Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  I flapped my arms like a giant bird when I recited the poem for D, dancing through the cluttered living room. “I know why the caged bird sings,” I sang low. D smiled up at me and flicked the ash of his roach into an open CD case. “The caged bird sings of freedom,” I hummed, feeling the tickle of the words vibrate from my tongue until I landed on the floor. I was so stoned; it wasn’t out of the question that I’d accidentally called Katherine from my back pocket.

  Katherine greeted me in the waiting room and we walked together to her office. She sat down quietly at her desk and shuffled through pages of notes. When she finally swiveled to face me, my stomach jumped to my throat. “Would you like a cup of tea,” she asked politely. She’d never offered me tea before.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I do,” she said and ripped open a pack of raw sugar and stirred it into a steaming cup.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “I’ve been unsure how to tell you something that feels very important to our ongoing relationship,” she said, nervously sipping her tea. The rim of the cup covered her nose and mouth. She looked over its white porcelain lip; two worried eyes of Horus stared me down.

  “I hope this isn’t about my co-payments?” I apologized. I hadn’t paid her a single one, hoping that she’d overlook the hundreds of dollars I owed.

  “No, that’s not it at all,” she said. “I’ve made adjustments in billing your insurance. There is no need to worry about the co-pays.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’d hate to have to end our work here. I can’t afford extras right now.” I sounded exactly like my mother did when she explained why she couldn’t join me out for dinner or a movie.

  “I don’t exactly know how to tell you this,” Katherine said, “but I have an identical twin sister, too.”

  “Oh?” I tensed up and grabbed the handle of my brown leather purse and squeezed. Katherine gazed at me as if she were looking into a mirror while trying to rehearse a speech. “That’s a coincidence, I guess,” I replied, trying to stay casual even though my heart was racing.

  “My sister is dying,” Katherine told me shyly. She was looking at the yellow, lined writing tablet in her lap. “I feel I’ve been out of bounds in seeing you,” she said. “I allowed my curiosity to cloud my judgment.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, though I was the farthest place from okay I’d been in a very long time. I felt weightless and invisible, a familiar feeling. Cara and I had called this our faraway place; we’d gone to it since the first time we saw Dad hit Mom, and often after that. The two-foot distance between Katherine and me grew to what seemed like yards and then miles. She was a tiny dot at the end of a sentence, a speck of dirt on my shoe.

  “When you called I knew I needed to see you. I wanted to know what will happen to me when my twin dies,” she said apologetically.

  This was simply impossible, but it was happening. There wasn’t a single person I knew who would believe this story. But I was already crafting a plan to tell it. I’d learned from Cara that relaying a story didn’t make it sting less, but it did make it survivable.

  I thanked Katherine for her hard work and opened up my pocketbook. I unsnapped my change purse and pulled out a double dose of Valium. I washed it down with the last sip of her warm tea. I closed the office door without saying a word.

  * * *

  Not long after I walked away from Katherine’s office, I closed the door on D’s apartment for the last time.

  D had been preparing to cook a salmon. I’d had too much to drink, enough to muster the courage to ask for the millionth time why we hadn’t managed to try to move in together again.

  “Isn’t salmon enough?” D asked, sipping a Manhattan and stirring a skillet of leeks simmering in a fragrant broth. He wiggled his nose and his wire-framed glasses slid easily down to the tip.

  “Not really,” I told him. “I want stability, a family, to change diapers. We don’t seem to be moving in that direction.”

  “Who said I don’t want that, too?” he said casually and turned the heat down on the vegetables.

  “I said it.” We’d been dating for nearly four years. “It’s not just you. I haven’t made the great leap either.”

  “Fuck, C,” D yelled and flung a raw slab of succulent Alaskan salmon at my head. I ducked and it slid down the wall and flopped onto the floor. “Get out of my house. Now. You think you’ll ever find a man who will cook you such delicious fish?” he roared ridiculously.

  “You don’t want me because I’m getting better,” I said. The words getting better used in reference to myself seemed foreign but rang oddly true. I was getting better.

  I walked down the hallway to the front door and sat on the floor before it, listening to D bang around in the kitchen. I promised myself that if I left, if I set one foot out into the hall and toward the stairs, I’d never come back.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said to the whirl of D’s clanging pots and pans, the scrape of a fork pushing a ruined dinner into the trash. “I’m sorry.” I closed the door quietly behind me. I ran as fast as I could down the stairs and onto the street. I hailed a cab home. I decided to take a trip to the Hudson Valley to visit Grace. I packed my bags.

  This time would be different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I wasn’t the same.

  * * *

  In D’s closet I left behind a wardrobe of dresses that were two sizes too small, several pairs of broken-down high-heeled pumps, a freezer full of film, and my prized Celeste green bicycle with licorice-red trimmed wheels and a straw basket attached to the front. It had been the nicest gift from Cara that I’d bought myself, a birthday tradition I’d started when I realized I would never be able to part with the indulgent treasures Cara gave every July. I saved up all year to buy myself something nice from my sister. I’d fled in such a hurry that my perfect bike was left at D’s.

  The next morning, I pulled a shirt over my head and laced my shoes and off I went to see my friend Grace in her rustic, converted barn in Rhinebeck. I have made that drive in little more than an hour and a half, but that day I made it in just under three, stopping off to pick apples from an orchard. My gift to Grace was a bushel of shiny, tart red and yellow Empires. In exchange for the apples we were to have one of those kinds of evenings: sitting around sipping tea, eating takeout from cartons, nibbling gross amounts of chocolate, downing bottles of wine until we forgot the reason for doing any of it: swearing off men. I promised Grace I’d never go back to D and she nodded and listened, not believing a word of my oath. We’d done this before.

  I had a habit of running to Grace, fretting about what to do with D. I’d gone to the barn just two weeks before when I’d discovered recent images of a woman he’d had an affair with in Germany. I’d retaliated each and every time he was unfaithful. For the woman in Germany, I’d traveled to France with a man I barely knew. I brought back a single piece of yellow crockery for D, a pitcher with a chipped handle. That was my thanks to him for his European affair. I was absolutely no better than he. Still the image of the German woman who posed for D stung. She bent over seductively in front of her camera in a transparent white swimsuit, hands on her knees, ass in the air, smiling as if to say: “I wish you were here.”

  “I don’t need his salmon,” I said to Grace, not sure if I meant it. “He has something he calls ‘the lobster trap theory,’” I added. Grace was slouched over her laptop on the sofa, slippered feet and crossed ankles propped on a coffee table. Her smooth black hair was trimmed into a no-fuss-or-frills bob. It fell softly toward her sharp chin and over her eyes as she leaned toward her computer, squinting. She was reading through her catalogue of music, trying to find a decent album to play to sooth my broken heart. She settled on Morrissey.

  “It’s not that he doesn’t want to commit. He just needs options,” I said, trying to make D’s big sea plan sound less harsh.

  “A lobster trap theory? What the fuck is that?” Grace chirped. She has a gentle and c
hildlike manner. Almost everything she says is delivered in an upbeat, chipper, airy tone. Swearing, cursing, hexing, or calm: there’s a quality to her voice that resembles song. “I don’t know,” she added, the words drawing out in tuneful notes. “It just doesn’t sound healthy.”

  “He says that men like to know that they’ve got options, even if they don’t act on them, like a lobsterman.” It sounded ludicrous as I was explaining it. “He says he just likes to make sure he can cruise around and pull up his traps and reset the bait if they’re empty, toss them back out into the sea.”

  Grace laughed. “I think you need another glass of wine.” She filled my goblet to the top. “How about we watch the sunset on the porch and swat mosquitoes?”

  I was fortunate to have found such a friend in Grace. We’d met years before but had come closer after she lost both her sister and mother to suicide within months of each other. She was two years behind me in loss and I easily traced her path alongside mine. She’d moved from the country to the city and now from the city to the country and soon she’d move again, she’d told me. She just didn’t know where.

  She wanted not to be burdened with her mother’s Shaker furniture and her sister’s pages of song lyrics, many guitars, and T-shirts. She wanted nothing more than to carry just a shell on her back, so she moved frequently enough to make that possible. Of course, I understood. I’d logged a move a year, sometimes two, since Cara had died. It was a way to rid myself of her things. Each moving truck seemed to carry fewer and fewer of Cara’s possessions.

  Grace and I found in each other a most enormous kind of relief: it wasn’t clear which of us had suffered more severely. It was an unspoken code between us that we were welcome to feel as if it were the other. We gave, through our camaraderie, the comfort of knowing that there was someone we knew actually—not from the TV news or radio or newspaper—worse off than we were individually.

  “I have problems of my own with men,” Grace said. On the horizon only a sliver of gold sun remained and it looked as if it was kissing the meadow before us. “I’ve met a man so fierce I fear I’ll be tempted to sleep with him.” She smiled mischievously and sighed like a happy schoolgirl. She took a long drink of wine and then jumped to her feet. “I have an idea!” she squealed. “I’ll have to fix you two up now that you’re single.” She clapped her hands, applauding her idea. “That will solve my problem.” It was the beginning of night, and the steady hum of crickets and cicadas buzzed loudly in incandescent twilight.

  The next day Grace and I went for a walk through the forest. We bravely plowed through an uncut path, pushing through briars and short prickly brush. Grace kept her head down, eyes on her feet. She watched her shoes crunch against leaves, not paying any mind to the husks of field stalks that whipped her legs. She walked quickly and kept up a good pace until she was far ahead, just a little spot of black hair and blue jeans in the distance.

  I counted steps as we went, a ritual from childhood walks with Cara. We had a game we played called Fewest Steps to There and Back. The twin who arrived home from a stroll with the smallest number won the other’s dessert. I’d found myself playing the game alone since she died, on walks on city streets, down apartment hallways, through parking lots and offices. I tallied my steps and compared them against my own last best try. My award for having kept going was still dessert. I shoved my hands in my pockets and counted my way through the forest, remembering how good Cara was at Fewest Steps. She’d won every round.

  “Chocolate or vanilla,” I shouted to Grace.

  “What on earth do you mean, dear bird?” she called out.

  “Cake.” I ran up beside her. “Let me make you one.” I’d started the venture of learning layer cakes just a couple of months before and discovered I had a talent for them. Why not practice on Grace? I liked the rules of baking, the rigid codes that left you with little room to improvise. Cakes had become my meditation, a place to retreat when I thought anxiety might get the best of me. I’d traded Valium for baking soda and whisks, and this was my secret for now. I didn’t want to tell a soul in case I decided to give it all up, my newly found health in calories and cholesterol.

  “How about olive oil cake?” she asked. “I have all of the ingredients at home.” The wind picked up and blew Grace’s hair back, exposing her pale neck. “I forgot my scarf,” she said sadly. She could turn on a dime. Ethereal happiness and dark despair sparred within her, a fight so close to my own.

  “Take my scarf,” I said and draped it over her shoulders. “I’m warm enough in my sweater.”

  A hollow pop echoed through the trees, like a car backfiring.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked, though I recognized the sound from my years at Camp Lejeune. Artillery fire. Or it could just as easily have been a clap of thunder as a gun.

  “Let’s get home,” Grace said. “I’d hate for you not to have enough time for our cake. Also, we shouldn’t be out so late this time of year. It’s hunting season and we’re both dressed in black.”

  Chapter 31

  I waited nervously for Tony at the bar. He’d agreed to meet me in Manhattan for a drink. I’d finished a second cocktail when he pushed past the floor-length red velvet curtains that hung at the doorway. In daylight I’m certain the drapes are ridiculous, shabby, possibly puke splattered or torn or moth eaten. At night, after a strong drink, the drapes are a magical portal. They swayed from the bustle of patrons in for and out from drink, muffling laughter, arguments, and conversations on cell phones. They separated the doorman and the noise of the street from the speakeasy ambience of this candlelit waterhole. They swished open to welcome Tony to our second date. Our first date hadn’t really been a date. We met on a blind setup with Grace. We three had dined together at a Mexican restaurant upstate. Tony and I had been so caught in the electricity of our attraction, we’d forgotten Grace joined us.

  I jumped from my bar stool and hugged him, clasping my hands and hanging my arms in a trusting circle around his neck. I gave him some of my weight and he held it nicely. Tony stands just under six feet tall and has broad muscled shoulders and arms. They’re the arms of a man who’s spent many hours at the gym, though long ago. The shape of the muscle is there, the girth and outline, though his middle is a soft round belly.

  “I’m so glad you could make it,” I said.

  “Me, too.”

  Tony pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, though he was early. “What are we having?”

  He folded his glasses and tucked them into his front shirt pocket, smiling boyishly. He knew what he was having.

  “I’ll have a Jive Turkey,” he told the bartender.

  “And the lady, what will she be having?” Tony asked me sweetly, looking at my empty cocktail glass. His steel blue eyes cut through the dark of the room; they were both warm and cold, welcoming and questioning, eyes that looked like they hid another, exhausted pair.

  “I’ll have a Pick Me Up,” I told the bartender, after scanning the list of whiskeys and sours for something fruity but not too much so.

  Tony looked good in his neatly pressed pink button-down shirt and blue jeans. How could a woman resist a big strong man wearing pink? I’d learned from Grace that Tony had been a sniper in the Marine Corps during the First Gulf War and had written a memoir about that time in his life. Could I be a match for a man who could shoot a gun, lay himself bare on the page, and wear cotton candy pastel?

  Through e-mails and conversations over the telephone we had discovered that we had much in common. We’d both been raised by strict military fathers; had young marriages that ended in divorce because of the affairs we’d had; spent the same years on Camp Lejeune, but in different capacities—Tony could have been one of the young handsome privates I’d try to flirt with on weekends at the Jacksonville mall.

  We also had both suffered the loss of a sibling in our late twenties. Tony grieved Jeff, his older brother, who lost a short battle with no
n-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in his mid-thirties. He told me he still had Jeff’s ashes in an urn on his desk. There was no place he’d found that had been right to scatter them. I’d met him just in time, he said. He’d traveled the world and found himself flat out and exhausted and running out of money and hope: he’d moved to a tiny cabin in upstate New York to try to make sense of his life, to reassess.

  “So Grace says Cambodia is the next stop for you?” I asked, nibbling on the rind of the orange wedge from my drink. “Is that trip work related?”

  Tony laughed. “I think I’ll stay where I am,” he said, “or move back to the city.”

  “Why Cambodia?”

  “It seemed like the farthest place away from Manhattan I could run,” he said and repositioned himself on his bar stool. “But now I’m not so sure I want that, to run.”

  “I understand,” I said, and looked at him for a long time, wondering if he saw in me what I’d seen in him. I’d heard the legend of love at first sight, of just knowing you’d met the person you were about to share a vast love with, and I’d thought the idea was as jive a turkey as Tony’s drink. I wasn’t so sure anymore as I sat there and observed in this man a depth and kindness, a kinship and openness that moved me to feel I’d known him all my life.

  “I had a feeling you would,” he said, and looked down bashfully.

  I leaned in. The musky scent of soap on his collar sent a thrilling charge up my back. I couldn’t resist the man in pink. I kissed him quickly on the cheek, then fully on the mouth.

  We stayed out until daybreak.

  As we made our way out of an all-night restaurant, men with briefcases who were early to work hurried to their offices. “What’s next?” Tony asked.

  I held my arm out to hail a taxi. One quickly pulled to the curb and Tony opened its door. “I’m going to take this cab home, alone,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Tony drew his hand down to the small of my back and pulled me away from the taxi to face him. He squeezed my hips tenderly and slid his fingertips just beneath my waistband. We both grinned wide and then kissed in the street.