Bolsover tries to find an explanation for the two deaths, to uncover some reason they had to happen or if they could have been avoided. He searches for answers in books. At the beginning of By Chance, he asks the question, “If fiction is not concerned to understand, what is its subject? Is its purpose merely to pass the time?” but he already knows the answer. The purpose of great literature is to reveal what is hidden and to illuminate what is in darkness.
I was right there with Bolsover on his search for understanding, rooting alongside him for a why and wherefore for death, and hoping that he might find relief from his agonizing pain of responsibility and, in finding this relief, show me a way to ease my own. Bolsover felt guilt as a clawing into his shoulder. I felt it closer inside me, a sharpness scratching hard against my heart. My still beating heart. Beating only by chance. The chance that felled my sister but kept me alive.
Anne-Marie didn’t like me much when I was a kid. She had good reasons. I was a bratty little sister. I went into her room when she wasn’t home and took things for myself. I borrowed clothes—she always had better clothes than I did; she knew how to pick out good things—and wore them to school. After I wore a shirt of hers, I remember stuffing it into the back of her closet and claiming ignorance when she asked if I’d seen it.
One day I found Anne-Marie’s diary and read it. I teased her when she got home about Scott Goodman, the neighbor she had a crush on. The truth was that everyone had a crush on Scott, including me, because he was tall and good-looking and very, very nice. The fact that Anne-Marie liked him was the surprising part. Her tastes usually ran counter to the popular stream of likes and dislikes. She was not a rebel but rather an iconoclast. She was sophisticated and discriminating in ways far beyond what might be expected of a sixteen-year-old midwestern girl. She took the teasing about Scott by hitting me back with sharp insults about the tiny size of my brain and the large size of my behind, and she hid her diary where I could never find it again. Anne-Marie didn’t tell my parents about my snooping around and my teasing. She was no tattletale.
But I was. I told on her when I found cigarettes in the bathroom, pleading with my mother that I was worried about Anne-Marie’s health. But I wasn’t really, not then. I just wanted to get her in trouble. I wanted her to pay attention to me, her puny little sister. Any attention, even her caustic insults, was better than nothing. Later, when she got meaner and faster with her insults, I wanted payback for the hurt she caused me. Now I can see that it was I who started the fights between us. I was using the only power I had, the power to pester and to irritate. Anne-Marie was bigger, smarter, and so much better looking than me. But I won the annoying game, hands down.
As far as sibling dynamics went, Natasha was the sister I played with and Anne-Marie was the sister I bothered. Not that there wasn’t solidarity among the three of us when required. One summer when we were driving through France, my father stopped our rental car at a gas station to fill up. Anne-Marie was by the open window, playing with her little red-haired troll named Troll. Just as my father pulled out of the station to drive back onto the highway, Anne-Marie dropped Troll out the window. My father would not go back to save Troll. We were on a highway with no turnoffs coming soon, and we couldn’t delay our trip for a doll.
“But it’s Troll!” Anne-Marie wailed. Natasha and I joined in, crying and crying for miles. We cried for Anne-Marie, bereft without her troll, and for Troll, all alone now in a strange country.
Troll was replaced by a large Steiff rabbit, and later Rabbit was replaced by a twelve-inch-long, amply stuffed lion named Lion. Lion had shiny brown eyes, a luxurious golden mane, and a soft yellow belly. Anne-Marie would hold him in one hand and use her fingers to move his arms up and down, giving him gestures as she made him talk. Lion was her alter ego. Lion could say anything—transmitted through a squeaky version of Anne-Marie’s own voice—and because he was witty and quick, everyone would laugh at him. Even I laughed at him, despite the fact that his most effective lines were at my expense. I’d be talking about the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books by Betty MacDonald, one of my favorite series, and he’d cut in. “Wiggle, wiggle. I like that. Add a plop, plop and it can be my new nickname for you . . . ’cause that’s what you look like when you walk. Plopplopwigglewiggle.”
One afternoon when I was in seventh grade I got on a town bus to go home from school. I don’t remember why I needed to take a bus that day. Maybe I’d stayed after school and didn’t want to walk all the way home. It was only a thirty-minute walk, but maybe I was tired or thought it might get dark soon. What I do remember is thinking that the bus route was strange. For some reason the bus was heading into downtown Evanston. I figured it would turn around there and then head back north to my part of town.
The bus stopped for a moment by the huge parking garage downtown that also served as the main bus depot. I looked out the window to see Anne-Marie there on the sidewalk. She saw me at the same time, and her eyes widened. She started waving at me and yelling. When the bus started to roll away, she began running alongside it, screaming, “Stop! Stop!” The bus stopped, and Anne-Marie leaped on board. “Get off,” she said to me. “You’re on the wrong bus.”
I had gotten on a bus heading to the Howard Street bus station in Chicago. The Howard Street station was in a seedy neighborhood of dimly lit bars, iron-barred liquor stores, dirty pawnshops, and broken-down apartment buildings. For a twelve-year old girl with no money, arriving at Howard Street as evening fell dark and cold around her, the bus station would have been the most terrifying place on earth.
“You saved my life,” I babbled as I started crying and shaking. Anne-Marie drew her arms around me.
“Don’t be stupid.”
But I knew that she had saved me. I was a horrid brat, and yet she had run after the bus that could have taken me out of her life forever and got me off. She might not like me, but she did love me. Together, we took the right bus home. I sat next to my sister and vowed to myself that I would never go through her room again, I would never tattle on her or spy on her. I had thought Anne-Marie was better than me before, but now I was sure of it. She was not only smart and beautiful; she had a generous heart, willing to forgive me and to save me. Natasha was my buddy, my pal with whom I played, the sister I turned to after a bad dream, who would let me sleep beside her. But Anne-Marie became my gold standard of achievement, the one whose approval I sought even more than my parents’. Up she went on a pedestal, and for me, she never really came down again.
In Per Petterson’s book To Siberia, a brother and a sister living in North Jutland during the years surrounding World War II face extreme hardship and family heartbreak. Because they have each other, they survive. But then they become separated. The brother, deeply involved in the Resistance, has to run away from their Nazi-occupied town. Now the girl is alone. She is no longer entwined and in tune with her brother. She is no longer protected or sustained by him. Her life pales: “I am twenty-three and there is nothing left. Only the rest.”
What did Petterson mean with those words, “only the rest”? For me, the words mean that for the rest of the girl’s life she will be alone, living on in an existence without her brother. I understood that. I had shared my whole life with my sister, and then suddenly we were not sharing it any longer. I found it hard to imagine a life without her. How could my life still be a full life? No one could ever make up for the person who had gone.
Anne-Marie once quoted Ezra Pound to me, that what we love best “remains, and the rest is dross.” What she didn’t add was Pound’s promise, “What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.” Not even death will take what I love best from me? The sister in To Siberia lives a long life, and writes about her brother. She transforms their lost history of unity into a recorded story of love. In writing words, she found her brother again. In reading words, in reading books, I was finding my sister again.
I was reminded of Anne-Marie in the characters I was meeting in all my days of books. She was the
kind of heroine authors like to put in their books, with her quiet strength and resilience, her utter lack of petty or trivial concerns, and the superlative combination of her beauty and her intelligence. Anne-Marie had her negative traits, but even those always seemed to me to be übertraits. Her caustic wit was knife sharp and accurate, but never directed toward anyone who couldn’t take it (she was never cruel), and her impatience with idiocy might have been overblown but it was never misplaced. Even when I was the idiot at the end of her thrusts of anger, I rarely felt wronged—I just wished for a little more sympathy. And always, eventually, the sympathy would come.
The main character in Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 is Oedipa Maas. She is nervy but also nervous, intelligent but self-questioning, honest and serious, an optimist but no pushover. Add in that she is good-looking, with long legs and long hair, and she was Anne-Marie. When I read that book, I pictured Oedipa as my sister, and my interest in her fate grew.
Anne-Marie was Aurora in Almudena Solana’s The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz, a woman who lives on her own terms, fully but quietly. She doesn’t understand why people rush around without thinking or exploring: “Why are people so afraid of thinking? Why don’t they ever leave time to reflect? There’s nothing wrong with tranquility; nor emptiness, vertigo, or even unhappiness. I think that these things are the first steps to precede the birth of a new thought. This is why I like to read.” Again, I pictured Anne-Marie saying these words, offering counsel to me. Slow down and think. Read a book. I was doing that.
Anne-Marie was the one I pictured for the rebellious gardener in The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna. No one can tell Sanelma whom to love and whom to forsake, and both her bravery and her loyalty reminded me of my sister. Anne-Marie was the New Year Sister in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Sister Years,” a woman with “so much promise and such an indescribable hopefulness in her aspect that hardly anybody could meet her without anticipating some very desirable thing—some long sought after good—from her kind offices.” Anne-Marie could look forbidding, but when she smiled, her features lightened up to those of a girl, a happy, bright girl expecting and offering all the wonders of the world.
Anne-Marie was sometimes deeply unsure of herself—strange or new situations always made her nervous—but when the truly terrible circumstances of cancer slammed into her, she responded with an iron will overlaid with grace and calm. Again like a heroine from a book, Anne-Marie thrust herself in front of the moving train that was cancer and tried to protect me from its reality. She absorbed all of its truth and all of its horror on her own, by herself. It makes me shudder now to think of how she must have felt, scared, angry, and helpless. I don’t know if putting on the brave act for me helped her psychologically with her illness. Or if by taking on the burden of protecting me—as she always had—she doubled her own burden.
The guilt that was scratching away at me, the twist of a knife that woke me up in the middle of the night and made me wonder wherein my failure lay, came from how Anne-Marie bore the horror of her cancer. How alone she was. How I could not share the weight of her illness, or take it from her. And it was guilt for placing her on a pedestal all those years ago and not letting her down again. I was looking for resolution—innocence or guilt—just like Bolsover. And like Bolsover, I was looking for a reason or an explanation for why she had to die.
In By Chance, Bolsover comes to realize that “he is not a wicked man, but only a foolish one.” The relief he finds is not in the absolution of his guilt but rather in the absolution of his life. He understands that he is lucky to be alive; it is only “by chance” that he is, while his wife and the child are dead. Bolsover resolves to take the chance offered and find what peace and joy he can, while he can. What else can he do but rise every morning to follow where “the sun has laid a blazing road of orange and gold”? He understands that “one must take control of one’s life or become nothing but a broken branch, drifting in the current.”
Guilt was the force holding me back from forgiving the death of Anne-Marie. Guilt was the barrier against accepting that I was alive, and she no longer was. My oldest, smartest, most beautiful sister had lost her own life, having long ago saved mine.
I had to forgive myself for living.
Toward the end of January, I read Moonlight Shadow by Banana Yoshimoto. Satsuki, a young woman whose boyfriend has been killed in a car accident, tries to assuage her pain by going out for long runs through her town. Every morning while out running, Satsuki stops for a rest on the bridge where she last saw her boyfriend. One morning she meets a woman on the bridge, and they begin a strange friendship: “Somewhere deep in my heart I felt I had known her long ago, and the reunion made me so nostalgic I wanted to weep tears of joy.” Through this woman Satsuki is given a unique chance, the chance to see her boyfriend one last time, and to talk to him. She calls across the river, “Hitoshi, do you want to talk to me? I want to talk to you. I want to run over to your side, take you in my arms, and rejoice in being together again.”
I read the book on a cold but sunny day. I was home all alone, the boys at school and Jack at work. The cats lay on the floor beside my chair in the squares of sun that came in through the windows. After finishing Moonlight Shadow, I sat back in my purple chair. If I had the chance to see Anne-Marie one last time, the chance Satsuki had with her beloved Hitoshi, would I ask her to forgive me for being the one who got to live? For not taking on the burden of cancer? No, of course not. Such questions would be self-serving and selfish, and would only cause pain to both of us. Instead, I would tell her the truth about what she had left behind in me. I would tell her how much I loved her. I would promise to bring her forth alive every day in my memories, and in my touching of the people, the objects, and the places she left behind. I would live, always with her in mind: I was not alone. “What thou lov’st well . . . ,” I would remind her. And in that love which I carried forward, I would find forgiveness.
I went upstairs to my bedroom. Lion sat there on a bookshelf, on top of stacks of paperback mysteries. He was raggedy, his shiny eyes sagging in their sockets. His yellow mane had gone gray with dirt and time, and his belly was flat. A gold-and-orange ribbon wound around his neck, tied on by Anne-Marie after bringing him out of retirement when my kids were born. The ribbon helped keep his head up, given that most of his stuffing was gone. In Anne-Marie’s hands, and with her voice, Lion entertained the boys. Once again, she’d had Lion make jokes at my expense, to my sons’ delight and disbelief and uncontrollable giggles.
Now Lion lived on with me, voiceless but still present. I took Lion in my arms and gave him a kiss, right on top of his ratty little head. He was Anne-Marie’s alter ego, and he will remain with me. As Anne-Marie remains with me, in my still-beating heart.
I’ve pushed blame away. My heart is scarred but clear of the scratching, clawing guilt that kept me from forgiving myself for living on when Anne-Marie could not. So where do I go now? What “blazing road of orange and gold” will I find to follow? How do I live?
I remembered the mandate from my very first book of the year, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, that I find moments of beauty, the “always within never.” I was finding beauty, and recovering memories, and absolving guilt. Seeking peace and discovering joy. My path forward was clear to me. It was a path set ablaze by words, words made into sentences and paragraphs and chapters and books. My way was paved by books.
Chapter 9
To Welcome the Interloper
When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
HENRY MILLER,
The Books in My Life
ONE DAY IN MID-JANUARY AN INTERLOPER ARRIVED IN MY LIFE. It was afternoon, and the kids were home from school. A good friend called and asked if she could stop by. She had a book for me to read. “I loved it,” she said. My friend—or rather, the book offered out to me from her hands—was the interloper, an unexpected guest at my table o
f books.
Three months into my book-a-day project, and I was into a good rhythm of reading and writing. January was almost over, and the postholiday, midwinter blahs never had a chance with me this year. I was too caught up in reading great books and in the challenge of writing about them every day. Every morning I posted my review of the book I’d read the day before. Then I walked over to my bookcase and looked over books I’d bought or borrowed from the library. I picked out a book for that day, ambled over to my purple chair, and began to read. If a phone call came in, I’d answer.
“Are you busy?” the caller would ask.
“Yes, I’m working.” Sitting in my chair, cats nearby, I was reading a great book. That was my job this year, and it was a good one. The salary was nonexistent, but the satisfaction was daily and deep.
Some mornings after I posted my review I headed out to the local library for a quick cruise of the stacks, looking for new authors or new books by loved authors. I gathered together an armload of books, found a quiet corner with a good chair to sit in, and began reading.
Westport Public Library has seating scattered throughout its building, but the best spots are the ones beside windows with full views onto the Saugatuck River. On a sunny morning, no matter how cold the temperature outside, I could settle into an illusion of summer heat as I sat there beside a warm window and looked down over a river sparkling and shimmering and dotted with birds. When I closed my eyes against the sun and saw the flashes of yellow and orange against my lids, I was as warm and relaxed as if I were sitting on a desert island, with nothing but a beach chair and my books. Those days I spent in the library I followed the sun around as a flower bends its stem, moving from chair to chair to always be in the light and the warmth.
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 9
