Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  The young doctor and I walked the campus grounds to Kernberg’s office in a small stone building. I’d layered myself in two pairs of pants and wore three long-sleeved shirts—all I’d packed in my bag to Payne Whitney. I wore slip-on flats and my feet were bare inside of my shoes. I’d forgotten to take socks to the hospital, counting on tights to keep warm. My stockings were confiscated at check-in: they were too easy to fashion into a noose.

  I looked for holes beneath the fence of the campus or a strait on the winding path where I could tear off. I could outrun my escort. I’d sized her up and determined that although I had asthma, she had been the kind of girl in high school who was still running the mile in gym class when the next period’s bell rang. I imagined she moved slowly so as not to ruin her hair. Her pumps stabbed like spikes into the wet ground.

  And then it started to rain. A drizzle fell first and picked up quickly into hail. If I ran now, I thought, I’d freeze.

  The resident pulled a collapsed umbrella from her shoulder bag and opened it over us. “Hurry in,” she insisted. “You’ll catch your death in this wet and cold. You’re too thin for pneumonia.”

  I hadn’t the courage to flee. I realized as I stood in the rain sharing the resident’s umbrella that I had expected to die, as surely as I expected that Cara would die. Having to live, I realized then, my feet wet and teeth chattering—that was the most unexpected and terrifying and impossible thing about surviving.

  I know what you are thinking: I’m on thinning ice. You are always one step behind me.

  You could fall in, too, and we’d freeze before taking in mouthfuls of cold water. We agree drowning is the best way to die: the bitter cold euphoria of what it is to stop floating. To sink and float, sink and float, and press against the ice until a thaw. A man would find us on an early spring swim, our identical bodies preserved by the cold. What a story he would tell about being tangled in identical limbs as he tried to do the backstroke. “And there were two of them!” he’d say. He’d bend ears into old age. We could be a litany of death. We could go on and on. Death would laugh and say: those who are born together die together. The man, years after the backstroke, would irrevocably ask into his late years, “What were those dear girls thinking?”

  * * *

  The medical student and I met Kernberg in his office. I sat in a green leather studded chair pulled up to the far end of a rectangular table. Kernberg sat at the opposite post. Medical residents, scribbling notes on yellow writing pads, filled three chairs on both sides of the table. Kernberg nodded and our session commenced. He appeared small in his high-back chair, and elderly, but he commanded attention with his heavy German accent and few words. He wanted to talk with me about my sister. He asked me to recall a time before her death that we’d acted unknowingly in the same way and to recall whether I’d acted in that same way since she’d been gone. He asked me to keep it simple: tasks first, then feelings.

  I told him about the sinks in Arlington Cemetery.

  We were only nine years old and touring D.C. with Mike. He took us to the tomb of the unknown soldier and had us salute. We walked the cemetery hills dotted with endless white tombstones, tablets that read BORN and DIED and SERVED and were as alike as the rigid military uniforms the men had worn and fought and died in. Mike walked ahead of us. I remember the quiet imposed by what I imagined to be the drama of battle. The silent cries of men before they’d become casualties were not far off; they were coming from the ground. I could hear the choppers and artillery fire. I was a girl of nine with a fierce imagination and a Marine Corps elementary school education. I knew how to raise a flag and I knew how to mourn our heroes.

  Cara and I were tired from walking so we knelt on the ground to rest. I rooted my hands through the grass and pulled it out in bunches, a child’s reflex. Mike stopped and turned; he had an animal’s sense for our wrongdoings. I’d not only shown weakness by resting on my laurels during our remembrance march, I’d also desecrated his good name and our family name, the name he shared with our mother while we kept our father’s.

  Mike yanked me up from the ground by one arm and held me dangling in the air. He held Cara by the other. I dropped my fist full of earth, the ripped strands of grass falling down onto the lawn below. “You’re in a place of honor,” he barked and then released me. “Go wash your hands.” He pushed us off toward the public bathroom.

  We shoved our hands in our pockets and did as we were told. Once we’d gotten out of earshot we giggled. “I have to pee anyway,” Cara told me. “Don’t feel bad. These guys are too dead to notice.”

  I went into the restroom first, while Cara stood outside and took a long drink at a water fountain. Inside there were dozens of orange doors parallel to dozens of sinks. I went into a stall at the far end of the restroom and then found a sink and soaped my hands. It was late afternoon on a weekday and the restroom was empty of anyone but me. Cara was still outside. I dried my hands with a paper towel and skipped out to find her. She was waiting by the door.

  “Aren’t you going inside?” I asked.

  “I was standing guard, but I’m not going in alone. Watch my back, okay?”

  I followed her in and and she surveyed the stalls. “This place gives me the creeps. I hate the military. They make the bathrooms the same as the graves.” Cara walked to a stall and went inside. She opened and used the exact one I had.

  She emerged after a minute and then selected a sink, my sink. We were wired to make the same choices given any number of options.

  I told this story to Kernberg.

  “You were little girls who made the same basic choices?” Kernberg asked.

  “Yes.”

  He wanted to know if there was something else, something small that connected us in our choices to each other. I told him about my chair.

  Mom had helped me redecorate after Jedediah moved out, and she’d found me an antique sitting chair at a yard sale with arms wide as a hug and a back that was tall and supportive and built to last. The chair was upholstered in smooth black leather but the seat was torn. Mom said she’d like to take me to a fabric warehouse so I could pick material I liked. She’d reupholster the chair. She thought it would be good for me to have a new piece of furniture, something completely mine: not from my marriage, not something inherited from Cara. Mom said she’d done the same for Cara with a chaise longue that had a swan carved into the wood on the back. They’d gotten as far as picking out the fabric, then Cara had died.

  The fabric warehouse had many thousands of lengths of silk, fleece, cotton, wools, linen, and tulles. There were rooms organized by design: shabby chic, modern, antique, utilitarian. I went to the most colorful room I could find and browsed the fabrics for an hour, trying to imagine incorporating a new chair into my life, one completely of my choosing. Jedediah wouldn’t argue that it was too pink, ornate, or feminine. Cara couldn’t want it for herself.

  I decided on thick red cotton decorated with tiny yellow elephants wearing sage green riding saddles. I pulled the fabric out of the bin and brought it over to my mother to ask whether or not it was good for a chair, if it was the right density and weight. I handed it over to her to inspect, proud of my choice.

  My mother went pale as she looked down at the fabric. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s the exact fabric Cara picked out. We already have enough to cover the chair at home.”

  “You’ve been taught your lack of free will is what defines you and keeps your sister with you? No?” Kernberg said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” He could read me and I feared that. I feared I’d have to let Cara go. “Am I sick, like her?” I asked in a child’s voice. I needed to know I hadn’t caught what she had when she died, taken her illness.

  “I never met your sister. She was not under my care. I can’t say what ailed her. I can say with certainty that you are not well, but this state of yours is temporary, acute. My concern is how you navigate as you go along.”

  “So I can go home? I don’t need to be
here?”

  “Yes, you can go home. But yes, you need to be here.”

  “You’ll sign off and let me go? I’m not a borderline?”

  “Yes you can. No, you’re not borderline, but we’re not finished here.”

  * * *

  I called D and let him know that, as it turned out, I was sane and could go home. Kernberg had said as much.

  “Kernberg? You saw Kernberg? The Kernberg?” D asked.

  “Yes. Is that so important?”

  “You just saw the father of modern psychotherapy, after Freud. You know that, right?”

  I didn’t. I was just glad to leave. “He seemed nice.”

  “Nice? Jesus, C. Jesus. Kernberg? No shit. I just can’t believe you saw Kernberg. What did he say?”

  “He said I wasn’t crazy.”

  “You mean you’re not borderline?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I knew it. But now that we’ve heard it from him, I’m relieved.” D took a deep breath. “I told you you’d be in good hands there,” he added lightly. “How about you come on back home? I’ll make dinner.”

  I loaded my suitcase into the trunk of my car in the Payne Whitney parking lot. During my short stay, a seal had cracked in the trunk and rain had soaked everything inside. My wool winter coat was ruined; it sat atop moldy dresses and soggy notebooks. The most prized book in my photography collection, a hardbound Arbus monograph with a set of dark-haired identical twins standing shoulder to shoulder on the cover, wearing crisp white shirts, jumpers, and curious frowns, was waterlogged. The cover and thus the twins were split down the center, ripped apart.

  I pulled out of the hospital parking lot and headed back to D’s in Brooklyn. As I hit the road I recalled a drive with Cara through the center of Northampton. It was January 3, 2003. We’d just had the first significant snowfall of the season. We were on our way to photograph winterscapes. Cara had been raped only a year and a half before. On that drive, she had lifted her chin toward the rearview mirror of my yellow Volvo wagon to check her makeup. I’d created a diva. One arm dangling out of the car window, she smoked a long cigarette; she was dead and breathing.

  I was about to take my first picture for Kindred. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  I found an embankment distinguished by a hibernating tree webbed with red berries and pulled the car over. The tree had hundreds of thin, tangled branches.

  I directed Cara to stand in front of my camera by pointing at a blank space beneath the berry tree. She tromped out into the snow and knelt down, pushing back the thorny, bare branches. “A real actress never lets anyone see her sweat,” she said, and proceeded to huddle on the ground.

  She lured a bough of the red berries over her head. Bittersweet climbed the vines she pulled closed. She wanted to be both hidden and seen, peeking out from behind the bough. I stood beside her and lowered a cluster of vines. I pulled the cage of them down hard to cover her. She stared at the lens of the camera as if it were a person familiar to her, someone to whom she needed to reveal her secrets, someone she wanted to lash with her painful truths. She looked down without my asking, hands in just the right place. Her cloak plumed around her legs, a black tulip in bloom. She reapplied the red lipstick I’d brought for her.

  We wore the identical black wool coats our mother had bought us for Christmas that year. Cara’s coat concealed purple pajamas. She’d refused to get dressed, so I found the only thing she owned that would cover her nightwear. She’d missed a spot for her lipstick on her top lip; a crescent moon of pale pink exposed itself from behind the garish red stain. She sat quietly picking at her ragged manicure and then lit a cigarette. She didn’t pay it much mind; smoldering tobacco touched the tips of her index and middle fingers. She wore a mood ring and the diamond from her failing marriage; she never took either off. Dirt and bark lodged under her nails. Her hands were turning blue. She clawed her way into place for the picture.

  “Hurry up, Christa,” she yelled out over the wind. “If you want me to lie down I’ll do it. I always know what you want.” She assumed the position, satisfied with herself.

  She didn’t know. I wanted her giant doe-in-the-headlights eyes back. I wanted the woman who believed that she could win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. Instead, I stood face-to-face with a Klonopin-ed Medusa who’d been stripped of her powers; a fallen goddess, stoned and frozen, who slurred her words.

  I heard my own voice counting for the picture. The voice was familiar; it’s Cara’s voice.

  I made pictures of us in snow and pictures of us over bodies of water and on mountains of rock, but I couldn’t reach her.

  The shutter clicked.

  I extended my hand to help Cara off of the ground. She took my hand and stood; she brushed herself off.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You need this.” She reached down and picked up a handful of snow.

  “Don’t.” I put my hands up and shielded my face. “Don’t you dare hit me with that.”

  She laughed. “You think that’s what I want to do?” She took the snow and threw it into her own face in a puff; it stuck in her hair and eyelashes. A frosty queen, she blinked at me. “If you die, I’ll kill myself.” Cara put her hands on the sides of her cheeks and felt their cold. She waited for me to respond.

  I wiped the snow from her face in gentle strokes. “If you die, I’ll survive you.” I sank to the ground and made a snow angel. Cara got down beside me and made one, too. We moved our arms and legs in tandem, like swimmers.

  Chapter 27

  I moved back to D’s in Brooklyn and started going on dates with Cara’s boyfriends. I logged onto Cara’s e-mail to find their names and addresses, and tracked down each one of them, calling or e-mailing. I was hoping I’d catch a glimpse of her by setting a boyfriend net. I did keyword searches. Her favorite words: lovely, moon, twin, and zodiac. Her pet names: baby, dearest, sweetie, flower, and the mystifying, chunky. I found searching for phrases to be helpful also:

  I love you.

  How’s it going?

  I want you.

  What’s your sign?

  I’m a Cancer.

  I had a nice time.

  Bowling?

  Dancing at Diva’s?

  I never do this but—

  I checked the archive of her e-mail tirelessly. She was too much of a romantic to delete a single letter; she’d saved and archived all of her messages in folders. Each was labeled not with a name, but with a type of jewel. She’d even held on to the rejections: “You’re too needy,” one of the men wrote. “I’ve gone back to my wife,” said another. I savored her notes. I looked for even a hint of flirtation in her correspondence with a man. When I found an inkling of courtship, I’d make contact and ask them to meet me. I told her boyfriends that I’d hoped to pull together a book of Cara’s work and needed help piecing together her last years. Not one of her boyfriends said no. There was a common reprieve: “Please don’t mention this to my wife.” And I heard more than once, “She won’t understand this, but I do.”

  I wasn’t cheating on D, I reasoned. It was research. I had no desire to be intimate with any of these men, and I never was. I thought of our meetings more as fact-finding missions.

  “Is it crazy to go out and find my sister’s lovers?” I asked D one night at dinner. We’d been trying out living together for the summer; we were in a honeymoon period, and though I’d kept my own place, we hadn’t gotten to the point where our shared possessions had become more than symbol; we’d bought only the trimmings for a home—groceries and sheets, roasting pans and books—with the intention of defining who we’d become together as we went along. There was always that fear, up until the end, that if we didn’t keep up appearances, we’d failed. I baked cakes and he prepared meals; he poured drinks with the precision of a surgeon’s hand.

  D had made an elaborate dish the night I asked him about the boyfriends: a roasted chicken in a cast-iron skillet that
he turned by hand and basted every ten minutes. He’d shelled several cloves of garlic, chopped carrots, potatoes, an onion, and parsnips and arranged them all around the bird. Each caramelized in the chicken fat as it cooked. D didn’t own a kitchen table, so we’d picnic on the living-room floor each night. He’d take an expensive, high-thread-count Italian sheet and spread it out. We’d eat on that, and tried not to soil the sheet with grease or wine. We’d sit across from each other, each with our own careful dining styles. D had been raised with meticulous table manners and could eat anything anywhere without betraying etiquette. I took tiny bites and lifted my plate up to my chin. It was my job to set our places, and I happily did so. I carried out plates, paper napkins, utensils, and a small carving station for the chicken stacked on top of a solid mahogany serving tray. I set our table on the floor. This was our eating ritual, which we followed with hours of pot smoking. I went back into the kitchen to see how dinner was progressing.

  “Sounds about right to me, Sweet Pea.” D opened the freezer and pulled out a half-sized martini glass handblown with a ribbon of tangerine that he’d brought for me from Europe. He placed it beside his larger one and poured us both a drink. The glass was dainty, just the right serving so my cocktail stayed cold. D mixed Manhattans, his favorite, and learned to make a more palatable, sweeter version for me than the mix he liked for himself. He’d served me my first stiff drink, and thought it funny that when I took my initial sips, I wrinkled my nose like a child. But a smaller, pretty glass had made the jet-fuel burn of the bourbon go down smoother; in no time, I was throwing them back and making my own. I was regularly drunk before dinner. “This chicken is nearly done.” D pulled a bit of the skin off the top. “Open up, sweetie.” He dropped the skin into my mouth. “When I wrote the memoir about Louanne, I contacted her friends and asked as many questions as I could. You’re just being a good artist.”