Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) Read Online Free

[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 ona 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.
    All my life that fear,
I will die, I will cease to exist
, has haunted me. That thing—when you’re dead, you don’t know it—really got me as a kid and stuck. And here it was, death, but not mine, Nora’s.
    •  •  •  •
    Nora and I wrote a pilot when she was in the hospital.
    Before the debilitating effects of chemotherapy would kick in, there was an eight-day window (maybe nine, maybe seven, maybe ten, maybe twelve. Don’t expect factual accuracy here, I would flunk that test. Everything from that time is cloudy). Nora mentioned that she recently had had a meeting about a pilot for cable TV. An hour-long pilot is only forty pages, she said, we can write it in a weekend. Perhaps it was fifty pages, shewasn’t sure, we’d have to check on that. Still, we could write it.
    Of course, I said. What is it?
    It was about an SEC officer (woman) and a CEO of an investment bank (man). Staggeringly rich, he’s corrupt in the way many/all bank CEOs in this world seem to be, imagining they’re not, doing tricky things we don’t know about, disdaining us for not understanding things they often don’t understand themselves. She (the SEC officer), a middle-class woman from Queens, gets assigned to his bank to police him.
    Explain selling short to me again? I said, testing out my ability to wrap my brain around a Wall Street story. She did. I failed to grasp it, as usual. She was the one with the math brain. (Amy and Hallie have math brains, too, and if you want to know who has the best hands of the four of us, it’s me.) Anyway, I knew a bit about banks. I have a savings and a checking account. Nora mentioned Dodd-Frank (a federal law intended to police bank behavior). She could handle Dodd-Frank. One of the great things about collaboration is you don’t need to know everything yourself, you need to know everything between the two of you. Frankly I don’t think she had a clue about Dodd-Frank, either. But this was a pilot. We didn’tneed to understand Dodd-Frank until episode three. We weren’t thinking about episode three.
    We were hoping only to get her through chemotherapy.
    George and Martha
, as we called the pilot, was an alternate universe. A place for her to live.
    We did write it in a weekend. Then we rewrote it. Sometimes I would arrive in the morning and find changes. She’d worked at night after I’d left.
    We worked on her laptop at a circular table in the room, outlining first, the way we always did, jotting ideas for characters. Taking turns at the computer as we always did. We discussed lunch, something we always loved to do, but the choices were more limited—tuna sandwiches