FIRST
DAY
ONE
ONE LOVES, THE OTHER IS LOVED: SO NANA TAUGHT us. I look at the beautiful bones of her face and speculate about this pronouncement. My grandmother has always been beloved, and so my grandfather, long dead, assumes a peculiar poignancy. Once, in some rapturous, unimaginable youth before she married, Nana was the ardent lover. But no one is alive to tell us about the object of her affection, and she will not disclose his name.
We are sitting in the living room of my mother’s house, waiting for the funeral to begin. Outside, the sky is the eerie pewter I remember from my childhood, lightless even at midday. In this room six years ago, before our mother recovered the furniture yet again, Tam and I were laughing at the weather. Then, too, it was noon when I realized, after her baby’s naming ceremony was over and the last guests had straggled out, that the day would not improve, that, to quote Tam: “This is it.”
I had fled to New York, whose winters are tamed by the city’s determination to outwit the season. Tam not only stayed in Toronto, betraying our pact to leave the minute we could, but chose a profession that forced her to rise most mornings at four in order to be on the air. For her, the half year of darkness is permanent, I think to myself. And then think: Permanent darkness.
Paralyzed, I stare at Nana, imploring her to rescue me, but she is stoic, not emitting whatever feelings she no doubt has. The fact is, my sister, her eldest grandchild, is dead. The silence in this room is not the anticipatory hush preceding a family celebration but the void of what cannot be accommodated.
“Tam.”
In speaking my sister’s name, I have invaded Nana’s solitude. I look at her carefully and observe, even in the somber room, that the skin beneath her eyes is gleaming. No one has seen my grandmother cry.
“Laurence is coming,” I state, more bluntly than intended.
Nana’s lips draw into a pucker of distaste. Once again Eve has said the wrong thing. Why doesn’t my admiration of my grandmother offset her reservations about me? One reason might be that as soon as I utter Laurie’s name, my body ignites, despite the house’s chill, despite the fact that it has been years since I lay naked on my grandmother’s bed at the cottage, tonguing Laurie from his kiss-bitten mouth to the taut circles of his bent knees.
“Typical.” I hear Tam sniff. “I’m not even in the ground.”
Whenever I come home, I fancy myself an outlaw. Years ago, one of Tam’s friends asked me at a party, “Does your mother feel like a failure because you had to leave Toronto?”
“‘Had to leave Toronto’?” I ranted to Tam afterward. “Does he really believe all human beings want to live four blocks from their parents so they can eat together every Sunday night at the Bagel King? I chose to live in New York, as any person with—”
“I know”—she said tolerantly—“a large soul.”
“‘Inviting thighs,’ I was going to say.”
“Oh, Eve,” said Tam, predictably.
Then I smile, because she has been brought back to me. My grandmother turns away. She may not want to judge me but she cannot help herself. I, who secretly view myself as her true disciple, find that at thirty-five I am back in my usual role in our diminished family.
I concentrate on the dark green velvet that successfully masks the previous sofa while my mind considers when my father will arrive from his house; whether or not my mother will be collected enough to come downstairs; if Tam’s children, in the new enlightenment, will be brought to the cemetery; and, the thought that closes my throat, what Tam looked like at her death.
I know her body as well as I do my own. Tam did not allow me into her room in these last weeks, to the separate anguish of my parents, who believed she was trying to spare her little sister. Despite their pleas, she stoutly maintained that for my sake I should not come, that we had chosen to speak only by phone. My mother reluctantly acquiesced. My father, in a conference call he imposed, negotiated with each of us in turn, but we were united and implacable.
When he gave up, it was with one of his favorite exhortations. “At least you girls get along. If I ever hear that the two of you are fighting, even after I’m dead—”
“—you’ll turn over in your grave,” Tam said.
Normally, in this abnormal situation, we would have giggled morbidly in the knowledge that she seemed headed for the grave a lot sooner than he did. But my father, holding forth, was not listening to himself. “Which would not be the first time,” I could hear Tam say acerbically.
The worst of several burdens I am trying to ignore is that Tam and I fought continuously since she got sick, as if the disease had afflicted our relationship along with her body, and that two weeks before she died we argued so vehemently we did not speak again. As children, we had a truce that the sister who leaves the house after a fight has to shout into the closing door, “I love you, I love you,” in case she were killed in a car crash before mending the rift. Now I have committed the ultimate offense, whose consequences I must bear alone.
Do all people have one story that haunts them throughout their lives? Nana has told me hers so often I can recite it in her cadence. Unfortunately, the tale has a moral I provoke, not by any conscious act but by my face and manner. In a deferred legacy, I resemble her fabled sister Nell, source of Nana’s unremitting grief and self-reproach. As I listened to Nana’s words, I could not tell whether to be flattered by the attention or repelled by the analogy.
“Nell was the most beautiful girl,” Nana would declare in wonderment. “You cannot imagine her loveliness. Pictures never did her justice; she had such a way about her.”
I have dissected the snapshots of Nana’s sister many times, looking for that beauty and carriage, but, like Zelda Fitzgerald’s photographs, the extant few of Nell do not yield the mysterious allure that was the cause of so much suffering.
“She made trouble wherever she went,” Nana said. “When our sister Abigail finally had a beau to call on her, Nell had only to toss her head and the boy never looked at Abby again. Of course, Nell tired of him in a week. The girl was born without a conscience.”
At this point in the story I feel a familiar disquiet, leavened by my amusement at Nana’s unselfconscious narration. “Pull up a plant to see its roots and kill the plant,” she was wont to say if I pressed her to concede her intent. I am not unmindful of the fact that my grandmother is comparing me to an amoral tease.
“On my own wedding day, when I went to put on my silk stockings—” Nana opened the box to find them snagged and torn, borrowed by Nell without permission and brazenly returned.
I do not change the subject. Like someone afraid of heights who is drawn to stairwells and precipices, I am fascinated by Nana’s version of her sister, whom I knew only as a skittery, defeated old woman with a nimbus of faded hair.
The hair is an indispensable part of the tale. Nell had thick red hair, not the carroty red bemoaned by Anne of Green Gables, but mahogany curls with lights of copper that she styled in elaborate, varied arrangements—a more trivial example of her flair for life that should, according to Nana, have rendered her sister immune from life’s blows rather than enticing them.