Sister Crazy. Emma Richler
Be a man.
‘Okay then.’
I lose. My dad is so happy, he is just delirious with mirth. He goes looking for some more of his kids right away. He tries it out on Harriet and Gus and wins both times. This is one of the funniest things that has happened in the whole of my dad’s life, it seems. He tells the story for years and years. This is the kind of thing that keeps him going.
It is possible, when my dad is stuck in a queue at the supermarket or in a traffic jam, he calls up these jokes, and things improve for him right then, he feels better. You have to find your own thing. My mother saying ‘Home, James’ in a very quiet blithe voice the day we came back from our abortive trip to the chemist that summer, on a quest for some stupid herbal remedy for depression, that makes me smile, it really does, anytime I think of it.
Here is a joke. Can you be a cowboy if you are Jewish? I do not know the punchline. One day I’ll ask my dad, who is Jewish and a cowboy, maybe the only one that ever lived.
7. ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU.
This is a very important rule and easy to slip up on. Here is how. You say to yourself, I have carried that book with me every single day this week and never once have I had time to pull it out and read it. It is making a big fat unseemly bulge in my pocket, it is bumping up against my hip when I walk, it is weighing me down. Today I am not taking it, goddamnit. That is the day your friend is forty minutes late and you are left at the restaurant with the foot of your crossed leg swinging loose and you have studied every face and every painting in the place. That is the day your bus gets caught in a traffic jam or you end up having to take someone to the emergency room and wait four hours for the person to emerge. Always carry a book with you.
Here, though, are two times I had a book with me and it was of no use.
This was the first time. It is my turn for the emergency room. I am there because I cut my hand pretty badly and sometime between diving onto the floor of my flat in a petrified faint and getting into a cab to the hospital, I grab a novel and slip it into my coat pocket. I have paid attention to rule number seven, yes I have. I choose Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, which I am reading for the second time. But when I am in Casualty, I am too sick to read. I am too sick and too scared. The nurse tries to speed me through. He asks, ‘Why are you so cold? How did this happen?’
I don’t know, I answer. I don’t feel well. I was cutting a bagel. I say this about the bagel because I have just read in a leaflet from a bagel shop that bagel-cutting injuries are a really common occurrence. I remember the bagel legend, too. How a Jewish baker invented the bagel in 1683 to commemorate the good deed performed by King Jan III of Poland. His good deed was this: he saved Vienna from a Turkish invasion. The bread was in the shape of a stirrup due to Jan’s love of equestrianism. In Austria the word for stirrup is Buegel. The name of the shop where I found the leaflet is Angel Bagel. Where was my angel tonight? Drunk somewhere, high on single malt. Nowhere for me. The thing is, I am lying about the bagel-cutting injury.
‘What are all those other cuts?’ the nurse asks.
‘I was reaching into a cupboard and I grazed my wrist on a cheese grater, how stupid can you get?’ I say in a rush.
If my dad saw me now with my cut-up wrists, he would be really really mad at me, although he would not say a thing. He would unstrap my holster and take away my gun. He would unpin my tin star. You are not fit to ride with me, that is what he would mean to tell me. You are no longer my right-hand man.
This brings me to rule number eight.
8. WHEN YOU ARE GOING THROUGH DARK TIMES, PACK UP YOUR KNIVES AND GIVE THEM TO A FRIEND.
I mean all of them, all your knives. If you are at all inclined to slice yourself up in dark times, to pretend you are a tomato, which is an ideal fruit for testing the sharpness of filleting knives, carpet cutters, cleavers, X-acto blades, Stanley knives and safety razor blades, to watch with fascination as the blood rises to the surface in particularly sensitive zones of your body such as wrists and ankles, then rule number eight is one for you. It will mean an expensive period of shopping at Marks & Spencer for ready meals, ones with bite-sized pieces of prawn or chicken in chilli tomato sauce, for instance. Or you can buy pricey pots of tomato sauce or roasted aubergines to put on pasta. Italian clam sauces are available in small jars from the best Italian delis. Or you can just eat a lot of yogurt and nuts and mashed banana. Buy bread in small shapes, i.e., bagels, or baguette de tradition you can break off bits from. It will be all right. If you feel like eating during dark times, you will not go hungry in a house empty of knives.
The second time I paid attention to rule number seven (ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU) and it was of no use to me was when my dad said goodbye to me before I took a coach to the airport on my way back home after my summer holiday, the one which featured the car ride and the quest for a herbal remedy for depression.
I have already waved to my mother. I asked her not to come with me because parting between us is a wrenching business, even for five minutes or so, even if we separate on a shopping expedition or something. I know I cannot go through the airport thing with her, no.
My dad lays his big hands on my little shoulders at the coach station, my two small cases at my feet. I am pretty sure my mother will have slipped some treat into my carry-on bag and I am looking forward to finding it as soon as my dad goes. Something about his two big hands on my shoulders just now has me worried. It feels ominous, like just before Joey warns Shane in the final shoot-out about the man aiming at him from the balcony. You know Shane cannot die, but he could. He could. He comes so close.
‘Jem,’ says my dad in a lower voice than usual.
I glance at his face and then stare at his chest. ‘We have done everything we can. We love you. We don’t know what else to do anymore. You have to look after yourself now. Got your ticket, passport, enough cash?’
‘Yuh.’
‘We’ll see you in a few months. We love you.’
As I watch him walk away from me, a slightly lurching walk, heels making their mark on the ground, arms swinging a little and the hands hovering loose but ready at holster height, I think, One shot. One shot is all it would take.
No, Jem, no. Never shoot a man in the back. Don’t you remember anything?
I want to scream after him, too. I want to scream, ‘Do you love me right now, though? Do you even like me now? Do you?’ But I just get on the coach and stare out of the window into the evening through a veil of tears, and at the airport I cannot read or eat the nice treats my mother stashed for me, I am good for nothing. My dad does not love me and I am on my own, I have to look out for myself, okay. These are my first steps in that direction and all I can do is pace up and down the airport lounge and cry quietly. There are no prizes for behaviour like mine and even rule number seven is of no use to me, goddamnit. I am thinking of making a pyre of my rule book or ripping it up in tight angry irretrievable pieces to flutter over the ocean. Tomorrow maybe. And I will never watch a western again. I hate westerns now.
9. ALWAYS HAVE SOME SPORTS NEWS AT HAND FOR WHEN YOUR DAD IS IN HOSPITAL AFTER A SCARY OPERATION TO DO WITH A FATAL DISEASE.
I’ve got my sports news ready in case my dad can talk to me, even for a few seconds. There was a tumour in him, they cut it out. My dad could have done this himself. Take a shot of cognac, stuff a hanky in your mouth, polish the knife on a rock, cut it out. Like snakebite, no problem. Today I might get to speak to him. Everyone is there with my mother – Ben, Jude, Harriet and Gus, even Ben’s wife and Gus’s girlfriend, who is pregnant. They have all flocked to him from wherever they live and are running and fetching and worrying and trying to joke with Mum and making calls to the outside world. I am the only one not there. Does he know it? Does he know I am not there? I am in the outside world. I just can’t go. I cannot be there. I am on the outside, waiting for calls. Sometimes the boys explain things to me about the operation, but I do not take it in. I have the same feeling when someone is explaining an abstruse political news item to me. It is a nightmare of information. I listen and nod and hope the person will shut up soon. I do not take it in. I tell myself,