Her: A Memoir (26 page)

“Aren’t you going inside?” I asked.

“I was standing guard, but I’m not going in alone. Watch my back, okay?”

I followed her in and and she surveyed the stalls. “This place gives me the creeps. I hate the military. They make the bathrooms the same as the graves.” Cara walked to a stall and went inside. She opened and used the exact one I had.

She emerged after a minute and then selected a sink,
my
sink. We were wired to make the same choices given any number of options.

I told this story to Kernberg.

“You were little girls who made the same basic choices?” Kernberg asked.

“Yes.”

He wanted to know if there was something else, something small that connected us in our choices to each other. I told him about my chair.

Mom had helped me redecorate after Jedediah moved out, and she’d found me an antique sitting chair at a yard sale with arms wide as a hug and a back that was tall and supportive and built to last. The chair was upholstered in smooth black leather but the seat was torn. Mom said she’d like to take me to a fabric warehouse so I could pick material I liked. She’d reupholster the chair. She thought it would be good for me to have a new piece of furniture, something completely mine: not from my marriage, not something inherited from Cara. Mom said she’d done the same for Cara with a chaise longue that had a swan carved into the wood on the back. They’d gotten as far as picking out the fabric, then Cara had died.

The fabric warehouse had many thousands of lengths of silk, fleece, cotton, wools, linen, and tulles. There were rooms organized by design: shabby chic, modern, antique, utilitarian. I went to the most colorful room I could find and browsed the fabrics for an hour, trying to imagine incorporating a new chair into my life, one completely of my choosing. Jedediah wouldn’t argue that it was too pink, ornate, or feminine. Cara couldn’t want it for herself.

I decided on thick red cotton decorated with tiny yellow elephants wearing sage green riding saddles. I pulled the fabric out of the bin and brought it over to my mother to ask whether or not it was good for a chair, if it was the right density and weight. I handed it over to her to inspect, proud of my choice.

My mother went pale as she looked down at the fabric. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s the exact fabric Cara picked out. We already have enough to cover the chair at home.”

“You’ve been taught your lack of free will is what defines you and keeps your sister with you? No?” Kernberg said.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He could read me and I feared that. I feared I’d have to let Cara go. “Am I sick, like her?” I asked in a child’s voice. I needed to know I hadn’t caught what she had when she died, taken her illness.

“I never met your sister. She was not under my care. I can’t say what ailed her. I can say with certainty that you are not well, but this state of yours is temporary, acute. My concern is how you navigate as you go along.”

“So I can go home? I don’t need to be here?”

“Yes, you can go home. But yes, you need to be here.”

“You’ll sign off and let me go? I’m not a borderline?”

“Yes you can. No, you’re not borderline, but we’re not finished here.”

*   *   *

I called D and let him know that, as it turned out, I was sane and could go home. Kernberg had said as much.

“Kernberg? You saw Kernberg?
The
Kernberg?” D asked.

“Yes. Is that so important?”

“You just saw the father of modern psychotherapy, after Freud. You know that, right?”

I didn’t. I was just glad to leave. “He seemed nice.”

“Nice? Jesus, C. Jesus. Kernberg? No shit. I just can’t believe you saw Kernberg. What did he say?”

“He said I wasn’t crazy.”

“You mean you’re not borderline?”

“No, I’m not.”

“I knew it. But now that we’ve heard it from him, I’m relieved.” D took a deep breath. “I told you you’d be in good hands there,” he added lightly. “How about you come on back home? I’ll make dinner.”

I loaded my suitcase into the trunk of my car in the Payne Whitney parking lot. During my short stay, a seal had cracked in the trunk and rain had soaked everything inside. My wool winter coat was ruined; it sat atop moldy dresses and soggy notebooks. The most prized book in my photography collection, a hardbound Arbus monograph with a set of dark-haired identical twins standing shoulder to shoulder on the cover, wearing crisp white shirts, jumpers, and curious frowns, was waterlogged. The cover and thus the twins were split down the center, ripped apart.

I pulled out of the hospital parking lot and headed back to D’s in Brooklyn. As I hit the road I recalled a drive with Cara through the center of Northampton. It was January 3, 2003. We’d just had the first significant snowfall of the season. We were on our way to photograph winterscapes. Cara had been raped only a year and a half before. On that drive, she had lifted her chin toward the rearview mirror of my yellow Volvo wagon to check her makeup. I’d created a diva. One arm dangling out of the car window, she smoked a long cigarette; she was dead and breathing.

I was about to take my first picture for
Kindred
. I didn’t know what I was doing.

I found an embankment distinguished by a hibernating tree webbed with red berries and pulled the car over. The tree had hundreds of thin, tangled branches.

I directed Cara to stand in front of my camera by pointing at a blank space beneath the berry tree. She tromped out into the snow and knelt down, pushing back the thorny, bare branches. “A real actress never lets anyone see her sweat,” she said, and proceeded to huddle on the ground.

She lured a bough of the red berries over her head. Bittersweet climbed the vines she pulled closed. She wanted to be both hidden and seen, peeking out from behind the bough. I stood beside her and lowered a cluster of vines. I pulled the cage of them down hard to cover her. She stared at the lens of the camera as if it were a person familiar to her, someone to whom she needed to reveal her secrets, someone she wanted to lash with her painful truths. She looked down without my asking, hands in just the right place. Her cloak plumed around her legs, a black tulip in bloom. She reapplied the red lipstick I’d brought for her.

We wore the identical black wool coats our mother had bought us for Christmas that year. Cara’s coat concealed purple pajamas. She’d refused to get dressed, so I found the only thing she owned that would cover her nightwear. She’d missed a spot for her lipstick on her top lip; a crescent moon of pale pink exposed itself from behind the garish red stain. She sat quietly picking at her ragged manicure and then lit a cigarette. She didn’t pay it much mind; smoldering tobacco touched the tips of her index and middle fingers. She wore a mood ring and the diamond from her failing marriage; she never took either off. Dirt and bark lodged under her nails. Her hands were turning blue. She clawed her way into place for the picture.

“Hurry up, Christa,” she yelled out over the wind. “If you want me to lie down I’ll do it. I always know what you want.” She assumed the position, satisfied with herself.

She didn’t know. I wanted her giant doe-in-the-headlights eyes back. I wanted the woman who believed that she could win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. Instead, I stood face-to-face with a Klonopin-ed Medusa who’d been stripped of her powers; a fallen goddess, stoned and frozen, who slurred her words.

I heard my own voice counting for the picture. The voice was familiar; it’s Cara’s voice.

I made pictures of us in snow and pictures of us over bodies of water and on mountains of rock, but I couldn’t reach her.

The shutter clicked.

I extended my hand to help Cara off of the ground. She took my hand and stood; she brushed herself off.

“Wait,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“You need this.” She reached down and picked up a handful of snow.

“Don’t.” I put my hands up and shielded my face. “Don’t you dare hit me with that.”

She laughed. “You think that’s what I want to do?” She took the snow and threw it into her own face in a puff; it stuck in her hair and eyelashes. A frosty queen, she blinked at me. “If you die, I’ll kill myself.” Cara put her hands on the sides of her cheeks and felt their cold. She waited for me to respond.

I wiped the snow from her face in gentle strokes. “If you die, I’ll survive you.” I sank to the ground and made a snow angel. Cara got down beside me and made one, too. We moved our arms and legs in tandem, like swimmers.

Chapter 27

I
moved back to
D’s in Brooklyn and started going on dates with Cara’s boyfriends. I logged onto Cara’s e-mail to find their names and addresses, and tracked down each one of them, calling or e-mailing. I was hoping I’d catch a glimpse of her by setting a boyfriend net. I did keyword searches. Her favorite words:
lovely
,
moon
,
twin
, and
zodiac
. Her pet names:
baby
,
dearest
,
sweetie
,
flower
, and the mystifying,
chunky
. I found searching for phrases to be helpful also:

I love you.

How’s it going?

I want you.

What’s your sign?

I’m a Cancer.

I had a nice time.

Bowling?

Dancing at Diva’s?

I never do this but—

I checked the archive of her e-mail tirelessly. She was too much of a romantic to delete a single letter; she’d saved and archived all of her messages in folders. Each was labeled not with a name, but with a type of jewel. She’d even held on to the rejections: “You’re too needy,” one of the men wrote. “I’ve gone back to my wife,” said another. I savored her notes. I looked for even a hint of flirtation in her correspondence with a man. When I found an inkling of courtship, I’d make contact and ask them to meet me. I told her boyfriends that I’d hoped to pull together a book of Cara’s work and needed help piecing together her last years. Not one of her boyfriends said no. There was a common reprieve: “Please don’t mention this to my wife.” And I heard more than once, “She won’t understand this, but I do.”

I wasn’t cheating on D, I reasoned. It was research. I had no desire to be intimate with any of these men, and I never was. I thought of our meetings more as fact-finding missions.

“Is it crazy to go out and find my sister’s lovers?” I asked D one night at dinner. We’d been trying out living together for the summer; we were in a honeymoon period, and though I’d kept my own place, we hadn’t gotten to the point where our shared possessions had become more than symbol; we’d bought only the trimmings for a home—groceries and sheets, roasting pans and books—with the intention of defining who we’d become together as we went along. There was always that fear, up until the end, that if we didn’t keep up appearances, we’d failed. I baked cakes and he prepared meals; he poured drinks with the precision of a surgeon’s hand.

D had made an elaborate dish the night I asked him about the boyfriends: a roasted chicken in a cast-iron skillet that he turned by hand and basted every ten minutes. He’d shelled several cloves of garlic, chopped carrots, potatoes, an onion, and parsnips and arranged them all around the bird. Each caramelized in the chicken fat as it cooked. D didn’t own a kitchen table, so we’d picnic on the living-room floor each night. He’d take an expensive, high-thread-count Italian sheet and spread it out. We’d eat on that, and tried not to soil the sheet with grease or wine. We’d sit across from each other, each with our own careful dining styles. D had been raised with meticulous table manners and could eat anything anywhere without betraying etiquette. I took tiny bites and lifted my plate up to my chin. It was my job to set our places, and I happily did so. I carried out plates, paper napkins, utensils, and a small carving station for the chicken stacked on top of a solid mahogany serving tray. I set our table on the floor. This was our eating ritual, which we followed with hours of pot smoking. I went back into the kitchen to see how dinner was progressing.

“Sounds about right to me, Sweet Pea.” D opened the freezer and pulled out a half-sized martini glass handblown with a ribbon of tangerine that he’d brought for me from Europe. He placed it beside his larger one and poured us both a drink. The glass was dainty, just the right serving so my cocktail stayed cold. D mixed Manhattans, his favorite, and learned to make a more palatable, sweeter version for me than the mix he liked for himself. He’d served me my first stiff drink, and thought it funny that when I took my initial sips, I wrinkled my nose like a child. But a smaller, pretty glass had made the jet-fuel burn of the bourbon go down smoother; in no time, I was throwing them back and making my own. I was regularly drunk before dinner. “This chicken is nearly done.” D pulled a bit of the skin off the top. “Open up, sweetie.” He dropped the skin into my mouth. “When I wrote the memoir about Louanne, I contacted her friends and asked as many questions as I could. You’re just being a good artist.”

“Thanks, D,” I answered, mouth full of salty, crispy, perfect skin. I felt for Louanne when he called her by her first name. She’d birthed him, nurtured him, loved him the best she could. She may have been an alcoholic and a nightmare, but she was still a mother.

*   *   *

Most of Cara’s boyfriends made small talk, then explained they’d be happy to help with any “research” I might be doing. Conversations would usually devolve; I became a boyfriend confessor. They were clearly mostly still in the solipsistic “if only I’d” phase of grief. “If only I’d loved her more,” “If only I’d spent the time with her that she needed,” “If I’d only not left her,” she might still be here.

We had more in common than they realized.

They were full of guilt and longing and regret. I’d so hoped to find them that way. I picked at their grief scabs to the point of bloodshed. I took pleasure in it. I was furious with her boyfriends. We should have been able to keep her alive if we’d all worked together, but, of course, we hadn’t. The men in my life had not shown up. My father had not loved me enough. My lovers could never give enough. Cara’s boyfriends had let us down, too.