November 16 - The last night in the house

Alex heard the whistle of the tea kettle, the sound drifting up from the kitchen, and for a moment she imagined it was the muted sound of train whistle streaming somewhere through the night before she realized this couldn’t be and understood what she was really hearing. She sat up on the air mattress that served as her bed for the night and glanced at her watch. 3.30. She had yet to find sleep tonight. Throwing off the coverlet, her feet floundered about on the floor a moment before finding her slippers, and she tossed her robe around her shoulders as she pattered softly down the stairs.

Meg was at the counter, stirring a spoon absently in the cup of tea she had poured, making small tight circles round and round in a lazy fashion as though she had forgotten she held the implement in her hand. After a moment, she squeezed the belly of a plastic honey bear and watched the amber ooze into the cup, then clicked her spoon against the rim of her tea mug three times – one two three. It was an infinitely familiar sound to Alex, who watched as Meg completed the ritual and then replaced the spoon on the counter.

“You too?” she asked from the doorway. Meg gave a start and turned to look at her sister. She seemed upset a moment at being found-out in her nocturnal wanderings, but then her features softened. “Yeah,” she admitted. “No sleep for me tonight. Tea?” Alex nodded and eased herself onto one of the stools where, for so many years, they had eaten breakfast side-by-side: bowls of cereal from the boxes that Anna McGeehan would line up on the counter in order of ascending height, or packages of instant oatmeal, or triangles of toast that their mother dusted over with cinnamon and sugar.

“Where did you find the tea kettle?” Alex asked, stirring her spoon aimlessly just as her sister had.

Meg shrugged. “One of the boxes by the door. Right on top, so not so hard.”

“And the teabags?”

Meg gave a guilty laugh. “I always bring them with me.”

Alex nodded as if this made sense; Meg had always been the one who was prepared.

She wondered if her sister was more prepared for this moment than she. Although only older by eleven minutes, sometimes she felt that eleven years separated her and Meg. Meg had always known which school activities she would devote herself to, which friends she would pursue. She had selected her college major eight years before she arrived on a college campus, knowing that it was economics for her, followed by an MBA and a career on Wall Street. Meg had gone on to do exactly thus. For Alex it had always been different, choosing each option in life because it presented itself, not because she went for it. If you had told her as a young girl age eight sitting on this stool for breakfast that she would go on to be the pastry chef at an It eatery in Chicago, she might have laughed at you, but somehow that was what she found herself doing, a career that had fallen into her lap, not one of her choosing. It was the same for the tea, she thought with an internal laugh. It was Meg who liked this blackberry variety they were sipping. Alex would stutter whenever the tea cart was presented to her in a restaurant. “Uh, whichever you suggest,” she would say to the server. Likewise with desserts, dinner specials, clothing sales, anything really. The manager of her restaurant said he was thankful the dessert menu was set every night and didn’t depend on her making up her mind.

So the question she asked now was: “Were you surprised?” Meg sipped thoughtfully at her tea, her brows drawing down over the rim of the cup like two fuzzy caterpillars.

“Surprised? No,” she confessed. “Sad, yes.”

Sad. Such a funny emotion, to feel about a space, an inanimate object. Anna hadn’t told her two daughters that she was selling the house, not until the sale had gone through and nearly everything was packed in boxes and stowed away. She had asked them to come for these last few days, to help clean out closets that, once open, began to vomit out pieces of the past. Old artwork from their kindergarten years, pictures from proms, old bank statements and lost letters and useless pieces of wax and paper clips and packages of moth balls, all being spewed out by closets and drawers and crates in the garage that had hibernated peacefully for years and now were affronted by the human flood that was emptying them all. And now this, the last night in the house.

Alex winced as her tea burned the roof of her mouth. She had forgotten how hot Meg liked it. Or, not forgotten, precisely, but let it slip her mind for the moment. Her sister had gone through a ‘tea phase’ where she had to make scalding hot tea every night before bed or she couldn’t sleep; she said she liked making it that hot because then she could add an ice cube and watch it melt and once the tendrils of melted water had settled in the tea, it would be the perfect temperature to drink.

“Remember how Mom used to yell at us for making witch’s brew in this kitchen?” Alex asked of a sudden. Meg chuckled into her cup.

“Oh yes.” She pointed to where they used to sit on the kitchen floor, by the sink. “We’d perch right there and take her biggest pot and add every possible thing in the refrigerator until it stunk up the whole house.”

Alex giggled. “Yup.”

Meg’s fingers drummed against the ceramic. “Remember all the boys we brought home who were made to sit and squirm on that couch under Mom’s first-date interrogation?” Alex turned her head and could see the imprints of those boys’ bottoms still, one after the next, ankles crossed and nodding their heads with a, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and, ‘No, ma’am.’

“I remember,” she agreed. “Remember sledding down the hill in the backyard?”

“And crashing into the trees that time you got the concussion.” Both girls were grinning now. “I remember.”

The laughter faded and the only sound was the ice cube hissing its way into nothingness in Meg’s second cup of tea.

“You think Mom will be okay in a nursing home?” she asked finally. Alex nodded not because she believed it but because it made the empty house less frightening. It had been Anna’s decision after all. Alex shuddered at the idea of making such a final choice. “This place is too big for her now.”

Meg nodded without believing it, and they were silent for a while, sipping.

“Sleep?” her sister asked finally, draining her cup and setting it into the sink. She looked around a moment, as if for a sponge or a dish towel, any normal kitchen thing, before remembering these items had been put away.

“Sleep,” Alex agreed, doing the same. She ascended the stairs to her childhood bedroom for the last time.

November 15 - What's obvious

“Jess, Jess Milton.”

Jess froze with a canapé halfway to her lips, and half of the smoked Gouda and bacon bits on top fell into the cleavage of her dress. “Oh god,” she groaned, looking around for a server with a napkin. The man who had said her name raised his hand to produce one with a look of triumph, then paused, realizing that to be gentlemanly and solicitous would be to dig his hand in between her breasts. The napkin wobbled in mid-air for a moment, and Jess solved his dilemma by snatching the paper and digging out the cheese and meat herself.

“Ha ha,” laughed Tom Ward, watching a bit too intently as she flecked off the last offending crumbs. “Didn’t mean to surprise you like that.”

Jess felt a little sick as she smiled at him. She had harbored a crush on Tom the entire four years they attended high school together, so she probably should be thrilled that he was interested in her décolletage now (he certainly had never looked when she was fifteen), but at the moment all she could really think about was how clumsy she felt. She was amazed he had even remembered her name, much less anything else about her. “That’s okay, Tom,” she reassured. “You’re well? Where are you working? Do you still live close by? Gosh, you look great!” Too many words all at once, she scolded mentally.

Tom arched an eyebrow. “I’m the president of a hedge fund now. We’re doing quite well for ourselves in fact.” His chest did a good imitation of a blowfish. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard about us recently. A few very important acquisitions. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Oh, of course I do! I mean…” Jess avoided the business section like the plague. “I mean, that’s great. A hedge fund. Remind me what those do again? Gosh, all that financial stuff is such gibberish to me.”

The left corner of Tom’s lips tugged upwards slightly. How she had swooned over that half-smile as a teenager!

“And haven’t you met my wife, Meredith?” He changed the subject.

Jess gave a start, only at that moment noticing that a woman had been standing next to him the whole time. Meredith was short and buxom, with a smile out of a Crest Whitestrips commercial. She extended a slim hand that sported a giant emerald on the second finger. “So pleased,” she drawled with the hint of a southern accent. Jess waffled a moment, the half-eaten canapé in one hand, the dirty napkin in the other, and then inclined her head as a third option. Meredith’s mouth fell open a moment at the rude manners before she caught herself and was all frozen smiles. “Well, nice meeting you dear.” Dear. The woman was easily fifteen years younger! Jess watched Tom steer his wife through the crowd.

She was rendered into one of the pillars in the room for an instant, rooted to the floor, then shook herself off and hurried to the buffet table, where she forcefully hurled canapé and napkin both into a trash can.

Maureen Teasdale and Veronica Watkins were leaning over the class notes brochure – it had arrived in the mail a month before the reunion; Jess had studied it – just down the table from her, obviously reading it for the first time, oohing and aahing with disbelief at the write-ups on each of their classmates, and clucking whenever they read the word Spouse or Children under a person’s name. Jess pretended to be absorbed in ladling out some of the punch.

“Jess Milton, Jess Milton,” Maureen was saying, as if fishing for the name in a dark lake.

“Right, she sat by me in math!” Veronica cried. Jess snorted; they had done no such thing. They were on the cheerleading squad together.

“Right. I remember… I think. Says here that she’s… hmmm…. An artist.” Maureen giggled behind her hand. The giggle still belonged to her eighteen-year-old incarnation, twenty pounds lighter than the version in front of Jess now, and sounded garish coming from this older woman’s mouth. “Sounds like a euphemism for unemployed to me.”

“Watercolors, pastels… some photography,” Veronica read, skimming along with one finger pressed accusingly against the page. “Featured in a show last –” she laughed – “last year at the local elementary school art space.” Both women were doubled over now, holding their punch glasses out to their sides as if for balance.

Maureen wiped a tear from her eye. “It’s obvious she hasn’t done much for herself since graduation, isn’t it?” Jess felt heat rush into her cheeks, the capillaries threatening to pop through the skin. Her hand convulsed around her plastic cup and she hurried away before she upended the ladle over Maureen’s very obviously-dyed brunette hair. Obvious? Maureen had already gone gray; that’s what was obvious.

“Obvious, obvious,” she muttered, pushing past smiling husbands and wives and clusters of ‘friends’ who hadn’t thought to call or write one another in the last twenty years. There was an errant child or two in the crowd, always clutching with concern at a parent’s lower hemline and staring up at the adults with eyes too wide for their small faces, as children’s so often seemed to be.

What did she mean obvious? Just because Jess had chosen a career as an artist and couldn’t boast of husband or children or heck, sex partner – even pet goldfish might have made her feel less lonely – didn’t mean she hadn’t made anything of herself. Okay, so her art sold sporadically, and she still had to call home to her parents every once in a while to meet the rent on time or head off a sudden power outage in the middle of winter, but she enjoyed making her art, and she liked being independent and alone. Maureen’s voice dragged up every damp day in her studio, when she wanted to tear her from her scalp and ‘sell out’ and take the easier path, but always, always some spark of creativity would come along that would stiffen her backbone, remind her that she was on the right path. Lacking piles of cash or children with a fine pedigree didn’t make it obvious things weren’t going well. Some things were obvious, she thought, but this? She tried to make a list of the obvious in her head.

“Let’s see.” She quoted, “Obviously roses are red and violets are blue.” Obvious was sad facts like how gravity made tits sag down over time or how giving birth stretched out the vagina.

Or were none of these things obvious? What if a woman got implants, after all? What if she’d had a c-section? And roses were often pink. Come to think of it, who had ever seen a blue violet? Wasn’t violet a shade of purple? Jess made it through the throng to the door and exhaled with relief as she stepped onto the porch, a good fifteen degrees cooler than it had been inside among the press of bodies. She leaned against the railing, drumming fingers on the chipped paint of the balustrade, and sipped at the punch. The voices drifting out from inside sounded like a very drunken hive of bees.

“Jess. Jess Milton.”

She turned with a jolt, this time only just catching the punch glass before the pink liquid slopped over the rim and onto her dress. She squinted at the man in front of her, trying to smooth out the thin wrinkles on the forehead and add a bit more hair to the front of his scalp.

“Yes?” she asked, at a loss.

“Jess, it’s me. Bradley.”

She looked harder. Make the shoulders less broad, take away the muscle tone to his arms, make him perhaps two inches shorter and perhaps… “My god it is you!” she exclaimed. He laughed self-deprecatingly. “Is it so obvious?” he quipped. Jess turned a shade pink again.

She stared into her punch.

“I hear you’re an artist,” Bradley said after a moment, and she wait pinker, waiting for Maureen’s reaction. “Jess, I just wanted to tell you…” Here it comes, she thought. The ‘get a real job’ or ‘what are you doing with yourself.’ …”that I think that’s so great,” he finished.

“No, it is a real job. I mean, what? You do?” She gaped at him.

“I remember you up in the art wing of the school almost every day after class. God, I look at all those poseurs in there just making money or doing what they’re supposed to do,” (he added air quotes to this last), “but it seems like you’re one of the few who is following her heart. It’s obvious you’re a lot happier than the whole batch of them.” He jerked a thumb towards the drones, who seemed to be rapidly disintegrating into dancing the Macarena.

She tilted her head, about to tell him he had it all wrong, but stopped herself. She barely remembered Bradley, she was ashamed to admit. “Remind me what class we had together in high school?” she said instead.

Bradley lowered his head, swishing the punch in his cup. “Well,” he coughed. “We didn’t, exactly, but I… Oh this will sound silly, but I had such a crush on you, Jess.”

“You… you did?” She tucked back a strand of hair that had come loose.

His eyes went wide. “You mean you really didn’t know? Here all this time I thought it was so obvious!” His eyes narrowed. “What?” he demanded. “What’s so funny?” But Jess couldn’t stop laughing, grabbing onto his forearm for balance as she nearly leaned double with it. After a moment, Bradley started to laugh with her.

November 14 - Remember an afternoon

They kissed goodbye on the day that they broke up, because after five years of kissing goodbye, it wouldn’t have felt normal not to do so. Perhaps it was a way to say, no hard feelings, thanks for the sex, thanks for five years. She watched him board his train and waved goodbye with no rancor or ill will, and watched his frown deepen as the door dinged to a close in front of his face. She didn’t wonder whether or not he had found a seat, or whether he was comfortable; whether he chose to read a book or to listen to music on the departure. Instead, she wiped abashedly at the moisture that had accumulated in the corner of one eye before anyone could really say it had been there at all, squared her shoulders, turned her back, and walked from the station.

He did not listen to music, nor did he open the book that lay unread past page three in his luggage, nor did he even just stare out the window and admire (or ignore) the landscape that went by. Instead he wrote her a letter. It was about everything she had ever meant to him and everything she always would. He remembered that afternoon. The way the sunlight glinted on your hair that day we took the boat around on the lake in the summer, he wrote. I thought to myself that nothing on earth had ever looked so beautiful. He scratched it out, embarrassed, even though only his eyes had seen this profession yet, but he kept writing sentences like this, couldn’t stop himself even as the train chugged along and increased the distance from their starting point.

He wrote for hours, wrote until his hand cramped, because he was writing the old-fashioned way, on lined paper that he had in his luggage, not on his computer, as though the laptop was too stale and impersonal for these deep words. When his train reached his destination, four hours later, he regarded with satisfaction what he had written. His first stop, he thought, would be a stationary store, then the post office, where he would tie it all up in ribbon and put it in a fancy envelope, and mail it using a decorative stamp.

We have left her, meanwhile, squaring her shoulders and boldly leaving the train platform. My entire life has been in preparation for this, she decided, wiping away the beginning of a tear before it could crystallize. She was excited by the time she made it to the car.

She drove, using the directions on her GPS device. Turn right in One. Point. Three. Miles, intoned the robotic voice, and she obeyed. She loved driving down new roads, on which she’d never before explored, even though she was only a few towns over from where she had lived for the past twelve years. Nervous knots of anticipation tightened in her belly as she neared her destination.

It was the botanical garden, laid out over fifty lusciously landscaped acres, and she had come because it was an attraction listed in the area, and she had decided it was her duty as a citizen to make the most of the world in which she lived. If it was deemed an attraction, she would be there. Had he hated this pastime of hers, the way it ate into her afternoons, their afternoons together? She had forgotten these sentences by the time her car puttered to a halt and she exited into the parking lot, gravel crunching beneath her sneakers. After all, it was a warm, early summer day, mid-afternoon on a Wednesday, and the sun kissed her nose and the breeze was just right, and the sky a washed-out blue. Most of the people she saw, at this afternoon hour on a week-day, were elderly couples, almost always walking with the woman’s arm looped through the man’s as though they were entering church solemnly on a Sunday morning, or perhaps attending a wedding, or perhaps it was a funeral. So she saw elderly couples and she saw mothers – always the mothers, she noted with a frown – out with their children, but they always came in pairs, these mothers, pushing their strollers and lowering their voices, their heads wilting towards one another like fading daisies so they could gossip, while the children ran ahead, and the mothers talked about twenty-something secretaries and other motherly fears, and they liked that here they could talk without really having to pay attention to the children because they didn’t worry that the flower beds would abduct their offspring.

I am intoxicated by the beauty here, she told herself, walking among these mothers and geriatrics, inhaling a dozen different perfumed blossoms as she strolled the main path, detouring to observe the trees in the “forest” with respectful silence, and cooing over the tiny bonsai trees in the greenhouse, and making a foray into the rose garden which had just burst into all its glorious yellow-orange-red-pink-magenta-maroon-crimson glory. She winked at the roses and moved on.

She went out of her way, walking to the far extremity of the botanical garden, because the map in her hand told her the lilacs were in bloom and were a “must see.” By the time she arrived, her feet were blistered and her nose reddened from the sun, and the mothers with their strollers and their broods didn’t bother to come this far, just the intrepid elderly couples, who suddenly looked awfully happy and smug in their longevity. She stared at the clustered purple flowers of the lilacs, lavender dust mops, they looked like, and she stifled a gag.

“I don’t even like lilacs,” she muttered, her eyes going wide at the realization. She hated that cloying, thick smell and always had. She limped back to her car.

Meanwhile, he has gone about his errands at the stationer’s and the post office, and we have left off with him here, thinking the night would be endless. He walked slowly, his feet dragging, towards the stolid, constant presence f the mailbox on the corner from his home, the same one he had walked by every day he had lived in this city for twelve years now (every day except weekends, when he had traveled to visit her, fostering their long-distance love). “Guess I get to see you on Saturdays now,” he told the mailbox wistfully, and lifted a hand to pull open the drawer and deposit the beribboned (and perfumed, he was ashamed to admit; he had added a spritz of cologne) envelope.

“Hey!” called a voice, staying his hand. He turned to see his co-worker waving, running the last few paces towards him, a gait made awkward by her high heels. She stopped at his side. “So funny seeing you here! The girls and I were just going out for a drink. You’ll join us?” He looked back over his shoulder at the mailbox, still just patiently waiting for him, but his co-worker was already tugging at his arm and he let himself be tugged. He tucked the envelope under his other arm and assumed tomorrow was good enough. He drank five glasses of foamy beer at the outdoor beer garden with his co-workers, and by the time he stumbled home at three in the morning he realized he’d left the package behind on the wooden bench of one of the communal table. Something about this should have bothered him, but his brain felt as fizzy as the face wash he scrubbed on his cheeks – metrosexual stuff from the drug store, he acknowledged with guilt, but he liked the way it smelled – so he decided to forget about it until the reason he should care mattered more in the morning, and he let himself flop onto bed and fall asleep with his clothes still on.

She sat awake for hours. She had thought she’d be so busy – remember all those afternoons she had swatted him away, declaring, “You’re getting in the way of all of my projects!” How her body had cringed at his approaching footstep, if she was in the middle of a good book, or about to dive into another escapade about town seeing the “attractions” listed in her home city. How delightful the idea of a full free night – of hundreds more free nights to come – now seemed, as the GPS guided her home from the botanical garden. She cooked dinner, and she popped open a bottle of wine with a smart sound, like poppers going off on New Year’s Eve, and she relished her solo party and put on the jazz music that he hated and she adored, and remember that afternoon by the lake where he had refused to let her play her favorite records. She unbuttoned her blouse and she half-cooked, half-danced around her kitchen.

By the time she finished dinner – not so good, after all, she thought, with a sour twist to her lips – the meat undercooked, the potatoes lumpy, the green beans not fresh – she frowned at the label on her wine bottle with consternation. ‘I don’t even like Spanish wine!” she said bitterly, but the wine bottle didn’t look ashamed of itself.

She surveyed her apartment and already it looked awfully big for one person, and the books on her shelf looked like awfully quick reads, and boring ones at that, and she couldn’t quite remember why it was that the night alone had seemed like such an intoxicating proposition. She flopped onto her bed and lay there staring up at the ceiling, hoping the respite of sleep might come.

November 13 - The window had other views

Hannah knew the scene outside the window intimately. She had made up her mind from the moment they brought her here that she hated looking inside the building, inside this one small room, so her eye was almost always drawn outside, to the window panes, to what was past the panes of glass. She could see things there that she thought she had almost forgotten about. There was yellow sunshine, like rays of piss slanting on the grass; there was the grass, which she remembered as prickly about her ankles, spiking into her flesh when she ran barefoot as a girl, while the dirt caked onto the soles of her feet; there was the blue sky with its cumulus clouds that made shapes and stories, shifting with the mood of the wind. There! In that one she saw a dragon, no this time it was a bunny rabbit, here, still another time, was her own portrait painted by God up in the clouds. Hannah placed her chin on the window sill – grimy; seldom cleaned, these forgotten window sills – and smiled up at her portrait in the sky for hours.

Hannah loved to tell Bruce these stories when her brother came to visit. “I saw a dog!” she would cluck with joy, while his wife and the two children – Hannah could never remember which was which so called them both, “My niece!” with a beatific grin to appease for the lack of a moniker – while they stood by with smiles plastered onto their faces. “Smile, girls!” Bruce would instruct as he beeped the car locked in the parking lot and ushered them inside, his wife included in the word ‘girls’. They were instructed not to say a word, lest it tip Hannah over the edge.

It was the happy stories and goings-on outside the window that Hannah liked to tell Bruce about most of all. “A family,” she crowed with delight. “I looked out, and the mother bent down and took the child’s hand, and the father, he went down, squatted on his ankles so he was his daughter’s height, and the grandfather – he was the one in the wheelchair – he was smiling.” Bruce would nod encouragingly, sure that this story had really come to pass and pleased at Hannah’s perception. It was when she said other things that he scratched his head and turned to the nurse after he left Hannah’s room and said, “Are you sure her dose is high enough?”

“My husband!” Hannah cried. “My husband he was outside the window last night! He came and he recited poetry. Just like that man with the long nose. Oh dear, I can’t remember…”

“Cyrano de Bergerac?” Bruce’s wife supplied before gasping and clamping her lips shut, trying to glare at her own tongue as if it had betrayed her. Bruce shot her a warning look.

“Yes!” Hannah said triumphantly. “Like Cyrano de Bergerac. He came and recited poetry and threw flower petals up at my window. You see this one here now?”

The two daughters leaned forward, eager to pet the velvety petals of a rose; Bruce found his own fingers itching to do so, tantalized by that soft plush flesh that he had always equated with touching a vagina, but then he recoiled when Hannah opened her hand and revealed tissue papers from the bathroom instead. She beamed down at them. “You see the flower petals he threw up at me?” One of the daughters started to snicker and Bruce smacked her on the bottom and she stood stick straight.

“Hannah,” he reminded. “You don’t have a husband, dear.”

Even this didn’t trouble him too badly; there was only so much they could expect the medication to do, even in this day and age. But there were other things that Hannah said that worried him more.

“The window has other views,” she whispered one time – thankfully he had thought to visit alone without the girls – clutching at the collar of his shirt so he had to call for the nurse to pry loose her fingers, her knuckles white from the effort and her lips parted in heavy panting, spittle flecking at the corners. The nurse eased her back against her pillows, told her to close her eyes, but Hannah whimpered and looked pleadingly at Bruce.

“The window has other views,” she repeated.

“What do you mean, dear?” he asked carefully of his mad sister.

“Sometimes it doesn’t look out on the yard. Sometimes it’s a dark pit, and I saw a man out there. I saw a man with a knife. I watched him butcher….” She shuddered.

“Butcher…?”

“Animals. The squirrels. The squirrels don’t play outside on the grass anymore.” Bruce was ashamed of himself for looking quickly, to reassure himself, that the grass was still there and that the squirrels still jumped and cavorted on the prickly green grass, and felt a sinking thud in his gut when he didn’t notice one right away.

She’s crazy, he reminded himself.

The nurse nodded when he told her to up the dose, upon leaving.

Hannah started shutting the curtain on her window, even in broad daylight. “But dear,” Bruce reminded her gently. “You love the green grass and the blue sky and the puffy white clouds.”

“Those things aren’t there anymore,” Hannah shot back with an angry stare, and Bruce wondered how she knew that it was a gray, rainy day out there at that moment. Of course; she must have heard the downpour, she would have felt the damp cold. She’s crazy, he reminded himself.

The next week, she had taped the curtain shut around the window. “We couldn’t stop her,” the nurse explained, spreading her hands helplessly.

“What do you mean you couldn’t stop her?” Bruce thundered. “How does a frail eighty-pound woman move her bed to the other side of the room all by herself?” Hannah was lying there now, sucking her thumb. The nurse flinched at his tone but straightened her back.

“She said she’s scared of the window, and it doesn’t really do any harm to have her sleeping in the other corner, so what difference does it make?”

Bruce opened his mouth a time or two but couldn’t think of the correct answer, so he stormed into his sister’s room and patted her back and tried to move her vacant stare from the wall to his face, to no avail. Sighing, hands in pockets, Bruce wandered over to the window. Needing to reassure himself – hating that need – he peeled back the layers of duct tape – somehow she had found enough rolls to tape around the window a good quarter inch thick in every spot – and peered out at the prickly green grass beyond. Just a normal day, he promised himself.

A quick movement caught his eye, and Bruce saw a man – he thought it was a man; a shadow of a man – darting across the lawn, out of sight before he could really put gender or size or texture or anything to who or what it was. Just my imagination, he thought, and looked around at the squirrels for reassurance, but there weren’t any playing.

November 12 - This is what can happen when you grow old

It is after midnight and I am tired and I am eating reheated, prepackaged mashed potatoes because that is all I can find quickly in the fridge that does not require preparation or lifting or effort on my part, and effort is something I have little of these days. I am reading while I eat, which is my habit, and a whole splotch of the mashed potatoes, a big white jism of it, lands on the page when I swing the fork across too abruptly, and I think to myself: this is what it feels like to be a man and to come. To watch your product artistically spurt outwards. For a moment I am satisfied with my creation, but then I remember that it is just mashed potato splattered across my page and I lick it up without pausing to think that this makes me look ridiculous because the only other being in the room at the moment is the dog and the dog is sleeping with her head in her paws.

John is asleep in the bedroom and I am afraid to go in. Not because I might have to change the bedpan, or because he will be having one of his night sweats again and I will have to cradle him against my breast like I did with our two children, who are now grown, when they were young, but because I suddenly feel tired. It is eight years now since John’s accident left him with two stumps that end just above where knee caps used to be, and left the once-powerful thing between his legs limp and useless. “I’m useless,” John wailed in the first few years, staring at his flaccid penis in the bathroom mirror, and I would rush to him from across the room and throw my arms about his shoulders and whisper fiercely into his ear, “You’re not, you’re not, you’re not,” over and over like a mantra. After a while, John stopped saying it. I wondered if he still thought it, had just grown tired of voicing it.

But I was used to John, now, used to being his caretaker instead of his wife, had ceased staring at my red-rimmed eyes after another sleepless night and reminding my reflection, “I did not sign up for this!”; that it was something altogether different I pictured when I waltzed down a flower strewn aisle in my parents’ backyard twenty-two years ago. John had stood tall and proud in a rented tux by the altar made out of an old, carved tree; he could still stand then – this was years before the accident. He would father two daughters and take me ballroom dancing and play pick-up soccer with his friends on weekends in the park for many more years before the motorcycle spit him out and landed on top of him and I heard the phone ring while I was playing with Greta and Mabel in the backyard and I knew before I even picked up the phone that someone was calling to tell me that something was very wrong. But I was used to the way things were now, the role to which I had been relegated, so why was I tired?

The phone. Yes, I was tired because of the phone.

Brring brring it had insisted earlier today. Somehow it was one of those phone calls where I knew before I even picked up, like a horror film with the slasher on the other end of the line. I had been cutting up an orange for John the way he liked – neat slices arranged on a plate – and sucked off the juice as I picked up.

“Hello?” sounded ominous.

And it is not every day that a mother calls a daughter and needs daughter to play mother. It is not every day Mom chokes out the words about the surgery she is having for the lump they found in her breast. “Stage three,” she laughs as though the number three is a great joke like the Three Stooges or the Three Blind Mice. Three wishes, the genie gives.

“Stage three!” she cackles.

“Oh, Mom.”

“You can be there?” she asks, and she sounds young, young like when I was the daughter and she was the mother and I was scared to go to my first day of Kindergarten and tried to glue my hand to hers with Elmer’s, and I want this strange role reversal to go back to the way it used to be.

“Yes, I can be there.” Because Brenda obviously won’t be. Brenda is the older sister so shouldn’t she be relegated to parent, I think with a pout in my brain roughly the size of my frontal cortex, but Mom has called me because she knows Brenda won’t be there. Brenda is in the throes of a divorce – that’s how she describes it in her weekly phone call, the throes of a divorce as though it is a passionate, orgasmic thing, her with her ankles over her head or her back arched, and she just grins and bears it while her husband (almost ex-husband) plows away at the details. And of course Brenda is infinitely too concerned with playing soccer mom to the terror that is her three young boys or too concerned with milking her (soon to be) ex-husband for every penny he is worth, to be bothered with our mother. Our mother, I want to scream at her, imbuing the word with everything it means about spurting vaginal fluids and nine months of back pain, but I know Brenda won’t come, so I just say to Mom:

“Yes, I can be there.”

That’s how it always was, when I was a kid. Janie can do it, my friends would say for the task on the playground that no one wanted to perform. Janie can do it, my family would say when delegating responsibility. Janie can do it, John would tell our daughters as they grew from pink bundles of flesh that fit into my arms to strangely gawky adolescents with his knobby knees and my thin blond hair.

“Yes, I can be there.”

“Good, good.” Mom sounds relieved. “Because, the one other thing, sweetie. If there are any decisions to be made… You know… You’d have to be the one to make them.” Decisions. She makes it sound like picking fabric swatches for the living room, or which entrée to serve at a wedding. The chicken or the fish? The cake or the pie? Cut the cord on your mother? Yes ma’am, coming right up.

So this is why I feel tired tonight, I admit. I sigh and give in and tiptoe to the bedroom door, but luckily John is still just sleeping and the bedpan is empty, so I’m off the hook for another little while. I tiptoe into the bathroom and stare at myself. I am going gray. “This is what can happen when you grow old,” I decide.