Bearded Women (26 page)

“We won’t do it,” Auntie said at our weekly Friday night dinner. “Absolutely not. We live together and we’ll die together.”

I don’t know why I kept stuffing baked ziti into my mouth. I should have stopped. I should have insisted that kind of surgery wasn’t the only option, even though it was.

“We should consider it,” Mom said, waving her fork at my aunt.

“Consider killing you off.” Auntie took another spoonful of pasta from the baking dish and didn’t look at my mother.

“It’s me or both of us,” said Mom.

“It’s both of us,” said my aunt.

My dad and uncle and I looked at each other because it didn’t seem like the conversation was happening. My brother wasn’t there to share our confusion, but we were used to that. He lives in town, but we don’t see him more than once a month.

“You should think about this more,” said my uncle.

“Listen, buddy,” said my aunt, “I’ve been thinking about it for fifty-six years. This is the way it’s going to be.”

My aunt and uncle divorced twenty-three years ago, when I was ten, but he still comes over for dinner twice a month. My aunt called him “buddy” instead of “cutie” like she used to, but I knew she cared for him because she couldn’t meet his gaze for the rest of the meal.

Mom and Auntie couldn’t decide what to study in college so they became bank tellers while waiting from some other profession to pique their interest, but they liked the bank so well they stayed there for thirty-six years. They were extroverted and cheerful, never gave a dishonest smile, and loved flirting with customers. That’s how Mom found Dad. She waited until my aunt and uncle got engaged before everyone tied the knot.

My brother and I came from Mom’s uterus, but our blood flowed through her and our auntie. Sometimes they were both mothers, but other times Mom was a little more maternal. She didn’t want us riding bikes in the street. She made us wash our hands for thirty seconds before eating. Auntie said Mom might as well make us walk around with bike helmets and a can of Lysol. I don’t know if I loved my mother more, but there was a connection I couldn’t explain. When she cocked her head in a certain way, I could read her mind. That’s how I knew there were things she told my aunt and no one else. I told myself that was normal, they were twins, but I felt like I was missing out on something. She was my mom, but we couldn’t have secrets, we couldn’t share little mother-daughter things. There wasn’t anything she told me that Auntie didn’t already know.

I have my own apartment, but since Mom and Auntie died a week and a half ago I’ve been staying at my old house with Dad. So has my uncle. Friends and neighbours have stopped coming by, so all we have are wilting flowers and leftover casserole.

After dinner my uncle and dad sit on the couch and try to read the paper but end up crying. Their tears threaten to flood the house, and it’s a pretty big one when you consider all four bedrooms. My uncle wipes his eyes on his sleeve and gets out gin and tonic water to make us drinks. I have a couple but stay sober enough so he can lean against me on the couch. My uncle is a small man, only five foot four, so he’s not difficult to support.

“I wanted to get back with her and now I can’t,” he says. “I’m ready to shoot myself.”

I rock him back and forth, back and forth, until he stops crying. Then I stand, pull him to his feet, and walk him to my old bedroom. I take off his shoes and socks, pull back the covers, and tuck him in. He’s had enough booze to give him a dreamless sleep. I pad to the bathroom where I’ve always kept a toothbrush. When I glance at myself in the mirror I see the shimmer of both their faces—Mom’s small nose and pointed chin, Auntie’s hazel eyes and full mouth.

I sleep in my aunt and uncle’s old bedroom because I don’t want my uncle to wake up on a mattress saturated with memory, though it hasn’t gotten much use since he and my aunt divorced. Mom and Auntie slept in the same bed with Dad every night after that, but I can still feel the mattress divot made by my aunt and uncle and mom’s bodies. I’m engulfed by their absence. The hugeness of loss. That’s when I let myself cry.

Mom was more traditional than my aunt, which is why she was nervous about me being unmarried at thirty-three.

“You’ve had decent boyfriends,” she said. “Weren’t any of them keepers?”

But Auntie said I was doing the right thing by playing the field.

“You need to wait until you’re really sure,” she said.

I’m still not sure how sure is “really sure.” My aunt said I’d know when it happened, so I guess it hasn’t happened yet. Usually I don’t mind the quietude of my apartment.

My brother is a different story, a thirty-year-old guy who bounces from girlfriend to girlfriend. Sometimes he snags two girls in one month and leaves them just as fast, so I’ve given up keeping track of his current sweetie. He got Mom’s good looks and Auntie’s sense of humour, so even though he has a reputation for loving and leaving, it makes him attractive to a certain set of females bent on conquest. They want to be the one who tames him. Good luck, I say.

“Girls aren’t bags of potato chips,” I told him. “You can’t use them up and toss them out.”

“They know what they’re getting into when they go out with me,” he said and shrugged. “I’m looking for specific things in a woman. I know what I can live with and what I can’t. A month is enough for me to tell if someone would get on my nerves in the long run.”

“So everyone gets on your nerves in the long run,” I said.

He shrugged again. “Most people turn out to be annoying if you’re with them for more than four hours at a time.”

When my brother started playing girlfriend roulette in his early twenties, Mom and my aunt said it was a phase. So much for that. I thought he’d slow down when Mom and Auntie got sick, but I only saw him twice at the hospital. He touched their hands, spent a few shadowy minutes in the corner, then he was gone.

My brother reappeared at the funeral with his latest girl. He cried while she patted his back. I didn’t know whether to believe his tears.

Two weeks after Mom died, everyone at the archive walks around me like several quiet satellites. I appreciate the blunt rhythms of my job. Scan books. Check the scans and correct distorted text. Put the files on the library’s online archive. It’s one thing that hasn’t changed since the double death, makes it slightly easier to deal with everything else.

Like sorting through their belongings.

After dinner Dad and I sift through their clothing. Some things can be donated to Goodwill, but I don’t know what to do with refitted pants and blouses and skirts, the things with odd slits or snaps or buttons to account for the section of organs and skin that bound them together.

“I can’t be without your mother,” my aunt joked darkly three weeks before they died. “I’d need to get a whole new wardrobe and it’s not worth the hassle.”

So what to do with fifteen extra wide skirts built for two? They’re too big for placemats and too small for tablecloths. I take my uncle’s suggestion and have a couple gin and tonics, enough to put me in a haze, because the last meals I had with Mom and Auntie are too vivid, especially the ones six months ago before that final diagnosis.

My mom and aunt agreed on many things, they had to, and one of them was hating doctors. Once they made up their minds, they formed a brick wall opinion. You could argue and plead and cajole and they would smile and nod and do exactly what they wanted.

This is why, when Mom started coughing a lot, she covered the fits with a smile big as red wax lips. My aunt said they’d be fine.

I said they should schedule an appointment with a doctor.

My aunt rolled her eyes. “We’ve been to more than enough doctors in our lives.”

“If you don’t go you might end up dead,” I muttered, though I couldn’t imagine that happening.

“Please pass the potatoes,” said my mother.

My mom and aunt were a little like Eng and Chang Bunker, those Siamese twins who married sisters and had tons of kids and lived in farms side by side. But Eng and Chang devoted their bodies to science after they died, and Mom and Auntie refused to do that.

“The doctors have studied us more than enough to know what’s connected where,” my aunt said.

But they must have talked about Mom’s coughing fits in private. I’d kill to know what they said, who argued what, because they scheduled an appointment when Mom was wheezing so bad that even her prescription inhaler didn’t provide relief. They wanted a stronger drug. They got a death sentence. But I think they knew it was coming.

I took two weeks off work, used up my vacation time and sick leave, but my boss let me since she knew the circumstance. Mom and Auntie and I went to the art museum to see Degas paintings, the zoo to see kangaroos and koalas, and we visited their favourite Lebanese restaurant every day for lunch.

A long good-bye is a mixed blessing—you can say all the things you want to say, you can make all the arrangements you need to make, you can have good times, but those moments are mixed with grieving. You can’t help but start the process before you have to.

When Eng and Chang Bunker died it was a lot faster—one twin passed three hours before the other, and the remaining twin didn’t want to be removed from his brother to save his own life. It’s a decision that’s hard for anyone to understand. But I know if my auntie had made another choice, I wouldn’t have had my mom around for those last weeks. That’s what I think about as I lie awake in their huge bed. I tell myself the trade-off was worth it. I tell myself it wasn’t my decision. I roll over and clamp a pillow over my head to shut out any more thoughts. Even if I’d given them my two cents, it wouldn’t have mattered.

I call my brother’s cell phone, get his voicemail and leave a message asking him to stop by the house for dinner tomorrow and to see if there’s anything from Mom and Auntie he wants to keep.

He doesn’t call back.

I leave one message a day for two weeks, then I get pissed enough to stake out my brother’s apartment and accost him when he’s coming home. Probably from a date.

“Hey,” he says when he slides out of his cute little Japanese car and I barrel out of my secondhand station wagon.

“Where have you been?” I cross my arms in classic older sister stance.

“I have a life,” he says. “I have work. I have Jen.” His latest girl.

“Did you get my messages?” I put my hands behind my back but he doesn’t notice my stare as he examines his key ring.

“I get a lot of messages and I have to deal with the ones from work first.” He walks away from me to his apartment door, but I trail along.

“You should help us sort the stuff from Mom and Auntie,” I say. “Don’t you want anything to remember them? Don’t you even care?”

He whirls around so fast I nearly knock into him.

“Of course I care,” he says, “but I have a shitload of memories. I don’t need their junk. I have enough of my own. I need to haul half of my stuff to Goodwill. Clothes and books and furniture and just . . . crap I don’t need.”

He whirls back around. “Are you coming in for a fucking drink or not?”

“I didn’t know I was invited,” I say.

“You’re my fucking sister. It would be impolite if I didn’t invite you in for a drink.”

I’m not sure when my brother started caring about politeness, but I’ll take what I can get.

“How’s Jen?” I say while he gets a couple beers from the fridge.

“She’s good,” he says. “Patient. She teaches second grade. I need a patient woman.”

“A patient woman who’s not annoying,” I say.

“You got it.” He pops the cap off my beer before handing it to me. My brother is a beer snob, only serves fancy microbrews, so when I’m at his place I know I’ll get something good.

“If I see anything from Mom and Auntie that I think you’d like I’ll save it,” I say. “Something small.”

“Sure, whatever.” He plays with a little ceramic elephant statue on his coffee table.

“Are you doing okay?” I say.

“Fucking peachy,” he says. “You want another beer?”

“I’m fine,” I say, taking a pull, then holding the bottle by the lip and swinging it from my fingers like a pendulum. My brother walks the ceramic elephant across the coffee table.

Six weeks after my mom and auntie die, I walk into the lobby of their old bank for the first time in two months. There’s a new person, a single person, inhabiting their window. I do an about-face and go back to my car and use the drive-through again.

At home I consider getting drunk with my uncle (Dad has still not told me or my uncle to leave), but he needs someone to guide him to bed and position the trash can on the floor just in case. Dad stays up late looking through the realty section of the paper. I have a hard time falling asleep, replay memories I haven’t considered for a long time. When I was in elementary school I got teased because Mom and Auntie looked like they did, but in third grade I learned how to ball my fists. When I came home with playground bruises and a note from the principal, Mom and Auntie were mad.

“You shouldn’t get a reputation as a girl who beats people up,” said Mom. She wouldn’t listen when I explained that I was defending myself and defending them against words. I tried to tell them about it when I was nine and ten and eleven, but they just smiled and said to tell the other kids that sticks and stones would break my bones but names would never hurt me.

After six or seven trips to the office with a bloody nose, kids left me alone. But my brother didn’t have it as easy. He was withdrawn, never talked back, so even the poor girl with the cleft palate who was stepped on by every other kid in their grade made fun of him. My brother was quiet as a marble statue. An easy target.

“The names didn’t get to me,” he said later when we were both in high school. “Why beat people up if they didn’t get to me?”

I still don’t believe him. How could those words not make him angry?

But I got even more upset a couple years ago when I tried to explain to Mom and Auntie how growing up with two mothers wasn’t easy. They knitted their eyebrows identically.

“We’ve always felt accepted in town and at the bank,” said Mom.

“You didn’t deal with playground jerks,” I said. “Don’t you remember my bloody noses?”