Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

Frankie’s younger sister, Toni, was a motionless lump in the other bed; Toni hadn’t heard Frankie come in or cry out, which wasn’t surprising. The nuns used to say that she and Toni both slept like the dead. Once, Frankie had believed that only people whose hearts were true could sleep so soundly, but that was a long time ago.

Once I’d confessed to my own mother that I thought God was a woman, because who but a woman would care so much about the oceans and the plants and the animals, who but a woman could build a whole world in seven days?

MY BOY WAS NAMED BENNO. The first syllable a kiss before the lips parted, pouted, and the second syllable fell like fruit. When I couldn’t sleep, I would say his name over and over again just to feel it in my mouth.

That’s the amazing thing, that you could half forget a war. But you could. Especially when that war is fought far away across the ocean, when your brother’s eyesight is too terrible for him to go and your mother is so grateful that she bakes a cake herself instead of telling the cook to do it, when there’s a black-haired boy with a sparkling hollow at his throat standing at your door and you can’t speak for the wave of want that swamps you and threatens to drag you under.

She looked older than she had when their father left. Frankie did too. Maybe that’s what happened when your father went away. You grew up. Not because you wanted to. Because what else were you going to do?

His voice, lower than she’d expected, slipped under her skin, vibrating there, as if someone had just moved a bow across the strings of a cello and left her yearning for a whole symphony.

Frankie sat there, oblivious to them all, the pastel warm between her fingers, thinking about the fact that Sam knew her name, thinking about the way his lower lip curled under his teeth to pronounce it, thinking about his lips and teeth and hair and bones and all the other truths of a body that seem so mundane when that body is yours, and so fascinating when that body belongs to someone else.

“Nothing is funny about war,” Sister said. “But one must find reasons to laugh anyway, especially when nothing is funny. Sometimes joy is the only defense you have, and your only weapon. Remember that.”

She didn’t want to be trapped by any mountains. She didn’t want to talk only to have Ada shake her head at everything that came out of her mouth. She didn’t want to live with spoiled girls and terrible boys. They had those at the Guardians, but at least they weren’t strangers. And she really didn’t want to leave Sam before . . . before . . . what? Before she could draw him. Before he was hers. She needed to have something of her own for once.

Well, that’s silly. Pardon me? There’s nothing you can do to stop it. Getting mad doesn’t help. Anger can be righteous. I said, Are you angry? She lifted her chin. Sometimes.

But there was sadness twisting through her laughter, woven into it, a grief she couldn’t name, a fear that the future would never come and a fear that it would, a strange sense that she wouldn’t be strong enough to meet it.

I’m scared I’ll be stuck here forever, I’m scared I won’t be, I’m scared you’ll die, I’m scared all the time, and being scared makes me so mad, when I think about the future there’s only smoke and fog and I can’t see my way through it.

Frankie wanted to say something, anything, but “love” sounded too small and “immortality” sounded too long and she didn’t know what word could capture all the moments in between.

The world keeps many secrets from itself, the angel said. But it can’t keep secrets from you without your permission.

Was there a word for that, a word for wishing for exactly the thing that caused you the most pain? Perhaps the Germans had one. They probably did.

Another door, I said. What? Doors can be dangerous. You never know what’s on the other side, what you’re letting in. True, she said. In stories, girls are always opening doors, always the wrong ones. Always crossing thresholds thinking they’re getting away free. Nothing is free.

It doesn’t matter which door you open, she said. Three or ten or thirteen doorways, there are wolves behind them all.

He had told himself that if he were destined to die, God would see to it that his death was quick. And if God wouldn’t, the bombs would. If he had to, he would pray to the bombs.

They had waited just a few minutes more in their quiet, all right way, when their father swept into the waiting room, hat at an angle, like the movie star he always was, like the Italian Clark Gable.

Hugging them, he rubbed their faces with his rough, scratchy cheeks, even teared up a little, as if he’d never learned that men don’t cry about anything, that real men were never sad.

Once upon a time, a banker and a banker arranged a merger, traded a girl for a stake in a corporation, agreed over a handshake and a scotch. And on a chilly afternoon, while my parents were out, Charles Kent tore one of those lovely new gowns off my back because I didn’t want to play. He laughed as I shivered in the sudden cold, he laughed as I gathered myself by the fire. He stopped laughing when I hit him with the poker. He cried when I hit him again. War is hell.

Names do have power. When Benno said my name, it sounded as if he had an actual pearl tucked beside his cheek, stowed beneath his tongue.

Why does the world demand girls be beautiful, but when they are, punish them for it? Why does it punish girls either way? Why does the world want girls to be sorry, some even more than others? Sorry, sorrier, sorriest.

Hell wasn’t fire and brimstone. Hell didn’t burn. And the only devils to be found were the ones you find on earth, and there were too many of those, and they looked like everybody else.

Girls were punished so hard for their love, so hard, hard enough to break them.

We are all our own devils, and we make this world our hell. Oscar Wilde had said that. I’d come back to punish them, but it seemed that someone already had.

One more thing: be happy, Frankie, as happy as you can. And if you can’t be happy, just live as much as you can. Be like Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, be something every minute of every day, be sad, be cold, be warm, be hungry, be full, be ragged or well dressed, be truthful, be a liar and a sinner, only be something every blessed minute. Make art, make the most beautiful art you can, draw everything you see, everything you feel. And when you sleep, dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is lost.