The Swiss Mother Eve

His pillow ruptures between her knees. Warm feathers plucked from the breasts of live geese burst into the settled darkness of the room. She watches them by the flashes of the storm’s lightning. They descend into the gaps of the floor-boards, they are scorched between the poles of the hissing radiator. They land into her palms, along her pregnant stomach and into the meeting of her thighs. A third month, February, begins today and Monsour and his musicians have not returned from their three-week tour of Spain. She has become another woman to memorize the flatness of dial tones, her spare change has been emptied into the pay phone around the corner. She has not reached him since December on the last day of the eighties. Swollen, urinating often, she goes about naked, beneath her nightgown. Smoking and watching from the attic as the storm passes through Switzerland. This morning, the last cigarette is gone.

At dawn, a whiff of couscous and fermented fish rises through the floorboards from the kitchen below. The living room downstairs houses Monsour’s mother Eva’s dirty, makeshift restaurant. The high voices of Mama Eva and her six sisters have become the enemy of all rest, along with the clattering of their clay dishes, the pounding of garlic cloves, shallots and pepper grains with stone, the crushing of ice and rock sugar, stomping into maize and cassava flour. Every hour, from her bed in the attic, Bonnie listens for the theme of the dubbed American soap operas. As a child, she learned all the themes by heart. Her grandmother, a formerly aristocratic Bostonian who lived in a one-room apartment in a geriatric living facility watched them devotedly. Bonnie sat in a lotus position on the worn, pungent Persian rug. The old balding rug had faded and matted. When Bonnie had chicken pox, she rubbed her hands into the rug to soothe the itching. On good afternoons, she sat at her grandmother’s feet, too close to the enormous black and white television screen that dwarfed all the prewar furniture of the tiny apartment living room. The television, the only functional relic of her grandmother’s former life was encased in an oak furnishing and by 1979 only held two channels.

As the only survivor of her family’s demise, her grandmother Sylvia was full of dismembered memories, defined by sad endings that she never told. Sometimes it was a curtain in the soap opera set that prompted a memory. Or a lampshade in the background of a love scene that Bonnie would never have noticed. Sylvia could remember the color and texture of her father’s favorite suit, but she couldn’t recall what exactly he did for a living. She could remember the peach color of living room curtains, the short, flirtatious man who was hired one year to clean the golden, floral pattern of the antique couch, but she couldn’t recall who they had for company or why the couch had required such rigorous cleaning. . . . why it had ultimately become unsalvageable and had been handed down to meeker relatives: a young interracial couple just starting out. From the soap operas, Bonnie learned the feeling and scent of her origins, but never the names and accomplishments, never any reason for pride.

This morning in Switzerland, Bonnie squats at the top of the narrow, swaying staircase. The racking window panes have begun to settle as the storm calms with the end of the morning. It’s before the afternoon rush and the dishwasher girl is dressing the tables, expertly folding the linen napkins to conceal the brown stains. The washing machine in the basement, a relic of the Second World War, is rotting. Every Saturday it floods the basement and stains anything white with little brown spots. It came with the purchase of the building and Mama has refused to do away with it, still grateful for never having to wash clothes by hand again. The dishwasher girl places the old, oxidized silverware on each napkin, she dusts the bouquets of stale plastic flowers with her apron.

The Aunts...