Can you break up with your sister? Can you decide to opt out of bullshit and awkward conversations and pretending to get along for the sake of other people? I hoped so. I traveled to New York with that hope, not with a dramatic finale in mind – doors slamming, glass breaking, hair-pulling – though that was possible, I thought, given how angry I’d been, how long I’d carried my simmering grudge. But closure would be enough. To just see this through to a logical conclusion.

          When I was ten and Ginny was twelve, Mack (MacArthur) Parsons, our father, shot our mother and then himself. When I was ten and Ginny was twelve, we rode home from school, threw down our bikes in the driveway, ran into the house, and found their bodies in the kitchen. (Every school day we raced home for ice cream and every time our mother mock-scolded us for abandoning our bicycles in the driveway.) When I was 30 and Virginia Abbott Parsons was 32, she hired a writing coach and wrote a memoir, Tragedy’s Daughter. The memoir was accepted by a major publisher a year later and Virginia became a minor celebrity. Radio and television talk show hosts and her publicist loved her because unlike other pesky high-falutin’ memoirists, Virginia didn’t insist on steering the discussion away from juicy personal stuff toward stuffy literary considerations. She willingly, graciously, and repeatedly responded to intrusive if not tactless questions. Virginia was being marketed as a regular gal. Her press kit bio highlighted the fact that she had written the book while generating salesperson-of-the-month figures at Honda of Tacoma.
          Tragedy’s Daughter had gone into six printings and its paperback release was an occasion being marked by a book launch party at a vodka bar near Union Square. Her publisher reserved a block of rooms at the nearby W New York and purchased plane tickets for me, Grandma, and my aunt, Bunny. I wasn’t planning to spoil the party. I hoped it would be a good party – I’d even helped convince Bunny to come. I would celebrate the author’s ill-gotten triumph and then take my permanent leave.
          Ofilia’s had the insincere perfection of a TV set. The designer had favored concrete and hammered steel, though the showpiece was a 20-foot bar constructed of thousands of white and clear Lego blocks. Neon tubes in various shades of blue ran in horizontal lines along the walls like the directional stripes in hospitals – “Please follow the blue stripe to radiology.” The food was cold and slippery. Three-quarters of the people I met in the first half-hour were assistant editors or assistant publicists or just plain assistants. The assistants had excellent posture and what I assumed were very expensive haircuts.
          Virginia was scheduled to appear on Good Morning America the next day. At the rate she was tossing back shots of Finnish vodka, she wouldn’t be looking her best.
          “Gosh, Linda, can you believe this place? Even the waiters are beautiful.” Her left ear was deeply flushed. New golden highlights shimmered in the dim neon glow.
          “I think Carrie and Big came here once on Sex in the City,” I said.
          “I had no idea they’d go to so much fuss.”
          “A person could freeze in here.”
          Ginny eyed the room like a sailor scanning the horizon. “Where’s Grandma?”

          The woman writes a good sentence:
          Mom was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, bent at the waist, her forehead resting on the table, as if she was just grabbing a minute of shuteye. Even later when we realized that Daddy must have positioned her like this, what we remembered was the peaceful pose, as if she had tranquilly accepted the two pointblank bullets.
          The part in her black hair was ruler straight. Her left hand, with its modest gold band, was palm down, stretched out toward the sugar bowl. Indeed, two half-full cups of coffee were undisturbed on the table, again suggesting a calm conversation over a cup of joe. Her other hand was in her lap, where she often kept both. She’d told us once that her mother had scolded her for years about her fidgety fingers and she’d taken to keeping them still and out of sight. Since our mother’s family was only one small step out of the underclass, Grandma apparently feared that even a small break in decorum such as restless hands, scuffed shoes, or an inadvertent belch might topple them back to where they’d started. Grandma was the scariest woman we’d ever known. And to the last, our mother was obedient.
          Yet there is so much that is false in even this brief passage that it makes me shiver with contempt. Just seconds after the scene registered, Ginny had yelped and then passed out, landing with a tumbling thud. The paramedics seemed gratified to have found one live body and took her to the hospital pronto. (Ginny always passed out when she saw blood, even the single drop that resulted from having her ears pierced at the mall. That time she escaped concussion but wet her pants.)
          It was Grandma (pulling up behind the police and fire trucks that I’d summoned) who’d suggested the notion of tranquility in death. “God, she’s at peace, oh God, oh God,” she wailed, or at least that’s what Officer Dinkler told the reporter who wrote about our family in a four-part series on domestic violence in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Grandma refused to testify at the inquest.
          Virginia recreated the scene using police photographs. It was their flood lights and flashes that rendered Arlene’s part a stark white gash and gave the photos their noir-ish vividness: black blood pooled on the table and floor, blood and bits of flesh spattered on walls and cupboards. Where is the tranquility in that?
          Interesting that Virginia didn’t hypothesize about Mack’s arranging Arlene’s body. Wasn’t it crazy if he was somehow trying to make her comfortable? From whom was he hiding the face he’d ruined? How long did he sit there – seconds, minutes, or longer (the coroner refused to speculate) – before he turned the gun on himself? And if Arlene did take those bullets without a struggle, wasn’t the most obvious reason that she was just plain ready to die?
          Neither the pictures nor the text reveal that Arlene’s and Mack’s chairs and the table were the only pieces of furniture left in the kitchen. Except for our bunker-tough hide-a-bed, Mack had busted every piece of furniture downstairs before he moved out. Ginny and I climbed onto the counter to eat our breakfast cereal. Arlene served TV dinners and plastic cups of root beer on a red plaid blanket in front of the gas fireplace and forced cheer like ointment from a nearly empty tube.
          What truly appalls, though, is Virginia’s persistent use of we. With her we, we, we (squealing like one of the three little pigs) she annexed me and the rest of our family to her story. For the record, Grandma hadn’t noticed the proliferation of we’s, and after I pointed it out, didn’t understand my concern one bit. “You’re getting your knickers twisted over a pronoun?” she asked. My left ear turned bright red with shame. What miffed Grandma was the comprehensive and unflattering portrait of her clan and that the memoir disclosed the family secret that Arlene had been pregnant with Ginny when she married Mack.
          Resentment clings to me like cat hair on a lint brush.

          “Some assistant editor asked me if we had electricity.”
          “Really?”
          Grandma snorted. “He’d read the book, Lindy, even knew we had indoor plumbing.”
          Because I always bite on her improbable statements, Grandma is convinced I’m the most gullible person alive.
          “He told me I was a very strong woman.” She looked straight at me so I’d know a response was required.
          “They really eat it up, don’t they?”
          “That’s what I’m thinking. If we was soup they’d be slurping us for Sunday supper.” She affected a hillbilly twang.
          “How is Bunny holding up?” I asked.
          “Fine, except her feet are blistered and swelled up from walking around all afternoon in her new high-heeled shoes. You can bet wherever she is, she’s sitting.”
          I was ready to find a chair, too, my own new shoes having worn a raw place on each little toe and my left heel.
          When the party was announced three months before, Bunny fretted, worried she would be taken for a hick. She’s a well-read, cultured, professional – the human resources manager at the local hospital – but she and Grandma are sensible shoes, no-fuss hairdo, don’t-buy-something-new-til-the-old-one’s-worn-out sort of women. Without a doubt, they’d spent more money on themselves in the two weeks before the party than in the five previous years, though Grandma had drawn the line at high heels. I’d selected my ensemble carefully, too. A slinky red dress with a somewhat plunging neckline, diamond stud earrings, a new stainless steel Skagen watch, and righteous indignation pinned to my chest like a fancy brooch.
          “Vodka? Champagne?” The waiter proffered two trays, one crowded with blue-tinged flutes and the other holding a shallow ice-filled bowl of slim shot glasses. The waiter wore navy blue eyeliner.
          “We’ll share.” Grandma plucked a single champagne glass from his tray. “You sure don’t see men like this in Walla Walla,” she said as he walked away.
          “You can say that again,” Virginia said, swooping in. “They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?”
          “Like china dolls,” Grandma said. “I reckon none of these fellas has had a bite of pot roast in years.” She winked at me.
          “You two should mingle,” my sister said, half-convincingly. Both of her ears were now flushed a dangerous purple. “Did I tell you that Dave Eggers might be here tonight? Dessofy says he’s a fan.”
          “I don’t know who those people are,” Grandma said. “Where’s Webb?”
          “Oh, Webb. You know, he’s always running atrociously late.”
          We didn’t know. Webb was her recently acquired New York boyfriend, a patent attorney.
         
          There’s being mistaken, which can be attributed to the soapy slipperiness of memory crossed with vehement wishful thinking, and then there’s Virginia’s loose relationship with the truth. It’s not lying exactly, but nothing in the family’s story was too complex or troubling to be flattened into cellophane prose. For character development she relied heavily on adjectives. Our father had been a gentle, misunderstood man who was deeply disappointed by the recent and completely unanticipated betrayal of his longtime business partner, followed by the breakup of his family, and at the time of the shooting he hadn’t slept in four days. Grandma had never thought Mack was good enough for Arlene. Grandma was fierce and unrelenting and proud. Lindy was a fragile creature, too fragile for this world anyway.
          Where to begin my rebuttal? First, I sincerely doubt anyone ever used the word gentle to describe Mack. He didn’t even sleep gently – the mess he made of the blankets and sheets had been a thing of family legend. Mack was in business for himself because he had never been able to hold a job for more than six months. His business partner, his only remaining friend, “betrayed him” by selling his half of the business to Mack for quite a bit more than it was worth and moving to Austin with his family. Mack moved out of the house on May 15. Arlene secured a 30-day restraining order against him on June 1 after a midnight shooting spree left fifteen bullet holes in our garage door. It came out at the inquest that there had also been numerous late night phone calls suggesting his willingness to do harm to others and himself. On July 1, Mack and Arlene held their fatal coffee klatch.
          Mack’s mother, who hadn’t spoken to him in at least five years, called for an autopsy, hoping to find something along the lines of an enormous brain tumor to explain his final burst of violence. No tumor was found. His liver was swollen, his stomach was empty. And maybe no one would have been good enough for Arlene in Grandma’s mind, but even if he’d stuck to dish-hurling and furniture-smashing, she wouldn’t have been wrong to want better for her daughter. Grandma was fierce, and got fiercer, but she provided us with as many of the accoutrements of normal girlhood as she could given her postal carrier salary and her determination to save for her children’s and grandchildren’s college tuition – even clothes and albums and beauty products she considered ridiculous. If she was sometimes motivated by pride as much as by love, then the love should still be noted in the official record.

          “So you’re a journalist. How’d you get started in that?” As he spoke, a young assistant with a shaved head and a carrot-red mustache slipped an empty shot glass in his jacket pocket.
          Blah, blah, blah. I was glad this was my introduction to cocktail parties. It was so over-the-top silly and posh that I wouldn’t miss never having to attend another. “Probably not much different from book publishing – it’s all about connections. My uncle didn’t like the idea of a college graduate working as a clerk in a pet store, so he pulled some strings and got me a job at the paper.”
          “Hank.”
          “Pardon?”
          “It was your Uncle Hank who got you the job, right?”
          “Right,” I said, and fled to the restroom.
          Ka-ching! I thought, recalculating the cost of my sister’s success. Briefly, naively, I had been able to minimize the appalling fact of Tragedy’s Daughter’s publication by picturing its readers as a faceless throng munching appetizers at book group gatherings in the Midwest and South – elsewhere. But its readers appeared at every turn: in my dentist’s office (receptionist and bookkeeper), at the credit union, and seated beside me in the airport shuttle. Determined as I was to see this through, it had been better not to consider just how many people at this party would know more about me than many of my closest friends. It was probably about time to wrap my brain around the implications of 100,000 copies of the trade paperback being shipped nationwide that week.
          Hiding in the women’s restroom was just the sort of thing a Tragedy’s Daughter reader would expect from me, so I wrapped some toilet tissue around my toes and fluffed my hair and rejoined the strangers who knew that I had been blinded in one eye in a serious car accident when I was five and that I’d lost my virginity at 15 in an adolescent psychiatric ward at the University of Washington Hospital.

          “These shoes are the devil’s work,” Bunny said, admiring her $300 Italian pumps.
          “I heard some women in the restroom saying that they inject their feet with black market Novocain when they go out at night,” Grandma said.
          “Real – ” I caught myself, but Grandma smirked anyway.
          “Everybody having fun?” I asked.
          “I could use a hamburger about now,” Grandma said.
          “Don’t let Virginia hear you say that,” Bunny advised.
          “Don’t you know?” I asked. “We’re here as Exhibit A, the rubes from Walla Walla, Washington, so as to show the folks in New York City just how far she’s come.” Or not. Maybe she hadn’t thought we’d come.
          “Shame on you girls. We’re guests here.”
          “It’s not Ginny’s dime,” I said.
          “You two are just cranky because your feet hurt.”
          “Want to trade?” I asked. Grandma’s flats looked comfy as bedroom slippers.
          “Not a chance.”
          “I’m not cranky,” Bunny said. “I love champagne. I love New York.”
          “Well, watch the champagne – both of you.”
          “Maybe you should cut Virginia off,” I said.
          “This is her night. If she wants to get a little tipsy – “
          “I am completely aware that this is her night. I just don’t intend to endure it cold, hungry, and sober.”
          Bunny hiccupped in surprise. It may be that I had never talked back to my grandmother before. Grandma gave me a hard look, then shrugged, as if to say, be that way.
          Thank you, I thought, I fully intend to.

          Virginia had arrived at my room the previous evening without warning. I humored her, dutifully sipping the gooey sweet chocolate liqueur she’d presented as a special treat.
          She asked, “So how are you doing, Linda?” adding, “Really doing,” as if I’d already fibbed.
          I flipped through the hotel’s promotional material. Revel in magnificence, one brochure instructed. “I’m okay. Job’s good, house is good, cat’s good.”
          She sighed theatrically. “How do you do it? I mean, how many school board meetings can a person sit through and not go mad with boredom?”
          “As opposed to the hair-raising thrills of selling SUVs?”
          “Exactly. That’s exactly why I had to do something to get out of there.”
          Was there a container large enough to hold all the things Virginia didn’t know about me, my life? How could she not know that there are enough arsonists, petty thieves, embezzlers, pedophiles, and meth labs in our area to keep any reporter from falling asleep at her monitor? How could she not know that the ordinariness of most days was a blessing?
          Another sigh. She kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the black velvet sofa. I kept my sigh to myself.
          “You don’t like the book, do you?”
          Note that she assumed I’d read it even though I had told her straight from the start that I didn’t think the book was a good idea and that if she went ahead and wrote it I didn’t want to read it. She knew that much, I guess, that I’d have to read it, want to or not. I read the whole thing the day it arrived. What I didn’t know was what to do with it next. I couldn’t get rid of it. I might need to refer to it, put my finger on a particularly offensive passage. The book ticked like a cheap clock. Every time I saw it, I heard Ginny’s voice in my head. Mine, mine, mine.
          “Go ahead, tell me.”
          “It’s very well-written.”
          “Well, it’s a great story,” she replied.
          “Great in what sense?”
          “It’s terrific material.”
          “Terrific material,” I repeated stupidly.
          Virginia shifted her attention. Beyond my room’s windows skyscrapers twinkled. I kept being surprised by how close they seemed.
          “What would it be like to have someone love you enough to want to kill you if they couldn’t have you?” I didn’t think she knew she’d said this aloud.
          “Ginny!”
          “What?” She looked away from the window, confused.
          “It doesn’t sound like love to me,” I said.
          “Really?” It was a sincere question.
          “Do you think that’s how Webb feels about you?”
          “No.” Her voice trembled.
          “Virginia, listen to me. That’s a good thing.” Where did she get off, being forlorn?

          Virginia wrote that I had been brooding secretly over my mother’s death for five years, attempting to overdose when the loss finally became too much. Typically, she got it half-right: the moment the last reporter hit city limits Grandma decreed our household a grief-free zone. We were putting this behind us. Any inconvenient emotions were to be kept to ourselves. Virginia’s mistake: the loss had always been unbearable.
          Bunny could slip away from the cutting board or from folding laundry without me noticing, but Grandma would be right there when she reappeared, inspecting Bunny’s face and eyes for tears. “Buck up,” she’d say and swat Bunny hard with a damp dish towel. She accepted Hank’s hangovers as long as he didn’t complain and he recovered by the dinner hour, at which time we were all expected to make lighthearted conversation, and anyone unable to participate would be dismissed from the table. I practiced my lines in our bedroom before heading downstairs. “Today we learned about feudalism and mitosis and meiosis and Andrew let Cedric the class mouse out of the cage right before lunchtime accidentally on purpose and Mrs. Fredericks tried not to act scared, but her face...” I practiced not crying: picture life without mom, imagine never seeing her again.
          Somehow I knew that even Grandma had to make an effort, at least initially. Only Ginny seemed genuinely free of grief. She was never asked to leave the table. She whistled while she peeled potatoes and took out the garbage. She taught herself to do cartwheels in anticipation of cheerleading tryouts. She made flash cards for studying her French verbs. Without being reminded, she polished her shoes and ironed her shirts and practiced her flute for precisely one half-hour every day as directed by her private instructor, Herr Schiller, though I suppose she can’t be blamed for the flute’s inherent perkiness. And I suppose she can’t be blamed for not feeling something unavailable to her, any more than a deaf person can be blamed for not being able to hear.
          For five years I was filled with dead leaves that scraped every time I moved.

          Over the course of a single glass of champagne, not quite sipped, a middle-aged man who never identified himself told me that his father had been a pimp. A gaunt woman in an emerald green, spaghetti-strapped dress confided that her brother had jumped off a bridge on his 20th birthday. I pictured my face as a dinner plate, tried to keep it that expressionless.
          Dessofy, Ginny’s agent, brought me a fresh glass. “I can’t tell you how much I admire you and Virginia.”
          “More than Derek Jeter?”
          He coughed out something like a laugh and excused himself.
          When Webb finally arrived he sought me out to ask how mad Virginia was. He smelled like sweat and cigar smoke and wintergreen breath mints. I turned my back on him. He wasn’t the public. He wasn’t a player in Virginia’s career. Being mean to him didn’t do any harm.
          “How are you doing now?” The woman had skin like raw bread dough and broad peasant features – a face made for a babushka. She was the first person I’d seen at the party who looked like she could have been from Walla Walla.
          “I’ve been suicide-attempt-free for fifteen years,” I said.
          The woman’s crimson-smeared lips puckered and unpuckered like a goldfish.
          Shit, I was having too much fun being rude. I grabbed her elbow. “Say, would you like to meet my sister?” I asked.
          Her mouth stopped puckering, but she kept a resisting tension against my grip.

          Abruptly orphaned, Ginny and I moved to Grandma’s and Bunny and Hank stayed at home, finishing degrees from Walla Walla Community College and Whitman College respectively. Bunny got a job at the local unemployment office and moved out, though her apartment was less than five miles away. Hank quit drinking and started going to church and adult Bible study. He worked at the local library. Nights he paged through graduate school catalogs while he watched baseball on TV. He seemed well on his way to being an old fuddy-duddy lives-with-his-mother bachelor. Ginny was trying to decide between Gonzaga and Seattle University. At least a couple of times a week everyone gathered for dinner, and our meals were much as they had always been, except that at the end of those first five years I didn’t have any fake cheer left in me.
          Only Hank ever asked why then? My doctors had apparently explained everything else to my family’s satisfaction.
          He held my hand, the right one with the hospital ID bracelet.
          “I was sick of it.”
          “Sick of what? Pretending?”
          I shrugged. Maybe, I thought. Kind of.
          “I thought that might be it,” he said, nodding. Hank would surprise everyone just a few months later, leaving for seminary in Berkeley, telling no one until the day before his departure. Later, I understood I shouldn’t have been surprised. He had given me his answer that day.
          Really, I had just been looking for some aspirin for a headache. It was a regular afternoon, midweek, mid-April. Maybe I was fighting something off. I remember feeling groggy. I stood for awhile in front of Grandma’s medicine chest. Apparently she’d never thrown out a pill bottle. There were Tylenol 3’s from some mouth surgery she’d had when I was in kindergarten. There were half a dozen vials of antibiotics that held just a capsule or two. The bottom shelf was full of newer stuff. I recognized her blood pressure medication and her antihistamine. Next to those were some other small bottles, at least three partially filled ones labeled “as needed for sleep.” That sounded so friendly, not bossy like “take three times a day until all tablets are gone” or “take with water on a full stomach.” At that moment, for sleep seemed like exactly what I was looking for and I started with those.
          I liked being in the hospital mostly. I felt the possibility for real friendship in a place where people raved and shouted and interrupted each other and laughed at the wrong moments.
          Is it ironic that my overdose actually helped? With the mandate of at least one MD and two PhDs, it became permissible to speak of Arlene and what had happened. I was allowed to ask questions and I received honest, hesitant answers. Negative feelings, in moderation, could be expressed without penalty. I could even cry.
          Bunny was promoted; I went back to the hospital for a refresher once, switched anti-depressants twice, and spent a part of two summers at a camp for troubled youth in Montana; Hank announced his plans to work in Central America after he was ordained. I finished high school, trying hard to tolerate the sympathy and attention Arlene’s murder continued to generate.
          Of course, our being able to speak of the murder created the opening for Ginny’s memoir. She was able to ask her own questions. Not that I didn’t do my best to stonewall her. During the period she was working on the book I rarely picked up when she called, though occasionally I’d relent, as I did one night when something in the message she was leaving struck me as odd, troubled maybe.
          “Linda, you’re there. Great.” Her slurred gaiety sounded steeped in Cabernet and I was immediately sorry I’d answered. “I was thinking about mom’s funeral,” she said. “I don’t remember much.”
          I wasn’t surprised. If I’ve got it right, the family doctor had given Ginny a mild sedative. She was groggy and her hair was dirty, hastily brushed out by Grandma. She must have touched the side of the car, waiting for all of us to get out of Grandma’s Cutlass at the church, because the fingertips of her white gloves were dark. She stared at them for most of the service, unmoving in her navy blue lap.
          “Why do we need to get into this now?” As if I didn’t know.
          She sighed. “Working on this book is weird. I mean it really stirs things up.”
          “I’m sure it does,” I said. I was wavering, though. The idea of Ginny being stirred up was a novelty. I could imagine how it might be. She was probably dragging up a lot of these memories for the first time. “Okay, you can ask me a couple of questions, but it’s late, so only a few.”
          “Oh Lindy! Thank you.” She paused, but I didn’t hear calculation. “What do you remember about being at the church? That’s the part that’s especially fuzzy.”
          “Just being at church was strange. I think we’d only been once or twice before, when we were really little.”
          “Yep. Easter. When Daddy and his mom were still talking. Grandma Parsons got us those Easter bonnets with the obnoxious elastic thing that pinched beneath our chins. And the church reeked of lilies.”
          “Well the funeral was three times as bad. No lilies, but carloads of carnations and roses and all sorts of other flowers and women’s perfume and hairspray and moth balls and that dry cleaning smell....I had to breathe through my mouth.”
          “Was it really sad?” Her voice was funny again and I felt sorry for her not remembering.
          “Sad and scary. People were so upset. I’d never seen Grandma in makeup before and she looked more dead than Arlene did. And I’d never seen so many men crying – boys she’d gone to school with, teachers from high school and even grade school, and all sorts of relatives I don’t think I’d ever met.”
          “I don’t like when men cry. They don’t know how. Their tears are messier and....”
          “What?” I asked. “What?”
          “You were saying how the crying scared you?”
          “It was just one more wrong thing.”
          Ginny mumbled something.
          “What?” I realized she had her hand over the receiver. I raised my voice. “Ginny! Is there someone there with you?”
          “Not exactly. I mean Roger, Roger Peters is here.”
          “Roger Peters your writing coach,” I said, furious with myself for being duped.
          The funeral got a full chapter in the book. I wasn’t surprised to read that Grandma’s pancake makeup was poorly applied and that she looked as lifeless as Arlene.

          At one end of the long room where Grandma and I stood, two waiters seemed to be vying for Bunny’s attention. She gave her hair a flirty flip and took a glass of champagne from each waiter’s tray. At the other end of the room, Webb was talking to Virginia, his hands clutching her shoulders. She swiveled her head toward me when he stopped speaking.
          She caught up to me before I could hide in a stall. Her mascara was smudged. She ran cold water over a handful of paper towels, folded them into a compress, and held it to one ear and then the other. Her reflection spoke to me. “You,” she said. She swayed, held onto the marble counter to steady herself.
          “What?”
          “C’mon, Lindy, I want you to answer the question.”
          “What question?”
          “About the book. What you think of the book?”
          “Do you really want to know?”
          She reapplied her burgundy lipstick, wiped at the mascara beneath her eyes. “You told me it was well written.”
          I looked up at the recessed halogen lights in the ceiling. “Well, the scene in which Uncle Hank and I talk about Arlene is very nicely drawn. You really captured the way – ”
          Virginia’s laugh was more like a bark.
          “What’s so funny?”
          “Oh, it’s not funny, really. It’s just that that was a conversation I had with Uncle Hank, but it worked better to have it take place between you two.”
          That couldn’t be right. When I fired up my inner film projector the scene played just as she’d described it. Hank and I were sitting at Grandma’s kitchen table. He was sobbing. “Arlene was the light of my life,” he said. “What am I supposed to do without her?” He was wearing a blue-checkered flannel shirt. His shoulders heaved. I was wearing lime green pajamas with feet in them.
          “You’re not going to be mad are you?” Virginia asked, still facing the mirror.
          My mind clicked, reorganizing itself. Of course she was right about the conversation. I had remembered it just as she’d described it because she’d described it.
          “You are mad, right?”
          When I closed my eyes I could still see the eight round circles of the lights, each one a planet with its own silver corona. I sensed her turning away from her reflection and giving me the once over. The circles behind my eyelids started to vibrate.
          “I didn’t think it was that big a deal. It’s not that big a deal.”
          My eyes burned. I blinked at her. Behind hot white stars she shimmered, arms slightly outstretched.
          “I’m tired, Ginny. Why don’t you get back to your guests?”
          I pressed my hot cheek against the grey-tiled wall. Now that was something. Ginny had altered my memory – actually inserted a whole new memory as easy as cut and paste. And my own brain, like a drowsy night watchman, hadn’t noticed the intrusion.

          It was after midnight. I’d done four hours of impersonating a sane and supportive memoirist’s sister. I was done.
          “I’m leaving,” I told Grandma, looking past her to the elevators. “I’m tired.”
          She turned my chin so she could see my face. “Yes, you are, aren’t you,” she said. “Enough’s enough, right?”
         
          I walked through Union Square Park, hobbling from the statue of Gandhi to the statue of George Washington before my feet said no more. I sat down on some steps. I might have even fallen asleep for a few minutes. I liked the idea that a barefoot thirty-year-old woman in a red cocktail dress resting her head on her knees, listening to the traffic and the leaves and the grunts and thwacks of a group of young hackey-sackers, was nothing special, not even worth noticing.
          I wasn’t surprised when she pounded on my room door a little after two a.m. I’d just been sitting on the couch looking at the building lights. She was carrying her shoes and her feet were dirty like mine. Her ankles were scratched up, as though she’d had a run-in with a mean-spirited shrub, and about three inches of her dress hem was undone.
          “Why won’t you leave me alone? Why won’t you...” I couldn’t figure out how to end the sentence.
          Ginny looked at me, hands at her sides, ready to take my judgment. I felt a space clear inside me, a lightness in my lungs.
          “Oh, shit.” How ridiculous, after all these years, to find my anger escaping like air from a punctured tire.
          “I’m sorry,” she said.
          “What for?” I demanded.
          “That I...” Perhaps she stopped because she knew there was no answer that would satisfy me. Perhaps I’d asked because I didn’t know anymore what I wanted her to be sorry for. Was an apology valid only if the person fully understood what she’d done?
          “Never mind. It’s okay.” What did it take to make the acceptance of an apology sincere? Maybe you just said the words – the apologies and acceptances – and hoped they came true.