Otherwise, it was an ordinary summer. None of us got around to quitting her job, though Vee began missing days here and there. None of us slept until noon, at least not regularly. We didn’t leave the city or go to the beach, not once. As it turned out, so long as our corporeal bodies walked this earth, we had no interest in seeing what they looked like in swimsuits.
We did attend the big Francis Bacon exhibition at MoMA, but we regretted it and left halfway through. “I always get him mixed up with Sam Francis,” Lady said apologetically, after we extricated ourselves from the crawl of people in headphones. After that, no other museum shows called to us.
We tried to read novels. We bought a hardcover about a woman who gets bitten by a rabid bat, but we couldn’t get into it. We were too distracted to lose ourselves in words on the page. We tried to watch movies, but we had the same problem. We couldn’t focus on the story. We saw only the actors, their faces in close-up, the flaws, the scars, the degree to which they’d aged since the last movie they’d been in.
With little else to occupy us, we got in the habit of showering and changing into our nightclothes immediately after dinner. Nothing elegant, just oversize tees and sweatpants and fuzzy socks. These, we decided, would be the outfits we died in.
As soon as we were dressed for bed, that’s where we’d go: Vee’s mattress, still on the floor. If we weren’t at work, then we were virtually bedridden, as if we were invalids. In-valids, our predictable joke. We sat up beneath the blankets, the three of us in a row, and always in the same order: Lady nearest the east wall, Delph in the middle, Vee to the west, the white plastic blinds pulled closed over the window above our heads. There we indulged in cocktails and conversation. There we wrote our story. There we finished writing our story. We printed it out and held it together with a big black plastic binder clip. We put it on our grandmother Karin’s sideboard.
Sometimes we spent entire weekends on that mattress. We were content in that small country, six feet three inches one way, six feet six inches the other. Sometimes Delph hooked her feet around Lady’s left foot and Vee’s right foot. This is how she wanted us to go out, all hooked together so we’d wind up in the same place. “Like those skeletons they sometimes find embracing in ancient graves,” she said.
It wasn’t until the middle of August that Vee began complaining about her back. She was beginning to find all this lying in bed physically uncomfortable. She was having muscle spasms so sudden and painful they took her breath away.
“Posture,” Lady said, and we bought three wedge pillows and tried to sit up straighter, but it didn’t help Vee.
“You need to do crunches,” Delph said. “Your core isn’t supporting you.”
Vee laughed. “I’ve avoided exercise my entire life. I’m not starting now.”
“What you need is a new mattress,” Lady said. “Something firm. And maybe one of those capitalist pig box springs.”
Vee dismissed this suggestion as well. It was crazy, she said, to spend a lot of money on a new bed that she’d use for only another few months.
“Yes, that makes perfect sense,” said Lady. “Better to live the last months of your life in discomfort than die with a few hundred dollars less in the bank. Your nonexistent heirs will thank you.”
There was no point in pursuing it, though; Vee didn’t want to get rid of the mattress where she’d once slept with Eddie. Instead, when Vee fidgeted and complained, Lady told her to roll over, and she’d rub Vee’s back, never quite finding the source of the pain, never able to soothe the knotted muscles, but rubbing anyway, stopping only when her fingers were stiff and her wrists ached, or when Vee said, “Okay, we’ve now passed pleasurable and have moved on to irritating.”
The pain would eventually subside on its own, but sooner or later it would come back, always a little bit worse. One evening, on our way from the kitchen to Vee’s room, glasses of wine in hand, Vee gasped and shuddered so dramatically that the zin sloshed onto the carpet.
“Come,” Lady said. “Let’s get you in bed. I’ll give you a back rub.”
Delph was about to make a joke along the lines of Vee being literally unable to hold her liquor when it hit her. With more compassion than it will seem, she said, “Oh, for God’s sake, how stupid can we be? It’s not your muscles that hurt. It’s your bones. It’s spread to your bones.”
“Oh,” Vee said. “Of course.”
We began to laugh. All this time we’d managed to know but not know, to believe but not believe. All this time, while we were diligently preparing for the end—making sure we had enough pills; reading up on the best liquids in which to dissolve them (fruit juice yea, milkshakes nay); writing nightly about our lives and our ancestors’ lives; honing and/or abandoning our various and varying philosophies; practicing meditation (we did it flat on our backs on the mattress, so naturally we called it beditation, though sometimes we had to be honest and call it napping); and affirming our pact on a near-daily basis—during all this we’d had our heads buried in the sand or wedged up our butts. We’d been unable to see the obvious.
Never mind opposable thumbs. Never mind his cognizance of his own mortality. It’s this willful amnesia that really separates man from beast.
But we were amnesiacs no more. There would be no unlearning what we’d just learned. Vee’s pain wouldn’t allow it. Now we saw what we’d been managing to overlook: the weight loss, the yellowing skin.
Sometimes Vee would run a fever. Sometimes she’d hallucinate an eerie visitation from our mother. She’d thrash in bed. “I’m lying on Eddie’s skeleton,” she’d whisper. His bones were poking her. What did it mean? she said in a whisper to prevent who knows who from hearing her.
And yet, despite all this—despite the advance of Vee’s illness and our unwavering determination to do what we intended to do; despite our relinquishing the last remnants of the hope we hadn’t known we’d been clinging to, even as we understood we were careening toward the end of our existences, at least on this earthly plane—we were never depressed. We didn’t sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. We’d written about the past, we were living in the present, there was no such thing as the future. We put one foot in front of the other. Day turned into day. All was well.
And then everything changed.
CHAPTER 12
Mid-September, two weeks after Vee finally called in and quit her job, Hurricane Floyd arrived. It was a weekday, a Thursday, when the heralding rain and wind began. Businesses shut their doors early. Lady’s boss closed the bookstore. Delph was sent home from the basement file room, though it was probably a safer place to be than the apartment.
The three of us sat in the dark living room. We were too tired to do anything at all. It was the weather, which was both threatening and enervating. Finally, Vee left her chair and lay on the floor.
“Do you want to go to bed?” Lady said.
Vee said nothing.
“Do you want me to put a blanket over you? Or a pillow under your head?”
Vee said nothing again. There was a bang at the window. We jumped. It was just the rain, but the rain hitting so hard it was as if every drop had coalesced and flung itself at our panes.
“What if we did it tonight?” Vee whispered.
You’d think that would have generated discussion. Instead we were silent. After a while Lady said, “Are you really that sick?” and Vee said no, she wasn’t, but that was the point. She didn’t want to wait until she was really that sick. Getting any sicker than she was now did not appeal to her.
We did nothing, said nothing. We weren’t even drinking. We just stared at whatever—the ceiling, the wall, the street below, where an inside-out umbrella skitched along the sidewalk like a black flower with a silver stem.
“It’s your call,” Lady finally said. “It’s always been your call.”
Vee was whispering again. “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to live. I just want to get out of this body.” It was hard to hear her, what with the clamor at the wi
ndows.
“Why are you whispering, honey?” Lady said, also whispering.
“Maybe if we just take it one step at a time.” Delph whispered too. “Maybe if we see where we’re at later tonight.”
That’s what we did. While Vee lay on the living room rug, Lady and Delph forced themselves into action. They stripped the sheets off the bed in the Dead and Dying Room and put on fresh linens. We believe in traditions. If Vee didn’t change her mind, this was the room where we would come to lie down.
We prepared what we understood might or might not turn out to be our last meal: macaroni and cheese from a box. There wasn’t much else in the house, but that was partially because macaroni and cheese from a box was the only thing Vee ate now, the taste of the powdered cheese-food so strong that it overcame the metallic taste perpetually and inexplicably coating her tongue. She didn’t eat a lot of it, though. Her stomach ached when she ate even the smallest meals, and everything, even ice cream, seemed to give her heartburn. These were the kinds of pains, she often said, that people who weren’t dying noted but soldiered through. She imagined the spokespeople from commercials for Pepto-Bismol, Bayer aspirin, Doan’s back pills, surrounding her, hawking their wares, telling her she was experiencing nothing that a little over-the-counter medicine couldn’t cure. She’d thought that when the pain came, it would be a special pain that couldn’t be named or described, an elegant pain known only to the dying. She’d expected shivers of agony that would come and go like cold waves in winter. Instead she had heartburn. She had cramps. She had diarrhea. Her back hurt.
Drinking, too, caused her pain, zigzags of lightning in her belly and, oddly, a fist pressed between her shoulder blades. She stopped drinking wine and hard liquor, but she refused to stop drinking entirely. Pain be damned, she drank Baileys instead, creamy and caloric, figuring both were good for her.
While Vee ate her minuscule portion of macaroni and cheese, Lady and Delph divided the rest between them. They gorged on it—the white flour, the powdered chemicals. They left not a single orange elbow behind. They killed off two bottles of wine.
There was no dinner conversation. Vee left the table early, repaired to her room. The rain was now loud as artillery. Lady and Delph washed the dishes, put them away, something they would not have ordinarily done.
In Vee’s room, Vee lay on her back, while Lady and Delph knelt on the mattress, facing the window, their bare callused heels on either side of Vee’s face. They watched the storm without comment. They took in the roiling Hudson, whitecaps and spray. They rubbernecked the besieged park. The older trees swayed with the wind, practiced and confident as subway commuters. It was the young, slender trees that bowed and scraped and lost their limbs. They were the vulnerable ones, their root systems not yet deep enough to allow them to stand their ground, their trunks not acclimated to gales.
“If we were writing a story and it was taught in school,” Delph said, her arms on the windowsill, her chin on her arms, “the students would cite those trees in an essay: ‘Nature Imagery in the Work of the Alter Sisters.’” She came up with a thesis sentence: “In this paper I intend to show how the young trees buffeted by the winds of Hurricane Floyd represent the main characters of this story, women who were too immature to withstand the blows life rained down on them.”
“It’s a hurricane,” Vee said. She was still whispering. It was dark, but she had her arm crooked over her eyes as if there were a ceiling light glaring down on her. “Trees fall down,” she said. “All any of it means is that a tropical cyclone met a ridge of high pressure at a time in our geologic era when ocean temperatures are abnormally elevated.”
Delph caught Lady’s eye. The two of them smiled at each other. The weather report delivered so matter-of-factly in a hoarse whisper. It was so strange and funny. This was something no one ever told you. Decompensating could be humorous.
“Of course, when you think about it, the reason those ocean temperatures are elevated is because of us,” Lady whispered. “Because of our family.”
“Because of him,” Delph said. Whispering made the word him sound like a sigh.
“Still,” Lady said, “it’s weird, isn’t it, to think that the trees may have no significance to us, but our family has significance to the trees.”
“Acausal time,” Delph said. “Arbor version.”
We might have continued like this, the three of us whispering about ocean temperatures and symbolism and the signs of global warming, if at that moment someone outside the apartment hadn’t begun rattling the doorknob, shaking the door in its frame, trying to get inside.
We stopped speaking at once. We were glad we’d been whispering. Easier that way to pretend no one was home. Lady and Delph clambered to their feet, stepped into the hallway, continued as far as the foyer. They must have looked comical, the two of them tiptoeing close together as if performing a pantomime, but they didn’t find what was transpiring amusing. Only Vee, still in bed, registered the humor: just our luck to be murdered in a home invasion just a few hours before our lovingly planned suicides.
Lady and Delph had stopped a few feet from the door. They watched as the brass doorknob twisted to the left, then the right, then left again, right again, faster, angrier.
“We should push a heavy piece of furniture against it, then call the police,” Delph whispered. At last—a bona fide reason to whisper.
But gathering courage, Lady called, “Who is it?” There wasn’t any answer, though, just the continued rattling of the door, the throttling of the knob. She and Delph looked hopefully to the array of chains and auxiliary locks on our side of the jamb, but, like the two of them, they were all completely undone.
Like turkey vultures, those pale-faced, big-beaked, squint-eyed creatures that communicate largely through hisses, Lady and Delph began to whisper again, issuing orders to each other. You should look through the peephole. You should get a carving knife. You should call 911. But they didn’t move.
Their inaction was, at first, rewarded. The rattling, the throttling, abruptly stopped. It was the most welcome and yet uneasy of silences. We all listened intently, Lady and Delph in the foyer, Vee in her bed, all of us hoping to hear the rush of retreating footsteps, the ring of a summoned elevator, the sounds of someone fleeing.
We heard none of that. Instead what we heard was the distinct sound of a key inserted into a lock. Tumblers fell into place. Delph took a step back, and Lady, directly behind her, put an arm around her, pulled her closer.
The front door opened. An old woman stepped into the foyer.
She wore a blue vinyl raincoat and red Keds turned maroon from puddles. She held a plaid plastic tote. She had no rain cap or umbrella, and her hair, a salt-and-pepper bob, was a wiry mess of short springy curls. She was as drenched as if she’d just stepped out of the shower or been dragged from the river. Her eyes were small and black, her nose as beaked as ours, but even larger, such an enormous nose, irrefutable evidence of the sad truth that cartilaginous body parts continue to grow through the entirety of our lives and even for a while thereafter.
Lady and Delph knew this nose was bigger now than it had been in the old woman’s youth or even at the end of the old woman’s life, because they knew who the old woman was. They recognized her at once.
It’s impossible to describe what they felt in that moment. They, who never cry, cried. They, who never giggle, giggled. They were deliriously happy, they were just plain delirious.
Delph was the one who dared say it out loud, sounding both sheepish and awed and afraid. Her voice caught. But she managed.
“Mommy?” she said.
Well, of course it was ridiculous. It’s one thing to have faith in the unknown and unseeable, one thing to have dorm room debates or grapple with theories such as quantum or God or synchronicity or nihilism. It’s one thing to decide you believe in time travel or guardian angels or curses or nothing. But to believe for even a moment that your dead mother has just walked through the door, first having checked
the weather report and donning a raincoat, also having packed a small bag and remembering to grab her old house keys—well, let’s face it, that’s neither faith nor science, it’s just psychosis, and Lady and Delph snapped out of it even before their tears and giddiness abated.
If it wasn’t our mother, though, who was it? Because what remained true was that the woman in our foyer could have been our mother’s identical twin. She was clearly related to us. A cousin, Lady and Delph guessed. A descendant of some Alter who’d managed to escape the death camps and, fifty-five years later, had traveled to New York and looked us up. That’s what they each were thinking, that was the next ridiculous thought that came to them. Ridiculous, because how would a tourist come to possess the keys to our apartment?
What’s more, this woman was not glad to see them. In fact she didn’t seem to see Lady and Delph at all. Nor did she seem able to hear them. She seemed, in fact, to inhabit a different dimension from theirs. When they asked rudimentary questions—Excuse me, but who are you? Excuse me, but where did you come from? Excuse me, but what the hell’s going on?—the old woman didn’t give a flicker of acknowledgment. When they offered towels, it was like talking to air.
As they watched, the old woman slung her wet tote bag over the spindle of the hall chair. Rain dripped from the tip of her nose. She looked to her left: the dinette and kitchen. She looked to her right: the living room. Her face lit with joy. Leaving squishy wet sneaker prints, she toddled past Lady and Delph and headed directly to Vee’s room. She flung open the door. Lady and Delph could hear Vee whispering some question, a version, no doubt, of the ones they’d been asking. Who are you? What do you want?
She hadn’t seemed able to register Lady or Delph, but she clearly saw Vee. Her expression changed completely. The light in her eyes turned to fear, and she wheeled back from the doorway, bumping into the wall behind her. She looked around, suddenly confused. Her confusion turned to agitation. She fluttered like a bird trapped in an airshaft, she flapped her hands like a child gearing up for a tantrum.
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