Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  How will I survive without you?

  You’ll breathe.

  Are you okay?

  Yes, but I’m so sorry and stupid.

  I thought my sister was egging me on to ruin my life and join her. I see now that she was after a different goal entirely, that she wanted something else, something better for me.

  I told her all about my day, as I always had. I spelled out what was happening in my life:

  Today I had a Mai Tai and cried, swam.

  Last night I didn’t sleep. When I did, I dreamed of you.

  Tomorrow, I will make photographs.

  Once, Jedediah asked if I’d been talking to someone in the back bedroom. He’d heard me laughing but hadn’t wanted to intrude on a private conversation. I told him I’d only been talking to myself.

  * * *

  On Christmas Eve, Mom and Jedediah and I hiked the Nepali coast on the Kalalau Trail, the edge of a dormant volcano. The steep trail has been crudely cut through the rain forest. Its vegetation is lush, nothing short of magical. Banyan trees with hanging vines grow stout and wide along the path and down to the water; their roots weave in and out of the red-clay sandy soil like jungle snakes. Mom feared the edge of the path, the vertigo-inducing ledges that overlooked the sea. She hung to the side, while Jedediah and I stood as close to the edge as we could, looking down at a family of whales that had gathered not too far from shore. They floated and turned around each other.

  I’d barely eaten that morning and afternoon, but I was beyond hunger. My stomach was so empty, had I had any food I would have been sick. So I moved up the mountain hungry, running on fumes, weaving back and forth and stumbling along. Jedediah’s hands were quick to reach out and steady me as I tripped over a rock or twisted my foot in a muddy hole. He took my picture when we reached the summit. I sat on the ground with my hair pulled back in a turban I’d fashioned from the white scarf, chin up to the sky, eyes closed, bony shoulders back and sun-speckled.

  I’d heard there was a cove with a beach of volcanic rock on the other side of the summit, an hour or two hike down from where we sat. It was a sacred place where people honored their dead. We’d have to move quickly to make it before sunset.

  My purse was a white Prada with studs, which I’d bought right after Cara died. Didn’t I deserve nice things if I was going to have to go through life feeling like I’d been sawed in two? In the Prada bag, I carried a museum of remembrance for Cara: her lipstick, hair clips, perfume, and a portion of her ashes were always there right beside my wallet, inhaler, and cell phone. The cap of the lipstick had come loose. Its bright red stain had smashed into the bag’s liner and melted from the Hawaiian heat.

  At the summit of the Kalalau Trail, I rummaged through the bag and pulled out a pale green silk box stitched with angular white cranes. I looked inside. It was stuffed with a plastic bag full of Cara’s ashes. I allowed myself to check the contents of this box several times a day, for fear I’d lost her. I saw that Cara was still there in the opulent box she would have liked. I fingered the bag full of my sister and closed her inside and dropped her back into my purse. The ruined Prada wasn’t only a museum. It was a mausoleum.

  “What was that?” Jedediah reached into my bag and pulled out the box. He turned it over, studying it.

  “Oh, that’s Cara.” I picked up my inhaler and took a puff. “Let’s hurry down to the beach, before dark.” I pulled Jedediah along.

  When we reached the cove, Mom walked right to the water’s edge, her feet sinking in the smooth white sand. Cautious steps. She pulled her own baggie filled with Cara’s ashes from her pocket and pinched it between her middle and index fingers; it swung like a pendulum. High tide was coming quickly; the waves pummeled the shore, obscuring the sound of my mother crying. When she turned around and mouthed something, her hair flew wildly around her face, sticking in her tears. I couldn’t hear her over the raging water. She barely kept her footing but, slowly, she made her way to the mouth of the sea, which was lined with knee-high, jagged black lava rock. There were small toeholds in the lava and she used them to climb the rocks one after another, until she reached a sandbar. I followed closely behind. Tiny blue crabs scurried sideways up the reef around us, skittering to hide and burrow into the sand. Mom opened the bag and cast Cara out into the pounding waves. Her ashes flew up into the air, and dispersed like mist. They funneled up, up, up and vanished.

  * * *

  My sister believed that death was a minor inconvenience to keeping up contact with loved ones. She tried her best to demonstrate her gifts at this when we were in college, and not only by using the Ouija board; we both took jobs, at her insistence, as telephone psychics. The company patched a telephone line into our apartment that rang from midnight to 5 a.m. Our spiritual training and qualifications were nil. Our new employer sent a contract and W-2 to fill out, including a handwritten note on a Post-it:

  Not a psychic? No problem.

  Don’t believe? Who cares?

  The object of service? Revenue.

  Company mission? The customer is always right.

  Was the customer right even when they demanded access to the world of the undead, a world that didn’t exist? I mulled the question over and asked it during my phone training session the following week. The training consisted completely of techniques to hold a caller on the line as long as possible—my new employer was clear: “Give the customer what they want, just keep them with you. Phone sex, therapy, tarot, past life regression, advice—it’s all part of the job.”

  We were to provide slow reflective answers, a beat or two longer than we’d use in normal conversation, and ask leading questions. Callers should be encouraged to do most of the talking—the surest way to raise their bills.

  Cara was a good psychic. She read Tarot cards for the callers and summoned their departed relatives. Several times she was able to describe these men and women in detail, down to their favorite outfits and bad habits. The phone was passed to me when a gentleman requested phone sex or got rowdy and rude.

  “What am I wearing?” One caller breathed into the phone. “This is a psychic line, right? Why don’t you tell me where I’d like your hand on my cock?” I obliged, and let the phone toll go as high as it took the man to get off, which wasn’t terribly long, just fifty dollars’ worth of filthy talk.

  I learned that when I tried to talk to the dead there was nothing but silence. I also learned that the callers who paid $3.95 a minute to talk to college coeds could have saved their money and gotten the same service in many a local tavern for the price of drinks.

  For me and Cara, the job was not tenable, fiscally or emotionally. Our pay rate was ludicrous, only a small take of the per-minute charge. Cara quit first. She reasoned that she could get a higher commission striking out on her own in Woodstock in a boutique, or in the town square in warmer months, though she never did psychic work again.

  When I resigned, it was because I held on to the voices of callers long after we’d disconnected. Trying to drift off to sleep after work, I still heard them crying, begging, moaning, chiding. I wondered about their credit card debts and divorces, their thoughts of suicide, their harmless crushes on colleagues and hopes for fame. Their losses through death had haunted me. I couldn’t bring people back. The callers’ sad voices had played in a loop in my head. Their need had been too great.

  * * *

  On Christmas Day, both Mom and Jedediah left Hawaii; as planned, I would stay on for another week. Jedediah stayed a few hours later than Mom did and he and I had a Christmas dinner of sushi before he flew home.

  The restaurant where Jedediah and I ate had elaborate plating. Sprigs of hibiscus and thin zigzagging colorful sauces were the beds for our dinners. I remember the garnish well; it was easier to stare down at my dinner than look at Jedediah, his rejecting eyes. I pushed my food around with my chopsticks and asked him to consider staying longer. He couldn’t, of course. He’d made plans for New Year’s Eve with friends at home; ever since he’d d
iscovered my infidelities of the last months, he was eager to do his own socializing. He wanted to leave the marriage but he felt he couldn’t leave, because he worried over me. He was also concerned that his need for retreat, distance, and most probably a divorce might be the thing that pushed me over the edge and caused me to take my own life. This was the reason he’d made the effort to indulge me in a trip to Hawaii; he’d told me this before we’d left Massachusetts, adding then that I was lucky to still have him in my life at all.

  We exchanged gifts over dinner. I don’t recall what I gave Jedediah—probably a game, a book, or a new pair of pants.

  Jedediah handed me an envelope with a piece of paper folded inside. He reached out for my hand over the table and squeezed it and wished me a Merry Christmas.

  He’d typed up a quote on the top of the piece of paper.

  “It’s the dedication for my book.”

  I read out loud the line of my Christmas present:

  For Christa and Cara—I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly—Borges

  Later, after we divorced, he changed his mind, his dedication.

  * * *

  Valium erases memory, though I do remember well one day in Poipu, the afternoon of the day after Jedediah left, when I crossed the line. I see flashes of myself under a straw umbrella. I’d decided I deserved a hamburger and as many dark rum punches as it would take to help me forget that Jedediah had gone home. The effect of the rum was mild, so I added two or three Valiums an hour and fell asleep in my beach chair.

  A manager from the bar and grill woke me, standing over me, shaking my shoulders. It was getting dark outside and I’d lost my room key in the sand or in the sea. I told the man I needed help finding that key. It might have been driven down into the sand with the force of nearly a dozen dropped plastic cups, all of them empty save a stray maraschino cherry in one or two. It would have been easy enough to find the key if the manager didn’t insist I leave immediately. It was simple, he said. I was scaring the children on the beach and disturbing people’s dinner. I had to go. He told me I’d not be welcome back and that he was calling the police to come and drive me home. I was that woman, the one making a scene, flapping her arms, asserting her sobriety as she stumbled and fell and gathered her things. I made it off the beach before the police arrived.

  I sulked down the two-lane highway to the hotel. I walked in my bare feet down the center of the road, traversing the single yellow line, my balance beam. Cars sped past and some stopped, their drivers checking to see if I was okay. There were a few men who asked if I wanted a ride or more of a good time. “I’ve had enough of one, thank you,” I replied, waving them off as the road dirtied my feet and rocks split my skin. I walked with Cara’s scarf tied around my waist, dragging behind me on the ground like a tail of feathers. The scarf picked up pieces of stray trash, mostly wrappers, and blades of dry sea grass. I was a castaway: my shoes had been swept away in high tide. I was marooned, locked out of my cabin, totally alone. I picked the lock on a window and hoisted my way over a bush of blooming crater flowers. Their petals fluttered down: pink, yellow, white, and red. I stomped over them. I landed on the floor of my room and passed out, waking to the mocking cry of the farm-less wild rooster.

  I’d arrived in Hawaii very thin and had done my best to avoid indulging at luaus. I’d gone from 115 to 85 pounds in six months and didn’t want to spoil my work. There were disadvantages to malnourishment. The plastic of subway seats banged my tailbone until I couldn’t sit. The yielding cotton of my mattress bruised my thighs from the weight of my sleeping frame. My hair fell from my head in clumps. Downy hair covered my body to warm it, like peach fuzz. My teeth became loose. It had become impossible to do even small things but I found my new slip of a body worth it. When I was good and ready and paper-thin, I’d die an individual, not a twin.

  * * *

  I stayed on in Hawaii through the New Year.

  I wrote Jedediah a note on New Year’s Eve on a postcard I’d found in a nearby gift shop. The card pictures a hula dancer facing the sea, her hips tilted, head to the side, and arms out. She dances beneath a full moon in a cloudless sky. The card reads: Lonely Lola Lo.

  I sent that postcard the day before I drove the red clay mountains in the north of Poipu and buried some of my sister’s ashes in the sandy soil there, beneath a tree. This was the only time I’d let part of her go by myself, touched what was left of her alone. Her ashes were a lucent blue in contrast to the vivid red soil, like a swatch of the night sky pulled down from the heavens, laid out on earth. The ashes were mingled with bits of white bone; those were the stars. What used to be human—flesh, fingers, legs, blood, and hips to bear children—was now a coarse powder that fell through my fingers.

  I spat on the ground beneath the shrubby tree. I’d found the farthest place from home I could to conceal what was left of Cara. I got down on my knees and pressed my cheek against the hot red earth and screamed until I no longer had a voice. I shouted down into the ground, into the hole I’d made for Cara. I cursed. I swore at God, Jesus, Edgardo, ex-husbands, undertakers, lovers, disappointment, and drugs, and most of all, Cara. All of them had allowed for half of me to be taken and left, like a person forced to try to survive without a heart or will.

  Chapter 23

  In March, nine months after Cara died, I flew home to Massachusetts on a direct flight from a failure of a trip to Rome intent on killing myself. I’d planned it all out: To die at home would be cruel to Jedediah; he’d have to find me and clean up. To die at Mom’s would be to destroy her, but I couldn’t live just to keep from upsetting her. To die in a cheap motel would be to die in a cheap motel. To walk into the forest and die would be to be eaten by animals. To shoot myself would mean the possibility of missing. Starving wasn’t working; sex partners worked even less well. A flight seemed like just the thing.

  I boarded the plane and settled into my seat, the window seat. I watched the baggage crew scramble around the tarmac, struggling to fill the belly of the plane with luggage. I saw my bag hoisted into the plane, a tattered leopard print zip-up with worn wheels, pink ribbon tied around the handle. I wondered who’d claim the bag at the other end of my flight. I pulled down my tiny plastic window shade and it blinked shut like a sleepy eye.

  I counted the full bottles of pills in my purse: three. They rolled around beside the small box of Cara’s ashes. There were enough pills to kill, enough that there would be no rescue. The flight attendants would assume I was sleeping, and not bother to try to wake me for food or drink. I’d be left alone to die, discovered only when it was too late for interventions, when all others had left the plane to meet waiting relatives or to attend corporate dinners. The plan was seamless. This neat and orderly way to perish required no directly gruesome involvement for Jedediah or for Mom.

  At takeoff I gripped the armrest, feeling the familiar rush of fear I always got when an aircraft jerked up into the sky. I had a ritual at takeoff that Cara had told me made a crash impossible: surround the plane with white light, watch it rise up like a steady bird into the air, see it glide from one safe place to another, imagine the plane lands in the destination and that migration is over. I placed four pills into my mouth and swallowed, one for every step of my ritual that I was about to neglect. I was ready never to see the ground again.

  I looked over toward the aisle, meeting the gaze of my neighbor, the woman in the middle seat, seat B.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked. The woman was young, no more than twenty-five. She tipped her head to the side, her long straight blond hair brushing her lap. She adjusted the strap on her flowing flowered dress and looked into my purse.

  “Nothing.” I turned away as best I could, closed my eyes, and rested my head against the window. I listened to the hum of the jet’s engines and imagined the turning propellers.

  “Doesn’t look like nothing from over here, but what do I know?” She grabbed my bag from out of my lap and t
ook out one of the bottles of pills. “Fear of flying? I had that, too, before I found God.”

  “I’ve had a really bad time in Rome,” I heard myself say. “Now I just want to be left alone.” But then for some reason I cracked. Confession wasn’t part of my plan, but I couldn’t stop myself from telling the clement stranger everything. I told the young woman all about my trip: how there’d been a man and a breakup and drinking and drugs. I told her how I’d been to the Vatican and then to dinner with a dear friend and her partner, a famous painter, and how my friend had asked me to join them both in bed, after. She thought this would save their relationship, to give her friend and herself to this lover. I said I would, even though I didn’t want to.

  * * *

  I told her how I’d left the tryst quietly, during the middle of the whole affair, and let the lovers finish. I told her how I scrambled to find my long black dress on the floor of their bedroom. I hadn’t realized I’d been crying until a tear landed on my bare foot. I told the stranger how I made my way to the sofa, in the living room, and that the man followed. I told her how he lay down beside me on the sofa and wept. He wept for his brother, who he said was a fuckup and a drug addict. He told me that he understood why I wept, that like him, I mourned my sibling.

  I told the woman on the plane how he’d been wrong, that I was crying for myself, for giving myself over to a man while I was married, and because I thought it would please my friend. I told her how I no longer had care or will. I told her how the man had said he admired my photographs, that he thought them beautiful, that he wanted to have for himself the beautiful living woman in those photographs. I told her about the pictures I’d taken and about Cara and how she had died.

  I told her how the man had looked into my eyes and declared to me that he should have the image of me he’d seen in pictures, how disappointed he was to meet me and find that I was not at all beautiful, that I no longer looked like either twin in my photographs. I told her how he’d been perplexed by this fact, the fact that men wanted me even though I was not much to look at. He included himself in this group.