What Happened to My Sister

by Elizabeth Flock

  “First of all, it’s not the Armageddon thing, just so you know,” I say. “It’s called Armageddon—just the one word, for one thing. And I don’t think I’ve ever even used it in conversation. What you may be referring to, however, is my Emergency Preparedness Plan …”

  “In case of the Armageddon thing,” she says, holding out a forkful of chicken salad for me to taste. “You think it’s still good? Try it.”

  “I’ll pass, thank you, and you should too if it smells weird,” I say. “Why do people do that? Who would want to taste something that’s already been declared borderline rotten with a gross smell? Are you listening, Mother? And by the way—”

  “Here it is! I knew I had cream cheese in here somewhere,” she says, her arm reappearing with a blob of tinfoil I know used to be rectangular but is now wrapped around what’s left of the Philadelphia cream cheese that’s been in there God knows how long.

  “Ha. Lookee here,” she says, holding it up like it’s a trophy. “Were you hiding from me, cream cheese?”

  There are two truths in my world, such as it is. One: my mother has a freakish habit of talking to inanimate objects as if they’re people, and two: evidently I must now worry about her poisoning herself. Tonight I’ll clean out the icebox. I don’t care what she’ll say.

  “Hey by the way, you never told me what the man from City Hall said.” I change the subject. “I had to get Cricket over to her father’s after ballet class and by the time I got back you were asleep and then it totally slipped my mind. You went to bed awful early last night, come to think of it. You feeling okay?”

  “Hand me the paper towels, will you? No, they’re right by the sink. There you go. Thanks,” Mother says.

  “Mom, I’m trying to talk to you here,” I say. It is so dang frustrating when she gets all scattered like she is right now. “Did they have any news about the appeal? City Hall, I mean? Can you just slow down a sec? I’ll do that later, Mom. I’ll clean it out. Just leave it and come sit down for a minute before I have to go.”

  She appears to be deeply concerned with the shelves in the fridge.

  “I take it the news wasn’t good,” I say. “About the National Register I mean.”

  She is rubbing the glass shelf so hard I can hear the paper towel squeak with Windex oversaturation. In between wipes she answers me in a mumble like the kind you do in the shower when you’re rehearsing an answer to something troublesome. Fragments come first.

  “… short memory …,” then “… after all this family’s done …,” followed by “… heartless …”

  “Tell me,” I say.

  “He says we lost the appeal,” she says, sighing. I watch her enormous back jiggle with even the smallest arm movement. “He says we fought the good fight and I should be proud about how far I got. Something like that.”

  “You should be proud about how far you got?” I say.

  Now her whole body is rippling from the strength of her vigorous cleaning.

  “That’s what he said. He said most people would not have reached the courts but because our family is important to the city of Hartsville—that’s exactly what he said, important to the city of Hartsville—and because we have been a tourist destination, they agreed to hear the case.”

  She pauses in her cleaning long enough to reveal what’s really been gnawing at her.

  “The thing I don’t understand,” she says, “is why, if we’re so dang important, they can’t just go on and list this house in the National Register and be done with it. He said Uncle Charles was an icon—an icon!—but he was not an American of historical significance. Can you believe the nerve? The audacity? He said such hateful things, you can’t imagine. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to what else he said. I wanted to reach across the table and strangle him. I wanted to ask him if he liked going to the movies. I wanted him to say yes and then I would have told him he had Mr. Charles Chaplin to thank for enabling him to be entertained by moving pictures all these years. He probably wouldn’t know The Kid from Star Wars, though, so I guess it’s just as well I sipped my tea and kept my mouth shut. Chaplins take the high road, you know. I’m just glad your father wasn’t here to witness it, God rest his soul. Your father—Oh my Lord, your father would have spread him on a cracker and had him for lunch. Your daddy wasn’t a Chaplin by blood but he was by marriage and he took as much pride in it as I did. Heck, I used to think he was more proud of it than me, the way he’d go on and on. Why else would he let me keep my maiden name like I did? That kind of thing wasn’t done back then, you know. Now, a’course, it’s all you see: hyphen this, hyphen that, kids not having the same last names as both their parents is common now but back then no Southern man worth his salt would’ve seen fit to have a wife who kept her family name. We were trendsetters and we didn’t even know it! But there he was, that horrid man from City Hall, just sitting there on the living room couch helping himself to a second piece of almond pound cake, telling me there wasn’t anything more I could do to get the house listed in the Register. Boy, did I have to bite my tongue. Because Chaplins always take the high road.”

  “I know, Mom, I know. Chaplins always take the high road. I’ve heard it all my life,” I say with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Mom. I know how much that meant to you.”

  “It meant more than you know, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I spot the clock on the microwave. “Oh good Lord, it’s eleven forty-five? But my watch says— Oh, great. Just perfect. My watch is officially past the point of no return. It says it’s ten oh five. I’ve got to leave to pick up Cricket from school in ten minutes. Listen, Mom? I’m putting the knapsack back downstairs in the basement by the laundry table where it used to be, okay? I’ve updated it and added some new things so now it’s all set.”

  “Windex, you are running me ragged,” she says, turning back to her scrubbing. Somehow she’s managed to fit her whole head between the milk carton and a Tupperware containing yet another mystery substance. “Honey, can you get the 409 out from under the sink and hand it to me before you go? Windex, you’re letting me down, honey, so I’ve got to go to the big guns!”

  I still haven’t gotten used to the smell snaking out from under the sink. I hold my breath when I open the cabinet door but the smell above the sink is nothing compared to the wallop down below. It’s so sickening I swear I can taste it.

  “Mom, we have got to do something about this smell—it’s getting worse by the minute. Holy shit!”

  “Language,” she says, her voice hollow from inside cold storage.

  “Good Lord, it’s a mess down here. I thought the plumber was coming on Monday? We called about this leak weeks ago,” I say. I come up for air, then go back down for another look. “Oh my God, the cabinets are rotted out they’re so wet. Here’s the 409. The mold’s spread across the entire space. You can die from black mold, Mom, you know that? We’re going to have to rip that whole cabinet out. I bet that’s what’s got to happen.”

  “Y’all have only been living back here a few weeks and already you’re renovating a house that’s been just fine and dandy through three generations of Chaplins thank you very much. Four, if you count Cricket. How on earth has it survived without you, I wonder?”

  “Mom, first of all, I’d hardly call replacing a cabinet a renovation. And anyway, what’s the alternative, waiting until we all have hacking coughs from black lung or whatever it is you get from that disgusting fungus inching across all the walls into our beds?”

  “Are you finished, Bette Davis? You really are a Chaplin with all the dramatics you have swirling around in your head,” she says.

  “If Eddie weren’t, I mean if Eddie and I were, well, you know what I’m trying to say. I’d have him come over and take a look at it but I can’t so let’s get the plumber in here.”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “You know, if you just did a little planning these things wouldn’t happen.”

  Now that got her at
tention but what the hell was I thinking?

  “Since we’re on the subject of things that need fixing,” she says.

  “Forget it, Mom, it’s nothing,” I say. Too late.

  She emerges from the refrigerator. Dang it all. Now she’s going to go off on me about my thing. Again. For the millionth time. She’s wiping off her hands, closing the icebox, making her way to the Big Chair for yet another lecture. I’ve never known what else to call this habit of mine. It’s not an obsession or OCD or whatever they call it. It’s just … it’s just that I hate surprises. Lots of people hate surprises—I’m not the only one. I am, however, the only smart one, because when life throws you curveballs—and we all know it does—I will be prepared. I like to say that with careful planning I’ve taken the un out of unexpected. Which basically means I’ve wiped out any chance for a surprise to catch me off guard. It’s not easy, you know. And hardly anyone appreciates the tremendous effort that goes into it.

  I’ve always been a “doer.” That’s what my daddy called me. “You’re a real doer, Honor,” he’d say with a wink. According to Daddy, there are two types of people: diners and doers. Doers go out and get the job done while diners sit and eat supper, figuring they’ll get to work the next day. I never did get the comparison—don’t doers have to eat too?—but I did learn that doing something was the better way to go in Daddy’s eyes. And in mine too. I’ve always liked projects of any kind but I wouldn’t say my thing started that far back. If I had to pinpoint when it started taking up my focus, I’d have to say it was high school.

  Back then Patty Werther was in charge of the senior prom but I did all the work, which meant the dance was surprise-free and therefore a flawless success in my humble opinion—one of the greatest in the school’s history, Mr. Kipper, the principal, said. He said those exact words: the greatest in the school’s history. He gave the thank-you flowers to Patty Werther, mind you, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was getting through the night with no calamities.

  At community college I went to every single class, I took copious notes, and I didn’t even mind photocopying them for whomever missed class, just so long as they signed my petition to ban touch football on the quad (you know how much it hurts when you get hit by an errant football? A lot, trust me. It hurts like H-e–double hockey sticks).

  After college I worked as a secretary at the local television station, and Larry Diesel, the weatherman, once told me it was common knowledge that if anyone needed something done well and fast they should give it to Honor.

  And frankly, I don’t think it’s a crime to sleep with a notepad and ballpoint pen by your bed. I don’t know about anybody else, but for me it’s not uncommon to wake up halfway through the night with a scenario that would require a set of skills or equipment I haven’t yet considered. So in the morning when I see a word or two scribbled down in that middle-of-the-night handwriting, I remember what I have to do. For example: one time I wrote “frying pan” and I knew that meant I had to get a new one because the Teflon was peeling off my old one something awful and what if a houseguest requests pancakes? Another time I wrote “red ribbon” to remind myself I needed to pick up more at the dollar store in case mine runs out on Christmas Eve after all the stores are closed. Okay, so maybe it was July when that happened, but you can’t put a time line on preparedness. Mother will run out of red ribbon and guess who will have the last laugh. That’s right. Little ole prepared me.

  Our older daughter’s diagnosis came on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday I had the three-ring binder color-coded and collated, and I firmly believe the decision of which chemo to do was made easier because we had all the information right there at our fingertips. Plan A tab = red, Plan B tab = blue. Plan C (the clinical trial) = yellow. Later, by the time the search for a bone marrow donor was under way, I’d turned our dining room table into a grid of neat piles of research I could easily cross-reference. We had no way of knowing how it would all turn out, but we did the best we could under the circumstances and anyway no amount of preparedness can help you when you go through what we did. Cricket was nine when her older sister died, almost exactly three years ago. An anniversary I’ve come to dread so much I very nearly block it out.

  On September 11, 2001, before the second tower fell, when the TV people started saying things like act of terrorism, I didn’t panic or run to the store for supplies. I felt terrible about the whole thing, mind you—just horrible. But I knew I had emergency backpacks under the bed, and because I have an inventory list I know they’re each packed with two flares, an army green canteen, a Swiss Army knife, three bottles of water, four packs of matches and a lighter, a jar of peanut butter, MREs, iodine tablets for water purification, a large bag of raisins, a ball of twine, a map of the United States, a compass, two hundred dollars in twenties with the Andrew Jacksons all facing out, and, at the very top, gas masks I got at the Army-Navy store some years back. So even biological warfare won’t catch me off guard. Last night I finally finished updating an identical backpack for my mother, and today I let her know it’s back where it’s supposed to be if she ever—God forbid—needs to use it, and you’d think I’d tried to ax-murder her, the way she’s acting right now.

  “Honor, honey, listen to me for a minute,” Mother says. “Don’t make that face, just listen. Now, I’m your mother and I can say what other people who shall remain nameless can’t. You’ve gone a little too far with this being prepared thing. You can’t plan life, honey! Things happen. Life happens. You know that. No one knows that better than you and Eddie. You need to show Cricket life throws punches but you get back up and you go on with your life. You don’t—”

  “I refuse to see how an emergency backpack filled with flares, bottled water, a little cash—”

  “Cash?” Now it’s her turn to interrupt. “Now, what’s that for?”

  “It’s for when the ATMs go down, but that’s not the point.”

  “Then what is the point? And when, by the way, do ATMs go down? I’ve never heard of that happening.”

  “As a matter of fact, on nine-eleven the ATMs all ran out of money,” I say.

  “But they didn’t go down,” she says.

  “No, I guess if you’re going to split hairs they didn’t go down, but they might as well have because everybody ran to get cash in case the terrorists invaded and there was none and safety experts said afterward that it was a good idea to keep some money on hand, just in case.”

  “Just in case what? Just in case the terrorists need to buy something at the Gap?”

  “Ha ha, very funny. I’ve got to go pick up Cricket in about two minutes, just so you know.”

  “Honey, this is too much,” Mother says, her face serious now. “It’s gone too far. Cricket’s finally doing better. She’ll start making some new friends soon, I’m sure. And you’re, well, you’re getting up every day. That’s a start. You’re trying—I see you trying, honey, and I’m so proud of you for it. I’m fine. Your brother—well … he’s about as good as he’ll ever be, God help him. Everything’s getting somewhat settled finally, and you’re convinced the world’s about to end. Can’t you see there’s something wrong with that, honey?”

  “I don’t think the world’s about to end,” I tell her. “I like being prepared for emergencies is all.”

  “You really need a comb in a Tupperware container? What kind of emergency would require a comb?”

  “I’ve got my reasons.” I say this with little conviction because, now that the kidding has stopped and she’s focusing, Mother’s going to tick off all the things she calls crazy and there won’t be a word I can get in edgewise.

  “Okay, so, what’s the reason for the comb?” She calls my bluff.

  The chair creaks as she settles back into it. The Big Chair. That’s what Eddie and I secretly call it because that’s what it is: Big with a capital B. Mother was always on the heavy side, but when my father died, ten years ago, she started eating and never stopped. I’d find candy wrappers everywhere—
jammed into the glove box, stuffed under the couch cushions, under her bed. Literally, everywhere. At first we thought it was a phase, that she would even out or taper off when the grief subsided. I tried talking to her about it gently, telling her we just worried about her eating habits for health reasons, but she got really defensive and teary and over time began cutting me off with a raised hand and “don’t even start” any time I broached the subject.

  When it became clear Mom’s fat was here to stay, I had Eddie remove the arms of one of the kitchen chairs and reinforce the legs with thick pine spindles interspersed between the delicate existing ones. The whole thing looks like a chair version of Frankenstein’s monster. But it will hold Mom’s weight, so at least I don’t have to worry about her crashing onto the floor.

  “All right, fine.” I give up. “What if Cricket comes home from school with lice? Someone’s going to have to comb through her hair and all the other kids’ hair to check if they’ve spread and they’ll need a comb to do it and guess who’ll be there, ready and waiting.”

  “Honor, honey—”

  “You know how many kids are in this neighborhood?” I ask her. “There are eight on this block alone, and that’s not even counting the missionary kids, who, if you ask me, are the exact ones who’ll probably get lice. Where are they now? Nicaragua or something? Shoot, I’ve got to hustle if I’m going to get Cricket on time. Can we talk about this later, when I get back?”

  “Oh well fine,” she says. “Go on and go. By the way, they’re in Guatemala not Nicaragua, and that’s mean to say about a family out there doing God’s work …”

  We both know she agrees with me on the do-gooder neighbors but feels she has to pay them lip service.

  “I love you so much,” Mother says. She reaches out, and I can tell she wants to push some hair behind my ears—she hates it when my hair gets in my face—but because of her size she can’t get close enough, so I lean forward so she can mother me because that’s what she loves to do. She loves to mother me. And her granddaughter, Cricket.