So are you a friendly ghost? Izzy had jokingly asked him.
I beg your pardon, he had replied.
But Kaspar has stuck around almost forty years.
Is he double parked? Antonia asks now, feigning concern.
Hell, no, Tilly laughs, her smoker’s cough exploding, giving heft to her laughter. I drove. Will wonders never cease? Tilly, who never drives on highways because, she says, highways have too many cars. That’s like saying a city has too many people, Antonia likes to tease her. Fuck you! Tilly’s response to any mockery is to cuss loudly—no matter where she is. Zero self-control.
By the way, Mona tells me you didn’t believe me that my daffodils were up, Tilly reports. So you think it’s all a pigment of my imagination?
Figment, Antonia corrects. Figment of your imagination.
Up yours. Tilly curls her upper lip.
So what else did Mona tell you? Antonia probes. Though she hates these sisterhood triangulations, bifurcations, she can’t help wanting to know the current Sturm und Drang. They might be one whole person, but not without constant altercations, meltdowns, hurt feelings. It’s exhausting.
As she drives, Tilly rummages in her purse for a piece of gum to mask her smoker’s breath so that Kaspar doesn’t smell it. She adjusts the bobbing dog with a neck spring attached to the dashboard to help her spot her car in parking lots. The doer cannot not do. But it means she misses her exit, and they have to drive ten miles out of the way. Just as well. Tilly knows a coffee shop where they can sit and gossip. The place also has an outdoor patio where Tilly can smoke.
It’s too cold, Antonia says, shaking her head.
No, it’s not. They argue about whether it’s too cold or not. This time, though, Tilly acquiesces. It’s Antonia’s birthday tomorrow, first one without Sam. You deserve to be spoiled.
Deserve, mi-sherve, Antonia scoffs. The verb annoys her—the whole idea that you are entitled to special treatment, a sense of grievance when life doles out to you what it doles out to everybody: mortality, sorrow, loss.
Don’t knock it, sister. Nice to be spoiled. So anyhow, what made you change your mind and come?
What do you mean what? To see you, of course. She doesn’t want to get into the mixed bag of her motivations.
They sit quietly for a moment, holding hands, a rare quiet respite in their hectic sistering. All those moments she was too busy to help Sam dig up his potatoes in the garden, to come quick to the window and see an unusual bird that just landed on the feeder. There will be a lot of these little kicks at her heart in the days, months, years to come.
They bus their own table, still Mami’s daughters long after there is a mother to be daughters of. So, what are you up for? Tilly asks. Want to go to the Vietnamese market? There’s also treasure-hunting at secondhand shops. A neat little bistro on the way home, where they can have a glass of wine, rum, vodka. Along with being a smoker, Tilly is the serious drinker of the four. Anything special Antonia wants? Just say the word.
She wants Sam is what Antonia wants, but that is not one of the offerings. How about I shadow you through a typical day.
I don’t get it, Tilly says, frowning.
Act like I’m not here, Antonia elaborates.
Why would I want you to visit and then pretend you’re not here?
I get to have a little window on your life. Then, when I’m in Vermont, I can imagine what you are doing at any given moment.
Tilly’s frown deepens. I’m not that predictable. Do you know at any given time what you’ll be doing?
Of course, Antonia does. Even if she were not grieving, she knows that at six every morning, she’ll be doing her yoga exercises while listening to her bird CDs, the singsong of the robin, the three-or-more repetitions of the mockingbird, the whiney notes of the goldfinch. It would actually be a comfort knowing that at that exact moment Tilly is drinking her coffee, listening to the news while prepping for the meals ahead, running a load of laundry—Tilly is a multitasker, a doer on steroids. Whenever Antonia calls, she can hear pots banging, a hose spraying, Tilly peeing, Tilly taping up the package she will have already mailed to Vermont for Antonia’s birthday, thinking that Antonia won’t be coming to Chicago to shadow her as she goes about her day.
I still don’t get it, Tilly says after listening to Antonia’s explanation. But then, you always had to be different from us.
So, will that continue to be her role going forward? The one who defines herself by being what the others are not?
They make the rounds of a typical Tilly day. At the Vietnamese market, Tilly fills up her cart with items Antonia recognizes from Tilly’s periodic care packages: dried mushrooms, candied ginger, boxes of teas with Chinese characters, peeled garlic in a jar. The store is pungent with nostalgic smells, reminding Antonia of mercados back home in the DR, she and her sisters trailing behind Mami and the tías down rows of piled vegetables, fruits fly-speckled, bloody strips of meat hanging from hooks, a calf bawling in the abattoir next door. Such are the madeleines that recall the sisterhood’s island childhood.
But Tilly’s favorite activity is shopping in the secondhand shops that abound in her suburb. They all have playful names, as if poking fun at their own con, selling people’s discards: Sweet Charity, Déjà New, and the too-cute Twice Loved, which Tilly says used to be a sewing shop named Son of a Stitch that closed up. The owner got a lot of flak from what Tilly calls—with the same intonation with which she curses—Christians.
Tilly has often complained about her evangelical neighborhood. We have more churches per square root than anywhere, she says authoritatively, and Antonia doesn’t have the heart to correct her speech or question her statistics. Leave it for Mona to challenge the numbers. Anyhow, Tilly says, one neighbor in particular, a gossip and troublemaker, brought over an Easter basket when Tilly’s kids were little. Along with dyed eggs and jelly beans there was a little bottle of red dye and four nails. I mean, give me a break! Tilly shakes her head. Ruining a three- and five-year-old’s Easter by bringing up the crucifixion!
Well, that is what Easter is, Antonia could have defended the woman. She has heard Tilly’s story before, but she listens again without commentary. It gives Tilly such pleasure to tell it. Part of Antonia’s turf, storytelling, which she periodically relinquishes to the others. Give them a turn to tell the story.
So I told her we were Jewish. Ha! It was like I’d personally crucified Jesus myself. Soon thereafter, the neighbor moved away. Tilly gloats, exactly what she had hoped for. That bitch was like a wolf in cheap clothing!
Antonia laughs but, again, offers no correction. Tilly laughs too, thinking it’s her story that has amused her sister.
In every shop, the salesladies—they are mostly women—are effusive about Tilly. We love your sister. It’s nice to see that Tilly has made her mark here. She has always been the low-profile sister, letting the others win the prizes, get the As and the attention. Give her her cigarettes, a bottle of rum, someone to screw. You guys are the stars, she always would say to Izzy and Antonia growing up. What about me? baby sister Mona would pipe in, aggrieved.
You’re the fucking meteor! Tilly would howl with laughter. She was the first to enjoy her own jokes.
In that book Antonia will probably never write on the lives of the anonymous, she’ll advance her theory about people who are the salt of the earth, the laborers in the vineyard, the migrant workers, the unremarkable siblings. They do not need to be famous, important, visible; there is an aggression to fame, a violence to it, whereas anonymity is companionable; we’re all in this together; first, I bring my girlfriend, then I help you bring yours. I’m nobody! Who are you? So many stray lines from her teaching days.