The following is an excerpt from the story Sister, Sister:
He should go but he doesn’t want to go. Perhaps the e-mail he just received will be a cancellation. He closes his eyes and says the Serenity Prayer. Into the corridor of faith has he entered, if not the main room. But his spirit sinks on reading his sister’s effusive note:
“I am so looking forward to seeing you.”
He doesn’t know why even the thought of visiting her is so emotionally challenging. But he does know. They are alone now. The family remnant, like a piece of carpet, is what they are now. A scrap from the whole cloth. Something like that.
His brother gasping, on the pavement to which he had fallen, that he didn’t want to die before he did die. His oldest sister dying in the apartment where she had been raised and which she was unable to leave. His second oldest sister found dead in the East River. His third sister taking her life in the dingy room in the SRO the family had managed for years.
The garbage-canned family. The shit-canned family. So he would say or think when allowing bitterness or vehemence to have its way. But he and Vera, being the youngest, had been determined to seek a happier fate, having seen the horror unfolding in the lives of their four older siblings. And they had gotten out. They had. Dobbs Ferry for her. West Ninetieth Street, in Manhattan, for him. Theirs not the journey their older siblings had taken from the family’s apartment to one of the single rooms in the same building.
But he hadn’t left. He hadn’t left at all. He had taken them, all of them, with him. They were packed inside his head. Packed inside of hers, too. His mother saying, when he was a child, “My only prayer is that we all be in heaven together.” Well, maybe that would be so. Maybe.In the Rooms of Recovery he had heard a sober drunk say, “So my mentor asks me, what kind of daughter do you want to be to your mother and father? What kind of sister do you want to be to your brother?” The question had brought the woman up short. It had changed her life. Hearing the woman was an emoticon moment. It brought tears to Gideon’s eyes. He had not been the son or brother he should have been. He had been not only a drunk but a betrayer. He had put his family on the page. He had described them from a point of view they might not like should they see what he had written.
And now he had done something even more despicable. For the several months since his sister had entered widowhood with the death of her husband, Maury, he had been writing, practically every day, about his brother-in-law’s death and the aftermath, using Maury’s demise for his own purposes, looking for something he couldn’t find in these explorations of the recent past. And not a word of what he was up to to Vera. Not a word. Why? It wouldn’t sit well with her. She would turn into conflagration central with her vilifying mouth. Thief. Creep. Hypocrite. He could hear her epithets and accusations now. Pretending to care. Pretending to be supportive. You selfish, selfish pig. And now the plaintive sound of Anthony Newley, the English actor, singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?” entered his head. Posing that question, the question of love. The song coming from the long, long ago.
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