Her: A Memoir (31 page)

Our family plot is in Schenectady, New York. Acres and acres of rolling hills that once abutted the forest are now directly beside a suburban shopping mall. To visit a relative there means also to be in full view of Macy’s and Sears and shoppers rolling their filled carts to waiting SUVs. I refused to abandon Cara in a dismal scrubby plot, in full view of mall employees and bargain hunters.

There was simply no place to leave her, so I took her everywhere.

I divided up her ashes and kept them in multiple bottles, urns, boxes, and satchels. I carried her for three years in my pocketbook. I have one container of ashes saved in a storage unit at the funeral home. I can visit a drawer full of Cara there.

I found three glass bottles in a gift shop: two purple and one clear. These little vases stand three inches high and are wide enough that I can hold each in my palm. Their handles serve as arms. They slide into grooves that I have attached to a black iron hanging rack. I poured some of Cara’s ashes into each bottle and corked them with purple wax from one of her candles. The iron rack was meant for votives, but I hung my sister there instead, securing her with wire.

I took her to California only a week after she’d passed. I was traveling for a photography assignment, photographing a heavy metal band from the ’80s. I rode with them on a tour bus through the West and watched them ready themselves for shows: four men who used curling irons, hairspray, and eyeliner and wore leather pants that laced up the sides of their legs. They called themselves Poison and after twenty years on the road they looked as if that’s what they’d swallowed. I hoped to spare them this judgment with my camera. That observation was crueler than they deserved. They were good family men and kind and all took great care with me in my grief sickness. Cara and I had loved them as girls and had worn their concert T-shirts and memorized the lyrics to all their songs. I stood at the side of the stage and watched them night after night as perplexed onlookers wondered how party anthems could bring on such tears.

At the end of my time with them, the drummer took me for a ride on his motorcycle in the desert. We drove through yellow sand and I held on to his waist with one arm and tossed my sister in the wind with the other.

I brought her next to an artist’s retreat in New Hampshire. I tossed some of her ashes into a ravine from the open window of a writing studio.

When I traveled to the White Mountains with Cara’s friend Danielle, we set her loose in a cold, black trout stream behind Danielle’s in-laws’ house, down a hill, past stalks of blue wildflowers and a ditch of tiny stones. Danielle cried for Cara with quiet tears. We sat beside the quick-moving water and each let go of a single handful of ashes. We fed her to the fish. Cara and Danielle had not spoken for years, their friendship a casualty of Cara’s drugs. The two women had loved each other since high school. Cara would have been pleased with their final parting. In the end, her best friend had been able to hold her, to say she was sorry.

I mixed her ashes into eye shadow and dusted my lids. I dipped a wet finger down into a baggie of ash and tasted her bones. I dropped an urn of Cara, spilling her, and vacuumed her up. I thought of stirring her into my coffee or making bread from her bones. I kept her in my glove box and beneath my bed. I showed her off to strangers. I stared at her ashes for hours and marveled at the way they sparkled and at how light and free she had become.

Lastly, I brought her ashes to Venice, as she had asked me to do.

It was D’s first time in Venice. He followed behind me with our luggage as I found our way from the train to the hotel. It was the first time that D and I had been out together in a Mediterranean city, and here, I was the one of proper height. D’s head poked over the crowd, higher and balder and whiter than the rest; I was at one with the sea of people, just another dark-haired traveler.

We checked into a small room in the center of the city, unpacked, fought, and then made up. We did it all in what seemed one long breath. We were practiced.

In the heart of Venice, there is no direction or time; there is dark and light; there is sun that disappears into shadow behind shabby stone buildings; there are curving, confusing, seemingly endless, glinting gray water streets. And for me, as perhaps for others, Venice had become a city of memories. It was exactly as I’d remembered from my trip with Cara: Venice was alive as if time hadn’t touched it. As I walked hand in hand through the winding alleys with D, looking for the perfect place for Cara’s final sleep, I could hear her laugh, see her sampling strawberry gelato on a tiny plastic spoon, watch her begging a gondolier for a free serenade, or reaching her arms out wide, hoping to land pigeons. I remembered how she’d thieved.

With every turn of a passageway I was lost for a spot to leave her. One place was too closed in, another was too public, a third was frothy with gasoline. I’d crossed the world; still, there was no perfect tomb. D and I wandered the maze of the city only to come full circle, arriving back at our hotel. I needed a guide. Then I saw him, a well-dressed man in tweed, holding a pocket watch: the innkeeper from the trip I’d taken with Cara. He walked down a stone staircase and over a slim bridge. I pulled D’s hand and we followed the man, our white rabbit. I told D who he was and why I needed to track him. D said I must be mistaken. It was unbelievable, impossible, and it was, but it was also true; it
was
him. We followed him all the way to the front door of the hostel where Cara and I had stayed.

In front of that hostel was our plaza, and from the plaza were steps that led down to the water. Cara and I had picnicked there. We’d taken a meal of bread and cheese and had finished a bottle of red wine. Glittering light reflected from the water onto Cara’s face as she chewed. I’d teased that she looked like a ghoul or a goddess; I wasn’t certain which. Those steps were nearly a square, enclosed by homes with immaculately tended gardens and with window boxes full of fragrant flowers. Excepting one narrow pathway that led out into the Grand Canal, here was a private ocean.

On the way to the watery steps, I stopped at a flower shop. I pulled a long-stemmed iris from a bucket of water and paid the shopkeeper. D and I found the square and I knelt on the steps. I pulled Cara from my purse. I emptied her from a stoppered glass bottle into a wave, the wake of a boat. Her ashes floated iridescent on the surface of the canal. I set sail with them the iris, just like the one tattooed on her forearm, and I cried for both of us.

I was finished.

I dipped the empty bottle into the water and took a sample. The silt that was left of my sister floated up and whirled in the bottle and then fell to the bottom; it was alive. Cara had become a snow globe, in a bottle that had once been hers. She’d had a collection of such bottles from around the world. She’d dipped them in all of the oceans she’d visited. She’d filled them with sand and water and kept them on her writing desk.

D asked if we might find the Tiepolos at the San Marco church. He looked down at my dusty, tear-streaked, ashen hands and helped me to a café where he bought us each an espresso while I washed. I closed the door on the café and turned the spigot on the faucet. I watched what was left of my sister on me circle the drain.

D and I stood in silence for over an hour in the church, craning our heads back to look at Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco. I was taken with his cherubs: valiant, insistent, dazed, plummeting through the clouds. They looked at war with the sky, shot down by God’s grace and wrath. A pair tumbled hand in hand.

Chapter 30

There wasn’t anything special
about the listing in the insurance pamphlet. I had only one criterion for a shrink: I should see a woman. I settled on one whose name sounded like it belonged to a solid person, a woman of strong conviction.

I described the problem at hand on Katherine’s answering machine: I was thirty-two years old. I’d suffered the loss of my identical twin sister four years earlier. I’d recently quit my job as a professor and moved from New England to Brooklyn. I was in a troubled relationship with an older man whom I loved dearly. I’d been hooked on Valium for so long that going without sent me into treacherous withdrawal. I’d found myself fighting the urge to jump in front of a speeding C train the week before, though I certainly wanted to live. That about covered it. I recited my list to Katherine’s answering machine as matter-of-factly as I might tell D what I’d bought at the supermarket for him to prepare for dinner.

Katherine quickly returned my call. I was seated in the center of the plush sofa in her office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the very next day.

She was short and tiny; frail, with narrow wrists and jutting collarbones. Her wavy brown hair hung, blunt cut, to her waist. She wore tailored gray tweed slacks and a black cotton leotard with a scooped neck. Strings of beaded necklaces dangled over the collar of her flimsy cardigan. She smiled at me with sympathy and curiosity as I explained the mess of my life. Her perfect smudge of a nose hung over her lip when she smiled. Her gaze gave her a pointy and sunken look of her own. We matched. Her arms and legs were among the thinnest I’d ever seen.

She told me in our first meeting that she’d been a dancer. An injury had caused the early end of her promising career with the New York City Ballet; a strained ankle had been her truest blessing, she said. It caused her to reconsider her life path, and she’d gone back to school to study psychology.

“Sometimes tragedy alters the course of our lives and we are freed in our traumas to live according to our true passions and desires,” she said in response to my long, guilty monologue on having abandoned photography. “We are free to write the new story of our lives, or so it seems.”

Katherine’s observation seemed so generic and well rehearsed, I was certain she used it with all of her clients. “I guess so,” I said. Hadn’t it been obvious I’d tried to think that? Couldn’t she tell from my message how I’d wished that cliché were true? I’d given up my job, my camera, and my home. I’d taken plenty of risks of passion after losing Cara, as if throwing caution to the wind would somehow give her death another ending.

Among the constellation of motivational posters that hung on her wall was one quoting Robert Fulghum. How could I accept help from a woman with such stock advice and strange decorating proclivities? I’d never given my own mother the same consideration.

Mom had hung one of the
All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Kindergarten
posters in our dining room during the author’s wild success when I was in high school. I’d passed it each morning on my way to the kitchen, rolling my eyes. He seemed so obvious, so uncool.

“Can’t we just take this lousy thing down,” I pleaded with my mother. “I don’t want my friends to see it when they come over.”

“I like it” was all Mom said in response to my arrogance. She swatted me off like a horse does a fly. Cara always left Mom alone in her tastes and that was dignified. I took them as a declaration of war.

Mom’s Fulghum poster read: “I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”

It had amazed me, even at sixteen, that my mother could address the summation of her problems, all of our storms, with a trite poster.

I recited the Fulghum poem in my head in Katherine’s office and cried. It felt like being brought to tears over a dog food commercial, but there you are. “Love is stronger than death,” I said to Katherine, seemingly out of nowhere, and I believed it then, for the first time since I’d read the silly line on Mom’s wall, the sturdy walls we’d all slept and dreamed beneath as a family of women, free of fathers and husbands, the safest place I’d known in all my life. And now I was replicating my mother’s ways. I lived alone and, though I was involved with a man, I was lonely. I had held on to my mother’s advice for a very long time: “Men will fuck you but they’ll never love you.”

The truth was: I hadn’t needed any of their love until Cara died.

“Love
is
stronger than death,” Katherine repeated.

That was exactly the problem. Love is stronger than death. I was wrestling all my love against Cara’s death, and I was losing: I was obliterating myself because in the face of her death I had nowhere to put my love.

I needed to believe Katherine. “I hope you’re right,” I said and laughed flimsily. I looked around her office and took note of a shelf of books on feminist psychology. I recognized some titles from an undergraduate seminar I’d taken freshman year with a brilliant professor. The posters and books canceled each other out. I focused on Katherine’s windowsill. There was a line of small photographs turned facedown. I looked at the smooth felt backs on the frames and wondered why she’d flipped them over. There were exactly four of them.

I returned the following week. I started hesitantly at the beginning, with Mom and Dad. Katherine listened with great care as I tried to describe the violence in our home; Mom’s blackened eyes, her smashed jaw.

“Do you think this has anything to do with your relationship narrative? Your choice of men?” Katherine asked.

“Probably,” I said, resenting her question. This was D’s consistent refrain. Again and again he asked me to consider whether or not I was using him as a stand-in for my father. But to me the story of my father had grown so old, it seemed as harmless and irrelevant as dust bunnies in an abandoned house.

“How do you think your mother feels about that?”

“My mom has very little sympathy for men.”

“Was it always that way?” Katherine asked. “Has that happened since her divorces?”

“There was an overcorrection, I think.” One evening when we were in high school, Mom sat at the kitchen table and waited for her date. Hours ticked by. His headlights never warmed the driveway. Mom quietly removed her earrings—silver hoops—and kicked off her uncomfortable shoes and retired for the night.