Nana is invisible behind the plastic tubs of food she is carrying. A stripe of masking tape on each bears her indecipherable handwriting. “But I hope you know what you’re doing.”
The echo of Gil’s earlier words is deflating.
“What are you doing?” I inch past her.
“We have to eat tonight, don’t we?” She rests the food on the kitchen table as she follows me.
“Why? Why tonight?”
I sound moronic.
“It’s Friday.” Nana is impatient. “Friday morning. Six a.m.”
She looks as self-possessed as if she were about to deliver a lecture. “We don’t sit tonight,” she says pointedly.
For a moment I picture our family standing as we eat. Then I remember: tonight is the Sabbath, when mourning is temporarily suspended.
“You’d better pull yourself together.” Nana enlightens me, “You have a half hour until people come.”
“I’m not showing up this morning.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Eve—”
“Don’t tell me you’re surprised.”
She does not contradict me.
“Nana, lie to me.”
“Even if I tell you it’s wrong?”
“Even if,” I affirm. “You taught us it’s important to be consistent.”
“Now don’t you sweet-talk me. It won’t wash, you know.”
I know.
“What will you do?” Nana braces herself.
“Sleep,” I say. “I’m exhausted.”
“Nobody told you to—”
“You’re right,” I deflect her. “And, yes, I’ll take responsibility for the consequences.”
“Then there’s nothing to say.”
When I hug her, she is so light I could pick her up.
Nana disengages slightly less immediately than I expect.
As the morning prayer floats toward me, I burrow under my quilt, saying the words my father inherited from his immigrant parents to beckon the angels who would protect us as we slept.
On my right hand, Mikha-El. On my left hand, Gavri-El. In front of me, Uri-El. And in back of me, Repha-El.
White wings filter the daylight. I am standing at the center of a loft in a dress that shocks, no stockings, and a preposterous hat, about to embark on a journey. My students are throwing me a confetti party, with seed cakes and baklava, bidding me a safe return. They pile wedding gifts into my arms.
The groom is blurred, but I know him. Laurie’s arm is around me even before the opening syllables of the ceremony. My parents are vaguely present, although, in dream logic, Nana has walked me down the aisle.
Tam is ahead of me, under the canopy. She is wearing a bridesmaid’s dress and a matching bow in her hair, looking exactly as she did, except that she is made of light.
“You see?” I say to Laurie, elated. “It wasn’t true.”
Radiant, I savor the perfume of the flowers over our heads, the silver goblet, the aura of achievement, when Tam in her luminosity mouths some words I cannot hear. Although she is not entirely flesh, I can still read her face. She is admonishing me, first in a temperate way, as if she does not want to curdle my pleasure over a minor matter, and then with increasing anger as I ignore her and motion to the assembled guests that we proceed.
My sister gestures wildly, but no one else can see her. Rather, smiles of satisfaction abound; my change in status has been met with unanimous approval. The hordes surrounding us clap with excitement.
“Kiss the groom,” they are calling out. “We want to see you kiss the groom.”
Tam’s half-mouth exaggerates what she is saying, but the more I stare at her, the more she dissolves.
Slowly, spitefully, everyone turns gray. Laurie disappears. My dress is red at the hem, color seeping upward until I am the most vivid apparition in the room. Then liquid scarlet begins to slip down my back, viscous filaments, while my sister’s voice enunciates words, precise, explicit, meaningless.
FOURTH
DAY
EIGHT
TOO LATE. TOO LATE.
When I wake up, it is past noon. The dream has invaded my brain like a shifty criminal. I dress furiously, as the melodrama of Tam’s note casts a baffling shadow over my lost morning.
Downstairs, I take a detour to the kitchen, lured by the tang of my mother’s soup. I dip my finger into the pot and screech.
“Tam! I mean, Eve!” My mother corrects her exclamation automatically. Not that my sister was the type to contaminate the soup.
I am clobbered by the recognition that I no longer know what type Tam was.
“Do you need a bandage?” says my mother.
She is cooking. She knows where the bandages are. My mother has returned, at least for Friday night dinner, a command performance even after the divorce. “Families that eat together”—she adapted the proverb to suit herself.
“We start at six,” she reminds me. “Sharp. You don’t want to incur Nana’s wrath.”
“Added wrath.”
“We count on Nana to hold things together,” my mother says. “And her wrath over our missteps is one reliable way.”
“Our missteps?” I emphasize the pronoun.
“You’re not the only one she thinks is out of line.”
“Was it hard to be her daughter?” I want my mother to surrender.
“You mean, is it hard? It isn’t Nana’s fault she gave birth to a hedonist. Even as we were fighting, I felt sorry for her. I was not the right daughter for my mother.”
Touché.
Nana’s austerity is intrinsic to her character. She asks little and requires less of the material world, for which I do admire her. All her life, my grandmother has been made uneasy by her mother’s native lushness. Nana’s ancestors passed along a Canadian thriftiness that resists the unruly heart. From time to time, Nana will announce: She has no patience for shilly-shallying and dilly-dallying.
Before Confederation, my family was in Canada. Nana has always conducted herself as the last heir of the British Empire. She pronounces the “h” in “white” or “why” like the Anglophile teachers of my childhood and has the chief attribute of aristocracy: no awareness whatever of her patrician carriage and habit of thought.
We were never rich but earned a stature that felt like wealth. Nana’s cousins inhabited Canada from Victoria to St. John’s, where they held the offices of council member or alderman. Such attainments were, as Nana’s bearing implied, only to be expected. Her work as a scientist was unique to the point of talk, and yet if I questioned her about her accomplishments, she claimed they had all merely happened to her, a matter of luck or timing.
It is a maxim in the study of women’s lives that remarkable women will ascribe their success to providence, rather than concede their struggle, over many years, against adversity. However skillfully I introduce the subject of her ambition or gift, Nana remains infuriatingly vague. Great-Aunt Abby says that by the time Nana was three, everyone knew she was brilliant, “a flash.” I love the slang, which evokes the sepia photograph of Nana, Abby, and Nell decked out in identical organza dresses, ringlets adorning their small, serious faces.
In an essential way, Nana cannot be known. Like any unrequited love, she is all the more intriguing for it.
Outside, light gilds the gray city, rendering it briefly beautiful. The trees are studded with the green cocoons of burgeoning leaves. Melting snow surges toward the gutters. Above me, the sky is flawless.
Everything seems drenched in futurity, but I am cleft: Why is the season intimating rebirth? Soon I will be baring my arms to the elbow, to the shoulder, sliding into sandals, while Tam dwells in a winter without reprieve.
Yet even as I am afflicted by remorse—for how can it be that I, her younger sister, am walking on the Toronto street while her unceasing enterprise is stilled forever—I am galvanized by a new vitality, practically skipping beneath the great arches of the trees as I head to the main avenue.
The world is soaked in color. I p
ass the glasses store, the pharmacy, and the arcade with the post office and coffee shop. These stores have been the object of my disparagement for their ground-floor modesty, unchanging window displays, and laminate decor. Now I am pierced by tenderness at the sight of them. On this block, at my mother’s urging, I got contact lenses, debated between two lipsticks and bought both, drank my first cup of coffee, pretending I was a veteran, and mailed a letter to Laurie, running to the post office instead of the corner box to give the envelope a half-day start across the Atlantic.
My recollected life, my crucible.
As I stride, I am making a list: Look into teaching a continuing-education course in British women’s fiction. Find an apartment in Forest Hill Village; there are a couple of late-night cafés clustered there, walking distance to my mother’s house, until Laurie and I—
“What will it be?” says the woman behind the counter.
I am the only customer. The shoppers of crowded Friday afternoons are already setting their tables for the Sabbath. Behind the glass are frosted chocolate doughnuts, gingerbread men with blue sugar buttons, iced cupcakes.
Simon does not know the glasses store. He did not buy licorice string and firecrackers in Duncan’s Corner Shoppe. He has never stepped foot in Coleman’s Bakery.
The woman taking my order, her hair in a net, is the same one who bagged my after-school treats in high school, the one who accommodated my dashes on the way to the airport for the blueberry buns I could get only in Canada. I recognize her, despite the years, but after more than a decade I am blessedly anonymous, one of thousands who have passed through her portals for the desserts of birthdays and holidays.
“Three of those.” I point to the buns, plump with preserves.
She lifts each bun from the tray, counting under her breath with the Hungarian accent I remember, and wraps it carefully in its own waxed paper sheet, positioning one after another into the cardboard box she has expertly assembled.
“Hold it up,” she demonstrates, taking my money.
The mundane nature of this transaction fills me with thanksgiving.
“I was very sorry to hear,” she says.
Whiplashed, I scramble to leave, forgetting to thank her. As I crest the hill above our street, impaled by a stitch in my side, I see the redbrick library, sanctuary of my youth, haven of my Toronto-loathing childhood.
What I need this minute is library luck, books that call out from the shelves the instant I pass them, a novel just released, the second volume of an out-of-print British memoir. Even in New York, I keep my Toronto library card in my wallet.
God of reading, heed my prayer.
I cruise the shelves, trying to silence my raggedy breath, unsure where to start. Fiction is not in its place. Records, tapes, and videos have dislodged the biography section, now at the back. The oak table on which I used to take research notes is cluttered with headsets and monitors.
Canada’s self-consciousness about its culture has led to the tagging of all homegrown volumes with a red maple leaf, a chauvinism unthinkable in America or England. I am scanning the top shelf and the lowest, applying my theory that the best books at eye level have already been borrowed.
Nothing.
Midway, under “M,” is the journal of a woman pioneer of Upper Canada. Perhaps I should reread her account of life in the bush, a guide to lighting out into uncharted territory. But skimming the terse entries, I do not find wisdom. Once again, she clears rocks, feeds slop to pigs: not one leap from the quotidian.
I move like a crab along the aisle, but the spines are toneless, interchangeable, no snap of “choose me.” At the bookend, straightening up before I turn, I glimpse a man seated before a video screen.
It is three o’clock, but there, unmistakable, is the poignant curve of my father’s back, his resigned shoulders. Founding partner of Toronto’s preeminent law firm, emblem of first-generation accomplishment, my father is hunched over the table in the middle of the afternoon, contracted to ordinary, like a senior citizen passing time before dinner and bed.
I squint to focus, trying to identify what he is watching. A documentary, black-and-white: I can just make out the wasted bodies, odiously exposed, in the arms of American soldiers.
Even from my vantage point I know these images, Allied footage of the liberation of the Jews. Frozen before the screen, my father is self-medicating in his own bizarre fashion.
I force myself not to interrupt him. He will watch or read anything about Jews, especially Jews in jeopardy. Unlike Nana, who is fully at home in the country of her birth and never admits the prejudice she confronted, my father grew up above the store. He still feels he is in Canada on sufferance.
My body is gutted; no one but Tam can find this situation properly hilarious. Immediately, I am suffused with self-pity, consigned to a lifetime of solitary rue because my sister had the effrontery to leave me, with only her stupid secret to keep me company.
Retreating into the biography stacks, I wonder if I should challenge my father’s irregular solace, when, before my eyes, face out, is the quickie biography of my sister, published when she reappeared on the air after Ella was born, the jacket covered with gushy copy about the woman who has it all.
The room’s natural light is failing. I know absolutely: even if I stay for hours, I will not find the right book.
“Hi, Daddy,” I say brightly. My voice is tinny, counterfeit.
He spins around, animated. “Hi, sweetheart,” the old lingo, as he hastily stops the tape.
Why is he not in his office, meeting with clients to plan their estates?
My father unfolds himself from the chair, insisting that he carry the bakery box. We do not mention Auschwitz. Escorting me, he walks on the curb side so that I will not get splashed by an aggressive car. He is protective, and I am peeved. What is he doing in my mother’s neighborhood?
“Guess who’s coming to dinner,” says my sister.
This is the time, before we lit candles, when Tam and I would squabble over whose turn it was to set the table. As the last of the winter day ignited the western windows, we dashed downstairs to fold napkins and place the wine cups above the knives. In the kitchen, my mother would be ladling gravy over the browning chicken and placating my father about the fact that again, and indeed every week, she was late for the Sabbath. His religion bug, as she called it, was decidedly not catching.
We are a faux family tonight, my parents artificially united, flanked by Nana and my uncle. Great-Aunt Abby has rallied herself to come. But Ben cannot be here. Ella and Gabriel, exhausted by mourning they are unable to name, are already asleep.
As my father sings to greet the Sabbath, the melody transports me to the cottage, my just-washed hair dampening the back of my shirt as Tam and I harmonize while the lake turns from silver to black.
“I want to breathe you into me,” her letter states, insidiously.
I want her out of my brain.
Nana is at the table with her sister. Gil is at the table with his sister. But on the other side of my father, Tam’s chair is empty.
Looking at my reduced family, I console myself: by tomorrow night I will be lying with Laurie, eluding all comparisons.
I kiss my great-aunt and open my mouth to speak, but my father is impatient. He pushes back his chair, drawing himself up. All of us stand. As he begins the blessing over the wine, his voice is like a damaged record, the needle jumping.
I concentrate on the potatoes, heaped in a china bowl, salted skin delectable under the flattering light of the chandelier. It is all I can do not to dump the entire bowl onto my plate when Nana finally passes it to me.
Before everyone has been served, I stuff half a potato into my mouth.
Nana looks at me askance. I want to tell her that the potatoes are sublime, restorative, but I am not willing to risk escalation. Already I am in the kitchen later, eating these potatoes cold from the fridge, rosemary speckling my lips, calculating how many I can pilfer before anyone will notice.
/>
My mother eats little. No one says Tam’s name, as if without the audience of visitors we have reached an accord not to mention her. I am waiting for the spasm of tension between my parents, the customary dissonance on this seventh day of peace, but the cease-fire holds.
“So,” says my great-aunt, “how’s life treating you in New York?”
“The same.” I am wary.
“How is—?”
“Simon? Fine,” I preclude her.
My effort is unsuccessful.
“I’m surprised he didn’t come,” my mother says.
“I wouldn’t let him. I told him it was out of the question.”
“How long have you been seeing each other?” says Abby sweetly.
I ask each person what he or she would like to drink, my childhood job, and go into the kitchen. The door I’ve swung shut does not insulate me from my family’s murmuring.
“Let me tell you right now,” I sum up inauspiciously on my return. “I’m the same person I was a week ago. And I’m not going to marry Simon just because—”
“There’s no fear of that, is there?” Nana says tartly. “You gallivant into town, free as a lark, of all times to—”
“I must be a wanton woman”—I do not let her finish—“as you suspected.”
My mother closes her eyes. Gil looks as if, with the slightest encouragement, he would take cover beneath the table.
“Scaredy-cat,” I mouth to him.
With relief, I listen to Nana’s condemnation. Simon, Laurie, death, and loyalty get their representative share of her attention. If I continue to goad her about my purported dissoluteness, perhaps my parents will send me to my room. But there is no Tam to analyze the scene with me, joint commentator on another Stanley Cup of domestic drama.
Dessert takes place in awful silence. In penance, Nana offers me a second piece of cake, although I have not touched the first. My father moves forward in his chair, presiding over a meeting in camera with no negotiation he can execute, while my mother, eyes watery, looks at him in appeal, as if he can again be the exceedingly responsible man she married, believing he could make anything right.
Evening Page 8