“Then I’ll keep checking in.”
So much for the man with whom I could never stop talking.
Tam’s room is not the lifeless shrine I feared. Ella and Gabriel have colonized it with board games and pull toys. When I open random drawers, I see that nothing is left of my sister. Unlike me, when she moved out, she threw away every childhood artifact. Tam was like a futuristic train, hurtling ahead in a whoosh of speeding silver. She loved a destination.
As a parting gesture, I fling open the closet door—where, on the corresponding shelf in her room, I find the hatbox.
Outraged, I clutch it as if Tam and I were in a tug-of-war.
“Mine,” I yell like a lunatic. “Mine, mine, mine.”
The letters, each in its envelope, look unimpeachable when I lift off the lid. Whatever they know, they are not disclosing.
I should have put a hair across the top, like detectives in the spy novels I devoured. The ribbons with which I had bundled the letters bisect each packet, but these meticulous bows are not mine.
I veer irrationally toward the idea that Tam is making me pay for my invasion of her secret drawer. “Pot calling the kettle black,” Nana would say.
“I hate you,” I say to her room, experimenting.
Until this week, I have considered myself a specialist in complexity, but now I am demolished by the surge and recoil of fury toward my sister.
A gust of nausea forces me to the floor. I picture my outspread fingers tightening compulsively around her neck. I cannot know why she chose—as she was dying—to toy with me. But I do know this: any hard-won reciprocity between Tam and me has capsized. She is smiling smugly in the willful afterlife she’s gained, and I am flailing.
The key turns in the front door. Gil and my mother are talking. I try not to slam Tam’s door as I scoot across the hall, hatbox in my arms.
By the time my mother calls my name, I am safely in the bathtub, scrubbing my flesh with a loofah in penitential fervor.
TEN
AT LUNCH I AM FIZZY WITH DESIRE, A TWO-YEAR-OLD with no attention span, food abandoned on my plate. I bat away the image of Tam’s gloating, cadaverous face. All I can envision is tonight, when I open the door to Laurie.
“You were always bored on Saturday afternoon.” In the kitchen, my mother presses her lips together to blend her lipstick. “Waiting for the sun to go down so Daddy would let you go out.”
My mother was the one who found the Sabbath unbearable, while I read on the couch, not noticing her or time’s passing.
“And you weren’t bored?” I say. “You drove Daddy insane once you didn’t want to keep it anymore.”
“I’m not sure that was fair of me.” She is thoughtful. “My family always did.”
“So what happened?”
“I rebelled. And the more your father clung to it, the more I wanted out. I turned him into my police.”
“But you must have talked about it before you got married. How you’d live. How you’d raise us.”
“He took it for granted. And so did I. He probably reminded me of Nana. The enforcer.”
“Given the sturm und drang,” I say, “it seems the sort of thing you would have discussed ahead of time.”
“But then I wouldn’t have had you girls.”
The incipient tears I see are not about me.
“Let’s go shopping,” I tell her. “Let’s go bowling. Let’s get out of here.”
No, let me find Laurie this second, away from you. And you, I say to my sister. Especially you.
“I need a quiet day at home. Besides, your father’s coming over.”
“Again?”
My father must be the occasion for the lipstick. “Now you guys are in harmony?” I put my hands on her shoulders and swivel her around so that we are once more face-to-face. “How often do you talk to him?”
“Every once in a while.”
“And he comes over?”
“If I invite him,” she says virtuously.
Where is Tam when I need her? What would she make of this saccharine prospect? I feel the past widening behind me, a wake of retroactive possibility.
What am I mourning—my parents’ marriage? My sister’s conversion into a ghost vixen? Or the terms of our understanding, upended like ruptured tectonic plates, baring my feeble assumptions.
“If you could do it all again,” I ask my mother, “would you leave him?”
I don’t know if I want her to say yes or no.
“But we can’t,” she says, surprisingly gentle. “Do it all again.”
The last time Tam and I had coffee at Fran’s, she had quizzed me as if I were a guest on her show.
“Tell me,” she said, leaning forward engagingly. “Why are you obsessed with that period?” She meant the British years between the wars. “They would never have accepted you as a Jew.”
“As if I didn’t know. I’ve read their diaries. ‘Oily Levantines.’”
“Would you rather live then?”
“A generation of women without men? Me?”
“But you’re not getting married anyway,” said Tam.
How could I explain to her, my seemingly logical sister, that the past has a bouquet, of white buttoned gloves, winter dusk, London streets, cloche hats, endless summer twilights in a Sussex garden, a walkway of pleached limes, and printed lists of privates killed in Ypres or the Somme. There are my women, as I think of them, striving to escape their Victorian upbringing, inventing their unconstrained lives, entering the public sphere with gusto, certain they had witnessed the war to end all wars—only to see within their lifetimes the ominous defeat of pleasure, virtuoso conversation extinct, a brilliant new world darkening.
Ages later, past eons of calculations, the remote stars finally pierce the sky. I have read every book in the house. I have paced. I have failed to nap. I have clocked the tempo of my parents’ speech until this intolerable day of rest is over.
“Out,” I tell my mother. “Don’t stay up for me. You, too,” I say to my father. They are about to take their seats in the living room for the final night of shiva.
“Elka wanted to see you,” my mother says. “She’s driving in from Brampton.”
But I am gone.
Laurie’s hand is assured on the steering wheel as behind us the city slips away. I remember everything. The lift of his jaw, the shape of his nails, his rolled-up cotton sleeve, the clench of his arm as we accelerate. To be lying with Laurie is all I want in this world.
As we fly through suburbs and then towns, the scale of the buildings diminishes until we pass only the occasional outline of a barn or shed. Soon there is nothing but forest and the dark absence of land that signifies water. I open the window. The loamy air of make-believe spring permeates the car as time unspools before us. Back I go as we move forward, Laurie’s teenage mouth drawing nearer to kiss me, Laurie’s face when I left him.
Snapping off my seat belt, I dare him to up the speedometer. The car lurches forward, Laurie gripping the wheel.
I am thrust against him as if I were on the Scrambler, the amusement park ride that would tip us upside down above the world.
“Talk to me,” I say, my hand over his thigh. “Tell me something.”
“What do you want to know?”
I hear his quickening breath.
“What happened to your wife?” I ask him, inching my fingers closer to the V of his jeans.
“Not with me anymore.”
“Where is she now?”
He does not answer.
“Go on,” I say.
“You go on.”
“What happened between you?” I expand my fingers.
“What happens between anyone?” he hedges.
“I’ll make you tell me.”
I lower my head into his lap and place my mouth precisely between his legs.
The car slows down.
“Steady,” I say.
“She left.”
Laurie came to visit me in New York only onc
e. For three days, we lay in my tiny room, never speaking of what was true: I was not going to come home, and he would not follow me. We made love incessantly, sated and desperate until daylight exposed the tousled sheets, the smudged glasses of wine, our bodies plummeting into stuporous sleep.
On the last afternoon, Laurie crouched at the edge of the bed and slid his tongue between my toes. I was mute with pleasure, interlaced by stinging regret for what I could not name, the signifiers he noted—cigarette butts, a fridge empty except for opaque bottles of beer, and no shade on my window.
Roused by my shaking body and the imminence of his departure, he cried, “You’re in love with someone else.”
But I was enchanted by my own limitless future, spilling into the humid summer streets of my chosen city, the gray avenue along which I watched his taxi recede toward the airport, to the original love whose clarity would not be replicated.
“Beautiful beyond words.” Laurie looks at me instead of the peel of highway.
Desire of this magnitude has an aspect of the terrible. What will happen after tonight? I think for the first time.
“You were in such a rush,” he replied. “But who came back? And who was right?”
So this is our pact: we are going to pretend the night will have no consequences.
Laurie’s face is smoothed by shadow, but his bare arm is lit and unlit as we drive. Beneath my clothes, my body is helplessly predicting its communion with his fingers.
We are almost there.
Under the night sky, our faces veiled by the mosquito netting on our camouflage hats, remnants of the Great War’s desert conquests, Tam and I lay on the dock, telling secrets. Above our heads reigned Cassiopeia and Cepheus, who had so angered the gods they were consigned to spending part of each night upside down.
“In the olden days,” I said to Tam, “our ancestors never knew if the moon would return.”
The heavens were boundless, streaked by the Milky Way. Tam and I played the game we had devised. Nana was queen of the night; occasionally, we crowned her king. Our parents were the wavering constellations. On some nights, they were very clear, but then they disappeared. And we were Polaris, the North Star: constant amid the motion of the others.
Around us the water was glass. Small creatures nudged the twigs near the shore as the crickets, invisible in the scrub and stone, sounded their rasping meditations. On August nights like these, when the heat lingered into evening, my father would sit on the dock while the three of us swam naked in water that seemed tropical against our skin. It was paradise not to tense intuitively against the lake’s early summer chill, the stars hovering.
My father, shoulders caped in his huge towel, lantern beside him and life buoy at the ready, was serious about his duties. Tam and I struck out alone with the thrill of the explorer until he grew perturbed and called us back.
“We’re here, Daddy,” we would call out, voices waterborne in a resonant duet, knowing, relieved.
He turned his back as we scaled the wooden rungs of the ladder to cowl ourselves in the towels waiting for us. Suddenly, we were freezing and had to run gingerly across the pebbled grass into the house to stand rigid under the near-scalding water until my mother knocked, laughing, to say we would use it all up before her turn.
I went to bed with wet hair and dreamed of magic, of gliding through the sky on the backs of lunar animals, of bodies becoming water, translucent with moonlight, our whispering on the dock an amulet against whatever misfortune might be in store for us.
With Laurie behind me, I turn the key. We move through the narrow hallway to the living room, shuttered for winter. Silently, we unhook the storms that face the lake as silver light pours in.
Laurie and I look at each other, not knowing how to start. Then I cast off my coat and begin to unbutton my shirt. Motionless, he watches as I tug at my sleeve and the shirt joins the coat on the floor. When I take off my jeans, I am not wearing anything.
Laurie eases his finger into my mouth and then touches each nipple with artful delicacy. But I do not want courtly love, elaborate with ritual possibility. No, I want to slam into him, body to body without imagination.
We have routed the ghosts of the dead to go back, blazing, delirious, soaked against each other as we stagger to my grandmother’s bed to consummate this night in the only place we can, returned to our mutinous youth before anything sorrowful happened to us and the reproaches of adults were the amusing counterpoint to our bodies’ ruthlessness.
“Mine,” I say, jubilant.
Laurie kneels over me, sorting my hair strand by strand into an ornamental wheel around my head. He bends toward me, just as he used to, and then, effortlessly, as I close my eyes, he says, “I want to breathe you into me.”
The ice cracking on the lake is the sound of Canada before humankind dwelled here. It was a great land swathed in ice a mile deep, ice that bestirred itself violently into our own age, heaving up spines of rock and water that fell from august heights into forced channels and riverbeds.
We of this century stand at the foot of an ancient pine forest on a bed of snow so soft, so entrancing we are planted for nine long months in the dappled midst of trunks too low to attain green. Then, for a brief wonder, we raise our heads, skulls lolling on our backs as if pleading for mercy, permitted to see the tips of the firs and cedars and, over them, a sky so passionately blue we are convinced: we can again survive this underworld so that, for scant moments every year, we may emerge into magnificent summer light, a light that transforms the towns and villages far from Toronto, grants them a condensed eternity as we make our way here, shed our winter skins to return to the children we were, the air whose purity revives our shrunken lungs—all the way back until death is merely the season’s turning, inevitable, innocuous, almost affirming.
I know everything now, and I am not afraid. Laurie is kissing my mouth, a connoisseur. I am touching him as eagerly as if we were still each other’s first, most tender love. When he and then I, an incalculable moment after him, begin, ecstatic, assuaged, our perfect descent, the name that I cry out is not his, not at all, but “Tam.”
ELEVEN
I CANNOT REMEMBER EVER BEING THIS COLD. MY FINGERS are so numb I need to fold them to button my shirt, dusty from its tenure on the floor. It, too, is icy, like a sheet hung on a winter clothesline.
I climb into my jeans, my back to Laurie, as modestly as if I did not know him and were forced to dress in the same room.
“When we get into the car,” I say, “you are going to talk.”
He is already clothed. “I don’t understand how you knew. Did Tam tell you? But if she did”—he reflects—“you wouldn’t have come here. What can I say?”
“Nothing in this house.”
As I turn the lock, I picture Laurie and me as negatives, the reverse of the man and woman who opened the door, hallowed by conviction, light where there should have been darkness.
Laurie looks woebegone in the driver’s seat. “Is it so bad? She was your sister.”
“I’m the one with the questions.”
He sighs. “If I tell you it was her idea, does that make it better or worse?”
It makes me think. And so, as Laurie pulls onto the highway, driving by rote, I enter the realm of unornamented truthfulness, in which I am alone.
No more dream of return, which has sustained Tam’s life past its mortal end. Now Laurie is gone, despite the fact that he sits solidly beside me, and my sister is gone with a finality that does not resemble any insight I’ve had during these days of mourning.
Beyond the window, the disenchanted night, unbeckoning, inert, a corridor to dawn auguring nothing.
Why did you do it? I ask her. Why did you tell me and not tell me?
For Laurie, my silence is excruciating. “She wanted to know what it felt like to—” he begins.
My unquenchable curiosity has been temporarily blunted.
I relinquish him to you, I say to my sister. Anything to bring you back.
>
“I wanted to give her something that could never be repaid,” Laurie says. “But tonight was not about her.”
“Not true.”
Ben’s haggard face, Ella’s gloved hand, Gabriel’s sobbing: all this on one side of the scale, and Laurie on the other.
Why? I ask her again.
Tam does not reply, but her old words are as raw as when they were uttered.
“Everything you’ve done has been driven by what’s between your legs,” she said.
I was impressed by her unaccustomed vulgarity.
“How do you think I felt,” she continued from her hospital bed, “hearing you year after year desecrate what meant the most to me, to Ben?”
Desecrate.
“Why do you suppose I didn’t name you as Ella and Gabriel’s guardian?” Tam went on, her voice in my head.
If I could reenter our fight, this time I would win; she had withheld crucial evidence.
“I meant every word I said,” Laurie intrudes.
But I cannot remember any of his language.
“We met through her,” he tries.
We met through her body. Her not-alive body, alive for him as long as I lay naked with him, alive for me to make of the embers of a twenty-year-old love a conflagration fierce enough to repeal time.
“Talk to me,” Laurie says. “We bumped into each other downtown. She had just heard the news and wanted to speak to someone she wouldn’t hurt, not her husband or her parents.”
Or me. I reappraise Tam’s brisk delivery when she called me in New York to tell me there were no more choices.
“I hadn’t seen her in years,” he says. “She looked thinner, older, of course, but not ill, not”—he pauses—“dying. But she was.”
I am the one who should be sitting across a café table from Tam.
“We were in a fast food place, where she wouldn’t see anyone she knew. She asked me a lot of questions about my life, whether I was satisfied, whether there was anything I wished I’d done.”
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