Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (2 page)

My writing
How to Eat Like a Child
—five hundred words about children and food that appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
—was my first big success and the first time I understood my own voice, truly heard it. I was thirty-two. I remember the sudden awareness and surprise.
Oh, this is who I am.
Our job as writers, as we begin that journey, is to figure out what we can do. Only do what you can do. It’s a rule I live by. Among other things, it means I can have novels heavier with dialogue than description. But more important, if you only do what you can do, you never have to worry that someone else is doing it. It keeps you from competing. It keeps you looking inside for what’s true rather than outside for what’s popular. Ideally. Your writing is your fingerprint.

It’s our job in life to come to some understanding of our own identity, and being a writer makes that easier.
What do I think? What do I love? What do I see? What are my stories?
come up over and over again and/or reveal themselves, sometimes unintentionally, over and over again.

At Nora’s memorial service, Martin Short quoted Nora: “Hazelnuts are what’s wrong with Europe.” It got a
big laugh. It was my line. Tom Hanks quoted this dialogue about falling in love from
Sleepless in Seattle
: “It was like coming home, but not to any home I’d ever known.” Also mine—from my wedding. I’d popped it into the script. (It turns out, even though you never wear a wedding dress twice, you can recycle your vows.) Some weeks later, Frank Rich in
New York
magazine quoted another line of Nora’s: “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.”

“That’s mine,” I said to my husband. I looked in one of her collections. There it was. I tried to recall if she asked permission to use it. I don’t remember. I’ve probably used hers. For all I know, I’m going to do it in the next paragraph. Our words and thoughts are muddied together in life and in the movies we collaborated on. We borrowed lines from each other the way other sisters borrow dresses.

I spent my life turning all my girlfriends into sisters; perhaps easier, more relaxed versions of my relationships with my sisters, surely warmer, more supportive versions of my mother. I confided more safely and intimately in my closest girlfriends. When my husband got cancer (now in remission), Nora and I rarely discussed it. Isn’t that odd? I couldn’t, because I was always trying to prove my bravery, and she didn’t ask, perhaps respecting my
privacy, perhaps relieved not to know. I have no idea. It’s one of those weird things that make no sense. How could we be so devoted and not talk about the most earth-shattering thing in my life? But sister relationships are quirky, all family relationships are. Some things are proof of nothing, and some are proof of everything.

This is complicated, trying to understand how we were close. Losing her is like losing an arm, it’s that deranging. But in regard to the daily pains of my life, the fears, the anxieties, the worries, I relied on my husband and my friends. Nora didn’t have the patience I needed. She didn’t allow herself any moping or self-pity. I like a good mope now and then.

That is one way we are different. One way we were different.

When I read the heapings of love from every corner after she died, I did wonder if she was cozier with a few of those who were her friends than with me, the way I am cozier with my husband and with my best friends. Certainly the need to claim a relationship/ownership after her death was awesome. One writer trashed other wonderful loving tributes, jockeying for position, as if to say,
Forget those guys, I was the one she really loved.

Was I surprised by how many people wanted to claim they were in her inner circle? She was generous to so
many, but how could they have been close to her if they knew nothing really? If they could all look back at their relationship, at the six years she’d been ill, like a cheated-upon spouse and had to reevaluate every encounter in light of new information? Maybe that’s what fueled it (all that claiming), that confusion. They were in the inner circle and they were not. Both are true. Some things are proof of nothing and some are proof of everything.

As busloads of strangers tell me what she meant to them, I sympathize with Caroline Kennedy. This is ridiculous, me and Caroline, I know, I know, we have nothing in common, and yet I do think about her, because losing her daddy has nothing to do with millions of Americans losing a president. Yet how many people must have come up to her with the need to share that they entered the Peace Corps because of him, or were driving down the Taconic when they heard he was shot, burst into tears, and had to pull over, or that their dad worshipped the ground he walked on, now
that
was a president.

In my case, what I remember most about Kennedy dying (I was a freshman in college and obviously an idiot, read on) is debating with my friends whether it was disrespectful to make out on the weekend after the president had been assassinated, which is not something I would ever mention to Caroline if the opportunity arose.
Anyway, when that need to share finally subsided, which was maybe decades, and Caroline could finally leave the house without meeting someone who named their cat JFK, her mother died, and everyone was telling her how much they admired Jackie, how brave she was, how they bought the same striped calypso tees . . . only Caroline had lost her mother, not a national widow or a style icon. Then, just as that was over (although it might not yet be), her brother John’s airplane crashed . . .

She has spent her life consoling other people for her loss.

She has also spent her life being reminded of her loss daily by caring people who don’t know her but who offer their condolences because it is the proper thing to do and because it is their loss, too, but without considering that the loss is entirely different and without considering that it might not be as easy for her to accept their sympathies as it is for them to give them. It might, for instance, evoke pain. It often blindsides me.

It also brings death into the day, and at this age death feels like it’s a car’s length behind, anyway. It’s best to be in the moment. It’s always best to be in the moment. At one event where I was speaking—a version of this happens often—a woman went into gales of laughter about how when she put on a turtleneck that morning she
thought of Nora. A stranger visiting someone in my apartment building rang my doorbell to tell me that he had been with my sister “in group.” (This would be group therapy—about forty years ago.) People share their illnesses and their losses, people whose names I often don’t know,
Hi, I just want you to know I have cancer, too,
or
my sister did,
or
I just lost my sister
or
my mother
or
my brother
. I don’t know what to do with all the sadness.

There is so much artificial intimacy these days, it’s not surprising there is postmortem intimacy. The ubiquitous Facebook—full of real friends and fake friends. All that thumbs up—it’s as if one is living in a virtual cheering squad. The other day I was scrolling through the News Feed and came upon a close-up of someone’s mother waking up after surgery. Did her mother have any idea she had been snapped and posted? She was barely conscious. The violation was shocking. When my dog Honey was hit by a car, I posted it on Facebook and found the messages heartening. With Nora, I don’t. I can’t process it.

The love and fun of Nora is now replaced by the legacy of Nora. What she means to others and to me (and to her children, her husband, my sisters, etc.) is entirely different. The Nor and Del (pronounced
Deal
) of it. The
Hi, it’s me, call me
. The intimacy that wasn’t the intimacy
of
I’ll tell you what I’m really feeling
, but was the intimacy of
I’ll open your refrigerator and take whatever I want
.

Our lives were in some ways entirely separate and unknown to each other, in other ways like vines twisted together. Invading her privacy is not something I want to do. Where that line is, is subjective. Perhaps to you I have already crossed it or I will cross it, but to me I have not and will not. During the years she was sick, we talked often about her illness. The conversations were easy only in the sense that we felt safe together and could speak intimately, but they are painful to recall and will always be secret and sacred. Some things can be told and some cannot.

Why am I writing about her/us at all? Because writing is how I understand everything that happens. Writing is the only way I know to move on.

Also, it’s comforting to go into my office at four every afternoon and write about us. It’s the only thing that really is, actually. A way to be together.

Last winter, when I gave a speech in Seattle, they told me that when Nora had been there a couple of years before, she had told them that the dressing room smelled moldy and they should fix it. So they renovated it. Nora told the managers of the theater where our play
Love,
Loss,
and What I Wore
was performed that they needed better toilet paper. “Our audience needs decent toilet paper,” she said. Recently I told the Marriott Hotel in Miami that they shouldn’t have cocktail napkins at their breakfast buffet, they should have big cloth napkins. I told Craftbar, a restaurant I frequent, that they simply could not be open for brunch and not have the biscuits ready. It was unacceptable.

Is this misplaced anger at the unfairness of her death? Is that why I have spent the short time that has since passed irritated—well, more accurately, walking around in a simmering, smoldering rage? The anger feels great. Life-affirming. Far preferable to the pain it’s masking.

With my newly found aggression, am I carrying on her tradition? Is it the middle child rises? I know—these forays into bossiness are feeble compared to Nora’s, but I’m just getting started. One of her gifts was to set the record straight, help all of us live our lives. Does wallpaper belong in the front hall? What kind of stuffing does the couch need? When I first started writing, she told me, “Always know what you think.” Oh my God, who always knows what they think (although it’s important when you write, it’s true)? She did. I thought she left me enough guidance for several lives, but today I ate a kale
salad. Kale is everywhere. And panko. What did she think of kale and panko?

It’s a whole new world in an awful and confusing way. A city in which the street signs are missing.

Perhaps that’s why I am losing things and spend a lot of time every day racing from one room to another trying to find my glasses/phone/keys/whatever I put down a second earlier. (I wish someone would invent a way to phone your keys.) I can’t stop for grief, which is surely why I am irritated. Life is too short, my motor is racing, and I want only to move forward. This is what dogs do and why they seem a model for living well. They are always in the moment.

•  •  •  •

Nora was powerful. In a room full of people, heads turned her way. Would she approve? Everyone wanted to please her. Were they smart enough? Funny enough? Personally I believe she was genius at giving and withholding at the same time, a potent combination, but that’s just what I think.

She was also ruthless as a writer. Shortly after her death, I was at a panel where two actors each read a piece of hers. In one, Nora shoved a dagger into Alix Kates
Shulman for writing about how difficult it is to be beautiful. In another she nailed a relative. And all anyone on the panel mentioned was how sweet Nora was, how witty, how generous, and what an extraordinary craftsman. No one mentioned the daggers. Or her take-no-prisoners toughness, her “I will throw you under the bus for a good story” (something she admitted to). Intolerance of what she viewed as stupidity was the talent and terror of her.

Talent makes its own demands. Big talent is a force with a mind of its own, except it is
your
mind. A gift is a pulsing creature, almost in a sci-fi way, needing to burst out. She had no choice but to let it loose. It was great security to know that, needing me as much as I needed her, Nora wouldn’t turn her unsparing eye on me. I once turned mine on her, however, sending her up when I created Georgia, a wildly opinionated, wildly successful, self-centered older sister in my novel
Hanging Up
. I thanked Nora for not getting upset about it. “But she was such a great character,” she said.

Nora always said that we shared half a brain. The knowledge of how similar we were, how much we appreciated each other, depended on each other, made each other laugh, could live without many other people but not without each other, was solace and joy for both of us.

But she needed to be on top. She needed to travel
around the track faster than anyone, not just me. When I was younger, I fancied or joked that she was moving so fast because she knew I was on her tail, but really she was simply a Thoroughbred, born and bred to race and win. She was the filly who won the Kentucky Derby. (And there have only been three: Regret [1915], Genuine Risk [1980], and Winning Colors [1988].)

In
Little Women
, the novel by Louisa May Alcott about four sisters, which was a seminal book for me in my childhood, Beth, the third sister, dies. I was obsessed with Beth. I compulsively searched that novel to find the exact place where Beth dies, where it says Beth dies or what she died of. She slipped into the valley of shadow, a frustrating vagueness like that. It didn’t satisfy me. I needed to know.

I identified with Beth, which makes no sense because Beth was third of four and I was second of four. Technically I was Jo. Possibly I became Beth in my head because Nora was so obviously Jo, the one with ambition. Although Jo was a tomboy and a rebel, as was I, and Nora was not. Perhaps the death of my uncle in his thirties, to some sort of cancer never explained, when I was a child accounts for my obsession with death. I remember being at Camp Tocaloma, a sleepaway camp I hated that my mother sent us to every August. I remember wishing on
a star, wishing every night, that Uncle Dickie would live, but he did not.

I also remember being on the playground and realizing that, if I was eight, I had lived eight years. Before that, in my child’s understanding, I had lived forever and was called eight. That actual time was involved, eight years, struck me with terror. Life/death. Finite. Not forever. I would die.