Death of the Black-Haired Girl

11

“HOW DID YOU WASH dishes up there?” Brookman asked his daughter. “In the river? With your hair?”

He was helping Sophia wash dishes while Ellie worked in her office, catching up on the mail. Sophia sang Mennonite hymns as she worked.

“The river was frozen, Daddy. I mean, that’s so silly.” She seemed at least as disapproving of the silliness as amused by it. It took her a second to laugh. “With my hair?”

She’s a pocket-size Bezeidenhout, Brookman thought. He thought of saying it to her, but he did not want to render her too perplexed in the process of cultural reentry. The twice-a-year trips between White Lake and Amesbury entailed a passage between the recitation-readings of biblical verses in High-German Gothic script and the latest e-mail abbreviations, and required a measured transition. On occasion Brookman had tried to find out how she was handling it and asked her. He was told the experience was variously cool, very fun and weird, but not really.

“More weird up there or down here?” Brookman asked her that night when they had finished the dishes. He had been to the place twice, long ago. He considered himself well traveled but it was very difficult to feel at home in White Lake. “The last time I was there it felt like there were people assigned to be nice to me. Like two people. Everybody else pretended I wasn’t there. It was before you were born, Sofe.”

“That’s how the people are,” Sophia said. “They’ve known me since I was little, though.” She thought about it for a minute. “If they don’t know you, they don’t know what to say. So they don’t say anything. And you don’t. And pretty soon it’s like you aren’t there. And then they act like you aren’t there. And then you sort of aren’t there.”

“I’ve felt like that in a few places, Sofe. Not only in White Lake.”

“Like they don’t always recognize me in my American clothes. I say like Hi in Muttersprache, and they go, Sophia! The kids. They call other people ‘the English.’ They call Americans ‘the English.’ They call other Canadians ‘the English.’ They call all outsiders ‘the English,’ even if they’re French.”

Ellie was coming down the stairs.

“It’s an unusual community, you know,” she said. “There are very sophisticated people in the Old Synod, you’d be surprised. Very wheeler-dealer some of them.”

“Yes indeed,” Brookman said.

“Daddy’s asking which is weirder coming to. White Lake or here.”

“Oh, ya? So which?” Ellie asked. “As a personal experience?” Before Sophia could answer, Ellie interrupted her. “Of course Sofe is a star exotic in both places, remember,” she said to Brookman. “So her experience is conditioned by that.”

“They’re both weird,” Sophia said. “I wouldn’t want to be there all the time. I’d miss too much. Except sometimes I think I would. Be there.”

“When you want to be a little girl again you do,” Brookman said.

Sophia left the room quickly.

“I made her cry,” Brookman said.

“It’s a tough transition.” Ellie leaned on the sink and smiled at the clean dishes. “Shit, Stevie, you made me cry too.”

“I’m so happy,” he told her. He was very glad about her being pregnant, but he did not really feel happy at that moment. He was glad to veer away slightly from what he knew most made her cry.

“It’s emotionally tiring,” Ellie said. “The trip itself, the wind, the overheated airports and customs. Do you know U.S. customs took an orange from Sofe once? I said to them, ‘Where the heck do you think the orange is from, Baffin Bay?’”

“They wouldn’t know where that was,” Brookman said.

“Ya got that right, eh.”

“The Canadian customs guys, when they’re bad, they’re worse. The Americans act like zombies. Your guys think they’re cute. Comedians. They’re hostile and sarcastic. They do Scotch standup comedy. Boreal wit.”

They stood in silence for a while by the sink. Brookman watched his wife, and though she had spoken of tears she was dry-eyed. He prepared himself for the inevitable. But it did not yet come.

“Once,” Ellie told him, “Sofe and I were in the meetinghouse up there just after worship, and we’re having the chat you two were just having — you know — the difference, up there, down here, blah blah. Which is weirder? Here or the Community.”

“We’ve given her a life lived in deviation,” Brookman said.

“At least,” Ellie said, “we’ve given her that!”

Brookman strongly agreed.

“Maybe because it’s after worship, Sofe asked me, Does Daddy ever pray?”

“What did you tell her?”

“She was small, maybe five or six. I said, Oh ya, ya, he prays the way ‘the English’ do sometimes. Untrue of course.”

“I don’t know if it’s untrue.” He folded his arms and walked away from the sink to the kitchen window. “I find the kind of prayer you — I mean your once people — do… uncongenial.”

“I’m sure, Stevie.”

“Look,” he said, turning to his wife a bit drunkenly. “What’s the use of it? You can’t ask God for anything. You can’t request special treatment. You can’t pray for an intention.”

“No deals,” she said. “Big God, little you. Sofe can tell you herself. Do you think she thinks of herself the way an American child would?” They both looked around to see if she was listening and lowered their voices. “She’ll tell you how we pray. How we used to pray.”

“She…,” Brookman began, but Ellie interrupted him.

“You worship Almighty God. You thank Him for his glory and you worship his will. He sent his Son. What must be, must be. You find his will and glorify it. You trust and live rightly and love. No deals.”

“You shame me,” Brookman said.

“Good,” she said. “I love you. I’m sent to explain to you that you’re other than the hot shit that you and others think you are. With the self-pity and indulgence the yokels in White Lake would call pride.”

“Pride,” he repeated dully.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Ellie said. “In my childish superstition I too still believe that God wills what I must do.” He watched her put a hand to her mouth, stunned almost at her own words. Thrilled and frightened at what he thought she might say. She let him lead her out to the cold rainy porch that opened to a dying acacia and the wooden top of a defunct well. They had tried for such a long time to have a second child. They laughed about her country potions. His wearing boxer shorts for a year, on the advice of some friend of Ellie’s. But they had never said a word about praying.

“But we did it, Ellie. We did it. Shouldn’t it be a sign for us? Isn’t it a blessing?”

“After so long,” she said. “So much trying.”

She turned her face away.

“I’m only who I am, dear one. Is it a blessing? If I let your pride dishonor me and my… children, I will have to feel my way. I will have to feel his pleasure, and if you do dishonor me — and in my benighted state I think you dishonor Him through me — I don’t know what will be commanded. I’m sorry, my Stevie, my love.

“This will sound stupid. I love you next to God. Don’t think I’m over the top. We’re not in an opera. You see that’s a commonplace, eh. All the girls where I come from, it’s required. Commanded. You’re my husband. You’re my Stevie too. But I have to feel that’s really how it goes. That has to be how it goes from now on. I must feel the rightness of things, the pleasure of things. You must make me have that.”

He moved a little apart from her, still holding her hand.

“I don’t think you ever put it to me that way before,” Brookman said.

“No, I suppose. It would have been pretty fucking uncool, back in the day. Right? But you knew, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And the old stuff comes back. We’re getting old. Maybe just me. Old stuff comes back, maybe just when I go up there.”

“Is the old stuff all we have?”

“It’s all I have, Stevie my darling. Of course I’m not as smart as you.”