August 15, 2019

Sisters

By Aaron Zevy

One hundred and seventeen people died in a monsoon on a small island in Indonesia the day I was born. I know this because every year on my birthday my sister Karen said a silent prayer over the extra candle on my birthday cake, the one that was supposed to be for good luck. For years as I unwrapped presents and played party games with friends she looked at me with puppy dog eyes to remind me of a dead Indonesian babies swept away in the flood waters.

I don’t know how she knew about the monsoon; she was only three on the day my parents brought me back from the hospital, but she was right. Years later, I took the subway down to the Toronto Reference Library and looked it up on the microfiche. April 7, 1965. It was on page three of the Globe and Mail.

I think of this as I sign autographs on the plane to Los Angeles. The kids in the row behind me are sure they recognize the star of one of this season’s top rated sitcoms. “Oh please Karen, can I have your autograph?” The parents are no better. “It’s for the wife,” says a balding man offering me his pen. “I don't watch the show myself.” The stewardess tries to maintain an orderly flow of fans streaming to my seat in the economy section. After the third autograph seeker I stop trying to explain that I am not Karen Harwood, nee Halper, famous actress. I am, in fact, her younger sister Dana, a copywriter at an advertising agency in Toronto. I hate to think how they will go back to their friends and families and say Karen Harwood looks a lot heavier in real life than on television. I motion the stewardess for a drink. I hate to fly.

Karen is six and I am three. It is my first time on an airplane. We are flying to Miami to visit our Bubbie and Zaide over the Christmas holiday, mom tells Karen to take me to the bathroom. Karen is not thrilled about her assignment. She is nestled in the window seat she managed to win after an extended temper tantrum and is colouring in her Alice in Wonderland colouring book. She glares at me, and returns her attention to her crayons. Bribes are made. Karen at six displays some of the negotiation skills she will later use with the television networks. After a promise of a chocolate bar she slowly gets out of her seat and leads me down the aisle to the bathroom. She does not take my hand. I refuse to go in by myself. She pushes me towards the door but I stand my ground. Neither of us move for a full minute until she finally relents and we both squeeze in. She doesn't pull the lever that locks the door and turns on the light. She makes me pee in the dark. She pulls the same stunt on the return trip. Mom is proud of her firstborn wunderkind. It is ten years before I learn that there are actually lights in a plane’s washroom.

It is a non-smoking flight. I try to sneak a cigarette in the washroom. An alarm goes off after my first drag. I smile sheepishly at the stewardess when I finally work up the courage to step out. I should be severely reprimanded but they think I am a famous actress.

I paid $1200 for the return flight to L.A. from Toronto. That’s what you get for booking it at the last minute. I called a travel agent I used to go out with to back date the ticket so I could get the excursion rate. He said it wouldn’t be ethical. I told him it wasn't ethical to have put his penis in my mouth. Then I hung up.

For my 1200 bucks I get an inedible Beef Stroganoff over noodles and a movie that played for three days in the theatres. I can't decide which is worse. Neither can the airline: the pouch in front of me contains two air sickness bags.

I’m dying for a smoke. I wander up the aisle and try to pick out fellow sufferers. We all have the look; checking our watches every five minutes. I finally make my way to the cockpit where I share a smoke with the co-pilot. We stand directly below the ‘It is absolutely forbidden to smoke in the cockpit’ sign. It’s great to be a famous actress.

Karen is fourteen and I am eleven. She gives me a quarter to steal a pack of cigarettes from Mom’s purse. We ride our bikes to the fields behind the new housing development and puff away like fiends. Du Mauriers. I remember the red box. We are joined by two of her friends. Sarah Cohen and Melissa Green. Together, they form the coolest triumvirate in school. My claim to fame is that I am Karen’ little sister.

“Thanks for the smokes you little geek,” says Sarah, “now run along home.”

“Yeah,” says Melissa, “go home and bake some cookies with your mommy.”

I’m about to cry when Karen takes a long drag and says, “She stays.”

“But Kar,” they whine together.

“She got the smokes so she stays.”

The co-pilot offers me some wine. He is drinking coke. At least I hope it’s coke. He catches me staring at the gold lettered name tag above the insignia on his jacket. His name is Tom Wolfe.

“We really should be drinking kool aid,” I joke hoisting my cup in a mock toast. He stares at me blankly.

“You see...” I begin explaining The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test but this Tom Wolfe has already begun his spiel for the obligatory tour of the cockpit. He points out the levers and instrumentation in a nasal monotone. I nod politely.

The plane is not the only thing on auto-pilot.

I pour myself another glass of wine.

I am drinking too much and I know it. He kisses me as we fly over Nebraska. His mouth tastes like jet fuel. Or maybe I only imagine it. I don’t like kissing him. I smile at the pilot who has placidly taken this all in and return to my seat.

Karen is sixteen and I am thirteen. The basement is decorated in late 70’s disco regalia. Forty of her closest friends assemble for her Sweet Sixteen. Gloria Gaynor pronounces she will survive as a strobe light rhythmically pulsates through the room. I am not invited even though I spent the afternoon blowing up silver balloons. Karen wears pink silk harem pants with a matching camisole. Her date is David Landau. Everyone at school has a crush on David. Karen doesn’t really like him all that much. She only asked him because it was expected. They have the leads in the school play. Bye Bye Birdie. I'm upstairs with the grownups. At midnight I sneak downstairs to see what is going on. They are playing Truth or Dare. It’s Spin the Bottle with a twist. They use an empty bottle of Dad’s Johnny Walker Red. Karen is thinking of a dare for Seymour Lipsky when she spots me hiding on the spiral staircase. Seymour Lipsky. He wouldn't ordinarily be invited to this type of party but he’s the stage manager. Karen dares him to kiss me. On the lips. He takes the glasses off.

He is a good kisser.

I never tell Karen.

I get the phone call at three in the morning. I’m awake. The marvels of insomnia. It gives me the chance to do some of my best writing.

“The bastard left me,” my sister says. We haven't spoken in three years. She sounds stressed. “I need you here tomorrow.”

I glance over at the calendar on my night table. The calendar has reproductions of famous impressionist paintings. I bought it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York a few months ago. This month is a Seurat.

Tomorrow is Thursday. I have drawn a happy face in the box for Thursday. To remind me of a dinner date. I didn’t need reminding.

“Call me Ishmael,” he had said last week at Tom’s party reaching over two people to shake my hand.

“Are you a Jordanian sheep herder or just a fan of Moby Dick?” I had replied.

“My favourite opening line. I figured it worked for Melville... ”

We talked for two hours and made dinner plans for Thursday.

Only now I was going to be in Los Angeles.

Karen is eighteen and I’m fifteen. Grad Ball. It takes David Landau two years to figure out the quickest way to my sister’ heart. Ignore her. For two years he dates almost every other girl in school. Karen is relegated to polite nods and hellos in drama class. The tactic works. By the end of senior year she is madly in love. In the weeks leading up to the Ball she uses every trick in the book before he finally asks her. It was going to be, according to her, “unfuckingbelievable”. Karen spends most of the afternoon before the Ball in our only bathroom doing and redoing her hair. Dad jokes about having to relieve himself at the gas station. I have to admit that she looks pretty good. Beautiful actually. I want to wait around to see how David looks but my friends and I are catching a movie at the mall.

Six of us pile into a station wagon. Nicole, one of my best friends, has just gotten her permit. This is her third time driving her parents’ eight-year-old rust brown Chevy station- wagon that we have already named Motel Nic. We turn the radio up loud. Six of us bopping to My Sharona on CHUM. Nobody notices the truck go through the red light. Nicole swerves into a ditch at the last second. Not a single seatbelt between us and I am the only one seriously hurt. Go figure.

I go through the windshield.

I always have to sit in the front seat. They pull Karen out of the dance to donate blood.

David Landau drives Melissa Green home that night. Though not straight home. That’s what we heard. People talk.

They live in this huge neo-colonial house north of the city now. He’s a big shot periodontist. A few years ago I went to him for a root canal. Didn’t feel a thing.

Los Angeles. The City of Angels is a sweatbox. Last night, awake again, I stayed up for three hours watching the weather channel. Unseasonably cold weather for southern California they said. But here it’s not yet noon and the radio is trumpeting a high of 80. I have carefully packed my suitcase with what I think will be sensible attire, but now, think of throwing it all in the garbage.

A television station devoted only to the weather; with every sophisticated satellite technology available to them, and they screw up.

The air-conditioning at LAX was either turned off or not working. Were they, too, anticipating a cold front that never materialized? Did they realize that I was sweating to death in my wool suit?

I ask the woman in front of me at the Dollar Rent-a-Car counter to keep my place in line while I go to the bathroom and find something suitable to change into. She was on my plane and we immediately have an unspoken bond. She is dressed in a short skirt and a white cotton blouse.

She looks very cool. Clearly she hadn't fettered those handful of nocturnal hours generally prescribed for sleep on the weather channel. No, she had figured: California, sure to be hot.

Our bond is short-lived.

I return in my workout clothes only to discover they have run out of cars. I look ridiculous but am prepared if the Dollar employees decide to break out into calisthenics. Besides, I don’t know anyone in the city other than my sister.

Well, almost no one.

I recognize the taxi driver. Well, not exactly, but I remember his name. Katchakarokian. I tell him where I want to go and then ask if he has lived in New York.

“You got a good ear for accents Miss,” he says, looking at me through the rearview mirror, “drove a cab there for fifteen years. Finally got out of that hellhole.”

Karen is twenty-two and I am nineteen. We share an apartment in the East Village. The place has no heat in the winter and is suffocating in the summer. We soon discover there isn’t enough hot water for both of us to take a shower in the morning unless it is limited to five minutes each; so we buy an alarm clock for the bathroom.

Did I mention that it’s a loft? An attic really. Though it does have hardwood floors and a working fireplace. Karen insisted on a place with charm. We have tons of charm but no kitchen. Still, the place is cheap and, more importantly, it is ours.

I’m a freshman at NYU film school. I tell my parents I walk through a park every day to get to classes. Washington Square Park. I don’t mention the drug pushers and prostitutes. I am sure I’m getting precious ‘life experience’ that will help me write the great American screenplay. Karen thinks I’m crazy.

She drops out of Juliard, full of ‘method acting ass kissers’ she says, and works as a waitress while auditioning for parts. Mom and Dad think she’s still in school. I don’t even begin to wonder what became of the tuition money they sent at the beginning of the term.

Karen brings home a steady succession of artsy types who think they’ve seduced her by quoting poetry as she served them cappuccino at the café. The walls are paper thin and I am kept up by the nightly acrobatics. It is here that Karen's acting skills are at their best. I wait for her to sneak into my room to borrow a smoke and give me her rating.

“I’ll marry the first guy who’s higher than five,” she says, rolling her eyes. Instead she settles for Steven. He is a tall, painfully serious man from ‘the biggest cheese county’ in Wisconsin. She met him at an audition. She tells me she is attracted to his sensitivity and ‘tremendous depth’. Steven ‘don't call me Steve’ becomes a regular fixture at the loft. He spends one afternoon alphabetizing our books and record albums. He talks about himself all the time. Always in the third person. ‘Steven is going to bed now.’ That sort of thing. I try to like him but can’t.

I sleep with him one evening while Karen is working a double shift.

I move to a new apartment on Bleeker street two days later when Karen finds out. The taxi driver helps me load all my belongings in his cab. We have to make three trips to fit everything in and while he drives he tells me all about growing up in a small Armenian town in Turkey. Listening to his stories keeps me from crying.

The hospital is in Westwood. It’s the medical centre at the University of California, Los Angeles. We circle around the campus a few times before we find the proper entrance. The fare is forty dollars and I give him a hundred dollar bill, tell him to keep the change.

He doesn’t remember me. I don’t expect him to.

In the hospital I feel ridiculous in my shorts and t-shirt. I slip into the bathroom and change back into my wool suit. At least the air-conditioning works.

The nurse behind the plexi glass window (I wonder if it’s bullet-proof) informs me that Karen's room is on the third floor.

“You are...?”

“Her sister.”

“I love the show,” she states.

“We're very proud of her.”

Leaning on a pair of crutches next to me as I wait for the elevator is a tall, lanky man with the longest beard I have ever seen. He reminds me of the Amish in horse-drawn buggies on the road to Elora, except he is dressed in a hospital gown, cowboy hat and dark sunglasses. On his cast someone has written ‘Death to the Pigs’. I look for another way up.

The stairs are at the end of the hall through the door marked emergency exit. By the time I climb to the third floor I’ve forgotten the room number. I walk down the hall slowly, peering into every room. In the waiting room I find a large family who look up at me with a mix of expectation and trepidation when I gently open the door. The men are dressed in baby blue tuxedos with white boutaneers while the women are in long yellow flowery dresses. Two little girls, five-year-olds maybe, are still holding their bouquets.

Flower girls.

“Her water broke at the ceremony,” explains a man who I assume is the groom. I smile and nod my head as if I understand. My Bubbie would call it a double mazel. I wish I had my camera.

I love wedding shots.

Karen is twenty-five and I am twenty-two. It is, on the surface, a beautiful day for a wedding. Karen springs this on us in characteristic fashion. His name is Evan and he is forty and not Jewish. It is not, all things considered, a winning combination for our family.

Evan runs an experimental theatre in Chicago. They got engaged two weeks after meeting, which was three months ago. Karen says he has this ethereal quality about him. My Dad says he has this ethereal goyish quality about him.

He pays for the wedding but refuses to attend. Dad always had a good sense of humour.

The wedding is on the stage at the theatre in Chicago. Some sort of quasi-minister quasi-rabbi is performing the ceremony. The bride and groom read their own vows. Evan lifts most of his directly from a Bob Dylan song. “You know something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”

I’m the maid of honour but am thankfully exempted from the traditional duties because I’m also the designated photographer. I scurry around the theatre and take black and white shots of the wedding party and guests. Evan asks me to dance at the reception and whispers in my ear that he would like to ravage me, (his words not mine) in the men’s bathroom. I decline politely and realize that dad probably had the right idea.

Later, while setting up the cake cutting scene I ask Karen to tell her asshole husband to move over to the left just a bit.

Karen calls me a jealous bitch.

“Jealous? Jealous?! If anything, I feel sorry for you. We all do.”

“Sorry for me? Who’s the one standing, once again, alone?”

“At least I don‘t have to get married because I’m so pathetically insecure.”

A piece of wedding cake flies through the air and lands on my shoulder. Karen has a pretty good arm for someone who’s never been interested in sports.

Evan's friends from the theatre group think we have staged this scene as part of the reception and give us a rousing ovation. I smile and raise my hand to call for a truce but Karen, oblivious, is on a roll.

“You’re just pissed off because your boyfriend dumped you for another man.”

I throw down the camera and storm out.

We haven't spoken since.

Karen is twenty-eight and I am twenty-five. I wear a hospital gown and surgical mask. The nurse tells Karen to push. I hold her hand. Everything is going in slow motion.

“Decides he doesn’t want to be a father,” she gasps between rapid breathing as she tightly clenches my hand. “Doesn't want the responsibility.”

“Great timing,” I say. “What a bastard.”

“Yeah, well, you know me with men.”

“He did have good hair,” I smile through the mask.

“Where the fuck is the doctor?” She screams. “Nurse, I'll give you a thousand dollars for an epidural.” It sounds like a bad line from her television show but the look on her face tells me she’s not joking.

A few hours later I’m holding the newborn girl in my arms. Karen is on the phone with her agent arguing about when she will be ready to resume shooting. She promises she can lose twenty-five pounds in six weeks. I don’t doubt it; Karen can lose weight on an ice cream diet.

A nurse walks in to check on the baby. Karen has decided, in a moment of weakness she is sure to regret, to call her daughter Eva, after the baby’s father.

“Will you be breastfeeding?” inquires the nurse after shyly requesting an autograph.

“I don't think so.” Karen sounds as if she had been asked if she would like to spend the summer picking lettuce with migrant workers.

I laugh so hard the baby begins to cry.

Karen looks like she’s about to cry too but quickly recovers and is back on the phone; this time to Evan's parents. I rock Eva back to sleep and examine her tiny features more closely.

She has my nose.

Karen will have to start saving for the operation.

The taxi driver says no one has ever asked him to take them to the Los Angeles Public Library before.

He looks at me like I’m a little crazy. Maybe I am. He calls his fellow cabbies and jabbers away in Hebrew. They don’t know where the library is either. In the end we pull over at a phone booth and I look it up. There’s a branch right off Melrose.

“I’m looking for old copies of newspapers,” I ask the young woman at the information booth. She is reading a tattered copy of Variety, circling want ads in the back with a yellow highlighter. In L.A. the actresses are sometimes disguised as librarians.

“How old?” She asks without looking up.

“From 1962,” I reply.

“That’s old.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Check in our computer room. Second floor.”

1962 isn’t in chronological order. I strain my eyes for two hours before I find the right date. I smile. A train derailment in Santiago, Chile. 184 dead.