drmstream[writing]

Some months later, after going on with the Cen­sus Bureau full-time, Ade­laide will be sit­ting in a vast room in Man­hat­tan with a hun­dred other women, work­ing through the cen­sus sheets from other dis­tricts in New York City, cal­cu­lat­ing the sums of each page and plac­ing the sheets in great binders that are orga­nized by broader geo­graphic areas, she’ll remem­ber her visit that Sat­ur­day morn­ing to 752 John­son Avenue. The inter­view left her dis­com­forted and unset­tled.  When she remem­bers, it is just a sen­sa­tion, and maybe the faint image of the small sit­ting room.

This is what she was doesn’t recall.

The room was hot and cramped, even though it was orderly, like the woman who answered the door. The sit­ting area was arranged within the bor­ders of a faded rug that once had deep red hues: two set­tees and the one high-backed chair. Beyond the sit­ting area a long table was pushed up against the wall and cov­ered with sewing tools. Stacks of fab­ric, spin­dles of thread, a bat­tered black sewing machine, small piles of scrap fab­ric, pressed sheets of rice paper. A stool. A dressmaker’s dummy.

Light came in through one win­dow at the back of the room and fell across the work­table. The win­dow jambs were stuffed with pieces of fab­ric. The rest of the room was in shadow.

The scent of smol­der­ing coal was strong. The heat was suf­fo­cat­ing in con­trast to the chill in the hall­way and the sharp cold of the street below.

The hus­band was not home; he was at his place of busi­ness, a saloon near the great plaza by the bank build­ing. Yes, even though it was the Sab­bath. A deliv­ery was sched­uled for the morn­ing, and not all mer­chants observe the Sab­bath, the woman said.

A hiss­ing sigh broke the still­ness in the room.

Two young women sat in the set­tees. The mother, Rebecca, stood by the end of one set­tee while she answered the ques­tions. The girls — they were girls, at least that’s how Ade­laide thought of them, because she thought of her­self as a girl, and she and these young women looked about the same age — were sur­rounded by scraps of paper on their settees.

One of the girls wore a dress from the same cut as her mother’s, but with­out the lace at the neck, so that the col­lar exposed her skin to the faint depres­sion at the bot­tom of her throat. She looked up dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion between Rebecca and Ade­laide, fol­low­ing each word, appear­ing ready to help. Respect­ful, Ade­laide might have called her atti­tude, if some­one were to ask her later to describe the scene. Appropriate.

The other girl lay back on the set­tee, her legs slung along the cush­ions and her feet dan­gling off the edge at her ankles. She wore a loose dress that appeared draped along her body. Her arms were bare and her stockinged feet and calves shim­mered in the heat.

She appeared intent on the paper that lay in her lap. She struck at it in fits and starts with a pen­cil. Her face was turned down, and in a momen­tary glimpse, because Ade­laide felt wary of look­ing at this young woman…or girl, although her energy didn’t feel girl­ish at all, nor wom­anly at all, but some­thing else that was like a woman’s energy, but untethered..in a momen­tary glimpse, Ade­laide noted the tan­gle of curls that fell for­ward past the woman’s brow, and the fleshy set of her jaw­line, the uneven twist of the edges of her nose.

Styl­ish, Ade­laide would have said, if asked to describe the girl.

An other, tan­gi­ble thing was alive in the room: a volatile, atmos­pheric essence that Ade­laide could not rec­og­nize, but that enfolded her with pen­e­trat­ing pres­sure. She was exposed to it when she first set­tled in the high-backed chair and arranged the papers to begin the enu­mer­a­tion of the fam­ily. The three women were paused in their activ­i­ties. A cur­rent coursed between them, its bal­ance sus­tained by the increas­ing speed of its cycles. Rebecca moved cau­tiously beside the set­tee; her younger daugh­ter — Ade­laide would learn — adjusted the folds of her skirts as she waited. The eldest daughter’s body was absolutely still.

“I’ll start with your hus­band, then. His name and age, please?”

Rebecca answered evenly. A record­ing of the con­ver­sa­tion would have cap­tured a dif­fer­ence in the tim­bre of Adelaide’s and Rebecca’s voices, even though that dif­fer­ence was imper­cep­ti­ble to Ade­laide.  Adelaide’s voice hung in the air: on an oscil­lo­scope, the fre­quency would be tracked by one thin green line. Rebecca’s voice, despite its even­ness, emerged from the atmos­phere of the room like a woman walk­ing out from the ocean, shed­ding water with each step closer to shore. Her fre­quency would be tracked by a wide spread of faint green jagged edges, touch­ing only minor peaks and val­leys because of the steadi­ness of her pitch.

“His birth­place?”

The essence of the atmos­phere changed sharply. Ade­laide started as if she had felt the per­cus­sion of a sharp impact. The room was unchanged. “Pry­luki,” Rebecca said, the sec­ond syl­la­ble blurred by a high-pitched hiss that got louder with the third syl­la­ble and then lingered.

“Not there,” the eldest daugh­ter said.

Her voice was thick, sinewy.

“He was born in Rus­sia,” the daugh­ter said.

Another instant that Ade­laide would not be able to recall later: the girl’s voice was unex­pected in the silence fol­low­ing the loud hiss, and Ade­laide had looked around, her eyes mov­ing from dark to dim as she cast her eyes about, and in the moment of her retina adjust­ing to the shift in light, she had locked gazes with the girl, could see in the periph­ery her lips move, could asso­ciate the mean­ing of the words with the move­ment of her lips, but the eyes were dis­so­ci­ated from the event. The eyes were wide and direct. They were deep and brown. They seemed to emanate heat.

From the older girl’s gaze, Ade­laide looked to the younger daugh­ter. Her eyes were soft, plead­ing, warm. The mother’s eyes were still, sad.

Ade­laide struck out the word she had writ­ten: Pryluki.

“They don’t need to know where we are from,” the older girl said.

This mem­ory was drowned in the thou­sands of lines Ade­laide filled out dur­ing the enu­mer­a­tion period. When she was work­ing on the cal­cu­la­tions and assess­ments, assigned another sec­tion of Brook­lyn that was not too far from where she had done her field work, she came across another fam­ily that listed their place of birth as Pry­luki. The Nuchmann’s: two par­ents and one child. Ade­laide did not recall the episode on John­son Ave., and found her­self won­der­ing idly where Pry­luki might be and what the trip from there to the streets of Brook­lyn was like.

Com­ing to Brook­lyn from upstate New York was an unspeak­able change. But the dis­tance was not so far that it ripped your mem­ory asun­der. Her imag­i­na­tion could go to the rail­way sta­tion and take the train back up the Hud­son, and ride the car­riage west into the hills, and be back in the quiet win­ter chill of her child­hood home. How could your imag­i­na­tion voy­age back over the ocean, in the crowded state­rooms of the ship, and then travel many miles into the land, maybe with­out rail lines even to make the trip eas­ier? The imag­i­na­tion would stop at the dock to leave. It couldn’t be strong enough to make a trip all that way; the energy of the present moment would keep pulling it back.

Her rumi­na­tion about Pry­luki was unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally long.  Still, she wasn’t reminded of the episode on John­son Avenue.

The atmos­phere had shifted when she locked gaze with the older girl. While Rebecca answered the remain­ing ques­tions about her hus­band Nathan, and then her­self, the girl began to read from a scrap of paper on her lap. Her voice grew in vol­ume, inde­pen­dent of the exist­ing con­ver­sa­tion, as if it were com­ing from another room, or at least another place, even though the young woman was present right in front of them. The moment held an inef­fa­ble sad­ness that stilled the air.

She read one poem, then another.

A smile makes the longest day
A mem­ory fit for a lengthy stay,
Sor­row breaks the happy spell
And marks the length of life as well.

Yet, when Ade­laide said to Rebecca, “And the name of your old­est child?” the girl inter­jected smoothly. A broad smile creased her face.

“Sadie.”