“Sir,” the woman on the other side of the door says. “Sir, you have to come out now. Sir? Are you all right?”
When it’s my turn, I’ll open my mouth, unable to speak, and feel a little tap on my wrist. Time to stand up, my watch will whisper.
Then, before killing myself, I’ll say one last time, “I am standing up.”
The Spirit World
Our house on Emerald Isle is divided down the middle and has an E beside one front door and a W beside the other. The east side is ruled by Hugh, and the bedroom we share is on the top floor. It opens onto a deck that overlooks the ocean and is next to Amy’s room, which is the same size as ours but is shaped differently. Unlike Lisa and Paul, who are on the west side of the house and could probably sleep on burlap without noticing it, Amy likes nice sheets.
She’d packed a new set in her suitcase, and on the night before Thanksgiving, as I helped her make her bed, she mentioned a friend who’d come to her apartment for dinner the previous evening in New York. “He drinks Coke, right, so I went to the store on the corner to buy some,” she said. “And you know how those new bottles have names on the labels—Blake or Kelly or whatever?”
I nodded.
“Well, there were only two left on the shelf, one with MOM printed on it, and the other with TIFFANY.”
I reached for a pillowcase. “Do you think if I were dead there would have been three bottles on the shelf instead of two and the third would have had my name on it?”
Amy thought for a moment. “Yes.”
“So the only Cokes at that store in New York City are for people in our family who have died?”
She smoothed out the bedspread. “Yes.”
I couldn’t tell if she honestly believed this. It’s hard to say with Amy. On the one hand she’s very pragmatic, and on the other she’s open to just about anything. Astrology, for instance. I wouldn’t call her a nut exactly, but she has paid good money to have her chart done, and if you’re talking about someone, she’ll often ask when this person’s birthday is and then say something like “Ah, a Gemini. OK. That makes sense now.”
She’s big on acupuncture as well, which I also tend to think is dubious, at least for things like allergies. That said, I admire people who are curious and open their minds to new possibilities, especially after a certain age. You have to draw the line somewhere, though, and with me it’s my anus. When I was in my early thirties, it became a thing to have colonics. A number of my friends started going to a man in Chicago and discussing the rubble he’d discovered in their lower intestines. “A pumpkin seed, and I haven’t eaten pumpkin in eight years!”
Their insides were like pharaohs’ tombs, dark catacombs littered with ancient relics. Now people are giving themselves coffee enemas, believing it wards off and even cures cancer.
“I think I’ll take the cancer, thank you,” my sister Lisa said to me on Thanksgiving morning.
“Amen to that,” I agreed.
Lisa’s not open to the things that Paul and Amy are, but she has her equivalents. If you told her, for instance, that she was holding her car keys the wrong way and that there were meetings for people like her, she’d likely attend them for at least three months. One of the groups she was going to lately was for mindful eating. “It’s not about dieting—we don’t believe in that,” she said. “You’re supposed to carry on as usual: three meals a day, plus snacks and desserts or whatever. The difference is that now you think about it.” She then confessed that the doughnut she’d just finished had been her sixth of the day. “Who brought these?” she asked.
I looked at the box and whimpered a little. “Kathy, I think.”
“Goddamn her,” Lisa whispered.
A few weeks before we came to the beach, Amy paid a great deal of money to visit a well-known psychic. The woman has a long waiting list, but somebody pulled a few strings, and, not long after getting the idea, Amy had her session, which took place over the phone and lasted for an hour. She sent me a brief email after it was over and went into greater detail as we rode with Gretchen from the Raleigh airport to Emerald Isle the day before Thanksgiving. “So start again from the top,” I said. “Was it scary?”
“It was maybe like calling someone in prison and having one person after another get on the line,” she said from the backseat. “First I talked to Mom for a while, who’s doing well, by the way, and takes credit for setting up you and Hugh. Then Tiffany appeared.”
I ripped open a bag of almonds. “Yeah, right.”
“Ordinarily I’d be like that too,” Amy said, “but the psychic’s voice changed after Mom went away. She sounded tough all of a sudden and started by saying, ‘I really don’t feel like talking to you right now. This is a favor, OK?’”
Tiffany thanked Amy for cleaning up the mess she’d left after she’d committed suicide.
“That’s strange,” I said. “I mean, how would the psychic have known anything about that?”
Amy sat up and moved closer, so that her head was between my seat and Gretchen’s. “I know! She said that Tiffany had tried to kill herself before—also true—and that she always knew that she was going to do this, the only question was when. It was crazy how much she got right. ‘Your sister was mentally ill,’ she said. ‘Possibly bipolar, and stopped taking her medication because she didn’t want to dull herself.’ She said Tiffany felt like everyone was taking from her, using her.”
“That was certainly true,” I said.
“Most of what Tiffany had to say was directed at you,” Amy told me. “She wants you to know that the two of you are OK now, that she’s not mad anymore.”
“She’s not mad!” I said. “Her? I’m the one who had reason to be mad.”
“She said she’d misunderstood you and that lately she’s been working on herself.”
“You have to work on yourself after you’re dead?” I asked. It seemed a bit much, like having to continue a diet or your participation in AA. I thought that death let you off the hook when it came to certain things, that it somehow purified you.
“Tiffany’s been hanging out a lot with Mom’s dad, Grandpa Leonard,” Amy told me.
This made me furious for some reason. “But she didn’t even know him.”
“I guess they met there,” Amy said.
“And where is that?”
Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like you can ask a thousand questions and get them answered. They tell you what they want to tell you and you just listen.”
I tried to let that sink in.
“She and Mom are finally getting along,” Amy continued. “She mainly wanted to let you know that she has no hard feelings. The psychic said Tiffany’s been trying to tell you this herself and asked if you’ve had a lot of problems with your phone lately.”
“No.”
“Power outages?”
Again I said no.
“What about butterflies?”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “Our house last winter was loaded with them. I’ve never seen anything like it. In the summer, fine, but this was crazy. Hugh and I talked about it every day.”
Amy crossed her arms. “It was Tiffany. She was trying to contact you.”
The appointment with the psychic had unnerved the whole family. “Tiffany was calmer than normal, but still it was like an actual conversation with her,” Amy said. “You remember how those were, right? We’d be shaking while they were going on. Then we’d think about them for weeks afterward.”
“I remember,” Gretchen and I said at the same time.
After Tiffany signed off, Amy spoke to an actor she’d known who died of a heroin overdose a few years back, and to her first serious boyfriend, John Tsokantis, who had a brain aneurysm when he was twenty-five.
Because she’d had a session so recently, I was welcome to cut to the front of the line and have one of my own the following week. “Do you want me to give you the psychic’s number?”
I said nothing.
“Is that a no?
” Amy asked.
Often, when signing books, I’ll pretend to have powers. “Well, look at the Scorpio,” I’ll say when someone approaches my table. I’m just guessing—I wouldn’t know a Scorpio from a double Sagittarius. The key, I learned, is to speak with authority. It’s never “Are you a Libra?” but, rather, “It’s about time I had a Libra up in here.”
Every now and then I’ll be right, and the person will be shocked. “How did you know my sign?” they’ll ask.
“The same way I know you have a sister.”
If I’m right about the sister as well, the person I’m talking to will become like a cat released into a new setting, very low to the ground and suspicious. “Who were you talking to? Did one of my friends put you up to this?”
I met a young woman a few years back, and after being right about both her sign and her sister, I said, as if I were trying to recall something I had dreamed, “You were in a…hospital earlier this week, not for yourself but for someone else. You were…visiting someone very close to you.”
The woman fell apart before my eyes. “My mother has cancer. They operated but…How do you…I don’t…What are you doing?”
“I can’t help it,” I told her. “I know things. I see them.”
I don’t, of course. Those were just guesses, pulled out of my ass in order to get a rise out of someone.
Hugh said the psychic Amy went to did the same thing, but I’m not sure. “How would she know what Tiffany sounded like?”
“Looked her up on YouTube,” he said. “Read one of your stories. These people tell you what you want to hear. It’s their way of getting you to come back.”
There’s something about picking the psychic apart that I don’t like. It’s cynical and uninteresting. That said, I knew I didn’t want to book a session. My mother and I were very close, and though I miss her terribly, I’m not sure I need to talk to her again. Since her death I’d thought of it as an impossibility. Now it felt like a decision, like Mom wants to speak to me and I’m saying no. But what if she’s angry at me for some reason? What would I do with that?
As for Tiffany, a few months after she died, a Dutch film crew came to Sussex and followed me around for three days. Our conversation was all over the place—we talked about England, writing, life with Hugh. The last hour was shot on a hilltop overlooking my house. The interviewer, a man named Wim, sat beside me. Off camera he’d mentioned that my sister had recently taken her life. Now he brought it up again. “What if you could ask her one question?”
It seemed like such a television moment, the intimacy unearned—grotesque, almost. And so I paused and blinked hard. Then I said, “I’d ask…‘Can I have back that money I loaned you?’”
What troubled me most about Amy’s talk with the psychic was the notion that the dead are unsettled. That they linger. I said to Lisa at the beach that Thanksgiving, “If they can see us from wherever they are, what’s to stop them from watching us on the toilet?”
Lisa took a moment to consider this. “I’m guessing that certain places are just…off-limits.”
“And who would make them off-limits?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “God, maybe. I mean…beats me.”
We were returning from a walk and came upon our father in the middle of the street a quarter mile from the house. He was dressed in jeans and had a flat-topped cap on his head. His flannel shirt was untucked, and the tail of it drooped from beneath the hem of his Windbreaker. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Looking for someone,” he said.
Lisa asked who, and he said he didn’t know. “I was just hoping somebody might come along and invite me to his house to watch the game. The Panthers are playing this afternoon, and you don’t have a goddamn TV.”
“You thought someone was just going to say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come to my place and watch some football?’” Lisa asked.
“I was going to build up to it,” my father said. “You know, drop hints and so forth.”
The day after Thanksgiving was bright and unseasonably warm. Hugh made ham sandwiches for lunch and we ate on the deck. “We need to have a code word so when the next one of us dies, we’ll know if the psychic is for real,” Amy said. She turned to Dad, the most likely candidate for ceasing to live. “What’ll yours be?”
He gave it no thought. “Ecstasy.”
“Like the drug?” I asked.
He picked up his sandwich. “What drug?”
“It should be something you say a lot,” I told him. “Something that would let us know it’s really you. Maybe…‘You’ve gained weight’ or ‘Obama’s from Kenya.’”
“Those are both three words,” Lisa noted.
“What about ‘Broderson’?” I said, referring to a North Carolina painter whose work my father collected in the 1970s.
“Oh, that’s perfect,” Amy said.
I went into the kitchen to get another napkin, and by the time I returned, the topic had changed and Dad was discussing someone who goes to his gym. The guy is in his forties and apparently stands too close in the locker room. “He undresses me with his eyes, and it makes me uncomfortable,” my father said.
“How does someone undress you with his eyes when you’re already undressed?” I asked. “By that point what’s he looking at, your soul?”
On our final evening at the beach over the Thanksgiving weekend, Amy and my niece, Madelyn, usually host a spa night. They dress in uniforms and let it be known beforehand that clients are expected to tip, and generously. Facials are given, and Kathy offers foot massages. The treatments feel great, but the best part is listening to Amy, who plays the role of the supervisor. This year, while massaging clay onto my father’s face, she asked him if he was alone this evening or with his gay lover.
“I know that a lot of men such as yourself also like their testicles waxed,” Amy said. “If that is of any interest to you, sir, I can get my trainee, Madelyn, right on it. Maddy, you up for this?”
It’s so subversive, not just insisting that our father is gay but that his twelve-year-old granddaughter might want to rip the hair off his balls.
Before the clay is rubbed into our faces, we’re outfitted in shower caps, and afterward, while it dries, we lie back with cucumber slices on our eyes. Paul programs his iPad to play spa music, or what passes for music in such places, the sound of a waterfall or rustling leaves. A whale saying something nice to another whale. A harp. This year I lifted the cucumbers off my eyes and saw Lisa and Dad stretched out like corpses, fast asleep. Paul was out as well, and Gretchen, whose legs were shin-deep in the warm whirling bath, was getting there.
It seems there was a perfectly good explanation for all the butterflies in our Sussex house the previous winter. From what I’d read since Amy brought it up, they flew in through our windows in early autumn, then passed into a kind of hibernation. Hugh and I were away until right before Christmas, and when we returned and cranked up the heat, the butterflies, mainly tortoiseshells—dozens and dozens of them—awoke, wrongly believing that spring had arrived. They were on all the second-floor windows, batting against the panes, desperate to get out.
As symbols go, they’re a bit too sweet, right for Lisa but all wrong for Tiffany, who’d have been better represented by something more dynamic—crows, maybe. Two big ones flew down the chimney of my office that winter and tore the place apart, systematically overturning and then shitting on everything I cared about.
What, I wondered, placing the cucumbers back over my eyes, would my symbol be?
The last time I saw my sister Tiffany was at the stage door at Symphony Hall in Boston. I’d just finished a show and was getting ready to sign books when I heard her say, “David. David, it’s me.”
We hadn’t spoken in four years at that point, and I was shocked by her appearance. Tiffany always looked like my mother when she was young. Now she looked like my mother when she was old, though at the time she couldn’t have been more than forty-five. “It’s me, Tiffan
y.” She held up a paper bag with the Starbucks logo on it. Her shoes looked like she’d found them in a trash can. “I have something for you.”
There was a security guard holding the stage door open, and I said to him, “Will you close that, please?” I had filled the house that night. I was in charge—Mr. Sedaris. “The door,” I repeated. “I’d like for you to close it now.”
And so the man did. He shut the door in my sister’s face, and I never saw her or spoke to her again. Not when she was evicted from her apartment. Not when she was raped. Not when she was hospitalized after her first suicide attempt. She was, I told myself, someone else’s problem. I couldn’t deal with her anymore.
“Well,” the rest of my family said, “it was Tiffany. Don’t be too hard on yourself. We all know how she can be.”
Perhaps, like the psychic, they were just telling me what I needed to hear, something to ease my conscience and make me feel that underneath it all I’m no different from anyone else. They’ve always done that for me, my family. It’s what keeps me coming back.
And While You’re Up There, Check On My Prostate
The summer after I turned sixteen, I took driver’s ed from a coach at my high school and quickly realized that this was not for me. Turning invoked a great deal of anxiety, as did staying in my lane, and parking—oh, parking—that was the worst. I suppose I could have tried harder to overcome my fear and discomfort, but I didn’t, and as a result I have never gotten a ticket, made a car payment, or called anyone a fucking piece of shit asshole through an open or closed driver’s-side window. It’s not that I never get angry, just that I never get angry the way people behind a wheel do. My fury isn’t poetry, just greeting-card prose: “Go to hell, you.”
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