Elodie
The abutter never entered my mind. The house was a good deal. It went on the market on Memorial Day weekend—a motivated seller with a low asking price. I was the first bid and there apparently wasn’t a lot of traffic on the listing right away, so they accepted. A dream come true.
They said that the abutter was about eighty or so. “He doesn’t bother anyone” is how he was described at the signing. Of course that turned out not to be true.
Before I lived in the house, back when I was trying to be an actress, there were times I had to run the extension cord to my neighbor’s apartment to keep the refrigerator on until I could pay the electricity bill. Do you see what I’m saying? So now I have my own house with money down and a mortgage. That counts a lot in this story. That’s why even though I’m not so proud of myself, I’m still proud of that. Arielle has a real backyard to play in. She has her own bedroom. I don’t want a medal, but if I’m explaining myself, that’s what I need to explain first. That’s why this place means so much. If you don’t get that, you won’t get anything else.
I couldn’t be prouder of Arielle, but I don’t take a lot of credit for her. She’s growing up in her own way, and it turns out that she knows what he’s doing. Ten years old. Excellent grades. A serious attitude. Those freaking gorgeous light-brown ringlet curls that she preens just so. Who am I to mess her up with my interference? Slow and steady parenting, I say. Slow and steady and stay out of her way. If I’d married her father, he would’ve had her in sports by now: softball or something. I just wait and see. She seems taken with books and art. I’m fine with that. I’m taken with books and art, too, but I didn’t push her in that direction—unless my reading and going to museums myself is pushing. I took her to a Red Sox game for her ninth birthday. It’s not like I gave her paintbrushes when she wanted a catcher’s mitt.
So the fact that she loves Povilas—“Opa”—is all her. I certainly didn’t want her to get attached. And I certainly didn’t want to get involved.
◆
Povilas
There are sixty minutes to an hour, but there used to be more. Is that right? No. So often I think something—maybe even say it—but I know it’s wrong a moment or two after. Each whir in my ear isn’t all mine, that’s why. I’m always second-guessing. Do I really remember those sounds or just the description of them? When I read Father’s diary, I feel as if I’m back in Lithuania, back on the farm—never running away though, I’m always running to something: late for school carrying books or rushing home with milk in a bucket. I dropped my books often, but I never once spilled the milk. Not once. And I was very young before the invasion.
“Hello?” she said. A woman, coming closer to my home. “Hello, there? Hello?”
That was surprising. The way she just walked right up to my driveway while I was out there. She asked me if I spoke English. I’ve been in this country for seventy years. From the time I was fourteen. I speak better English than a lot of people who grew up here. The little girl said once, without her mother there, “Can I come in your yard?” “It’s ‘may I,’” I told her, and she acted like it was the first time anyone had corrected her grammar. Basic English grammar.
I read Father’s diary pages and letters on some history website from Lithuania. Someone must have saved his journal. Or stolen it. He said he was determined to die to save others. He didn’t write “willing”; he wrote determined. But he lived! He lived despite all the threats—them wanting to “skin him” for his work underground. I was about ten when we heard that on the radio. Those were “more than rumors” he’d said, right up until 1970 when he died, when he was living on and off with Dalia and me in Mayborough, when the doctors said he suffered from depression with delusional disorder. He lived his whole life in paranoia, finally hit by a bus in Springfield. How do you live through a war and get hit by a bus? That’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder how I made it to eighty-four.
And yet I never spilled the milk.
“So what are you building there?” the woman, my new neighbor, asked. “Hello? Do you speak English?”
I nodded.
“What is it you’re building?” she asked again.
“What do you do, miss?” I said. I meant to say, “How do you do?” I speak English better than the new generation. It was an innocent mistake, but I had already made it, and now it was too late.
“I’m. Your. Neighbor,” she said and outstretched her hand. Her heels were sinking into the lawn, which had gone to seed like alfalfa. That was something I’d let go. I’ve let some things go, I admit. Time used to be longer. “I. Live. Next. Door.”
“Yes, yes,” I said. I took off my work gloves. I needed to wear thick gloves to place the shards of glass on my sculpture. I didn’t want to say what I was building, not because it was a secret, but because I liked the idea of a grand reveal. Of a person walking by, driving by, saying, “Oh, look now. That’s what it is.”
“Pleasant to meet you.” Why was I being so formal? So foreign-sounding? “I am Povilas.” I was making the flag with little shards of glass from crushed recycling. It looked like a flag waving—the Lithuanian flag. Stripes of yellow, green, and red. Right at the foot of my driveway facing the street, just like I remembered from the entrance to the DP camp in some burg (Tollburg? Kohlburg?) where I first met Dalia, her hair piled in two braids on her head like a schoolgirl. She was a schoolgirl, was that right? Yes, we were only thirteen when we met. Now we aren’t young anymore. I should say, I’m not. Dalia is gone now. I sometimes think I hear her voice at night. I don’t believe it’s her; it’s just something I look forward to.
I know there was a time when time was longer. Probably at the DP camp when I was a boy. That’s what it was. Pieces of glass…little pieces, colorful pieces…had been shaped into the Lithuanian flag, welcoming the families. I loved how they glistened in the sun. Mine glistens too. Have you seen it? No, of course you haven’t. I’m thinking you’ve been to Mayborough. Isn’t that funny? I’m like a relic making a relic. I’ll probably forget why I started by the time I’m done.
◆
Elodie
No, you haven’t seen me in anything. That’s what people always ask when I mention that I am—that I was—an actress: would I have seen you in anything? I graduated from Vassar in Drama, so I should’ve made something of myself in New York, right? But unless you were in the audience for the semiprofessional stage productions of The Poughkeepsie Kyanites after my graduation in the early 2010s—or a casting director in New York who didn’t hire me—you’ve never seen me act. In Poughkeepsie, I was in Children of the Sun (The Maid), The Ghost Sonata (The Milkmaid, an Apparition), The Bald Soprano (The Maid), and Blood Wedding (Death as Beggar Woman). I suppose I was a “type”: ghost/maid/beggar. Sometimes ghost-maids and beggar-ghosts. My big break—well, it was with the Kyanites, so not that big—was being cast as the understudy for Masha in The Seagull. But there was no big flu season that year, and I never got on stage. How I love Chekhov—the angst and the humanity. I think it was the great Sanford Meisner who said, “Life beats us down and crushes our souls and theatre reminds us we have one.” I always wanted to play a villain, the kind that would give Arielle nightmares. Not in order to give her nightmares. But I mean I could’ve really done something with a juicy evil role. I’ve dyed my hair black so many times, Arielle thinks it’s my natural color. I like the dark side.
I’m nobody special. But nobody really knows me, that’s why. I don’t share much, but I feel deeply about things. Even Arielle’s father didn’t really know me. That’s not a put-down by any means. That’s just the truth. And so when we broke up, I was lost, but I wasn’t any less understood. I have a ten-year-old daughter who probably knows me the best of anyone. But still, that’s a sliver. Just the mother part.
I say all this so you understand me a little. Where I’m coming from.
Povilas’s yard: what can I say? It was like a trash heap. Or a compartmentalized trash heap. Piles and piles of broken glass. I mean it was an absolute health hazard to children—to my child especially, who lived next door, who liked to walk down the driveway and talk to “Opa.” That was a problem for me in many ways. My child shouldn’t be calling a neighbor “Grandpa” without my consent. That and the mess of the yard set me off. There’s something called propriety. Common courtesy. Property values.
I’m writing this because I know it’s important. To Arielle mostly, but also to people in this town. I’m not out to make myself look all rosy. Truth is what matters here. So many people asked me why I did the things I did. And now you’ll know.
◆
Povilas
I’m sorry. I got off track, didn’t I?
So I said, “pleased to meet you,” but my neighbor was looking at the sculpture like a math problem that she didn’t know the steps to solve. Finally she said, “A lot of people are upset about this.”
The light was reflecting off the glass, and I had to step away from the glare to see her. She was young, but not very young. Maybe forty, I thought. Maybe divorced or a widow. There was no man around. I noticed that her hair wasn’t natural. No one’s hair is that dark.
“What people?” I said.
“People on our street,” she said.
“Who? You just moved in,” I said.
“I’ve been talking to some neighbors,” she said.
“Which neighbors?” I said.
Once I got in the swing of cross-examining, it took on an enjoyable rhythm. I think she thought I was doubting her or making fun, but I wasn’t. I just wasn’t all that serious about it. I suppose I didn’t guess just how serious she was.
“If you don’t clean up, I’ll be forced to call the city.”
“Mum,” the little girl said then, peeking from behind the big tree. “I like it.” She was about ten, with long curls and dirty sneakers.
“Would you like to help me?” I asked the girl. She took a step away from the tree, but her left hand still touched it. She was wearing a shirt that said Be Kind—I’ll never forget that.
“No, no, no,” the mother said to the girl. Then to me: “This is my daughter. This is why you need to clean up your property.”
“What’s your name?” I asked the child.
“Her name is Arielle. She lives next door to you, and you owe her a safe neighborhood.”
“Oh, well, once I have the sculpture done, there won’t be all this glass around.”
“People are upset about this.”
“I can tell. You represent them with great authority. The Neighborhood Resistance?”
“I could help,” Arielle offered.
“You’ll cut yourself,” she said.
“Yes, I wear gloves. Do you have gloves?” I asked her. She looked at her mother.
“I’m sorry to be this way,” the woman said then, softer. “But your property can’t stay like this. The city will have to get involved. You don’t want that. Really you don’t. Come on, Arielle. Nice to see you…”
“Povilas.”
“Povilas. Yes.”
“Maybe if I put the glass in bins. With covers?”
“There are ordinances.”
“Thank you for alerting me.” I meant this sincerely, but I think she found it rude. I don’t always speak the best way to women. Dalia told me that once or twice. Times a thousand.
I bought the bins at the Home Depot and used a shovel to fill them by color. I should have thought of it in the first place. I had broken all the glass with a mallet and then just left it in piles. That wasn’t appropriate. What was I, some crazy artist? I liked having some order to the chaos. I remembered the flag at Kohlburg—yes, I believe it was Kohlburg. The flag there, too, was made with such tiny pieces of glass, stuck together just so. That’s what made it so special. A mosaic. Like us at the DP camp.
Aren’t I clever, Dalia?
◆
Elodie
I gave Povilas fair warning. He said he’d clean up the yard, but it was all lip service. He put some of the glass in buckets, but not all of it. It was a disaster area. I talked to the neighbor across the street and the one on the other side with the For Sale sign who hadn’t had even a bite. They said it was a disgrace. And a shame. That Povilas was losing his mind. That his place was making our places “not worth shit.” That really stung. I wasn’t the one selling, but I might be at some point. This house was my first house ever, get it? So, yes, I called the city on him. And, yes, they came out and delivered a citation. And apparently Povilas’s garage was stacked with papers, and they deemed it a fire hazard. So things kind of snowballed. It was never my intention that he be threatened as he was. Somebody laid it on a bit too thick. It wasn’t me. It was someone from the City. I just called. I didn’t tell them to be rabid about it.
People have called me “the actress” (as if that’s a bad thing), “that drama queen,” “Meryl Streep,” and some other things I won’t repeat here. Yes, I’ve heard you when I’m in line at Stop & Shop. But I merely pointed something out. Everyone else turned it into high drama.
What happened was Arielle snuck out one afternoon while I was on the phone for work, and when I went outside to look for her, I was frightened not to see her. By the time I went down the driveway and saw her in Povilas’s yard, I was already loaded for bear.
“Arielle, you come home this minute!”
“No, Mum, no!” she said. Curls from her low ponytail were hanging in wisps around her face with a sheen of sweat. She had a pair of big gardening gloves on and she was putting a few pieces of glass together like a puzzle on the driveway. “This is so fun. I’m working!”
“I’m sorry. Did she not have permission?” he said. He seemed surprised, for sure. And I was surprised, too.
“I gave her the gloves,” Povilas said. “I’m sorry if you didn’t—”
“No, I was just scared,” I said. “I was working. I didn’t even know she left the house.”
The two of them were in the sun, but I hung back under the shade of the big tree. I wanted Arielle to come to me without any more discussion.
“What is your profession?” he asked me. Arielle held up glass shards to the light. Neither of them seemed in a rush to appease me.
“I teach public speaking,” I told him. And he raised his eyebrows, as if I weren’t cut out for my line of work. “I help people feel comfortable speaking in front of an audience.”
“Speeches. I hate speeches.” He looked away, like he couldn’t be bothered.
Arielle had formed a nice little collection of red glass, shaping the jagged pieces into a square. She held up her gloved hands like she was pleased with herself and went to the bin for more.
“Well, people need to speak publicly and many of them need coaching. The mayor of Mayborough was my client before I moved here.” I don’t know why I was explaining myself.
“The woman?”
“Yes, Mayor Shanahan.”
“I voted for the man.” He squeezed glue onto the base.
“Okay.”
“I wanted to keep the old farm on Route 10.”
“Mayor Shanahan isn’t taking away the farm on Route 10. That was a private sale,” I said. Local politics.
Povilas shrugged. “I wanted the farm.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I would have preferred the farm, too. But that’s progress.”
“There’s a lot of progress I don’t understand,” he said. Arielle had come back and was carefully placing her arranged pieces on the glue. “Seems I can’t do what I want in my own yard anymore. On my own property. They are telling me there will be fines, possibly worse, if I don’t clean. A ‘hoarder’ they called me.” He wiped some sweat off his forehead with the back of his glove. “And the fellow next door never said a thing to me, but now he’s all about selling his house and I’m ‘bringing down the neighborhood.’ He said the city council has lost patience. That I’m a ‘fool.’”
“Well, that was unnecessary,” I said. And it was. Turned out Mr. Foss never minces words. I guess I woke the sleeping giant, because Foss then wrote a flyer and stuck it in everybody’s mailbox. That was not something I wanted.
By the time the issue made it to the front page of the Mayborough Patch online, everything had been twisted all around. At the city council meeting, when they asked for public comment, Foss kept bringing me up, saying how I went to his house and told him the “dump next door” was the reason he couldn’t sell his house. I never called it a “dump.” I only said that the stuff in Povilas’s yard belonged in the dump. That’s a completely other thing. And, of course, Povilas saw the whole meeting on the public access cable station—and so did Arielle. And what was I supposed to do? Foss had a petition and he got all these signatures. And then he called me a “hypocrite” for not signing. Everyone who supported the poor old man hated me, and everyone who signed the petition got an earful from Foss about what a phony I was. I couldn’t win. Not with anyone. Including my own daughter.
◆
Povilas
Sometimes I hear the sound of everything breaking. Like it’s fresh in my ear.
The front lines advancing, the fire at the farm, an explosion and glass shattering as I lay on the floor in the wine cellar. And the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat, sending us jumping off the caravan. Mother telling me to hide in the brush and thinking I’d never find her again.
But it turned out to be Lithuania that I’d never find again.
On sunny days, we would lie down in the field, my cousin and me, one of the long brown tufts of dry grass in his mouth like a piccolo perched for a song. I never knew that the last time we were there was the last time, or I would have enjoyed it more. Savored it.
If there’s an image in your head or a sound in your ear, there’s a reason for it. It’s something worth remembering, worth telling. That’s what my doctor said. I suspect he said it just to get me to write these things down. To remind myself of myself. It’s good for the deteriorating mind or something like that. I see buildings pockmarked by rifle fire. Armored vehicles. The sky lighting up. War planes overhead. The cow running away into the night, my uncle chasing her. Mother told me so many times not to look: what didn’t I see?
I had no father when I was a boy. Is that right? No. No, of course I did have a father. I just lost time with him when he stayed behind from us, resisting. He shot his revolver in the air before we parted to symbolize that we would be together again. We didn’t see him for more than a year, and then we were reunited at the DP camp. A miracle. That’s what we all said. A miracle to be reunited after all that death.
Where is Arielle’s father? What is he resisting?
Lithuania was crushed by executioners that day. The mood was as if a barbed wire had enveloped my heart. That was in Father’s diary. I can still read Lithuanian when I come across it. It all comes back. In my Father’s letter to my mother: I don’t know when I will see you …. Watch out and keep the kids safe …. If I don’t come back, tell them about our homeland and their Dad.
The DP camp was mostly Lithuanians. The buildings where we refugees lived had once housed Nazi soldiers—big cement buildings, four stories high, with an open area out front and a huge, gated entrance, wide enough for trucks. That flag had been made from all the tiny pieces of broken glass and urns and china, all the destruction. It was the first thing you saw, slanted, at an angle, raised up so people could see it as they walked in. Not a flat image, but our flag waving. I remember that vividly. That’s what I want to get right. The waving. Yellow, green and red—the right shade of each. A mosaic. No missing pieces.
I remember.
But was it Kohlburg? Or Verdsburg? Or Schweinford? They moved us a few times. Which one was it? How could I forget the name of the place? It was where we were reunited with Father. It was where I met Dalia.
◆
Elodie
Things got dicey. Povilas was told he had fourteen days to please the city council. I felt responsible, mostly because Arielle told me it was all my fault.
“We could help him,” she said.
His garage was a mess. Old papers. Boxes of them. Newspapers tied with twine. Photos with his wife, books full of them—no children, which seemed sad considering how well he got along with Arielle. Sometimes it seemed he thought he was her Opa. That was a little concerning.
The red was all done—the stripe along the bottom of the flag. It was the easiest for Arielle to reach. We convinced Povilas to let us bring most of the leftover red glass to the city recycling center. “I’ll need to keep some for repairs,” he said. Arielle nodded emphatically at me. She was on the ground sorting the green shards, and I knew this was never going to happen in two weeks. Povilas needed more time.
So I had this idea to appeal to all of you and explain things. Why he needed to finish his sculpture, why he was a treasure in our community, why I was won over by him. I went to the City Council meeting ready to plead his case. And I did. Not many of you showed up, but I’m sure you caught it on cable access.
The point I was trying to make is that Povilas isn’t some crackpot or criminal deserving threats and censure. He isn’t destructive. He’s instructive—a historian of sorts. He may not have a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council or live in the studio lofts downtown, and his yard may look like the pile of rubble after an explosion, but he’s important. To all of us. If you can’t see that, I feel sorry for you and how you were brought up. I know I might not be the world’s best mother, but at least I have a kid with some empathy. No surprise, the man has medical bills. He needs pretty significant care. Losing this battle with the city isn’t an option.
What none of you know is after the council meeting, Povilas looked at me in the hallway at City Hall, which was perfectly quiet, and asked: “Why are we here?”
I thought he was being defeatist, so I just said, “People can be so difficult.”
He nodded and scanned all those names on the Wall of Veterans—the giant gray plaque on the brick wall outside the council chamber. The hallway was a bit dark. He was squinting.
“Is it a list of the resistors?” he asked. “My father was armed with a pen, you know. He was armed with a typewriter.” His look was pleading.
“That’s a list of the Veterans. From Mayborough,” I told him. “American Veterans.”
He nodded, then asked, “But, Dalia, why did you darken your hair?”
That just brought me to tears. He has no family, no one alive to remember. We have to be that for him. Mayborough. Povilas Zaskas’s community. I don’t want any special attention. I’m just here to remind you.
◆
Povilas
Dalia says I have to leave this place. But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would I leave my home—where we have had so many wonderful memories? No. It couldn’t have been Dalia. It must have been her voice in my ear. That’s right.
Writing things down is helpful.
Like when I was at the DP camp at Kohlburg. The one with the flag. Did I write about the flag yet? There was a flag at the entrance of the DP camp made with tiny pieces of glass, and it looked like it was waving in the wind. That was quite a welcome. People can do wonderful things if they have the motivation. Wonderful, caring things for each other.
Dalia and I were thirteen when we met on the benches in the center of the camp. I was on the last boys’ bench and she was on the first girls’ bench. We were back to back, but we looked over our shoulders. She had her hair in two braids, piled on her head above each ear. And there was something about the way she smiled at me. Just me. I knew it was because I had said, “Sveika sugrįžus namo”—Welcome back home—on the day that she arrived. My father was made Pirmininkas, first director to the Lithuanian refugees, so I thought it was a nice gesture to make someone feel at home. To use adult speech and for those words to be not just Welcome, but home. Of course, I wasn’t just being nice. I thought Dalia was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. A beauty from the inside. Like my mother’s.
We both came to the United States on the same cargo ship. Two families. That was another miracle. We lived just six blocks apart in New York. I was happy to walk to her apartment then back the three blocks to the school. I carried her books.
She told me she would do everything she could to save the sculpture. Not the one at the DP camp, the one I started making at home. She said she would finish it and save it. No, not Dalia. No. What am I saying? It was that woman. The one with the black hair. The one whose daughter calls me Opa. I could never really be an Opa, because I was never a Papa. Dalia and I couldn’t have children. Who knows why? Some things are a mystery. Some things hurt a great deal, but then you forget. Somethings you remember and don’t know why.
I wish I had just one photo of Dalia and me at Kohlburg. Standing near the flag. The light reflecting in her eyes. If I had that I would always remember.