She flushed. “No. But I have thought of calling it off,” she said suddenly.
All my life I longed for my sister to be more approachable. Now I found myself unnerved by her fallibility. “Did you talk to Mum about it?”
She looked defeated. “Mum admires me too much.”
My mother, mourning her daughter in the living room, has been deflated by sorrow, vitality replaced by a husk of resemblance. Uncle Gil attends to her with vigilance as she rests against him.
“Tam was extraordinary,” says Mackenzie Stoughton.
I am on guard, scrutinizing Mac as if he were a stranger instead of Tam’s producer for a decade.
Everyone from Tam’s office seems to be in the house the day after the funeral. Even the cashier from the cafeteria is stammering to my parents in a mixture of English and Portuguese how sorry she is.
According to the sociology of this rite, I am deemed to be less broken than my parents. The television visitors say something awkward to my mother and father before pulling up chairs before me. They have come directly from the show and are still in their fevered postproduction state.
“Tomorrow morning,” says Mac, “a full segment will be devoted to her.”
I hope he is attributing my gimlet gaze to bereavement rather than the conjecture to which I am subjecting him: Could he be the one? Could the handkerchief he keeps moving to his nose as though apologizing for allergies signify a loss much more drastic than friendship?
Mac is introducing me to people, all men, whose names I recognize from the card accompanying an ornate fruit basket yesterday. To Nana’s amusement, I had diagnosed acute Anglo-Saxonism from the prevalence of signatories whose first names could also be last names.
When Nana broadcast her weekly “Science Made Simple,” she was the only woman and Jew on national radio. Tam’s work life does not seem very different, if these visitors are representative.
To check my parochiality, I put my hands together and touch them to my lips. Tam’s colleagues experience my silence as if it were dead air, that most dire of television conditions. They interrupt one another to tell me their favorite stories of Tam, the time she disarmed a deranged writer who tried to choke her co-anchor, Harris, on a live show; her deft interrogation of the president who, to his chagrin, confessed his Lone Ranger fantasies to her on prime time.
My father and then my mother begin to listen, sustained even now by my sister’s accomplishments.
“And that smile,” Mac says.
Tam was not a conventional beauty, but she was immensely appealing, an everywoman raised one or two degrees above the norm. Magazines had boosted their newsstand sales by featuring her on their covers. She had a dazzling smile, one that transformed her face unforgettably. Tam knew the impact of that smile, which the senior litigation partner in my father’s firm had declared, when Tam was still in high school, could charm a jury off its feet.
“What most impressed me,” Harris says, in the same commanding voice he uses on the air, “was her courage. She showed us all what real integrity looks like.”
This canonical description of Tam aligns with my parents’ version of their daughter. I am doubly expelled from the hallowing of Tam, first by our fight and then by her letter, a stone tossed into the cottage lake that shatters the mirrored water to the far shore.
I focus on Harris, but skeptically. I cannot imagine him in bed. His buffed nails and the fanatical crease of his trousers make him an unlikely candidate for mussed sheets. I, however, have never been attracted to the artifice of polished men. Maybe he’s a tiger after he hangs up that bespoke suit.
Mac, lounging in his black jeans, is more my taste. But what was Tam’s taste? And who could have dreamed I’d be framing such a question?
I look to Ben’s reaction for cues, but he shakes Mac’s outstretched hand in a perfunctory manner and is manifestly uninterested in Harris’s reminiscing.
“Everyone grieves in his own way,” my mother says primly.
Her platitude joins the others, puny words that cannot compete with those Tam left me, syllables I attempt to match to Mac’s aging choirboy mouth or Harris’s chiseled lips.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, my indefatigable mind performs. Who is the one? Which of these men looks as if he were capable of saying to my sister, “I want to breathe you into me.”
Simon is the first man to understand the sway of language over me. The texture of words, the taste of them, savory sentences exchanged deliberately: well past the end of love, I can remember what each man said, lying rapt, translucent with desire, until the hidden words between us, the ones too intimate for daylight, revealed themselves.
“Why can’t they realize the true way to your heart?” Tam used to say. “They think it’s sex.”
“It is sex.” I defended my reputation.
“No, it’s what they tell you in the dark,” she said. “All a man has to do is lean across a restaurant table in low light and start talking.”
Now, while Mac speaks to my mother and father, I am picturing Tam in the dark, a tableau constructed in three dimensions before my eyes. She is naked on a white bed, arched to meet the hands of a man whose face I cannot distinguish, her perky newscaster suit on the chair. The shades are drawn. She has called home to see that the children are settled. Now she and he can disregard the illuminated dial of the clock radio.
I see the back of his head making its languorous circuit and hear her voluptuous sigh as he crouches between her legs.
“Television is a tough world,” Harris declaims, “but no one begrudged her success.”
Tam’s onscreen rapport with Harris was enough to make them the subject of gossip, to her annoyance. But it was Mac she trusted, Mac who supported her in the inevitable politics of such a rarefied occupation, whose wit engaged her enough to quote him.
“He’s so Canadian,” Tam said. “Upper Canada College, father a diplomat.”
I strain to recollect whether her tone was one of amusement or ardor.
“Call for you,” my uncle says. “Shall I bring you the phone?”
“I’ll take it in the den.”
Nana’s glare incinerates me as I walk away.
Across the street from the den is the house that once belonged to a boy named Jay, with whom I had a brief romance. I would sit in his room, his windows facing Tam’s, more fascinated by the oddity of seeing my house as if it were my neighbor’s than by Jay himself.
“I don’t understand what’s so interesting about your own house,” he’d grumble, trying to coax me onto his bed.
But the temptation of his stash of pot or his Day-Glo posters as a backdrop to coupling did not compare to the seduction of what was already mine.
I shook him off, unable to explain, even to myself, why I could stare for prolonged minutes at the facade across from me, waiting for my mother’s or Tam’s shadow to cross the upstairs landing—this view I had never anticipated that imbued daily life with an aching mystery. If I stayed still, I might see my father’s car, a blue Rambler that had long ago joined the great junk heap in the sky.
I kept my vigil so staunchly that Jay grew bored. Afterward, in what Nana would have called a controlled experiment, I knelt at Tam’s windowsill to look at Jay’s house. But it remained merely a house, exercising no sorcery.