But when Laurie steps inside, “boring and suburban” are hardly the words that come to mind. Tam and I must have different taste in men, I think. My hands, folded decorously in my lap, are already tracing the planes of his face as if I were eighteen and still in love with him. My fingers are inside his mouth. His clothes fall away, and I see what he looks like naked.
I feel myself color at my imagination’s transgression and lower my head. When I look up, I can read his face. He was never as articulate as I, and in my clairvoyance I know that he is struggling to say something to Nana and me, and that he is too full of feeling to say it.
When he clasps Nana’s hand, a final surprise overtakes me. I begin to cry, mortifying myself and embarrassing my grandmother. Laurie moves away from her to me and lifts me up.
My body reads every muscle I intuited moments ago. Although my tears, unconnected to my volition, will not stop, I am alight with desire, not the easy flirtation I foresaw but the real thing, the encounter of memory and chemistry that happens rarely and seems irresistible.
Is he feeling it as well? In my experience, “vast,” says Tam within, the body cannot lie. Laurie steps back as if scorched, and his voice, formal, discreet, inquires after my mother and my father, civility restored. But I know something is going to happen. And I hear Tam, confirming that I’m right.
Since Tam’s diagnosis, I have had a recurring dream, one I used to have as a child that my unconscious filed and then retrieved for this emergency.
I am in the bedroom of my grandmother’s cottage, the one overlooking the lake. The room is softened by light; sky and water are a placid gray. The lake is lapping quietly at the narrow beach, encroaching so incrementally that at first I do not realize the beach has disappeared. Now the water is at the wooden back steps. Now the steps are hidden. The lake is rising, inexorable as it climbs the house, blind, remorseless, until the wall of water reaches the roof. From inside, all I see is the merging of gray lake and sky until the cottage is engulfed.
Sex is the only antidote to death that I’ve discovered, but even Simon’s dexterous lovemaking in my apartment or his does not prevent the dream from coming back—memorably, twice in the same long night. Psychologists like to debate the question, Does insight lead to change? No insight would lead to the change I require: that Tam’s decree be reversed, like a rented movie scurrying backward in order to be returned the next day, its plot already forgotten.
TWO
I AM STANDING AT THE GRAVESITE OF MY SISTER, dreaming of plums. The ripe, rose-colored ones with the blushing flesh within, the kind I would bite into greedily while Tam looked on, half appalled, half envious of my gluttony.
Beneath the soles of my boots, the unyielding cold of the ground punctures my summer reverie. For once, I have dressed like a grown-up, in a coat conservative enough for Tam’s wardrobe. As a result, my teeth are chattering in an exaggerated fashion and I cannot feel my feet. I want to wrap my arms around myself, but Ella, Tam’s daughter, is squeezing my gloved hand with insistent fingers.
Above, the sky has the blank look of imminent snow. I am enclosed by my family: My father in a stiff hat, towering over everyone; my mother at my side, crying so hard she does not know I’m here. Tam’s husband, Ben, is composed, a rebuke. In from Vancouver, my uncle Gil leans on Nana, who is erect as a monarch on an old coin.
There are scores of people, many from Tam’s television world, the adult life she created in Toronto. It is not tasteful to look around so avidly, but I do, despite the horror, the open rectangle before me.
I recognize some of Dad’s partners, crimped with empathy. I haven’t seen them in many years, but I know each face nonetheless, like a police illustration that heralds what someone who is missing will look like decades later. I can visualize the hall of offices on the way to my father’s, the blue ribbon of Lake Ontario in his window. In my mind I am still a child, running soundlessly down the pale carpeting to surprise him.
Now he is here, stricken. One of the men in tweed overcoats who surround him must have closed his office door to sit with Tam while she reviewed her will. She never would have left this world without one.
What secrets is she taking with her, I find myself wondering, as the dismayingly small box is lowered into the depths.
Tam had a secret drawer when we were children. The skull-and-bones warning on its face taunted me from the day she proclaimed that the drawer was forbidden to anyone in the family.
One summer evening, I waited until the upstairs was empty and tiptoed into her sanctuary. Tam’s curtains stirred faintly. Outside, my father was sliding the hose in a green arabesque across the lawn.
I dragged Tam’s desk chair to the dresser, my heart clattering. When I pulled its glinting handle, the secret drawer made a plaintive sound.
Below me, my mother was making her own kitchen sounds. I hoped I had calibrated the friction in the house precisely, with my parents in their separate principalities. When I would hear their voices rise in the crescendo they could not dampen, I’d dream of being invisible. First, I would be Eve, and then I’d simply dissolve, transparent Eve-molecules surveying their former domain in unassailable tranquility.
The light was already dim, but I could not admit my presence by turning on the lamp. For a minute I hesitated, imagining all too easily the purgatory to which Tam would consign me if she found me posed at her dresser. Then, as usual, my passion to know everything prevailed.
Peering over the lip of the open drawer, I saw only two treasures, positioned perfectly like every other object in her room. A purple felt whiskey bag, its gold drawstring tight. And a locked diary, whose key was inexplicably beside it.
Unsurprisingly, the diary was the focus of my attention. Swiveling the tiny key to release the clasp, I eagerly turned the waxy, scented pages. What would I discover that would explain with finality not Tam’s secrets but the secret of Tam, the fascination she held for me in her orderliness, her certainty about what she wanted, and the discipline she could so easily summon to get it.
But there were no confidences in these pages. Tam’s diary read like an army manual: “Morning: Up: 6:45 a.m. Sit-ups: 10 min. Shower: 7 min. Dress: 3 min. Eat: 5 min. Brush teeth: 1.5 min. School. Home: English: 40 min. History: 35 min. Called Anne: 7 min. Susie called me: 9 min. Bed: 9:45. Anthology: 15 min.”
I read every page, yawning with tedium and yet compelled. There was something ferocious, spellbinding, in her relentless transcription of the mundane.
Today’s date had no writing. I fanned the future’s pages. Blank. Blank.
And then, isolated in capital letters: “EVE.”
I turned the page and squinted to read the lone sentence.
“I know something Eve doesn’t know.”
Even when I splayed the last pages, the diary held no clue to help me decode her tantalizing prelude. Tam had verbalized the operating assumption of our lives.
I yanked open the mouth of the whiskey bag. In seconds I was coughing spasmodically from soap dust. Tam seemed to have saved every bar of soap Daddy had brought us from the hotel rooms of his European trips. Now they were disintegrating in her secret drawer. I jammed the diary’s clasp into the lock and shoved the drawer closed.
It was truly dark. My father must have come inside. I heard my mother’s annoyed rejoinders, while outside the sprinkler began its consoling night music. Then Tam was calling me to supper. I would have to enter the dining room’s abrupt light, guarding my own secret while all my feelings for her—devotion, guilt, and a confused yearning—lobbied me in competing percussion.
The first shovelful of earth knocks brutally on the wood of the coffin. My father has always set store by the uncompromising rituals of Jewish mourning. To participate in burial honors the dead. He straightens up and steps back from the edge.
I wish I could lift one of the shovels lying about for this purpose, move a single clot of earth from the raw mound to the grave, particularly when I see Nana wrestling with the metal handle, her white
puffs of breath like an SOS in the crystalline air. No one tries to dissuade her.
Then Ella says, “Now, Daddy?” I look down to see her quite lyrically arch into the sky the rose Ben gives to her. Almost black, like a smudge of blood, it falls into the hole without a sound.
I bite my lip to prevent my whimpering. The wind has picked up, piercing my chest. The rims of my ears feel brittle. Arrhythmic thumps are having a strange effect inside my head. Now I know what people mean when they say the earth rushes up, I think idly. But I do not find out what fainting feels like, because Laurie grasps my arm, standing so firmly at my wilting side that I cannot fall.
The purity of the air has heightened my senses. I can smell Laurie’s skin, feel through my coat the nubby texture of his. Beside my feet are embossed leather wingtips, neatly aligned.
When I knew Laurie, he wore cowboy boots, fringed suede vests, and silk shirts I couldn’t wait to pull out of his jeans.
As the funeral ends, I remember the least predictable fact about him. Beneath the weathered denim, Laurie wore nothing.
The first time I undressed him, I had been more surprised by the immediacy of his nakedness than by the fact that my friendship with him seemed to have undergone spontaneous combustion. One moment he was Tam’s younger buddy, exemplar of Toronto’s provincial confidence. Then my startled face undid all the sophistication I’d affected to deter his interest. “Now look who’s provincial,” his bobbing penis seemed to say.
The boys I knew before Laurie wore white jockeys, and I would have bet money on Laurie as a white jockey guy.
“Eve!”
I jump. It is Tam, exasperated by my discursion at her funeral on men’s underwear.
“I can’t help it,” I whisper back.
As if in divine affirmation, my eyes light on the tombstone ahead. There, in simple lettering, my great-aunt Nell’s name is inscribed. I thought she was buried somewhere in Arizona, where she’d lived in old age, but the family must have decided to bring her home.
Throughout my twenties, I traveled. While others traipsed from sight to sight in classic European cities, I could be found at a café table, my notes before me untouched as I waited in the sleepy square of an Iron Curtain town, sipping an iced drink, encircled by children hawking souvenirs, the dusty trees almost motionless. I frequented markets; I listened to women haggling over desiccated root vegetables.
Ostensibly, I was engaged in research, following in the footsteps of young British women who had set out at the end of the Great War to assess in writing the consequences of the catastrophe that had decimated a generation of fiancés, husbands, and brothers. Certainly I was becoming an expert on atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Tam’s alarm clock was ringing before dawn. She washed her hair, ate in the car as she drove downtown, and took the elevator skyward to a production room where she worked without lunch until well after dark. Tam had been assured that if she persevered, she had the talent to be on the air.
Although Tam knew the chic places that had begun to spring up near her job, we met for our reunions at Fran’s, the all-night dive of our high school years. There we would sit in the corner booth, drinking refills of coffee into which we poured one fluted container of cream after another.
Our brains lit up by caffeine, we played our parts. She ranked herself on the scale of her ambition. I relayed my adventures, with a soupçon of misgiving.
“My tombstone will declare, ‘She had potential.’”
Tam restated her belief in me. “No,” she said. “‘Late bloomer.’”
Sitting in the coffee shop window, her face illuminated by the sporadic glare of the dwindling cars on St. Clair Avenue, she wistfully added, “When I die, mine will be inscribed: ‘She didn’t have enough fun.’”
I contradicted her. “‘She knuckled down.’”
I did not know what would become of me. My classmates were now earnest graduates of law or medical school, while I dawdled in Central Europe, imagining myself into the purposeful lives of the women my grandmother loved to read. Within a decade of their journeys after the war, they would be eminent writers, known by English readers throughout the world for their pioneering entry into the public realm, their underlined novels, pamphlets, and speeches still in Nana’s library.
The peers they invoke in their journals were so famous that the diarists could not envision a day when the names would require an identifying footnote. And yet these women—Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bentley, Winifred Holtby, as well as the friends they cite with presumed familiarity—are almost entirely forgotten.
When Nell graduated from the University of Toronto, she was written up in The Globe and Mail as the only woman in her class to teach in Western Canada. I see her striding to work on the prairie, her hair wound around her head in sinuous plaits, her shirtdress billowing behind her. I hear her students calling out “Miss” respectfully as she writes the upper- and lowercase alphabet on the board.
How did she live alone in Saskatchewan? How did her family allow her to go off like that?
“How could we stop her?” was Nana’s retort.
All that beauty and conviction: look what became of it. She, too, lies in the ground. So does one of the lovely daughters she bore, who starved herself and died before her mother. So does the professorial husband Nell wed impetuously after a three-day courtship in New York and tormented the length of their ill-starred marriage. She should have stayed home, the pundits in Toronto wagged their tongues. Plenty of suitors, but she was headstrong.
This afternoon, as I got into the car on the way to the cemetery, I put up my hair. Now the back of my neck feels skinned by the bitter air. It is one year since Tam heard the news that became her fate, a year since she called me to say that the possible roads had narrowed to a footpath only she could take.
In New York, the winter day was unfairly brilliant and auspicious. The river, next to which I walked for hours, was studded with ice that fractured the light and flung it back to me. Over my head the occasional plane dipped and vanished into the sun. I longed to vanish, like Amelia Earhart, leaving no place to mark my end.
Instead, I marched into the nearest hairdresser and said to the woman who lifted my curls admiringly, “Cut it off.” Then I watched with grim satisfaction as the pelts fell around my feet.
When I met Simon that night, he swallowed visibly to mask his shock.
“Don’t say a word.” I stalked past him into the bedroom.
But when even the last medical means had been exhausted, Tam’s hair returned, while, hundreds of miles away, mine, too, began to grow back, with unseemly alacrity.
There is my great-aunt’s birth date on the stone. She and Nana, only one year apart. Did Nana ever feel as I do, axed like a surviving Siamese twin, the phantom half beyond reach but still present in some suspended, useless eternity?
People are starting to go, but I cannot turn away from my sister. As if departing from a king, I walk backward from the grave, a soldier in an honor guard whose watch is over but who will not relinquish her duties.
The wisecracking commentator within me fades. I am purely here, my heart a slippery fish, my bones splintering. The matter of which I’m made, the genetic material we share, is uttering its own refusal: I cannot leave her.
When the hum of the limousines grows louder, I turn around. My father, strangely protective, is helping my mother into the car. Hats, coats, and bodies around the grave have rearranged themselves like a kaleidoscope, pieces falling away from the center into rooms and lives that have nothing to do with Tam.
The first bite of snow stings my cheek. I want to rest, a dreamy sleep without this terror, the snow covering me tenderly, perfect crystals melting, then crusting into a patina over my temporal flesh, accruing in icy intricacy until I am a white testimony to my sister.
THREE
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INTRIGUED BY WHAT IS HIDDEN. As a child, I would stand behind my mother in the kitchen, forcing her to turn by crying out, “I want to understand everythi
ng.”
Although I like to pretend I have sprung from the head of Zeus, unshackled by my family’s idiosyncrasies, as soon as I come back I feel the press of my ancestors, demanding tribute for my neglect of their claims. My mind begins its speculations about how we came to be the way we are, unchastened by my mother’s refrain, “No one can understand everything. Not even you, my darling.”
Nana’s answer was more opaque. “Some stones are best left unturned.”
I begged her to tell me which ones she meant, but I already knew the tenacity of her closed face.
On the steps outside my mother’s house, I falter. An intuition, a warning pulse, stops me from crossing the threshold. I take a shuddering breath of conifer and cold. The door is ajar; I will myself to enter.
My parents sit apart in the middle of the living room. Between them, one low seat awaits me. My mother’s chest and mine bear a pin of torn black ribbon, symbol of heartbreak. But Nana and my father have done it the old-fashioned way. The lapel of Nana’s impeccably tailored jacket is ripped, expressing, I suspect, not only deference to tradition but fury. My father’s white dress shirt is conspicuously gashed.
The air is redolent with perfume, tuna fish, and boiled coffee, while visitors swarm about us, talking to each other in the hushed, excited manner that premature death invites.
When he still lived with us, my father was pedantic about closing the curtains as night fell, although, since we saw no houses beyond the garden, presumably no one was watching. One of my mother’s pleasures is to keep the curtains open through the night. I am distracted by the windows’ twilight reflection—masses of people in the choreography of a party.
The long buffet near the kitchen holds ziggurats of food. A communal busybody with pleated cheeks asks me officiously if I would like her to make me a plate.
Evening Page 2