Dear Irene ik-3

by Jan Burke

  “Irene?” the voice on the other end asked from a distance. I flipped the receiver around so that I was no longer holding it upside down.

  “Barbara,” I said to my sister, “the next time you call me this early on a Saturday, I will attach you to a twenty-foot bungee cord and push you from a nineteen-foot overpass.”

  Frank groaned again and put his pillow over his eyes.

  “You’re hungover!” she scolded loudly. I moved the receiver a good six inches from my ear while she prattled incessantly about how ashamed my mother would have been had she lived to see me behaving like this. (I am convinced that Barbara, given a choice between dropping a neutron bomb and invoking my mother’s memory, would still find the latter a more potent weapon.)

  Frank groaned louder and rolled onto his stomach. I reached down and unplugged the phone, wondering as I fell back to sleep how long it would take Barbara to realize all her bitching was failing to do more than sear some phone lines.

  Sometime around noon, as I lay watching him, Frank pulled the pillow off his head. “I don’t know how you do that without suffocating,” I said.

  He managed a smile. “I’m going to tell your sister that we are moving to the Himalayas and can’t be reached by phone.”

  “Sooner or later she’ll see my byline in the Express and know she can start calling again.”

  “You’ll have to make up a pen name.” The smile broadened to a grin. “How about—”

  “Never mind. I can tell from the look on your face that it doesn’t belong in a family newspaper.”

  “What did Barbara want?”

  “I don’t know. I unplugged her.”

  He laughed and pulled me close. “Let’s stay in bed all day.”

  “Are you kidding? I just got my cast off. I want to get some exercise.”

  “Who said you won’t be getting exercise?”

  There was a loud banging at the front door. I heard my name being screeched by a fishwife. The bedroom is at the back of the house, but we could hear her “I know you’re in there!” quite plainly.

  “Barbara says I won’t be getting exercise.”

  Frank groaned for the fourth time that morning and reached for his jeans. I hurriedly got into a bathrobe, amused briefly by the realization that I could now do something like pull on a bathrobe and run to the front door.

  “Hell’s bells, Barbara,” I called out as I made my way down the hallway, “keep your pantyhose on!”

  I opened the door and she shot into the house like she had been launched from a catapult.

  “Of all the despicable tricks! I can’t believe you were so rude! I had hoped Frank would teach you a few manners but I can see…”

  What she could see just then was Frank, coming down the hallway as he buttoned a shirt. It stopped her mid-tirade.

  “Good afternoon, Barbara,” he said.

  She took in his bare feet and sleep-tousled hair and began to stammer. “Fr-Fr-Frank. I… I only saw Irene’s car. I didn’t know you were home.”

  “My car is at Banyon’s. We took a cab home last night because your sister and I forgot to draw straws for designated driver. We were celebrating the removal of her cast and splint.”

  “Oh.” She looked more than a little disconcerted.

  “Were you yelling at me on the phone all this time?” I asked.

  That brought back some of her ire, but Frank’s chuckle cooled it right back down into embarrassment. “Never mind,” she said.

  “Come on in and make yourself comfortable,” Frank said. “I’ll make some coffee.”

  Barbara looked down at my hand and, seeing the puffiness around my thumb and forefinger, said, “It still looks funny.”

  “Thank you.” I walked back to the kitchen, leaving her to follow or stand there.

  She chose to follow and soon the pleasant aroma of coffee allowed me to become a little more human.

  “Anything I can do to help?” she asked.

  “Not a thing,” Frank said, getting some cups and saucers.

  “I’d be happy to help,” she tried again.

  “Just relax and enjoy yourself,” Frank said easily.

  As I watched her take a seat at the kitchen table, I mused to myself that Barbara had probably never in her life “relaxed and enjoyed herself.” She’s bird-nervous by nature.

  I put a couple of pieces of nine-grain bread in the toaster on the table and studied my sister while I waited for them to pop. For the most part, Barbara and I don’t look or behave as if we could be related. She has my mother’s red hair and green eyes; she’s tall and willowy. Her delicate features are very similar to our mother’s. Her skin is soft and white.

  I’m only a little bit shorter than Barbara, but I’m built differently. She has always seemed more fragile to me; even though she’s the older sister, I’ve been the one she runs to with her problems. Unlike her, my hair is dark, my eyes blue. I look more like my father’s side of the family. I am, I admit, much less feminine than my sister — always have been. I was climbing trees while she played with dolls. I felt great when I hit my first home run, she felt wonderful when she learned to put on nail polish. I got tremendous satisfaction out of digging a hole in the backyard and filling it with water and then bombing it with dirt clods. Barbara was in the house, trying on my mother’s high heels. I still haven’t learned to walk gracefully in heels.

  She married O’Connor’s son, Kenny, and divorced him when he turned forty and went thorough man-o-pause. He was brutal in his verbal abuse of her in that period. I couldn’t stand him before that, and afterwards was unwilling to try for polite. She got back together with him, much to my dismay. I was praying they wouldn’t remarry. But it’s her life. Barbara and I have never been great pals; in fact, we usually drive one another crazy.

  The toast popped.

  “Your hair is growing,” she said to me, as Frank filled our coffee cups. It made me reverse some of my thinking of the last few minutes. We are sisters, and woven over our differences is a fabric of kindnesses paid out to one another in times of trouble. After my captors had cut my hair into odd-shaped clumps, it was Barbara who came by and patiently reshaped my hair out of its bizarre styling into the cut I wore now. Having my shoulder-length hair lopped off by those men had been demeaning and extremely upsetting; Barbara’s efforts had made it much easier to look at my reflection in the days following that ordeal.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Thanks again for the haircut.”

  “I should trim it for you.”

  “No thanks. I want to let it grow out again.”

  “You can’t go around with the same hairstyle you had in ninth grade, Irene. You’re a grown woman.”

  I was determined to keep my cool. “Like I said, I appreciate what you did for me, but I’m going to let it grow out.”

  “Honestly. You’d think you’d act your age.”

  Frank was looking between us, not trying very hard to hide his amusement. To hell with him, I thought. I’m still not going to be drawn into a fight with her. My head hurt.

  “Was there something you wanted this morning?” I asked.

  “It’s afternoon.”

  I shifted in my chair a little but said, “This afternoon, then.”

  “Well. Yes.” She took a dainty sip of coffee and glanced nervously toward Frank. He looked toward me with a silent question and I answered with a look that asked him to please stay put.

  “Don’t drum your fingers, Irene,” she said.

  “You came by this afternoon to ask me not to drum my fingers?” I took a deep breath. “I have to drum my fingers. It’s part of my physical therapy.”

  Frank made a sputtering noise in his coffee, but she either didn’t pick up on it or was still too intimidated by him to comment. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “I’ll stop doing it. Now, you were saying?”

  Once again she looked over at Frank, who seemed to have himself back under control. “Well,” she said.
r />   We waited. When she got it out, it was all in a rush.

  “How can I make any of the wedding arrangements if you won’t set a date? Of course I didn’t tell him you were living together, but Father Hennessey is willing to give Frank instruction and said he would set aside a date for the wedding if we would just name one.”

  Two sounds broke the brief second’s total silence which followed this announcement. One was Frank’s coffee cup clattering onto its saucer, and the other was a rushing noise I heard in my ears. I began to realize that the latter was the sound of my blood boiling.

  “Of all the unmitigated gall!” I shouted. “Barbara, who asked you to make any arrangements? Who asked you to talk to Father Hennessey? Who in the hell do you think you are, talking to him about Frank converting when I’ve never even said to you that we would be married in the Church?”

  “Not get married in the Church!” she shouted back. She looked between us as if I had just said we planned to go live naked in the woods.

  “The point is, my dear sister, that you are once again butting your nose in where it doesn’t belong!”

  “I’m your older sister. I have an obligation to take our mother’s place in situations like these! If Mother were alive—”

  “Don’t start! If Mother were alive, she’d respect my wishes. But she’s dead, Barbara. She’s been dead for over twenty years. And you won’t ever take her place in any situation!”

  “You are being mean and selfish!”

  “I’m being selfish. Look at you!”

  Our shouting match came to a sudden halt when Frank stood up and looked between us. He shook his head, then walked out of the room. Not much later, I heard him going out the front door.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Barbara said, but I had already decided to honor Frank’s unspoken request — to grow up — so I didn’t rise to the bait. She went on for about another thirty seconds, but conversations with Barbara, like earthquakes and dental appointments, always seem to last longer than they actually do. When she finally wound down, I even managed to hold back the 486 really spectacular comebacks I had been considering, and simply said, “I need to find Frank. You need to go home. We need to talk about this later.”

  “What do I tell Father Hennessey?” she whined.

  “That there has been a misunderstanding and that I’ll call him if I need him.”To administer Last Rites to my sister, I added silently. Okay, so I was only pretending to have grown up.

  “And Bettina Anderson wants to do the flowers! She’s going to be so upset with you.”

  “Who the hell is Bettina Anderson?”

  “You don’t remember her? You went to high school with her.”

  “I’m not just trying to irritate you, Barbara. I swear I didn’t go to high school with anyone named Bettina.”

  “Betty Zanowyk.”

  “Betty Zanowyk? Lizzy Zanowyk’s sister, maybe? I went to school with Lizzy Zanowyk. What does that have to do with this Bettina person?”

  “Bettina Anderson is Elizabeth Zanowyk. Or should that be the other way around? You know her, Irene. She called herself Betty Zanowyk after high school. Lizzy, Betty, and Bettina are all names that come from Elizabeth. She’s been Bettina Anderson for about five years now.”

  My head was aching again. “Let me guess. She’s not a Zanowyk because she got married to someone named Anderson?”

  “No, she got tired of being a ‘Z.’ She says she was subjected to alphabetic discrimination all her life.”

  “Barbara… please, go home.”

  “I don’t know if you should marry Frank. It’s not healthy to deal with anger by going off and pouting,” she said.

  “Barbara.” I said it very softly, with my teeth closed. She knows that when I say her name like that, she has gone too far. This has been instilled in her since childhood, when she learned about it the hard way. I use it sparingly.

  “He isn’t used to us yet, I suppose,” she mumbled.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We bicker. We fight. But we stick up for each other, too. Don’t you remember? Dad used to say it was because we’re Irish.”

  “I don’t know if it’s being Irish,” I said. “But it’s true that Frank’s quiet, for the most part. I can get him to shout, but most people can’t.”

  She smiled knowingly. “That’s how you know he loves you. I read about this in a magazine at the place where I get my nails done. If he’s willing to shout when he’s around you, it means he trusts you enough to get angry with you.”

  “Well then, Jesus Christ, Barbara, I must trust you to the depths of my soul. Go home. Let me get dressed and go after him.”

  She stood up, then asked, “How do you know he didn’t just drive off?”

  “His Volvo’s at Banyon’s, he’s too tall for the Karmann Ghia, and I didn’t hear him call for a cab. There’s a beautiful beach about a block away. Where do you suppose he went?”

  I FOUND HIM leaning against the railing at the top of the cliff, near the steps that lead from our street down to the beach.

  “Sure you want to go through with this wedding, Harriman? Barbara as a sister-in-law? Think it over.”

  “She’s not as bad as all that.”

  I didn’t reply. Why start another argument?

  “She’s just excited about our getting married,” he said. “She’s just trying to be helpful.”

  “I’ve told you how I feel about all the help I’ve been getting lately.”

  He smiled. “You’ve mentioned it.”

  We stood there for a moment, just watching the waves below.

  “Want to go for a walk on the beach?” he asked.

  I hadn’t been able to do that in weeks. He saw me brighten at the suggestion and led the way down the stairs.

  We hadn’t walked far when he said, “You were right the other night. There are people who try to do too much for you.”

  “I shouldn’t let it get to me. What happened with Barbara happens to all engaged couples, I suppose. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on us now.”

  “I can’t wait to find out what Episcopalian minister in Bakersfield my mother has set up for us. But she’s probably gone further than Barbara. Watch out. If we don’t set a date, she will.”

  “Just promise me you won’t ever get the two of them together. God knows what they’d plan for our lives.”

  He shuddered and I laughed.

  He took my hand as we made our way down the beach. In spite of the run-in with Barbara, I was feeling good. Gradually, something was reawakening within me. It might have been my courage.

  6

  MONDAY WAS A COOL but sunny day, my first day driving myself to work. In celebration of that newfound independence, I put the top down on the Karmann Ghia and took to the streets of Las Piernas at a speed that created a biting windchill factor inside the car. Well worth it.

  Even downtown morning traffic didn’t dampen my spirits. I parked the car, put the top up, and went into work.

  When I got to my desk, the phone rang. I answered.

  Nothing. Not even breathing.

  “Sorry, wrong number,” I said, and hung up.

  I took off my coat and started sorting my mail. There’s always a lot of mail to deal with on a Monday, but with the approach of Christmas, the usual onslaught tripled. A large percentage of it arrived in colored envelopes.

  Since receiving the letter from Thanatos, I had developed a daily postal ritual. First, I carefully separated out all mail in colored envelopes. Then I sorted the colored envelopes. As I went through them, I made a special stack for those without return addresses, addressed to me on white computer labels. This would be the last stack I opened. I started in on my other mail.

  The phone rang again. Again, no one on the line. I hung up and called Doris, the switchboard operator. No, she hadn’t put any calls through to me that morning.

  I shrugged it off. The calls weren’t being made after lunch time, so they probably weren’t bei
ng made by the watcher. And there was no watcher anyway, I reminded myself. None. No one. Think about something else. At this rate, someday I would be the one writing letters about dogs picking Super Bowl winners.

  Still, it made me feel a little spooky about the last stack of mail. I got a cup of coffee, logged on to my computer, checked my calendar. Told myself to get it over with, picked up the stack, shuffled them, counted them. Thirteen. Thirteen? Better check the count, I thought, then became so angry with myself that I ripped the first one open. A coupon for a discount on carpet cleaning. I was more careful in handling the others, but that coupon turned out to be the most spectacular item in the group. So much for my frightening mail.

  I went to work on a story that would run near New Year’s Day, our annual standard story on new laws and programs going into effect January 1. Said, “Yes, it’s great to have the cast off,” to at least two dozen well-wishers.

  I ate lunch in the building, telling myself I stayed in because I was so busy, not because of the phone calls. I kept distracted by my work and coworkers for the rest of the afternoon. It was dark when I left the building, but as I stepped out the door and glanced toward my car, I came to a halt.

  My parking lights were on.

  For a brief moment, I was simply confused by it. Had I turned the parking lights on? No, I was certain I hadn’t.

  The next thought: Two phone calls.

  Lydia came out the door and said cheerfully, “It must be great to be able to drive again.”

  “Walk me to my car, would you, Lydia?”

  She followed my gaze and said, “Uh-oh. Worried about your battery? No problem. I’ve got jumper cables in my car. Why did you turn your lights on this morning?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how—”

  “He’s trying to scare me.”

  “Who? Who’s trying to scare you?”

  I hesitated. Lydia had been dealing with my unfounded fears on a daily basis. Thanatos suddenly seemed like a crazy answer to her question. I forced a smile. “No one, no one. Sorry. I was just thinking about something else. I don’t know why I turned the lights on. Haven’t driven for a while, so I guess I was out of practice.”