by Wendy Burden
Anyway, there we were. I was going over in my head how I was going to get her to come clean about the death of my father, when she beat me to it—only it wasn’t exactly the information I’d been after. It was about how my sister had died in the toilet.
The fact that I’d had a sister at all was a revelation to me. All I’d ever wanted was a sister. Someone to haggle over the Balenciagas and the Schlumberger with. Ally, co-conspirator, or worthy opponent, we would have been tighter than ticks. I would have been able to call her, page her, text her, e-mail her—and say, You get this? And she would have gotten it.
My sister had been born at seven months, when my mother thought she was evacuating her bowels, not the contents of her uterus.
“All of a sudden, there was a tiny arm hanging out of me,” my mother said, weaving her head at the memory. She reached to gather a few of the ever present Greek coins that lived on the table, and her fingers clicked nervously over them as she spoke of the botched delivery and subsequent trip to the hospital.
“But I don’t understand! Why couldn’t they save her?” I cried. “They save preemies at four months!”
“They didn’t back then, Toots.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said flatly. “Somebody must have screwed up at the hospital or something.” I persisted, as if this were happening in real time.
“Nothing could be done. They did all they could. End of story.”
I folded up my arms and glared at her. I hated myself for thinking she hadn’t tried hard enough, but I just knew she hadn’t.
“The worst part,” my mother said, and then she paused. “The worst part was leaving the maternity ward with empty arms.”
I looked at her, sitting there in her hideous caftan, all bloated and cancer-riddled, with her Greek coins and her Diet 7UP and rum—and my heart broke in pieces. My poor, pathetic mother. Once again, I couldn’t imagine that kind of sorrow. We sat there on opposite ends of the table, and like the enigma she was, my mother wept as she said that all she had ever wanted was a houseful of babies.
“A house full of babies. Go fucking figure,” I repeated in the car driving home.
Epilogue
EDWARD MANAGED TO miss out on his grandmother’s demise, as well. Even though he had set up a vigil, Will was the one who was with her when she died at home, and the inebriated chauffeur was the one who got to call everyone.
Edward was beside himself. In the months, and the years that followed, he developed a New Age theory involving a parrallel spiritual world to help him make sense of the one in which he had been doled such wildly uneven shares. He became more convinced that our father had come back as him. He even took to calling people up and apologizing for killing himself. He tried to unravel the mysteries of his muddled life with knowledge gleaned from his fledgling faith. And from instructional Web sites like Healpastlives.com . . .*Are You Being Affected by Your Past Lives?*
Heal Your Life NOW By Healing Your Past Lives!
When I allowed myself to consider Edward’s theology, I found the similarity to my other brother’s chosen Eastern path oddly reassuring.
When our mother’s breast cancer eventually meandered its way down to her liver (which, aside from the tumors, was surprisingly intact), she summoned Will, Edward, and me to her final Christmas. In Nantucket.
Nantucket? we all marveled. There’s got to be a mistake. She must have told the booking agent the wrong island. She meant Nassau. Or Nevis. Nantucket? Who the hell would rent a house in the North Atlantic for Christmas? An alcoholic Yankee on chemo, that’s who.
My brothers and I agreed to stagger our visits, so that no one would have to suffer unduly. A couple of days before Christmas I drove from Manhattan to the Woods Hole terminal in a whiteout blizzard, and spent the three-hour ferry trip cowering belowdecks in my car as we pitched across the stormy sound. It was after midnight when I rang what I hoped was the right doorbell. (Locating one out of a thousand historically correct clapboard houses is challenging when, out of mortal fear, you’ve been imbibing the special edition Stolichnaya originally intended to go under the tree.) In a flash, like she’d been waiting there all night, my mother threw open the door. She glared at me under the light of the reproduction gas lamp.
“Wha took you sho long?” she snarled.
“And merry Christmas to you too!” I said. The vodka coerced me into kissing her chemo-orange cheek.
At the end of the dim hallway, I could see her husband. He was seated at a table in a scrimshaw-decorated kitchen, his grizzled head in his carpenter hands. The girth of his waist had enabled the frogs on his belt to stretch back into tadpoles. Edward was sitting quietly beside him, and he gave me a brotherly Thank the Universe you’re here! look. My mother remained where she was in the entry, searching my face. I thought she was going to embrace me—I mean God knows she should have after the crossing I’d endured to get there—and I dropped my bags in order to receive her, but instead, she spat out, “Wrinkulsh and acne at your age?” and marched into the kitchen to refill her drink.
Two dirgelike days later, I crept up the narrow staircase to say good-bye. My mother was asleep with her two Rhodesian ridgebacks curled up like parentheses on either side of her. She looked like her tribesmen had already laid her out for burial; her flat, brutally scarred chest was ablaze with amulets of gold and silver, and ceramic and rock, and bead and bone. Bracelets and bangles lined her dehydrated arms, and a bit of bluish scalp peeped from under her embroidered emerald green skullcap. I didn’t wake her; I just stared at her for a long time. I wasn’t crying or anything, but I’m sure my face was an obliging flush of red.
The inevitable predawn phone call came in February. No way was Edward going to miss this one; he had stuck by our mother’s side (helping himself to her morphine patches) until one night the hospice nurse had cranked up the drip and she’d slept so well that she’d died.
According to my brother, the nurse was in hysterics. It had been her first death.
Out of curiosity, I recently Googled Charles Thomas, the glorified daddy figure of yesteryear. I’d seen his full name in my grandfather’s deposition, so it wasn’t hard to find him. There wasn’t a lot of info; turns out all along he’d been a CIA spook. The last entry I could find on him was a stint posing as a foreign service officer in Lisbon in the late 1970s.
There was no death date on any of the entries.
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •
I would like to thank:My family for the material, especially Will and Edward, my two weird but much adored brothers
Charles Addams
Kim Witherspoon, my agent
Lauren Marino, my editor
Julia Gilroy, who whipped things into shape
Cathy and Stephen Graham for the world
Brian Siberell for his good looks and his enthusiasm
Grant Manheim for the title. And everything else.
Jay Presson Allen and Wendy Wasserstein
Readers and supporters: Nancy Palmer, Prudence and Teddy
Ragsdale, Tracy and Dan Oseran, Patricia Bradbury, Ivan
Gold, Ann Leary, and Gus Van Sant
Amy Dickinson for her timely counsel
Brianne Mulligan, Julie Schilder
The Lake Oswego Library for free office space, and the staff at the LO Peet’s for caffeine
And Charlotte and Celeste, my two gifted and beautiful daughters. Here’s the definitive answer to your childhood question about the strange lady with the tinkly ice in her glass.
