A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

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      “Chinese?” I didn’t even wonder how, at six years old, she might know this. She was my older sister, and it didn’t occur to me that she might make things up.

      She soon lost interest in the supposedly Chinese writing and moved on to one of several piles of wet sawdust beside the crates. “Let’s look for treasure!” She dropped to her knees, and I started into a pile beside hers, my heart pounding with the awesome possibilities.

      Lil found two bottle caps and three pennies: a fortune to us. When I plunged both hands into the damp lumpiness, it felt like the mixture of ground almonds, flour, and egg for making mandelbroyt cookies. My pinky grazed something slender and pointy. I pulled it out. A fountain pen! This was much better than bottle caps, even better than pennies, and Lil knew it.

      “Lemme see that. It looks expensive. I bet it belongs to Mr. Rothbart and he threw it out by accident.”

      “Too bad, it’s mine,” I said. I knew what she was up to.

      “Itsh mine! Itsh mine!” she taunted, making an ugly face. In addition to my muddy-sounding ds and bs, I couldn’t do ss at all. “You don’t even know how to write—what are you gonna do with it?”

      “Shut up!”

      “Okay, I’m serious, I really am.” Now she made her best adult-giving-a-lecture voice. “If Ma finds you with that, she’ll take it away and give it back to Mr. Rothbart. So the best thing is to give it here.”

      “No way.” I squinted. I held the pen more tightly in my fist and put my hands behind my back.

      “Suit yourself. I’m tired of this game, anyway,” she said, and started back along the wall. She’d hardly gone more than a foot when she paused and crouched down to look closely at one of the bricks.

      “What?”

      “This one’s loose.” She pushed with one finger and it sank slightly in. She turned and announced, slowly, like I was an idiot, “I’m going ... to try ... to pull it out.” She often talked to me like that. Pretty much everyone did, and not just because I was five.

      She picked at it with her fingernails, gingerly, but they weren’t long enough. She pulled two barrettes from her hair and inserted them into the crevices—it worked. She dropped the brick on the ground, then stuck her hand inside. “It’s perfect!” she said. “This can be our secret hiding place. Only you and me will know about it. Swear not to tell. Cross your heart, hope to die, stick a needle in your eye.”

      “I swear,” I said, full of wonder and excitement, not only at the hiding place, but also at a shared secret.

      She placed her found pennies and bottle caps in there, and then stuck her hand out. “Gimme the pen.”

      “No! I wanna take it home and show Bessie!”

      “You can’t show it to her—she’ll tell.”

      Just then, we heard our names called from the street.

      Lil put the brick back and grabbed my hand, pulling me up the lane to where Ma was waiting, arms crossed, expression stern.

      “What have you two been up to back there?”

      “Nothing, just looking around,” said Lil.

      “And what’ve you got behind your back, young man?”

      “My barrette,” said Lil, before I could think of an answer. “I’ve been trying to get him to give it back, but he won’t.” Lil grabbed the pen, smothering it with her hand so Ma didn’t see it, and she stuffed it in her dress pocket. “He got cooties all over it—I have to clean it off at home.”

      I frowned at Lil. She’d gotten her way, again, and managed to make me look bad too. I wished I were as smart as she was. How did she think of things so quickly? As we walked home, she whispered, “I just did you a favour. I told you Ma would’ve taken it away.”

      I wasn’t sure about Lil’s true motivation. I hardly ever was. Had she been helping me or just seizing an opportunity? She did give the pen back, but only a few days later, and only briefly once we’d returned to the alley behind Rothbart’s. Then Lil took it again and put it in our new secret hiding place, where she would have access to it whenever she wanted.

      From then on, the wall behind the pharmacy harboured all sorts of found objects Lil and I didn’t want our parents to know about—an extra stash of marbles, a shiny gold crucifix we discovered behind a church and would never have dared to bring home, a box of matches, and countless stray pennies we saved up to buy ribbon candy.

      The next year, when Mrs. Debardeleben was torturing me with the obturator, I went to Lil for help. One morning after my therapy session, we grabbed Ozzie and took off early to St. Patrick Street. We scanned the sidewalks as we always did, to see if anyone was watching, then ran to the end of the alley. Lil counted ten columns in from the back and five rows up. She picked at the brick, worked it out, and stuck her arm in the hole to pull out our accumulated loot. We sat with legs splayed in front of us, scattered the treasure, and started counting. When Lil declared that nothing was missing, she popped everything back and I crammed Ozzie in last. Lil placed the brick into its slot and off we shot, out of the alley and home again.

      IF A CHILD IS BORN WITH BOTH a cleft lip and a cleft palate, most parents are so distraught about the lip that they choose that operation first, even though it’s less pressing from a medical perspective. The goal for the lip is to stitch it seam-lessly, until it’s as pretty and perfect as Cupid’s bow. That’s the shape the textbooks tell surgeons to aim for: Cupid’s bow. They know the power a smile has to shoot love’s arrow straight and sure.

      Ma, however, was of the opinion that vanity was an indulgence, and since they weren’t able to save enough money to fix both the lip and the palate, they made a choice. Besides, since I had a partial cleft, the doctors advised my parents to consider that scarring from the operation might be more severe than the deformity itself. What a laugh. In choosing not to pursue the lip operation, my parents made the sensible decision, the one that ensured my survival, but they didn’t consider how disfigurement might make survival a capricious gift. They couldn’t know what it would feel like to have a warped bow, one that would cause the arrow to miss its target nearly every time. Ma frowned on vanity, but can a beautiful person, or even someone who is merely plain, truly understand what it means to be ugly?

      Not just ugly. Different enough to draw attention to it.

      Hare, serpent, ape.

      Nowadays, comparisons with the animal kingdom are rarer. Ma didn’t like them, even then. She declared, when I was born, that my notch was like a pinch of dough, raised up too high by the fingers, making a point where there should only have been a slight lilt. She said it made my mouth triangular, like hamentashen, the pocket pastries named after King Hamen’s hat and eaten at the holiday of Purim. The tip of my tongue, showing there in the gap, was like the poppy seed filling, only the wrong colour. I don’t think they filled them with cherry in those days.

      She started calling me her little Hermantashen, a humiliating term of endearment only someone who loved you would inflict. Eventually, everyone used this nickname—except Pop, who said it was ridiculous—and in no time at all, it evolved into ’Tashen, and then finally just Toshy. Doctors, teachers, prison guards, my late wife ... for seventy-seven years, people СКАЧАТЬ