Read Online The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler - Free Book Online Page B

hanging from a chain around her neck. And there on the other side of the counter, a woman in a long black coat, wearing a black hat with a little half-veil. My mother. “Was she pretty?”
    Ida smiled, but then she thought for quite a while before answering. It was a pause that confused me because the question I had asked wasn’t exactly difficult.
    “A woman can be beautiful without being pretty,” Ida finally said.
    I nodded as if I understood what she meant.
    “You have her eyes,” she told me.
    “I do?” My eyes were my best feature, my aunt Nina had told me. When I got older she was going to show me how to make them up to take advantage of them. I glanced instinctively towards the gilt-framed mirror on Ida’s wall now, and saw my mother’s eyes looking at me.
    “What’s her hair like?” I asked Ida. Mine was brown and wavy, though in the summer it was more frizzy than wavy.
    “I don’t remember her hair.”
    “You don’t?”
    “She usually wore it pulled back.”
    “In a ponytail?”
    “A bun.”
    “A bun?” Now I was disappointed. Buns were what old ladies did with their hair.
    “A twist,” Ida elaborated. Tveest is actually how she would have pronounced that word—she was from Poland—but I didn’t notice her accent very often. Hers or my grandmother Bella’s or my teachers’ or that of the parents of half of myfriends. I was used to it, used to the v’ s where w ’s should be, the ee ’s for i ’s, the r ’s that made my name sound like something they had to dislodge from somewhere deep in their throats. “A French twist.”
    I didn’t know what a French twist was, but it sounded more like the sort of arrangement a beautiful woman like my mother would decide on than a bun.
    “Why don’t we have any pictures of her?” I asked Ida.
    Another long pause, but this one didn’t confuse me because the question I had just asked was actually a very hard one. No one seemed to know the answer. (“Sometimes when people are very, very sad they don’t like the way they look,” my father had told me, which made no sense at all. “Not everybody likes to have their picture taken,” Elka said, which also wasn’t an answer but the lead-up to another question, “But why don’t they?” which led straight to the dead end of “I don’t know.”)
    “There are some people who believe that a camera can see what the human eye can’t.”
    “Really?”
    Ida nodded.
    “And can it?”
    “Of course not. But maybe your mother had that belief.”
    I thought about that as I sipped at my sweet red tea. “What was she afraid the camera might see?”
    And here Ida smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. It was as if something about me had finally pleased her—the question I had asked, the fact that I could understand the conversation we were having—but there was no happiness in the pleasure. “Who she was inside.”
    I thought about that. “Like an X-ray?”
    “In a way,” Ida said, and I thought immediately of the machines at Kiddie Kobbler, not far from Ida Pearl’s in Snowdon, where they X-rayed my feet to make sure my saddle shoes, loafers and oxfords fit properly. I liked to see my bones, though, liked how my insides looked.
    “But she was a smart lady,” Ida said, as if someone had just said she wasn’t. “A person can have certain superstitions and still be very smart, and your mother—I could tell from the conversation we had in my store that day that your mother is a very smart lady. But you want to know something?”
    I nodded, breathless with expectation about what she was going to tell me next.
    “Even if she wasn’t so smart, your phone number and new address are going to be in the phone book just the way they’re in the phone book now, so if she’s looking for you she’ll be able to find you just like she’s been able to find you on Cumberland.”
    It wasn’t quite the next new fact about my mother that I had been hoping to hear, but at that moment it seemed better