"That's not nearly as interesting as what you guys were up to, I'm sure."
"Just tell me where you were, Gizzy." His prodding, which is worse than his own lying, turns me cold.
"I know she's deaf, but are you? I told you, I was at the library"
Her smile is a cold spasm of pain and all of her anger and knowing cuts into him. I want to stand in the line of her fire to deflect it. So that she will know we were one together and not two, caught, for a second, in one cage. But, before I can get between them, Giselle presses her hands to her forehead and lets out a low moan.
"What the FUCK, Sol!!!" She leaps on his back.
He drops the spoon he has been clutching. His face shuts down. He walks down the hall with Giselle hanging off him, still screaming. I grab her shirt to stop her raised arms that have begun to rain blows on the back of his head. I pull her from him because he is not protecting himself, he is not resisting but letting her, like he let me enter him in heat, he lets us take him over.
"Eat your goddamn soup!" she screams, dragging me back to the kitchen on the frayed tail of her shirt, before hitting the pot into the sink with a wide swoop of her arm and burning us both.
. . .
I'm sorry, I am, because you're right, Giselle, we don't need to share everything. But the next time you come leaping at me, I'll be ready. The next time you come swaying your fucking bag of bones and burdens, I go straight for the jugular.
Straight to the teeth.
chapter 23
Stab wounds of the heart usually cause rapidly increasing tamponade.
Love is not popular anymore. It is thankless. Noble. Do not expect any reward. Trust yourself. Someone has penned this on the bathroom wall in the bar, and, every time I pull my head up from the toilet between spitting and retching, I see it. After throwing Sol out of the house and Holly into the sink, I go to a downtown bar and drink martinis till the oily, salty flesh of green olives and alcohol brine is all I can taste.
And I stay there, past the post-dinner crowd, until closing time. I try to make meaning out of those words as I excise every last piece of food and venom I contain. And then, with the razor-sharp sentimentality of the wretchedly drunk, I get it, and that stranger's bathroom philosophy becomes part of me, as surely as the scar on Holly's forehead is part of her.
Once upon a time, on a hot summer day, our father cried, "Look at the sun!" and our mother, just out of the car, neatly plopped Holly on the concrete—on her head. That moment left a scar extending from her hairline to her left ear.
—The thing you were most careful with, you lost.
The sun, not to mention the moon, hung like huge globes of malleable fire in the great northern sky that day. Dad was right, it was stunning, but Holly didn't look so good.
So, here I am, in a downtown bathroom stall thinking about that well-stitched line on my sister's head, about the scars I want to put on Sol's head as those words stare down at me: Love is not popular. Not noble. . . not love, no reward. Trust love. Is not love. Trust yourself
I try to put it all into some kind of order, to measure memory, betrayal, to get the stories straight, thinking that, maybe by putting her story next to mine, I can get close to Sol, understand him. Because he loves her, too, he is part of my story and hers.
My parents scraped Holly off the ground and she was happily sucking on an orange slush an hour later in emergency. I remain on the toilet-stall floor until the memory of that moon-sun day and all the booze have given me such a colossal headache that I can't think about anything anymore, especially the rapid contusions of love. Then I pass out and dream of cords plugged to my face like leeches, my arms strapped down, electricity jolting through my palms. When I wake, a piece of sharp green glass on the floor is cutting into my hand and I know it's a sign. I etch a letter on my hand; put it on top so I can see the jagged edges bleeding out: S.
S is for sorrow, for all I don't say. S is for sick now, my punishing ways.
Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: avoid "misadventures" with sharps.
—Hello, My Name Is. You. You. Giselle. Me. She.
What is betrayal? What is betrayal, split in two? What is betrayal? Is what, betrayed by you. (Again.)
—Betrayals are measured by what is offered and what is taken up. Goddammit you're stupid, didn't you learn this already?
The heart forgets what the body remembers. As I try to get up off the bathroom floor she shoulders her way up to my face and screams insults.
—You expected him to love you?
She taps me on the shoulder, my hungry, doubting companion. She's always with me, like a jealous streak, a trick knee, a weak stomach, a bad heart, this hunger is DNA you cannot undo.
Like fleas, or the smell of cheap cologne, she is hard to get rid of. Smiling, smug, arms crossed, her pixie-toes tap out a metal rhythm that sounds like the smack of surgical tools falling onto a metal tray. Like genius or sorrow she has curled up inside me and censors no evil, no criticism.
—Get up off the ground, loser.
Sometimes she's British. Sometimes she is a poet. Sometimes she has a drawling southern accent when she mocks me. Other times she is long-nailed and pure JAP. She's got a rough cat's tongue and a debutante smile. She's got a Chanel bag, can out drink me any day, and is the skinniest girl I know. But she is always, always right.
—I want you to curse every time you stole a kiss from his cheek and thought you knew love.
She likes to skip around and wear transparent Victorian nightgowns even on the coldest nights, in order to mock my shivering mortality.
Occasionally, late at night, she is kind: she lights my cigarettes, pours me drinks, and waits quietly for some mutual banter to emerge.
—You're a real piece of work, you know that?
—I know.
—And that sister of yours. . .
—I don't want to talk about her.
But more and more, she resembles a lion-woman: her hungry iron gaze is trained on me, never wavering. Her eyes penetrate; she is always prepared, always ready to pounce on the slightest vulnerability. When I stumble on the street she laughs: proof. But when I slip into my clothes, and they hang a little looser, she pats my back and hands me an extra sweater, my lion self.
She is incomplete, a succubus: trigger-happy, toilet-mouthed, knife-wielding, blue and white and sometimes green in the face from screaming, from telling me all I cannot have. When I manage to beat her down, tie her into a chair on the far side of the room, get her to eat some food, she smiles her sanguine, toothless grin. She starves proudly, waits, like a saint, she waits for death by fire or baptism.
—This is when, she spits, when it is three o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep from hunger.
She is holy, wholly my own, and when I reach out to touch her image in my face, she hovers an inch or so before my skull. Then she flicks her tongue out at me like the enraged lion she is; she snaps my fingers between her feline jaws; a barrage of dead spiders, splinters of wood, and bone.
—This is when I love you most.
No new method and no new discovery can overcome the difficulties that attend the wound of the heart,
In group today, after everyone commented on how I looked like shit, we were supposed to read our little essays about our families but I'd forgotten mine, so when my turn came I said, "My dad died a long time ago." Then I told them about the time Dad tried to teach me gymnastics.
Before that, all the girls had been complaining about their dads. Things were going "the Sylvia Plath way," as Susan used to say. Walking out into the summer night, I heard Susan's high-pitched Scottish voice in my head and laughed out loud: "My father had such high expectations of me, my father wanted me to be the perfect little girl, blah, blah, fucking blah. If every woman adores a fascist, it's her own fault."
She claimed Sylvia Plath was the patron saint of anorexics and Electra-complexed women everywhere, but I've always sort of liked her poetry. It's not often that you re
ad someone's words, and their pain, which has been dead for decades, lives on to give you a headache. I think there's something to be said for that.
I told the group about how, one day, Thomas seemed fixed on the idea that I should learn the perfect cartwheel. The fact that I was a chubby uncoordinated child who preferred reading to gymnastics did not faze him. We were on the front lawn and I could barely hold up my weight each time I did the turn. When I was upside down in the air, he held my legs.
"Straight!"
"Ow! Daddy!"
"Straighter!"
Then Holly came along. Holly, who could run before she could speak, Holly who could throw a baseball hard and fast and long; who'd had the perfect backhand by age seven, who didn't have to be taught a thing about the physical world.
She couldn't get enough of him, and she lunged at his legs when he came in the door. He was the magnet she crawled to when she could not walk and, when she could, his hands were the pinnacle of comfort. In my memories, she is always stroking them, kissing them, somehow attached to them. They seemed, to my mother and I, twin beings, this man and his child.
But it would be fair to say that Holly's "disabilities" were counteracted by my growing brain, as our father's disdain for fat and lazy women was rivalled only by his condemnation of stupid people.
Before he started growling at me for touching his things, before the screaming and fighting became the holding pattern of our relationship, I used to tug the instruments out of his pockets as she shimmied up his back and rolled over his shoulders when he came home from work. So certainly, together, we made the perfect daughter. Together, it seems, Holly and I can share almost any man.
part ii
chapter 24
Shock or angioplasty is required immediately to reinstate a stopped rhythm.
"You can't wear black to your grade-eight graduation!" Mom says.
"Why not? You wore black to Aunt Judy's wedding."
"That was different."
"Why?"
"I was in mourning. Stop moving, Holly, or I'll stick a pin in your leg."
Vesla has Holly in a silken, raglike dress, with a floral print. She is trying to figure out how to take the waist in so that Holly's torso will be vaguely visible.
"Why don't you let her wear my dress?" I hang on to the edge of the doorway, framing the question in a mild voice. Feeling weak, I sit down on the laundry hamper to stop my sudden swooning. This is the first time I've acknowledged Holly since the fight. She shoots me a grateful look.
"OK."
Mom gets up and spits the pins out of her mouth; a gesture of letting the operation go.
Holly rips the dress off as she skips out of the room.
"Thank God she's graduating."
"Of course she is, she only missed a week of school."
Holly clears her throat from the hallway.
"Do you have shoes?" I yell.
"Oh! Shoes." We hear her darting into my room. When she finally gets my shoes on, she slides into the room campily. I catcall and Mom lets out a surprised laugh. The long, tight, black dress is cut up the length of her left leg. She kisses the air, swivels her hip, and then, sucking in her cheekbones, struts up and down the hall.
"Holly, you're a fox. Realty, you are," I say, laughing, thinking about how Agnes would react to the dress.
"Too much." Mom shakes her head. And as Holly plucks a carnation out of a vase and places it in her mouth, Mom turns to me.
"Is Sol coming to Holly's graduation?"
His name that has not been spoken, that we have not said in weeks. Neither of us. And now hearing it out loud, we both turn to look at the sound of his name, like a car crash between us.
Failed hearts: Experienced cardiologists are able to assess organ damage immediately.
—I told you so.
Causality. The law of cause and effect. What are the reasons? But there is no order. No who or what. No direct factors leading up to the disappearance of my body either, though the lion-queen believes she has all the answers:
—Funny that.
—What?
—How all the men in your life leave you for Holly.
Medicine was once a clean, easy, causal science to me: identify the symptoms, locate pain, perform Woodwork, analyze urine, take X-rays, then add it up, listen to your patient, proceed with a differential diagnosis. This is how I came to medicine, why I preferred it over psychology. This is why I wanted to fix broken bodies, not broken minds.
You can never get to a person's mind. You cannot know the different deeds and missions of happiness; you can't tell a scream of pleasure from one of pain. Sometimes, we can barely read pain. Neither a barometer nor a guide, pain can mislead us. Even in the body, the laws of chain reactions can be false. This is why people always want a second opinion.
It is important to appreciate that the lessening of pain does not necessarily indicate the underlying condition has been resolved.
Walking around the well-tended grass at the graveyard, I think maybe I should become a pathologist. Mom pats the earth gently, making a little lump around the new orange tiger lily she's planted at the base of Thomas's grave. She stays on her knees for a little while, wiping the stone with a handkerchief, pulling weeds up from the earth, making order.
Holly hates "the stone," as she calls it, explaining, "That's not him, that's just the place where they put his body."
"I know, but what else are we supposed to do, Hoi?" We have this conversation every month, when it's time to go to church and visit the stone. "It's for Mom, not for him, or for you, it's not for the dead, the dead don't care." Holly usually starts to throw her clothes on the floor at this point in the conversation and complain that she has nothing to wear.
But I like the stone, it helps me keep things straight. The last time I saw him he gasped like an animal whose limbs were being severed. After we came home from the hospital, my mother stared straight through us while Holly and I sat in front of her, mini-zombies, staring right back. I think of awful wayward things: the heart-disease corpses we used to dissect in school, their bulging arteries and veins, and then I think maybe becoming a pathologist isn't such a great idea after all.
I know Holly talks to him and sees him and has this real spiritual connection and everything, but it's different for me. I like to preserve the image I see in the odd seventies photos of a handsome, grinning man with sharp cheekbones and polyester collars. In photos his image can't wander, he can't become someone else.
My mind is an ugly place and I can let almost anything go to rot in there. And anyway, what would I say if he strolled up to me, like he does to Holly? What in the world would I say? The sad thing is, I've imagined that too. I know exactly what I'd say if my father came up to me in broad daylight, offering me some of his ghostly advice. I wouldn't even let him talk. No.
So what? You remain the fucking ghost you always were to me, I'd say, and then I'd walk away
Cervical dilation to allow an easier passage of menstrual blood in patients with severe degrees of dysmenorrhea may be helpful in rare instances but is not generally recommended as routine.
I saw7 her today, on my way to the library, on an escalator in the university. As soon as she saw me, I turned and started running the wrong way down the escalator, excusing myself and bumping into people. But she caught up to me, as she always does.
—What're you doing?
I felt the bottoms of my feet lighting up, on fire. I crashed through people, plastic bags split open, and books fell onto the metallic teeth of the stairs.
"Watch it!"
—Why can't you see that I'm all you have?
She comes to me, quietly, calm-before-the-storm serious, when she knows I can't run. In the middle of the night, when I'm standing in the kitchen, trying to fill the gnawing gap in my stomach, she marches right up and starts her lecture:
—just go to bed, you don't need food.
—But I do, I'm hungry.
—We don't get hungry.
/> "We do get hungry," I say out loud to a yogourt container and a soggy bag of french fries Holly's left in the fridge. "People get hungry and then they need to eat," I say loudly, trying to drown her out, stuffing Holly's old fries, the yogourt, a block of cheese, and a piece of bread into my mouth, all at once. A plate of cookies, a hunk of steak from two nights ago, down, down, down, as she gets louder and louder.
—But you'll be different when you finish}you'll befat.
She marches me into the bathroom and unties my robe to reveal my proud little swollen belly.
—Good Lord, look at yourself.
—I'm looking.
I see it protrude over my belt, the soft fold of skin, no longer concave and hard. I trace my fingers over it and think of how Sol used to like to rest his head there and read the paper. I try to reason with her.
—People eat. They eat and work and love. That's what they do, that's what I do.
—Not you. Not us, we are stripped clean of want, we move like lean lions, we do not gorge, like you just did. . .
—But. . .
—But nothing, ow. What's that?
Something hot and wet and foreign in my crotch. I strip down, find I am leaking.
—Blood.
—Yes, blood, my first period in three years.
—Goddamn you!
I kneel on the floor naked, blood snaking under me, warm and vile on the clean white floor. Dysmenorrhea: the cessation of menstruation.
The cessation of the cessation, the end of the end. She yanks my head over the toilet bowl and knocks it against the rim. I encircle my growling stomach.
—You'll clean yourself up and starve that a way, young lady.
—I will not.
My stomach feels distended. It knots as she grips me, shoves her fingers in my throat till all I've gulped is gone down, down, down the bowl.
—It's been a while since we pulled that old trick out of the bag, eh?
—Yeah.
I flush and scrub the toilet, the floor. Then I run water in the tub and lower my body into the scalding heat, see my skin go pink when it touches the water. As the steam rises I place my hands over my no longer inflated belly and rest my head on the edge of the tub.