I start to cry.
“You don’t know how many times Tam would be struck by something funny and have to call you when I didn’t get the joke. I can see her laughing into the phone. And I hear you through the receiver, laughing back. That’s what you need to remember, not how she let you down but how she turned to you. That’s what I remember, too.”
“It’s not enough. Say more. We had such a ragged ending,” I wail.
“We can’t imagine ourselves in her place,” Ben says. “No matter how dark your life may seem, you still expect infinity—all the chances in the world. To undo what you’ve done. To try something new. But Tam couldn’t lie to herself or pretend. She was out of time.”
On a bitter spring morning, Winifred Holtby was walking in the country, defeated by the knowledge, just acquired, that at thirty-three she had only brief years to live. Usually without self-pity, she was afflicted by the unfairness of her fate.
At that moment, she found herself standing at a trough of frozen water from which young lambs were trying in vain to drink. Taking up a stick, Winifred broke the ice for them. As she did, she heard a voice within her say, “Having nothing, yet possessing all things.”
She strode down the hill with the exhilaration that, says Storm Jameson—another writer beloved of Nana—“springs from the sense of having lost everything.”
I pray as ardently as a convert for Winifred’s glory, the spiritual intoxication named by Jameson. Instead, Tam’s words beset me, a galling inversion.
Tam had finished her first course of treatment, and we were bickering across a tiny table in an overpriced Bloor Street restaurant.
“Don’t you think there’s something ridiculous about living for sensuality into your forties and fifties?” Tam said.
I averted my gaze from her wig. “No.”
“Why not? What about a husband and children? What about your dissertation? Lust above PhD: What would Winifred have to say about that?”
“Winifred had less sex in her life than I have in a month.”
“Really? How could you stay interested in a woman with no sex life?”
I recorded her sardonic tone without comment. “That’s one of many things that make her interesting. Like me and Nana. Can you think of any pair of people more opposite than the two of us?”
Tam acknowledged that she couldn’t.
“Which is why she’s fascinating,” I say. “Why is Mummy so extravagant? Because of Nana’s reserve. But I find her dispassion peaceful.”
“Nana’s tough,” Tam said. “She invited Ella over last week, but by the afternoon Ella had read every kids’ book and played every game. She told Nana she was bored. You know what Nana said to my daughter? Remember, Ella’s five.”
“What did she say? Can you find our waitress? My coffee’s cold.”
Tam ignored me. “‘Ella, you’re going to have to be more resourceful.’ Then Nana unfolded the paper—and Ella was on her own.”
“That’s so Nana. What did Ella do?”
“She asked her what ‘resourceful’ meant.”
“You’ve got to love the woman,” I said. “Although she doesn’t always love me.”
“Nana is not exactly a live-in-the-moment person.”
“Neither am I. I live in the past, as you like to point out. And I do have a plan.”
“Yeah?” said Tam.
“I’m going to finish my book, keep teaching my women, and have a baby.”
Tam jolted her cup. “With whom?”
“Whomever,” I said glibly.
“Daddy would be proud of that ‘whomever.’ Remember how he made us look up words like ‘inculcate’? Please don’t tell me you’ll be one of those single women who goes to a sperm bank.”
“Why not?”
“Eve, men fall in love with you all the time.”
“Not all the time. And I’m the one who has to choose.”
“So choose,” said Tam.
“Why do you care?”
“You’re my sister,” Tam said, as if that were an explanation. “Not some woman I’m chatting up about the latest lifestyle trend.”
“Calm down. And thanks for implying I’m not chic.”
“I am calm,” she maintained, looking exercised.
“Will you be embarrassed to introduce me in Toronto? I can always leave the baby in New York.”
“With whom?” she said, imitating my grammar and making me laugh.
“Truth? I’m not willing to give up on falling madly in love and having a baby with said person.”
“Why would you think of having a baby with someone you weren’t in love with?”
“Madly in love,” I said. “One hundred percent gen-u-ine passion.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he has to be born within a year of me, so if an old song comes on the radio, he’ll be able to sing it, too.”
“But Simon is six years older, and he was born in a different country. So your very significant criterion disqualifies Simon.”
“And that’s why I’m not marrying Simon. You can expense the bill as firsthand research on aging single women.”
“Yoo-hoo,” says Ben, waving his hand before me. “Where are you?”
How can I tell him that the past is making guerrilla incursions into my life? Even if I expose her, my sister is untouchable.
“Anger is a poison; use it sparingly” is Simon’s advice whenever I vent my annoyance to him over a dogged bureaucrat or petty tyrant.
As I refute him in my mind, the kitchen door bursts open again.
“You’re not going to believe who showed up,” Gil says. “I can’t believe it myself.”
Ben and I look at him expectantly.
“My glamour-puss cousin. This is worth the interruption. Live from Hollywood, Aunt Nell’s daughter Sandra. Now going by the moniker of Alessandra, if you please. Feast your eyes.” Gil points to the living room. “I haven’t seen her since she was a child. She wants to meet everyone in the family. Your mother is mortified. So is mine. It seems Sandy doesn’t quite get the etiquette of shiva. I suspect she has strayed from her roots. She’s on her fourth marriage. Or fifth.”
“How did she know to come?”
“She’s filming in Toronto, and someone told her.”
The living room is stuffed with people, but there is no missing Sandy. She has the aura of a woman who expects to be the sole focus of wherever she happens to be.
I scan the room to find Nana. Unsurprisingly, she looks shell-shocked.
Sandy’s voice carries over the din. “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to meet y’all. ‘Finish the take and cut,’ I said,” quoting herself grandly.
I’m enthralled, in a sickening way.
“Darling,” she calls out to me, “you must be Eve. Your grandmother was just telling me about you.”
A likely story.
“Come, come, let me see your face. Yes,” she says. People have stopped talking and are looking at her. “You have it.” She walks over to me and highlights my cheekbones with her fingers. “Did anyone ever tell you how much you look like—”
“Nana tells me constantly.”
My grandmother would like to object, but she cannot deny it.
“She’s my mother reincarnated,” says Sandy.
In the living room light, I can see that Sandy is at least twenty years older than she first appeared, but neither the lines of aging nor the almost unnoticeable marks of the surgery she has undergone to offset it diminish her flamboyant allure.
“Come sit beside me,” she says cozily. “There’s so much to catch up on. I feel as if someone has given me such a marvelous present. Sit,” she commands. “Let’s tell secrets.”
I sit compliantly.
“So who is he?” she says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who are you in love with?”
“Absolutely no one,” I say.
“You have that look.”
Now I remember that I have
n’t slept all night. What everyone else in the room is attributing to the travails of the sixth day of shiva, Sandy is, more accurately, registering as the aftermath of lovemaking.
“I bet you have men swarming all over you,” she says.
“‘Swarming’ is an overstatement.”
“But you’re gorgeous,” she cries. “The camera must love you.”
“How long are you in Toronto?” I change topics.
“Two more days, and I’ll be back in L.A.”
“What role are you playing?” I ask Cousin Alessandra.
Tam, you don’t know what you’re missing.
“The older woman. The older, seductive woman,” she says more hopefully. “So tell me about your sister. I hear she was a star.”
“She was.”
“Girl next door, ingenue type?”
“Exactly.” I am beginning to understand that casting is Sandy’s frame of reference.
“Tragic death too young?” she recaps, like a TV Guide description.
“You could say. Now tell me about your mother. She’s a legendary figure to me.”
“Mother was one of a kind. Uncontrollable. She had a dramatic life, you know. I guess you’ve heard about my sister,” she says, and actually lowers her voice.
“Not very much.”
“She was the family beauty. Far more than I,” says Sandy, tossing her hair. “But unfortunately, she was brainy.”
“Unfortunately?”
“If she’d been content to earn her living from her looks, she could really have gone places—modeling, acting, all doors were open. Instead, she had to try for a PhD. In anthropology, which no one took seriously. She was very insecure about her mind, and in the end it killed her.”
I look disbelieving.
“Anorexia and pills. Very sad,” she concludes, quite cheerily.
“Your mother was beautiful and clever. Wasn’t she a role model?”
“Mother didn’t do anything with her mind. Apart from teaching, which she gave up before we were born. Papa was the intellectual. She was always restless. Your grandmother was the brain in her generation. It was hard for Mother, coming after her.”
Sandy’s voice carries, but Nana is absorbed in pacifying my mother.
“Your grandmother had her youth,” Sandy says. “But you know all about that.”
I try not to show her how interesting I find this conversational arc. “Maybe a different version from yours.”
She launches into the story. “She was crazy in love before your grandfather. It was a great romance—letters and flowers and trips to the country. Even a ring, a cluster of diamonds in a platinum setting. He made a big impression on Mother. Very elegant in his tennis whites.”
“I’m confused about why it ended.”
“Darling, he was loco,” says Sandy. “Or so they thought. He would fall into these black slumps, and there was no reaching him. Maybe she could have put up with it, because otherwise he was the most charming thing, but there was another glitch.”
I make a prompting noise.
“Inbreeding,” she says, in an operatic whisper. “First cousins. Bad for the gene pool. They were very young. The parents broke it up.”
“What happened to him?”
“Truthfully, I think Mother dated him for a while. On the sly. They must have been some pair.”
“And then?”
“Never been heard from since. He was the type to die young,” she says blithely. “But your grandmother must have told you everything.”
I nod, in seeming affirmation.
“Promise you’ll come see me in L.A. I’m longing to show you off. What do you do in New York?”
“I’m getting my PhD.”
“Another one,” says Sandy. “Is your whole family book-smart? Everyone reading all the time? No fun?”
“A lot of fun,” I say protectively. “This particular occasion isn’t fun.”
She dismisses my sensitivity. “If you want a pick-me-up, just give me a call. Here’s my card—” She extracts a turquoise square from her handbag. “Don’t be shy.”
Sandy stands up, inviting the room to watch her. She hugs my uncle one second longer than she should, kisses my disinclined mother and grandmother, and waltzes out.
“Well!” Gil says to me.
“Please don’t tell me you fell for her. You’ll tumble in my esteem.”
“She is beautiful—” he says.
“In a blowsy way.”
“Not my type. But what she had to say—”
“You were eavesdropping.”
“Of course,” he says, indignant. “Wouldn’t you?”
“What do you think?” I dive in. “About Nana?”
“I’m remembering that she once spoke about cousins who lived with her while they went to university. Do I dare ask her?”
“I couldn’t.”
“I couldn’t either,” he allows. “But now when I look at her—”
“Hard to imagine her crazy in love, to quote Sandy.”
“Not so hard.”
We look at Nana and drop our eyes the instant she looks back.
“She’s still scary,” I say to Gil. “Admit it.”
“She’s my mother,” he protests.
“So what?”
“So,” he says, “I admit it.”
“It’s lucky Sandy didn’t have that little chat with Nana,” I say. “Nana would have made mincemeat out of her.”
“Alessandra!” he scoffs.
“Snob,” I offer in return. “She did solve one of the big family mysteries.”
“Shiva can do that,” Gil says sagely.
I am wary.
“You sit around together, and people tell stories. Stories you never knew.”
“I’ll say,” I exclaim, in a tone so heartfelt Gil scrutinizes me.
“Any revelations you’d like to share?”
“Private recognitions, that’s all.” I seem to have become a professional dissembler this week.
“I hope they take you to a new place,” Gil says sincerely.
“Now you sound like you’re from the West Coast.”
“Closure,” says Gil. “Someone’s come to see you.”
Mac approaches my chair, looking ill at ease. Silent, he reaches into a small shopping bag to hand me a rectangular package.
I am under no illusions. It is the last full day of shiva, and my sneaky sister has one more gambit. For a second, I contemplate the idea of refusing to take it: in the postdeath competition, I want to win this round.
As if sensing my aversion, Mac drops the object into my lap. “Sorry I can’t stay,” he says, and exits like a process server.
THIRTEEN
“NO MORE CHANCES,” SAID TAM, OUR LAST FIGHT replaying, word for word. “Do you understand what I’m telling you? No more treading water, wasting time: all the stuff you do.”
Tam’s skin was blue across the thrusting bones of her arms. She strained to raise herself against the metal rails of the hospital bed. But when I moved to help her, she shook her head.
“There’s nothing wrong with my life,” I said.
“Nothing—except that you’re squandering it. What do you have to show for yourself?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No husband,” she began her catalogue. “No kids, and you’re thirty-five years old. Practically no permanent address. A boyfriend you’re no closer to than when you met.”
I was trying to decide if her last point was true when she said, “You don’t even teach serious students who are going for degrees.”
“My students are serious,” I said. “They just don’t have our advantages.”
Tam hears no irony.
“And I’m content with my lot. How many people can say that?”
“Truly content?”
“Tam, aren’t you glad you’ve led your life in the way you believe is right? Isn’t that enough?”
“You have a responsibility,” she persisted. “To M
ummy. And Daddy. What will they be proud of?”
“I’m not a drug dealer. Besides, you’ve given them enough accomplishments to last a lifetime.”
We both refused the knowledge of how abbreviated that lifetime would be.
“How would it help to have two of you?” I said.
“What will they live for now?” was her rejoinder.
“You can’t mean that. They’ll never get over this”—I did not define “this”—“but they have Ella and Gabriel. And, yes, they have me, inadequate as it may seem.”
“And what have you given them?”
“I don’t have to give them anything. I can simply be. Their daughter, my students’ teacher, Simon’s lover, my own imperfect self. I’m still worthy. And your perfect self is all the more worthy.”
“I’m not perfect,” she said. “But it’s so unfair.” Her voice caught.
My self, smashed.
“Tam, if I could switch places with you—”
“It’s no use.”
I looked at her, questioning.
“You’ll never change.”
“Just because you’re dying,” I said, candid at last, “does not entitle you to insult me. I don’t want to change, if I haven’t made that clear. I happen to like myself the way I am.”
“Because you’ll do whatever it takes,” Tam returned. “Emotionally. Going from person to person.”
Adulteress, I think now, quaintly. Liar.
“You’re hallucinating,” I’d said suddenly. I was speculating frantically that the cancer had affected her brain—like Winifred Holtby’s disease at the very end.
“I am not out of my mind. No, I’ve thought about it for a while.”
“That I didn’t care about the men I loved? Yes, loved,” I said defiantly. “Is now the very best time to have this discussion?”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said, as if we were in high school.
“Let me get this straight.” I sat down. “You’re allowed to say what you want to me, and I’m not allowed to say anything back.”
“No,” said Tam. “I’m allowed to tell you the truth.”
“Which is?”
“You don’t know how to love.”
“That’s it!” I yelled. “You’ve gone too far.”
Any minute, a man in a white jacket would come to take me away.
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