By the time Durk was four years old, Ashley’s first potential mother-in-law had turned him over to the state. There was a short interim where he lived in foster homes he says he doesn’t remember before he was adopted by a woman old enough to be his grandmother. He got a legal mother through the adoption but not a father. The lady’s husband wouldn’t let the lawyers print his name on the court documents.
The lady who adopted Durk kept him warm and properly fed. He was fully vaccinated and safe, the way anyone would be with his own in-house social worker. When he turned eighteen, Durk stuffed his huge, smelly football equipment bag with everything he owned and fired her as his social worker, as his mom, as his daughters’ grandmother, as Ashley’s mother-in-law. None of us has ever met her.
Tina has never met her mother-in-law either. Martin’s mother was one of the Socialite Suicides of the 1980s. Remember them? They were those sad, rich ladies—ones who acted out clichés like long black cigarette holders and martini lunches and pet peacocks. In another cliché, they became so crushed beneath their own ennui that six of them killed themselves within two years. Most of them took civilized overdoses of what people used to call “tranquilizers.” Typically the socialites were found dead in their beds, Marilyn Monroe style.
Martin’s mom liked luxury cars better than she liked movie stars. After her kids were in bed and the staff were finished for the night, she shut all four of the garage doors and turned on the ignition of her silver 1950 Bentley. Martin’s father had given it to her the same winter she met his mistress in person. That night, Martin’s mother sat in the dark of the garage and waited. The car ran out of gas after she was asphyxiated, and just before Martin and his brothers would have been sick from the carbon monoxide seeping into the house through the ceiling and walls. They were unharmed, but the paramedics rushed them to the hyperbaric chamber in Calgary anyway.
It’s not like Martin’s mother meant to annihilate her family. She was just never troubled by trifles.
The family sold the silver Bentley. Now it’s an exhibit in one of those travelling auto shows. It’s the Hope Diamond of death-cars—pristine and tragic and cursed.
The last time the auto show came through the city, Tina wrapped a silk scarf around her head, topped it with a big hat and sunglasses. She paid the gate admission and found her mother-in-law’s Bentley. It was parked inside an arena, diagonal on a maroon carpet, rimmed with velvet ropes, the doors open. Tina ducked under the ropes, bent her body—pregnant belly and everything—through the driver’s door. She sat behind the wheel, the tip of her pinky fingernail slid into the ignition’s keyhole. If she turned her finger, the nail would have broken off, the ragged-edged sliver falling through the slot, disappearing into the machine. Tina tipped her head back, against the seat, crushing the brim of her hat, closing her eyes behind her sunglasses. And she stayed there, trying to sense—something. She didn’t move until a guy with a walkie-talkie and a T-shirt marked STAFF politely asked her to step out of the car.
“Another overgrown Goth-girl,” she heard the auto show guy report.
When they first got married, Tina believed it was dutiful and helpful to coax Martin to talk about the Socialite Suicides.
He was confused, genuinely bewildered. Martin’s emotions are bizarre and inappropriate most of the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re always faked.
“Talk about it?” he’d said. “What do you want me to say?”
“Well, maybe you should start by telling me how your mom’s death made you feel.”
“Why? Anyone can imagine how it would make someone feel.”
“Sure, but what if the feelings I imagine for you aren’t the right ones?”
“Of course they’re the right ones. Why wouldn’t they be?”
That’s how it always went. Tina hasn’t broached the Socialite Suicides with Martin in years, not since she sat in the Bentley herself.
The story of the end of Heather’s mother-in-law is the one we like least. Heather did meet her mother-in-law. We all did. We called her Carol. Heather and her mother-in-law knew each other for over ten years before the end.
It was a difficult decade, as most people’s final ten years usually are. During that time, Carol was poor, morbidly obese, and probably mentally ill. Her blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar—everything in every cell of her body was strained to breaking. Her first heart attack hurt. She couldn’t breathe, and the violent diarrhoea that came with it—her body jettisoning cargo, desperate to do something—was a particularly rude surprise. No one tells people to expect these things. We talk about heart attacks in terms of a crushing but civilized sense of doom and pain above the waist, never a feral collapse of the lower works. We medical people are complicit in it. At the hospital, we quietly clean everyone up, and the secret stays safe.
Carol said bypass surgery and the recovery from it were worse than the heart attack itself. She’s not the only person to think so. I hear it often from patients in the ICU still groggy from brushes with clinically controlled death, stapled shut and sore.
“I know what she’s trying to do,” Heather intoned to me over the telephone. It was the day Ewan had to drive his mom back to her house in the middle of a visit, the day Heather discovered Carol had been staying with them for three days without the blister pack of prescriptions she needed to stay well. “Carol knows there’s more than one way to make sure she doesn’t have to live through the recovery from another heart attack.”
I don’t know if Carol brought her pills with her the last time she came to stay at Heather’s house. It was midway through the morning, after Ewan and the kids had left for the day, when Heather carried a load of clean laundry into the bedroom where Carol was sleeping—only she wasn’t sleeping.
When the ambulance didn’t arrive the moment Heather ended her 911 call, she hopped onto the bed, kneeling beside her mother-in-law. Heather is a person who fixes things, not a person who waits for things. She knew just enough emergency first aid to believe she had better try to fix this too.
She stayed there, compressing Carol’s chest with the heels of her hands, until the paramedics came. In all that time, with all that pressure, the skin on Carol’s sternum never bruised. The fat beneath it was waxy like the untrimmed edge of a pork chop palpated through plastic wrap in a grocery store cooler. Between compressions, Heather stooped to blow breath after breath into Carol’s throat, sealing the void with her own mouth.
I’ve seen death countless times in the hospital, as a professional. In intensive care units like mine, rolling out a green sterile carpet for death to strut in on is what we do. I’ve seen death happen, watched it dawning over everything. But Heather is one of the few people—maybe the only person I’ll ever know—who can say what human death tastes like. And not “tasting death” in some ephemeral poetic sense, but in the real sense—lips and teeth. She tried to tell me about it once, not to shock me but to comfort me, as if she was afraid I might think it was worse than it had turned out to be.
“Everything is there, the whole planet—mucus membranes and saliva that’s cold like something spat on the street. There’re yellow plaques, un-brushed morning teeth, wet dental metal, all the sugar and salt that’s never quite swallowed away. It’s cold but it tastes,” she said, “like anyone would taste when you get too close.”
Two months after Carol was buried, Heather began an apprenticeship as a mortician, working a few days a week in a pastel stucco funeral home. She told us it was inevitable. She told us it was only a sign of bad high school guidance counselling that she hadn’t known to choose a career in the funeral industry instead of mucking around at university getting that criminology degree. She told us to ignore the timing, that her new job was a long time in coming and hadn’t begun with her mother-in-law’s death.
Maybe it begins in the same place for everyone who does Heather’s work—someplace defiant, near the need to reject the secrec
y meant to protect us, hiding death away from us so we can live. A funeral—an embalming or a cremation—is an interruption of decay, a re-routing, a hijacking. In that way, Heather devastates devastation every day. Death has a thousand yellow-grey faces she can know, features for her to set in peaceful poses. My sister takes death by its hands, lifts it, turns it, drains it, and fills it. She’s mortal as anything, but she’s moving through the ends of all those worlds, upright, alert, warm and alive, taking everything apart.
Meaghan
[2]
There’s a broad, flat television screen flashing from the rafters. And there must be something wrong with me, because I’m standing underneath it, here at my local video game store, again. The store is usually deserted this late in the evening, after all the commuters have cleared out of the downtown. I have no idea how they make any money. But tonight there’s a small, surly crowd gathered behind me. They’re teenaged geek-boys who may never be mature enough to know how to approach something as feminine as me. They’re watching over my shoulder, scowling at my thumbs swivelling and tapping at the plastic game controller moulded into the shape of mushy, damp man-hands much bigger than my own.
“Die, already,” the snotty short-guy of the group mutters. He’s their fearless leader. And on the Openly-Perturbed-by-Females index, he’s moved well beyond being intimidated by me and on to being infuriated.
No fear, Meaghan. Don’t look back at them.
I stand here, fighting to stay aloof and statuesque, resisting the twitches and flinches my stupid nervous system involuntarily synchronizes with the lights on the screen.
The angry geek-boy blows out a loud sigh. The sound is directed toward the counter, where a grownup geek-man is usually sitting on a high stool, one hand cupped around his bearded chin, the other hand flipping pages of a gaming magazine written mostly in Italian.
“Dude,” the boy calls to him, “she’s been stuck on this level for fifteen minutes.”
There’s movement in my peripheral vision. The man behind the counter has raised his head to glance at me. That’s all.
The boy tries again. “Come on, man. Don’t you have, like, a store policy on time limits for game demos?”
“Nope,” the man says into the magazine.
I want to look at him properly, this man who refuses to take control of me even though I’m in his space, even though another guy is calling on him to do it. But I don’t look. Even something as small as that look would be giving up ground.
Petulant leader-boy huffs. “There’s no way you’d let any one of us stand here and demo a game for this long while paying customers were waiting to try it. You know what this is, man? It’s sexism—reverse sexism.”
I love that gag. I laugh out loud without looking away from the screen.
The man behind the counter closes the magazine. “Look, bro, you’re welcome to buy the game and take it home.”
“Yeah? Well, she can buy the game and take it home too.” There’s shuffling behind me as the boy widens his stance even though it will make him shorter. “I am not spending any money on this until I get a firsthand sense of the game play.”
I toss the game controller back onto the display’s stand. “Its game play is pretty ballistic,” I say. “Good for noobs. You’ll be fine.”
I walk away, all swag, like I’m an actor in a movie about myself. I move toward a rack of magazines with names like Game-ista and PlayProX and flick one of them open, flattening it against the glass countertop.
From the opposite end of the counter, the store clerk glances at me again. I’m bent over at the waist in my turquoise, seaweed-cloth yoga pants, scanning pages full of gun barrels and undead minions. I hope stupid gravity isn’t making me look misshapen. I’m the curvy sister—too curvy, if you ask me. Ashley says not to worry about it. She calls me “voluptuous” even though the last traces of her childhood speech impediment make the word an almost impossible mouthful for her. That’s Ashley: she’ll happily grapple with “voluptuous” if there’s a chance it’ll make me happy.
Whatever anyone calls my figure, I’m getting sick of it. I’ve been seriously considering doing something crazy like eliminating all hard cheeses from my diet, at least until after my wedding.
The clerk behind the counter shifts to look at his T-shirt rumpled beneath his cardigan. It’s printed with a picture of a fierce panda bear. It must give him courage. He speaks to me. “Hey, I definitely don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but are you ever going to, you know, buy anything here?”
I look up from the magazine. I’d prefer to seem poised and cool right now, but when I’m not all noble with indignation, I can’t deadpan anything. I’m like a little kid that way, painfully earnest, and I hate it. He probably notices my tiny smile as I answer, “Someday, maybe.”
Despite my dumb, accidental warmth, he swallows like his mouth has gone dry as he says, “So if you’re not exactly a customer, how come you’re here?”
I let a long breath out my nose. I know what I need to get through this: Heather. If I can’t be tough and curt, I can at least be Heather. I can say whatever I want.
“Alright. I had it out with my boyfriend on Sunday night, okay. He’s been getting all huffy because of the ‘inappropriate’ amount of time I spend gaming. So every night since then, I’ve been telling him I’m going to the gym. But then I come here instead so we don’t have to argue about it. That’s what you call a successful relationship, my friend, one where everyone is sufficiently sheltered from their own unhappiness.”
It’s far more information than he asked for, and something about it must feel like a gift. He takes more courage and says, “It’s not that I mind the foot traffic in the store or anything, but, I mean, why don’t you tell your boyfriend you’re headed back to your own place and go play at home?”
I laugh. “He’s at my home. We live together. We’re engaged.”
He looks sceptical.
“What?” I demand.
“Engaged?” He seems the right age to have lots of engaged friends. “Chronically engaged or, like, seriously engaged?”
I don’t know him, but I shove him with one hand anyway. I’ve slipped from being Heather into acting more like Tina—not just mouthy but sparking with impulsive aggression. “Seriously engaged,” I say. “We have a wedding date and everything: March 15th. And you can spare me the Ides of March remarks. It was the only day that month we could book the church hall his mom wanted.”
He’s squinting at the hand that’s just shoved him. “Engaged with no ring?”
“It’s the twenty-first century,” is all I say as I lean back, jamming my hands into the tight, undersized pockets on the front of my hoodie. I do have an engagement ring—a classic, brilliant cut white diamond like the one on the luxury tax square of a Monopoly game. I made Ian promise he’d buy one mined out of a pit in the far north of our own country, where I can be sure it’s never been smuggled in someone’s colon. I don’t wear it because the band is a little too tight. By the end of the day it makes my finger swell like links of cartoon sausage. Ian offered to have it resized, but I told him to leave it. The bad fit is good motivation for losing some of my cuddly, engaged-girl weight.
There’s something inside my pocket. My fingers recognize it and pull it into the open to vindicate me. It’s a small swatch of satin fabric cut with pinked edges. The card stapled to it identifies its colour as lime green, no matter what Suzanne says.
“This,” I say to the clerk. “See this? It’s a fabric sample for my bridesmaid dresses. We already ordered them.”
He raises both his hands. “Okay, okay. You’re seriously engaged.”
I nod. “That’s right. And that’s my story.”
“Great.”
“Want me to tell you your story?” I curl the green fabric around my finger as I step closer to the counter. “Let me guess your story. I’m good at
this. You can’t be solid cliché. It’d be way too easy if you were one of those video game store clerk tropes. You know, a guy in a panda T-shirt who’s got three quarters of the credits he needs to finish his physics degree, but will probably never make it back to school. One of those people who doesn’t have a girlfriend though he’s starting to wonder about maybe meeting that chick from his favourite message board in person, hoping she doesn’t turn out to be another bored twenty-something guy. And, of course, in the video game store cliché, he’d have to live at home, in the suburbs with his mom. That couldn’t possibly be you, right?”
His laugh isn’t genuine. His head droops and his shoulders rise, like he’s slightly suffocated. “Uh—no. Solid cliché—no. Mostly, no,” he says. “It’s an unfinished creative writing degree, actually. And my mom—she’s dead.”
Behind my glasses, I raise one eyebrow. “Your mom is dead? For real?”
He shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Yeah, for real. People die all the time. It should be normal, though it never is.”
I’m not Heather or Tina anymore. I’m humble, regretful me—which looks sort of like Suzanne.
“I am so sorry,” I say. We stand on either side of the counter, looking down as if we’re both reading the same ad for the upcoming release of Mech-Commandos 4 taped to the underside of the glass. I can’t help but smile again, but I manage to keep it from spreading further than just one half of my mouth. I’m raising my head, saying, “Awkward is something else I’m good at.”
He snorts a quiet but real laugh. “Don’t worry about it.”
I pluck my phone out of my waistband to check the time. “Look, it’s nine o’clock now. Throw these kids out, lock up, and let’s go somewhere.”
He blinks. “Go somewhere? Like where?”
Sistering Page 3
