The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler Page A

present from a lady named Joyce that my father had dated for a few months when we still lived on Cumberland. (She was very nice when she came to dinner—it was she who had given me my records of Israeli folk songs—but after a while she stopped coming.) On one of the lower shelves there were a few novels from when Elka had signed my father up for the Book of the Month Club. My father didn’t read novels—he read newspapers and magazines—so I wasn’t sure why Elka would have signed him up unless maybe there had been a two-for-one deal when she joined herself. And beside the Book of the Month Club selections, the notebooks.
    They had always been there, the notebooks. In plain view, in the centre of our living room. It was an odd place for them, in some ways, but where else was my father supposed to keep them? In a box at the back of his closet as if they were something to be ashamed of? There was nothing about my mother anybody needed to feel ashamed of, Elka had told me, and my father obviously agreed, so her notebooks sat in plain view, in the middle of our living room, in broad daylight (light that was slowly damaging them, though I wouldn’t know that until years later when I studied conservation).
    There were two. The older one had once belonged to a girl my mother had known in Europe. And right beside the girl’s notebook, my mother’s.
    The girl’s had a soft leather cover that had been fawn-coloured at one point. You could still see the original colour deep inside the seams when you pulled it off the shelf and opened it, which I did now. But the outside was mostly stained and discoloured. Inside, its pages were filled to the very edges with handwriting, Yiddish words so tiny I could barely make them out, a crowded mess of words that I couldn’t understand.I closed it, put it back on the shelf, and pulled out the other one. This one was my mother’s. She had bought it not long after she and my father were married, but she had not taken it with her when she left. It was also leather-bound and was in good, almost perfect condition. And it was empty.
    Why hadn’t my mother written anything in her book? I wondered. Why had she left it behind? (“I don’t know,” my father had said. “Maybe she couldn’t think of anything to write,” Elka said.)
    I had never been alone with my mother’s notebook before. This was very different from looking at it with someone watching me. I opened it and ran my fingers along the empty pages, wondering if my mother had run her hand along those same pages. I ran my fingertips along the pages and then the surface of my whole hand, wondering if I was touching where my mother’s hand had touched. I closed my eyes to see if I could feel anything unusual, and I thought maybe I did, but I couldn’t tell what, for certain. I did it again, and, yes, there it was again, a strange, pulsing feeling. It was a bit like when my aunt Nina had brought over her Ouija board and we sat with our fingers on it (lightly, Nina warned me) and then all of a sudden, it began to move a little. I sat for a long while with my fingertips resting on the first page of my mother’s notebook, and there was definitely a pulsing coming from it.
    One more package had arrived from my mother by that time, bringing the total to three. All of them rocks. The most recent one had come to our new apartment, so Ida Pearl had been right about how smart my mother was. Or that she was smart enough, at least, to know how to use a phone book. The wrapping paper on the third package was green; one of the stamps had another goose on it, nesting this time. Both thepaper and the stamp went into the scrapbook and I also was able to add a line to the page about my mother’s likes: Birds , I wrote. Then I crossed it out and wrote, Geese , which was more specific.
    The rock was as beautiful as the other two. This one had a fossil in it, an entire little skeleton like a mini-dinosaur embedded within it, as if a baby dinosaur had