All the Houses (18 page)

She told us to take a seat, it would be a few minutes, and Courtney asked, “Do you know how many minutes?” Her way of talking to people behind desks and counters made me cringe. Her voice took on this high pitch, and her eyes widened, she would be “sweet” in a way that seemed obviously fake to me. The nurse took it in stride, though.

“No more than five or ten,” she said. “Fifteen at the most.”

“Because our appointment was for eleven,” Courtney said.

Courtney had a kind of authority, or two kinds, a false authority and a true: there were the high-pitched and bossy phrases that jumped out of her mouth, but then there was her physical authority, a latent, athletic power to which people responded. It was a simple enough mistake, for her to conclude that the respect had come about because of what she said and how she said it.

But her physical grace, why couldn't I have had that? Even reclining onto a gurney-type blood-draw table in a clinical box of a room, she might have been sunbathing; someone might have come to dangle grapes over her lips—but never over mine as I scooted my butt up toward the center of my table, crunching and tearing the paper bedding as I went.

When we were young, the saying “The one with the most toys wins” had been printed on notepads and coffee mugs—a joke, but one derived from real desires, real fears. The peculiar warp of those fears had made us the peculiar children we were, stalked by the greeds we'd grown up around. I would like to offer into evidence Courtney's crocodile boots, jutting off the end of her table.

The nurse tied a length of rubber so tightly around my arm I thought there would be no blood left in it, but before she stuck me she patted the vein inside my elbow almost tenderly, with as tender a touch as can come from a stranger in latex gloves. Then the needle went in.

The room was all corners and sharp things, my sister the sharpest. Like a long, elegant pair of scissors. She was saying, and I realized she'd been talking this out in her head ever since the car ride, that Hugo just didn't engage, didn't really even speak that much. If he would just ask her how her day had gone, that would be something at least. And it was like he constantly needed instructions, she said, she was always having to tell him what to do.

She started to full-on vent about her marriage, veering back and forth between generalizations—“lack of trust” was one—and minute particulars, e.g., she didn't like that Hugo sometimes put large items, such as padded mailing envelopes, into the bathroom trash can. Honestly none of it seemed so bad to me, but I understood her to be saying that she wasn't sure she loved him the way she once had, and I also understood, by the way she was saying it, that she really had loved him and maybe still did. I'd never given her full credit for it. Some part of me resisted believing in her feelings, preferred to think that she didn't actually have any.

I wasn't entirely sympathetic, though. She'd been giving instructions since she learned to speak—so far as I know she'd wailed them out before then—and it was inconceivable that she could have married anyone who was not inclined to take orders. Moreover, she was, based on my own experience, a difficult person to live with, given her particular food needs and missionary enthusiasms and fast-changing moods. Aware that I had to agree with her but not say anything negative about Hugo that might be held against me later, I said as little as I could.

“But. There are good things,” she said. “And I mean we've got the house now.”

I couldn't tell whether she meant that the house was one of the good things, or whether she'd said it to refute some other, unstated possibility. And then, from where I don't know, a ray of warmth passed over: it felt, for a moment, as though the venom might be cleansed out of us, whatever spoiled old things were in our veins might be sucked up into the sterile bags that hung beside us on poles. Who would protect me in this world if not my older sister? My sudden wish was to climb onto her table with her, get under the covers as we had in our parents' bed, back when they shared a bed—but there wasn't room for two on a gurney.

I am an optimistic sibling this way. I've always maintained an ideal of sisterly affection, like a photograph of a model in a bikini taped to the edge of a mirror.

“How's your place?”

“It's all right. Dad hates it.”

“He probably wishes you'd stayed at home with him,” she said.

“Yeah, I just couldn't stay there.”

“I thought that's why you came back, though, to look after him.”

My body tightened. “That's part of it, but … Anyway he's okay. He doesn't need someone looking after him twenty-four seven.”

“He did end up back in the hospital.”

“That was a false alarm,” I said. “I was never planning to stay there, like, long term.”

“Why did you come back here then? To write a book?” She made it sound like writing a book was an exotic hobby, along the lines of paragliding, and I chose not to answer the question.

“Honestly it seems like he's doing fine.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She sighed the most irritating of sighs and then said, “You know, you haven't been around.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does it mean to say that you haven't been here? That you can just run away from everything and do whatever the hell you want?”

“Is that what you're mad about?”

“I'm not mad,” she said, and raised her knees, boots resting on the end of the gurney. I looked over at her and saw that her eyes were closed. I couldn't tell if she was thinking things over or falling asleep. After a long pause, she said, “I'm not mad at you.”

“Okay.”

“I do feel that you have distanced yourself from our family.”

“I'm here now,” I said.

“I'm just trying to tell you how I feel, so please don't argue with me. This is how I feel.”

“Right.”

We were silent for a while, and the next time she spoke there was no trace of the frost from before. Abrupt changes of heart—or at least, of tone—were normal for her, while my temper shifted much more gradually. “So what else is going on?”

“Not much,” I said slowly. “What else is going on with you?”

“Actually there's this guy at my office—”

“Michael?”

“I've mentioned him before?”

“A couple of times.”

“I don't know if I told you, I went to Chicago last week for a meeting? He went too, it was just the two of us from our office. We flew out and back together. And he's handsome, at least I think he is. He's married, it's not like anything happened or would ever happen, but on the plane, it was like, oh shit. I mean, we weren't even drinking, but—”

“Planes are romantic.”

“It's weird, isn't it? It's so weird. They're so gross, airplanes are nasty. How can they be so gross and still sexy?”

“Gay dudes hook up in men's rooms.”

“There are some things that sound cool to me about being a gay man, and having sex in a public restroom is definitely not one of them. Anyway. We talked the whole flight there, and the whole flight back, and it was clear that if we'd been single…”

“You're not, though.”

“I'm not. I'm married.”

“You are married.”

“It was like I could tell him everything. I can't remember the last time I talked to somebody like that. And there was that thing, I was so painfully aware of every time he moved a muscle, I knew exactly where his arm was, his leg was. It was like being in eighth grade and having a crush on the guy next to you in class.”

“Sounds flirty,” I said. I was trying to sound more neutral than I felt.

“It's not cheating, to flirt.”

“How would you feel if Hugo flirted like that with some woman on a plane?”

“I don't know. I think it can spice things up a little. I mean, when I got home we did have really good sex, better than we've had in, like, a while.”

“So are you still flirting with this guy?”

“There is such a thing as context,” she said.

“Context. Okay.”

“I hate to tell you this, but—”

“I just don't get it because I'm not married.”

“That wasn't what I was going to say.”

“Yes it was.”

She didn't respond, and I realized there was a radio playing, tuned to one of those soft-rock stations that play the blander tunes of the 1970s and call it “magic.”

“You know, we're going to have plenty of room in the new house, if you need a place to stay for a while.”

“I have an apartment.”

“But if you wanted to look for someplace else.”

“I don't think I need to do that,” I said.

“It's not a great neighborhood you're in.”

“Sorry I can't afford a house in Spring Valley.”

Both of us lay back and were quiet again as the blood went gurgling out of us. I closed my eyes and then opened them. After the draw was done we were led to another room, where we were supposed to wait out any dizzy or fainting spells—or in our case a silent spell, with a silent spell's invisible heft. We were sentinels of the space closest to us, tacticians at a yard or so, and cared thickly for each other from ten feet away—but don't come any closer, please. We oscillated, each of us by turns crowding the other one, or shutting the other one out, or both at once.

An old lady volunteer offered us cookies and juice. Courtney declined and I accepted, munching loudly. After I took one, the woman rearranged the remaining cookies on the plate in such a way that they were evenly spaced, then offered the plate again. She asked whether we were sisters. Maybe only siblings and spouses sat in that kind of silence, not the silence after a fight but the silence that substitutes for fights you might as well just have in your head, shadow-boxing with your shadow sister.

“I feel kind of funny,” I said. “Dizzy.” The volunteer assured me it would pass. Her double chin and wide neck made her face into a kind of pliable rectangle, all the more rectangular because she had a boxy masculine haircut, pouffed at the top, Clintonesque. How did she know it would pass? What if they had taken too much out of me? I asked whether it was possible to get my blood put back in.

“You can't get it back,” Courtney said.

“Why not? They're going to put it in somebody, right? I just think I want it back, in me,” I said. “Right now.”

“I'm not sure that we can do that here,” the volunteer said.

“I really don't feel right. I think I needed that blood.”

“Get a grip on yourself,” Courtney said.

“It's my blood!”

“You donated it.”

“You pressured me into it.”

“No I didn't.”

“I think I remember my acupuncturist in L.A. saying that I have a blood deficiency,” I said.

“I don't think that means you have a low volume of blood.”

“Why wouldn't it mean that?” In fact, I had no earthly idea what that, or anything else my acupuncturist had ever said to me, truly meant, but I did want my blood to be reinstated. Here was a part of myself I'd given away without enough forethought, and in that light-headed moment I felt that if I could just take those pints of blood back, it would mean something.

“I want it back. I just want it back.” The volunteer regarded me with what appeared to be genuine concern in her milky eyes. I bowed my head. “Please.”

“I really don't think it works like that,” Courtney said.

“I'm not like you!” I said. She was wrong, wrong about everything.

The old woman plodded into the other room to ask the nurses about my request. She came back and explained that they'd offered to examine me, and while it was unlikely that I would need a transfusion, if I did receive one, for medical reasons or bureaucratic reasons or what have you, it would not be my own still-warm blood but somebody else's. I declined the exam and ate a couple more cookies, which were too sweet and too dry.

*   *   *

Courtney's sun came out again as we left that place and drove down to Georgetown, or maybe it was just that shopping made her perk up. I can't say the same for myself. She was an ace shopper, pawing her way through racks of clothes as though there were something very particular she knew to look for and seizing, say, a shirt, which she would examine closely and, if it passed the examination, carry over to the dressing room for further assessment. She could spot imperfections that I could barely see, then convince me they were there, tiny holes and loose stitches. Finding something defective seemed to give her almost as much pleasure as finding something she wanted to buy. Meanwhile I pulled shirts, skirts, pants out at random, each one representing a possible new style, a new look—I never did know what it made sense for me to wear. When it came to style I had a developmental delay: fashion trends would arise, cuffed jeans or off-the-shoulder tops or high boots, and while other women went prancing around in them I would dismiss them as silly, overpriced, wholly unnecessary, but one or two years later, after Courtney and her ilk had moved on to the next look, I would find myself plucking from the sale rack, admiring, and ultimately buying nothing other than an off-the-shoulder top. In the end I would regret buying it, though. I regretted buying just about anything that wasn't edible. It was never that far from my mind that one day we'd all be dead, while so many of these off-the-shoulder tops would remain.

As we were leaving a store, Courtney asked me about the temping.

“I know it's kind of lame, it's the kind of job you get when you're twenty-two, but…” I said.

She told me it wasn't too late to make a plan for myself. You could go back to school, she said, or get an internship.

“An internship.”

“But soon it will kind of be too late, I mean I think you're pushing it if you want to have, like, a career, and not these random kinds of things.”