Evening. Nessa Rapoport
the lawn.
I dragged Tam’s desk chair to the dresser, my heart clattering. When I pulled its glinting handle, the secret drawer made a plaintive sound.
Below me, my mother was making her own kitchen sounds. I hoped I had calibrated the friction in the house precisely, with my parents in their separate principalities. When I would hear their voices rise in the crescendo they could not dampen, I’d dream of being invisible. First, I would be Eve, and then I’d simply dissolve, transparent Eve-molecules surveying their former domain in unassailable tranquility.
The light was already dim, but I could not admit my presence by turning on the lamp. For a minute I hesitated, imagining all too easily the purgatory to which Tam would consign me if she found me posed at her dresser. Then, as usual, my passion to know everything prevailed.
Peering over the lip of the open drawer, I saw only two treasures, positioned perfectly like every other object in her room. A purple felt whiskey bag, its gold drawstring tight. And a locked diary, whose key was inexplicably beside it.
Unsurprisingly, the diary was the focus of my attention. Swiveling the tiny key to release the clasp, I eagerly turned the waxy, scented pages. What would I discover that would explain with finality not Tam’s secrets but the secret of Tam, the fascination she held for me in her orderliness, her certainty about what she wanted, and the discipline she could so easily summon to get it.
But there were no confidences in these pages. Tam’s diary read like an army manual: “Morning: Up: 6:45 a.m. Sit-ups: 10 min. Shower: 7 min. Dress: 3 min. Eat: 5 min. Brush teeth: 1.5 min. School. Home: English: 40 min. History: 35 min. Called Anne: 7 min. Susie called me: 9 min. Bed: 9:45. Anthology: 15 min.”
I read every page, yawning with tedium and yet compelled. There was something ferocious, spellbinding, in her relentless transcription of the mundane.
Today’s date had no writing. I fanned the future’s pages. Blank. Blank.
And then, isolated in capital letters: “EVE.”
I turned the page and squinted to read the lone sentence.
“I know something Eve doesn’t know.”
Even when I splayed the last pages, the diary held no clue to help me decode her tantalizing prelude. Tam had verbalized the operating assumption of our lives.
I yanked open the mouth of the whiskey bag. In seconds I was coughing spasmodically from soap dust. Tam seemed to have saved every bar of soap Daddy had brought us from the hotel rooms of his European trips. Now they were disintegrating in her secret drawer. I jammed the diary’s clasp into the lock and shoved the drawer closed.
It was truly dark. My father must have come inside. I heard my mother’s annoyed rejoinders, while outside the sprinkler began its consoling night music. Then Tam was calling me to supper. I would have to enter the dining room’s abrupt light, guarding my own secret while all my feelings for her—devotion, guilt, and a confused yearning—lobbied me in competing percussion.
The first shovelful of earth knocks brutally on the wood of the coffin. My father has always set store by the uncompromising rituals of Jewish mourning. To participate in burial honors the dead. He straightens up and steps back from the edge.
I wish I could lift one of the shovels lying about for this purpose, move a single clot of earth from the raw mound to the grave, particularly when I see Nana wrestling with the metal handle, her white puffs of breath like an SOS in the crystalline air. No one tries to dissuade her.
Then Ella says, “Now, Daddy?” I look down to see her quite lyrically arch into the sky the rose Ben gives to her. Almost black, like a smudge of blood, it falls into the hole without a sound.
I bite my lip to prevent my whimpering. The wind has picked up, piercing my chest. The rims of my ears feel brittle. Arrhythmic thumps are having a strange effect inside my head. Now I know what people mean when they say the earth rushes up, I think idly. But I do not find out what fainting feels like, because Laurie grasps my arm, standing so firmly at my wilting side that I cannot fall.
The purity of the air has heightened my senses. I can smell Laurie’s skin, feel through my coat the nubby texture of his. Beside my feet are embossed leather wingtips, neatly aligned.
When I knew Laurie, he wore cowboy boots, fringed suede vests, and silk shirts I couldn’t wait to pull out of his jeans.
As the funeral ends, I remember the least predictable fact about him. Beneath the weathered denim, Laurie wore nothing.
The first time I undressed him, I had been more surprised by the immediacy of his nakedness than by the fact that my friendship with him seemed to have undergone spontaneous combustion. One moment he was Tam’s younger buddy, exemplar of Toronto’s provincial confidence. Then my startled face undid all the sophistication I’d affected to deter his interest. “Now look who’s provincial,” his bobbing penis seemed to say.
The boys I knew before Laurie wore white jockeys, and I would have bet money on Laurie as a white jockey guy.
“Eve!”
I jump. It is Tam, exasperated by my discursion at her funeral on men’s underwear.
“I can’t help it,” I whisper back.
As if in divine affirmation, my eyes light on the tombstone ahead. There, in simple lettering, my great-aunt Nell’s name is inscribed. I thought she was buried somewhere in Arizona, where she’d lived in old age, but the family must have decided to bring her home.
Throughout my twenties, I traveled. While others traipsed from sight to sight in classic European cities, I could be found at a café table, my notes before me untouched as I waited in the sleepy square of an Iron Curtain town, sipping an iced drink, encircled by children hawking souvenirs, the dusty trees almost motionless. I frequented markets; I listened to women haggling over desiccated root vegetables.
Ostensibly, I was engaged in research, following in the footsteps of young British women who had set out at the end of the Great War to assess in writing the consequences of the catastrophe that had decimated a generation of fiancés, husbands, and brothers. Certainly I was becoming an expert on atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Tam’s alarm clock was ringing before dawn. She washed her hair, ate in the car as she drove downtown, and took the elevator skyward to a production room where she worked without lunch until well after dark. Tam had been assured that if she persevered, she had the talent to be on the air.
Although Tam knew the chic places that had begun to spring up near her job, we met for our reunions at Fran’s, the all-night dive of our high school years. There we would sit in the corner booth, drinking refills of coffee into which we poured one fluted container of cream after another.
Our brains lit up by caffeine, we played our parts. She ranked herself on the scale of her ambition. I relayed my adventures, with a soupçon of misgiving.
“My tombstone will declare, ‘She had potential.’”
Tam restated her belief in me. “No,” she said. “‘Late bloomer.’”
Sitting in the coffee shop window, her face illuminated by the sporadic glare of the dwindling cars on St. Clair Avenue, she wistfully added, “When I die, mine will be inscribed: ‘She didn’t have enough fun.’”
I contradicted her. “‘She knuckled down.’”
I did not know what would become of me. My classmates were now earnest graduates of law or medical school, while I dawdled in Central Europe, imagining myself into the purposeful lives of the women my grandmother loved to read. Within a decade of their journeys after the war, they would be eminent writers, known by English readers throughout the world for their pioneering entry into the public realm, their underlined novels, pamphlets, and speeches