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

dowdy,” I’d written her. She reassured me that I could probably fix it by getting it more stuffed. I had made a huge mistake, I wrote back, re-covering it in a hideous fabric—a mistake as bad as the pumpkin-colored Fiat I’d once purchased and a West End Avenue apartment (that was my worst mistake), all dramas she’d lived through. We had sat on the floor of that empty apartment trying to figure out if I really could live there. I couldn’t.
    In spite of all our anxiety about her health during those months—frequent talks and updates on thetelephone—our sisterhood was continuing online at its most normal, with us sending pictures of possible replacement couches back and forth. At one point she e-mailed me from a couch store, urging me to hop in a taxi and come over, she thought she’d found one. I wrote her asking/bemoaning,
What’s wrong with
my living room?
After double-checking to make sure I wanted to hear, she dove in. She actually thought my couch was fine, but I needed new lamps, my chairs would be better off in the bedroom, and it was possible my coffee table was making too much of a statement. She offered to meet me at Mecox Gardens, a shop on Lexington Avenue, for lamps.
    When I came upon all these couch exchanges, I remembered that one particularly, the one where she had dissected my living room, but I couldn’t find it. It was gone. It’s as if it deleted itself and all that is left are the sweetest—twenty in all.
    •  •  •  •
    I had learned Nora was sick six years earlier. I’d come home from Paris—my husband and I had been there for New Year’s Eve, and it had been the best New Year’s Eveof my life. We’d rented an apartment, and many of our close friends were there, and we’d had a fantastic party. When I came home there was a message from Nora: “Are you back yet?”
    She’d waited until I got home before bothering me with the news that she was not only sick, but the doctors thought she had six months to live. Jerry and I went up to her apartment. All I remember from that night was fear. It was in the room the way air was. We were all terrified. And that she showed me her hand. It was as white as marble.
    I find myself often looking at my own hand, turning the palm up, taking some weird survivor relief that it is pinkish. Waiting for the day when it is not.
    Nora was terminally ill. It was as if the Earth had shifted on its axis, something unfathomable had occurred in the galaxy in which I lived.
    Sometime after knowing about her illness but before she was stabilized on treatment—when, I’m not exactly sure—I was walking down a Greenwich Village street thinking desperately, truly desperately,
I need something from her, I need something
. A few days later we were working at my apartment on our play,
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
. I was sitting at the computer, and she wasbehind me and she said, “I have this ring that you should have. It’s a pansy ring, and you love pansies.” Which I do, they are my favorite flower (and one of Honey’s middle names). She took off the ring and gave it to me.
    And the end of that story should be,
And I never took the ring off.
But I did, because that enamel pansy got caught on things, and several times it practically yanked my finger off. I often took the ring off, and one day I lost it. My guess is it fell off the bedside table and my dog ate it (and perhaps that is why she is eating her paw), but why would she? More likely the vacuum cleaner sucked it up.
    I drove myself crazy trying to find it. I can’t bear that it’s gone.
    •  •  •  •
    I have been wondering whether Nora’s refusal to reveal her illness, her decision to keep it a secret, is something people will aspire to the way they followed her advice about egg white omelets. To those people, I want to say that she wasn’t always right. Five years ago, she told me to sell my Apple stock.
    Not telling was the right choice because it was the one she wanted