Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (8 page)

I loved the story, convinced as I had become of the importance of memories. But I came up hard against the conclusion posited by Dickens: the reason it is good to remember a past wrong is so that “we may forgive it.” How could I ever forgive the taking of Anne-Marie's life?

The weekend before Christmas my parents and Natasha came to Westport to make the gingerbread men we make every year, a tradition dating back to when I was in elementary school. Our gingerbread men reflect our interests. When I was little, I made snowmen iced with white frosting to a one-inch thickness. I've always had a sweet tooth, and I took any license to indulge. When I was a teenager, I made a David Bowie gingerbread man, using red-hot cinnamon dots for the lightning bolt across his face; Anne-Marie made a Lady Godiva; and Natasha made volleyball players wearing our high school colors. Around the same time my mother began her tradition of making an anatomically correct Adam and Eve, and a gorgeously endowed mermaid. This year my kids tended toward the gory, using red sprinkles for blood and decapitating their gingerbread men so frequently it was as if we were making an army of martyred saints.

Days passed on with reading and writing, Christmas card making and sending, carol singing, school parties, and one car accident. I was hit from behind when I stopped for a school bus. Luckily, I came out just a little stiff in the neck, and the car was drivable. Repairs would have to wait until after the holidays.

On Christmas Eve, friends came for dinner. The evening ended with dancing on the kitchen table. Peter was in charge of the music, the husbands were responsible for photos, and rest of us—two mothers and six kids—were four feet off the ground and whooping it up. Christmas morning came early, the boys eager to see what Santa brought them. While Jack drove into New York City to pick up my family for our usual celebration of eating, drinking, and eating and drinking some more, I wrote up my review of
The Love of the Last Tycoon
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, read the day before. The review was posted by the time Jack got back with my parents, Natasha, and her boyfriend, Phillip. Christmas eating and drinking and talking and toasting and celebrating began.

It was after ten o'clock on Christmas night when I sat down with my book for the day. The kids were asleep upstairs, my father and Jack were watching a movie in the family room, and my mother and I sat in the living room, seated in a strategic position, both by the fire and with a great view of the tree. Its lights glowed in the darkness of the front hallway. I stoked up the logs in the fireplace and brought my mother a glass of port and myself a mug of hot chocolate doctored liberally with Tia Maria.

I tuned in to the crazy story of
The Love Song of Monkey
by Michael Graziano. A man immobilized in a coma and sunk twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea finally has the time to think about his life. As he says, “There is no place on earth better suited for meditation than the mid-ocean ridge.”

“Mama,” I said, reaching across to touch my mother on the arm. “This book, it's about a guy who stays underwater—he can't die, but he can't get out of the water for years either. He just thinks all about his life. And now, that's how it is for me.”

“Yes?” She was always willing to give me the benefit of the doubt.

“It's like my year of reading is a similar state of suspension, and I am also plunged twenty thousand leagues under—but under a pile of books. And for me, there is no better place for meditation than with all my books. I too finally have time to think about my life.”

“And what are you thinking about?”

“That this has been a great Christmas. Because I did only what I really wanted to do—our family did the great stuff, like having you here and making the gingerbread men. I skipped making three varieties of cookies, and I read a book instead. And then I had time to read another one! And I didn't obsess over our Christmas card. I didn't go crazy with outdoor lights. I just hung some strands over the front porch, leaving the bushes unlit. I let the kids decorate our tree on their own, and I gave them free rein with the rest of the house.”

I pointed over to the play tables covered with white cotton and displaying mixed-up villages of nativity scenes of all shapes, sizes, and nationalities (my own collection), plastic Santas and elves, reindeer, and camels, along with wooden rabbits, birds, one dog, an assortment of miniature toy soldier nutcrackers, and an ark my father had carved for the boys, which was now covered in colored sparkles and surrounded by holly branches. It was not quite my mother's crèche scene, but it was beautiful in its own way.

“And I have thought a lot about Anne-Marie.”

My mother's face contracted. Then she shook her head. “I think about her all the time,” she said. “How much she would have liked to see the boys as they grow up.”

“I know.” My eyes were filling with tears, but I went on talking. “And they do remember her, too. I think they always will.”

“I hope so.”

“This reading, it makes me see how we do remember, all the time, the people we've loved. They become part of us—they are part of us. Anne-Marie is part of all this.”

My mother listened.

“For this one year, Mama, I am staying twenty thousand leagues below the surface of what would have been my normal, overscheduled, overcontrolled life. I have Anne-Marie to thank for this. I am underwater, swimming with the authors of all the books I've been reading and sucking up the oxygen of all their words, and she is there too. The lives in the books are breathing life into me, new life. And helping me learn how to keep her alive. In me.”

My mother nodded, her face tight, her eyes looking down. I knew that the way she missed Anne-Marie and longed for her to be with us was too painful for her to talk about. I felt the pain instead, in the sharpening of the air around us, in the heightening of the burn from the fireplace. There was a sudden intensity of living marked by remembering a death. And I knew, for my mother, she wished she could exchange her life for that death, and bring my sister back. But there was no such bargain to be made.

I felt a constriction deep within my throat. Neither my mother nor I would take the bargain offered by the ghost in Dickens's story—we held on to our memories of Anne-Marie with all our might—but in our remembering of Anne-Marie, was there a place for forgiveness? Rolling forward, looking backward. Did I also have to forgive the death of my sister?

Forgiveness is an elevated form of acceptance, an acknowledgment that life is not fair: “I forgive you, life, for the shitty deal you handed my sister.” I couldn't do that. I accepted that I was alive and that Anne-Marie was dead. I accepted that no square deal would be offered, nor could one be made. But forgiveness? Something was holding me back.

I turned off all the lights in the living room and moved to sit next to my mother on the couch. We sat together for a long time in the dark, looking at my oversize lit-up tree. Years ago I'd gone out in the dark looking for the huge star in the sky. Maybe the star I'd been looking for in the sky all those years ago was actually here. In the tree. In my family. In all these books. In all the memories I carried inside me.

Peace on Earth.

Good tidings of great joy.

It wasn't forgiveness. But it was a beginning.

Chapter 8
Finding Another Chance

Once it perches on one's shoulder, guilt is not easily shrugged off.

MARTIN CORRICK,

By Chance

AT THE MOMENT WHEN I STOOD BESIDE MY SISTER'S DEATHBED
and heard my father crying, saw the hand of my mother clenching the white sheet covering Anne-Marie's body, I thought only of how to take my next breath, how to go on into the next moment of being alive, when Anne-Marie no longer was. But underneath my reacting brain, deep in the recesses of matter and memory and motivation, guilt was percolating. As the days went on, I felt the weight of it, so heavy and so unwieldy. I struggled with it, turning it this way and that, trying to understand. My rational self knew that I wasn't responsible for her death. My irrational self was not so sure. As months and then years passed, the guilt persisted. I reacted by living as fast and as hard as I could, figuring that by living double I was making it all up to Anne-Marie, living a life full of experiences that she would never have.

In the book
By Chance
by Martin Corrick, James Watson Bolsover is also a man burdened with guilt. Two deaths weigh upon his life, the death of his wife and the death of a child. Bolsover struggles with his remorse, fighting against it with reason and with anger, with sadness and with resignation, for “once it perches on one's shoulder, guilt is not easily shrugged off.” His wife's death, owing to illness, clearly was not his fault, and the child's death was an accident. Yet he believes he might have eased the illness or prevented the accident. Without an easy resolution of either innocence or guilt, Bolsover suffers.

Bolsover tries to find an explanation for the two deaths, to uncover some reason they had to happen or if they could have been avoided. He searches for answers in books. At the beginning of
By Chance
, he asks the question, “If fiction is not concerned to understand, what is its subject? Is its purpose merely to pass the time?” but he already knows the answer. The purpose of great literature is to reveal what is hidden and to illuminate what is in darkness.

I was right there with Bolsover on his search for understanding, rooting alongside him for a why and wherefore for death, and hoping that he might find relief from his agonizing pain of responsibility and, in finding this relief, show me a way to ease my own. Bolsover felt guilt as a clawing into his shoulder. I felt it closer inside me, a sharpness scratching hard against my heart. My still beating heart. Beating only by chance. The chance that felled my sister but kept me alive.

Anne-Marie didn't like me much when I was a kid. She had good reasons. I was a bratty little sister. I went into her room when she wasn't home and took things for myself. I borrowed clothes—she always had better clothes than I did; she knew how to pick out good things—and wore them to school. After I wore a shirt of hers, I remember stuffing it into the back of her closet and claiming ignorance when she asked if I'd seen it.

One day I found Anne-Marie's diary and read it. I teased her when she got home about Scott Goodman, the neighbor she had a crush on. The truth was that everyone had a crush on Scott, including me, because he was tall and good-looking and very, very nice. The fact that Anne-Marie liked him was the surprising part. Her tastes usually ran counter to the popular stream of likes and dislikes. She was not a rebel but rather an iconoclast. She was sophisticated and discriminating in ways far beyond what might be expected of a sixteen-year-old midwestern girl. She took the teasing about Scott by hitting me back with sharp insults about the tiny size of my brain and the large size of my behind, and she hid her diary where I could never find it again. Anne-Marie didn't tell my parents about my snooping around and my teasing. She was no tattletale.

But I was. I told on her when I found cigarettes in the bathroom, pleading with my mother that I was worried about Anne-Marie's health. But I wasn't really, not then. I just wanted to get her in trouble. I wanted her to pay attention to me, her puny little sister. Any attention, even her caustic insults, was better than nothing. Later, when she got meaner and faster with her insults, I wanted payback for the hurt she caused me. Now I can see that it was I who started the fights between us. I was using the only power I had, the power to pester and to irritate. Anne-Marie was bigger, smarter, and so much better looking than me. But I won the annoying game, hands down.

As far as sibling dynamics went, Natasha was the sister I played with and Anne-Marie was the sister I bothered. Not that there wasn't solidarity among the three of us when required. One summer when we were driving through France, my father stopped our rental car at a gas station to fill up. Anne-Marie was by the open window, playing with her little red-haired troll named Troll. Just as my father pulled out of the station to drive back onto the highway, Anne-Marie dropped Troll out the window. My father would not go back to save Troll. We were on a highway with no turnoffs coming soon, and we couldn't delay our trip for a doll.

“But it's Troll!” Anne-Marie wailed. Natasha and I joined in, crying and crying for miles. We cried for Anne-Marie, bereft without her troll, and for Troll, all alone now in a strange country.

Troll was replaced by a large Steiff rabbit, and later Rabbit was replaced by a twelve-inch-long, amply stuffed lion named Lion. Lion had shiny brown eyes, a luxurious golden mane, and a soft yellow belly. Anne-Marie would hold him in one hand and use her fingers to move his arms up and down, giving him gestures as she made him talk. Lion was her alter ego. Lion could say anything—transmitted through a squeaky version of Anne-Marie's own voice—and because he was witty and quick, everyone would laugh at him. Even I laughed at him, despite the fact that his most effective lines were at my expense. I'd be talking about the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books by Betty MacDonald, one of my favorite series, and he'd cut in. “Wiggle, wiggle. I like that. Add a plop, plop and it can be my new nickname for you . . . 'cause that's what you look like when you walk. Plopplopwigglewiggle.”

One afternoon when I was in seventh grade I got on a town bus to go home from school. I don't remember why I needed to take a bus that day. Maybe I'd stayed after school and didn't want to walk all the way home. It was only a thirty-minute walk, but maybe I was tired or thought it might get dark soon. What I do remember is thinking that the bus route was strange. For some reason the bus was heading into downtown Evanston. I figured it would turn around there and then head back north to my part of town.

The bus stopped for a moment by the huge parking garage downtown that also served as the main bus depot. I looked out the window to see Anne-Marie there on the sidewalk. She saw me at the same time, and her eyes widened. She started waving at me and yelling. When the bus started to roll away, she began running alongside it, screaming, “Stop! Stop!” The bus stopped, and Anne-Marie leaped on board. “Get off,” she said to me. “You're on the wrong bus.”

I had gotten on a bus heading to the Howard Street bus station in Chicago. The Howard Street station was in a seedy neighborhood of dimly lit bars, iron-barred liquor stores, dirty pawnshops, and broken-down apartment buildings. For a twelve-year old girl with no money, arriving at Howard Street as evening fell dark and cold around her, the bus station would have been the most terrifying place on earth.

“You saved my life,” I babbled as I started crying and shaking. Anne-Marie drew her arms around me.

“Don't be stupid.”

But I knew that she had saved me. I was a horrid brat, and yet she had run after the bus that could have taken me out of her life forever and got me off. She might not like me, but she did love me. Together, we took the right bus home. I sat next to my sister and vowed to myself that I would never go through her room again, I would never tattle on her or spy on her. I had thought Anne-Marie was better than me before, but now I was sure of it. She was not only smart and beautiful; she had a generous heart, willing to forgive me and to save me. Natasha was my buddy, my pal with whom I played, the sister I turned to after a bad dream, who would let me sleep beside her. But Anne-Marie became my gold standard of achievement, the one whose approval I sought even more than my parents'. Up she went on a pedestal, and for me, she never really came down again.

In Per Petterson's book
To Siberia
, a brother and a sister living in North Jutland during the years surrounding World War II face extreme hardship and family heartbreak. Because they have each other, they survive. But then they become separated. The brother, deeply involved in the Resistance, has to run away from their Nazi-occupied town. Now the girl is alone. She is no longer entwined and in tune with her brother. She is no longer protected or sustained by him. Her life pales: “I am twenty-three and there is nothing left. Only the rest.”

What did Petterson mean with those words, “only the rest”? For me, the words mean that for the rest of the girl's life she will be alone, living on in an existence without her brother. I understood that. I had shared my whole life with my sister, and then suddenly we were not sharing it any longer. I found it hard to imagine a life without her. How could my life still be a full life? No one could ever make up for the person who had gone.

Anne-Marie once quoted Ezra Pound to me, that what we love best “remains, and the rest is dross
.
” What she didn't add was Pound's promise, “What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee.” Not even death will take what I love best from me? The sister in
To Siberia
lives a long life, and writes about her brother. She transforms their lost history of unity into a recorded story of love. In writing words, she found her brother again. In reading words, in reading books, I was finding my sister again.

I was reminded of Anne-Marie in the characters I was meeting in all my days of books. She was the kind of heroine authors like to put in their books, with her quiet strength and resilience, her utter lack of petty or trivial concerns, and the superlative combination of her beauty and her intelligence. Anne-Marie had her negative traits, but even those always seemed to me to be übertraits. Her caustic wit was knife sharp and accurate, but never directed toward anyone who couldn't take it (she was never cruel), and her impatience with idiocy might have been overblown but it was never misplaced. Even when I was the idiot at the end of her thrusts of anger, I rarely felt wronged—I just wished for a little more sympathy. And always, eventually, the sympathy would come.

The main character in Thomas Pynchon's
Crying of Lot 49
is Oedipa Maas. She is nervy but also nervous, intelligent but self-questioning, honest and serious, an optimist but no pushover. Add in that she is good-looking, with long legs and long hair, and she
was
Anne-Marie. When I read that book, I pictured Oedipa as my sister, and my interest in her fate grew.

Anne-Marie was Aurora in Almudena Solana's
The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz
, a woman who lives on her own terms, fully but quietly. She doesn't understand why people rush around without thinking or exploring: “Why are people so afraid of thinking? Why don't they ever leave time to reflect? There's nothing wrong with tranquility; nor emptiness, vertigo, or even unhappiness. I think that these things are the first steps to precede the birth of a new thought. This is why I like to read.” Again, I pictured Anne-Marie saying these words, offering counsel to me. Slow down and think. Read a book. I was doing that.

Anne-Marie was the one I pictured for the rebellious gardener in
The Howling Miller
by Arto Paasilinna. No one can tell Sanelma whom to love and whom to forsake, and both her bravery and her loyalty reminded me of my sister. Anne-Marie was the New Year Sister in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “The Sister Years,” a woman with “so much promise and such an indescribable hopefulness in her aspect that hardly anybody could meet her without anticipating some very desirable thing—some long sought after good—from her kind offices.” Anne-Marie could look forbidding, but when she smiled, her features lightened up to those of a girl, a happy, bright girl expecting and offering all the wonders of the world.

Anne-Marie was sometimes deeply unsure of herself—strange or new situations always made her nervous—but when the truly terrible circumstances of cancer slammed into her, she responded with an iron will overlaid with grace and calm. Again like a heroine from a book, Anne-Marie thrust herself in front of the moving train that was cancer and tried to protect me from its reality. She absorbed all of its truth and all of its horror on her own, by herself. It makes me shudder now to think of how she must have felt, scared, angry, and helpless. I don't know if putting on the brave act for me helped her psychologically with her illness. Or if by taking on the burden of protecting me—as she always had—she doubled her own burden.

The guilt that was scratching away at me, the twist of a knife that woke me up in the middle of the night and made me wonder wherein my failure lay, came from how Anne-Marie bore the horror of her cancer. How alone she was. How I could not share the weight of her illness, or take it from her. And it was guilt for placing her on a pedestal all those years ago and not letting her down again. I was looking for resolution—innocence or guilt—just like Bolsover. And like Bolsover, I was looking for a reason or an explanation for why she had to die.

In
By Chance
, Bolsover comes to realize that “he is not a wicked man, but only a foolish one.” The relief he finds is not in the absolution of his guilt but rather in the absolution of his life. He understands that he is lucky to be alive; it is only “by chance” that he is, while his wife and the child are dead. Bolsover resolves to take the chance offered and find what peace and joy he can, while he can. What else can he do but rise every morning to follow where “the sun has laid a blazing road of orange and gold”? He understands that “one must take control of one's life or become nothing but a broken branch, drifting in the current.”