At the end of the meal, Nana helps Abby into her fur coat, two old women under five feet. While Nana grapples with the hook and eye beneath Abby’s chin, Abby looks at my mother and chants in the singsong voice of a child, “I’m taller than she is.”
Perhaps life sears a sister’s archetype into one’s soul at the outset, and nothing she says or does for the rest of her days affects the inaugural image. Whenever Nana speaks of Nell, she sees not an aged woman alone but the glowing girl who drew men magically.
Years ago, after we had recounted the Seder’s tale of exile and liberation, my grandmother said to me, “Your hair looks like I could turn you upside down and mop the floor with it.”
I must have looked dismayed.
“It’s sticking out all over,” she explained, as if her footnote made the original comment acceptable.
When Nana hurts me, which is not infrequently, her barbs feel less personal than wounds inflicted by other people.
“Do you know what this haircut cost?” I said then, recovering to defend my single vanity.
Later I heard her report the statistic to Abby. Nana and her sister remember when a five-pound tin of salmon cost a nickel.
There is a moment in the Seder when I, the youngest, would leave the table to open the front door for the prophet Elijah, messenger of a redeemed world. Tomorrow night, I will part from this family to orchestrate, once and for all, my deliverance.
In bed at last, I imagine I’ll be dreamy with anticipation, that gauzy suspension of vigilance. But sleep is my new enemy. Desperate, I try an old tactic, one I used on pallets in strange cities. I slow my breathing until I am in Nana’s cottage, reading a novel, one of her favorites, while the porch planks beneath the rocking chair creak companionably.
The summer I turned eleven, with Tam at camp, my mother invited me on a grand tour of Europe’s capitals. In a cinematic fantasy of mother-daughter rapport, we would flit from Venice to Rome, Geneva to Paris.
While she described our suite in London, she gave my grandmother a look that did not escape my observation. My mother was conjuring a vision of frivolity to lift the heavy-heartedness that subjugated me whenever my parents’ disputes assumed their new character—a terrifying indifference in the face of which their words of recrimination and despair would have been welcome.
Nana listened as I tried, ineptly, to decline in a way that would not hurt my mother. I knew instinctively that my trailing after her while she deliberated the fate of her marriage would undo me. Notwithstanding what I saw every day, I wanted the fairy tale, an invented past of peace in the house.
“Why not send Eve to the cottage?” Nana said.
My mother looked horrified. “She’ll be bored to death.”
Nana drew inward.
“Eve?” my mother checked.
“I want to be with Nana,” I said, as amazed as my mother that I, who already longed to travel, was rejecting such munificence to spend a summer alone with my grandmother.
“Settled,” said Nana.
My mother could not help saying to me, “When I was your age I couldn’t wait to get back to the city. Soon you’ll be sending me letters about how you’re jumping out of your skin.”
Obdurate as she, I would not yield.
Nana and I stayed by ourselves, faithful to our routine. She liked the first hours of daylight. I slept until nearly noon. We waited the requisite hour after my breakfast and her lunch before we went swimming, Nana paddling steadily in her skirted suit, her tireless crawl estimable, I imitating her until I was short of breath, emerging before she did to lie on my sun-warmed towel next to hers.
On the porch, I consumed titillating bodice rippers from the town library. Nana completed the New Statesman acrostic in ink. Occasionally, she would glance benignly at the lurid paperbacks beside my chair. It was as if she had declared an amnesty. Never before or since has Nana been so merciful.
She might tell me about her childhood summers at the cottage, about the Trent-Severn Waterway and the Kawartha Lakes, how she worked at a nearby dairy during the flu of ’18 to build up her constitution, or about the way farmers and merchants, timber barons and travelers bought passage from town to town.
The waterway continues down the Severn River to Lake Simcoe, churning waters tamed by massive dams, and on to Georgian Bay. Its journey spans the distance between the Jews that Nana’s family alone represented, and the rest of Toronto’s Jews with enough means to summer away from the hot city in places like Bell Ewart and Roches Point.
How Nana’s parents and grandparents found their way to this town, and why they were content to spend a century of summers in a place they must have chosen because its social life was cordially but certainly closed to them: these are among the mysteries Nana chooses not to dispel.
Long past supper, when evening descended with the lenience of a northern summer, light departing like a reluctant guest, my grandmother made me chocolate pudding, quivering in the speckled blue bowls she and her sisters had scraped clean with the same tarnished spoons.
In her presence, the reproachful voices were hushed. There was no one to save. Nana’s reticence was a kind of tact, and I flourished alongside her.
At night she turned on the radio to Starlight Serenade; we played gin to its swing tunes. My contribution to her education was rummy 500, a game she sometimes allowed herself to win, to my consternation.
Then we would go out, arm in arm, to look at the moon. Both of us liked the harvest moon, hanging low over the water, a burnt orange whose monthly flux was dependably changeable.
When Nana went upstairs, I lay under the maroon satin quilt on the living room couch to read. Then I darted into my bed on the porch, clasping the hot water bottle she had placed beneath the sheet, until I fell into sleep.
FIFTH
DAY
NINE
DELPHINIUM, FOXGLOVE, LARKSPUR, ROSE.
Each beguiling word releases, like a crystal stopper from an old perfume flask, the seduction of reading. On this bed I drowned in tales of love, courtships on winding paths and hidden terraces, bosoms bared in English gardens.
Lavender, cowslip, valerian, may.
Light saturates my wall and ceiling. I stretch deliciously, then amble down the stairs. My mother will make me coffee. We’ll lounge about as day compounds into evening, shiva postponed for the Sabbath until my story can begin.
But the kitchen table is strewn with breakfast dishes, orange juice pulp dulling the inside of a glass, blueberry preserves staining the china, a napkin askew.
On the counter is a note in her writing: “At kaddish with Gil.”
It is Saturday morning. The stove clock says 11:11. I am the sister and daughter who is supposed to be standing beside my mother to say kaddish. But even if I rush into my clothes, I cannot be at services before they end.
Communal prayer was my father’s domain. On Sabbath mornings, my mother stayed blissfully in bed.
“It’s her time,” my father would tell us as Tam and I closed the front door to accompany him.
This shape-shifting of my irreconcilable parents—my mother at prayer, my father who knows where?—abrades my serenity.
I pour myself a glass of wine from last night’s bottle, climbing the stairs to resume my delinquency. If she wanted to wake me, she could have. But a miasma of fear has conquered whatever well-being I have mustered.
I need to kill time, to slam together the accordion hours between Laurie and me until tonight.
At the pulse of his name, I know exactly how to spend this morning. Up in my room, alone in the house, I will read every one of his love letters.
Nerviness subdued, I feel quite triumphant as I sip my wine, which has improved overnight. Like me, I think to myself. I will take down the hatbox in my closet, unfold each of the letters whose postmarks I once knew by heart, and review them line by line.
“You, you, you, you, you.”
I have not sat on the tufted stool of my vanity for years, but my mother will
not part with this furniture. It was hers when she was a little girl, and she claims to be saving it for my daughter.
Every time I come home, I backslide, pitching what I’ve worn onto the floor, my open suitcase buried beneath a mass of wrinkled black. I never hang up my clothes. And so it takes me a long minute to register what is amiss.
Resting my glass on the vanity, I am facing the rococo mirror, its enameled flowers and ropey metal vines framing a view of my closet’s interior. But the highest shelf is bare. No hatbox.
I flip around to the closet to stand on my tiptoes, peering, in case I’m wrong. But I do not see the outside curve of the box.
After the divorce, my mother gave up her annual appearance at my father’s traditional synagogue and donated to the Salvation Army her collection of hats. I requisitioned a hatbox papered in blue scrolls and rosettes in which to store my letters from Laurie.
On my early trips home from New York, engrossed in the pursuit of love, I ignored the box. Why would I go to the kitchen and haul the step stool upstairs to exhume it? Every romantic knows that letters reread after the expiration of love lose their potency.
Now, in a rage whose acceleration is dizzying, I am obsessed with the idea that the letters are gone.
I stalk the house, opening closet doors. My mother’s gypsy dresses, scarves, and jewelry are resplendent even at rest. On my father’s side, I still expect to find his sober jackets hung on polished wings of hangers, shoes in martial pairs. But his closet has become a jumble of leftovers: an electric broom missing its dust cup, my mother’s out-of-season clothes, fraying straw beach hats, an ironing board.
In the spare room, where my uncle is staying, the closet is vacant except for his shirts and a full-length photograph of Nana’s grandparents. My uncle is as tidy and economical as he was in his youth. His leather kit bag, mottled and worn, is the one he took to the cottage or its exact replica.
Scampering past the uncurtained hall window, I tear down to the basement. Perhaps my mother decided to keep my few belongings in the cold storage room, where our camp trunks are stacked, net bags of potatoes and onions draped over them. I yelp as I stub my toe on the filing cabinet, containing all the household documents I would pore over sneakily: life insurance, my parents’ will, our old report cards.
The hatbox would not fit into these drawers, but to honor the memory of my foraging I rifle through the files.
Even in summer, it’s freezing down here. I shiver in my T-shirt and underwear.
In the third drawer is a crammed manila folder, its label obscured by homemade valentines and lace doily concoctions. I press the file’s contents against the front and read the name on the tab: “Eve.”
Here are my childhood clevernesses, saved by my mother. “When you girls are all grown up in houses of your own,” she used to say, “I’ll give you the beautiful cards and drawings you made me.”
Although my apartments are temporary, I am nevertheless stung by the contrast in my mother’s confidence. Tam’s file is probably in her home office, not a paper out of place, while mine languishes like a spinster. I paw through misspelled Mother’s Day cards and new year resolves to improve, but these relics only amplify my foreboding.
The edge of the metal drawer digs into my stomach. I have a third-person glimpse of myself, nearly naked in my mother’s basement, and think I hear my family calling, “Eve, Eve.”
Alarmed, I take the two flights of stairs so quickly I am gasping on the landing. On the way to my warming wine, I pass the closed door of Tam’s room.
It has been five days since the funeral, and I have not gone inside.
“If that hatbox is in your room,” I say as I turn the knob, “I’ll kill you.”
“Tell me how to be sexy,” said Tam. In a week she would be seventeen.
I was reading on my bed, oblivious.
“Eve!” My sister looked down at me, demanding my attention.
When I am reading, there is a lag until sound turns into meaning.
“I want to know how to be sexy,” said Tam, “and I want you to teach me.”
I put down my book.
“How to be sexy,” I repeated stupidly.
“It can’t be what you wear,” Tam said, “because you dress like a schlump.”
Undeniable.
“And it can’t be what you say, because you have an effect before you open your mouth.”
“But when I open my mouth, it’s better.”
“Why?” Tam sat down.
“Because when they say something back, I can tell if they’re interesting.”
“I’m cute,” said Tam, “but no one finds me sexy.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“Are you asking because you want a boyfriend or because you want guys to want you?”
“I don’t see why that matters.”
“Are you saying it’s none of my business?” I said. “Because if you are, then don’t ask me.”
Tam glared at me. “It isn’t any of your business, but if I have to tell you to get you to tell me, I will.”
“Don’t bother,” I said, closing the book on my finger and getting ready to flounce out. “Because I have no idea what makes me sexy. Or anyone.”
“Eve.” She was imperious.
“You know, Tam, you want me to give everything away while you say nothing. But I’m finally too old to fall for it.”
I was thirteen.
“I think you want a boyfriend,” I said intrepidly. “And I’m sure you’re going to have one any minute. Make up your steel-trap mind, and he won’t be able to resist you.”
“He is resisting me,” she said.
Suddenly, I was mad at him instead of her. “Who is he? What idiot wouldn’t see how great you are?”
“He likes me as a friend,” she said. “What a cliché. But he wants to sleep with Marcie.”
“Everyone wants to sleep with Marcie,” I said. “But that’s because she’s willing to sleep with anyone who asks.”
“Still,” Tam said.
“Do you really want a guy who is the kind of person who wants to sleep with Marcie?”
Tam thought for a second. “Yes.” Then she heard herself—and laughed.
“Is it Richard?” I hazarded.
She blushed so classically it was embarrassing.
“Richard,” I confirm, “is the kind of guy everybody wants.”
She looked at me with apprehension.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m only at the flirting stage. But if you’re not willing to sleep with him—”
“I’m not,” she said.
“I don’t know if there’s any way you can get him.”
“I need breasts. Bigger ones.”
“Not even that would do it. And you’d look absurd.” I was already a half foot taller than Tam.
“You’re saying it’s hopeless,” she said.
I sat down again. “You have to act as if you don’t care—and then mean it.”
“I must have a boyfriend this year.” Anticipating my question, she said, “Because I need to go hear TV journalists speak downtown when it’s too far from the subway.”
“You need a boyfriend so someone will drive you downtown?”
Tam nodded without shame.
“Taxis. Ever hear of them? Then you don’t have to talk to the driver, or kiss him, or pretend to be interested in his brothers and sisters.”
“But I’ll look more grown-up with one,” she said.
“Why is that important?”
“Because when I go up to ask a question, they’ll take me more seriously.”
“When you retire, will you live on the ocean side of Florida or the bay?”
“I have to be a broadcaster,” said my sister.
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“No need to be crude,” she said. “I want to be on TV by the time I’m twenty-five, and I’m already sixteen.”
“So old.”
&n
bsp; “People who are very successful,” Tam reported, “knew what they wanted to do at an early age.”
“I’d better hurry.”
“Ha, ha. Do you actually have any idea?”
“Ha, ha. Actually, I don’t.” I opened my book.
“Eve.”
“Okay, I do.”
“You do?” she said eagerly.
“I want to spend the rest of my life—”
Sloth was the biggest transgression in Tam’s copybook.
“—reading in my pajamas,” I said.
My hand on her doorknob, I am rescued by the phone.
“Hello,” I say. A statement.
“Well, hello,” says Simon. “You’re out of breath.”
“I am.”
“Why would that be?” He does not sound like himself.
“What’s wrong?”
“Why should anything be wrong?” he says. “More than what already is. How are you managing?”
Now I know what I hear in his voice: worry, an emotion not in Simon’s inventory.
Before Tam bequeathed me her explosive little missive, I was proud of my faithfulness. Not for me the squalid secrecy of overlapping lovers and forbidden men. When I came home to Toronto, I could be a bad girl on high moral ground, leaving me immune to Tam’s fretting jabs and Nana’s censure.
“Look what’s happened,” I indict her. “You’re turning me into you.” A conniver, like a cheesy country song.
“I can’t talk,” I say to Simon, as if I have an urgent appointment.
“I’m noticing. Have you decided when you’re coming back?”
My silence is telling.
“Because I’d like to meet you at the airport,” he says recklessly.
You’re breaking the rules, I want to cry, imagining him, roses in hand, waiting for me at the gate.
“If that’s okay,” he plunges on.
“Simon, I promised my mother—” Great. Now I’m a liar, too.
“Of course.” He reclaims his dignity. “Will you call me when you can?”
“Yes,” I say. Which is not perjury.
Evening Page 9