Sisterhood of the infamo.., p.9
Sisterhood of the Infamous, page 9
“Is your sister a person of interest in Jasmine’s murder?” I didn’t know how they figured I was Barb’s sister. I hadn’t shown my face before, and I doubted the news crews even knew what Barbara looked like. “Isn’t it true your sister was stalking Jasmine for years?” Apparently they didn’t have the problem I had with that word, and they were more than happy to share it with the masses.
“Five minutes. We’re asking for only five minutes,” another shouted as I opened the front door to let myself back in. “Can you send someone out later?” Finally, someone said, “It looks worse, not saying anything,” like this was supposed to scare me. Like I’d get on issuing a statement right away. Maybe I’d hire a public relations firm because I didn’t know how to say that there wasn’t enough to do, with the cleaning and bathing and cooking and grocery shopping, and the waiting. I could tell them about that—the work involved with a dying sibling. But that was not what they had come for. They wanted me to say something inappropriate, possibly cruel. They had fanned out in the neighborhood the night before to interview the people who had lived beside Barb all her life. They must have found out how she never moved into her own place; that the family was troubled, by divorce and death; and that I, her closest surviving relative/next of kin, was an idiot.
“It’s Day 3 of the investigation into an emotional Hollywood tragedy,” one of the reporters was saying on television as I walked into the bedroom. “Tragedies for two families, really,” the reporter continued. “Here at the home of Barbara Ross….” It was year six for Barb’s illness; the doctors gave her five to ten years to live once the cancer got into her bones. At the time, it seemed like they had given her a lot of time. I imagined my daughter as a teenager, able to form solid memories of her aunt. The time did not necessarily go by in a flash but now, with so much unfinished business thrown at her, the present was tedious.
“We’re also expecting an update from the LAPD sometime this Thursday,” the reporter said, and I wondered how could anyone know what day it was without the television constantly reminding us. “We’ll bring you that briefing as soon as it happens,” the reporter promised, and with his pledge, I switched to another channel.
“We’re not sure if Barbara Ross is a person of interest, a witness, or someone, maybe the last person, Jasmine talked to before she went on her run—”
“What run?” Maria asked.
“You don’t know?” Ionie said, like she’d been studying up on the case. “Don’t you know she was running the trails in these hills,” Ionie intoned, “when she got attacked?”
“Not these hills,” I said, and I pointed at the shuttered windows, so Maria and Ionie would know the threat here was not immediate.
“Aren’t all these hills connected?” Ionie said.
“No one’s going to get you, Ionie,” Maria assured her.
I changed the channel again, like I could find some kind of neutral station. Something without news, dates, or coming attractions—anything that would not remind us what we were really doing: waiting. And anything that would not remind us what we were really waiting for.
“We have reason to believe that Barbara Ross is seriously ill, possibly in hospice.” Another newscast. Maria motioned for me to join her at the far corner of the bed, to help with the sheets. Barb had an accident.
“Possibly? Didn’t I tell them that yesterday?” Ionie complained.
“You’re head nurse,” Maria said. “Maybe you’ve got to tell them again, today.”
“The thanks I get,” Ionie said. “And what kind of day are you going to have, Miss Barbara?” she said to her patient, who had to sit up now so we could replace the sheets and towels, give her a second sponge bath, and recheck her pain patch and the port in her chest. “She’s going to get right out of this bed and talk to all the people. Tell them to go home and mind their own business,” Ionie said playfully.
“They think I’m interesting,” Barb said, though she was half awake. Her head lolled but she was not blinking. Her eyes were closed, and when she opened them, she did not seem to like what she saw—this room, Maria and Ionie, me, and the television. She shut them instantly and kept them shut.
“Doesn’t everybody think so,” Ionie said as she held Barb around the waist, like Barb was in her lap. “Lift the feet now,” she instructed Maria, while I grabbed what I could of the fitted sheet and stretched it out beneath her. Barb had a look on her face I’d seen before, almost smiling, eyebrows raised, the potential to laugh, or to be surprised.
“Something funny, Barb?” I asked.
“Hilarious,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Am I interesting in the right way this time?” Barb asked.
“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, and I looked at my sister, all of her, the body that was kept under the blankets. She was stringy and stiff. We could see her bones—all of them, delicate and cartoonish. What was left of her muscle appeared loose, untethered. Her arms reminded me of curtain rods, and the fabric when it gets bunched up and tangled. This was the last of her, what was left after six years of cancer treatment. You’d have to say it was a failure, wouldn’t you? Or this was all that was left after forty-seven years, after all the other remedies for all the other illnesses, diseases, physical, congenital, or psychological.
Since birth she had been the subject of so much speculation in our family, the great feats she was capable of, and the best way to ensure they were accomplished. My father had great plans, which my mother thought would ruin her childhood. Then her childhood became her adolescence and my father had more plans, though Irv and Helen still disagreed on what they should do and how Barb would do it. Then her adolescence thinned; it disappeared in a snap, with anorexia, therapies, feeding, and the constant watching. We had to put her under surveillance. And then she finished school, she had her degrees and her career researching whatever she was researching, and she was an adult; it seemed like she was an adult. She had money and a car, but she was still living at home, not just single but celibate, and committed to going nowhere and having to do as little as possible with other human beings. There were titles, articles, grants, and even more money, a lot of it, but we hadn’t expected things to be so small for her, shrunken and so restricted. This was how it would end, in much the same way—all that speculation, potential, and expectations shriveled into next to nothing.
“Maybe we ought to show the reporters this,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe they could really do something with this.”
“Are you out of your mind, miss?” Ionie said.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said, though I did want to give the cameras something that would shock the audience at home, shock everyone, and make them rethink their twenty-four-seven coverage of this nothingness. But I wasn’t going to say that, either.
“Wasn’t it bad enough when you brought the police in here?” Ionie said.
“I didn’t have a choice about that,” I said.
“So this is the one choice you would make?” Ionie accused.
“I said—”
“Okay, stop it, guys,” Maria was almost yelling.
“Am I head nurse?” Ionie asserted.
“So start acting like it,” Maria said. “Call the office, call her lawyer, or call anyone. Get them to fix this—this situation.”
“Will it get me away from her, this calling?” Ionie said, meaning me, of course. Maybe I should have, but I did not, let myself imagine all of what Ionie thought about me, what Maria must have also thought, given this and whatever Barb had told them. My husband, who did not list my sister among his favorite people, had said I should concentrate on how Barb had finally relented, granting me permission to visit; that she had said I could stay for as long as I wanted. She had decided to tolerate me at what had to be the end. If I could tough it out, not start a scene, take whatever abuse Barb or anyone else lobbed onto me. I wasn’t good at that, naturally. I had to get better.
“Don’t worry about her,” Maria said, her head nodding in the direction of Ionie’s scramble for the kitchen.
“Because I’ve got enough to worry about, right?” It didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, but there was nothing I could do to take it back or to take back everything I had ever said or done that led up to this day. “You know what my mother would say about you,” I said to Maria. “She’d say you have nerves of iron and steel.”
“Iron and steel,” Barbara said, and I thought I saw her lips curl, her dimples push through, a kind of unconscious smile trying to overtake her face.
“I’ve worked with Ionie a lot,” Maria said, sitting down at the edge of the bed. “She needs to get over herself, sometimes.”
“Iron and steel,” Barbara repeated.
“She’d say that about people who could put up with anything,” I explained, because I was relieved to have found something to talk about, to have found a way to tick off more time, to delay or stall or postpone whatever was coming next, because it was going to be awful. We were running out of options, or Barbara was. Maybe we all were. “She also used to say that she didn’t raise us to be tough enough for this world.”
“Your sister is strong,” Maria said. “Very strong.”
“I don’t think that’s what my mother was talking about.”
“Your sister is a fighter,” Maria said, and she took hold of one of Barb’s feet through the blanket, like I’d seen Ionie do. But Maria didn’t pull on the foot to get Barb’s attention. She patted it, like she was including Barb in the conversation.
“She got it from running, you know,” I said, because what else could I say: thank you? Or, I know? I could have listed everything Barb had to fight through because she was always up against something—dumb kids, bigger kids, though she never had any problems with boys like the rest of us did. No teasing, no threats of violence. Boys she knew how to handle. She did what they did: science, skateboarding, and athletics. Girls are what got her into trouble. The rude, the cruel, and the snotty: she was attracted to them, or was it that they were attracted to her? Always the most catastrophic in symbiotic relationships. She knew how to find them, or they found her. Then there was the band, always breaking up and getting back together. It was like she found the worst people to grow up with. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem,” she used to say. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was—being gay before the world was ready for it? But there were lots of gay kids in school, even more at the ballet studio. And not just the men.
I’m not saying it wasn’t hard. I have no idea how hard it was. I wanted to be a ballerina. I fit into all the prescribed slots of sex, gender, and profession. I fit in without question. Barb was a tough girl, a tomboy, the genius kid. She fell for the pretty and imperious types and wanted to be one of them; she got close by falling for Jasmine in high school. The sun rose and set on Jasmine’s word, and when they stopped talking, the world stopped spinning for Barbara. That always seemed to be the end of her life to me.
“She didn’t tell me she was a runner,” Maria said.
“Oh yes. Among many other things,” I said. I understood that I was supposed to head off the oncoming lull in the conversation, the awkward silences that would be filled by the television, the noise from shows and commercials. But I had never known how to talk about my sister to the people who knew her. “What did she tell you?” I asked.
“That she was going to burn in Hell for being a lesbian,” Maria said.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry—”
Maria waved me off. “People say a lot of weird stuff when they think they’re dying,” she said, although I was not sure if this was true. My parents certainly didn’t say anything weird—they were passed out and comatose, as they waited for their ends. They both had strokes, how lucky was that, everything quick and efficient, if not neat. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in years and yet the same thing pulled them under, like they knew only one way of suffering and that was together. They had suffered each other so much that they couldn’t conceive of suffering in their separate ways.
“Your sister isn’t ready to go yet,” Maria said, like she was trying to reassure me. Like there was more time for us to reconcile any outstanding grievances and for us to be sisters.
“You could have fooled me,” was all I could think to say in response.
I don’t know who Ionie called, but there were so many people I hadn’t seen in years—people Barbara hadn’t seen either—who braved the gauntlet of news cameras to grace our front steps. They had heard Barbara’s name on the television, probably, and had to see if it was the same Barbara they remembered from high school or from kindergarten. Or they had seen the house on television and had to know first-hand if it was the same house where they played baseball, climbed the ivy, and tried to make the patio into a skate park. Of course it was. The living room had the same furniture though the patio was larger, because Irv got tired of taking care of the lawn and poured cement over half of it. That was in 1976-ish, I think, the bicentennial. Irv disappeared just before the Fourth of July, like he finally had something to celebrate on the occasion.
“This yard isn’t half as big as I remember,” one visitor said. He was one of the boys she used to play with, a neighbor or elementary school chum who thought Barb was cool because she wouldn’t wear dresses and wasn’t afraid of dodgeball. “We could really have made use of a patio this size,” was another variation I got; the real estate that was our childhood home that our mother maintained and that Barbara had inherited always seemed to be a subject of great excitement for visitors, like they were astounded it still existed. Soon it would be liberated. One woman, who I had seen only in a housecoat while I was growing up, arrived at the house fully reinvented. She brandished her real estate license with her swift walk and her knowing inspection of the premises. She wanted to know what my plans were. I told her my plans were to get back home to my husband and daughter. The woman shook her head and probably muttered something about how I was as dense as everyone had always said. She didn’t know I wasn’t inheriting the house. Barb had made certain of that in her will, which she once brandished before me, so I couldn’t get greedy.
Those who had been astounded by the size of their memories, or the yard, were disappointed when I told them that they were right; they must have thought they were having profound moments of reckoning. The near-death state of the neighborhood tomboy, apparently, wasn’t enough to inspire the same kind of reflection. They bowed their heads, ducked out of the bedroom, and said they were sorry, like Mr. Silvers was the day before. Others said they wished they had known earlier. They would have come by; they would have brought food from their wives, or flowers, or cards. None of that stuff would have changed anything or, I think, made the outcome easier on anyone. But I was so surprised to see these people—so shocked and amazed that after so many years they yearned for Barbara, that I could not say anything. Or I could not say the right thing. Or I could not have said what probably should have been said if I even knew what that was.
“I wasn’t expecting to meet you this soon,” one of her former coworkers said. He was from the insurance company where Barbara worked between college and graduate school, writing computer code for actuary programs. She calculated risk factors for people buying life and health insurance and became fond of telling her friends and myself what was most likely to kill us: cancer from sleeping under electric blankets, cancer from living near oil wells, or cancer from eating canned tuna fish. Cancer, cancer, cancer. It was the inescapable conclusion to all modern living. She saw it in food, in clothing, in shampoo and makeup, in shoe leather and in kitty litter. You could not go anywhere or do anything without encountering it. We may have been prone to other diseases or were heading toward early deaths from other causes, but cancer was like her personal demon. The irony went unspoken.
“When did you expect to meet me?” I asked.
I remember he was overdressed for the summer heat in a coat and tie, like he had been expecting to find a memorial service once he got to the house. “I thought maybe after—”
“After what?”
“I—I—that wasn’t how I meant it,” he said, and he took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and blotted it around his forehead. I might have felt sorry for him, but he managed to get himself swallowed up by the crowd before I could have told him.
I wondered why they came—I mean, I knew why they came. But why did they keep coming? We told a lot of people to come back on another day—Barbara was exhausted and could handle only so much. Or Maria and Ionie could handle only so much in the presence of gawkers, curiosity-seekers and a few who thought they knew more about hospice care than the hospice nurses did. “Why don’t you call my supervisor, and you can discuss it?” Ionie offered to my mother’s friend who wondered why the bedroom was so dark and whether light would improve Barbara’s mood. Why wasn’t Barb on a morphine drip? It would have been so much easier than administering it orally. “You have a degree in medicine? You set it up,” Ionie said, which sent the woman skittering out of the bedroom. Ionie kept up with her dusting and straightening as the people marched in. They marched out, I think, because they were afraid of Ionie, her composure and determination, and her efficiency around the dying.
“Could you show your mother at least tried to teach you some manners?” Ionie demanded once as she got ready to check Barb’s diaper, in front of a group of men who said they knew Barb from graduate school. They looked at me like Ionie wasn’t speaking to them or like she was speaking a foreign language.
“Give the patient some privacy,” Maria instructed and herded them out onto the patio. “Don’t bring them back,” she whispered to me as I tried to help her; the men kept looking back toward Barb, like they had been pushed away from an auto accident after they had fought their way through traffic to see, like they were being denied some kind of explanation.
