by Miriam Cohen
“Do you think you’ll have kids?” I asked her.
She thrummed her collarbone. “I haven’t had my period since I was younger than you.”
I nodded. The washing machine filled with soap. “I probably won’t get married.”
“Yes, you will.” She lowered herself to the floor and sat on her hands.
I lifted my key to Lily’s lock, now that three hours were gone, and the door opened for me. Magic, I thought. But it was only a man. George. I’d never seen him this close before, and he looked even better than I’d thought, like some kind of rapist. I let the key drop into my pocket.
“The babysitter,” he said.
“I’m the babysitter,” I echoed, like an immigrant fresh off some boat.
He passed a palm quickly over Max’s hair, as if someone had told him to. Max swatted the hand away, and ran down the stairs to the basement, but then he ran up again. And down again.
“Do you need to be taken home?”
I leaned back on the heels of my sneakers.
He shook his head. “How obtuse of me. You live close by; my wife did tell me that.”
I let my feet fall forward. “You’re not away on business?”
He smiled at me slowly, like I’d asked him what my own name was.
“Business canceled.” He smiled again. “So you live right around here?”
I was hurt that he didn’t realize I lived across the street from him, that at night, he had never, as I’d hoped he had, watched me. I’d imagined him and Lily peering into my room—my own curtains parted for them—and imagining a daughter, me as their perfect daughter.
It wasn’t time for me to leave, and anyway, I didn’t want to walk across the street and be home. I wanted him to drive me somewhere far, for us to sit side by side, him asking me questions like what grade was I going into and what was my favorite subject; did I know what I wanted to be when I grew up? I thought of the farthest place from my house I knew the way to.
“I actually need a ride to the hospital,” I said. “My sister, you know.”
George nodded, but I could tell he didn’t know. I wondered what he thought when he saw my sister. Even if he didn’t see me, he would have had to see Amelia, jogging around the block, over and over.
“She has cancer,” I said. It’s not like she has cancer! my mother said once to my father, when I was young enough to think what she meant by this was relief.
George raised his eyebrows and stepped back, as if our fingers had touched in a bolt of static electricity.
Cancer. I held the word on my tongue like melting chocolate. I loved Amelia just then, Amelia with cancer. Now, the dinner table with Amelia slipping food to me beneath the table, my parents watching her, but not me, as I ate, and the nights my father ordered in pizza and ate it alone in front of the TV, the rest of us referring to him distantly, as if he were away on some trip, this could be easily explained: My sister was unfairly stricken, a martyr, weathering the burdens of her illness with uncommon grace. Cancer of the kidneys, I could tell George, because it was true her kidneys was failing, her skin now the understated yellow of diluted urine. Cancer of the liver, the pancreas, the stomach.
“Cancer of the bones,” I said.
“So you need a ride?” he asked, as if I’d presented him with a confusing logistical problem.
“I live across the street,” I said. “I don’t need a ride there.”
He squinted at me. “I’ll just let Lily know.” He and Max took the stairs together, and I wondered if George thought his son was following him on purpose.
I wanted, more than I wanted most things, to go with them down the stairs. I wanted to see Lily at her cello. I wanted to watch her play. No, I wanted her to play for me. I didn’t go downstairs, though, because if I did, there would be a family gathered around a cello, and also me, too tall to be a child of theirs.
The basement door opened, and Lily emerged, Max squirming on her hip. He was smiling his sort-of smile. George was behind them, to catch them, I imagined, if Lily fell from Max’s weight.
“His business was canceled,” Lily said to me. She was looking at George. They were standing close to each other, but not touching.
“Sometime business gets canceled,” George said.
“Business—and women—can be so capricious, can’t they?” Lily said.
“You need a ride to the hospital?” Lily said to me, still looking at him. She swallowed the way I sometimes saw my mother swallow.
“Because my sister has cancer,” I said.
If just Lily, or just George, were driving me, I’d sit in front, next to one of them, and they’d ask me to adjust the radio or the air conditioning. Instead, I had to sit with Max, in the back. Max had a car seat even though he was old for that. Lily asked me to strap him in. I missed the buckle twice, almost gave up, then got it.
I asked Lily and George if they worked together. I was sure they’d tell me, in fact, yes, they did work together, and then tell me how they met.
“No,” George said. He asked me for directions, and I told him the regular directions, and the shortcut directions, to show I’d been to the hospital more times than a person whose sister was not often gravely ill.
“I don’t suppose you listen to much cello playing, Carol?” he said.
I was embarrassed of the way I must have mumbled when I’d introduced myself. Carol. Karin. “I love the cello,” I said.
“Do you play?” Lily asked.
The worst possible answer I could give to her question was yes, and when I heard myself say it, I felt as if I were equally capable of jumping in front of a train, or smothering Max, or telling my parents, no, Amelia wasn’t eating: all these things I was not supposed to do.
“Well,” Lily said. “Maybe you and I could play together sometime.”
“That would be really fun,” I said. And then I kept talking. “I don’t get to play as much as I’d like because my sister’s so sick. We had to sell my cello. To pay for treatment.”
George looked at me in the rearview mirror. “That’s enough,” he said, like a father, though not mine.
We pulled up at the hospital, and I started to unbuckle my seatbelt, then stopped. I didn’t want to go to the hospital. I didn’t want to walk through florescent hallways and see trays of individually packaged sliced bread, cans of Ensure, IVs and blood pressure machines, nurses in cartoon-patterned scrubs, doctors with their lab coats open, and lines of girls, all of whom would not be my sister.
“I forgot,” I said. “My sister already died.”
“She already died,” George repeated.
I knew I should’ve felt bad about lying, but I felt sort of terrific, because though there were limits involved in being the sister of a sick sister, the possibilities were boundless for sisters of dead sisters, sisters who were forced, in conversation, to say, I don’t have a sister.
“I need a dress for the funeral,” I said. “Can you take me to buy a dress?”
“Your sister’s not dead,” George said.
“Ask anybody.” My heart banged against my ribcage. “Ask any doctor in the whole hospital. Ask a nurse. Ask the receptionist, or the other patients, or their visitors.”
Lily held the head-rest and turned around. “I might have a dress for you,” she said. “Black, right?”
“Lily,” George said, but at the same time, I said, “Yes.”
We pulled into the driveway and Lily reached toward Max, her fingers sweeping his cheeks. “We’re home,” she said. “You’re home.” Max didn’t answer, and I wondered how it was that Lily continued to talk to him, knowing he’d never say anything back.
George parked the car. He didn’t look at any of us, just went inside and shut the door as if we wouldn’t be following him within seconds. Lily unstrapped Max, which I should have thought to do. Max tried to bite her wrists, but she pulled them away in time. I would’ve thought there was a better trick than that. Max smiled his strange smile.
In the hous
e, George was standing at the fridge. He turned around. “Max’s dinner?”
“There’s a plate. We’re doing no wheat now,” Lily said.
George nodded. He closed the fridge. Then, shaking his head, he opened it again. He put Max’s plate in the microwave. Max began to bang his head against the wall, as if to a beat.
“You need a dress,” Lily said, like she was thinking out loud.
I nodded. She turned to me, and for a moment I wondered if I was supposed to hug her, and then that moment passed, and I couldn’t believe I’d even had that thought.
“I have dresses.” She was talking to me, but looking at George.
George bent over Max’s plate and unpeeled the condensation-beaded saran wrap. He sat at the table, next to the plate. Max continued banging his head. He sounded like a healthy heart, the way my own heart sounded in Dr. Feingold’s office, the way my sister’s heart hadn’t in forever.
“That’s not fair,” George said, though Lily hadn’t said anything. He stood, and I thought he would leave the room, the way my father would have if, in our house, something were called unfair. But George went over to his son. He placed both palms over Max’s ears. He guided Max away from the wall even as he punched and kicked, his jaw working over air. George sat beside him at the table, the small set of shoulders next to the big set, like a model of what might be.
It turned out Lily did have dresses. She kept them in the basement, as if they went along with the cello.
“These are for my recitals,” she said.
I thought of what someone who wasn’t me would say in this situation, and I said, “You must play all the time.”
She reached for a dress. “This one’s black,” she said.
They were all black. From a distance, they all looked like the same dress, the color uniform, the length so similar it seemed she’d had them identically hemmed. The sleeves of each were like bat wings. There were details that were different: one dress had, at the collar, a tiny flower; one was velvet, another, silk.
“Have you ever been to a funeral?” I asked her.
She held out a dress, the hanger at her neck, ruffles falling over her knees.
“My sister’s not dead,” I said, which was not what I meant to say. I meant to comment on the cello, or to tell her she was beautiful, or to ask her about her recitals: when she had started playing, maybe.
“This dress might be a little old for you.” Lily nodded, as if I’d been the one to say this, originally, and she still thought my sister was dead.
“Why don’t you try this?” She handed me the dress with the tiny flower.
I took the dress from her. I held it against my body and could tell immediately that it would be too small. Amelia could have worn the dress without unzipping it.
“I should try it on now?”
“We’re just women here,” Lily said.
I’d never been called a woman before, and though I liked the way it sounded, I also knew she was wrong. I took off my shirt, but left my jeans on.
“You can just lift up your arms,” Lily told me, and slid the dress over my head, like a mother would.
I looked terrible.
Lily touched the zipper at my back, and I felt a droplet of sweat slip down between my breasts like an awful tear. But she didn’t try to zip it. She just kept her hand where it was, on the small of my back. It made me shiver in a good way.
“I wore that to my first recital,” she said. “Back before Max, before George. My mother bought me that dress. I loved that dress, and that night, I played better than I’d ever played, you know?”
Now I understood her.
I turned around. “Your mother died?”
Lily smiled a little bit. “My mother still thinks she’s too young to be a grandmother,” she said.
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I wanted Lily to stop talking about her mother. I wanted her to talk about George, and how she was in love with him. Because I saw them, at night, when they thought no one did, and I watched them sleep, and sometimes I watched one or both of them wake, and I knew it was for Max.
“Would you play for me?” I said.
Lily touched the flower at my throat. She brought her fingers to her own throat. “Is there a particular piece?”
I wiped my hands on the dress. In the mirror I watched the way my face didn’t change. I looked like a person who never felt anything.
“There isn’t a piece,” I said.
Lily walked over to the cello. She positioned herself on a chair, the cello between her legs. She lifted the bow. She rested the cello’s neck against her shoulder, her fingers winking over the strings like shadow puppets. With her other hand, she moved the bow. Lily’s face, as she played, seemed to round out and smoothen, shadows disappearing impossibly beneath her eyes. I saw that she couldn’t see me, or the room we were in, or herself. She couldn’t hear her husband or her son, right above us. And next door, the house where my family lived, that was another country, but a small one, a place and people she didn’t have the time to imagine or wonder about.
SURROGATE
There’s never enough work for Sophie, but Professor Schapiro says it’s not important that she do something, but that she be. He’s paying her cash. Sophie is helping Professor Schapiro with footnotes for a book called, right now, The Scandal of Hansel and Gretel: Incest and Other Mischief. All the research is done in his house. His office is in his bedroom. Professor Schapiro asks, a lot of the time, does Sophie hear the internal slant rhyme in “Hansel” and “scandal”? He barely moves when he asks her, as if the fate of the entire book depends on her hearing the rhyme. He’s growing a beard, and it’s now at the point where it sticks out from the sides of his face like the hands of people shouting, Surprise! Only the beard quivers while he waits for her answer.
He was Sophie’s undergrad thesis adviser for her dead-in-the-water English major. Sophie was interested in Virginia Woolf, but Professor Schapiro had looked almost stricken at the suggestion. So she’d written about “The Frog Prince,” which he’d liked. Sophie’s favorite part of the story was when the princess threw the frog against the wall instead of fucking him. Professor Schapiro likes Sophie for no reason she can see. It’s as if he’d glanced up and seen her at exactly the moment he was looking for someone, anyone.
He hadn’t been a popular professor; being in his class was like trying to catch a train. Sometimes you got there just in time, and other times you missed it and ending up just waiting and waiting, balancing on the precipice of giving up. And he was a harsh grader, scrawling illegible, unintelligible shorthand all over a paper. Didn’t I teach this? he’d plaintively ask the class. Didn’t we go over this? But he’d offered to be her advisor, awarded her an uncalled-for A. And he’d given her this gig, paying her too much, explaining she was his first choice.
Doing nothing is more difficult than it would seem, though, and so Sophie creates tasks for herself. She gets coffee. Usually, Mrs. Schapiro, who also works from home, ignores her, but today when Sophie says, mild as cottage cheese, “Professor Schapiro asked for a coffee, do you want one?”, Mrs. Schapiro’s eyes get very bright and she smiles.
“What do you do when you’re with my husband?” she says. “With him.” She winks extravagantly.
“Mostly nothing,” Sophie says. Because, aside from its being true, isn’t this what Mrs. Schapiro has been hoping to hear?
But Mrs. Schapiro frowns. She and Professor Schapiro have an open marriage, she explains. Picture, Mrs. Schapiro says, a mouth at the dentist. And now Mrs. Schapiro demonstrates with her own mouth, opening wide enough for Sophie to see the silver inside her molars: ahhhh.
“I, for instance,” Mrs. Schapiro continues, “am on the table four days a week with my acupuncturist. With him.” And here again is the wink.
“I wonder if you’d like to see my office,” says Mrs. Schapiro, and begins walking away. She walks quickly, but not so quickly as to suggest she doesn’t mean for Sophie to follow her, whic
h Sophie does.
Unlike Professor Schapiro, Mrs. Schapiro has an actual office with a large, antique desk and a window.
“A room of one’s own,” Sophie says, delighted with herself for the reference.
But Mrs. Schapiro just looks at her. “My office,” she says, very slowly, as though it has occurred to her that Sophie might not be fluent in English after all.
Mrs. Schapiro, it turns out, is much more interested in her own writing than in anyone else’s. Mrs. Schapiro is hard at work on a children’s book that will, if all goes to plan, become a wildly successful series. The book is about a little girl named Frances. Frances is a puff of yellow for hair on a body made of sticks with a triangle that’s a skirt. When she runs, she’s all elbows and dust, and the freckles on her nose are actually stars. Once the series launches, each book will begin the same way: “Frances loves living in France. Frances does not have any parents. Her parents are dead as doornails.”
The books will help children grapple with their desire to kill their parents, Mrs. Schapiro explains. All children want to kill their parents. “Surely you’d agree?” Mrs. Schapiro asks.
“I guess,” says Sophie.
“You shouldn’t be doing ‘mostly nothing’ with my husband,” Mrs. Schapiro says, and Sophie is flattered that Mrs. Schapiro has remembered and filed away her comment, even if it was only from a few minutes ago.
Mrs. Schapiro frowns deeply, or seems to. There aren’t any lines. “Poor Sophie.”
Sophie does sometimes think of herself as poor. Her sadness is like a lapdog, begging to be held, carried close to the heart. The sadness (on insurance forms, it’s depression) gets in the way, her therapist says, of the work Sophie must do on herself. Work. As though Sophie is a roof with gutters in need of repair. Part of the work is to set long-term goals, engage more fully in life. Live a little. Her therapist isn’t entirely sure of this job—it seems more like treading water, running in place—but her father is pleased. He thinks Sophie’s here gaining experience and connections for graduate school. Who wouldn’t want to go to graduate school? her father says, and it’s not a question.