Also she explained, for a brief time, after she lost the small talk, she didn’t know what a fork was. Recently, she’d taken all the forks out of the kitchen drawer in the house she shared with her husband and closely examined them. She rested a fork on her growing belly. She managed to identify it as an eating tool. When her husband passed her a fork during the breakfast he insisted they shared every morning to strengthen their marital bond, she asked, ‘What would you name this instrument?’
‘Fork,’ he answered.
In this way, my sister felt the matter was settled but she was worried a similar incident might occur with the knife, the lifelong boyfriend to the fork. Fondling the forks was just one of my sister’s late night activities. The others, she said, weren’t worth getting into. She was nearly seven months gone, a pregnancy at forty that the doctors described as ‘geriatric.’ We described it as miraculous. I listened, I listened, I half-listened. I was on a book tour and was, despite myself, despite the kind of person I encouraged myself to be by reading recommended deep literature, distracted by whatever hotel room I was sitting in – its flat design, creeping brownness and unfriendly furniture. Whenever my sister asked about the tour, or my work, which she found confusing and opaque and sort of disagreeable, like I’d started an argument I refused to finish, I simply said, ‘I love it. I really love it. I believe in it.’ Then we were silent for a long time.
‘What’s a person who talks constantly about what they like called?’ my sister asked.
‘A zealot.’
‘Am I a zealot now that I can’t do small talk?’
‘I’m not sure. You could be.’
‘Am I too chubby to be a zealot?’
‘You’re not chubby – you’re pregnant. And, anyway, I think zealots can be chubby.’
‘No I think their heightened states keep them pretty slim.’ She paused. ‘Do you know what I thought of the other day?’
‘Isn’t this small talk? Aren’t you doing it right now?’
‘I’m your sister,’ she said. ‘It’s never small talk when we do it.’
*
My first book, the most successful, had been about two children, two sisters, who had an alien encounter. I wrote it when I was twenty-seven. People started to speak to me in completely new ways, as if I was now wired differently. Movie talk. I met movie men and their handshakes seemed to glide right through mine. There were sequels, a series that seemed not to have been written by me, but by a woman who resembled me, a woman with a steady stream of benign answers. It surprised me how little I wanted and, when I actually got something, I never knew what to do with it, except giggle, like a girl winning a school prize.
Time passed. I ate lunch with my agent. She blinked hard at me as if to say, ‘Where is the new book?’ She kept the rest of her body neutral. Blink, blink, blink. No book. Now the anniversary tour, where I sat, styled and tidy, in front of neat rows of children. In the lobbies, I was faceless, like a crude reproduction of myself. My phone was more real to me than the people I encountered. I was just an ear and, because I was lucky, another ear listened back.
My sister thought I was an interesting person because I presented as pleasant – I had a high, persuasive laugh and I wrote books for children – but I was deeply contrary. I was contrary in ways most people don’t know how to be contrary. I was contrary in my bones. In a room with a desk and a bed and a chair, none of which were mine, I showered, watched the steam dissolve off my skin, and called my sister. The dial tone, two transformative beeps, and, on the other side, she was there.
‘Do I have a temper problem?’ I asked.
There had been some regrettable incidents in the past.
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s more like you’re just stuck in bad traffic all the time. It’s on the quieter end of the violent scale.’
My sister and I, from a young age, categorised our problems – facial, bodily, personality – marvelling at how easy it was to sort everything into a list. The certainty of a list. My main trouble, my sister declared, was that I always lived my life like I was immediately planning on leaving it.
‘Buy a chair, buy a table, settle,’ she insisted, her voice, for a second, distorted by the speaker. I looked around the hotel room, the dull impermanence of it. I thought of my own practically unfurnished apartment. People and the stuff they owned confused me – and it was confusion rather than any point I was trying to assert about my own independence. Stuff tied them to the world in a way I had no inclination for. I guess because I never expected to be here too long.
‘Was I always this way?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer. I repeated myself. She still didn’t answer.
‘I don’t know anymore,’ she said, quietly.
*
When we were children, thirteen and nine, my sister and I spent a summer in our local swimming pool. Our mother was dead by then. Her illness happened mainly at home so when I think of death now I can’t conjure anything except the stretch of brown linoleum leading to my parents’ bedroom. We heard her, through the transparent walls, promise our father she wouldn’t do it to him. But she did.
We never thought it would happen that way. You could call us unprepared. You could call us hopeful. Startled by our new single-parent freedom, my sister and I went to the local swimming pool. The water was cloudy and we charged into it in cheap, faded costumes. A memory of my sister’s triumphant face as she hit the filthy water. She did lengths, her body slashing, appearing and disappearing, and I stood in the shallow end. Or she floated on her back, with no trace of self-consciousness. Over us, like a threat, hung a painted, shimmering sky. In the changing room, as we slipped out of our clothes, my sister spoke about the planet. After our mother passed my sister had become obsessed with other planets. No, not planets. One planet. That I never knew the name of, and nor could its dimensions be found on any of the star constellations charts I searched furiously.
*
Several of the people who came to the readings were grown-ups, or they passed as grown-ups. Late twenties, early thirties, and they glared at me from the back of the room, like I was still too young, or, suddenly, without permission, I was now too old. I was never sure which. Afterwards, they sloped off, maybe ashamed that a children’s book still meant something to them. I had this gesture I did – it made me smirk – where I put my hands up as if to say, ‘I don’t have all the answers but, at the same time, I have most of the answers.’ I crossed my legs. I sipped my water. I said some words about the imagination. That’s just how it went. The problem was people asked boring questions and when they asked boring questions, I gave boring answers. But if someone had asked, even once, the right question, I would have told the truth. Mostly, it was young girls who enquired – the world kept spurting out young girls who looked at me in an awful, worshipping way – and what they always asked was, ‘Do you have a sister in real life?’
‘I do,’ I would say.
Their follow-up questions were hard to predict.
‘Is she tall?’
‘She’s slightly taller than me.’
‘Is she your friend?’
‘Yes,’ I always said, ‘she’s a very good friend of mine.’
Finally, the microphone was switched off, the sound extinguished, and I went back to the hotel.
*
At one of the readings in a generic city, an older man, visibly nervous, the words sticking in his throat, stood up and asked if I thought there was a parallel world alongside this one, a world we knew nothing about? I said yes, I believe that to be true and he looked satisfied, like life had suddenly been solved. That night, when I returned to the hotel, anxious for reasons I couldn’t identify, I rang a friend. He sounded relaxed, like he was lying down on the other end of this call. I wanted to say, ‘Stand up, treat me with respect,’ but it was far too late to start treating each other with respect.
‘If you were,’ I asked, ‘to name a fork something other than “fork”, what would you name it?’
He was silent. ‘It’s a fork. A fork is a fork.’
‘I disagree. A fork is never just a fork.’
We had been in love once. It had been sloppy and hurtful. On the hotel television, static black lines, like determined swimmers, swept across the screen. I couldn’t hold down furniture and I couldn’t hold down people. It all just peeled away from me.
‘If you want,’ I said, ‘you can hang up and I will just keep talking.’
He stayed on the line. Despite everything we had done to each other, we remained close.
*
My sister called me in the next hotel room – I tried not to acknowledge these rooms, the unending blankness of them, how they cruelly reflected my own life back at me – because she didn’t know how to kiss anymore. She’d been sitting on the couch with her husband and he turned rapidly and put his face close to her face. It was alarming, seeing the bumpy forehead of her beloved looming over her. Then she knew, because of the expectant creases in his forehead, that there was a gesture required of her. She rested her nose against his nose and wiggled it. ‘I opened my eyes wide,’ she explained, ‘as if to say, “I appreciate all of you.”’ That night, in bed, he rolled away from her.
‘I think he wanted you to kiss him.’
‘How do you kiss?’ she asked.
‘You just put your lips on someone else’s lips and go from there.’
I remembered my sister, at thirteen, forking out a malevolent tongue at me. ‘Tongues,’ she announced, ‘are for kissing.’
‘Do you use tongue?’ she whispered down the phone.
‘Only if you really like the person. Do you really like your husband?’
She thought. ‘Sometimes.’
*
I rang the doctor my sister had been seeing. I found his number online and, alone in hotel bars, I rang it. My sister had reported a range of symptoms: shortness of breath, dizziness, her memories spotting and blurring like she was being reborn, her chest and stomach filling with a substance that felt like water. I rang it hundreds of times. I prepared what I would say. I would say, ‘Hello, I’m a woman who needs help,’ although I had worked hard my whole life to appear as if I never needed any help. Nobody answered, not even a secretary. I could see the phone ringing out in a dingy office by a car park, or in a plush, velour room with a couch that forced you to lie down and unfurl. A horror image of a sterilised surgeon’s clinic with strip lighting and stirrups invaded my dreams nightly. I left messages. I did readings and, somehow, even in my complete absence, the words came out. I answered the questions that were put to me.
I remembered, ten years previously, the first lunch I had with my agent, who told me, with a laughably solemn expression, that not everybody was going to love me. Here was my great, insurmountable problem, the culmination of all the lists – not everybody was going to love me. I didn’t need everybody. I needed one person. I rang that number.
*
My sister had only woken me in the middle of the night once before in my life, but in another hotel room in another city – exemplary in its tidiness, chocolates on the pillow – she called, late, and asked me to smoke down the phone to her.
‘Have you forgotten how to smoke?’
‘I’m eight months pregnant, idiot.’ She paused. ‘Please?’
I got up and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I struck up a single match and rasped in the direction of the receiver. I pressed my smoky mouth to the screen, watched the weak blinking of the fire alarm.
‘How’s that?’ I asked.
Somewhere, alone in the house she shared with her husband, she inhaled.
‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘What time is it there?’
‘Three.’
‘So what do you tell people at these things when they ask how you got the idea?’
I rested my head on the bed frame, stubbed out the red light of the cigarette.
‘I tell them I have a rich interior life.’
Water drizzled down on the bed. An alarm sounded. I closed my eyes and wished for the bed to become a blue swimming pool, into which I would lower myself, step by step, and sink.
*
After swimming, my sister and I always waited in the nearby tennis courts for our father. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘is where they are going to land. A clear space so we can see the lights.’
I thought it was childish of her, at thirteen, to still play these games and her childishness, as it would in later years, embarrassed me. In the car on the way home, swimsuits soaking our clothes, our father sat silently. As we drove – streets devoid of their gossipers, lamps angled skyward – the town seemed average. Sometimes, at night, it was capable of convincing you it was a normal place.
When we got home my sister washed my hair clean of chlorine in the kitchen sink, her fingers kneading my skull. Bent over, my shoulders cold against the ceramic, I felt sick as if a secret was going to be unearthed. At home, my sister handled things, but in her new school she was gaining a reputation. She had stopped finishing her sentences and her copybook consisted of blank lines where the words should have been. She vanished for hours on end. When my father asked her about it, she explained she was preparing for them so, when they came, she would be one of them.
One night, she took me from my bed and carried me to the swimming pool. They found us a day later. Two diligent swimmers arriving for 7 AM practice, discovered us in the pool, unconscious but fully clothed, early morning sunlight streaming in. When they heaved my sister’s body out of the water, they realised she was bleeding. We found out later she had miscarried. Three months. I didn’t need to be there to know that, upon this discovery, my father, like an animal, let out a low, intimate sound.
They kept us in hospital for two weeks, the scent of chlorine strong on our bodies. Every night, I held my right hand under the hot tap, watched the water flow off my palm. I wandered the hospital, its still, concrete hallways like a drained pool. For the hour I was allowed, I visited my sister’s bedside, pressed my warm palm to her forehead. She didn’t smile or speak, but I wanted her to know I was there. Just once she sat up and said, ‘Tell our mother you love her.’
‘Our mother’s gone.’
I thought maybe she had forgotten. There was bruising on her face and neck.
‘Tell her anyway.’
*
The microphone was turned off, the sound extinguished, and I always went back to the hotel.
*
In the last hotel room, in the final city, my phone froze. I had been talking to my sister. I wanted to know how that doctor worked. I wanted to be in the treatment room. Was it gently psychological or did he apply shocks to her body? Was it electricity? What was the process? Was it painful?
My sister answered my questions abruptly.
‘I wanted to have this baby,’ she said.
‘Was it painful?’ I asked again, insistent.
The screen flashed bright then black.
I took the lift to the hotel bar. I had a drink. I wanted to use the phone but when I saw the barman, suited, assured, giving no indication that he was dying, or that anyone in his family was dying, or forgetting their lives, or losing something day by day, I was so angry that I was speechless. I thought of all the people who cared about him and how they would continue to care about him. So what I said instead was, ‘I think this hotel is trash.’
He blew out his cheeks.
‘It’s not a personal thing,’ I explained. ‘I’ve decided all hotels are trash.’
‘That’s okay, ma’am.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve had a longish trip.’
‘Did you enjoy your breakfast?’
‘I did.’
‘Good.’
There was a prolonged silence.
‘May I use the phone?’ I asked.
He placed a black, old-fashioned telephone on the counter and shuffled away. I made to call my sister but, in a resigned and desperate move I was familiar with, I called my friend. He answered. Ten years
ago, meeting him, hearing his voice, felt like the start of my life. I wasn’t a child anymore. Why couldn’t I say it? What would it sound like?
‘Would you forget me if you could?’ I asked.
I hadn’t moved on. I don’t know how anybody moves on from anything.
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I wouldn’t.’
*
When the barman called my room later that night and asked would I accept a call, I said no problem. I said a few words to him before my sister came on the line. I had told her the city, but I hadn’t given her the name of the hotel, and I thought of the stream of numbers she must have punched to find me.
‘You’re worried I’m going to forget you.’
I didn’t reply.
‘No, not ever. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I agreed.
She explained how she was forgetting our mother now. She remembered making our father’s lunch, our wooden back door divided in two, how, when you stood outside, for a second, you were a half-person. She remembered holding me in her arms. But she couldn’t see our mother, how she looked, or how her touch felt, or, towards the end of her life, what machines ran out of her body.
‘Don’t hang up tonight.’
I stayed on the line.
*
There is a moment when you get a call you don’t want to receive, when you look at your phone as if it’s to blame for the news it’s about to impart, as if it’s wholly responsible for this crime. Two separate films unspool in the dark. Then you answer it.
*
The news is never what you expect. My sister’s husband told me what hospital she was in. Early labour. It was the same hospital we were kept in as children. I came straight from the airport. I pushed a button and doors slid open. There were doubtless many things happening in that hospital, as there are in hospitals all over the world, but I didn’t notice any of them.
Show Them a Good Time Page 16