TWO SISTERS
M.E. Daley
I was crouched on my unmade bed doing my toenails when I had to have a drag from my ciggie like I always do when I am in the middle of something half way difficult or merely ticklish. A sliver of light shone through a broken louver, and struck me between the eyes like a knife. It occurred to me that I was wasting my allotted time on the planet smoking.
I took one last puff and another puff and carefully tapped it out before I headed down stairs still in my nightgown. Today, I would not be held captive by my obsessive introspection. Not one more time. Today, I would act out. Be the person I was meant to be. I would have self- control. Stop smoking first. I would quit the meat rack where management treats its minions like nuts in a can of cocktail cashews, coming around every five minutes to fray our nerves by barging into our cubicles unannounced and braying orders. I would take only two mgs of Valium to sleep, and stop keeping it in my desk during the day. I would show them I was a woman to be dealt with. I was a person of parts. I would use my clichés sparingly and wisely in my ad copy. I lit a cigarette, now number two and a half for the morning, and started to put the coffee on when I saw it was already made. God, now I had lost my sense of smell, being so far gone with my childish self-absorption
“I put the coffee on,” my sister screamed from upstairs. “Can’t you smell
it? Keep smoking. You are losing your short-term.memory.”
I yelled back, “Stop monitoring me, you purist asshole. Try living without your daily
six-pack of Coke.”
***
My beautiful sister was tall, rangy, blue-eyed, smart and dumped by her fiancé of five years. As for me, I was short and wiry as a distance runner, had springy black hair, and a poor attitude. The truth is I was happy to see her brought up short when her guy took a walk.
My sister’s beauty flattened me, and made me acerbic and ready to pick a fight with her or almost anyone who said, “Hello,” and gave me one of those fake smiles affected by people with two personas.
After years of loitering on the fringes of my sister’s limelight, I felt twinges of schadenfreude when she told me, “He never came back when I sent him to the corner for Tampax.” With that, she took to her bed like some heroine in a clammy romance novel. I knew that if she closeted herself in her room and read her books and stuffed her face for any length of time, she would get fat. I was glad. Yes, glad, glad, glad, I tell you. I fulfilled all her wishes, picked up the greasy burgers, shagged all over town for her kook books, went to our moldy library, craned my neck to look at the topmost shelf, got down on my knees to wrestle with the lower shelves, all so she could read her garbage. Now she could fulfill just one of my wishes.. She could get fat..
My mind, weary of my broken promises to reform, dropped me into a cartoon strip my father used to turn to before the morning headlines. His favorite character was “Lonesome Jones,” a citizen of a town called Dogpatch. The poor guy went around, day and night, with a cloud hovering over his head, not unlike the larger cloud that floated above me and my band of hopeless illiterates as we cruised Second Avenue on our lunch break, smoking and looking in shop windows at vintage clothing, and checking the faded paperbacks in front of a used bookstore. As we furiously lit one cigarette from another in the free hour we had, the smoke drifted above our heads and formed one enormous cloud. Nobody stared. Even the out-of-towners were used to seeing smart ass New York locals acting like they owned the sidewalk.
Weeks went by like calendar pages flipped in a movie, before she loomed in the doorway of the kitchen. I had failed to hear her dainty steps coming down the stairs. Strange the way fat people seem to waft about an inch above where they plant their feet, seeming almost to float. Perhaps their fat buoys them up.
“Good to see you out of your lair, starch tank,” I said.
“The diet starts soon, so stop feeding me so many carbos. Just leave what I ask for at my bedroom door.” “I will need exercise as well,” she added.
“Picking up a fork doesn’t count,” I said.
“I think I’ll use the stairs. Go up and down them twenty times a day. “
“ If you fall, it’s the end of our house.,” I said.
She ignored me. “I can hold onto the bed and do squats, too. And try to remember, the house was left to me. I can level it if I want. “
I was sure that sooner or later she would re-appear, having squeezed into one of her pricey outfits. No dice. She stayed in her room and told me to leave food, magazines, and the crazy books she read when I could find them.
Her fare was simple enough, and I had no trouble supplying the three huge greasy hamburgers with two slabs of half done beef patties, super extra thick, chocolate malts and lattes with more whipped cream than coffee and, much later, pizza from the all night place, delivered by a smirking boy, who kept staring at my chest looking for my non-existent breasts, while I dug in my purse for money.
I’ll say this for my sister, she never slacked off on her reading. Besides newspapers and magazines she read her usual tomes, and over-sized paperbacks. She read “I & Thou” by Buber, Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Ralph Ingersol, Allen Watt’s “The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Sex,” Arthur Koestler’s “Synchronicity,” Jung, Woody Allen, David Sedaris, Kubler Ross on “Death & Dying,” Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, (one of her dead favorites), Perlman, Thurber, Steve Martin, Didion’s “Play It as it Lays”, (and especially “The Year of Magical Thinking” (because she was a death freak), Michael Chabon, Brett Easton Ellis, John Updike, Alice Munro, and, Fran Leibowoitz, . After a lacerating day at the agency, trying to improve on “:New and Improved!” I would gather up some of the books she wanted at the library and thrift stores, When the books were again stacked outside her door I could tell if she had read them, or at least leafed through them, for they were smeared with grease. She kept the last Didion book and paid the library dearly for it. I never saw it again. I told you she was riveted by the idea of death.
My sister had one close friend, a Marcie Bloom, who was allowed in her grease pit at any time. Weeks went by while we lived our separate lives. I worked and ran the streets for her books and food and left it all outside her door.
Her transformation began when she asked me to shit can the burgers, and malts, and pizzas, and, in their stead, we were awash in the food brought by this Marcie Bloom person, who never acknowledged my presence, as she staggered upstairs with grocery bags bulging with cartons of cottage cheese, yogurt, (no sugary fruit at the bottom) oranges, hard-boiled eggs, and greens, and pre-cooked chicken strips.
***
“Dearest One,” my sister said gently, for her precious Marcie’s sake. "Don’t wake up Marcie. She spent the night, and needs her rest after another round with that rancid man.” My sister’s ex had changed his mind and if I would let him in the house, he would tear upstairs and scratch at her door. Sometimes in the middle of the night. She always opened it wide so he could see that she was as fat as ever, and maybe more so, and now her newly plump breasts, he had always coveted like a hungry newborn, were straining at her pajama top. I heard every word she yelled at the poor fool, “Get out of here,” she bellowed, “You craven, duplicitous, twit.” I guess the ruined man didn’t leave as requested, and spent yet another night curled up on the cold hardwood floor in front of my sister’s door.
. ***
Every morning Marcie locked arms with my sister for their morning walk, increasing it to four or five blocks before I lost sight of them.
The two were conjoined. My sister would put her arm around Marcie’s waist. She was still somewhat pale and tottering, caused, no doubt, by withdrawing from all the Whoppers. And long weeks, spent lying on her bed, her head propped up reading and laying waste to a box of Mr.Goodbars.
Eons later, when she finally came downstairs again,, my sister was dressed for tennis. Tennis? Who was she kidding? But she wore her treasured diamond tennis bracelet, her hair was clean and shiny, and pulled back with a barrette, and she was almost as slim as before. As she skipped down the stairs, she swung a tennis racket, back and forth in a showy arc while I hunched like a cement garden gnome on the lowest stair step. My god, would she never fall apart?
“Beat it, lamphrey,”I called to my sister’s ex as he banged on the front door.
***
It took me all of five seconds to figure it out: My sister had staged the whole fucking mess from the beginning. She was the dumper and His Thinness was the dumpee. The thing was the ex had a coterie of friends who were doing the twenties. The bony women wore Louise Brooks hair-dos, gowns cut on the bias, made with low-cut backs. And navel length ropes of pearls. The women twirled a lot to show off their clever haircuts, my sister told me, clutching her sides with laughter, causing those nearby to take cover as airborne necklaces flew about the room. The men were sticks, including the ex, in the Brit clothes of the day. Short suit coats nipped in at the waist. Shellacked hair. Diamond pinky rings. They looked like gangsters, and perhaps they were. The ex wanted my sister to be as thin as the women in his crowd, but she was far too wholesome looking to fit in.
If my sister gained a pound, her fiancé railed at her. The man was obsessed with weight. He would check her dresser drawers to see it she had moved her belts to the next buttonhole. Once, when she was cooking up a burger for herself, he came roaring in our front door, yelling that he could smell it outside. My sister put the patty on a spatula and held it out to him. She told him, in a small voice, that it was a veggie burger. He threw it in the garbage anyway, spatula and all.
Once we were quasi-friends again I got up the courage to ask her about sex with the dofus. “Sex?” She hooted. “I felt like a precocious teenager had splayed his body on top of me. He was one of those “Dare I eat a peach” people. He had dieted and exercised himself down to one twenty five and was proud of it. He was all sharp elbows and kneecaps. There was no heft to the man. I fought the urge to swat him off me and onto the floor. Why did I agree to the betrothal? Money, what else? He has enough to keep us high kicking into our eighties.”
If you want to know what I think, I think she locked herself in her bedroom so she could eat her head off, get fat, and be free of him for good.
6:57:21 AM 
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