“Mummy, let me,” I say.
She is pouring tea into a used cup.
“Mum!” I rebuke her, moving the cup to the sink. I take a mug from the cupboard while Ben waits.
“Not that one,” says my mother.
I have inadvertently set down a memento from one of Tam’s press junkets. My sister’s face is wrapped around the cheap pottery.
In my haste to remove the offender, I slam it against the countertop. A crack splits Tam’s artificial smile.
“Eve,” Ben says again.
He has aged well, I note, as if he were not merely four years older than I. His hair, a wavy salt-and-pepper, is becomingly long, and his wire-rim glasses lend him a rakish air. Ben is chair of the history department at Toronto’s most prestigious private high school, and I’m sure that the girls who attend it dream of him at night. Chin in his cupped hand, he has that lost-puppy look Tam liked from the beginning.
Impulsively, I walk over to give him a hug.
Ben smiles. I have hoped he did not take sides in my final debacle with Tam. His devotion to her notwithstanding, it seems he hasn’t.
“I need to speak to you,” he says.
My mother is sipping her tea, captivated by Ella’s chatter. “I’m not taking a nap today,” says Ella. “No way.”
“What is it?” I ask Ben in an undertone. “I don’t like to leave my mother.”
“I promised,” he mouths to me.
I pad upstairs after him to the landing.
“I have something—” Ben says. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket.
My name is on the front of an envelope, the handwriting Tam’s.
“—for you,” he concludes. “Tam told me to give it to you on the first morning. ‘Before anyone comes.’”
I can feel the heat in my face. Nothing seems more intimate than this envelope, my sister’s name engraved on the back beneath my fingertips.
“Ella needs me,” Ben says tactfully.
Ignoring the incessant opening and closing of the front door, the faint call of “Eve,” I sit on the bed and wriggle my finger under the beveled edge of Tam’s stationery.
On the card I withdraw are a few ornamental words, printed with a fountain pen as if they were a calligraphed invitation to a tête-à-tête.
For the half second between eyeing and decoding her note, my mind composes: “Eve, forgive me.”
But what I see is this: “The last time we were together, he said, ‘I want to breathe you into me.’”
I turn the card over pointlessly.
This missive is not a hasty scrawl to a sister in whom Tam had a sudden urge to confide. No, Tam inscribed these words as carefully as she did everything else. The strokes are lucid, symmetrical.
I force the card into its concealing envelope. Whoever uttered this sentence to my sister, it was not Ben, who, in giving me this letter, has lovingly fulfilled an edict that rocks my body as I press my knees to my chest.
“Honestly, Eve,” says Nana’s voice through my door. “You’re expected. Now.”
I drop the envelope into my backpack, zipping it closed. But my sister’s words cannot be contained.
“I want to breathe you into me,” my mind chants as I hurry downstairs. “Into me, into me.”
Tam and Ben were married downtown in an old synagogue revived by an alliance of preservationists and retired craftsmen, who had faithfully restored its wainscoting and stained-glass windows. The ceremony, the first to take place there in fifty years, was covered by the Toronto Star and the Sun, even meriting a restrained mention in the dowager Globe and Mail.
Tam wore Nana’s wedding dress, fastened at the back with lace-covered buttons in a dense line from neck to hip. I did them up one at a time, struggling to fit the tiny ovals into their thread loops.
“How are you going to get this off when it’s over?” I said in frustration.
“Ben will tear it off with his teeth,” she told me airily.
We both laughed at the picture of Ben as ravisher.
“I’m not a reluctant bride,” Tam said.
I thought it would be graceless to remind her that a mere six weeks ago she had cried in the kitchen after mailing the invitations.
“It seems so—” She’d hesitated then.
“Final?”
“Well, I should hope it’s final,” she snapped at me.
“Don’t blame me,” I said, “for your attack of nerves.”
“I am not nervous.”
“Are too,” I told her.
“I’ve never been nervous in my life.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I said, in the voice of my mother’s newest infatuation, a psychiatrist whose pomposity we would mimic, barely out of his presence.
“Imagine,” Tam said, “if Mummy announced her engagement just after my wedding.”
“She never will.”
“Get engaged?” said Tam.
“She still likes Daddy too much.”
“You’re wrong. She’s only begun to speak to him civilly.”
“Sex,” I explained. “Daddy is sexy.”
“Eve!” Tam said, disgusted.
“He is,” I persevered. “Unlike Dr. Sanders. Can you picture him in bed?”
“‘And how does that make you feel?’” said Tam.
I was laughing. “I’d like to transfer him and his transference right out of this house,” I said. “Then again, he’s not long for this world.”
“Meaning?”
“None of them lasts very long.”
“True,” she said. “I intend to stay married forever.”
“Who said you wouldn’t?”
“We’re a statistic, children of divorce.”
“Tam, what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing.”
“Ta-ma-ra.”
She was flicking her nail. “Sometimes Ben seems old.”
“He’s one year older than you are. Anyway, wasn’t your list ‘mature, responsible, worships me’?”
“Yes,” she said, “but—”
“Are you worried you’ll be bored?”
“Not at all.”
“Your great desire is your work. Besides, you can always take a lover.”
Before I could tell her I was kidding, she said fiercely, “Ben is my lover,” verifying my supposition. She stopped herself. “If you ever say a word about this to me—”
“I won’t, I won’t,” I said in mock alarm.
“Or to my children.”
“Your children! Are you—”
“Of course not,” she said. “It’s just—”
I waited.
“I’ll never sleep with anyone else.”
“Most people,” I notified her, “have several boyfriends until they find the one they’re looking for. You’ve already found him.”
She looked marginally cheerier. “Do you think it’s the same each time?”
“Definitely not,” I said.
“This is such a tasteless conversation I can’t believe I’m having it.”
“Do the two of you—? Any problems?”