It was my mother’s idea, one dictated to her by a Greek custom she remembered learning from her mother or some other relative — or perhaps from her imagination. Her sister had died suddenly, one week before her fiftyfourth birthday. My mother had bought her a purse for her birthday, but had not had the chance to give it to her — one just like her own, an alligator-skin purse that Cal had admired.
After the initial shock of Cal’s death was over and we sat quietly sobbing in my aunt’s living room, my mother cried out, “Oh, no, oh, no.”
“What is it?” I rushed to her, thinking that she had suddenly come out of numbness to realize that her sister had really died.
“The purse,” she said, her voice trembling.
“What purse?”
“I bought Cal a purse for her birthday.”
“Perhaps you can keep it for yourself.”
“No, you don’t understand. I bought her a gift that I didn’t give her. Now she will come back from the dead to get me, to take me with her.”
“Why would your own sister do that to you?”
“It’s what the Greeks say. And it’s true. Maybe she is jealous that she’s dead and I’m still alive. Or maybe it’s not really her who comes back, but an evil spirit, or devil, in her form. That spirit will come for me.”
She continued sobbing, but then stopped. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll give her the purse now. Put it in her coffin with her.”
“Do they let you do that?” I wondered, having already encountered several times the illogical regulations of our burial customs.
“I’ll make them. Jerry will do it for me. I’ve known him for years.”
Later, before leaving for the funeral home, she went to her bedroom and came back with a bag which apparently contained the purse. Her mouth was set tight with resolve, a resolve she displayed to Jerry the funeral director as soon as we arrived. I was angry at her. Her sister, my aunt, whom we had loved so deeply, and whom we would both miss desperately, was dead, we were about to see her dead body, a fact that frightened me since I did not want to believe she was dead and now would have to accept it — and my mother was arguing with the undertaker about placing a purse in the coffin, thinking more about her own feared death than about her sister’s actual death.
As I had suspected, there was a regulation against it. But Jerry finally said, “I’ll look the other way and you sneak it in — but hide it so I don’t see it.” My mother did just that, tucking the alligator-skin purse under the pink satin lining of the coffin just under Cal’s feet, where the satin bunched out and could be used to cover any unsightly body parts that could not be made beautiful by the undertaker.
She waited until just before the funeral, when the coffin would be sealed forever. I almost giggled watching her surreptitious way of leaning over Cal’s feet, lifting one foot a little, hiding the purse — she moved like a thief, stealing from someone who was just sleeping, who was likely to sit up any minute and say “Gotcha.” I expected Cal to do just that — she and I could have had such a laugh over my mother’s actions. Cal was always childlike and fun-loving. Her mother would scream, “Calliope, grow up, dress like a grown woman, behave yourself,” but Cal would not grow up, and she and I were like best friends rather than aunt and niece.
Throughout the wake and the funeral, I thought of that purse. It helped me get through the grief, provided ‘comic relief.’ It certainly appeased my mother. She now could concentrate on her grief and forget her fear. Now her sister’s ghost would not come to her one night, reach out a bony hand, and demand, “Come.”
That night, after the funeral, I was sound asleep, dreaming that Cal and I were dancing the cha-cha on the beach, when my mother shook me, yelling loudly in my ear. I couldn’t understand her — she was screaming and crying.
“Mom, what is the matter!” I wondered if someone else had died or was sick.
“Something terrible has happened!” She was crying so hard that I couldn’t understand her for quite awhile. “I . . . I . . . put my own purse in the coffin instead of the one I bought for Cal. All my credit cards are in it, my licence, and some money.”
“How did you manage to do that?”
“I was so nervous. And I left my purse, I thought it was my purse, at home, and just took my keys and some Kleenexes in my small purse. Instead of grabbing up Cal’s purse, I must have grabbed my own. I don’t know how I did it. Then tonight I opened my purse to look at Cal’s picture that I keep in my wallet — I couldn’t sleep, I missed her so — and I found the purse empty. Cal’s purse! And my own purse is down in a hole in the ground with a dead body!”
I thought of the sealed coffin in the grave. “Maybe they haven’t buried the coffin yet. We could have them open it, and you could switch purses.”
“No, No. Don’t you realize what that would mean? To take back a gift I had given her? Not to mention the sacrilege of opening the coffin after the funeral. She would come for me for sure. I would die violently because of my sin against her.”
I had always wanted a sister, but now was glad I’d never had one. Was this an example of a relationship between sisters? This threat, this fear, this desire for each other’s belongings and circumstances, this insistence on sharing every condition, even death?
I was awake now, but not enough to think clearly. “Let’s make some coffee,” I insisted, and stumbled out of bed to lead my mother to the kitchen. I started the coffee and tried to think of a logical way to solve this dilemma.
“Will Cal be angry at the gift you did give her, your own purse with all that’s in it? Isn’t that a good gift? She won’t come for you then, will she?” Of course I wanted to tell her that this was all hogwash, but I didn’t bother — she never listened to me.
“But what about my identification and credit cards?”
“You can get new ones quite quickly. I’ll make the calls for you in the morning. We’ll just say you lost your purse. Then, you can cancel those cards — not that Cal can use your credit cards, but we can’t tell anyone where the purse is.”
“You never know. Cal always envied me my credit cards.”
“She did not. Mom, what’s the matter with you?”
She began to cry again and I wished I hadn’t said anything. But I was getting into her way of thinking now. “You know, since all your identification is in the coffin, and not Cal’s, maybe someone will think that’s your body and never come for you. You can live forever.”
Her eyes brightened, then dulled. “I don’t want to live forever. But I want to live out my time and do more with my life. All I’ve done is be a mother.”
I swallowed the clichés that almost came out and which perhaps she wanted to hear. She spoke again, though, rather quickly. “Yes, you’re probably right, she won’t come get me now, she’ll appreciate the gift of my own purse and identification. I hope she doesn’t mind — she knows who she is, anyway.”
She started to walk out of the room. “Where are you going?”
“To bed. I’m tired.” So she went to bed, and I sat up and drank coffee until morning, making a list of the phone calls I needed to make to get her new credit cards and a new license. I hoped she wouldn’t tell anyone else about this, even my brother, who would just groan. I would not tell him. Let him go back to his home and his job without hearing of this dark side which he never liked to face.
I didn’t tell any of my friends at university about this, not for a long time, though I wondered if this really was a Greek belief and why it had developed. I was studying anthropology and ancient religions and occasionally looked for such a superstition, found many similar ones, but nothing quite like that. I didn’t try very hard, though. My friends would have laughed at my mother, at my heritage, if I had told them.
After Jack asked me to marry him, and I said yes, and we were in bed after beautifully happy lovemaking, and he had told me about his childhood fears, I told him the story of the purse. He listened quietly until I finished. Then he said, “God, your family
’s crazy. Are our children going to be that way?”
“Crazy! My family isn’t crazy! My mother grew up with those beliefs. She inherited them.”
“Then your family’s been crazy for a long time.”
“Are you implying that I’m crazy, too?”
“No, of course not. You must not have inherited that gene.”
“Get out,” I said.
“What?”
“Get out. I will not have anyone making fun of my mother and my family.”
“But after what you told me, what do you expect? I’m not making fun of you.”
“But I’m a product of that family. That Greek family. Perhaps you’re prejudiced against Greeks. You’re such a WASP. You WASPS have no imagination at all.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“You could have tried to understand my mother, her suffering, her fear. Instead of saying she’s crazy.”
“Okay, don’t get so excited. I thought you thought it was a strange and funny story.”
I realized I had, until he’d said so. Now I had to defend my heritage.
“I guess you don’t want to marry me now,” I yelled.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did. You said you didn’t want to have children by me, in case they inherited the craziness.”
“That’s not exactly what I said.”
“Get out.”
He got dressed, while I waited in the bathroom with the door locked. I heard the door slam when he left.
He called me after that, several times, but I always hung up on him. Finally, he gave up. I was crazy to think I could marry a WASP.
After that, I told all my boyfriends, at least the ones I was serious about, the story of the purse. I wanted to see their reactions, use that to determine whether I’d be happy with them. My boyfriend from Ghana was furious at me for not using a certain spell that his grandmother had taught him to prevent the dead from coming back — but I told him over and over again that I did not know that spell. My Chinese boyfriend told me it didn’t matter, not to take it seriously, not to worry. But most of them just laughed, thinking it a big joke, a funny story, only a story. I had one Greek boyfriend who didn’t laugh but hadn’t heard of that particular superstition — he said his family wasn’t superstitious at all. He was sympathetic, though, since he found his family strange and rather primitive and never went to visit them.
My mother and I talked frequently on the telephone, but rarely about Cal. I reminded her one day about the purse, that our solution had worked, that Cal had never come back, that my mother’s life had been healthy and happy, for, in fact, she was in love and about to marry again (something that hadn’t happened to me!).
“Oh, Cal did come back,” she said, “but just once.”
“What?” I should have listened to Jack, I thought, she is crazy.
“Yes, she came back. But I explained to her about the mix-up and my decision to let her have my purse and all my credit cards and identification — told her I had really wanted to give her her birthday present — and she understood. She’s stayed away since then.”
Six months after her wedding and short honeymoon with her new husband, my mother had a stroke. I drove six hours to be with her and sat at her bedside as she slept. She had lost feeling in her left arm and left leg, and her speech was slurred. When she saw me there, she was not surprised. “Let me die,” she said. “I want to die.”
“C’mon, Mom. The doctor told me you’ll pull through and might get all feeling back. You just need to work at it.”
“I don’t want to. I want to die.”
I was always helpless against her words. She never listened to me. My words were useless, hitting the wall of her mind and bouncing back at me. So I was quiet. Then she mumbled something, and I leaned forward to hear her.
“It’s because of the purse,” she said.
“The purse?”
“Yes, my purse in Cal’s grave, while I had hers. I never used it. Do you hear me, Cal, I never used your purse. I kept it, but it’s yours. I bought a new one. And I gave you mine.”
“But you said Cal came to you, that she understood.”
“I never told you that. Why do you lie to me?”
“Mom, stop it, you did, you did tell me that.”
“But now Cal is waiting for me,” she continued, as if I’d never spoken. “She will come for me. Come for me, Cal, you’re right, I was selfish, I did all the wrong things, I was a bad sister, a bad mother, my children loved you more than they loved me. But I did try, I tried to give you your purse, for your very own.”
All I could say was, “It’s not true,” over and over again, and “You tried to give her your purse, she’d never be mad,” but she wasn’t listening. After a while, her speech became too garbled for me to understand, and she went back to sleep.
Mike, my stepfather, came in, looked at her and sighed. “Is it my fault?” he asked sadly.
“Your fault? Now don’t you start! How could it be? You’ve made her happy.”
“I hope so. But why won’t she fight?”
She woke up again, saw Mike, and smiled.
“Why won’t you fight?” he asked her.
“Because my sister died first, and she was younger. It should have been me.”
“Well, that’s not the way things work all the time,” Mike said. “It’s not your fault she died first. But you’re here. So hang on to life and get the most out of it.”
Clichés, but she liked them. My mother always loved clichés, but I could never speak them. And Mike meant them. I might have meant them, too, but she wouldn’t have believed me. So I kept silent. As did my brother. In this way we understood each other. He wandered around the hospital, saying nothing, like a shadow, like one of those zombies, unable to speak or to interrupt the flow of my mother’s words, slurred and garbled, but constant and overwhelming. After a few days, he left, and so did I.
The next time I saw my mother she was in a wheelchair. The time after that she was walking with a cane. Mike was standing beside her, helping her when she needed or wanted to be helped. She was talking constantly. I tried to tell her about my studies, about my new apartment, but I couldn’t explain what my life was like, so mundane and undramatic. She was talking about the male nurse who spoke Greek to her and made her move her arm. “He had a crush on me. He called me the Greek goddess.” She talked about all the dead ones — her parents, her brothers, her sister, her first two husbands. I couldn’t tell her about my boyfriends or my research into superstition, its harmful and beneficial effects on people who needed those beliefs to help them understand life and death. We talked about television shows and the movies she’d watched on her new VCR.
“I have a present for you,” she said and reached for her purse, opened it and took out some money. “I have some money for you. Use it for something special for yourself. I gave your brother the same amount, so he won’t be jealous.” I didn’t see the money or count how much it was — I was noticing the purse, made of alligator skin.
She saw me looking. “You know, I found this in the closet. Perfectly good. Never used. I must have forgotten about it. What a waste. So I’m putting it to good use now.”
I folded up the money and put it in my purse — a black one made of fake leather. I was against killing alligators for their skin. “Thank you,” I said. But she was already talking about something else, about somebody she’d seen on Oprah, about Mike’s daughter who reminded her of me because she wrote poetry and published it in the newspapers, about how wonderful Elizabeth Taylor looked.
Unfinished
THE STREET LOOKED familiar, though Margo didn’t remember walking here before. Used books, antiques, jewellery, pottery, paintings, hand-woven shawls. She looked in the window at the shawls, admiring the bright blue one and the cream one with tassels. Her reflection and the sun partly blocked her view of a third shawl, which seemed to have roses and violets on it. Too gaudy for her. She preferred something simple an
d plain. She was tempted to try the blue one on but walked past the shop.
Every day she walked in a different direction, as she learned her way around the city. She had moved here just two months ago. She had retired now, her husband had died one year ago, and she had been fortunate to find a small house just a few blocks from her older daughter’s house and six blocks from her younger daughter’s. Now she could spend more time with her grandchildren — or at least she had thought so. The families were so busy with work and school that she’d hardly seen them at all; she often walked by their houses only to find that no one was there.
A store called Memories advertised “Collectibles.” Displayed in the window were teacups, napkin holders, antique picture frames, record albums, necklaces, bracelets, and animal figurines. Margo went in to browse. Maybe she could find some small gifts for the children. Ashleigh loved tiny dolls, Barry collected models of vintage cars, and baby Ryan enjoyed stuffed animals and soft books.
She didn’t see anything for children. The attractive woman at the counter seemed friendly, though. She was probably in her sixties, a little younger than Margo. Her dark hair, speckled with grey, was pulled back in a bun and her long flowered dress rather old-fashioned. Her eyes and soft voice were kind; Margo wondered if they could become friends.
The woman smiled at Margo and said, “Welcome.”
“Thank you,” Margo said. “Do you have anything for children?”
“I’m sorry, not right now.”
“I’ll just browse, then, if you don’t mind.”
The woman nodded, and Margo wandered around the store: sets of china, silverware, used books, and, in the back, sheet music from the 1930s and 40s. Those were her mother’s favourite songs, and hers. She used to play them on the piano, the spinet her mother had given her when she’d moved away for her first job. Now the piano was standing forgotten in her new living room. It hadn’t been tuned in years. She wasn’t sure if she could play anymore with her arthritic hands.
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