“Are too,” I told her.
“I’ve never been nervous in my life.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I said, in the voice of my mother’s newest infatuation, a psychiatrist whose pomposity we would mimic, barely out of his presence.
“Imagine,” Tam said, “if Mummy announced her engagement just after my wedding.”
“She never will.”
“Get engaged?” said Tam.
“She still likes Daddy too much.”
“You’re wrong. She’s only begun to speak to him civilly.”
“Sex,” I explained. “Daddy is sexy.”
“Eve!” Tam said, disgusted.
“He is,” I persevered. “Unlike Dr. Sanders. Can you picture him in bed?”
“‘And how does that make you feel?’” said Tam.
I was laughing. “I’d like to transfer him and his transference right out of this house,” I said. “Then again, he’s not long for this world.”
“Meaning?”
“None of them lasts very long.”
“True,” she said. “I intend to stay married forever.”
“Who said you wouldn’t?”
“We’re a statistic, children of divorce.”
“Tam, what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing.”
“Ta-ma-ra.”
She was flicking her nail. “Sometimes Ben seems old.”
“He’s one year older than you are. Anyway, wasn’t your list ‘mature, responsible, worships me’?”
“Yes,” she said, “but—”
“Are you worried you’ll be bored?”
“Not at all.”
“Your great desire is your work. Besides, you can always take a lover.”
Before I could tell her I was kidding, she said fiercely, “Ben is my lover,” verifying my supposition. She stopped herself. “If you ever say a word about this to me—”
“I won’t, I won’t,” I said in mock alarm.
“Or to my children.”
“Your children! Are you—”
“Of course not,” she said. “It’s just—”
I waited.
“I’ll never sleep with anyone else.”
“Most people,” I notified her, “have several boyfriends until they find the one they’re looking for. You’ve already found him.”
She looked marginally cheerier. “Do you think it’s the same each time?”
“Definitely not,” I said.
“This is such a tasteless conversation I can’t believe I’m having it.”
“Do the two of you—? Any problems?”
She flushed. “No. But I have thought of calling it off,” she said suddenly.
All my life I longed for my sister to be more approachable. Now I found myself unnerved by her fallibility. “Did you talk to Mum about it?”
She looked defeated. “Mum admires me too much.”
My mother, mourning her daughter in the living room, has been deflated by sorrow, vitality replaced by a husk of resemblance. Uncle Gil attends to her with vigilance as she rests against him.
“Tam was extraordinary,” says Mackenzie Stoughton.
I am on guard, scrutinizing Mac as if he were a stranger instead of Tam’s producer for a decade.
Everyone from Tam’s office seems to be in the house the day after the funeral. Even the cashier from the cafeteria is stammering to my parents in a mixture of English and Portuguese how sorry she is.
According to the sociology of this rite, I am deemed to be less broken than my parents. The television visitors say something awkward to my mother and father before pulling up chairs before me. They have come directly from the show and are still in their fevered postproduction state.
“Tomorrow morning,” says Mac, “a full segment will be devoted to her.”
I hope he is attributing my gimlet gaze to bereavement rather than the conjecture to which I am subjecting him: Could he be the one? Could the handkerchief he keeps moving to his nose as though apologizing for allergies signify a loss much more drastic than friendship?
Mac is introducing me to people, all men, whose names I recognize from the card accompanying an ornate fruit basket yesterday. To Nana’s amusement, I had diagnosed acute Anglo-Saxonism from the prevalence of signatories whose first names could also be last names.
When Nana broadcast her weekly “Science Made Simple,” she was the only woman and Jew on national radio. Tam’s work life does not seem very different, if these visitors are representative.
To check my parochiality, I put my hands together and touch them to my lips. Tam’s colleagues experience my silence as if it were dead air, that most dire of television conditions. They interrupt one another to tell me their favorite stories of Tam, the time she disarmed a deranged writer who tried to choke her co-anchor, Harris, on a live show; her deft interrogation of the president who, to his chagrin, confessed his Lone Ranger fantasies to her on prime time.
My father and then my mother begin to listen, sustained even now by my sister’s accomplishments.
“And that smile,” Mac says.
Tam was not a conventional beauty, but she was immensely appealing, an everywoman raised one or two degrees above the norm. Magazines had boosted their newsstand sales by featuring her on their covers. She had a dazzling smile, one that transformed her face unforgettably. Tam knew the impact of that smile, which the senior litigation partner in my father’s firm had declared, when Tam was still in high school, could charm a jury off its feet.
“What most impressed me,” Harris says, in the same commanding voice he uses on the air, “was her courage. She showed us all what real integrity looks like.”
This canonical description of Tam aligns with my parents’ version of their daughter. I am doubly expelled from the hallowing of Tam, first by our fight and then by her letter, a stone tossed into the cottage lake that shatters the mirrored water to the far shore.
I focus on Harris, but skeptically. I cannot imagine him in bed. His buffed nails and the fanatical crease of his trousers make him an unlikely candidate for mussed sheets. I, however, have never been attracted to the artifice of polished men. Maybe he’s a tiger after he hangs up that bespoke suit.
Mac, lounging in his black jeans, is more my taste. But what was Tam’s taste? And who could have dreamed I’d be framing such a question?
I look to Ben’s reaction for cues, but he shakes Mac’s outstretched hand in a perfunctory manner and is manifestly uninterested in Harris’s reminiscing.
“Everyone grieves in his own way,” my mother says primly.
Her platitude joins the others, puny words that cannot compete with those Tam left me, syllables I attempt to match to Mac’s aging choirboy mouth or Harris’s chiseled lips.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, my indefatigable mind performs. Who is the one? Which of these men looks as if he were capable of saying to my sister, “I want to breathe you into me.”
Simon is the first man to understand the sway of language over me. The texture of words, the taste of them, savory sentences exchanged deliberately: well past the end of love, I can remember what each man said, lying rapt, translucent with desire, until the hidden words between us, the ones too intimate for daylight, revealed themselves.
“Why can’t they realize the true way to your heart?” Tam used to say. “They think it’s sex.”
“It is sex.” I defended my reputation.
“No, it’s what they tell you in the dark,” she said. “All a man has to do is lean across a restaurant table in low light and start talking.”
Now, while Mac speaks to my mother and father, I am picturing Tam in the dark, a tableau constructed in three dimensions before my eyes. She is naked on a white bed, arched to meet the hands of a man whose face I cannot distinguish, her perky newscaster suit on the chair. The shades are drawn. She has called home to see that the children are settled. Now she and he can disregard the illuminated dial of the clock radio.
I see t
he back of his head making its languorous circuit and hear her voluptuous sigh as he crouches between her legs.
“Television is a tough world,” Harris declaims, “but no one begrudged her success.”
Tam’s onscreen rapport with Harris was enough to make them the subject of gossip, to her annoyance. But it was Mac she trusted, Mac who supported her in the inevitable politics of such a rarefied occupation, whose wit engaged her enough to quote him.
“He’s so Canadian,” Tam said. “Upper Canada College, father a diplomat.”
I strain to recollect whether her tone was one of amusement or ardor.
“Call for you,” my uncle says. “Shall I bring you the phone?”
“I’ll take it in the den.”
Nana’s glare incinerates me as I walk away.
Across the street from the den is the house that once belonged to a boy named Jay, with whom I had a brief romance. I would sit in his room, his windows facing Tam’s, more fascinated by the oddity of seeing my house as if it were my neighbor’s than by Jay himself.
“I don’t understand what’s so interesting about your own house,” he’d grumble, trying to coax me onto his bed.
But the temptation of his stash of pot or his Day-Glo posters as a backdrop to coupling did not compare to the seduction of what was already mine.
I shook him off, unable to explain, even to myself, why I could stare for prolonged minutes at the facade across from me, waiting for my mother’s or Tam’s shadow to cross the upstairs landing—this view I had never anticipated that imbued daily life with an aching mystery. If I stayed still, I might see my father’s car, a blue Rambler that had long ago joined the great junk heap in the sky.
I kept my vigil so staunchly that Jay grew bored. Afterward, in what Nana would have called a controlled experiment, I knelt at Tam’s windowsill to look at Jay’s house. But it remained merely a house, exercising no sorcery.
“Are you all right?” Simon’s English accent inquires from New York. He does not reproach me for my silence of the last two days. Simon and I argue genteelly about abstractions, but are puritanical in sidestepping claims of the heart.
“There’s no good way to answer that question,” I say, bewildered that the story he knows about my sister and me has been usurped by a surprise story, a pretender that supplants the tale of two loving sisters who had a terrible fight.
My quandary would appeal to Simon, whose academic expertise is postmodern theories of language. He takes for granted that the reader, opening a book, sets sail purposefully but can never conclusively reach land.
Through the lace curtains of the den, snow is falling daintily, a gloss on a pretty winter scene. The glazed windows lend the front garden an enclosed, precious look. As a child, I would race outside on a day like this to step into a fantasy counterworld, where I befriended fauns and eluded witches until salvation came. But across the pristine expanse of white lawn, a procession of this-world visitors continues to advance. And I am mired in a darker universe.
“You have a letter,” Simon says.
“What do you mean?” I cross-examine him, as if he suddenly has the power to read my mind against my will.
“You asked me to check your mailbox,” he says patiently, “and so I did. You have one piece of mail.”
“Who from?” I say suspiciously—and ungrammatically.
He is interpreting my response and filing it under grief.
“Eve, we don’t need to talk about it now. I’ll save your mail for you. You can look at it when you get home.”
“I am home,” I say.
“Right,” he answers briskly. “And I’m in New York, thinking of you.”
Sometimes, in bed with Simon, I consider the two of us, expatriates in New York, and marvel at how brief the Canadian period of my life turned out to be.
Naturally, he disagrees. “You can take the kid out of the Empire”—he teased me once—“but you can’t take the Empire—”
Given that the Empire’s representative was at that moment deep inside me, I laughed, as he knew I would.
Simon is the university’s youngest tenured professor of English literature. I, too, teach English, but it cannot be said that I share my field with Simon. He has deconstructed language and reconstructed it again, the substance of his mental forays so arcane that one needs to be a mathematician to appreciate it.
His theories have earned him the sort of prizes for which he is not even permitted to apply. I’m waiting for the pendulum to swing back, and Simon knows it.
“Someone should study us,” I contend in our disputes on the topic, “the old-fashioned readers, sneaking our flashlights beneath the blanket of fashion to read as if the world depends upon it.”
Unlike me, Simon revels in his statelessness. He is a citizen of literature, he claims. His parents came to England from Vienna, and he has no geographical dolors. “Attachments,” he says, “are portable.”
Simon is too urbane to acknowledge that he is stung by my inability to contemplate our life together with any degree of seriousness. I prefer to think of us ironically—an approach he should endorse. The fact that Simon has won, with relative ease, all he desires simply underlines my resolve to stay just out of reach.
Although we have known each other for over two years, the time I spend with him confirms our disposition from the start, a wariness on both our parts that is refreshing rather than a deterrent. I met him when he came to observe the class I teach on women’s autobiography, a course for mature students. He was interviewing ordinary people about how they read. For a man whose writing is complex to the point of opacity, Simon is nicely accessible.
After he finished querying my students, he turned his attention to me.
The more discerning his questions, the more evasive I became. Why, he wanted to know, was I teaching American women the lives of British writers of the twenties and thirties? What did I find in Storm Jameson’s autobiographies or Vera Brittain’s testaments that was more persuasive than narratives of citizens of the United States? How, he persisted, did I expect stories of another culture to elucidate the lives of women who were looking for sanction and precedent within their own? And in what way did memoirs of English writers from between the wars speak to me as an American woman?
For a person who did not believe in geography, his exploration was rather confined.
“If you’d give me a minute,” I said, “you might find out that I’m not American.”
“I’m no Henry Higgins,” said Simon. “Where are you from?”
In my mother’s living room, Ben sits with Ella on his lap. I find it hard to look at him. My own mutable love life has been defined by the bedrock of my sister’s. Is it only now that her husband appears slightly out of place among Tam’s glamorous set?
“Eve,” Ben says. “Ella wants you. I can’t get her to sleep,” he adds. “Please.”
Ben’s benign manner has been appraised in print as the most excellent correspondence to Tam’s drive. Their evident affection made their life together the subject of fawning articles about domestic bliss. The idealization of Tam’s marriage was in the public domain for so long that I did not question it.
Mac and Harris shake hands ceremoniously with each member of the family. As they depart, Mac turns to me and says brusquely, “I’ll be back on Sunday.”
Then Laurie is sitting before me.
The room’s sounds recede into a hum. I see his tapered fingers set evenly on his thighs and want everything back: my sister, our youth, desire uncomplicated by history. More than anything, I want the incomparable elixir of beginnings, the heady confidence that all yearning can be assuaged by one man’s mouth and hands.
“Meet me tonight,” I say to Laurie. My mind has reverted to the sly resourcefulness of adolescence. “Side door at six.”
Laurie stands. “Your niece is waiting for you. I saw her at the foot of the stairs. Six,” he says. “I’ll be there.”
“Tell me a story,” Ella demands. She is
lying in her pajamas, eyes distant with impending sleep. “I’m wide awake.”
The breadth of her forehead and her bowed upper lip are replicas of Tam’s. For a moment I am woozy, tossed between my present self as I look at my sister’s daughter and myself as a child, inspecting Tam.
“One you’ve heard or one you haven’t?” I say, our formula.
“The milk carton.”
“Again?”
Ella nods with satisfaction.
“One day,” I tell her, “we were at Nana’s cottage. I was three and your mummy was six.”
“Like me,” says Ella.
“Yes, this is a funny story,” I say, as if in warning.
“I know the story,” Ella reminds me.
“So what happens next?”
“Just keep going.”
“It was lunchtime, and Nana had run out of milk. She gave your mummy and me some change and told us to walk to Mrs. Edgar’s.”
“‘And hurry home,’” Ella says.
“‘And hurry home, or there will be no milk for lunch.’ So your mummy and I walked down the road—”
“By yourselves,” Ella chants.
“By ourselves, past Mrs. Lloyd’s, past Stewart’s Marina, until we got to the store. Mrs. Edgar gave us the milk and she said—”
“‘Hold it carefully, and don’t let it fall, or something will happen.’”
“Of course, we had to see what would happen, so as soon as we got outside, we rolled the bottle down the hill. When we got to the bottom and picked it up, it started dripping. We turned it right-side up, but it kept leaking. No matter which way we held that bottle, we left a trail of milk behind us.”
“At first, you were nervous,” Ella points out.
“At first, we were nervous. We were scared that Nana would yell at us. But the more the milk dripped, the funnier it seemed, until your mummy and I couldn’t stop laughing. In fact—”
Ella, giggling, prompts me. “You laughed so hard—”
“We laughed so hard”—I am smiling with her—“that I peed in my pants.”
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