Equal Affections (21 page)

Baths helped her. Also, she had checked out from the library some works of Catholic theology, most of which she found dull and hard to concentrate on. It didn't matter. Faith, she understood, didn't have to be a matter of intellect. She had only to watch Clara, who cleaned her house, maneuvering her way through the rooms with an earphone plugged into her ear, sermons every second of the day, to understand that faith didn't have to be a matter of intellect. Faith—if not blind, then mindless—had accompanied Clara through all the thousands of miles of vacuuming that had been her life these last twenty years. It accompanied her through quick lunches of canned olives dumped in a bowl, through the drive back and forth from the small stuccoed house she shared with a hazy collection of fellow churchwomen, children, new arrivals from the islands. Faith, Louise was coming to understand, was not an argument in a book; faith was a little radio, cheaply made, a wire crawling up a white uniform and creeping, like an earwig, into the ear. Something you listened to every moment of the day. She knew what Clara would have thought of it all. What was an itch, what was cancer, compared with the ravages suffered by Christ? Live chastely, Louise had heard her mutter more than once. Tithe gratefully.

___________

In any case she should have known better than to confide in her sister. Every time in her life she'd confided in anyone, especially her sister, it had turned out dreadfully. But Eleanor had a way of coaxing things out of her.

For one thing, she always came unexpectedly, and never without substantial gifts of food—cakes, pies, casseroles, pâtés, sometimes a whole turkey or roast beef. This gave her a reason to stay awhile, whereas if Louise had had her way, she would've invented excuses, put Eleanor's visits off, one after the other. Her little sister, whom everyone assumed to be her older sister—Eleanor was fatter, her hair grayer, her eyes more worn, not to mention the brace and the cane—was mostly an
annoyance to Louise, a source of guilt, frustration. Why did she live the way she did? Why would anyone choose to live that way? She had married Sid Friedman, after all, supposedly a psychologist, in Louise's opinion a rogue, and passed thirty years with him on the constant brink of bankruptcy; they were always putting money into talentless songwriters, or “prime land” that turned out to be tumbleweed-strewn desert, or dubious kitchen gadgets that sat unused in Eleanor's drawers for years. More than once the meandering small talk of Eleanor's food-bearing visits had led to requests for loans or tales of no-risk schemes, airplanes and pyramids, in which it would be a crime for Louise and Nat not to invest. Louise, who had never borrowed a dime in her life, wondered, Does she have no shame? She wondered this even as she wrote the check. And Eleanor was “litigious,” a crossword puzzle word, meaning she sued people—contractors; plumbers; drivers whose cars scraped the paint off her fender; people from whom she had bought dogs, garage door openers, motorbikes, washing machines. Her motivation was not so much justice, or even revenge, as it was a sportsmanlike determination to get the most she could out of her small misfortunes. “I take an optimist's view of the hazards of daily life,” she liked to say. “Everything's an opportunity, if you look at it the right way.” Louise studied her coffee.

For three years now Sid and Eleanor had been living a town away from Louise and Nat. Before that, for two decades, it was Los Angeles—an easier distance for Louise, since it meant having to see her sister only once or twice a year, on holidays. In those days, when Eleanor flew up, Louise invariably dragged Danny to the airport to pick her up, only to find she was not among the passengers disembarking from the plane. Then Louise would hear herself paged—always a terrifying experience, her own name booming through the loudspeakers—and at the white courtesy telephone listen as Eleanor promised to be on the very next flight, an hour from now. Often, by the time Eleanor actually got off the plane, Louise and Danny had been waiting three or four hours. Still, finally, there she was, stumbling down the long airport corridor with her children (still children then), her messy hair flying, waving her cane, and saying in a mock child's voice, “Oh, gee, Mommy, is Auntie Louise mad at us? Won't Auntie Louise forgive us for being a teeny-weeny bit late?”

“Three hours is not a teeny-weeny bit late, Eleanor.”

“But we're so sorry, Auntie Louise, and we couldn't help it, the traffic was so terrible! Oh, dear, what can we do to make Auntie Louise love us again?”

This was Eleanor at her worst.

Eleanor at her best was the morning her oven exploded. Louise stood with her in her kitchen, examining the charred interior. She was still in her pink bathrobe and furry slippers. “Ellie,” Louise said, “I'm sorry. I know how important an oven is to you, and that this one was expensive. I'm sorry.”

But Eleanor only shut the oven door and said, “Look.” The glass had fractured without breaking and was run through with a network of intricate and tiny cracks.

“Oh, Ellie,” Louise said.

“It's kind of pretty, isn't it?” Eleanor said, running her finger over the shattered glass. “I almost like it better this way.” And smiled. She had managed to look beyond the destroyed oven, the son in Alaska, the daughter who would never have children, not to mention the unpaid mortgage and the upcoming court date and the ever-present threat of destitution and ruin. In the midst of a terrific fight with Louise once, screaming as they drove along a Boston highway to visit their senile mother, screaming as they got out of the car in the nursing home parking lot, screaming as they approached the electric doors, Eleanor had suddenly stopped and said, “Look at that flower, growing in the cement.” And in a second she was on her knees examining the little flower that had struggled through the stone, so thoroughly delighted that Louise could only step back, silenced, impressed. Eleanor had forgotten her argument in the noisy cement parking lot; she had forgotten her sister and her mother and her children. She had forgotten them all.

As little girls they had sat together on a two-seat toilet, their underpants around their ankles, perched on the edges of the twin bowls that reached from the common tank like two fused cherries on a stem. They liked to sit for hours like that, and talk in quiet voices, as little girls do, close enough in age, back then, not to notice the difference. As they got older, it became clear that Eleanor would always be the uglier, the less intelligent, the less lucky of the two, yet also, in many ways, the more contented. She could sit, as a teenager, in the grass, her crutch by her side, and look in a way that Louise knew meant she was really seeing
things, seeing them in a way Louise envied. She noticed grass, flowers, trees, stars, and remarked on them. “Look at the stars, Louise!” she might say, and Louise, to whom they were only stars, only nodded, ashamed at her lack of vision. In high school, in spite of the crutch, Eleanor met and fell in love with Sid Friedman and dated him happily, gratefully until their wedding, untroubled by his bad breath and awkward haircuts. What a pathetic choice, Louise had always thought, and yet she could not help but feel slightly disgusted, slightly surprised that Eleanor, four years younger, was married and settled first.

They grew up contentious, at odds. In adulthood Louise resented Eleanor, avoided her, considered herself—resolutely—the lucky one, without a cane, without a brace, with (relatively) normal, happy, healthy children. Eleanor never expressed even the slightest resentment of her sister; she was constantly, infuriatingly loving, no matter how cruel Louise might be. Her nonstop, smiling affection was a tactic, a weapon, Louise decided. Revenge came through the mail: obscure articles about sibling homosexuality, as well as alarmist tabloid clippings about AIDS, slow death, and postinfectious promiscuity, and photographs of gaunt, dying men clutching teddy bears. All, Louise reminded herself, because of her own tragic children. In person Eleanor was all smiles, always the bearer of gifts, and made no mention of the letters. She lived in one of a hundred identical houses built in the fifties, in cramped quarters, where the furniture was old and catscratched, the carpet stained. Only in the kitchen had no expense been spared, and yet even that room was constantly littered with empty boxes and cans and rotting vegetable rinds. Odd—Louise had always assumed that Eleanor must have hated having to live under such circumstances, must have grown hot with jealousy when she walked into Louise's clean-smelling, commodious kitchen, with its tile floor and window-ledge hummingbird feeders. And yet, she sometimes wondered now, children aside, was it right to assume that Eleanor longed for more than she had, longed for the stable bank account and big house her sister cherished and nurtured? Sometimes it seemed to Louise as if turmoil itself somehow powered Eleanor's life, as if she and Sid staved off settledness and certainty—those still pools—in favor of living always in the wave, the furious ocean, of going after things, of getting. Thus disaster—or at least the sensation of disaster—eluded Eleanor. She had said it herself: Everything's an opportunity, if you look at it the
right way. If you thought about it, her life had unfolded as an endless chain of opportunity, possibility, while Louise sat in her perfect house, awaiting the mutiny of the cells. If you thought about it that way. But of course, Louise had to remind herself, few people would have thought about it that way, and fewer would have chosen Eleanor's life over her own.

What was indisputable—and indisputably annoying—was that Eleanor and Sid lived topsy-turvy in the messy bed of love, happy with each other as Louise and Nat—between clean sheets, in tight parallel—hadn't been for years. They were in love with each other in ways so obvious and absolute as to make irrelevant the fact that Louise could not imagine how anyone could fall in love with either one of them. They cared only what they looked like in each other's eyes—what did the world matter?—and it was this single-minded vision that rendered Eleanor's clippings obsolete, pointless. What use were they when she really had had the upper hand all along?

___________

A car pulling into the driveway, unexpected, was the sign. Fresh from the bathtub, relieved for the moment of the exasperating itch, Louise stood still in her bedroom, hoping it was someone turning around. The engine, however, turned off instead of turning over. She heard a car door open and slam, and then the familiar scraping of Eleanor's cane against the gravel.

“Hello, dear,” Eleanor said as she made her noisy stumble through the kitchen door. “I brought a buckle and a slump.” She hoisted a large paper sack onto the kitchen counter and fell into a chair. “I've been experimenting with old-fashioned American desserts all week,” she said, pulling off her coat. “We ate the cobbler, and Joanne and Ed took the crumple. Here, hand me that bag.” Louise did, and Eleanor pulled from it two tin pans, wrapped in wax paper and filled with incoherent splendors of fruit and cake. “No more aluminum pans in our house,” Eleanor said. “It causes Alzheimer's.”

“Glad to know it,” Louise said. “One more deadly thing. Anyway, thanks, Eleanor, I'm sure Nat will enjoy these.”

“They're not for Nat, they're for you,” Eleanor said.

“I'm on a diet.”

“Thin as a rail and on a diet! Me, I've been on every diet there is, it doesn't seem to do much good.”

“A diet's why I'm thin as a rail.”

“Oh, don't be ridiculous, you've always been skinny. Anyway, eat it if you want, and if you don't, give it to your friends. Everyone does what they can, and you know me. What I do is cook.”

“Thank you, Eleanor.”

“Anything, dear. I figured I might bring a little cheer, since you were uncomfortable with that rash of yours.”

“I've felt better.”

“Do you have any coffee?” But Louise was already pouring. She scrutinized her sister, who was, as usual, a mess, her hair unwashed and uncombed. She was wearing stretchy pink pants, a blouse with a hideous pattern of yellow flowers, blue sandals through the open ends of which two scratchy blue toenails peeked. They were the kind of sandals that jam the toes together, the kind their mother had worn. Eleanor had always favored unlikely colors.

“So this latest lawsuit is a real fiasco,” she was saying, “thank you, half a cup is fine. Have I told you about it?”

“I have trouble keeping them all straight.”

“Oh, I'm sure I told you about this one. A couple of months ago I was at the movies, seeing
Out of Africa
? Anyway, the movie was about to start, and this man in front of me was smoking, even though there's a no smoking rule. Well, you know how allergic I am to cigarettes! So I just tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Sir, there's no smoking in this theater.' He ignored me. So I tapped him on the shoulder again and said, ‘Sir, maybe you didn't hear me. There's no smoking in this theater,' and this time not only did he not say a word, he actually took another cigarette and lit it up. As a challenge. So finally I tapped him on the shoulder a third time, harder, and I said, ‘Sir, if you don't put out that cigarette I'm going to have to get the management.' And you know what he did?”

“What?” Louise said.

“He turned around and said, ‘Lady, if you don't shut the fuck up and
let me watch the movie, I'm going to throw this fucking Coca-Cola I have here in your fucking face.' His exact words. Well, I wasn't going to take that for a second! So I stood up and got the manager, and of course when I came back, he wasn't smoking. They're tricky, that kind. ‘This man abused me verbally because I asked him to quit smoking,' I said. ‘I want him thrown out of this theater.' Well, the guy just looked up real innocent, but sure enough, everyone around confirmed he'd been smoking. Then the manager—he must have been on the take—he said there was nothing he could do about it except tell the guy not to smoke anymore. So he told the guy, who sort of shrugged, and went off and I sat down again and the guy lit up a cigarette, turned around, and blew the smoke in my face. That was when I slapped him.”