Garden of Lies Read Free Page A

back was spreading, like a tight band wrapping about her middle,
    as if she were wearing a girdle that was too small. Pain slammed through her in icy waves.
    God, God, get me to the hospital. Any minute, they’ll have to carry me out of here on my back,
    in my stained dress. Everybody staring. God, no, I’d rather die.
    She shook free and pushed past the perfume counters, their mixture of fragrances cloying,
    making her stomach heave. Somehow she made it outside, through the heavy glass exit door,
    wrenching her way to the curb through air so thick it was like syrup.
    “Lenox Hill Hospital,” she gasped, sagging into the back of a cab.
    She cranked the window down, letting in a blast of hot air, a soup of exhaust fumes and baking
    sidewalks. Still, she couldn’t stop shivering.
    The elderly cabbie began humming “While We’re Young.” [7] Sylvie wanted him to stop, but
    felt too wretched to speak, and too guilty.
    “Wadda ya say, now that we got those Nazi bastards pushed outta Egypt, ya think Ike’ll invade
    Italy?”
    Plainly, he was the talkative type. She stared at the little roll of fat bulging over the back of his
    collar. It was an angry boiled-red color, scribbled with wiry black hairs.
    Sylvie wanted to be polite and answer, but just then she felt nausea rolling up her middle in a
    slow greasy wave.
    As the taxi lurched up Park Avenue, she got that tight feeling again, starting in her lower back
    and spreading around her abdomen like pincers. Tighter and tighter, until it became a red-hot
    shaft driving straight through her. God! Sylvie stiffened, arching her back, feeling the springs of
    the caved-in seat digging into her buttocks. To keep from screaming, she bit the inside of her
    mouth.
    Sylvie longed for her mother so intensely that for a minute she could feel Mama’s firm plump
    arms about her, smell the sharp eucalyptus scent of the Vick’s VapoRub she always massaged
    into Sylvie’s chest when her asthma was bad. Don’t cry, shainenke, Mama’s voice soothed inside
    her head. I’m here. I won’t leave you.
    She could see her mama’s sleep-puffy face, the frayed gray rope of her braid twisting down
    one shoulder of her worn flannel wrapper. And in her watery blue eyes, the ghost of the little girl
    who had played croquet on the lawn of her papa’s great house in Leipzig before she’d had to flee
    to America.
    Mama, abandoned by her weak husband, selling postcards and catalogues in the Frick Museum
    for twenty-eight dollars a week, foolishly dreaming of that better life she had left behind.
    It had embarrassed Sylvie to hear how she spoke of the museum, as if she owned it, as if every
    painting were theirs.
    Tomorrow after school you’ll visit me at the museum, and I’ll show you the new Rembrandt.
    Think of it, Sylvie. Such beauty, to own such beauty!
    We owned nothing! Sylvie cried out to herself, struggling against the claws of pain that drove
    into her now. Only a few sticks of furniture. And the hand-me-downs that Mama’s sister, Aunt
    Willie, whose husband had built up a big business in fox collars and stoles, sent over in the gold-
    colored boxes meant for his merchandise.
    [8] Mama always said we had something better than Aunt Willie’s big house on Ditmas
    Avenue. We had each other.
    But that wasn’t true, Sylvie thought with a pang. Mama left me, didn’t she?
    The pain in Sylvie’s belly seemed to snake up into her throat. Mama ... oh Mama, why did you
    have to die?
    She closed her eyes, felt tears burning behind her lids slip out the corners, slide down her
    cheeks. She thought of that day, prissy Mr. Harmon calling her from her teller’s cage into his
    office. Your mother ... I’m sorry ... a stroke. Everything had gone fuzzy and gray, then black. And
    then, waking up, she was riding in a limousine. Leather seats smooth as melted butter, deep
    cushions and carpeting under her feet, a window separating the back seat from the front, with a
    gray-capped driver. How strange, a