Chains Around the Grass by Naomi Ragen

PROLOGUE: Queens, New York. February, 1961

There Sara sits on the new blue carpeting in the house of the uncle she hardly knows, playing with the two little girls they’ve told her are her cousins. She's taken in their frilly party dresses, their smug delight. They hold grown-up dolls with diamond earrings and high heeled shoes close to their chests until an "aunt" with hatefully pitying eyes hisses at them:
"Share!"
Grudgingly, they do.
These are their dolls, their house, their new blue carpeting. That is very clear to her. Acutely aware of the cost to her dignity, she nevertheless surrenders, accepting the doll with the humility of a beggar. She dresses and undresses it. For so many years - perhaps her whole life - she will play and replay that scene with shame, harder on herself than need be, overlaying it with a knowledge she never had at the time: She will never be able to forgive that image of ignorant bliss, that joyful dressing and undressing of the doll with breasts all the while her father was being buried.
"Passed away,"
is all they told her, her uncle and her mother sitting in the front seat of the uncle’s new car that was to take them from the housing projects in Queens to suburban Long Island. She sat in the back between her brothers thinking: ridiculous. Impossible. She didn’t cry. Instead, her fingers dug vengefully into the new upholstery, trying-but failing— to make a hole.
For years to come, her peace sacrificed to well-meaning fools who couldn’t bear to watch a child see its father buried, she will look out windows, searching for him, like Shirley Temple in The Little Princess watching for soldiers back from the battle of Mafeking. But unlike Shirley, she will not stamp her little foot and shake her pretty curls, adorably insisting:
"He isn’t dead, I tell you!”
She will not move at all, sitting by the window on the seventh floor of the ugly red brick housing project in Queens.
Only forty-five years later, her mother newly buried, a grandmother herself, will she stand by her father's grave, believing it. She will bury her head in the soft, heavy middle of the brother she has been angry at for forty years, weeping loudly.
"We needed help," she’ll cry.
"And there was no one to help us!"
Embarrassed (she is always, it seems, embarrassing him and he her) her brother will nevertheless embrace her, sending his stunned grown sons hurriedly back to wait in the car. Only then, will she have that insight that has eluded her so long, allowing her to see beyond the six -foot bully with the mean mouth and hard hand. She will be able to glimpse in him, once more, the angry, grieving twelve-year-old; see him as someone’s little boy, orphaned, at the age of her youngest child, her baby. Only then will she realize, that out of all those alive on the planet, only he can at that moment understand her perfectly.
There it is, the opening door, the bitter cold rush of February air chilling the overheated room of the suburban tract house, which has so impressed the child and her mother. And there is the mother, long awaited, a little unstable in the black high heels, uncomfortable in the borrowed hat. She does not, and has never, owned a hat of her own. She pulls up the black veil that covers her tear -stained face.
"Where were you? Why did you leave me?"
Sara sobs into her mother’s black-skirted thighs, her arms like a tourniquet about Ruth’s knees. The mother’s answer has been lost to time and memory. Only the smell of earth, and the chilled fibers of her woollen coat remain behind, in tact, as solid as any tombstone.