her on the arm in an avuncular fashion and said, “Now go find a boy your own age and I will go home to my Sofya.”
After him, it had been one boy after another until Teddy Brynn. Teddy and then, after he was killed, his brother Arthur had briefly sated her cravings enough for a few years of almost-fidelity. That lasted until Edith was born, when she learned that Arthur had been banging one of his students while she was in labor. Why isn’t there a word like nymphomaniacfor a man like Arthur, who goes through girls like Kleenex?she wondered.
She put down the pen with the blue ink and reopened the folder with her translations. Then she got up and pulled a record off the shelf—Schubert’s Winterreise— and put it on the phonograph to settle her nerves.
***
Uncle Edwin and Edith were playing checkers in front of the cold fireplace when they heard the Schubert begin. In the pictures Edith had seen of her father and uncle as little boys, her father had towered over her uncle. But now they were the same height. They had the same tightly curled glossy black hair, though Arthur had a small bald spot and Edwin did not. They shared the same blue eyes and fair skin and the whiskers that scratched her face except for the first five minutes after they shaved. Edwin liked to tease, and Arthur liked to teach: he was a professor, after all. But their voices were hard to tell apart. It was funny when they argued. The fights were usually about politics, because Edwin was not in the Party and Arthur lived for the Party, and when they quarreled, it sounded like someone fighting with himself. Like when Edith talked to her reflection in the toaster.
In the new kitchen Arthur vigorously mixed cream cheese, grated cheddar, green onions, and chopped walnuts with his big bare hands, making cheese balls to eat with the predinner drinks that they had started drinking right after lunch. He had learned to cook from his mother but, at least in his own eyes, had long since surpassed her. Making food and feeding people were things he deeply loved, so he did most of the cooking for his family. Kitt made a few exotic things like beefsteak tartarewhen the whim took her. Now that Edith was old enough to help him, Arthur had taught her how to slice carrots and dice potatoes and mince onions with the knives that he kept gleaming and sharp. A smoldering Chesterfield hung from his lip, and smoke swirled over his bowed head. He tossed another apricot-sized cheese ball into the stainless steel bowl and walked with it into the old kitchen, just in time to see one of Edith’s red checkers gleefully pounce catlike over one of Edwin’s black men.
“You sure that’s what you want to do?” her uncle asked.
Edith, carefully stacking her latest prey on top of the neat pile of her previous victims, nodded, jaw firmly set.
Bam! Bam! Bam!Her uncle executed a triple jump she hadn’t seen coming. Edwin swept her captive checkers into his palm.
Edith howled, “No fair!” flushing red as a wave of acid rose to her throat. Outrage flooded her in spite of her efforts to keep calm. She slammed the flat of her palm down on the checkerboard, and all the remaining checkers flew up and landed all over the board, the floor, and on Edwin’s lap.
Without a trace of compassion, her uncle sneered, maddeningly, “No fair that you weren’t paying attention? I’m not buying it. If you’re going to be a big baby, game over.” Edwin swept the few checkers still on the board into his big palm and tossed them into the box. Edith was sobbing now, great wet furious sobs. She knew she was a sore loser, which made her a baby, but she couldn’t help herself. She felt stupid, and duped. And she really, really hated to lose. She could feel that hatred in every part of her body, burning, swelling, and prickling inside her, as if she were a hot-air balloon about to burst or a torrent of lava hurtling down the side of a volcano. She couldn’t stop the surge of bile, thatlfelt as if it would drown her.
Standing behind her, Arthur leaned over her, smelling revoltingly of sweat, tobacco, and garlic. He popped a cheese ball into her wide-open howling mouth. Chesterfield still between his lips, he said, “Can that crap or I’ll give you something to cry about.” For Arthur believed that when feelings get too big to ignore, you either have a stiff drink, eat something rich and spicy, bang a girl, or best of all start an argument, preferably a political argument. Edith didn’t know any of these tricks and failed to see the cheese ball in the helpful light in which he offered it. She spit it out, spattering bits of cheese on her uncle and the checkerboard, and she yelled, “I hate you. I wish you were dead!” sounding more like her mother than Arthur wanted to notice.
As if summoned, Kitt cracked open her study door, stuck out her head, and pronounced in her most acid voice, “A deaf man couldn’t work with all this racket and carrying on. I can’t bear listening to it another minute. Go sit on the Crying Rock until you’re ready to be human.” She withdrew, with overtones of Schubert in the background, and slammed the door.
Edwin and Arthur both looked at Edith and, in unison, twinlike, they pointed to the door.
Just like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, she thought furiously as she exited, slamming the screen door behind her so hard it rebounded several times like a drum roll.
Whenever Edith cried for no good reason—and as far as she knew there were no good reasons—she was sent out to sit on the Crying Rock until she was prepared to act like a civilized, pleasant, and inobtrusive child. The Crying Rock was an ordinary piece of New England granite left behind by the Ice Age. It was more or less the size of her grandfather’s’s old sheepdog, Miss Hazel, when she was curled up to sleep with her nose tucked under her tail. The rough oblong boulder was covered with a delicate tracery of gray-green lichen and had a few scattered fingertips of soft deep-green moss sprinkled here and there. Recently Edith had also been expected to mind Marcus, when he was sent to the Rock to calm down. Arthur said that he and his brothers used to sit on it too, when they cried when they were boys growing up in this house, though it was hard for Edith to imagine them crying about anything. If anything, her grandparents had even less use for crying children than her parents did. Whingeing, Granny called it.
She felt like running away but, obediently, she sat down. At first her face was hot and red and her nose was running. She felt as if she might throw up and her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it. Her fists were hard, white-knuckled little balls. Her chest was tight and her breathing ragged.
After a while her snuffling faded and her breath evened out. Shutting out any more thoughts about checkers, she minutely examined the tussock of sword grass near her feet. She looked for the perfect flat-bladed stalk that she could hold lengthwise between her thumbs that would, if she blew in just the right spot, produce a piercing whistle. Uncle Edwin had shown her how to do this, and although she had tried again and again, she had yet to make a sound. Across the yard, through the screen door of the kitchen, she heard laughter, the tinkle of ice in the highball glasses, Uncle Edwin and Arthur tuning up their guitar and fiddle. Then they launched into a rousing chorus of “Los Cuatro Generales.” Arthur had learned that song when he’d gone to fight the Fascists in Spain a long time ago, when he was a teenager, before Edith was born. Edith knew how to make the drinks they were all having now, and had been having since Marcus went down for his nap. A jigger of Scotch on ice cubes made Scotch on the rocks; if you used Irish whiskey and lemon juice and sugar, that made a whiskey sour. Her favorite, which Kitt would usually let her sip, was the hot toddy—like a whiskey sour but with hot tea and more sugar. Kitt liked hot toddies when she needed to go to bed in the middle of the day with a headache or a cold or just because being pregnant again made her always tired.
It was Arthur and her uncle who made her cry, but it was Kitt who banished her to the Crying Rock. Her father and uncle got mad, like she got mad and Marcus got mad. They yelled and sometimes they hit. Their faces got red and scary. But when her mother got mad, her fury felt cold and terrifying, like a blizzard. It seemed as if she wanted to make Edith disappear. Forever. Kitt sometimes screamed that she wished she herself had never been born. And Kitt hit herself, slapped her own face, even
