The boys I knew before Laurie wore white jockeys, and I would have bet money on Laurie as a white jockey guy.
“Eve!”
I jump. It is Tam, exasperated by my discursion at her funeral on men’s underwear.
“I can’t help it,” I whisper back.
As if in divine affirmation, my eyes light on the tombstone ahead. There, in simple lettering, my great-aunt Nell’s name is inscribed. I thought she was buried somewhere in Arizona, where she’d lived in old age, but the family must have decided to bring her home.
Throughout my twenties, I traveled. While others traipsed from sight to sight in classic European cities, I could be found at a café table, my notes before me untouched as I waited in the sleepy square of an Iron Curtain town, sipping an iced drink, encircled by children hawking souvenirs, the dusty trees almost motionless. I frequented markets; I listened to women haggling over desiccated root vegetables.
Ostensibly, I was engaged in research, following in the footsteps of young British women who had set out at the end of the Great War to assess in writing the consequences of the catastrophe that had decimated a generation of fiancés, husbands, and brothers. Certainly I was becoming an expert on atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Tam’s alarm clock was ringing before dawn. She washed her hair, ate in the car as she drove downtown, and took the elevator skyward to a production room where she worked without lunch until well after dark. Tam had been assured that if she persevered, she had the talent to be on the air.
Although Tam knew the chic places that had begun to spring up near her job, we met for our reunions at Fran’s, the all-night dive of our high school years. There we would sit in the corner booth, drinking refills of coffee into which we poured one fluted container of cream after another.
Our brains lit up by caffeine, we played our parts. She ranked herself on the scale of her ambition. I relayed my adventures, with a soupçon of misgiving.
“My tombstone will declare, ‘She had potential.’”
Tam restated her belief in me. “No,” she said. “‘Late bloomer.’”
Sitting in the coffee shop window, her face illuminated by the sporadic glare of the dwindling cars on St. Clair Avenue, she wistfully added, “When I die, mine will be inscribed: ‘She didn’t have enough fun.’”
I contradicted her. “‘She knuckled down.’”
I did not know what would become of me. My classmates were now earnest graduates of law or medical school, while I dawdled in Central Europe, imagining myself into the purposeful lives of the women my grandmother loved to read. Within a decade of their journeys after the war, they would be eminent writers, known by English readers throughout the world for their pioneering entry into the public realm, their underlined novels, pamphlets, and speeches still in Nana’s library.
The peers they invoke in their journals were so famous that the diarists could not envision a day when the names would require an identifying footnote. And yet these women—Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bentley, Winifred Holtby, as well as the friends they cite with presumed familiarity—are almost entirely forgotten.
When Nell graduated from the University of Toronto, she was written up in The Globe and Mail as the only woman in her class to teach in Western Canada. I see her striding to work on the prairie, her hair wound around her head in sinuous plaits, her shirtdress billowing behind her. I hear her students calling out “Miss” respectfully as she writes the upper- and lowercase alphabet on the board.
How did she live alone in Saskatchewan? How did her family allow her to go off like that?
“How could we stop her?” was Nana’s retort.
All that beauty and conviction: look what became of it. She, too, lies in the ground. So does one of the lovely daughters she bore, who starved herself and died before her mother. So does the professorial husband Nell wed impetuously after a three-day courtship in New York and tormented the length of their ill-starred marriage. She should have stayed home, the pundits in Toronto wagged their tongues. Plenty of suitors, but she was headstrong.
This afternoon, as I got into the car on the way to the cemetery, I put up my hair. Now the back of my neck feels skinned by the bitter air. It is one year since Tam heard the news that became her fate, a year since she called me to say that the possible roads had narrowed to a footpath only she could take.
In New York, the winter day was unfairly brilliant and auspicious. The river, next to which I walked for hours, was studded with ice that fractured the light and flung it back to me. Over my head the occasional plane dipped and vanished into the sun. I longed to vanish, like Amelia Earhart, leaving no place to mark my end.
Instead, I marched into the nearest hairdresser and said to the woman who lifted my curls admiringly, “Cut it off.” Then I watched with grim satisfaction as the pelts fell around my feet.
When I met Simon that night, he swallowed visibly to mask his shock.
“Don’t say a word.” I stalked past him into the bedroom.
But when even the last medical means had been exhausted, Tam’s hair returned, while, hundreds of miles away, mine, too, began to grow back, with unseemly alacrity.
There is my great-aunt’s birth date on the stone. She and Nana, only one year apart. Did Nana ever feel as I do, axed like a surviving Siamese twin, the phantom half beyond reach but still present in some suspended, useless eternity?
People are starting to go, but I cannot turn away from my sister. As if departing from a king, I walk backward from the grave, a soldier in an honor guard whose watch is over but who will not relinquish her duties.
The wisecracking commentator within me fades. I am purely here, my heart a slippery fish, my bones splintering. The matter of which I’m made, the genetic material we share, is uttering its own refusal: I cannot leave her.
When the hum of the limousines grows louder, I turn around. My father, strangely protective, is helping my mother into the car. Hats, coats, and bodies around the grave have rearranged themselves like a kaleidoscope, pieces falling away from the center into rooms and lives that have nothing to do with Tam.
The first bite of snow stings my cheek. I want to rest, a dreamy sleep without this terror, the snow covering me tenderly, perfect crystals melting, then crusting into a patina over my temporal flesh, accruing in icy intricacy until I am a white testimony to my sister.
THREE
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INTRIGUED BY WHAT IS HIDDEN. As a child, I would stand behind my mother in the kitchen, forcing her to turn by crying out, “I want to understand everything.”
Although I like to pretend I have sprung from the head of Zeus, unshackled by my family’s idiosyncrasies, as soon as I come back I feel the press of my ancestors, demanding tribute for my neglect of their claims. My mind begins its speculations about how we came to be the way we are, unchastened by my mother’s refrain, “No one can understand everything. Not even you, my darling.”
Nana’s answer was more opaque. “Some stones are best left unturned.”
I begged her to tell me which ones she meant, but I already knew the tenacity of her closed face.
On the steps outside my mother’s house, I falter. An intuition, a warning pulse, stops me from crossing the threshold. I take a shuddering breath of conifer and cold. The door is ajar; I will myself to enter.