The Resurrection of Tess Blessing

by Lesley Kagen

  It was more of a statement than a request. Birdie has that get-out-of-my-way-buster look in her eyes. She was normally pretty docile, but she had that unpredictable wild streak. When they were kids, Birdie dove off the high dive at the neighborhood pool and she wasn’t even that great a swimmer. She cracked Dennis Patrick in the back with a rock when he attacked Tess in an alley. She rang Mr. Johnson’s doorbell—he was the Lutheran that all the kids in neighborhood said would stuff you like the deer he had hanging on his living room wall if he caught you playing ding dong ditch. She liked to stick her head too far out of the window of a fast moving car.

  Tess was becoming very frightened that the guy with the friendly face would have it rearranged by her sister’s fist if he didn’t allow her into the duplex.

  Thankfully, after he gives the two middle-aged women standing on his front porch the once over, he says, “My family’s at Mass and I’m just puttering. Why not?”

  Tess can think of a hundred reasons.

  She tells her sister, “You go.” She doesn’t want to stir up the past and doesn’t understand why Birdie does. One of them had to stay as close to the present as possible. “I’ll wait out here.”

  Birdie leans in to the handsome man like she’s telling him a secret. “She’s shy,” she says with a wink. “Give us a minute.” She pushes Tessie to the side of the porch and begins to softly sing in a demanding way, “All kinds of weather, we stick together. The same in the rain or sun.” The Sisters song from the ’50s musical White Christmas is one of the girls' favorites. They used to perform it up at Lonnigan’s for their daddy and all the customers on special occasions. “Two different faces, but in tight places, we think and we act as one.”

  Tess can’t resist when Birdie locks her arm through hers and drags her back to the nice young man to tell him, “We’re the Finley sisters.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Dave Trilby. Come on up.”

  Birdie quietly counts the sixteen steps that deliver them to the small landing in front of the entry door.

  Dave escorts them straight into the living room and there he is. Leon, on the old flowered couch in his boxer shorts, glued to the boxy black-and-white Zenith, a Swanson’s fried chicken dinner on a metal TV tray in front of him. A snubbed-out Lucky Strike is jammed into what’s left of the gummy brownie.

  The three of them proceed through the dining room that holds few memories since the sisters never once remember using it.

  The blue paint on the girls’ old bedroom has been replaced with a color that’s almost the same as the pink in Haddie’s room. Someone had tried repeatedly to patch the long crack in the ceiling that Tessie used to stare at night after night, waiting for it to burst open and the world to fall down upon them. “This is my little Natalie’s room,” Dave says. “The ceiling is a work in progress.”

  Birdie steps into their old room and says, “I love what you’ve done with it,” but Tessie remains mum. The memories are coming fast and hard. Birdie rocking. Birdie wetting the bed. The two of them huddled together with the pillows over their heads to muffle the screaming on the other side of the wall. Shadow puppets.

  “The bathroom,” Dave says a tad embarrassed as he walks past.

  Tess peeks in. She can smell the Dutch cleanser they used to scrub the tub and their mother’s Aqua Net hair spray.

  Dave steps to the right, into Louise and Leon’s former bedroom, and says, “Speaks for itself.”

  Indeed it does. A cacophony of double L’s arguments are bouncing around in Tess’s brain. Birdie admires the bedspread, and then elbows her sister to say something polite, so Tessie closes her eyes and sticks her head in. “Hasn’t changed one bit.”

  Dave leads them into the kitchen where the lovely Louise is standing in front of the stove complaining about cooking or her useless children or threatening to throw a pot of boiling water at Leon when she finds out he gambled away his paycheck again.

  As Tess had feared, Birdie hadn’t anticipated how being in the duplex would affect her. She tells the guy, “Thanks so much for taking time out of your day,” puts her arm around her now-quivering sister, and guides her down the front staircase. Dave’s face is puzzled as he locks the door behind them.

  On the familiar front porch stoop where the Finley girls sit hand in hand to await Haddie’s return, Birdie says in her littlest-girl voice, “Oh, heck, Tessie, I’m having a cloudy day.” She sets her head on her sister’s shoulder. “I need some candy.”

  On the short drive over to the third destination, Birdie insisted they stop at a Mobil station on North Avenue so she could clean off the Volvo windshield and check the oil. Four times each.

  Tess calls to her out the car window, “You could get a freakin’ job here it looks so good. Please get back in the car.”

  Birdie flaps her arms and says, “We’ve gotta run it through the car wash. Get off all the filth…filth…filth…filth.”

  “Wow,” Haddie says from inside the car. “She reminds me of Otto.”

  Tess, who has often thought the same thing, says, “Me too.”

  Birdie leans through the Volvo window while they wait for the customer in front of them to run through the cycle. She pants, “I got the super-duper version.”

  Tess grabs ahold of her. Birdie lets her for a moment, then pulls back, and says as she gets back in, “Just get the fucking car washed.”

  Wanting to make her sister feel better about her looniness, as the car is sprayed and soaped, Tess tells her and Haddie about her deep-seated fear of a greasy man watching her from a cracked window in a gas station washroom. How he’d wait for her to leave the car to pick up a Three Musketeers bar in the minimart so he could spike the Coke in her cup holder with curare.

  Not exactly sure how to react, Haddie snorts.

  But Birdie says perplexed, “I get being afraid of a greasy guy. “The Peeker” up at the Clark Station was always bugging you when we were kids, but curare? Where the hell did that come from?”

  When Tess says, “Freaks of Nature. Those pygmy cannibals?” her sister laughs.

  Back on track, at least for the moment, Tess gives Haddie the directions to Ma’s as they exit the service station. Birdie is bouncing around in her seat now, giddy with delight. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to do this!” By the time they make the turn onto 63rd Street, her car door is halfway open. She runs up the stairs, yanks open the door of the house-shop, and yells out, “Ma, we need candy!”

  Tessie had told her about Little Ma taking over the business after her mother passed away, so Birdie isn’t thrown when her successor comes out from behind the curtain. After they make their delicious selections, the three of them snuggle together on the steps out front.

  Tess catches sadness flit across Haddie’s face as she watches her aunt dig into her bag of sweets. Her daughter can’t eat sugar without feeling guilty. Tess shakes out a few M&M’s into her hand, offers them to Haddie, and says, “Baby steps, right, Bird?” and she nods in agreement.

  They talk and eat their goodies until the Blessed Children of God church bells ring out twice. According to the schedule Tess had devised, it was time to fulfill their last order of business for the day. She stands and grabs onto the iron railing for support, smiles wanly down at her little sister, and says, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for we.”

  The Edge

  Will greets them in the mudroom and takes Birdie’s suitcases out of her hands. The last time he’d spent time with his sister-in-law was at Tessie’s and his wedding. Soon after, she had relocated to Florida. He’s unsure if he should hug her, so he comes off like a diner owner greeting a customer who hasn’t frequented his establishment in a while. “Good to see you again,” he tells her as he takes her hand in his and gives it a firm shake. “Hungry?”

  Birdie says, “No,” but that’s the extent of her chit-chat repertoire.

  Tess leads her into the den where Henry is playing online poker, oblivious to all but his full house. She calls him
on his cell phone. He doesn’t pick up. “You are so gay,” he says with his killer smile. “I love you too,” she says. “Don’t forget we’re having supper together night as a family. Turn around and say hello to your aunt.”

  Just like Birdie had with Haddie, she and her nephew quickly find common ground. Like him, she has always loved cards. Solitaire when they were kids, and Gin Rummy, when she got older. A few years ago when her agoraphobia got so bad that she couldn’t leave the house for a few months, she became addicted to one of the first online poker sites and made a small fortune. When Tess steps back into the kitchen to touch base with Will, she can hear her sister sharing betting strategy with Henry.

  Will whispers to his wife, “I drilled a hole in the box and covered it with an adhesive flap so you won’t run into the same problem you had the last time you tried to scatter them. I’ll show Birdie how to open it, so you don’t have to, okay?”

  A still-recovering Tess sighs; she’s so very weary. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take.” She looks over at her skinny sister deep in conversation with Henry. “If we’re not back by five thirty….”

  Will gives her a hug and says, “Supper will be waiting.”

  Birdie wants to hold the golden box as they descend down the beach path, but they hadn’t planned anything else out funeral-wise. Tessie’s only priority is to be rid of her mother once and for all, but her sister looks sad and solemn. She doesn’t feel the same bitterness toward Louise that Tess lugs around, which was hard for the both of them to understand after the way their mother had treated her.

  After they wend down the crumbly asphalt path and arrive at the shore, they sit in the sand, slip off their shoes, and dig in their toes. They study the thrown-away and lost items that’ve rolled up onto the beach. Down the beach, a flock of seagulls are arguing over a carp.

  When Birdie stands and walks to the water’s edge, Tess joins her. Puffy clouds are rolling across the sky, pushed by a wind that’s not coming off the lake, but at the girls’ backs. Tess points up and says, “It’s your color. Robin’s egg blue.”

  Birdie tries a smile. “I was just remembering all the time we spent at the beach with her when we were kids. How beautiful she was lying on that white sheet.” She begins to cry. “I know you didn’t so much, but I really loved her, Tessie. I never gave up believing that if I worked hard enough, lost weight, got smarter, that she’d love me back.” She turns to face her sister. “The day you agreed with Leon and let them pull the plug, you killed my hope too.”

  “Oh, Bird. I’m….”

  “I know.” She leans into Tess. “I’m sorry too. I know now that you only did what you thought was right.”

  The girls slide into one another and lock in place until Birdie steps back and says, “I’d like to say a few words.” She may not understand Birdie’s devotion to Louise, but Tess is humbled by the sincerity of it. She bows her head in respect.

  The Lord is my shepherd.

  I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

  He leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul….

  When Birdie finishes reciting the entire Twenty-Third Psalm by heart, she shrugs and tells her sister’s amazed face, “I’ve been reading the Bible. It’s not as bad as it used to be. Do you want to say something?”

  Her knee-jerk reaction is to repeat one of her mother’s favorite expressions—“That’s the way the cookie crumbles”—but she’d been working on forgiving Louise the way I’d suggested she should. Tess knows that if a woman wasn’t loved by her mother, she’ll go one of two ways when she herself becomes a mom. Either she’ll make it her life’s work to bestow upon her children the love she never received, or she’ll treat her babies the same harsh way she’d been treated. Louise took route two.

  Tessie was just seven years old at the time. She’d come home crying from the park with a bloody cut below the knee. She was still young enough to hope, like Birdie, that this would be the time that her mother would tend to her the way she saw the other mommies in the neighborhood tend to their kids. Louise would express dismay, sit Tess down on the edge of the bathtub to ever so gently wash off the boo-boo with warm water, brush it with iodine, and cover it with care and a Band-Aid. Give her a little kiss maybe, and tell her how brave she was before she sent her on her way. But when Tess came wailing to Louise that afternoon, her mother was in the midst of scrubbing the kitchen floor. She glanced up at her daughter’s bleeding leg and barked out, “You think that’s bad? When I was a kid, I fell off the monkey bars at school and broke an arm and a leg. I laid there for two hours until a nun found me and called my ma who told her I was supposed to be home doing the wash and shouldn’t have been playing on the monkey bars in the first place.” Louise wrung out her rag in the bucket. “Sister Elizabeth found me and dropped me off at the hospital. I was in traction for a month. When Ma finally came to visit, she bitched the whole time about the bill.” Tessie got only a glimpse at the profound pain in Louise’s eyes before she told her, “You know where the Band-Aids are,” and went back to her scrubbing.

  Tess looks at the golden cube in her sister’s hands and decides to recite an Atticus quote from the book that means so much to her. “‘You never understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.’” It was the best she could do.

  When the two of them step into the icy water, Birdie kisses the golden box before she lifts up the adhesive flap the way Will had showed her. She remains dry-eyed when she tips the box and says, “Dust to dust…,” but Tess finds herself welling up when the water claims what remained of the woman who never loved them.

  The house emptied shortly after a feast of pork chops, apple sauce, mashed potatoes, and steamed baby corn, carrots, and green beans. Henry’s playing poker at Teeter’s house. He has a sister that Haddie is friends with so they drove off together. Will is plying his trade. The Finley girls are in the kitchen, busy cleaning up. Like the old days. With a twist. Birdie rinses the dishes too thoroughly in water so steamy that it curls her pixie-cut, dyed blond hair as she scours stains off pots that Tess had thought were permanent. She shoves her hand down the garbage disposal to scrape the blades clean with a lemon. Attacks the sink with the Dutch cleanser until it shines.

  She pauses at one point to tell Tessie, who’s been drying the pots and wiping down the yellow tile counters, “Almost done here. Where are the rest of your cleaning supplies? Your powder-room sink needs work.”

  Tess needs to intervene or her sister might stay up half the night cleaning. She places her hand on Birdie’s back and says, “But I’ve been so looking forward to the two of us cuddling and talking. How about you leave the sink ’til tomorrow? Can you do that?”

  A fine sweat breaks out on the side of Birdie’s nose.

  “Don’t make me play the cancer card,” Tess says. “Go upstairs and take a shower.” She doesn’t tell her sister to relax. That’s what people who don’t know any better tell people like them. “Please? I’ll be right behind you.”

  Birdie’s arms start to shake. She’s fighting the compulsion, but the effort to overcome the tug of war is monumental. She chews her lip, looks at her sister, and then back at the powder room, and then back at her sister, and chews her lip harder.

  Tessie removes the sponge from her sister’s hand and tosses it in the sink. Birdie picks it up and puts it in its proper place, adjusts it three more times, and says with clenched fists, “Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. But if you love your family, you’d post an out-of-order sign on the powder-room door. That sink is a breeding ground for malaria,” before she stomps toward the staircase.

  After Tessie lets Garbo out, she makes two cups of Ovaltine and brings them up to the guest room that she’s readied, she hopes, to her sister’s liking. Her suitcases have already been emptied, her foldables put away perfectly in the oak chest, or hung in the closet on color-coded padded hangers th
at she’d brought along. She is quite the clothes horse.

  Birdie pads into the bedroom in a pretty, frilly nightgown, still damp from the shower. She throws back the new quilt that covers the brass bed, points at the sheets, and says, “Get in. Age before beauty.”

  After Tess gets cozy beside her, they sip their Ovaltine and talk nonstop.

  When Will comes home after work, he knocks on the bedroom door, pokes his head in, and says, “Good night, girls. Love the milk mustaches,” and shuts the door behind him.

  Birdie says, “He smells like fried onions and he’s stupidly cheerful, but I like him.”

  Tess says, “Yeah, me too,” and resumes describing her cancer ordeal to her medical transcriptionist sister, who, of course, wants to hear every little detail and see her scars. When she lifts up her cows-sipping-café-au-lait-on-the-Champs-Élysées nightie, Birdie inspects Dr. Whaley’s handiwork and says, “I’ve seen worse, a lot worse.”

  Tess wants to know more about her work and asks, “Do you enjoy it?”

  “It’s a mixed bag. I think I have half the diseases I’m typing up, and most of the doctors have God complexes, but I can do it from home and I’m really, really good at it.”

  Tessie doesn’t doubt that. Birdie can’t help but be insanely thorough. “And how’s life in Boca Raton?”

  “Not terrible. But I still wake up every morning feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Palm trees are weird, and palmetto bugs were created by Satan.”

  They compare symptoms next. It’s one of the ways they bond.

  Birdie’s tells Tess that the delusions had disappeared with cutting-edge medication, that she’d learned to manage her struggles with food years ago, but, “As you saw today…the OCD and panic attacks are still a problem.”