In Harriet’s body, she bent to retrieve it. She straightened and beheld a large, disheveled woman, tangled hair, eyes closed: herself outside herself, the very sight she had feared in the theater when it had seemed that Harriet might enter her office and the both of them would die. But Harriet was alive, she was alive in Harriet, and “the woman” was at least upright.
She placed the manuscript on the table and touched the woman’s arm. Her hand wasn’t felt. “Are you all right?” she said. Incredibly, the woman nodded, a definite down, up, down. Who had heard the question? What remained of her to hear?
A smear of the guy’s yellow foam sullied her blouse. Her glasses were crooked. Harriet was overcome with pity, so much pity that it overcame Rose. She had a sense that they were silently discussing her, saying that, after all, she wasn’t so bad. Nice clothes, a shine to her hair, you wouldn’t call her unhealthy. And wasn’t that a Rolex? There they both were, inspecting her and feeling the most tender concern and love, forgiving her because it was obvious that she was the type of person who would never forgive herself.
Blood slid out of her nostril. They—Rose and Harriet—offered a napkin and were a single Harriet reflection in the woman’s glasses. They put the napkin next to the manuscript. Might they get her something to drink? Coffee? Juice?
The woman shook her head.
“Okay, well,” they said. “Take care.” They stuck the pen and newspaper in the shoulder bag and transferred the cup and crimped muffin shell to the tray. They brought the tray to the counter and said, “Thank you.” At the door they gave the woman a final worried look.
I’m in here forever, Rose thought.
She was in there for another second. She emerged crying and disoriented, her last dependable memory a glimpse of Harriet on the other side of the road. She wiped the blood and went outside and stood looking uncertainly at the clinic until a male server from the café dashed through the rain with her briefcase and manuscript. Her “Thank you,” not in Harriet’s voice but in her own, cleared her fog.
A taxi idled at the corner, and she climbed in and said, “The Regal Theater on Mount Pleasant.”
“Is it too loud?” the driver asked about his music, country-and-western, a man singing that his bucket had a hole in it.
“No,” said Rose. She was sweating under her drenched clothes, but she was alert now, and exuberant. She itemized her experiences as if for a judge and jury. One: traveling day after day, sometimes twice a day, into the body of another woman, a pregnant woman. Two: seeing Harriet in the flesh. Three, and most astoundingly: seeing herself from outside herself.
The thunder reached her between songs. She gripped the leather strap above her window and stared at the license plate of the truck in front of them. She tried to recall the physical feeling of the last episode, but there were only emotions: hers, Harriet’s, hers and Harriet’s united.
Rain pitched down, lightning crackled on all sides. She looked out her window. Her vision wasn’t sharpening. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. Nothing.
The episodes were over. Her whole body told her: a new kind of tension, the floating swoop you got when a plane loses altitude. The episodes were over. They stopped if the host body aborted a baby. They stopped if you saw yourself from outside yourself. They stopped because they stopped. Rose covered her face with her hands out of what felt like anguish and then, within a few minutes, like relief.
The thunder lost volume, the downpour lightened to rain, and the taxi pulled up outside the theater, her old faithful theater. She wondered if Lloyd had stayed on, but from the vestibule it was her mother she saw, moving around in the glowing pod of the snack bar.
“So you decided to make an appearance, did you?” Fiona said, her accent a blatant giveaway. She had been repositioning the drink cups. She switched, when Rose approached, to furiously scooping popcorn.
“You’re early,” Rose ventured.
“I’m late,” Fiona snapped. Her face was pink. She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. “Where’s that man we hired?”
“It’s a sauna in here,” Rose said. It wasn’t quite, but they were both overheated. She crossed to the electric panel and got the central air going.
“That’s it, throw our money out the window,” said Fiona.
“Look at the clock,” Rose said. “Behind you.”
“What for?”
“What time is it?”
Fiona twisted around. “Twelve,” she said. She went still, ladle raised. “That can’t be right,” she said in her regular voice.
“Twelve noon,” Rose said.
Fiona hung the ladle on its hook.
“Well, the popcorn’s made,” Rose said. “It’ll keep.”
“It will,” Fiona said. “God help me.”
“Why don’t we sit inside?” Rose said. “Under the fans.” She turned on the houselights.
“You’re soaking wet,” Fiona said and walked out from behind the counter.
“Oh, Mom,” Rose said. From the waist down, except for her pumps, Fiona was naked. “Go back, go back,” Rose said, making shooing motions. “What if Lloyd comes?”
“Who cares,” Fiona said, but returned to her post.
“Where’s your skirt?”
Fiona raised her eyes in one direction and limply pointed in the other, like a Leonardo da Vinci saint. Rose followed the finger to the ticket stand and a neat pile of clothing, underpants on top, an old lady’s beige padded underpants. Her eyes stung. I can’t do this, it’s too much, she said to her father. You’re all abandoning me, she said, and was once again a little girl at an agricultural fair, watching a man make cotton candy, turning to Ava and her parents, who should have been beside her, but they were far ahead, receding into the crowd.
“Rain, rain, rain,” Fiona said cheerfully. “It’s like the tropics.”
Rose held up the skirt and underwear. “I need you to put these on,” she said. “You can leave off your panty hose.”
“Well, bring them here.”
While her mother dressed, Rose opened the auditorium doors. She was thinking, home care, but who would Fiona tolerate? And how was Rose going to be able to tell when Fiona was suffering a ministroke if, half-naked, she could speak so sensibly and without an accent?
“Life is all doing and undoing,” Fiona said. “Putting your clothes on, taking them off, dirtying the floor, washing the floor.”
She wanted to sit in the front row. So they did, not directly under a fan, but it was cool enough.
“I haven’t sat here since we bought the place,” Fiona said, plucking the neck of her blouse.
They talked about the regulars who preferred the front row. There were six, they agreed, all of them young except for Gerry, who was eighty-something. Fiona came up with the names before Rose did. She was her old, quick self. Then she twisted around and said, impatiently, “Where’s your father? Where’s Ava?”
Yesterday Rose would have said, “Mom, they died.” She would have dragged her back to the real world and their shared, incurable sorrows. Today she couldn’t remember why she had ever found it necessary to be so remorseless.
“They’ll be here,” she said.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2006
It was a lovely, clear, early-autumn morning, all the leaves still green, the rosebushes in second bloom. Rose had filled the bird feeder and mowed the lawn. Enid, the Filipina caregiver, had washed Fiona’s hair and helped her dress.
Charles had come by as he came by every morning, weather permitting, so that he and Fiona could watch Let’s Make a Deal together. Fiona called him Blackie, to Rose’s horror, although Charles was fine with it. He called himself Blackie. He said, “Fiona, Blackie is here,” and removed the white panama or gray homburg he wore just for the short trip across the road. Fiona waved him over to the sofa and patted his fleshless thigh, and he took her hand and entwined it in his gnarly, branchy fingers.
Now, at ten thirty, Rose, Fiona, and Enid were walking along College Street fro
m the parking lot to the neurologist’s. Fiona, who considered Enid her special charge, her refugee, clutched the young woman’s arm and pointed at the window displays. She named items that caught her eye—lamp, teapot, men’s shoes—articulating carefully, as if for a toddler. Rose trailed behind.
They crossed the street and arrived at a corner florist’s. “Lilies!” Fiona cried. She released Enid and hurried to the door.
Enid gave Rose a questioning glance.
“We have lots of time,” Rose said. “I’ll wait out here.”
She texted Lloyd to remind him to pick up the marquee bulbs on his way in. She Googled Toronto weather, a habit she’d been unable to break despite all the thunderstorms that had come and gone without an episode. Clouds moving in after 6:00 PM, she read, a 10% chance of rain over the next 12 hours.
A baby carriage entered her side vision, and stopped. She noted the red light. She looked down at the child, a girl (pink tuque), not a newborn but not a toddler either, wrapped tightly in a bunny-patterned blanket and gnawing at her fist. “Oh, how cute,” Rose said. She looked at the mother. The mother smiled.
Piano wires snapped in Rose’s head. Harriet bent over the child and nudged the pacifier between her lips. She straightened, gave Rose a neutral look that might have been dawning recognition, and pushed the carriage.
Rose blindly followed. A truck turning right almost hit her, and she staggered back and peered above the cars to keep Harriet’s small figure in view. Her heart was suffocating. The infant soul she had privately mourned and paired with Ava in eternity was alive. A girl. Could it be that she had gotten through to Harriet, that Harriet had broken under her appeals and commands?
“Rose,” said Enid.
Rose turned. She saw Enid as if through etched glass.
“Fiona wants to buy some flowers,” Enid said. “Is that okay?”
“Sure,” said Rose and followed her into the store.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am forever indebted to my Canadian publisher, Iris Tupholme, to my agent, Jackie Kaiser, and to my editors, Patrick Crean and Meg Storey. Thanks also to my readers, Marni Jackson, Susan Swan, and Christopher Dewdney, and to repertory-cinema experts Mike Blakesley and Andy Willicks.
MORE PRAISE FOR Little Sister
“Little Sister is an existential puzzle about the
female psyche. In it, women change bodies
when lightning flashes, become pregnant with
lost relatives, and search for friends they have
never met. Gowdy is renowned for her ability to
shine light on the hidden, unsavory, and electric
recesses of the mind. In Little Sister, Gowdy’s
storytelling is fearless, inventive, and dazzling.”
—HEATHER O’NEILL, author of
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
PRAISE FOR Helpless
“Gowdy writes as if she is on a sinking boat and
needs to throw out all the dead weight. The only
words that survive are the ones that matter.”
—New York Times
“What [Barbara Gowdy] does, with bravery and
compassion, is explore the immense impact that
obsessive love can have on innocent—and
not-so-innocent—people.”
—People
PRAISE FOR The White Bone
“The White Bone . . . will linger long in the
memory, like an intensely unnerving yet
wonderfully strange dream.”
—JOYCE CAROL OATES,
New York Review of Books
“Inspired . . . A marvel of a book . . . The
language, social structure, intellectual and
spiritual world of elephants are as real as the
fabric of human life. Absolutely compelling.”
—ALICE MUNRO
“Monumental . . . A work of profound empathy
and inventiveness, humor, depth and brazen
artistic license . . . The White Bone is a
spectacular achievement.”
—Chicago Tribune
Also by Barbara Gowdy
Helpless
The Romantic
The White Bone
Mister Sandman
We So Seldom Look on Love
Falling Angels
Through the Green Valley
PHOTO © RUTH KAPLAN
BARBARA GOWDY is the author of seven previous books, including The White Bone and Helpless. Her work has been published in more than twenty-four countries. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Copyright © 2017 Barbara Gowdy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn,
New York
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Gowdy, Barbara, author.
Title: Little sister / Barbara Gowdy.
Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, OR : Tin House Books,
[2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056178 (print) | LCCN 2017002814
(ebook) | ISBN 9781941040607 (hardcover : acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9781941040614
Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9199.3.G658 L58 2017 (print) | LCC
PR9199.3.G658
(ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056178
ISBN 978-1-941040-61-4 (e-book)
First U.S. edition 2017
Interior design by Jakob Vala
www.tinhouse.com
Little Sister Page 19