Alice missed her mother too. But she felt lonely right now at the table with her. She knew her mother was about to ask her if she’d decided on a major—she hadn’t—and if she had a boyfriend—she didn’t—and if she was having fun. But she also knew that a part of herself and a part of Julia were still standing side by side in front of the wall of images, looking at their own faces, as painted by a woman in another city, from Julia’s other life.
Alice remembered the time in middle school when she had passed her mother in height and realized that Julia was not a perfect superhero, that her mother was a human woman, which meant she had flaws and a past, which seemed to be at one with her wild hair. Alice had spent her life watching her mother try to harness both her hair and her past, wrapping them up, trying to impose her control on them every single day. Wishing she were back in her room, alone in front of the wall of pictures, Alice thought: She’s done the same with me.
Sylvie
September 2008
Sylvie left the library early. She told the assistant librarian that she had a headache. She walked home by her usual route, past Cecelia’s murals. Pilsen looked particularly colorful that late-September afternoon, and Sylvie was glad to be surrounded by her sister’s art. Whenever she visited the twins’ houses, Sylvie traveled the halls to see if any portraits had been added or removed. She was guaranteed to see all the women in her life: her sisters, her nieces, her mother, and herself. Part of Sylvie’s desire to go home early today was to visit the piece of Cecelia’s art that hung in her own living room: the landscape Cecelia had painted for William shortly after he left the hospital.
Sylvie let herself into the quiet apartment with her key. William wouldn’t be home for a few hours. She felt her shoulders relax. The space was peaceful and designed exactly to their liking. She and William rarely entertained here; big communal dinners happened at the super-duplex, and Kent was a foodie, so he always suggested they meet at restaurants he wanted to try. The apartment was where she and William didn’t have to mute their love or pay attention to anyone else. They liked to be in the same room, so Sylvie would read next to William while he watched basketball games with the volume off. When Sylvie cooked, she prepared meals she knew delighted her husband: any kind of pasta, any kind of stew. When William cooked, the recipe usually included chickpeas, because they were Sylvie’s favorite.
She leaned against the back of the couch and studied the painting of wind, rain, and light. The landscape had always looked like hope to her, and Sylvie needed some. She’d been to see her doctor the week before, because of an odd, recurring headache. Sylvie was able to see the pain when it arrived: It was lavender and emanated from somewhere near her right temple in concentric rings. Sylvie had drawn the headache on a piece of paper for the doctor, and he’d sent her to see a specialist. The specialist had run tests. Sylvie lay in an MRI machine, strangely proud of her ability to lie perfectly still, because it pleased the technician. Sylvie hadn’t mentioned her headaches to William or the twins, and she didn’t tell them she was going to the doctor. She’d assumed the headaches would turn out to be nothing, or perhaps a symptom of perimenopause. She was forty-seven years old, after all.
The specialist, a man who spoke at a fast clip—presumably because he was in so much demand and therefore had so little time—told her that there was a tumor in her brain. Sylvie nodded in response, to be polite. He talked about the location of the tumor and the size. He used the word terminal. Sylvie nodded again, listened some more, and then left his office. The building she exited was near Northwestern, and she decided to walk home. She didn’t pay any attention to her direction; she knew that, like a homing pigeon, her body would take itself to Pilsen.
While she walked, Sylvie discovered that she wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis. It settled so quickly inside her that she realized she must have known, on some level, that it was coming. When the specialist had used the word incurable, she’d thought: Of course. That sounds right. Whenever something went wrong in her house while she was growing up—the electricity went out, the washing machine flooded, the refrigerator died—her mother’s first words were: “We’re being punished.” Sylvie was being punished for the choice she’d made twenty-five years earlier. Even though she’d stopped considering herself Catholic after her father’s funeral, she recognized the religion’s retributive justice in her bones. She was surprised, though, to find that she’d unconsciously kept that belief system. She would have thought that she’d evolved past the guilt that was laced through Catholicism and her childhood, past the concept of an eye for an eye. But apparently she had bought into that retaliative framework, perhaps in the pews of St. Procopius as a child. Sylvie had betrayed her sister, so her body had betrayed itself.
It’s also possible that you’re just in shock, Sylvie thought now. The painting in front of her was becoming less potent; the light, the hope on the canvas, was fading. Sylvie knew this was because she’d been looking at the painting for too long; its meaning was lost, the same way the meaning of a word is lost when repeated fifty times. She knew the hope was still in the painting; she just could no longer see it.