Without Tess by Marcella Pixley

Author:Marcella Pixley [Pixley, Marcella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2011-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

ANGEL

I lean back in the armchair and watch the snow fall against the window. Everything outside is gray. The sky is gray. The courtyard is gray. Down by the harbor, the ocean and the fishing boats are gray. The relentless, freezing February wind comes up from the ocean like a ghost. From somewhere far off, I can hear a seagull screaming.

I leaf through the pages of the Pegasus Journal one by one, looking for something to move us forward. Kaplan is patient. He doesn’t rush me. He just sits back in his chair and waits for me to speak. Here is a page covered in eyeballs with fishhooks jabbed through pupils. I flip that one over. Here is a sketch of two little girls sitting in a rowboat. The rowboat is on fire, and the girls’ faces are melting. I flip that one over too. Finally I stop on a picture that makes me catch my breath. It is an angel with magnificent feathery wings that extend to either side of the page. Tess has detailed every feather so you can see the separate filaments, and she has done something with light and shadow so that it looks like the sun is glinting off the page.

At first glance, the picture is beautiful. Alarming in its detail and its texture. But then, when you let your eye travel inward, away from the magnificent wings, you can see that the angel’s body is emaciated and sunken like the body of a corpse, as if the wings are the only part of the angel that is alive. The bones show through the flesh. You can see the tendons, the muscles, the veins. The face is little more than a skull with skin stretched across the bones.

“Kaplan,” I say.

“Yes, Lizzie.”

“Do Jews believe in heaven?”

Kaplan looks at me. “I don’t know,” he says.

“I wish I believed in heaven,” I tell him. “It would make things easier.”

“Would it?” says Kaplan.

“Isabella believes in heaven. That’s why she always wears that stupid silver cross. I think tomorrow I’ll go to the jewelry store to buy myself a silver cross. I’ll wear it around my neck every day, just like Isabella. What do you think of that, Kaplan? Would that make you happy? It would? Okay. That does it. I’m sick of all this Moses and Merlin stuff. I’m converting to Christianity. Halle-bloody-lujah.”

Kaplan doesn’t say anything. He is watching me very closely.

I sigh and look back down at the sketch. “Do you think this is what she looks like under the ground? Right now, if I dug her up and looked?”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Do you think after five years there would still be any skin? Or would it all be bones by now? I bet the skin would be gone. Even when she was alive, there was not much more to her than bones. I think about that sometimes. About opening her coffin and looking inside. I wonder if I would recognize her. I bet it would be easier recognizing someone bony like Tess than a different kid who was fat and fleshy when he was alive.

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