Ella finds this hilarious and disgraceful in equal measure. “You were only three,” she says.
She turns over, and I see that in her hand she is crushing a rag. I look closely. It is a shred of the paisley scarf I gave Tam, faded from repeated washing.
My chest constricts violently. I force myself to imitate Ella’s breathing until hers deepens into sleep. And still I sit, watching my niece’s small form rise and fall.
Against the incantation of the evening prayer, I am waiting in the den for Laurie’s car to turn into my mother’s driveway. The air is dark blue, the one color of winter as opulent with possibility as summer light. Silhouettes against the resonant sky, the far houses are black, while the snow has its own severe enchantment.
Laurie is taking me for a drive on a dare. I have challenged him to flaunt protocol, to carry me off, anywhere.
When I hear his car, I make my way to the rarely used side door. Laurie taps on the milk box until I open the inside bolt.
He grins.
“Bad boy,” I say.
“Ready?”
He is driving a sporty successor to Lady, the silver convertible that picked me up each morning to go to university.
“This is not a grown-up car,” I say in appreciation. I seat myself gamely, but the car provokes something more cavalier. Stepping out into the frigid twilight, I undo the buttons of my coat and fling it into the back.
Once, in weather like this, I was in an accident with Laurie. An approaching car rammed into us, and Lady’s hood crumpled instantly, as if she were made of paper. We skidded in a dreamy circle until we lit on someone’s lawn, inches from a formidable tree. While Laurie got out and began the necessary exchange with the other driver, I sat dazed in the front seat, watching this Canadian ritual—two men on the street, breath steaming, hands ungloved, fumbling for pens to copy down addresses and license plate numbers.
“Where to?” Laurie says now.
He has a plan. I can tell by the determination in his jaw, the ease of his hand on the wheel, already turning. The heat is blasting. The distinctive smell of Laurie’s leather jacket condenses time. Cassettes are scattered at my feet, in the open glove compartment, beneath the armrest between us. For the next hour we will be inside our music, Laurie’s other hand rapping the beat.
I do not pay attention to where we are going. The streets roll by, we slide around corners, then cross a two-lane bridge onto a narrow road.
Laurie pulls over. We are in front of my family’s first house.
“Look,” he says, pointing to the house across from us, “there’s the Gregory house. And there”—he adds with brio—“is a Gregory.”
Sure enough, a woman who could be the Gregory daughter my age steps through the doorway.
“How on earth did you remember?” I ask him.
He looks pleased.
“What other tricks do you have up your sleeve?” I say suggestively.
Laurie turns off the tape. “What would you like?”
It is so quiet. No cars pass us as we sit in the dark. I look at the house where Tam and I were born and cannot decide if it is comforting or calamitous to return.
We used to play with the Gregory children past dusk until our parents called us, name by name, forcing us to go inside while we pleaded, “Ten more minutes.”
I can feel Laurie moving toward me. My limbs are stilled by cold, my heart quickening every time I rediscover his presence. I know he will not draw any closer without a sign, and I understand that, despite my braggadocio, I will not be able to kiss him in the car before the house of my childhood as if nothing has happened.
He studies me and turns on the ignition. “Home in no time,” he promises.
I want to tell Tam I saw a live Gregory, and the window out of which our parents leaned so that she could take a picture of them on her first camera. I want to hug her living flesh, breathe the musky scent of the lotion she favored instead of perfume, her hair against my cheek.
And I want to anoint the altar of grief with a sacrifice, but I do not know what to offer.
FIVE
IN THE REALM OF SLEEP I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CONFIDENT of my capacities. Tonight, however, the image I have suppressed is mocking me—Tam’s small body, earth bearing down on her in consuming darkness. Frantic, I try to assemble my sister, the geometric panels of her hair, the rhythmic thud of her sneakers against the track, her calves like pistons.
Or the way she bent over me in the early morning when we were teenagers at the cottage. “Let’s go swimming,” she’d say, as soon as I stirred.
“Tam, I just woke up. This second.” I feigned a stretch. “We haven’t even had breakfast.”
“How about if you watch me from the dock?”
I reached for my book, lagging after her.
“Some lifeguard,” she said, turning back. “If I were drowning, you wouldn’t notice.”
“I’d look up once in a while.”
In fact, I loved to watch Tam’s body knifing into the lake. Her compact strokes, as incisive as she was, made short shrift of the cold. She swam between our two docks as if someone were chasing her, disappearing briefly at the foot of the ladder to emerge at my side, dripping water over me.
“My book,” I protested.
Tam smiled, humor reinstated by exercise. If she didn’t jog and swim by breakfast, she was edgy for the rest of the day.
She wrapped a towel around her black tank suit and sat down beside me. The wood beneath us was beginning to warm. I lay back, ripe with inertia. “Is there anything like summer?” I said. “Name one thing.”
Tam arranged her towel parallel to mine, reclining, eyes closed, her hands behind her head as I glanced surreptitiously at the just-discernible mounds on her chest.
How could such radiant health be defiled? Although I had disgusted her in the hospital when I asked to see her scar, I was trying to restrain my imagination, in which an inflamed seam meandered across the devastated landscape of her rib cage, restoring half my sister to profaned girlhood.
In my presence, Tam cried only once, brokenhearted over Ella’s vulnerability to this marauder. We did not speak of the hazard to me, also kin, but after I left her bedside, I slept clutching my breasts so fiercely that I woke bruised.
Now I have a revised version of her body: Tam, turning over in bed with her lover. My immaculate sister on rumpled sheets, wrapped in a dissolving shroud, flesh falling from her bones in the teeming grave.
I, who am considered the sleep genius in the family, the one to glide at will into Morpheus’s arms, glower at the second hand of the clock on the night table.
“You have a one-track mind,” I say to the clock. It ticks on ruthlessly.
Even in her teens, Tam would crawl into my bed, trying to catch what we called my slumber angel. Without waking up, I moved over to make room for her.
In the morning she’d conduct her investigation, determined to master the aptitude. “Tell me how you do it.”
“Yes, tell us,” said my mother.
“One minute I’m here, and the next—”
“Teach me how.” Tam dispensed with my blather. “I could conquer the world if only—”
“Tam,” I said dryly, “you’ll conquer the world anyway. Besides, there should be one thing I can do that you—”
“You know what Daddy says.”
I whipped around to read my mother’s face, but she seemed oblivious to the reference. My father liked to reel off the names of leaders in history whose ability to catnap enabled them to prevail against fortune’s vicissitudes and the enemy’s resources. Napoleon was his perennial favorite.
“Look where he ended up,” I prodded Tam. “Your energy is daunting enough. They say insomnia and sexual repression are linked.”
Tam’s dismissive hand brought my amateur psychologizing to an immediate close.
Jabbing the lamp switch, I sit up. I am ravenous, compelled to notice that my life is tethered to my body.
Tam used to wake m
e at midnight to escort her to the kitchen when she couldn’t sleep. “That’s the point of being a sister.”
Sometimes she made a dessert soufflé, moving efficiently from pantry to stove, softening butter, melting bars of unsweetened chocolate, separating eggs. My job was to scour the mixing bowl with the edge of the spatula, licking it clean until the aroma of distilled chocolate emanated from the oven.
If I couldn’t wait, she made shortbread, allowing me to pour in the entire package of chocolate chips and then eat the raw dough to her half-hearted protests. Both the addition of chocolate chips and the shortbread’s unfinished state offended her law-abiding mind.
I get out of bed, shivering. After the artificial summer of New York apartments, I cannot adapt to the temperatures of Canadian houses.
“I’m a tropical girl,” I would say to my father, begging him to turn up the thermostat.
“Eve,” he replied, in the same tone each time. “You are not supposed to be walking around in a T-shirt in the middle of winter. Put on a sweater.”
My mother set the dial at seventy-six the minute he moved out of the house. This week, however, she seems to have regressed. I find my robe in my closet and weave my arms into its tattered sleeves.
I want to wake my mother. I want her to guarantee, as she did when I was small, that everything will be all right. Bunching up the blankets, I would steal across the hall of our old house to my parents’ room. One tap on the door and my mother would be there, custodian of my father’s sleep. She’d scoop me up, finger on her lips, to return me to bed.
My mother smelled sweet in her drowsiness, of cold cream and hair spray, her own womanly fragrance. Pulling the sheet tight over me, she would smooth my hair in even strokes, singing of summer and water.
But tonight she is alone behind her bedroom door. The moon is gone, and the reliable city beyond my window gives no comfort.
On the landing everything is dark. But when I slink down the stairs, the house is awake with me. I hear the grandfather clock in the living room, the furnace’s low rumble, the electric urn’s reheating water again and again through the night.
A cup of tea is what I need, not from the urn but prepared the way my mother taught us at the doll parties she invented. On winter afternoons, she warmed the miniature pot and cups, letting the tea steep for the obligatory minutes. Straining the gold liquid into the china with which she had played as a child, adding as much sugar as we wanted, my mother invited us into her fanciful world.
There was never a time when her kitchen was not a paradigm of abundance. My mouth waters in anticipation of the antique cookie tins whose lids can scarcely fit. Etched green glass jars were stuffed with figs or Medjool dates, their bursting skins pasted onto the inside glass as if they were trying to escape. Foil packets of every size were a freezer cornucopia.
In the middle drawer of the dining room buffet, my mother hid the treats she was saving. Every year, Great-Aunt Abby’s handmade chocolate fudge disappeared, looted by Tam and me one day after its arrival.
Someone has left the light on in the kitchen.
“It’s a desert,” my uncle says when I push through the swinging door.
My pulse goes haywire. “You just scared the hell out of me.”
Gil is sitting at the kitchen table in his pajamas.
“And you’re in my seat,” I say, elbowing him.
“It’s bad enough that Tam is dead”—he moves over—“but there’s not a thing worth eating in this house.”
“You don’t like mayonnaise with a little egg salad? You don’t like pimento olives on frilly toothpicks?”
He holds up his palms, a supplicant.
“You’ve been looking for food in all the wrong places.”
“You’ll see,” Gil threatens. “How much lox can the average mourner eat? Tam was such a terrific baker. You’d think that a master planner like your sister would have left us something.”
“You’re sick,” I advise him, walking over to the pantry.
But the shelves are vacant. I open cupboard doors, slide glass panels, rotate lazy Susans. An expired can of baby corn, a box of dried-up raisins testify stoically to our diminution.
“In all the praise so far, no one has mentioned her cakes.” My uncle looks at me intently. “Lighten up.”
“Now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard lately. Maybe it’s because I don’t get to talk to you.”
“Your mother is my first responsibility. What can we do?” he says. “Tam’s gone. I loved her. We’re stuck with it.”
“That’s all?”
“No, one more thing.”
“Make it quick, because I’m starving,” I tell him.
“I’m going to order a pizza.”
“Gil, it’s after midnight. I bet there’s not a pizza place in the Toronto metropolis that delivers at this hour.”
“In Canada, we call them pizza parlors. Bet there is.” He takes out the phone book.
“Tell them not to ring the bell.”
He dials a number, then another, and orders in triumph. “Such skepticism,” he says. “What do you have to be pessimistic about?”
I roll my eyes. “If we had one of Nana’s Neapolitan cakes—”
My grandmother bakes as if she were still snatching moments between experiments. Her cakes are slightly skewed, and the icing never makes it all the way down the side. On holidays, Nana made her Neapolitan cake. After it cooled, she would cut it into one-inch squares because otherwise, she insisted, it was too rich.
Gil and I could eat a cake between us.
“Whoever could have had so many pieces?” Nana would say when she came back into the dining room to find only scattered crumbs.
My uncle and I did not need to confess.
A faint knock announces the pizza. Gil returns, balancing the square box like a posh waiter. “Madame?”
We eat all of it.
“Finally, something healthy,” Gil says, draining a glass of Coke. “Now talk.”
“About what?” My mouth is full.
“How is Simon?”
“You cut to the chase,” I say in admiration.
“I try to keep up, even across the continent.”
“The answer is—”
He leans forward.
“—I don’t know.”
“Still don’t know?”
“What am I supposed to know?” I am exasperated.
“I don’t want to rush you,” he says. “But there are these little beings called children?”
“You don’t have any. Of your own.” Five years ago, my uncle married Sybil, a widow with two daughters.
“I had extenuating circumstances.”
“You couldn’t settle down. And neither can I. Maybe you’re my role model?” I say hopefully.
“Please. And I have more biological possibilities than you do.”
“Show-off.”
“Seriously,” he says. “Aren’t you thinking about it?”
“I’m thinking about it. But not very much.” I pause. “Who am I being?”
Nana had a rule that children at her table were not allowed to say they disliked a food she served. When Gil was seven, he famously declared of her shepherd’s pie, “I like it. But not very much.”
“I’m dreaming of true love,” I say to him.
“What’s wrong with Simon? He seems like a good sort of fellow.”
“Just what I need. ‘A good sort of fellow.’ Is that what you held out for? You dated every woman on the planet until you found Sybil.”
“Not every,” says Gil. “What’s really going on?”
My silence is weighty, and my uncle is no fool.
“Don’t tell me,” he says slowly.
“Then I won’t.”
“If there’s one thing to learn from the situation we find ourselves in now,” Gil says, “it’s that you can’t go back.”
“People do.”
“You’re not that kind of person. And don’t forget, I was still in
Toronto when you went out with him.”
Neither of us mentions his name.
“You left him for perfectly valid reasons,” says my uncle.
“Refresh my memory.”
“One: you wanted to get out of Toronto.” A second finger pops up. “Two: he wasn’t smart enough for you.”
“What? That’s not a bit true.”
“Three: he wasn’t attractive to you.”
“That’s a total lie.” I am flustered.
“Okay, that was the test answer. You fell for it. Has it occurred to you”—he collects our paper plates and napkins for the garbage—“that the shiva of your sister might not be the optimal time to begin a romance?”
“According to Mummy, I could meet my husband any day.”
“Husband?” he says. “You’re not thinking of marrying Laurie?”
“Don’t take his name in vain. And since when have you lectured me about my personal life?”
“You’re right, I take it back. I’m too old to be preaching to you. But you’re my favorite youngest niece—”
I wince. Gil always called Tam his favorite eldest niece.
“As long as you know what you’re doing,” he says.
“I haven’t a clue what I’m doing.” I feel abandoned. “And I’m not beginning a romance—”
“That’s what it looks like to an interested observer.”
“—I’m continuing one.”
“Ah,” says my uncle. “As someone who changed your diapers when you were born—”
I want to be in bed with Laurie. I want to take him into my childhood room in my mother’s house and lie naked with him until these days of dread are vanquished. My reason knows that nothing will bring back my sister, but my body is not interested. I audition words—“escape,” “illusion”—but they are not credible.
“Excuse me for interrupting,” my uncle says, “but you know what Sybil says. When one big thing changes, it’s wise to keep everything else the same.”
“Prudence. Not in my repertoire.”
“I look at you,” my uncle says, “and I remember holding you in my arms when you came home from the hospital. It’s hard to believe.”
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