Evening. Nessa Rapoport
a day when the names would require an identifying footnote. And yet these women—Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bentley, Winifred Holtby, as well as the friends they cite with presumed familiarity—are almost entirely forgotten.
When Nell graduated from the University of Toronto, she was written up in The Globe and Mail as the only woman in her class to teach in Western Canada. I see her striding to work on the prairie, her hair wound around her head in sinuous plaits, her shirtdress billowing behind her. I hear her students calling out “Miss” respectfully as she writes the upper- and lowercase alphabet on the board.
How did she live alone in Saskatchewan? How did her family allow her to go off like that?
“How could we stop her?” was Nana’s retort.
All that beauty and conviction: look what became of it. She, too, lies in the ground. So does one of the lovely daughters she bore, who starved herself and died before her mother. So does the professorial husband Nell wed impetuously after a three-day courtship in New York and tormented the length of their ill-starred marriage. She should have stayed home, the pundits in Toronto wagged their tongues. Plenty of suitors, but she was headstrong.
This afternoon, as I got into the car on the way to the cemetery, I put up my hair. Now the back of my neck feels skinned by the bitter air. It is one year since Tam heard the news that became her fate, a year since she called me to say that the possible roads had narrowed to a footpath only she could take.
In New York, the winter day was unfairly brilliant and auspicious. The river, next to which I walked for hours, was studded with ice that fractured the light and flung it back to me. Over my head the occasional plane dipped and vanished into the sun. I longed to vanish, like Amelia Earhart, leaving no place to mark my end.
Instead, I marched into the nearest hairdresser and said to the woman who lifted my curls admiringly, “Cut it off.” Then I watched with grim satisfaction as the pelts fell around my feet.
When I met Simon that night, he swallowed visibly to mask his shock.
“Don’t say a word.” I stalked past him into the bedroom.
But when even the last medical means had been exhausted, Tam’s hair returned, while, hundreds of miles away, mine, too, began to grow back, with unseemly alacrity.
There is my great-aunt’s birth date on the stone. She and Nana, only one year apart. Did Nana ever feel as I do, axed like a surviving Siamese twin, the phantom half beyond reach but still present in some suspended, useless eternity?
People are starting to go, but I cannot turn away from my sister. As if departing from a king, I walk backward from the grave, a soldier in an honor guard whose watch is over but who will not relinquish her duties.
The wisecracking commentator within me fades. I am purely here, my heart a slippery fish, my bones splintering. The matter of which I’m made, the genetic material we share, is uttering its own refusal: I cannot leave her.
When the hum of the limousines grows louder, I turn around. My father, strangely protective, is helping my mother into the car. Hats, coats, and bodies around the grave have rearranged themselves like a kaleidoscope, pieces falling away from the center into rooms and lives that have nothing to do with Tam.
The first bite of snow stings my cheek. I want to rest, a dreamy sleep without this terror, the snow covering me tenderly, perfect crystals melting, then crusting into a patina over my temporal flesh, accruing in icy intricacy until I am a white testimony to my sister.
THREE
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INTRIGUED BY WHAT IS HIDDEN. As a child, I would stand behind my mother in the kitchen, forcing her to turn by crying out, “I want to understand everything.”
Although I like to pretend I have sprung from the head of Zeus, unshackled by my family’s idiosyncrasies, as soon as I come back I feel the press of my ancestors, demanding tribute for my neglect of their claims. My mind begins its speculations about how we came to be the way we are, unchastened by my mother’s refrain, “No one can understand everything. Not even you, my darling.”
Nana’s answer was more opaque. “Some stones are best left unturned.”
I begged her to tell me which ones she meant, but I already knew the tenacity of her closed face.
On the steps outside my mother’s house, I falter. An intuition, a warning pulse, stops me from crossing the threshold. I take a shuddering breath of conifer and cold. The door is ajar; I will myself to enter.
My parents sit apart in the middle of the living room. Between them, one low seat awaits me. My mother’s chest and mine bear a pin of torn black ribbon, symbol of heartbreak. But Nana and my father have done it the old-fashioned way. The lapel of Nana’s impeccably tailored jacket is ripped, expressing, I suspect, not only deference to tradition but fury. My father’s white dress shirt is conspicuously gashed.
The air is redolent with perfume, tuna fish, and boiled coffee, while visitors swarm about us, talking to each other in the hushed, excited manner that premature death invites.
When he still lived with us, my father was pedantic about closing the curtains as night fell, although, since we saw no houses beyond the garden, presumably no one was watching. One of my mother’s pleasures is to keep the curtains open through the night. I am distracted by the windows’ twilight reflection—masses of people in the choreography of a party.
The long buffet near the kitchen holds ziggurats of food. A communal busybody with pleated cheeks asks me officiously if I would like her to make me a plate.
“Can’t eat,” I say, and look around to catch Tam’s eye.
The sonorous voice I have been trying to quell makes its callous declaration: You will not speak to her again.
All those who approach loom over me. I greet their knees, subduing my panic, an inversion of the times my parents allowed us to mingle with the company for the cocktail hour.
My mother’s oldest friend, Marly, steps even closer. “Sweetie, you look exactly the same. I can see you, toddling after Tam. Eve the rebel,” she says to her husband in an indulgent non sequitur.
No wonder Nell went to New York and married in a weekend, I think mutinously.
“Tam never had an angry word for anyone,” Marly continues, her face crumpling. “She was so good. And she loved you more than words can say.”
Marly’s hackneyed paean to my sister is superimposed on Tam’s own words as our fight unfurls.
“You want it as much as I did,” Tam said. “You just don’t know how to work for it.”
She was lying in the hospital bed, looking up at me.
“Tam,” I protested. “I love my life.”
“What life? Teaching obscure women about obscure women? You’re in love with the past,” she accused me. “What about Simon?”
“He’s in the present,” I countered.
“It’s pathetic. You’re jealous of me,” she said suddenly.
I looked at my sister, her body emaciated and bloated, her destiny written on her skin.
Pity felt worse than rage. “I work hard, too,” I ventured.
“I’ve always believed in you,” Tam said. “But you’re still teaching night school.”
“Continuing education.”
“You keep saying you’ll move on, but you don’t.”
“Such