The Story of Her Life

MY SISTER WAS MORE CHEERFUL during the first year. We would sit nights at the dinner table over the mounds of healing food my mother made--chicken soup, chicken salad, chicken casserole--and laugh about the wigs she had to wear. She used to grab the curly sideburns of the one she had on and yank it up and down like she was buffing a car, her last boyfriend watching her wide-eyed as she did it. He lasted until about the ninth month, when he jumped ship for friends in the West. After he left, my sister drew in her eyebrows just in case. She was brave.       By the second year, she was getting smaller, breathing less, asking the doctors fewer questions. She lay in her hospital bed during treatments and talked about my father's car wreck as if she was him. I wonder what he was thinking when it flipped, she asked me once. My mother left the room when she talked like that, as if she felt my sister getting colder, knowing that we were going to talk about death like we didn't think it was possible. I remember looking at my mother one time as she rose, silently, and walked out of my sister's hospital room to smoke a cigarette. She looked just like Lauren Bacall did in The Big Sleep--angry and afraid.       Before her illness, my sister had always been the older one, the stronger. One night, when Dad was on a business trip and Mom was working second shift, the power went out in our old house. I was eight and my sister was twelve. I had been glued to the couch and the television for about an hour, close to falling asleep, and my sister was upstairs playing house with imaginary cousins. After five seconds of darkness, I started screaming like a monkey caught in a thresher, and my sister came downstairs.       Stop it, she said. Come here. I got up and walked with her to the kitchen. She fished a flashlight out of the utility drawer, along with some matches and a white kitchen candle. Sit down, she said. I sat in the middle of the floor and she handed me the flashlight to hold. What do we do? I asked her. I don't know, she said. But we should take the phone off the hook in case some killers call looking for us. You're right, I said.       Later, our mother came screaming up the driveway at 65 miles an hour in her Chevy Caprice and stormed through the front door yelling about kidnapping and cut phone wires and the million calls she had made to the house. But when my sister had come back to the kitchen from taking the phone off the hook, and we sat down in the middle of the floor to wait for someone to rescue us, she had told me, Don't worry. We've got peanut butter. I believed her.       Now, as my sister's disease progressed, I found it hard to talk to her, and I didn't know what to believe. I didn't know who she was praying to, if she was scared, what I should do. She was living something that I could only watch, as if she was an ice skater on a blue, plastic lake at the bottom of a snowglobe that I held in my hand. The white plastic snow swirled around her as always, but I think she was slowly understanding that the water was over her head.       One afternoon, while I visited her at the hospital during another treatment, she told me about an idea she had. She told me that I should start looking for strangers I met on the street and remembering them. Anyone, as long as I thought they were interesting. She said that we could both probably deal better with the hospital bit if we just said fuck it. I told her all right.       The next time I visited, I sat down and we talked about small things for a few minutes as she grew quieter. Our mother left the room during a brief silence, taking her cigarettes. I think she knew what was coming.       "Did you see somebody interesting?" my sister finally asked.       "Yeah," I said. "What's this about?"       "Just tell me about them," she said. I did.       I took the Green Line C trolley near my apartment to visit the hospital, and about three quarters of the way to downtown Boston it goes underground like a mole and comes out of the darkness into Kenmore subway station. One of the days that I rode into Kenmore on my way to Massachusetts General, a drunk man looking homeless got on my train, stumbled up the stairs, and leaned heavily on a pole. I expected him to smile at the woman seated next to him and reach up her skirt, or start pissing on the rubber mats covering the floor, but he just swayed gracefully with the train. He looked as if he was waiting to enter a ballroom already dancing.       Halfway to the next stop, he looked heavenward at the noisy fan above him and blew one breath back to it. Then he starting chanting, "Lotion, lotion," like a mantra, "lotion, lotion." Then louder.       "Ding dong," the speaker overhead said. "Auditorium next."       "Fuck you!" the man yelled at the ceiling. A few of us laughed.       He crouched and looked at us all. "Say something!" he screamed. "Say anything!" When the door opened at Auditorium station, the man stood straight and walked casually out of the car.       "How was that?" I asked my sister.       "Great." She looked down at her sheets, pulling peaks of cotton into small mountain ranges over her legs. "I want you to do me a favor."       "What?"       "I want you to tell me how he's going to die." I couldn't process what she said for a second, as if a hurricane ran through my synapses. "Think up something imaginative."       "I don't like this," I told her.       "You're the creative one," she said. "Remember when Mom would buy us both coloring books at the same time?"       "Ken and Barbie," I said.       "I would color inside the lines and you would draw stickmen throwing their shoes at each other."       "I only did it that once."       "You did it one more time than me," she said. "Be creative. Tell me a story."       "I don't understand."       "George, all I can see when I think about death is a set of gates over clouds that look like bathroom tissue. There are two big H's on the bars, sometimes G's for God, and I walk through. That's it. I can't see anything else." She flattened her sheets so hard that if her hands had been irons the sheets would have scorched. "Tell me. How's he going to die?"       My sister had been sick for almost two years. At this point, she was 5-4" and weighed 106 pounds. She had never asked me for a goddamn thing. How could I refuse?       "By violence," I said. I told her he'd be sleeping in an alley, his head on his arm, when a tall, thin man comes walking through. The homeless man wakes suddenly and sees a two-foot length of pipe slide out of the tall man's sleeve. Jumping up like a knight, the homeless man grabs the top of a trash can for a shield and starts screaming that the other guy's a pig and inhuman. The tall man hesitates, then roundhouses his pipe on the lid until the lid bends in half. Our man backs away, yelling the whole time, saying the other man's a coward, but it's three a.m. and the alley's deserted. The homeless man gets one shot in with his lid, a quick clip of the tall man's jaw, but then the lid is knocked from his hands. He reaches for a bottle in another trash barrel but gets hit hard in the face before he can defend himself. He goes down, the bottle breaking next to him. Then the tall man beats him to death with twenty hits to the head. I was red-faced and shaking by the end of my story.       "God," she said. "That's gruesome."       "I'm sorry," I said.       "Mom!" she yelled at the door. "Come back in. George is finished." I don't know how my sister knew our mother was listening, but she was standing right outside the door. She walked in from the hallway angry, unbelieving, and shaking her head as if she'd just bailed us both out of jail.       I began noticing more people. A month or so after my sister and I started her game, I saw a man talking to himself across the aisle as I rode to work on the subway one morning. He was a large man with a huge belly, and his unshaved face and unwashed head seemed to be slowly caving into his chest. He spoke in a low tone, nearly chanting, and held a wrinkled, brown paper sack close to his side. It looked to be his lunch, in a bag he had used a hundred times before on the same trip to work. His left sleeve, the one nearest me, was empty and hung straight towards the floor of the car, as if it was pointing to the wheels, as if he was telling them to go.       The man's eyes were only half-open, and even if another passenger had danced the dance of the seven veils up and down the aisle, he wouldn't have watched. He was saying something so important to himself that if he stopped to listen to the carbonated opening of the doors, or to the dying-bird notes of the guitar player in the last station, or to the screaming of the car as it passed over the rails, he would have lost the thread of his chant. As I watched him, I imagined that he was concentrating on his sleeve as hard as he could, talking his arm back in pieces.       He had begun at the shoulder seam of his jacket, reminding himself about the coarse, curly hair that grew in spirals from the shoulder and over the hard muscle of his arm. Then he had moved down to the booster scar near the bicep that looked like a finger poke in the dirt. He was probably to the crease in the elbow by now, and the thick, blue vein that connected the upper arm to the lower, telling himself how it would look as it bent towards his lap. He would keep chanting, I thought, until he reached the forearm that had been covered with dark, straight hair since he was twelve, and his wrist that was as thin as his mother's. If he concentrated hard enough, he could pick up his lunch bag with his left hand as he was walking out the door at his stop, feeling the slick, worn wrinkles and the thick ham sandwiches hanging at the bottom.       Before the train reached his station, the man woke up with a cough and a grunt, then rose slowly to his feet and staggered a little. When the train came to a complete stop, he got off, the opening doors blowing his left sleeve straight behind him.       My sister became more quiet. I noticed it first on the day of the one-armed man. As I got off the elevator at the hospital that afternoon, I walked past the lounge and saw my mother reading People magazine with a cigarette in her hand and another one already laid out beside her on the table. She never stopped on one page, but flipped through the magazine like a censor looking for breasts. Three other magazines lay spread-eagled at her feet. She glanced up at me for a second as I stood there. Then she ashed her cigarette and went back to the magazine. She was tired of disapproving. I walked into my sister's room and set down the coffee I had brought for myself.       "Hi, sweetie," she said.       "Hi," I said. I took off my coat, and we sat for a while talking about the news and the family and how she felt. She was using fewer and fewer words. As the conversation stumbled along, I studied her appearance secretly. The nurses placed her in the bed so that she sat up against hard pillows, wearing a surgeon's cap that fit close to her bald head and her own nightgown under the sheet. I mostly noticed her skin; it had become chalky and thin, like milky cellophane. It seemed to be losing inner layers so that if the treatments kept up, you would soon be able to see right through my sister, to her organs shifting and her bones framing every movement.       "Mom looks relaxed," I said.       "Smoking like a fiend."       I looked down at my hands. They seemed disconnected, nervous. We sat for a few minutes, and I realized how patient my sister was becoming. Even as I looked down, I knew that without my mother distracting her, she was calm, waiting until I was ready.       "I don't know if I want to talk today," I finally said.       "Why? Nobody interesting?"       "No," I said. "I don't know." I looked up and told her that I wasn't sure my visits were helpful. We weren't saying anything about death except that it was inevitable. I didn't think it would help her to say that. She nodded her head slightly, then looked down to the sheets and wrote her name in her lap.       "You are being helpful, George," she said.       "If I am, then tell me a story."       "All right," she said. She sat for a minute, moving her legs to wrinkle the sheets again. She told me a story of a boy named George who assumed everyone did things for the same reasons he would have. "He was very disillusioned," she said.       "Does that mean shut up?" I asked.       "It means tell me a story."       I gave up and told her that I saw this man who was one-armed on the subway, carrying a lunchbag and mumbling with his eyes closed like a child memorizing directions. I told her that I thought he was talking his arm back, from shoulder to fingertips.       "How's he going to die?" she asked.       "Alone," I said. I told her he will be listening to Frank Sinatra on an AM radio, touching the dial occasionally to bring in the station a little better. He imagines that he's Sinatra, singing to a million easy women at the plush Nirvana Lounge in Las Vegas. Between songs, he expires in his La-Z-Boy chair. The mortician mumbles something over him at the funeral home, passing his hands through the space where the man's left arm should be like a magic trick. The funeral will not be well-attended, but a few friends from the war will come by and think hard about him for the first time in years as they extend their suited arms to lay flowers on his grave.       "Thank you," my sister said.       "It wasn't very good."       "Good enough. Tell Mom to come in."       During her last two or three treatments, my sister got flowers from friends and relatives all over the country. A delivery man came once while I was there, arms filled with lilies and roses. Cards rested on top of small plastic tridents like signs in the wilderness, directing you through the flora to senders in California, New Jersey, North Carolina. You must know a lot of people, the delivery man said. I used to talk a lot, my sister said. Read me a card, she said to me after he had gone. She was whispering by then, and it would have taken a lot of effort to read it herself. Aunt Julia and Uncle Walter send their love, I said. Any news about Lydia? she asked. I looked at the back of the card. They say she's over whooping cough. Good, she said. Read me another. I picked one from a small urn of daisies.       One day, I rode the trolley into Boston to do some shopping and stared out the window from the minute I got on. It was beautiful outside. People walked through the new snow puffing white breath in front of them, dragging groceries home or sleds. It was late afternoon and there were only a few riders on the train into town, sniffling and dripping slush into the creases of the rubber mat that ran the length of the trolley. Rush hour riders in cars passing the other way were jammed into the aisles, reading even the trolley maker's nameplate at the front of the car to distract themselves. I knew what they wished--to be home in front of roaring fires with their healthy children, holding multiplication cards up to bright faces.       Halfway into Boston, an older woman stepped up into the far end of the car. She had bleached-streaked hair that was coarse, like heavy wheat, and her face was as red as a fisherman's. She looked as if she had walked the Yukon just to catch this train. As the woman made her way to a seat, she swiveled her head back and forth to get a glimpse of the other riders. As other people noticed her, I could feel them tighten, look quickly at the magazines and paperbacks and subway tokens in their hands. The woman looked wild, but took her seat placidly. She faced me; I was looking forward to the front of the car and she was facing straight backward.       A few moments after the train moved off from the stop, the woman took off her enormous army green parka and sat back down on it. People began to glance at her curiously because of her energy, but she smiled at them. Not an insane smile, but like one you would get from James Taylor. The train stopped again after a minute, and in the commotion of riders getting on and off, the woman took the opportunity to lean towards the young man in front of her and whisper into his ear. He turned quickly back to her, looking up from his magazine as if he had a pain in his neck, and shook his head. She whispered again, and he shook his head again. Then she pushed his shoulder a little with her fingers.       C'mon she said. I could read her lips exactly. It's free.       He turned back towards me and gave a shrug. Then he turned to face the woman fully and offered his left hand, palm up, to her. I could see her begin to draw soft lines on his skin. Then she started to whisper.       I had seen palm readers at carnivals, and sometimes on the sidewalk holding cardboard signs that sold you your future for $10, but all the ones I had noticed before were dark, fat, moustached, and mysterious. The wheat-haired woman looked like a grandmother, although a little more insane than your average, but I supposed even gypsies have children. She kept whispering.       And the trolley kept moving. When it stopped again, more riders got on, filling some more of the seats as the woman looked intensely at the man, then at his left hand, then back up at him, shaking her finger. I couldn't hear them, but every once in a while I caught a word by reading her lips. Venus, she said, making a circle in the air. Mound of Venus.       I found myself thinking of my sister, her thin arms, the wrinkles in her hands. I wonder what fortune tellers see when they open the palm of a woman who has decided she's going to die. Is the skin blank, the wrinkles pulled tight without the worries of the living and the journey as clear as a feature film, or is death as dark as a thunderhead, hidden in the folds of a dissolving hand? Is it easier to see the future of someone lying on a soiled sheet, wrapped in plastic tubing, draped with a paper gown? Or would the palm reader sit there next to the bed, hearing the machines whir, watching the nurse insert one more needle, and be as confused as the rest of us about how and when and why the person is going to die?       More people got off and on at the next stop, and between snow-frosted bodies I saw the woman pat the open hand of the magazine man and smile at him. He smiled back, slid his hand out of hers, and then turned back to the front, not quite able to go back to his reading. I could tell from the way he glanced down that he was trying to memorize what the wheat-haired woman had told him.       The woman looked around for another victim. As she surveyed the car, I glanced out the window and saw that we had arrived at the last stop of the street-level section of the C line. Some people stood on the sidewalk, waiting to climb up into the car, but as they moved in I could still see the older woman fairly clearly. Directly across sat a young woman with an open seat next to her. The young woman was reading something, I couldn't see what, but had glanced over at the palm reading a few times as it went on. Now, she was furiously involved in her reading again.       After a few seconds of watching her, the older woman addressed the younger. The young woman looked up, then down at her lap, then over at the magazine man, who had glanced back.       It's fine, I could hear him say in a deep voice. He held up his hand. I'm fine.       The wheat-haired woman slid into the empty seat.       This last stop on the trolley part of the C line lies at the edge of a long, downward slope into the subway tunnel. As I watched the young woman make her decision, the doors closed tight on all sides of the trolley, and the conductor's voice fell from the ceiling. "Kenmore next," he said.       We descended. As you look out the window, the concrete subway tunnel rises around the train like moveable walls trapping you in a magician's basement. You're in complete darkness for a few seconds. I glanced at the palm reader. By the movements of her elbow, I could tell that she was drawing lines in the young woman's palm. The woman smiled at her, as if she was hearing a future that would never include homeless people or airplane crashes or global famine. It was as bright as the fluorescent light that was now bouncing into the windows of the train as it bulleted through the tunnel.       The consultation continued as we rolled into Kenmore station. A group of people stepped up into the train and moved into the aisles toward seats and empty standing space, filling it almost completely. As the train moved into downtown, the commuters were swarming through the doors. I was getting a little claustrophobic, peering between wool coats to see the pair of women. But it didn't last long.       As we neared the next station, the older woman stood up and shook the younger woman's hand. She staggered for a second in the aisle as the train slowed, then tapped the magazine man on the shoulder.       "Auditorium," the conductor said.       The train exhaled a group onto the platform and inhaled a horde back in, but the wheat-haired woman stood her ground in the middle of the aisle. Motioning for the young woman to slide over into the empty half of her seat, she looked at the magazine man.Give me your hand, she said silently. I could read her mouth like a book. The young man gave it to her. She turned back to the younger woman and said something I couldn't make out. The young woman lifted her hand up. The wheat-haired woman took the young woman's right hand, leaned down and clasped it with the man's, and then held them for a second. The two strangers smiled uncomfortably, and the woman let them both go. The older woman sat down then, on top of her old parka, as the man and the woman exchanged greetings, the crowd shoving between them.       "Copley," the conductor said above me. The palm reader and her two clients were still talking. I got up, walked to the open trolley door, and stepped off the train into Copley station.       A week after the palm reader, my mother called me. Come quick, she said, but the taxicab took forever and the snow had gotten worse. When I got to the hospital, she told me that my sister was dying, and I didn't really believe her until she took me into the room. My sister lay light, translucent, barely breathing. Too little oxygen was getting to her brain, my mother told me. I said I would watch over her for a while, and my mother walked back to the lounge to cry hard and wonder how this could have happened. When I looked down at my sister, I knew that at this point she wasn't playing any games. She was dying as fast as she could. I stood watching her for a second, straining upward against her oxygen tubes like a balloon, and then sat down to tell her a story.       I told her that I saw a wise old woman on a train who could read the future in the folds of your skin. When she meets two strangers-- whether on the subway, or on a bus, or on the sidewalk--she first reads their palms and then joins them like rope, because any future is bleaker alone. I told my sister that this woman will die in a hospital room not far from hers. Near death, her eyes are closed, but she still gropes for the hands of her family. They circle her when she reaches for them, whispering goodbyes and looking down at the crosses and calluses in their own palms, hoping they can still see the future after she's gone.       My sister moved a little then and mumbled something I couldn't make out. I told her to keep talking, if she could, say anything. The longer she spoke, the more time we would have to tell our relatives and friends to come. They could fly here, maybe, or drive, or take the train, and as they walked tired and stiff through the hospital door from their day's journey, they would fill her room. Then, after everyone had arrived, they would brush the snow from their shoulders, pull off their cold hats, and circle my sister one last time, with new stories, calm voices, strong hands. --For Robin