Our banter is like a game of chicken neither of us is willing to call. Since he’s in England for half the year, we do not see each other routinely. “Besides,” I inform him, “I cannot live in a rainy climate.”
“Noted,” he says. “Writing her dissertation on British writers. Cannot live in Great Britain.”
We are neither here nor there, immobilized on an Iceland of relationship, decisions adjourned.
No situation on this earth was more likely to drive my sister crazy. For Tam, indeterminacy was a moral failing.
In my mother’s living room, the brief day is shuttered, sky waning to ambient light, when the arbitrary murmurs coalesce, a melody in a minor key. Someone thrusts a prayer book into my clenched hands.
I do not follow, but when my father and my mother stand, I stand. And then: it is our turn to recite the fearful words.
Naked, I mouth the syllables of the kaddish in a monotonous trance. I cannot believe we are now the ones speaking aloud into the silent, receptive community.
I’m too proud, I think, as the service ends and people take their leave.
“Eve, we want you to know how—”
“It’s hard to believe that—”
“We’ve been thinking of you so—”
Inevitably, I flee.
Above everyone, the hall is an airy refuge. Portraits of Nana and Grandpa gaze at each other pacifically across the landing, as if to say: We made this family. We did our best. But such a matter is beyond our province.
I pass my mother’s room, evade Tam’s childhood door. Beside the laundry chute is the entrance to the third floor. My fingers are adept at disengaging the latch. I cannot remember when I was last in the attic, and yet I know exactly where to place my foot on the first steep stair. When I close the door behind me, I find myself in absolute blackness.
Slowly I ascend, placing each foot with care. At the top, a thread of moonlight outlines the wood ledge.
Turning the glass knob, I am in our old playroom, unadorned, toys scattered where Ella has left them. Here is the tiny dormer room where once—Tam and I were enthralled to discover—a maid had lived at the century’s turn.
On this flowered window seat I would lie until dusk, reading the books that are still piled beneath the hinged lid: lives of nurses in the Crimean War, siblings who journey to faraway lands by sail, wand, or potion. Here, when I was dropping out of high school, failing every class but English, Tam held me while I cried and told me she was certain I would be like Margaret Mead, intrepid, singular.
“With a PhD as good as Nana’s,” she insisted.
“But not in chemistry.”
We agreed it was unlikely.
My mother’s decorating habit has not extended to the attic. On this braided rug, I lay under Laurie as he kissed me. If I turn quickly enough, I might catch a ghostly glimpse of him.
I breathe in an essence of dust and wood oil. In the crooked closet where Tam and I had our clubhouse are a couple of wire hangers. The attic’s emptiness is not sorrowful but confers a perfect peace. Alone in the dark, I feel my body shed its carapace of grief.
Through the bathroom’s doorway, the ancient, footed tub beckons. I used to stand before the circular stained-glass window, pretending to be a captain at the helm, steering the great old house to safety. Now I unfasten the hook, and the window swings open.
The winter air charges my skin. When I close the colored glass, I can hear the reassuring thrum of the heat. In the linen closet are the worn beach towels we took to the cottage every year. I feel the ridge of Tam’s initial, and hers is the one I take as I slip off my skirt and pull my sweater over my head.
It is bliss to be by myself, bare. Mapping the length of the room, I notice the slap of my feet, iridescent in the low radiance of the filtered night sky. When I turn the clover-shaped taps, the water rushes out in a glistening coil. Rummaging around the back of the closet, I find it: Ballerina Bubbles, Tam’s much-coveted Chanukah present of decades ago. I lift off the torso of the pirouetting girl and pour in all the powder that remains.
Mounds of froth erupt. I skim the surface with my toes and then step in, molding my back to the curving porcelain until the steaming water is scant inches from the top.
The silence, when I close the taps, is complete. I am going to stay here through the night, I decide. No harm can befall me.
In a second, I am twelve, stretched out on the dock of Nana’s cottage, the sun glazing my back where I lie, dreaming of love, lulled by the lap of water against wood, a minnow flicking between the slats, the far-off drone of a motorboat signaling the particular indolence that only a dock in summer can impart.
I am trying to imagine kissing, picturing the tongues I have read about, hours of turning faces and someone’s passionate hand. In my renewed innocence I am almost asleep when I sense rather than hear the opening door.
“Eve?”
I know Laurie’s voice immediately but do not seem capable of speech. Instead, I sink further into the water’s delicate embrace.
Laurie is too circumspect to turn on the light.
“You may sit,” I say regally.
He perches on the hamper.
I can decipher his face and the two glimmers of his hands. Lacy shadows waver over him.
When I was in love with Laurie, I was maddened by the wait between his sentences. Now, hypnotized, I do not care. The quiet lengthens steadily; neither of us will intrude upon it.
I am savoring a rare placidity when Laurie says, “You cut your hair.”
“It’s growing back,” I assure him, as if everything else will be as it was.
“Remember those nights we stayed up late?” Laurie says. “Eating the sugar cookies your mother kept in tins?”
I listen.
“You and Tam sat across from me, howling over something that set you off, an inside joke you never could explain.”
Stillness.
“Is it warm in there?” says Laurie.
“I’m in the womb,” I tell him dreamily.
But the bath is cooling. I would like to add hot water, feel heat stream beneath me in prickly currents, but I will not sit up. Suddenly, I am as self-conscious as my primal namesake, innocence dispelled, wondering how she got herself into this predicament.
“Do they miss me downstairs?” I ask.
He pauses, and the room’s encompassing history reasserts itself: What is the present day? I have been here long before you, and I’ll be here when you’re gone.
“I’ve missed you,” comes Laurie’s reply.
I do not want him to break this spell by moving toward me.
But I have forgotten Laurie’s grace. He raises the towel heaped on the floor and holds it like a screen in front of him. I walk toward the pale square until it is all that is between us; I cannot see his face. When I turn my back, Laurie’s arms envelop me.
I feel his clad body behind mine, not with desire but with innate sympathy, two night creatures taking each other’s measure. I want to stand like this, enfolded in him, Tam’s towel damp against my skin, forever.
SECOND
DAY
FOUR
“EVE,” BEN SAYS URGENTLY AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE, “I need to talk to you.”
Startled, I scald my tongue on my tea.
Ben mimes that the subject is not for Ella’s ears. As I look quizzical, my mother, her face gouged by heartache, walks into the kitchen and lifts the teapot.