“How is life in New York?” he says. “Teaching going well?”
“Yes, Dad,” I say obediently, regressing in an instant.
“Did you have any trouble getting the time off?”
“It wasn’t negotiable. Actually,” I revise, “they were nice about it. I’ve been there for three years, and they like me.”
“I’m sure they do,” he says in a voice so hearty I look around in discomfort.
“Where is everyone?” I say quickly.
“It’s a lull,” he announces. “Afternoon. People on their way home from work. You must be a superb teacher,” he regains his thought. “You were always a great talker. Even when you were little. And a good listener, too,” he says tolerantly.
I’m sorry that his pride depends on such flimsy support. Clearly, he has given up on his vision of a sterling academic career.
“We should talk,” he says emphatically.
I signal my willingness.
“How are you doing?”
I shrug, as if I were still a truculent teenager.
“I know how much you counted on her.”
The needle in my mind moves, in one second, from passivity to rage.
“She wasn’t perfect,” my father tells me.
It is such a kind thing to say that my eyes smart. I move my chair close to his.
“She was much too hard on herself,” he elaborates.
I can only stare at him.
Which he does not notice. “Where’s little Gabe? It cheers me up to see that kid. He’s starting to look like her, don’t you think?”
“Oh, Daddy,” I say.
My father sobs, wrenching, hoarse gasps of unassuageable suffering.
I throw myself at him, wrapping my arms around his heaving shoulders as if he were the child and I the inadequate representative of the real world.
His sounds are rusty. My eyes fill in helpless empathy as the firmament cracks.
Tam was the one who told me about the divorce. Neither of my parents knew how to relay the news, a subject they discussed so frequently and in a tenor sufficiently heated that Tam had successfully disentangled the story line.
“Act surprised,” she instructed me, “but not so surprised they’ll think you’re stupid.”
“I knew all about it,” I lied.
When they ushered me into the den and closed the door, I was as ill with trepidation as the innocent I was pretending to be. By the time they completed their stumbling narrative, I no longer needed to dissemble. While they uttered their sunny reassurances—“This has nothing to do with you and Tam. We love you both, we just can’t get along with each other”—I managed to throw up all over my father’s recently acquired leather armchair, my mother’s guilt offering to him. Its buttery skin bore the faint parameters of my unsimulated distress for a year, until my mother re-covered the chair and moved it to the basement.
Suddenly, people who do not know my mother or father well enough to have come to the funeral are crowding into the house, wanting to serve up original words that somehow congeal into bromides when they hit air.
Sitting on my mourner’s chair, I feel as if I have been in this posture since primitive times, a statue before which petitioners lay the muck of fruitless language. The front door opens and closes continually, and a swill of syllables pours over me: other people’s memories, their attempts to make sense of what cannot be explained.
“You remember Blanche,” says my mother.
I muster a civil face for our old neighbor.
“Roy, nice of you,” says my father. “Pull up a chair.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Nana says. “It’s Elizabeth Boyd. However did she—”
Just as I cannot say “thank you for coming” one more time, I hear the splatter of the mail above the din. Scuttling to the door, I am not surprised to find an envelope for me, unstamped. I tear the paper savagely.
On Laurie’s card are pedestrian words whose impact is immediate.
“Call late tonight. I’ll be home. L.”
Even as I explicate the lives of women who left their provincial homes to make their mark, I cannot deny the rapture of waiting.
“You’re an addict,” Tam would charge. She meant: To the incandescence of love, ambushed by every variant of longing.
Tam scorned my elevation of indolence to a virtue. She had a theory that women should marry young so that they could get on with the real assignment of life, which is work.
“Why do you think great men always had a woman at their side?” she said. “They knew: you can’t get anywhere without a stable family life.”
“What about Paris in the twenties?”
But Tam had only contempt for the life of bohemia, which she considered affected. “There are people who look cool and people who are cool,” she said. “If you have time to hang around in a café, how much work can you be doing?”
I tried not to take her words personally. I was, and remain, a devotee of cafés. My passion for them is also a testimony to that perpetual lassitude that so unsettled my sister.
“How many books did Winifred Holtby write?” she grilled me over the coffee I demanded we order at a lowbrow diner near her production studio.
“Fourteen. Didn’t you ask me this last time?”
“And how old was she when she died?”
“Thirty-seven. But she had no sex life,” I said in my defense. “I would have finished my doctorate long ago if it weren’t for sex.”
The truth is: falling in love, staying in love, assessing whether you’re still in love, and falling out of love can be a full-time job. Winifred had one unsatisfactory and very intermittent relationship with a man she’d known since her youth, who was damaged by the Great War and could not stay steadfast—or even in England.
Her most important love, by far, was her matchless friendship with Vera Brittain. And its great accomplishment, after sustaining them both through the irreparable losses of the war, was the way it released them to pour forth their work.
“You seem to know everything about her,” Tam continued. “Why can’t you wrap it up?”
“Because I can’t.”
“If I knew half as much,” Tam said, “I would have written my PhD, turned it into a book, and done the talk show circuit.”
True.
“Is it that you don’t think you know enough until you know every single thing?” Tam is so earnest she is scowling.
“I’m having an interpretive problem,” I said. Perhaps if I could find the correct balance of love and work, I could arrive at a point of view on Holtby. “Anyway,” I took the offensive, “what’s the rush?”
“You’re joking,” she said, searching my face.
“I wish I were.”
“But Simon’s so productive.”
“What does Simon have to do with me?”
“Isn’t he an inspiration?” Tam persisted.
“If you weren’t,” I said forthrightly, “why would he be?”
“Maybe you chose him because he’s like me.”
I thought of Simon at his desk, fifteen books open around him, papers on every chair and all over the floor. “No,” I said. Simon didn’t care if I finished my dissertation. In his view, an external honor has only instrumental significance.
“But aren’t you ambitious?” Tam pronounced the word as if it were in quotation marks.
“Very,” I said, to ward her off.
“I don’t get it. What do you want?”
“Romance. Maybe when my hormones fade, I’ll start to sprint.”
“I never know if you’re serious,” Tam said. “Then why not just marry Simon? Do you realize how old you are? Thirty-five and two months,” she said promptly. “Aren’t you afraid someone will beat you to your topic before you finish those coffees?”
“No one, and I mean no one, cares about these writers in America. It’s mine to lose, as you would say in your profession. So save your career advice for all those newly minted college grads who be
g you for internships.”
“What about money?” said my jackhammer sister. “Rent, food, travel. All those books. You’re not being kept, are you?”
I looked at her with incredulity. “Me? Can you imagine Simon forking over a wad of cash and saying, ‘Sweetheart, go buy yourself something pink and frothy.’ Tam, I have a tiny studio, no possessions, I use the library—and I do earn a living by teaching, remember?”
“What about kids?” she said, unable to restrain herself.
“You’ve done one too many stories on the ticking biological clock. I know it’s your job to be the older sister, but you have to trust that I’ll manage. I have so far.”
“I’d never forgive myself if I kept my mouth shut and deprived you of a family.”
“I didn’t know you could give me one.” I smiled to make sure she understood I was teasing.
But Tam was in pursuit of her prey. “Tell me about Simon’s family. Are they like us?”
“His parents are in England. He’s an only child who was sent away to school when he was seven. And he knows nothing about us, either.”
I did not want to admit to Tam that between Simon’s British reticence and my disinclination to consider him a boyfriend, we spent our time in an arrested present tense. Fortunately, he was not here. If Simon had been sitting with us, Tam would have found out everything, unto the tenth generation.
“You’re impossible,” she capitulated.
“Call late tonight. I’ll be home. L.”
It was a letter that precipitated the history of Nana’s contrition regarding her sister. When Nell traveled to New York for a lighthearted summer weekend, and met the retiring professor to whom she inexplicably took a fancy, and wed him without consulting anyone, she knew within a year that her marriage was a catastrophe.
For the first time in her heedless life, she wrote to Nana to beseech her, with atypical deference, for her sanction: it might be best, she proposed, for her to leave her new husband, despite her early pregnancy. Could she move in with Nana and her family until she got back on her feet?
Nana, who never quit a task before it was completed with excellence, or tolerated within herself a rash thought or injudicious deed, composed several drafts of her response before she sent it.
“Be loyal to those duties willingly undertaken,” she wrote.
Since that day, she carried as legitimately hers the responsibility for the ensuing suffering of Nell’s daughters.
Years ago, on an aimless Sunday afternoon, looking at shoe boxes of correspondence moved from one apartment to the next, I resolved to sort the notable from the trivial, to refine my collection to the essence of meaningful exchange. No more letters confirming hotel reservations of vacations long past. No more overtures from conferences not in my field.
Reaching into a box, I drew a routine note from Tam, giving me her arrival time in New York. The letter was eight years old. I tore it into tiny fragments and valiantly pitched the no-longer-legible remains into the garbage.
A second later I was subject to such thrashing anxiety I had to shove the boxes back into the closet and slam the door. It was all I could do to stop myself from reconstructing that letter, lying so poignantly in the wastebasket, my sister obliterated scrap by scrap.
SEVEN
AT THREE IN THE MORNING, I AM SITTING OPPOSITE Laurie in a club downtown and west, a neighborhood I do not know. We are mesmerized, downing one bottle of wine and then another, like besotted teenagers on a dock at night, daring each other to leap into the water.
My heart has not quieted since I walked out of the house, into the booth of this underground club not unlike the cafés of our youth, where the way we moved and dreamed was the constitution of a new era.
Part of me is mocking the pathos of my return. But irony is extinguished by desire, which will not be tamped down by any paltry appeal to reason.
The club dims until Laurie is a wraith—shadowed hair, gleaming eye, mouth engraved. He is dark, but I am ablaze, as if I have guzzled light, the reincarnation of first love compounded by grief.
The last set begins. After a single chord, I recognize the song Laurie played for me in his room the night our friendship alchemized into love.
An anarchy of refusal electrifies my body, scalp to sole, defying all the chastening elders who relish denunciation, who issue their trivializing edicts about maturity and acceptance and compromise.
I do not have to listen to you.
“Don’t do it,” says Tam.
Or you.
The lead singer takes the mic. “It was homeward bound one night on the deep.”
Laurie sets down his glass.
The singer’s voice wails. “I dreamed a dream and thought it true—”
Laurie’s fingers cross the dented metal of the table. Between my legs is a metronome of coveting.
Stand, it says.
I stand.
Move, it says.
And I move.
If there is a price for what I am about to do, I’ll pay it willingly—anything to be restored to this perfection. I lean into the space between us. My hands are on his shoulders, my body porous, bones aligned. When Laurie splays his fingers against me, everything else is banished.
This is the velocity of lust. We press into each other, defenseless.
Shift over, the waiters are gathered at the bar, watching. The singer has begun to improvise, changing keys. The door opens to a rush of icy air, but we are greedy. Laurie chants my name into my hair as if I must be his salvation.
I tilt my head to look at him. His gaze is unfamiliar. The crescents of his lashes descend to shield his eyes, and then his tongue is in my mouth.
I have expected an encounter with the novel, a first kiss in all its springy delight. But we are not new. Laurie’s body may seem as it was then, but our kiss is stoked by mortality. Votaries, pilgrims, we are exacting revenge against everything wrong with this flawed world.
Laurie and I move toward the door, spellbound.
“Home,” he says.
“Eve,” Tam yelled through the bathroom door. “Your time is up.”
Sixteen years old, I was getting ready for my first official date with Laurie. When I finally opened the door, my sister waved her arms in disgust. “It reeks in here.”
“Too much?” I held up the perfume bottle.
She relented. “It will fade by the time he comes,” she said, opening the window.
Cool air began to dissolve the fog of the mirror as I toweled my hair.
“How can you stand there like that?” Tam was huffy.
“Like what?”
“You’ve got nothing on.”
“Every morning we get ready in this bathroom. And every morning I’ve got nothing on. I’m your sister,” I told her. “Ta-da.”
“Very funny.”
“What’s your problem?”
“My problem?” she said. “I’m not the one with the problem.”
“And I am?”
“Look”—she pointed to the flat green box open next to the sink—“you used up all my blush.”
“I haven’t touched your blush in months.”
“Well, you should have bought me a new one when you were done with mine.”
“I’ll buy you a new one tomorrow,” I said expansively, stifling any evidence that my swooning love was gamier for the undernote of Tam’s ill temper. She did not want Laurie, whom she treated as a lapdog. But she had to be the first to have a boyfriend; we both acknowledged her hegemony.
Tam was not satisfied. “You know I hate it when my things are ruined.”
“Your blush isn’t ruined. And you shouldn’t have lent it to me if you didn’t expect me to use it.”
“I said you could use it. I didn’t say you could use it up.”
“Tam, this is ridiculous.”
“So you say.”
We were not, I understood, arguing about her blush.
Laurie lifts my hair and pushes it back to bare my face. I t
ake his lip between my teeth and bite. He pulls away and then kisses me with such intensity I am momentarily afraid.
“Not yet,” I say without breath. “I know what to do.” Not his house, and certainly not mine. “If you pick me up at ten on Saturday night—”
“Too long to wait,” he says.
I will pay obeisance to my mother and my father until nightfall on Saturday. Then I’ll sit in the car beside Laurie, away, beyond language, the collapse of present and past that will be curative.
Looking at him, I tell myself the truth. I am a person who wants to strip the skin from my life, pare away the facade, whatever the consequences.
On trips abroad I would stand, riveted, before tin market stalls where great sides of pig hung boldly while merchants fanned away flies from the raw, red flesh. Or stop on the street to stare at a clump of fur and offal.
I had to see what had been hidden—the guts, coiled, steaming. Tam learned to summon me to the site of a corpse while she stood at a distance, appalled. No matter how intently I looked, I could not reconcile the distorted form before me with a once-living animal. Seconds ago, it had been a sinuous cat, stretching on a grassy sliver of the road, and now: bones snapped, clotted blood, pelt ground into gravel, what had been clandestine revealed to every passerby.
No queasy thrill, however, compares to the terror of this week, the intimate unraveling of my sister.
Before my mother’s house, somnolent near dawn, Laurie raises his hand through the open car window in salute. “Saturday night. Ten,” he asserts, as if to convince himself.
I do not turn around. Tripping up the walk, coat undone, I ease the front door closed behind me with a truant’s caution. I will be in the kitchen, cupping my mug of black tea to inhale the pungent steam as I surface into the day.
“I’m not going to ask you where you were.” Nana rends the peace, blocking my path in the hall.
“Good,” I say, assuming a veneer of casualness betrayed by my swollen mouth and matted hair.
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