Her: A Memoir (32 page)

The next day the phone rang. It was her date.

“Were you abducted by aliens?” Mom asked him plainly, giving him no time to respond. “How about your children? Were they abducted by aliens?” Cara and I eavesdropped on our mother’s conversation, mouths open wide in disbelief and pride. I gathered from the way Mom listened that the man must have told her that no, neither he nor his kin had suffered such a fate. Mom calmly cleared her throat. “I guess we have nothing to discuss then. Please forget my number.” She hung up the phone and resumed folding a pile of warm laundry. No one said another word. I wondered why Mom couldn’t give the poor guy a break. I vowed then and there to keep an open mind on men and a forgiving heart. I would be nothing like her. She was harsh and cutting, so Italian, so immovable. I would be more permissive; this had become my downfall.

I thought about how to explain to Katherine what had happened in my mother’s life since Cara had gone. “There hasn’t been anyone worth mentioning in her life, no love at all.” Mom had broken up with Graham. She lived alone. She kept up the yard cheerfully herself and was busy with work and friends. She liked to go for cocktails and walks on weekends and Thursdays; other than that, she was home. I tried to visit her often and it was always the same scene. Mom watched
Law and Order
on what seemed to me to be the
Law and Order
channel. No matter the day of the week or the time of the day, the show played. Mom favored the more gruesome episodes, ones where young women were abducted, defiled, murdered, and then tossed in the trash. Was this Mom’s way of trying to occupy Cara’s terror? Repeating it again and again, as if by learning it play by play, she might take on some of the fear and humiliation Cara suffered and carry it herself?

Cara had been my torch in our dark house. I couldn’t have survived it without her. And where was she now? It seemed impossible to be in a world without her. All of our stories and hurts were now mine alone. I’d grown so used to stories being shared that without Cara it was as if neither of our lives had ever happened. With her death, my history had been erased.

“There is so much I can’t remember,” I told Katherine.

It wasn’t simple for me to begin therapy with our early days. There was too much ground to cover; there were too many boulders in the way of what was happening now and what I felt really needed talking about. I wanted to rush through the story of our girlhood. But Katherine slowed me down. As the weeks went on we seemed to be getting somewhere. She understood something about twinship that nobody else had.

“I get it,” she told me. “I’m single and I’m in my forties. There’s no love like family. I still live with my sister. It’s easy to feel like we’re just two old maids, but we have each other, and that makes a home.”

I wondered what relevance her sibling had to the matter at hand, but I agreed. “My biggest fear, aside from her dying, was that Cara and I would be spinsters together, like Marge’s chain-smoking twin sisters on the Simpsons.” I laughed at my own joke. I imagined Cara and me side by side in some crappy apartment, old as goats—that once greatly feared fate now seemed such a luxury. I wasn’t making any kind of home comfortable for myself because I’d never thought, even though I’d been married, that I’d have to have one without her.

“At least you wouldn’t have to pretend to laugh at someone else’s jokes,” Katherine said. “I can’t tell you how unfunny these guys in Westchester are.”

I looked up at the clock and saw that our session had run over. Therapy was going better than I’d expected. I left her office with the great big hope that if I kept going on my path, I’d wander into the right life, somehow.

I was surprised to hear from Katherine after our eighth session. She called to say that we needed to have a talk to “clear the air.”

I considered her words on the subway ride to her office. Had I possibly pocket-dialed one of the monologues about her hokey observations that I’d recited over a joint with D? Making fun of therapy with Katherine was so easy, and I liked to make D laugh. My favorite poem of Maya Angelou’s had been penciled onto the white wall of Katherine’s waiting room, behind a fern, beside a rack of month-old magazines with the delivery addresses scratched out. The words were written in such small, winding script that they were nearly illegible. I often wondered who had put them there. I decided it must have been a teenage girl. Her As were round and her Ms sloped like dull mountains. Was this her prayer to herself? An attempt to memorize for an exam? An act of vandalism and boredom? A mantra?

I flapped my arms like a giant bird when I recited the poem for D, dancing through the cluttered living room. “I know why the caged bird sings,” I sang low. D smiled up at me and flicked the ash of his roach into an open CD case. “The caged bird sings of freedom,” I hummed, feeling the tickle of the words vibrate from my tongue until I landed on the floor. I was so stoned; it wasn’t out of the question that I’d accidentally called Katherine from my back pocket.

Katherine greeted me in the waiting room and we walked together to her office. She sat down quietly at her desk and shuffled through pages of notes. When she finally swiveled to face me, my stomach jumped to my throat. “Would you like a cup of tea,” she asked politely. She’d never offered me tea before.

“No thanks,” I said.

“I hope you don’t mind if I do,” she said and ripped open a pack of raw sugar and stirred it into a steaming cup.

“Not at all,” I said.

“I’ve been unsure how to tell you something that feels very important to our ongoing relationship,” she said, nervously sipping her tea. The rim of the cup covered her nose and mouth. She looked over its white porcelain lip; two worried eyes of Horus stared me down.

“I hope this isn’t about my co-payments?” I apologized. I hadn’t paid her a single one, hoping that she’d overlook the hundreds of dollars I owed.

“No, that’s not it at all,” she said. “I’ve made adjustments in billing your insurance. There is no need to worry about the co-pays.”

“Good,” I said. “I’d hate to have to end our work here. I can’t afford extras right now.” I sounded exactly like my mother did when she explained why she couldn’t join me out for dinner or a movie.

“I don’t exactly know how to tell you this,” Katherine said, “but I have an identical twin sister, too.”

“Oh?” I tensed up and grabbed the handle of my brown leather purse and squeezed. Katherine gazed at me as if she were looking into a mirror while trying to rehearse a speech. “That’s a coincidence, I guess,” I replied, trying to stay casual even though my heart was racing.

“My sister is dying,” Katherine told me shyly. She was looking at the yellow, lined writing tablet in her lap. “I feel I’ve been out of bounds in seeing you,” she said. “I allowed my curiosity to cloud my judgment.”

“That’s okay,” I said, though I was the farthest place from okay I’d been in a very long time. I felt weightless and invisible, a familiar feeling. Cara and I had called this our faraway place; we’d gone to it since the first time we saw Dad hit Mom, and often after that. The two-foot distance between Katherine and me grew to what seemed like yards and then miles. She was a tiny dot at the end of a sentence, a speck of dirt on my shoe.

“When you called I knew I needed to see you. I wanted to know what will happen to me when my twin dies,” she said apologetically.

This was simply impossible, but it was happening. There wasn’t a single person I knew who would believe this story. But I was already crafting a plan to tell it. I’d learned from Cara that relaying a story didn’t make it sting less, but it did make it survivable.

I thanked Katherine for her hard work and opened up my pocketbook. I unsnapped my change purse and pulled out a double dose of Valium. I washed it down with the last sip of her warm tea. I closed the office door without saying a word.

*   *   *

Not long after I walked away from Katherine’s office, I closed the door on D’s apartment for the last time.

D had been preparing to cook a salmon. I’d had too much to drink, enough to muster the courage to ask for the millionth time why we hadn’t managed to try to move in together again.

“Isn’t salmon enough?” D asked, sipping a Manhattan and stirring a skillet of leeks simmering in a fragrant broth. He wiggled his nose and his wire-framed glasses slid easily down to the tip.

“Not really,” I told him. “I want stability, a family, to change diapers. We don’t seem to be moving in that direction.”

“Who said I don’t want that, too?” he said casually and turned the heat down on the vegetables.

“I said it.” We’d been dating for nearly four years. “It’s not just you. I haven’t made the great leap either.”

“Fuck, C,” D yelled and flung a raw slab of succulent Alaskan salmon at my head. I ducked and it slid down the wall and flopped onto the floor. “Get out of my house. Now. You think you’ll ever find a man who will cook you such delicious fish?” he roared ridiculously.

“You don’t want me because I’m getting better,” I said. The words
getting better
used in reference to myself seemed foreign but rang oddly true. I was getting better.

I walked down the hallway to the front door and sat on the floor before it, listening to D bang around in the kitchen. I promised myself that if I left, if I set one foot out into the hall and toward the stairs, I’d never come back.

“I’ve got to go,” I said to the whirl of D’s clanging pots and pans, the scrape of a fork pushing a ruined dinner into the trash. “I’m sorry.” I closed the door quietly behind me. I ran as fast as I could down the stairs and onto the street. I hailed a cab home. I decided to take a trip to the Hudson Valley to visit Grace. I packed my bags.

This time would be different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I wasn’t the same.

*   *   *

In D’s closet I left behind a wardrobe of dresses that were two sizes too small, several pairs of broken-down high-heeled pumps, a freezer full of film, and my prized Celeste green bicycle with licorice-red trimmed wheels and a straw basket attached to the front. It had been the nicest gift from Cara that I’d bought myself, a birthday tradition I’d started when I realized I would never be able to part with the indulgent treasures Cara gave every July. I saved up all year to buy myself something nice from my sister. I’d fled in such a hurry that my perfect bike was left at D’s.

The next morning, I pulled a shirt over my head and laced my shoes and off I went to see my friend Grace in her rustic, converted barn in Rhinebeck. I have made that drive in little more than an hour and a half, but that day I made it in just under three, stopping off to pick apples from an orchard. My gift to Grace was a bushel of shiny, tart red and yellow Empires. In exchange for the apples we were to have one of those kinds of evenings: sitting around sipping tea, eating takeout from cartons, nibbling gross amounts of chocolate, downing bottles of wine until we forgot the reason for doing any of it: swearing off men. I promised Grace I’d never go back to D and she nodded and listened, not believing a word of my oath. We’d done this before.

I had a habit of running to Grace, fretting about what to do with D. I’d gone to the barn just two weeks before when I’d discovered recent images of a woman he’d had an affair with in Germany. I’d retaliated each and every time he was unfaithful. For the woman in Germany, I’d traveled to France with a man I barely knew. I brought back a single piece of yellow crockery for D, a pitcher with a chipped handle. That was my thanks to him for his European affair. I was absolutely no better than he. Still the image of the German woman who posed for D stung. She bent over seductively in front of her camera in a transparent white swimsuit, hands on her knees, ass in the air, smiling as if to say: “I wish you were here.”

“I don’t need his salmon,” I said to Grace, not sure if I meant it. “He has something he calls ‘the lobster trap theory,’” I added. Grace was slouched over her laptop on the sofa, slippered feet and crossed ankles propped on a coffee table. Her smooth black hair was trimmed into a no-fuss-or-frills bob. It fell softly toward her sharp chin and over her eyes as she leaned toward her computer, squinting. She was reading through her catalogue of music, trying to find a decent album to play to sooth my broken heart. She settled on Morrissey.

“It’s not that he doesn’t want to commit. He just needs options,” I said, trying to make D’s big sea plan sound less harsh.

“A lobster trap theory? What the fuck is that?” Grace chirped. She has a gentle and childlike manner. Almost everything she says is delivered in an upbeat, chipper, airy tone. Swearing, cursing, hexing, or calm: there’s a quality to her voice that resembles song. “I don’t know,” she added, the words drawing out in tuneful notes. “It just doesn’t sound healthy.”

“He says that men like to know that they’ve got options, even if they don’t act on them, like a lobsterman.” It sounded ludicrous as I was explaining it. “He says he just likes to make sure he can cruise around and pull up his traps and reset the bait if they’re empty, toss them back out into the sea.”

Grace laughed. “I think you need another glass of wine.” She filled my goblet to the top. “How about we watch the sunset on the porch and swat mosquitoes?”

I was fortunate to have found such a friend in Grace. We’d met years before but had come closer after she lost both her sister and mother to suicide within months of each other. She was two years behind me in loss and I easily traced her path alongside mine. She’d moved from the country to the city and now from the city to the country and soon she’d move again, she’d told me. She just didn’t know where.

She wanted not to be burdened with her mother’s Shaker furniture and her sister’s pages of song lyrics, many guitars, and T-shirts. She wanted nothing more than to carry just a shell on her back, so she moved frequently enough to make that possible. Of course, I understood. I’d logged a move a year, sometimes two, since Cara had died. It was a way to rid myself of her things. Each moving truck seemed to carry fewer and fewer of Cara’s possessions.

Grace and I found in each other a most enormous kind of relief: it wasn’t clear which of us had suffered more severely. It was an unspoken code between us that we were welcome to feel as if it were the other. We gave, through our camaraderie, the comfort of knowing that there was someone we knew actually—not from the TV news or radio or newspaper—worse off than we were individually.