then I must acknowledge it, and I am so used to pretending it isn’t
there. “Are you happy?” I ĕnally work up the courage to ask her. I
want her to say that she is, so that I can be too. I want her to say that
she’ll never be happy, not really, so that I’ll know the hole isn’t only in
me.
“Dicuka, here’s some advice from your big sister. Either you’re
sensitive, or you’re not. When you’re sensitive, you hurt more.”
“Are we going to be okay?” I ask. “Someday?”
“Yes,” she says. “No. I don’t know. One thing’s true: Hitler fucked
us up for sure.”
* * *Béla and I are now bringing in $60 a week, enough to try for a second
child. I get pregnant. My daughter is born February 10, 1954. When I
awaken from the anesthesia that American doctors routinely
administered to all women in labor at that time, she is in the nursery.
But I demand to hold my baby, I demand to nurse her. When the
nurse brings her to me, I see that she is perfect and sleepy, not as big
as her sister was when she was born, her nose so tiny, her cheeks so
smooth.
Béla brings Marianne, now six years old, to see the baby. “I got my
sister! I got my sister!” Marianne celebrates, as though I have put away
money in an envelope and ordered her a sister from a catalog, as
though I have the capacity to always grant her wishes. She will soon
also have a cousin, because Magda, who married Nat Shillman in
1953, is pregnant and will give birth to a daughter in October. She
names her Ilona, after our mother.
We name our own new daughter Audrey, aer Audrey Hepburn. I
am still dazed from the drugs the doctors used to sedate me. Even the
intensity of labor, of meeting and nursing my baby for the ĕrst time,
have taken on the numb quality of my life in hiding.