confused when you were not confused.

He knew my name. He had double-checked it and my room number on the chart on his way out, so that if he wasn't on food duty tomorrow, he'd remember where to find me, because he was already wondering what had happened to you. Mr. Kravitz. He'd memorized it. Room 206.

"I am not confused! It was Mr. Kravitz. In 206. He's, like, a hundred and seven years old and he sews."

Now Julio's face changed. The boy was describing me as aptly as you had when you compared me to Petronius.

But Julio knew, as did everyone at Shady Glen, that I did not speak.

"Mr. Kravitz doesn't talk," he said, his voice stony. "So I don't think he talked to you."

"Are you calling me a liar?" The boy's voice was stonier than Julio's.

"If you're telling me that Mr. Kravitz spoke to you, yeah, I am."

And there it was, that anger again. Not like it had been the day the social worker told him his mother was in a hospital, or the day of the Incident. But it was there, always seething in him, keeping him warm against the world's coldness.

"I am not a liar!" he growled.

"Easy now," Leyla said, overhearing the hubbub. "No one said you were."

"Yes, he did," the boy said at the same time Julio said, "Yes, I did."

A name popped into the boy's head, a mean word he'd heard people use to describe people like Julio. It was on the tip of his tongue. But then he thought of you, the trouble you'd probably gotten into with that word you'd said, and he decided to keep quiet.

The boy stalked off and, without being asked, filled a bucket and went back to bleach duty, though a fat lot of good it had done before—everyone had still gotten the barf bug.

He was cross from the bleach, cross from Julio, cross from having had that one tiny moment of feeling if not good then useful taken away from him. And though he had not been confused before, now he very much was. If it was true that I did not speak, had not spoken, why had I spoken to him? A boy who had done a bad thing? Whom no one wanted? Who was nothing?

While the boy went up and down the empty hallways, cleaning banisters with bleach water, Etta came by the kitchen to report that Arnold Myerson had gotten sick, resetting the quarantine clock. "So three more days of meal delivery," she said wearily. She sounded tired. She was tired, not just from being pregnant and from the lockdown but from the unpleasant phone call she'd just had with corporate about ways to increase efficiency, which really meant ways to save money. Corporate wanted Etta to identify two residents who could be moved from the main residential part of Shady Glen, which had a long waiting list, into the more restrictive, and expensive, Garden unit, which had two open beds. They had sent her a list of potential transfers. Dickie McGinity's name was on the list. So was mine.

"I'm not sure we want that kid Alex interacting with the residents," Julio replied. "He's a liar."

Etta sighed and patted her belly. She'd been reluctant to take the boy on, but the social worker was a trusted friend, and he'd sworn up and down that the boy would be helpful. And, after that first day, he had been. "What'd he do now?" she asked.

"He made up this whole story about talking to Mr. Kravitz, when you and I both know that he doesn't speak."

"Do we know that?" Even though on paper I seemed like a vegetable, albeit one who sewed, Etta had never believed it. When she stopped by my room with mending, she'd often chat with me. In her mind, I always answered. She'd very nearly told that to corporate when they'd recommended me for the Garden unit, though wisely she'd stopped herself, because if she'd said that, they might've sent her to the Garden unit. "Just because he hasn't spoken to us doesn't mean he doesn't speak."

"But if he hasn't spoken to us, why would he speak to some random kid?" Julio asked.

Etta shrugged. "We could ask Mr. Kravitz if he spoke to Alex. Did you think of that?"

"Well, no," Julio said, flustered because, honestly, he'd no sooner have thought to ask me a question than he would have, say, his mother's beloved Pomeranian.

And even though Etta had residents to check on and reports to file and emails from corporate to ignore, she took a walk to room 206 and knocked on my door before entering.

"So, word is that you're talking now," she said.

"So it appears," I replied, my voice sounding like a rusty chain saw.

"Good to know," she replied. "You were talking to Alex? Our volunteer?"

"The boy? Yes, I was."

"Happy to hear it," she said. And she was. If I was speaking, corporate no longer had a reason to move me to the Garden unit. And Etta wanted to keep me here, among her flock.

The baby growing inside Etta kicked hard, and Etta groaned. "This little girl is gonna be a gymnast."

"It's a boy," I said.

She chuckled. "The aunties all say I'm carrying too low and too ugly for it to be anything but a girl."

"The aunts are wrong. You're having a boy. And you are not ugly."

"You may not be mute, but I know you're blind," she said.

"You're having a boy," I repeated.

"We'd better pick out some boys' names, then."

"Maybe Joseph." I said. "Josey for short."

That afternoon, Leyla found Julio in the kitchen pantry amid the industrial-sized cans of peaches.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Hiding."

"From what?"

"That Alex kid. Turns out Mr. Kravitz is no longer nonverbal." He paused as if the fact pained him. "Etta talked to him, and turns out he really did talk to the kid."

"That's a good thing, isn't it?" Leyla asked.

"I guess. But I called that kid a liar and he wasn't." He looked stricken.

"There is a solution for that." Behind her mask, Leyla was smiling. "You could apologize."

"I'm not very good at apologies."

Very few people are. Most of them prefer to say sorry for having offended someone rather than being sorry for the offense itself. But Leyla knew that a good apology had to name the wrong and offer some compensation, and she could help with part of it.

Leyla believed food could speak. Her Lebanese father had taught her that. If you were angry when you made fattoush, it would taste bitter. If you prepared a baklava with love, it could do the heavy lifting of an apology. She pulled down a tray of warm baklava, fresh from the oven, and put a slice on a plate and handed it to Julio.

"Start with this," she said.

Julio found the boy still cleaning banisters. "You did good with the deliveries. I'm sorry Mr. Kravitz kept you so long." It wasn't quite the apology Leyla had suggested, but it was a start. Then Julio handed him the plate.

"What's this?" the boy asked.

"Baklava," he said. "If you don't want it now, I'll put it aside for when you come to the kitchen for your meal."

The boy was confused again. Why would he come to the kitchen when his baloney sandwich was in his backpack?

"You know Leyla sets aside meals for the staff, don't you?" Julio asked.

He hadn't known Leyla set aside meals. He hadn't known he was considered staff.

Staff. He was part of the staff. He appreciated the apology but not as much as this. He'd done something useful. And now Julio was telling him that he'd like him to continue deliveries, even chat with the residents, including, he said, Mr. Kravitz.

After Julio left, the boy stared at the pastry, unsure how to eat it. It was flaky and bursting with what appeared to be nuts. It looked, to be honest, a little weird. He popped a piece of baklava in his mouth and gasped. He tasted the nectar the bees had collected. He tasted the sunshine the hive had basked in. And he tasted the love.

OBVIOUSLY, I WAS GOING TO have Olka fired! It was one thing to slight me, insult me, stab me with a pin. But another to say that terrible thing about me, and by extension my family. All I had to do was repeat the word to Father and she'd be gone.

But first I needed to prove that she was not just a bigot but a liar. Her claim of being my peer at school was like a pebble in my shoe. I looked up her employee file in the office. Her application listed her name, Oleksandra Wojcik, her age, nineteen, her address in a working-class suburb. Her religion, Catholic. Much of this read like Pani Zuzana's file might have. Except that there it was, at the bottom: a graduate of the same school that Adek and I had attended.

Well, even if she had gone there—as some sort of pity case, I reasoned—I knew she hadn't been top student. Unfortunately, proving that required tracking down my least favorite person. Adek and I attended the same university, and I found him outside the library, lecturing to a trio of enthralled young ladies about the dangers facing our neighbor Czechoslovakia now that Germany had annexed Austria. "And anyone who doesn't see that Czechoslovakia is next and then Poland on the chopping block isn't paying attention," he told his rapt crowd as I strode up. Then he pointed to me. "Like Jozef here. I expect he's not paying attention at all."

He was trying to bait me, but I wouldn't swallow. "Adek," I said, my tone as falsely jovial as his. "Tell me, who was top student in your year?"

"Why do you ask?" he said, his tone painfully casual, like this was all so dull to him.

"Just curious. Was it you?"

He shrugged. "I really don't remember."

He didn't remember? Adek was a braggart, a peacock. If he'd truly been top student, he would have announced it now to his flock of admirers.

"Was it a girl named Oleksandra Wojcik?" I asked.

As if a flying object were hurtling toward his face, he flinched. Only for a moment, but long enough to confirm that Olka had indeed been top student. And for this, I had laughed at her. It didn't justify or excuse what she'd said. It explained it, though.

But she'd said that awful word. And for that alone she needed to be fired. Her behavior had been inexcusable. Yet a little nagging voice kept asking me if perhaps mine hadn't also been more than a little despicable.

Days passed, and I did not tell Father or Mother what had happened. More days passed, and then it was the afternoon of my date, so I went down to the tailoring room to collect my suit.

Olka was bent over one of the sewing machines, so focused on her work that I had to touch her shoulder to get her attention.

"Pan Kravitz," she said, startled. Even if she had not said my name, the crimson in her cheeks suggested that she now had connected me to the other Pan Kravitz, the man who signed her paychecks. "I have been waiting for you."

"You have?" I felt oddly hopeful, wondering if she'd been thinking about me as much as I'd been trying not to think about her.

She stood and trudged to the rack in the corner of the room and returned with the gray garment bag. "I trust this is to your satisfaction."

Her manner, as if underwater, frazzled me. All my clever words escaped me. Tongue-tied, I stalled by meticulously inspecting her work, as if I were someone who could judge a good alteration from a bad, when in truth, back then I did not know the difference between a slip stitch and a knot stitch.

As I tried on the jacket, which fit to perfection, she walked to the rack and pulled down a wool coat worn thin at the elbows.

"Please thank your father for giving me this job." She began buttoning the coat with trembling fingers. I did not know it then, but all week long she had been anticipating being fired. When it did not happen the day after she insulted me, or the day after that, her anxiety had only grown. And the anger with which she had lashed out at me now ricocheted back on herself. How terribly she had behaved, as coarsely as her uncle, whom she loathed. Whom she thought she was better than. But then she'd spoken just the same way he did.

And, oh, how stupid to risk a job that, however much she resented it, was as good as she could hope for. It paid a fair wage and included a benefit she had not fully appreciated before: time to herself.

When her uncle found out she'd been fired, his wrath would be terrible. She could already feel the sting of his slap across her face. "You're good for nothing," he would tell her, as he had so many times before. And right then she was inclined to agree.

She seemed to be on the verge of tears. I offered my handkerchief. She hesitated for a moment, as if doubting the gesture, before taking it and dabbing her eyes. She folded the hanky back into a neat square, returned it, then put her hat on her head, securing it with two small pins that she removed from the back of her bun.

"Going somewhere?" I asked.

"Home."

"It's not six o'clock."

"You want me to finish out the day?" She set her pocketbook down. "I have nearly finished my last job. I'll do that and then I will leave."

"Why?"

"Because I'm fired."

"Why would you be fired after you've done such a fine job on my suit?" I asked.

At this she frowned.

"You take no pleasure from praise?"

She knew she ought to keep her sharp tongue to herself, but she was so certain she was fired, and deserved to be fired, she didn't see the point. "Praise my intellect, my resourcefulness, but not my ability to sew a straight seam."

"And why not? I have intellect, so I've been told," I replied. "But I don't sew, and you do it well, so why not compliment that?"

She had no answer.

"Perhaps you would prefer I praise your beauty?"

Now she scoffed. "I know what I am, and what I am not."

"And what are you?"

"Someone who scrabbles her way through life. There's no beauty in such labor."

"I see you're as uncharitable with yourself as you are with others," I replied.

"Please, stop," she said, holding out a hand to deflect my words. "Don't speak of what I said to you. I cannot bear the shame. I would apologize, but words are too meager. There is no excuse for it. Firing me only begins to right the wrong."

"If you knew it was so bad, why did you say it in the first place?"

"I don't know. I was angry. And humiliated, and it was the first word that flew to my lips. My uncle…" She looked down. "He says that. Not that it's an excuse. But it was why I reached for it."

"Because I'd humiliated you?"

She pressed her chin to her chest. "Yes."

"So did you mean it?"

"Of course not!"

"And did you mean what you said about me being a ‘spoiled, two-faced brat who speaks out of both sides of his mouth'?"

She looked down. "Do you want candor or flattery?"

"Flattery, always, but you've set a trajectory toward candor, so why change course now?"

She looked up now, training her eyes on me, unblinking. "From what I witnessed at school, you are someone who floats through life, buoyed by the current, but who nevertheless believes himself to be swimming."

"Just because I go with the current and not against it does not mean I am not swimming."

"That's my point. You get to choose. To swim or float. To go against the current or with it."

"And you resent me for it?"

"I don't resent you. I resent a system that gives the rich the upper hand because of the dumb luck of birth."

"Dumb luck? My great-grandfather started this business with only the ten fingers on his hands."

"And what of your fingers?"

"What of them?"

She held out her hands. They were rough, with calluses from sewing, burns from ironing, cuts from slicing potatoes.

As I held out mine, I found myself feeling exposed, much more so than when I'd been half-naked before her. My hands revealed the truth. Soft, tapered, the nails impeccably kept. They were hands meant for turning pages, uncorking champagne bottles. These were hands that privileges were dropped into, not hands that had to grasp for anything. Hands that would inherit a successful business, one that sold clothing, and yet did not even know how to sew.

There were so many things I might have done in that moment. I could have marched upstairs and informed my father that our new seamstress was not only a bigot, but she was also a communist. I might have taken my suit and gone on my date and never seen Olka again. But for some reason I did something else, something that would save my life, over and over.

I asked Olka to teach me to sew.