Hard to imagine anyone’s ever having had cause enough to wonder what in my life might have once been worth a count — dying adorations, maybe, or playsome enamorations going way back to nursery school, or any hands most recently mislaid on me, then on bedposts, then on banisters on the bullying way back down the stairs.
My sisters were just sturdier, vulval versions of myself. We kept in touch by tardy and typoed e-mail. Greeting cards arrived on time to clear things up again about Mom. (“Hi there guys. Sorry for the form note.”)
When I asked how things were going, the answers came out more like pledges than anecdotes.
The older of them rode the bus over one night and knocked, tunicked and flip-flopping, a bismuth-pink on her lips. She had gotten herself a flu shot some days before, and would I have a go at the Band-Aid? She whisked up her sleeve. Her bare upper arm was pale and asquish.
I saw her home afterward to her troves.
My younger sister threw herself into her work, battled away at largely moony evenings. For a time, our feelings ran parallel toward the same woman. A yearning for her firmed in us both.
This woman put wrong names to our faces, and there were oddened tilts and tonings to her voice as often as we approached. Her wardrobe was a rowdydow of oranges, beckoning reds.
Eyes an acorn color.
Hair she kept ruckussed upward.
A finger sometimes presuming upon a front tooth — to test the sureness of its set, its hold?
These were weeks of endangering heat. My sister and I were of like violences of mind about this unrelished, unensnared piner throwing herself aside. We plotted a past for her: meadow hockey in college, weddings called off, devotions forever obsolescing. We left a brood of brazen tulips on her doorstep. Pictured her kicky and ambitious sleep, an exercise of caution in her days, her vague but chaoticized dailiness. We started eating where she ate — ordered the same boffo salads, with just scribbles of onion, parings of radish fillipped in just right.
Still, we made no grabs, no gains, until my sister wondered, Maybe we were the couple?
What at first doesn’t sit right might eventually be made to stand at least to reason.
Then came crackdowns at work — freezes on travel, on “favors” for office affairs. I liked how things got worded on the stop orders, and I liked how a day harshened around ten o’clock and again about three; I liked personal bombshells — the miscarriages and surprisingly affordable addictions.
But I mostly liked feeling pinned down, sized up, taken for.
The new guy they paired me off with was just some kid, formerly rural, with a headful of unmastered mathematics and specialty jests.
He figured in my toilet ruminations, true, but only as someone spooked, not spooking.
The library girl had the disease in its early, bashful stage. “Watch and wait,” she said the doctors had said. But it did not come out of its shell the little while I knew her.
I would help her off with her coat, and she would put everything she had into a practiced shakiness that could not be ignored. The money we threw around was mostly money torn most of the way down the middle.
She had a diary she decorated alertly but wrote in only here and there — tidings, updates, mostly flashily inaccurate. I know because I, too, tended to peek at life and generally save my breath.
Then a boxier month holding more than I knew what to do with. My mother died idly and lopsidedly in her sleep, and within days had begun her cindered foray into the infinite. My father threw himself truantly into grieving, claimed he could hear his mind clearing up too soon. My older sister had started courting some galled dab of a man. He kept his back to the rest of us while we whiled away the days of bereavement pay.
This was supposed to be broad-skyed autumn, don’t forget.
Slants were falling all across my life, too. A sore, a lasting blemish of some sort, had asserted a fresh residency on my chin.
Then my older sister had a change of heart, married her man’s grappling brother instead. The ceremony was swift, inventive, isolating.
A year or two of slower considerings, and then another year broke out its days. I was newly forty, and veinier, but now and then still had a crack at people.
I squibbed myself this way and that into a few more women, fled the coming fruitions.
Then Elek.
I had known him for only the hour, but he left that scathing of citrus on my lips.
In years to come, I shared a house — some plywooden, hideaway housing, really — with a much younger woman who had a daughter, a keeper, from a man who had left. This woman and I helped each other off with high-collared sweaters that verged nearly to our shins, ate take-out pizzas that had been rechristened to sound like sensible dishes. We fought like equals. When the daughter grew up a little further and started overdoing it (she had a finessed, triumphal bloom on her), the two of them got mistaken for sisters wherever they went. They took to explaining that they were just good friends with hopes of someday being something more.
People Won’t Keep