As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel by Elizabeth Poliner Page B

discovered was a good place to think. The tub dry, my clothes still on, I hurdled the high rim and sank down, just as if I were soaking, but in silence rather than water. And something about that silence, along with the confinement of the tub, got me into a particular frame of mind, one in which it became more than evident that this was uncanny—this life, this existence at all—and what I meant by that was that it seemed so very strange to be me, just me, this silent inner self whom only I actually knew. The outer self, whom the family knew quite well, was but a shell, a quaint cover story, and that week I had only just begun to understand that no amount of living with them, cramped cottage and all, would ever change that fact. She didn’t even have a name, this essence of myself, this non-Molly whom I quickly took to, rather liked, and that Friday, after Howard had taken off with Davy, and in the time we still had before we’d begin our Shabbos meal, squirreled away in the upstairs bathroom with the locked door and the womb-like walls of the tub surrounding me, I managed in just a few quiet minutes to do it, to woo her from the cave of my soul. Hello, I whispered to my near stranger of a self. Hello.
      
     
    Moments before, upon the men’s arrival that evening, after my father had loosened his tie, my mother, already dressed in a proper skirt and blouse for Shabbos, emerged from the kitchen to bring him a glass of water and told him to “Sit, sit,” to which he answered, “I’ve been sitting already, too much sitting,” and then she, as if she hadn’t heard him, walked back into the kitchen, and he, as if he hadn’t heard himself, sat, in the corner chair in the living room. And that’s how my parents behaved toward each other then, courteous but cool, aware of each other but imperturbably so, as if they inhabited separate spheres and saw each other only from a distance. From what I observed it was hard to imagine them ever being passionate toward each other, hard to imagine that time when Ada was eighteen and Mort was twenty-four, and the attraction they felt for each other was so strong that Vivie was thrown, easily enough, by the wayside.
    For Vivie the ordeal—something in hindsight she called her slow march toward freedom, toward a self she never knew she had—began like this.
    A week after she’d spotted Ada and Mort hand in hand outside her front door, Vivie had to endure the fact that when Mort finally apologized to her, coming to her home just to do so, he didn’t even hint at the possibility of their resuming their old courtship. It was real, then, she knew: the hand-in-hand business wasn’t just an accident as Ada had tried so hard to convince her, describing over and over again the spill she’d taken just seconds before on their front walkway.
    “He was pulling me up,” Ada had insisted. “That’s all. That’s it. I was so embarrassed to fall like that—on my tuches!—but he acted like he didn’t even see.”
    But with Mort’s apology Vivie came to know better, came to know that her younger sister was capable of making a lie sound not only convincing but even sweet.
    Then Vivie had to endure that first time, several weeks later, when she watched from her bedroom window as Mort approached her front door, rang the bell, and asked—albeit timidly—for Ada. Vivie crept from her bedroom to the top of the stairs where she could hear everything but not be seen. She gasped as Mort and Ada laughed upon meeting again. The laughter was quiet, meant not to be heard, but it was laughter—joy—all the same. And that’s when my aunt decided that her survival, her dignity, depended on her moving out.
    She knew of an extra room down the street in the Bloomberg home, where she’d babysat Lorna Bloomberg for so many years. The family was more than happy to offer it and to her relief accepted only the most nominal of pay. “We think of you as family,” Mrs. Bloomberg told her, surprisingly