* * *
I’d pleaded with Jedediah as if he had more power than I to lift Cara from her addiction. Of course I knew that wasn’t true. In retrospect, I think I knew he couldn’t help. Still, it hurt me that he wouldn’t make more of an effort. Later, after Cara died, I’d see how easy it was for Jedediah to turn away from me, too. After we’d divorced I’d often think of this moment in his study. He’d been unwilling to help my sister through her brutal and terrible ordeal, and when it was my turn for mental collapse he’d eventually be unable to help me. He didn’t have the right tools to do it. It seemed possible that no matter how I’d behaved, saint or sinner, Jedediah would never have had the fortitude necessary to weather the brutal storm of grief that visited our home.
Cara was raped only four weeks after Jedediah and I were married; the rape became part of our marriage. Jedediah would lie beside me most nights. Or we only spooned, him behind me, his arms wrapped around my waist. We could have been brother and sister. On the rare occasions when we’d begin making love, I’d close my eyes and imagine that I was my sister. I could feel her assailant on top of me. Jedediah was gentle, but to give to him, I had to float out of body. I kept my floating a secret.
I walked back to the bathroom; I placed my ear against the door and listened. There was a lot of noise and then there wasn’t any at all. She came out with Band-Aids on the insides of both arms.
I had nothing to say to her when she emerged, except, “Get out.”
I packed her suitcase and dragged it out of the guest room.
“You’re going to rehab,” I said. “I’m not going to have anything to do with you until you go.”
I pointed to the door.
I remember how the tailpipe of her car spewed smoke as she pulled out of the driveway. I went to the sink and washed the dishes. I stared at the wall in front of me. I thought: when Cara dies I’m going to get a divorce. When Cara dies, I’m going to move to New York City. When Cara dies, I’m going to be very thin.
* * *
Bitter berries cling to the tree I cling to. I am wrapped here. Stuck on the land. Autumn fell beneath the snow. We can’t eat the berries. They are poison on red lips. Come and get me. This is the land where you put me. This is the dirt I buried myself in, frozen solid beneath the snow. I ate the berries. If you ask, I will tell you. There was no knowledge to consume. I was naked before I put them to my lips, before I stuck my arms with the things you said would kill me.
If I were to write a letter to you, it would read:
Dearest C.,
Nobody can save the naked on the bloody ground. Please forgive me. Please forgive yourself.
It’s that simple.
I can tell you what it’s like to die. It’s blue and it’s calm and it was autumn two years ago and it’s not like sleeping at all. I can’t tell you how I got back. I can’t tell you about traversing cliffs, traversing life. I can tell you how to hurt yourself because that’s what I got good at. I can tell you about being a bitter berry. I can tell you about my purple face and how many words my ears can’t hear. I can tell you what a fist feels like. I can tell you how to eat and shoot and eat. I can show you how to run. I can show you how to fight. I can show you broken bottles on scattered leaves: It is my face. It is these branches. It is a landscape within another landscape. I know your camera. It says, I love you and I am watching. Your film takes the color of the sky and keeps it alive. You bleach and freeze my body, pure as white. I pray it’s not artifice. I need these moments, the snow and the winter cold. Berries. Remember not to eat them when you are bitter. What would Grandma think of our lives? Give me your hand, please. Pick me up.
Chapter 17
I chose flowers and prayer cards, a casket, the method of internment. I sent word of Cara’s death to those who loved her. Mom said I should do the planning. I was the only one, she’d said, who’d know what Cara would have wanted.
“How would you want your funeral?” Mom asked. I was the next best thing to having Cara there to do it herself. So I planned my funeral during the second week of June in 2006, a hot and humid seven days when spring gave way to summer.
I went to three flower shops to look for a casket topper: I wanted daisies. The daisies, I argued to the flower shopgirl, must not just top the casket, they must look wild on it, as if they were growing on the lid of the box where Cara lay. I’d bought the Trappist premier Premium casket in a cherry stain. The Trappist is handcrafted out of hardwood and has mitered joints and raised panels on mortised stiles and rails. The Trappist came with a hinged lid and an optional keepsake cross. The daisies on that casket would have to be chaotic and spill over peat moss or something green that might have grown in a fairy tale.
“This isn’t just any casket topper.” I leaned in over the florist shop’s counter, within breathing space of the shopgirl’s register. Her brown hair was tied back in a severe ponytail; the braces on her teeth were looped with neon green rubber bands. “This is for my sister, my identical twin sister.” I was nearly out of breath. “And I don’t want any plastic ribbons.”
“We don’t have daisies in right now.” The girl absently counted change. “I’m sorry to hear about your sister,” she continued, “but what is peat?”
I turned my back on the girl and opened my funeral-planning guide. “There is another store down the street,” I said. “If you can’t help me, I’ll take my business there.”
“I can manage daises, I guess,” she conceded. “Let me ask my manager.” The shopgirl picked up the phone and spoke softly into the receiver. “He’ll do it,” she told me, and pulled out an invoice pad from beneath the counter and started scribbling. “We’ve got peat moss but we’ll have to order daisies. You’ll have to pay extra; they aren’t in season.”
After the casket and the topper, outfits were next. I dressed my sister and then I dressed myself.
For her funeral Cara wore the dress I’d asked her to wear to my wedding: the black chiffon dress with the three underlayers of crepe that had swished about as she walked. She’d worn open-toed jeweled sandals to the wedding. We’d bought the shoes together at an Albany shopping mall. The price was high but I’d pushed them her way, urged her to try them on, and then bought them for her, an early birthday gift. I’d looked through her closet for the sandals to give the funeral director, sifting through pairs and pairs of shoes, and couldn’t find them. I bet she wore those kitten heels into metal nubs.
Her feet were bare, hidden beneath the closed lid of the coffin. She would have wanted it that way, to be barefooted in the afterlife. The casket opened in two parts and the bottom part was shut. A silvery metal rod propped the top lid. It was not just as I would have wanted. I decided then that I wanted a glass coffin for my rest. I told Jedediah and no one else. Months later, the search history on our home computer revealed that Jedediah had been reading instructions on how to build or buy such a casket.
Cara looked garish in hers. She wore a glossy, cherry stain on her lips. Her hair was kiss curled and sprayed. She was boxed in, cushioned by the soft shining white of satin padding. Her blood was drained and replaced with preserving chemicals. Her lips were sewn in place, almost shut. Her eyes were stuffed with cotton. Her head was propped—these are the things the undertaker must do to prepare a body.
I knelt beside my twin and stared down at her. Her lips were parted as if she were about to give a kiss. I was drawn to the tiny slit between her lips, a wordless sliver of black that set off the thread that closed her mouth: alabaster complexion, pink cheeks, claret lips with silver stitching. I could have kissed her but I didn’t. Her eyes were closed with the same thread spun for her mouth. Her eyelids were made up with sarcoline shimmer and shadow, but the liner was crooked, drawn beyond her lashes, almost to her temples, and her cat’s eyes had a smudge. The light shadow dusted at the crease of her lids brought out the sour color of her pallor. She looked yellow and green and blue. Her skin was taut and her rose rouge wouldn’t blend. Blush sat on the tops of her cheeks
in powdery circles. The worry line on her forehead had been erased by the magic plumping effect of embalming fluid. She would have been pleased to know that death had made her younger.
Cara’s was a bare-shouldered corpse. She wore a shawl that matched her dress. It was flimsy, barely there. Heliotrope velour flowers covered it seam to seam. It didn’t hide the mole on her shoulder, or the web of bruises visible from her neck to her collarbone—she must have bumped herself or fallen before she died. The velour flowers, the hair style, her makeup had all looked flirty when she was alive; the outfit looked dowdy in death, grandmotherly. She resembled an Italian grandmother in death. The undertakers who prepared Cara’s body specialized in that exact clientele, grandmas; they’d done their job well. I would look like this if I were dead right now, I thought. I bent in closer and touched Cara. She felt cold and solid. Her arms had been shaved clean. She smelled like her perfume, Pleasures!, and like corn chips and rot. Her corpse was both mine and not mine. They say that the funeral ritual helps survivors acknowledge death. It keeps those who are still alive moving forward so they won’t die themselves. The body lives. We look upon the dead and separate ourselves from them. I haven’t died, too, we can tell ourselves; this is not me. The death of an identical twin is just the opposite.
My sister lay in her casket, one hand crossed over the other. The remaining polish on her nails was old, dull, and chipped. Her cuticles were pulled back where she had bitten them. I had never seen such a tacky, hopeful manicure. Coral wasn’t the color a person who intended to die would choose for herself. I was looking for evidence, for a clue that said: I didn’t do this to you on purpose, with no word or note, no letter.
I dressed for Cara’s wake without mascara and dabbed my lips with the same color I gave the undertaker to apply to my sister’s cheeks. I wore a black eyelet dress, tea length, with four ruffled tiers. The dress was trimmed, each layer, with a red and white candy-striped ribbon. I pinned two cream-colored orchids into my hair, one above each ear. We’d both fastened two orchids into our veils at our weddings; each represented a sister. I wore black-strapped pumps. Blood vessels on my cheeks had burst from crying. I didn’t bother trying to cover the purple-flecked constellations with powder.
“You could wear a trash bag and still look good,” Cara had told me once; we were standing in the dressing room of a Salvation Army store. I wore a wool tent dress and an equally hideous matching cap, woven from yarn with a loose pile. “It’s really unfair,” she’d said, looking at herself in a frumpy pair of pants and a cardigan. We could wear an identical garment and it would look different to us, but we’d look exactly the same to anyone else.
I had dressed for her wake in a fury. If I was to be a living stand-in for my sister, I would take it out on her with my outfit. People glanced first at Cara in her casket and then at me. I saw a flickering horror in their faces that they concealed with hugs and solemn handshakes. I looked like a tart and a circus clown. The confused and curious looks, familiar to me as Cara’s twin, were now grim instead of inquisitive. Twins are fun to try to tell apart, but not at a funeral.
Chapter 18
I don’t know if I believe in the intuition of twins. The knowing, feeling, or knowledge of the whereabouts and pains of a double have always seemed impossible to me, even having one of my own. But when I found out about Cara, I was driving east on Canal Street in Manhattan. And before the ringing phone in my lap was answered, I knew what I’d discover on the other line. I did.
I’d just gone to a tiny bar on the Lower East Side in Manhattan with Jedediah to hear a reading of his book. The bar was a place where Cara had read just the week before. The woman who ran the series came up to me after and said hello, thinking I was my sister. I was tickled. I loved being mistaken for Cara; it was a game I never tired of. I explained to the woman that I was Cara’s twin, and the woman and I both laughed at her confusion. She told me how beautifully Cara had read; I’d had to work the evening she was scheduled to read. I told the woman this, though she didn’t ask why I’d not come. The truth was that ever since I’d asked Cara to leave my home, I felt I wouldn’t be welcome at her readings. Cara was furious with me; she had sent hundreds of text messages berating me. She was distraught by what she felt was my total abandonment. She had told Mom to call me and say that if she died by suicide it was my fault, period.
I’d fallen on the floor and wept for an hour the night my mother delivered the blow of those words, wondering what spell Cara must have cast to convince Mom I was deserving of such a message. I felt the punch of Cara’s threat in my gut as if it were freshly dealt as we said good-bye to the bar owner. The familiar flutter of worry in my chest, a steadily turning pinwheel.
After my husband’s reading I stood in the warm evening sunlight and held up a compact mirror to help something out that had blown in my eye. I blinked, trying to free the lash or dust or pollen, and I noticed that the color of my eyes seemed lighter, greener, more like Cara’s than usual. My guilt was palpable, and I missed her. I thought maybe it was time to apologize, so I called her. There was no answer. I figured that she still wasn’t ready to talk.
I got behind the wheel and pulled out onto the avenue, taking a left onto Canal Street. A pair of sisters, no older than nine and six, laughed and played on the sidewalk. They wore pretty yellow matching sundresses and each carried lazy, drooping helium balloons that chased after them as they ran ahead of their exhausted mother. My heart sank at the sight of them. Why wouldn’t Cara answer her phone? Was I so terrible as not to deserve a single hello? I’d tried her many times that day and was transferred each time to voice mail.
I watched the girls skip-dance down the block. Their long, curly, dark, messy hair bounced against their backs. They stopped at the corner and hugged. I smiled at the loving pair, watching as the older girl quickly broke their embrace and made an ugly face at her sister, who promptly cried. The mother shuffled up and took each in separate hand, a silent practiced scold. She pulled them along as the crying girl wiped her tears with the back of her arm and her sister pouted. I’d been trying to call Cara since noon; I knew how the younger sister felt. Cara had shunned me with the scary face of silence.
The phone buzzed in my lap at 8 p.m. and I looked down at the words, Mom Home, flashing on the display. Mom and I had talked on the phone every day since I’d left for college. But I was queasy at the sight of her number, even though this was the hour we usually talked—after work and dinner. I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I passed the phone to Jedediah.
“It’s my mom,” I told him. “Could you get it? I have a bad feeling.”
“Okay,” he said, “but can’t you just call her back later? We’re driving.”
“No,” I snipped. “Just answer. Please?”
“I don’t want to talk to your mother right now,” he said lightly, apologizing. “I’m tired and hungry.”
“I think Cara died. Please answer the phone,” I said, surprising myself.
Jedediah rolled his eyes. He’d heard this before. Cara was so frequently in trouble that he’d grown used to having to calm me down, to talk me off the ledge of worry. But how could he respond to his panicked wife but to answer the call and put her mind at rest? So he did. Jedediah listened to my mother on the other line. He was quiet.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” I asked, begging him to wave me off, to say everything was okay. Instead, Jedediah looked away and at his feet, as if my mother’s words were a weight. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” I said again, not waiting for his response.
“Pull the car over,” Jedediah said, pointing toward the curb.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” I repeated the words that had so strangely come to me. I jammed down on the brake.
“Christa, listen to me,” Jedediah demanded. “Pull the car over.” He put his hand on my shoulder, trying to steer me in the direction of the parking space.
“She’s dead,” I said. I had believed she might die for so many years and the shock of fee
ling I had was nothing like I’d imagined it would be. I felt bodiless, as if I had fallen into a great cold bottomless sea, sinking fast as a boulder. A scream started in my chest and roared out from my throat. I screamed again and again, short high staccato stabs. I never knew I could make such a sound. I stopped, my face wet with tears, and looked at my husband wild with fear.
“Yes,” Jedediah whispered, and tried to take the wheel with one hand and pull me closer with the other.
I batted him away and felt what I can only name as my spirit rise up and fly through the tiny crack between the window and the door. I was vapor, air, mist, breath. I was wind, a woman without a body. Unmoored and unafraid of the consequences of oncoming traffic, I reached for the door. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out of the car and shrieked, banged my hands on the hood, and ran out in front of passing cars. The light turned green.
I weaved through traffic, shrieking at the top of my lungs in waves, like warning sirens for a fire. Cars blasted their horns. Drivers cursed, hung from their rolled-down windows, and waved angry middle fingers.
I didn’t see him, but Jedediah chased after me, apologizing to furious drivers as he went. I stopped finally beneath the changing traffic light, looked skyward, and howled like an animal. The force of my screams snapped both of the thin straps of my sundress. They waved limply over my exposed bra, fluttering up and down as cars sped past. The woman on the sidewalk, the mother, picked up her girls in their yellow dresses and covered their ears. She carried them to safety inside a jewelry pawnshop on the Bowery. The lights outside flashed: CASH! DIAMONDS! LAY-AWAY!
Chapter 19
The morning after Cara died, she came back. I hallucinated her in my kitchen.
Cara wore baggy blue pajamas cuffed at the wrists. She sat with her ankles crossed, on the floor in front of the woodstove, beneath an open window. She had helped herself to coffee; she stirred it with a teaspoon. The soft clink of silver against porcelain, the bell with which she’d summoned me.
Her: A Memoir Page 14
