Nana’s reverence for physical beauty can oddly humanize her magisterial intellect. More often, it is tiresome. Nana herself is beautiful, which she knows but will not allow. And I am no femme fatale luring men into disastrous entanglements. I would never betray my sister, either by ruining her clothes or stealing her beaux. Yet some part of me is thankful to be the reflection of my grandmother’s obsession, however distorted and to my detriment. Nana’s love is imperial and remote. At least I compel her interest.
Waiting for the doorbell to chime is like waiting for Canada to change. I have never been able to explain to my family why this country’s most soothing feature, its sedate proceeding from one occurrence to the next, is such an irritant to me, inciting behavior more outrageous than I’d planned.
“Drama queen,” says Tam inside my head.
Although I do make inconsistent attempts to deflect the way my family perceives me, on the morning of my sister’s funeral even I am amazed at what I’ve wrought.
Over the years I have tried not to think about Laurie. Once, when I asked Tam if she ever ran into him, her verdict was definitive: “Boring and suburban.”
But lately, each time I came home, I did enact one ritual. I sneaked into the den to look up his name in the phone book. The sight of his address—always the same—was equated in my mind with his reassuring constancy, a devotion I had forfeited by leaving the city as I did.
Yesterday, I saw that Laurie had moved. His wife’s name was no longer beside his. When I read the new numbers next to his bare name and thought, “I’ll ask Tam what happened to his marriage,” I felt shaky. I should have called Simon in New York, as I had promised. Instead, I memorized Laurie’s number.
Hearing his machine message, I intended to hang up. Then I announced myself and said starkly, “My sister is dead.” I breathed so that I wouldn’t cry, and put down the receiver.
At once I remembered the first long-distance call between Laurie and me. We had not spoken in a week—a lifetime at seventeen. Laurie and I had made an intricate plan, taking into account the time difference between Toronto and Florence. But when the operator called on the anticipated day, the circuits were busy, once, twice, again.
My mother was nothing if not a romantic. Applying her charms, she cajoled the operator into trying continually, on behalf of starstruck lovers everywhere. When the operator finally informed me my party was waiting, I was so overwrought I could not talk. Nothing seemed momentous enough for the occasion.
I sat on my bed, atypically mute.
“This has to be the most expensive silence your mother ever paid for,” Laurie said.
Last night I stared at the phone, willing it to ring. Throughout the evening people called; I delivered the funeral arrangements mechanically. At midnight, in defiance of a code I didn’t know I lived by, I picked up the receiver and called Laurie again.
“I thought it was too late,” he said. He knew about Tam: What could he do to help?
The timbre of his voice had an extraordinary effect. I entered an idyll of our lovemaking so tactile I could dispel it only when he repeated my name.
Astonished, I invited him to come to the house before the funeral began, an idea unconventional enough for him to question it and then decide aloud that whatever might comfort me, the mourner, must be right to do.
Since I’ve come home my mind has been running frantically in and out of the past without transition. Nothing I think about seems to hold still long enough to catalogue it in its appropriate tense.
And so it has been more disconcerting than usual to return to my mother’s house. Although I am under the roof beneath which Tam and I grew up, the decor reflects my mother’s endless faith that physical transformation will produce a more profound change, as if interior design were a spiritual term. This conviction has sanctioned her to redo the living room with unsettling frequency. I can never be sure where I’ll be when I walk in.
Several years ago, I had entered a subtle space of unbleached linen and dun-colored cotton, the summer house of an industrial magnate. At the start of Tam’s illness, the room hardened to glass and metal. But on the morning of my sister’s funeral, I find myself waiting for Laurie in an English sitting room, not unlike the parlors of Nana’s youth.
Nana and I face each other on matching velvet sofas, accompanied by oversized cabbage-rose chairs. Braided tassels cinch the draperies, released onto the floor in moiré splendor.
Today, Laurie is the curiosity I have allotted myself. Nana used to like him, until she knew we were sleeping together. She grew up with his grandfather, children of the only two Jewish families to summer in their tiny Ontario town. The connection was all that protected me from her wrath.
Not that she and I, ever, said a word about sex. It was not proper form for a woman born in the reign of King Edward VII. We are ten years from the millennium, but Nana is unable to shed the post-Victorian constraints of her childhood.
The look on her face when she acknowledges that Laurie is on his way recalls instantly the silences that would descend upon Nana and me.
I want to tell her not to worry. I am braced for the nice man with an incipient paunch who will offer condolences to both of us. My ear is alert for the doorbell when Laurie appears, conjured, in the archway of the living room.
Laurie was a boy when I loved him, his youth an emblematic condition representing not only his chronological age but an essence, a nectar I could imbibe to counter my persistent sense of dislocation in this city. He was wholly of his place and era, belonging in Toronto, where he would inherit his father’s business or go into law, as, in fact, he did; marry someone from his neighborhood and live happily ever after, while I sought grandeur and danger in New York.
But when Laurie steps inside, “boring and suburban” are hardly the words that come to mind. Tam and I must have different taste in men, I think. My hands, folded decorously in my lap, are already tracing the planes of his face as if I were eighteen and still in love with him. My fingers are inside his mouth. His clothes fall away, and I see what he looks like naked.
I feel myself color at my imagination’s transgression and lower my head. When I look up, I can read his face. He was never as articulate as I, and in my clairvoyance I know that he is struggling to say something to Nana and me, and that he is too full of feeling to say it.
When he clasps Nana’s hand, a final surprise overtakes me. I begin to cry, mortifying myself and embarrassing my grandmother. Laurie moves away from her to me and lifts me up.
My body reads every muscle I intuited moments ago. Although my tears, unconnected to my volition, will not stop, I am alight with desire, not the easy flirtation I foresaw but the real thing, the encounter of memory and chemistry that happens rarely and seems irresistible.
Is he feeling it as well? In my experience, “vast,” says Tam within, the body cannot lie. Laurie steps back as if scorched, and his voice, formal, discreet, inquires after my mother and my father, civility restored. But I know something is going to happen. And I hear Tam, confirming that I’m right.
Since Tam’s diagnosis, I have had a recurring dream, one I used to have as a child that my unconscious filed and then retrieved for this emergency.
I am in the bedroom of my grandmother’s cottage, the one overlooking the lake. The room is softened by light; sky and water are a placid gray. The lake is lapping quietly at the narrow beach, encroaching so incrementally that at first I do not realize the beach has disappeared. Now the water is at the wooden back steps. Now the steps are hidden. The lake is rising, inexorable as it climbs the house, blind, remorseless, until the wall of water reaches the roof. From inside, all I see is the merging of gray lake and sky until the cottage is engulfed.