by Lesley Kagen
These days, Tess thinks he sees her more like a middle-aged chick running through the streets screaming, “Run for your lives! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
And she really doesn’t blame him for feeling that way. She has to put up with herself, but why should he? She can even understand why he’d go looking for nookie elsewhere. She’s already damaged goods. Emotionally, spiritually, and now, probably physically. Why would Will want her when he could have sane and fully-breasted choir-leader Connie “Luscious” Lushman?
“And you don’t have malaria or AIDS either,” Will adds on after a long silence.
At the bottom of the freeway exit, he makes the turn that’ll take them down the roller-coaster country road that’ll deposit them back in Ruby Falls. “This is just another one of your erroneous assumptions.” He’d come up with many polite terms for her fears over the years, “erroneous assumptions” was the newest.
Tess regrets telling him about the mammogram now, and reluctantly adds on, “I’ve got a biopsy scheduled tomorrow at St. Mary’s City to confirm it.”
The other reason she’s been dragging her feet is she knows he’s not going to take the news well. Given his current coolness toward her, she doesn’t think he’ll worry all that much if she’s got cancer. But even if they were getting along, he’s much too, “Keep your sunny side up, everything’s going to be okay!” But, like most men, he’s a wuss when it comes to illness. This disease would be particularly hard for him to deal with; his father died of bone cancer when Will was fourteen. The man has been enshrined in his son’s memory, but Cyrus Blessing was anything but a saint. She’s been gone many years now, but during the time that Tess tended to Mother Ruth after her stroke, the same way her gammy had when she sensed her number was up, Will’s mom revealed long-held family secrets. With sad, loose lips, she told Tess one afternoon in the bedroom with the rose wallpaper how her husband had taken a fancy to one of the diner’s waitresses in 1952. “Her name was Rochelle. Shelly, they called her. Willie doesn’t remember, he was in kindergarten at the time, but Cy left us to be with her. He came back a few months later with his tail between his legs, but things were never the same between us after that. Pay attention to those diner girls, honey. They can sneak up on you.”
Tess looks sideways at Will and wonders if unfaithfulness is coursing through his blood. Maybe he can’t help but stray, it’s in his DNA. He left his former fiancée for her, didn’t he?
His gap-toothed grin casts a spell on my friend’s body the evening he came roaring up in that old Triumph to the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, and it can still make her inner thighs tingle. She’s often thought about how Connie Lushman must rue the day she’d sent him for tango lessons because she’d wanted their spotlight wedding dance to be memorable.
At twenty-three, Will Blessing was four years older than Tess, but he was far less world-weary than she for his small-town childhood had been a mostly smooth sail. With his decided slant toward optimism, she’d found him completely irresistible and more-than-a-little goofy. He wooed her with mall-store jewelry and six packs of Coke in the glass bottles because anybody who knows anything about cola knows they are the crème de la crème. He watched ’40s musicals with her in the little efficiency apartment above the bike store, and when he proposed to her only weeks after they’d met, he was wearing a zipped-up sweatshirt with the hood tied too tight beneath his chin. He loved his mother and admired his long-dead father. He blushed when Tess cursed. “Bringing them back to their former glory,” is how he described his passion for restoring old cars. She loved that. It made her feel sure that he wouldn’t dump her for a newer model when she went rusty.
Had she been wrong about him? Made an “erroneous assumption”?
As they turn onto Ruby Falls’ half-mile-long Main Street, Will says upbeat, “I was thinking of making ribs tonight.”
He slathers baby backs in brown sugar and maple syrup. Tess is about to protest, to say something about watching her waistline, but then she remembers she probably has cancer and is probably gonna die soon, so she doesn’t have to worry anymore about how fat she is.
She breathes again on the car window, draws a happy face, and tells him, “Ribs’d be great!”
Not-Such Devoted Sisters
Tess is in the sunroom, the spot where she feels most secure. Photos of the children hang on the pale-yellow walls alongside shots of wildlife that Haddie has taken since she was quite small. Even then, she showed such aptitude. She’s also a runner, but Henry’s the real athlete in the family. His basketball, soccer, and golf trophies are prominently displayed in the sunroom’s built-in bookcases. Curtains of patterned daisy bouquets tied with green gossamer ribbon drape the floor-to-ceiling windows that remain open in the summer to allow in the smell of lilacs, Tess’s and her gammy’s favorite flower. Alongside the weeping willow tree—certified the oldest in town by the Ruby Falls Historical Society—stands a faded red bird feeder that Henry made in Boy Scouts when he wasn’t so hip.
My friend is seated at her cherry-wood rolltop desk with her bare feet resting atop her furry footstool. She’s usually quite attentive to Garbo, but she doesn’t notice her tail-wagging this afternoon because she’s staring at the computer that Will had surprised her with on her most-recent birthday. When she ripped open the box and expressed dismay because she’s not good with anything new, especially anything technical, he said, “You gotta move into the future!” like he was so tired of her living in the past. Like she wasn’t?
Tess is working hard on number five on her list this afternoon because it’s Thursday—the fourth day of the week.
TO-DO LIST
Buy broccoli.
Make sure Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
Set up a vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
Convince Will to love me again.
Get Birdie to talk to me.
Bury Louise once and for all.
Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.
Die.
It’s crucial that she sends the e-mail she’s about to compose to her sister at 3 p.m. so it arrives at precisely four o’clock Florida time. She wishes she didn’t have to write. She’d do just about anything to hear Birdie’s sweet voice, but she must have caller ID because when Tess attempts to phone her, she won’t pick up. And the care packages and gifts that she sends to Boca Raton are returned with a “No longer here” written across the brown paper. She’d love to believe that Birdie moved and just forgot to leave a forwarding address, but even if she didn’t recognize her sister’s childish scrawl, she knows that’s highly improbable. To people of their ilk, change of any kind, be it location, hairdos, or eating habits, is to be avoided at all costs. Maintaining the status quo externally is crucial when your insides are a fluctuating mess.
My friend has also tried to reach her sister through her business. Ms. Robin Jean Finley has a fancy website to advertise her medical transcription services: Meditran.com. Sad to say, Tess has not found her to be “Reasonable and Rapid” the way she touts on the site. Counting today, she has attempted to contact Birdie on a 112 occasions since their mother’s death. She even pretended to be a doctor who wished to use the transcription service. It wasn’t until after she clicked the Send button that she realized she’d given herself away by signing the letter, Dr. Karen Ackerman, who was this chronic nose-pickin’ kid the girls had grown up with. (How surprised the sisters would be to learn that “Boogie” Ackerman is now a well-respected otolaryngologist in Houston, Texas.)
I’m by her side, like always. Garbo can see me, that’s why she’s dusting the floor with her tail, but Tess can’t, of course. “Imaginary friends” are forbidden to materialize unless called upon to do so, but there are always exceptions to the rules. I’ve appeared to her before, long ago, in another dire circumstance, and because I’m growing more and more concerned about her estrangement from Will, and her refusal to tell the children about the mammogram results
, I had a little pow-wow recently with The Powers That Be. They agreed that if she didn’t call upon me soon, because she doesn’t have another soul to confide in at the current time other than the dog, that it’d be okay to give her a nudge in the right direction.
I’m lounging in an overstuffed chintz armchair next to her desk with my eyes closed. As she types, she speaks aloud in her throaty voice that I so thoroughly enjoy:
“Dear Birdie,
Looks like your wish came true. I’m probably going to die. I’m pretty sure I’ve got breast cancer.”
She pauses to imagine how her sister might take that news. Where was she at emotionally these days? They’d been so close as kids, practically woven together, but once they hit their teenage years, the seam that bound them began to fray. Tess loved her mother in a distant, dutiful way, but she didn’t like her and never trusted her. Her rebellion as a teen was to be expected. She drank beer, skipped school, smoked cigarettes, lost her virginity, and so forth, but Birdie did no such things. She stuck to Louise’s side, embedded like an embryo. Their mother did not anger her the way she had her big sister. If anything, it seemed to Tess, Louise’s demands made Birdie feel needed and loved, maybe for the first time.
Robin Jean Finley would probably never have left the nest if their stepfather hadn’t insisted on shoving her out. He’d laid down the law and refused to take her along on the move to Sacramento, California where he’d found another car job after he’d been let go by American Motors for on-site gambling. “Enough is enough already. This one ain’t gonna leave on her own the way the other one did,” Leon told their mother. “Ya gotta push her out.”
Louise did not immediately jump on that bandwagon. Because eighteen-year-old anorexic and anxious Birdie couldn’t hold even the simplest of jobs due to her hand-shaking panics, number-counting, and skeletal appearance, she decided that making her mother love her was going to be her life’s work. From the moment the sun rose until it set, that child worked her tail off as a lady-in-waiting to Louise. Birdie would follow her around the duplex asking, “Can I get you a slice of ice cream cake roll? Wouldn’t a foot rub feel good?” in her itsy-bitsy voice. “I’ll get the Jergens.”
Louise wouldn’t miss her daughter per se when she moved to Sacramento, but she sure would miss being waited on hand and foot, but what could she do? Leon had drawn a line in the dirt and he was her meal ticket, so out Birdie of the nest went.
The day the moving van pulled up to the duplex, Tess arrived shortly after with a U-Haul trailer attached to Will’s car. She’d been begging her sister to move in with her and her about-to-be husband into the nice, old Blessing house in Ruby Falls. When Birdie refused, Tess agreed to help her transport what little she had to call her own to a rooming house on the south side of Milwaukee that she’d pay for until her sister could apply for disability.
Birdie spent her rooming-house days pining for her mother, watching game shows and soap operas on the communal television, and playing poker for pennies with the mostly older boarders. On Christmas Eve, four months after Tess’s wedding to Will, an ambulance was called to deliver Birdie’s broken body to County Hospital where she was admitted to the psych ward after flying out the top-story attic window. (She had long ago stopped seeing and talking to her IF, but that’s not a two-way street. If Bee hadn’t moved that snow pile two feet to the left when Birdie came sailing down head first, Tess would be sisterless.)
After her physical injuries where attended to—a broken collarbone and three cracked ribs—she received intensive daily psychotherapy and was released from the hospital a month later. Despite Tess’s renewed pleading to move in with her and Will, Birdie got it in her unpredictable head that a change of scene would do her good. She called and asked Leon and Louise if she could move in with them again, and when they told her again that she couldn’t, she packed up her few things and hitched a ride to Boca Raton because she always did have a bit of a wild streak.
Tess writes to her sister in Thursday’s email:
“Please, please forgive me. I know now that I shouldn’t have taken Leon’s side when Louise got sick.”
Shortly before her death, their mother had been living in an apartment in the not-so-nice part of Sacramento where she’d landed after she and Leon had a final parting of the ways over a floozy named Mary Lou, the manager of the parts department at Capitol Automotive. Louise procured a job at Macy’s Chanel counter to pay the rent. Her daughters faithfully called every Sunday morning to listen to her complain about her apartment that was a dump, the job that was beneath her, how the gals she worked with were jealous of her good looks, and that she got paid jack squat. Birdie beseeched her time and time again to move to sunny Florida, but Louise always told her the same thing, “Humidity is hell on my hair,” and when Tess offered to bring her home and help her find a place, she’d replied, “Been there, done that.”
It was the manager of the cosmetics department who called to inform Tess that Louise had collapsed at work and had been taken to the hospital. “Got your number off her application,” Mrs. Lanfrey said. “She talks about you and your sister all the time. She’s so proud. Are you the lawyer or the Ford model?”
Tess was brought to her knees. She had talked to her mother on the previous morning. Only thing out of the ordinary about the conversation was that pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker Louise hacked more than usual. She mentioned that she thought she was coming down with the flu, but Tess figured that she was just milking the cough to get her to write a larger-than-normal monthly check again.
Turned out they were both wrong.
Seventy-three-year-old Louise had come down with something a whole lot worse. A particular kind of pneumonia had made her lungs go hard and corrugated. (A matching set for her heart, if you ask me.)
If the Finley sisters weren’t so terrified of flying that they avoided looking up when they were outdoors, they would’ve taken the earliest flights to Sacramento. They talked for hours on the phone about driving to California, but since the both of them had varying degrees of agoraphobia, they knew they wouldn’t make it far before one of them bailed. Didn’t matter. Louise lapsed into a coma and was put on life support shortly after her admission to the Kaiser emergency room.
Revolving doctors called and kept Tess up to date on her mother’s condition for eight days. On the ninth, one phoned to inform her that Leon, who Louise was not officially divorced from, had decided to pull the plug.
When Tess called to pass the verdict on to Birdie, she screamed, “No…no…no…no…you gotta stop him, Tessie! You have money…pay Leon off…do something…I can’t—”
That right there? That was the exact moment when the seed of the sisters’ most-serious riff was sown.
Even if Tess could’ve convinced Leon to keep Louise alive, she wasn’t about to. The doctors had made it clear that even if she did wake up, she’d spend the rest of her days on a ventilator. That’s not what her vain mother would want.
Birdie, who was so accustomed to her big sister sticking up for her, interpreted her siding with Leon on this vital matter as the ultimate betrayal of their love. She yelled at her sister before she hung up, “You didn’t do anything to save Daddy and…and now you’re doing the same thing to Louise. You’re a murderer. I hate…hate…hate…hate you. I hope you die too!”
After Louise had been disconnected from life support the following morning, Leon called Tess to report, “My little Lou-Lou is gone.” There was bawling, followed by dramatic nose-blowing. “If you send me some cash, I’ll take care of her…it…the arrangements. She wanted to be cremated and have her ashes thrown into Lake Michigan. Ya know how crazy she was about the beach.” Blubbering. “She mighta been a bitch on wheels, but she was gorgeous and I loved her. You and your sister too. Could you send that check right away, kiddo? Make it out to me, alright?”
Two weeks later what remained of her mother was dropped off on the Blessings’ front porch by Stu the UPS man. When Tess, who had been dreading the deliver
y, arrived home and saw the box with the California address nestled amidst four chubby Halloween pumpkins, she locked the front door behind her and called her husband at the diner to inform him that she needed, “Help!”
She often burst into a bout of laughter in times of duress, so she giggled when Will withdrew her mother’s remains from the cardboard box sent by the Neptune Society. She had pictured Louise’s urn as ornate, maybe even bejeweled, but the golden cube that her husband placed on the kitchen counter was burnished and cool to the touch. (If one endeavors to select a resting spot based on the deceased’s personality, I thought Leon was uncharacteristically right on the money when he’d chosen the metallic container.)
The assignment to scatter Louise’s ashes brought up complicated feelings that rendered Tess all but incapable of following through on her mother’s last request. Unsure how long it might take her to navigate through the flashbacks and the pain, she set the golden box on a kitchen cupboard shelf next to the bone china. She’d throw furtive glances at it throughout the day, hoping, always hoping, to experience some sense of an ending, and the courage to make the short trip to the beach.
She returns to the e-mail that she’s typing in the cozy sunroom.
“You’ve got to believe me, Bird. I tried to scatter her.”
It took her almost a month to achieve the intestinal fortitude she needed to slide Louise into an Olsen’s Market brown bag for the short trip to Lake Michigan. Will offered to come with her that afternoon, but she told him, “No. This is between her and me.”
A steady drizzle was falling upon the crayon-colored leaves stuck to the twisty, crumbly, asphalt path that wound from the top of the bluff down to the shoreline. In the surrounding woods, squirrels scooted up and down old-growth black-barked trees, hustling like crazy to put up supplies for another brutal Wisconsin winter. The calls of hungry seagulls mingled with the crash of waves as they fell apart on the beach below, but the sounds barely registered above the rush of blood in Tess’s ears.