Tam’s face was agonizingly unnatural, both swollen and excavated. “Why do you think I’ve never been able to consider you raising my children?” she said.
Your raising. “How about because they have a father?”
“Wrong,” said my sister. “I was afraid they’d turn out like you.”
“A woman who’s cold-blooded?”
“Maybe not cold,” she retreated slightly, “but not able to give wholly to one person. Face it,” she said.
But I was not going to face it. I turned on my heel and left her.
I had imagined many last conversations with my sister, drenched in bathos, but not this one.
In my room, I unwrap the brown paper as if I had ordered porn to my mother’s address. I would love to hurl Mac’s packet into the trash, but curiosity supersedes experience, as always.
Before me is a video, my name typed neatly on its label.
To watch or not to watch? The question is already rhetorical.
Under the bed is the accordion file that tails me on every journey: random chapters of my dissertation, the work perennially incomplete. I can recite by heart Vera Brittain’s account of Winifred’s final sickness, but I still do not know the end of her story—what meaning to ascribe to her life, to her death.
My room is a mess, the unmade bed tangled with clothes turned inside out, scraps of paper, and books opened every which way. As I toss blankets and sheets in the air, looking for the remote, I feel sick.
“Screw the remote,” I tell myself, and shove the cassette into the VCR.
“Who’s the real transgressor?” I assert to the empty room, building myself up for the viewing like a fighter spitting into his palms before donning his gloves to enter the ring.
The screen grows light. There she is, suddenly, alone in her hospital bed, looking at me.
“Dear Eve,” she says, awkward and very ill. “I’m making this tape with Mac’s help. I seem to need help for everything these days.”
Tam is so small in the white room.
“By now you’ve figured out what I wasn’t able to tell you in person. If you haven’t, stop this tape and wait until you do.”
Not very realistic.
“I don’t expect you to do that. I couldn’t.” Her smile is quavery.
I need to lie down.
“If you’re not furious, you’re at least disappointed in me. I am in myself,” she confesses, “except that I had to do it. I know I’ve been very judgmental about you when you’ve offered that excuse—”
I’ll say.
“—but a person can be humbled, even at the end.”
I peep at the screen through my fingers.
“Why haven’t I called you? If you translate my pride into conscience, you may understand why I was so mean.”
She sounds as if she’s twelve.
“I can see you,” she says, “already forgiving me. But don’t forgive me so fast, because you’ll hate me later.”
This experience does not feel as satisfying as it should. Tam and I invented the cosmic callback, the vindication of a beseeching phone call from a lover or employer who had initially turned us down.
“I wish I could hug you,” she says.
Tam is still in charge, because, of course, she can’t hug me. I rub my sleeve against my wet face.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you openly instead of arguing with you. I’m sorrier that I called you what I was afraid you would call me. I know you think of yourself as bohemian,” she said, her voice fading, “but when I thought of confiding in you, I realized that you’re the faithful one. I can’t say more on a tape, which is only for your eyes. I would ask you to destroy it as soon as it’s finished, but that’s probably unfair—and I’ve been unfair enough.”
She falls back against her pillows, breathless.
I’m so afraid she’s going to stop speaking that I rewind the tape to watch it again. Automatically, I inspect her for subterranean clues to a deeper, different reality. But the second viewing rewards me no more than the first. This is my sister, as truthful as she can allow herself to be on the record.
I pause the tape to freeze Tam and put a pillow beneath my head, arms folded on my chest, legs aslant, copying her pose.
“What can I give you?” Tam says desperately. “What haven’t I told you that I should have?” She purposely modulates her tone. “There are two things I want to say. The first is: Simon’s the one.”
Simon. I try to imagine him as a living being, not a disembodied vapor from what used to be my present.
“I guess you’re thinking I’ve lost my credibility.”
Now that she mentions it.
“But marrying Ben was the smartest thing I did. I can see you sitting in your room, looking at the screen skeptically.”
I am.
“I should be beside you, not on the screen,” she says. “I bet you feel I’m trying to control you from beyond the grave. Well, I am. But just because I’m bossing you around doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
More, I implore her.
“They’ll be coming in to refill the morphine drip,” Tam says. “I love morphine. Soon I’ll need so much I won’t be coherent. What can I give you?” she says again. “I wish I could visit you in your dreams. Remember we promised each other that whichever one of us died first would send the other a sign? But in case it doesn’t work, or if you get tired of waiting, here’s the last thing I want to say.”
The last thing. Tam, stay. Say something trivial. Pick a fight.
“Ask Nana what happened in the decade between Mummy’s birth and Gil’s. No, asking her won’t work,” she retracts her suggestion. “Sit with her and talk about losing what is irreplaceable.”
The idea of having a heart-to-heart with my grandmother is even less probable than my breaking through the screen, in an old-fashioned movie, to enter into a real conversation with my sister. But I can see that Tam is losing her breath.
“I love you,” she says. And the screen is black.
In soggy sleep, my face mashed into the pillow, I think I hear the phone ring. No one else picks up.
“You don’t sound right,” Simon says.
“What time is it?” I say blearily.
“You don’t even sound like you.”
“I need to be home.”
“Home is portable,” he says staunchly. Then he wavers. “Are you not feeling at home?”
“Don’t ask me.”
He asks me. “What happened?”
I flop back onto the bed. “All my certitude cells turned over at once.”
“What are you no longer certain about?” he says, very gently. “What does a woman look like who has endured total cellular turnover?”
“Terrible. I’m going to the mirror to check.”
A drawn, anxious-looking woman with stringy hair looks at me without sympathy.
“When are you coming back?” He has learned his lesson and avoids the word “home.”
I don’t know.
Simon does not seem to like my silence. “Isn’t it over tomorrow?”
“After breakfast we take a walk around the block. And then it’s over. But I can’t desert my parents.”
“Did they ask you to stay?”
I know they expect me to leave. Shall I tell Simon that I was thinking of getting an apartment around the corner from my mother and having dinner with my father twice a week?
The video’s black edge is leering at me.
“Give me the day of your return. I want to be certain I’m in the city,” Simon says. “Can I help you with your plane ticket? Do you want to use my travel agent?”
What is happening to Simon? If you really want to be helpful, I think, pack up my apartment and ship my stuff here.
“I’m fucked up,” I say eloquently.
Simon is an only child who hasn’t lived at home since he was seven. “You’re thinking that nothing in my experience corresponds to what you’re feeling,” he says.
I
hate when he does that.
“Maybe,” I concede.
“That’s not quite true.”
“Look, Simon. It’s lovely of you to call”—I assume my best British manners—“but it’s already late, and there are still things I need to do.”
“I won’t keep you,” says Simon. “But you are on my mind increasingly.”
I say nothing.
“I—I guess—I don’t—” Simon at a loss for words makes me curl up like an infant.
“I can’t stay on,” I say miserably. “I’m sorry.”
“Who can care for you while you’re there? Care? Care about you?” He is stuttering.
This conversation is becoming a minor nightmare. “I have to go. I have to.”
“Then I look forward to your arrival,” he says formally.
I respond very maturely to this turn of events by crawling beneath the afghan and yanking it over my head.
LAST
DAY
FOURTEEN
“EVE, WAKE UP.”
My mother’s voice is drilling a hole in my brain.
“Why is it dark?” My own voice is whiny, stretching the word “dark” into two syllables.
“It’s six in the morning.”
She has my attention. “Aren’t you the mother who brought us up to believe there was only one six o’clock in the day?”
“But I haven’t had a turn to talk to you.” She extends her hands for me to pull myself up.
“Take a ticket,” I say, secretly pleased.
“I made coffee.”
“Real?”
“Espresso,” she announces.
“There is a God,” I intone. At the end of shiva, I have my mother to myself as we head to the kitchen.
“What happens next?” she says, looking expectant.
I am afraid to violate our harmony. “How about marriage, children, and a house with a yard? Just like you?”
She has the grace to laugh. “I’m not proposing my life as an example.”
“I hope not.”
My mother looks chastened. “I know it wasn’t easy, what happened with me and your father. I was on a journey—”
“No journey metaphors.”
“You’re intimidating me.”
Duly reprimanded.
“Your father could not listen to me. Although he listens to his clients very carefully,” she says. “Now that I’m older, different qualities seem important.”
“But Tam’s broken your heart.”
“Do you think I would give up even one memory of Tam? I can still feel her fuzzy new head against my neck in the middle of the night.”
But what about me? I want to add.
“And my recall isn’t less just because you were second,” my mother says serenely. “You were such a peaceful girl, the most beautiful baby in the hospital.”
“And smart,” I say, out of habit.
“Of course. But don’t underestimate beauty. And I’m not referring to Nell.”
“Was she as gorgeous as Nana claims?”
“I didn’t see her often,” my mother says. “Daddy thought she wasn’t the greatest influence. And she was always moving around. But when she pulled up in her snazzy car and rang our bell with some tinsel gift I couldn’t live without, she was irresistible. You could get drunk just talking to her.”
“What must that be like?”
“It was more than physical beauty,” my mother clarifies. “She had a spark that made everything fun. Nana was no better at withstanding her than Gil and I, however much she may deny it.”
“Or she wouldn’t talk about it so much.”
“Right,” says my mother conclusively. “And you think I’m frivolous, like Nell.”
“Not really,” I equivocate.
“You do. Your father did, too, in his day, but neither of you understood. The counters—” she says, waving a dampened cloth in my direction.
“‘Neither of you understood,’” I prod her, standing up. “About beauty. Then explain.” I abandon the counters.
“You think it’s just the surface of things,” she tells me. “But I am looking at the deep beauty of the world. Beauty is a gift. You received it. Yes, you did,” she says, presuming my dissent. “But it was only given to you to give again.”
“I’m losing you.”
“Words are so frustrating,” says my mother.
“Words are my life,” I say theatrically.
“Our physical lives are an echo. We’re here to see the beauty beneath. When I can make a beautiful room for my family, when I imagine the way they’ll feel in a room I’ve made for them, that’s love. I can’t understand why women mourn the loss of their beauty.”
“You can’t? Tam did.”
My mother is absentmindedly stroking my hand. “That was for external reasons—like income. To me, if you’ve been given beauty, it’s a responsibility to make beauty with it. It’s like the law of energy: Beauty doesn’t die; it just takes different forms. The most important thing is to give it back, to leave the world larger.”
“Thank you, Leni Riefenstahl.”
My mother will not be incited. “I mean beauty bound to love. Moral beauty. Not carelessly wasted, like Nell’s. More like Winifred’s.”
For a moment I don’t catch the reference.
“Your Winifred,” she says. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”
“Radiant, until the very end.”
“Did she ignore it and pretend she wasn’t? Or did she put it to good use?” my mother asks shrewdly.
I see Winifred on her first trip to Africa, telling young women at the High School Speech Day to “hold beauty fast,” looking herself like a young goddess as she returned to England to take up the cause of racial injustice with all her powers.
My mother the philosopher.
“I am much larger because I was Tam’s mother,” she says. “Everything she did is still with us. The facts of her beauty. Her children. The life she lived well.”
“But you’re shattered.”
“Of course I’m shattered. This is the week we allow ourselves to be. But I know what I need to do afterward.”
“I wish I did. I want to rewind time,” I cry. “Go backward. Tam will be alive, and you’ll be married to Daddy again.”
“We can never, never go back.”
“I don’t know what happens now,” I say childishly.
“You will,” my mother says, without the edge in her voice I am accustomed to hearing. “I believe Tam is leaving you gifts all the time. Soon you’ll be able to see them.”
“Will I know what to do about Simon?” I ask, as if my mother is a fortune-teller.
“And work,” she says. “One follows the other, and it doesn’t matter which comes first. You need to decide.”
“What?”
“Something,” she says vaguely.
“Mum, what was it about Nell? Why was Nana so afraid of her?”
“Do you know what she did at the cottage when she was fourteen? Do you know who her first boyfriend was?”
I look inquiring.
“Mrs. Floyd’s son,” my mother declaims.
“But—”
“That’s right,” she says. “He wasn’t Jewish. Can you imagine? In those years, it’s hard to say which family was more horrified. We were good neighbors, but Nell broke the barrier. They had to send her away. And you know? I don’t think she was interested in him at all. Not only that: the man is almost ninety, he’s been married more than sixty years, and he still asks after her. To this day. I don’t have the heart to tell him she died. If you could bottle what she had!”
“She did it her way.”
“And left a trail of suffering. That boy got off easy. Every summer I hear again what a sight she was in her white bathing suit, rowing down the river, the talk of the town. So don’t be defeated,” she says.
“Because Nell looked so good in a bathing suit? Mum, you still believe everything can be remedied.”
“I
love the way you talk,” she says. “‘Remedied.’ No, I don’t think perfect happiness is possible. I don’t even think perfect interior design is possible.”
“That’s enlightenment.”
“But it’s noble to try. Imperfection is starting to interest me. I made mistakes,” she says proudly.
“They were costly,” I say. “You hurt us so much. We could have been a regular family.”
“Do you think that if your father and I had stayed together, Tam wouldn’t have died?”
“Maybe,” I say sullenly.
“Eve,” she admonishes me.
“I can wish, can’t I?”
“And you think that’s why you haven’t married? But Tam married wonderfully well.”
I am manifestly silent.
“Surely you’re not jealous of Tam? Not now.”
“I am definitely not jealous of Tam,” I tell her. “Not now, and—believe it or not—not ever. Except, maybe, for the kids.”
She brightens. “That’s good news.”
“Not yet,” I warn her.
“Two grandchildren are not enough for me,” my mother says. “And don’t think I’m saying this just because I’m an old-fashioned woman who never had a real job, as you liked to notify me when you were a teenager. There isn’t a mother who doesn’t worry, full-time, about why her unmarried children aren’t married and having children themselves.”
“Really?”
“It’s all my friends talk about—even the most feminist.”
“If you remarry Daddy, I’ll marry Simon.”
“Tam liked him a lot,” my mother says. “She said he was a man of virtue.”
“Simon?”
“Yes, she thought he was good. Upright. That was Tam’s highest compliment.”
“It’s not how I think of him.” Or her.
“Why, is he bad?” she says with amusement.
“You know I like them a little bit bad.”
“Everyone needs some spice. I did.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“And I wouldn’t tell you. But those days are long ago. Don’t be defeated,” my mother says again.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t know what will happen next. You always wanted to.”
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