Aftermath of Dreaming(8)

“Okay. Question.” Suzanne’s slender hands sort through the alabaster objects overflowing on her coffee table. “I want to carry Mother’s prayer book, but I saw some lily of the valley that are just so perfect. Is it too much to carry both?” She holds up a small snowy tome. “Do they cancel each other out?”

“Oh, my God, the one from their wedding picture.” I have never seen the prayer book in real life, hadn’t even known it still existed, as if it might have intuitively combusted the minute our parents’ marriage went kaput. I take it from her hands. The gold ink spelling our mother’s maiden name is still crisp, the ivory leather pure except for a faint thumb mark on the back, like a print left behind on the safety rail of a sheer drop.

“Yes, that one.” Suzanne takes the coveted object back, puts it on her lap, and folds both hands on top of it.

“How’d you get it? I didn’t see it when we split her things up.”

“Yvette, I got Mother’s prayer book because I asked her for it.”

“After the accident?” My mind is frantically reconstructing our mother’s last days, trying to imagine a moment when a lucid conversation with Momma was possible, as she lay looking so unreachable in that hospital bed.

“No, God, I did not take a dying woman’s prayer book. Honestly. I asked her for it ages ago when I was twelve and she let me have it then. I knew I would carry it before you.”

“Oh.” My sister has always had a propensity for planning ahead that seems to me a particularly unfair trait when it involves items that other people (meaning me) are not even aware they should be thinking about. She is the only person I know whose material here-and-now is abundantly affected by decisions made very far in the past.

“Okay, so.” I try to push away the image in my mind of Momma handing Suzanne this book. The way Momma must have looked in 1977 when Suzanne was twelve and I was eight. Momma would have been wearing a crisp linen dress, no doubt, with small heels, just like any other normal day in her life, never imagining that in a little less than two decades, her life would brutally end. “What kind of flower?”

“Lily of the valley. They’re white.”

“Right, white.” I take the prayer book back, and as I turn it over in my hands, the coolness of the kid leather comforts me. It smells like Momma. That keen, rich scent that permeated the air when I was a child as she’d hold my face in her gloved hands to kiss me goodbye before she and Daddy went out to parties and balls.

“That would look great, Suzanne. Just a simple spray behind the book, even cascading over a little, but not covering the front.” I move one hand around in the air, trying to illustrate tiny flowers cascading down. Then another scent wave of Momma hits me, so I quickly give the volume back to Suzanne.

“Good, that’s what I thought, too.” She walks through the maze and puts the prayer book away in a cabinet drawer. I half expect her to lock it up and swallow the key. “You’re great with this stuff.”

“So are you.”

“Coffee?” Suzanne is already leaving the room. “And how’s my veil coming along? I need to see it soon, the wedding’s in just eight weeks, for God’s sake.”

“Great, it’s great, almost done. Just the detail work left on it now.”

I am secretly thrilled to be alone. The objects on her coffee table are astounding, the buried treasure of some dreadfully fabulous betrothal dream come to life: garters and albums and place cards and champagne flutes and a heart-shaped ring pillow with a smaller heart in the middle.

“It means a lot to me that you’re doing it,” Suzanne shouts from her kitchen, as I pick up the pillow to examine it. “If I’ve learned one thing from Matt’s family, it’s that they show up for each other, and I want you to hear that I really appreciate you showing up for me.”

I notice that “Suzanne” and “Matthew” are embroidered in cursive script on the white satin pillow next to ribbons that will hold their rings. I can’t tell if the “Suzanne” ribbon is for the wedding band that she will receive from Matt, or if it is for the ring she will give to him and thus be wed. I wonder if she wonders that as well, but probably she already knows.

I quickly flick the pillow back onto the table as she enters the room carrying our family’s grand and heavy silver coffee service, but easily, as if it were made of papier-maché.

“Sure, Suzanne, it’s not that big a deal.”

“It is to me, considering how we were raised.” Suzanne is using her “I am saying something loving that happens to be true, so don’t challenge me” tone. I suddenly feel exhausted.

“Okay, well, good.”

I push a mountain of tulle aside so she can set the loaded tray down. She has the same expression of determined politeness she had when we played tea party with our dolls as she pours my coffee and hands me the china cup.

“You know, Suzanne, our parents did show up for us—okay, fine, you’re right, not after Daddy disappeared and Momma wouldn’t leave her bedroom. But before that—the first fourteen years of my life and, hell, your first eighteen—they were good parents.” I can’t help myself. For years, I have felt like a portable tape recorder whose pause button my sister depressed during the last conversation we had about our parents when I was fourteen and I am sure that my words are picking right up where they left off. “Daddy used to take us to ball games with him, and all those trips to Grande Isle, remember the father-daughter days at school and the times he would—”