By Kat Rosa
One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for girls
Four for boys
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret
Never to be told
“What does it mean?”
“What? The beginning? Oh, I don’t know. It’s prophecy, right?”
“What?”
“You know, like fortune telling. What we can expect from life. All these fucking crows are landing on a fence and how many there are means something significant about the future. Shit, I don’t know.”
“Seriously, Emily, you’re full of it. And don’t you think you’re a little too old to be talking like that?”
“It’s some folk belief, I think, from the south maybe,” Emily says, complacently sidestepping her older sister’s usual reprimand. “It’s the oldest story, man trying to read prophetic signs into the world around him. Trying to read meaning into the meaningless. They’re not just pulling it out of their ass, Jane. You’re only pretending to misunderstand.”
“Be serious, Emily.” She says this as if these three words completely refute her younger sister, and as Emily concedes her point, perhaps they do. The dominance of being born a full two years before, the wisdom one gains between twenty-nine and thirty-one, has been exerted, and the expected acceptance made, just as the sisters have been exerting and accepting for decades past. Jane, the older, sits down with a full cup of black coffee, picking up the white napkin and rolling it slowly between her finger and thumb – rolling, twisting, slowly destroying. “Anyway it’s a great song, a great band,” she says, shelving the subject.
The two sisters are talking over coffee, as grown sisters who have stayed close often do. The older is not so very old, not as old as she seems, just as the younger is not so very young. One has something to tell, the other does not want to listen.
As her sister joins her at the table, Emily bolts up, jolting the flimsy, collapsible card table; the coffee cups jitter and slosh threateningly. She grabs hers and adds more cream and more chocolate mix from the open jar on the counter until it is more chocolate than anything else. Emily drifts to the window farthest from her sister, stirs her cup idly, and stares out at the hillside of antique yellow, the trees and fence rails speckled with black. “They’re already landing.”
“What? The crows?”
“Yes, Jane, the crows.” Then, more quietly, “ten minutes, you’ll see. There’ll be masses of them out there.”
“Emily, your skirt!” Jane calls from the table with languid resignation and rebuke. “You’ve spilled coffee on it.” Wet black steeped in dark crimson. “Seriously, you’re so flighty. I don’t see how Joe can ever leave you alone; you’re like a child.” Both sisters laugh – one a bit hollowly, the other nervously. The younger sister looks around, taking in her house, the sink of last night’s dishes abandoned in haste, the dishrag on the floor, the books on the refrigerator, under the dishes, on the table in haphazard piles. Taking it all in as if for the first time, Emily winces.
“Well, he just better fucking get used to it. Two years into marriage, it’s too late to change anything.” Emily retrieves the dishrag from the cracking tile floor and moves to the opposite window, blotting her skirt. “But I wouldn’t think he’d have any complaints. And he’s so messy anyway, I bet he doesn’t even notice.” And to her sister’s raised eyebrow, “we’re doing just fine. We’re still going… you know, we’re good. Without the help of Lady Jane.” She turns to look out the window over the kitchen sink, the one facing east where the sun has already died.
“And don’t think I’ve forgotten,” Emily continues in a strained singsong voice, still not facing her sister. “November fifteenth, 1997. Isn’t Tuesday the fifteenth?”
“Wednesday. Today’s the thirteenth. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.”
“That makes… what? Five… six years?” She saunters to her seat, sits, and instantly bounces up, retrieving her coffee cup. She upsets the cup slightly, leaving a dark brown semicircle on the watermelon pink of the counter. “I’m so bad at math. Is it five or six?”
Crepuscular rays – gold, pink, purple – glance off the yellow walls, the yellow linoleum, dancing, lingering, as everything begins to darken outside and the kitchen is caught in that transitional moment, an ephemeral glow, haunted and ethereal. The glow, she said. Emily had said she had the glow; “a glow to match that golden dress, Jane.” It was this same time of year eight years ago when the dwindling light of early evenings somehow makes the brief afternoons golden. “‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet, and the river jumps over the mountain,’” he said, “‘and the salmon sing in the street.’” At the time Jane smiled, bemused at what she thought was a children’s nursery rhyme. It was a poem, Emily had told her later. A great poem. As proposals go, Jane thought hers was especially romantic. But that’s how it is with unromantic people; theirs is the first love of the world.
Emily, having forgotten the dishrag, the skirt, and the stain, counts on her fingers.
“Seven.” Jane says, rising, crossing to the sink. “It would be seven.” Wrist-deep in dirty dishwater, she’s grateful that she can’t tuck her hair behind her ears, grateful that amber locks tumble down, across her cheeks; she stares in the sink. “It would be seven. Seven on November fifteenth. But… instead I’ve… I’m moving out, Emily.” A minute passes; sixty seconds; Emily watches the black needle tick them off, one by one, on that traitorous kitchen clock. Emily–”
“Emily, Adam has been unfaithful – has committed an infidelity.”
“No, he hasn’t.” Out the window, night is falling fast; and all her silent screaming can’t hold that last bit of friscillating dusk light. “He’s had sex, is what, Jane. He’s fooled around. Screwed around. Fucked.” One by one, last night’s dishes, abandoned in haste, go into the sink and come out clean and new. Stray and silent tears swirl in coffee and hot chocolate mix. “Jane. Are you sure, Jane? I mean, are you sure you have to?”
Jane is silent at the kitchen sink, washing her sister’s dirty dishes.
“It’s just that… that these things can sometimes be gotten over, you know, Jane. It’s hard, but people forgive; or…” Or people live, with irreconcilable differences, tensions, conflicts everyday; they make the choice and go with it. Even if they can’t forgive. Even if they think they can’t go on, Emily thinks but doesn’t say; she has to remember whose side she’s on, what she’s supposed to feel. Indignant, outraged; the sister of a cuckolded wife. The Sister. Sisters, who rode along winding, narrow ruts through long yellow grass. Two bikes, bubble gum pink and banana yellow, on a bumping stretch reaching down to the sand, down to the ocean. Brisk ocean wind blew hair and grass alike, and bikes bucked forward simultaneously; there were grass roots, greener than the rest of the stalk, the soft dirt mixed with sand, and then, the pure blue sky above, embracing yellow and pink. Passersby see two upside down bicycles and hear laughter tears erupt from a sea of grass. There was a time, maybe only that one moment, of simplicity, synchronicity, unity.
The smash and clatter surprise both sisters, and Emily, her back to Jane, is scalded and the broken coffee cup lies at her feet. Jane, still with the napkin in hand, rises.
“Fuck! Oh, shit. Shit, shit.” Emily looks back out the window, but the hill, the long yellow grass, is yellow sullen smoke in the dying sunlight. And then, not even that. “Shit, sorry. The crows. I was startled by the crows. They’re thick as night out there.”
“Emily, come here. Don’t cut yourself; let me get this.” Jane moves fluidly around the kitchen. “Why isn’t your broom in the cupboard?”
“It’s really quite simple,” Jane continues, as she cleans. “He had adulterous relations; OK – he cheated. So I’m out of the house, out of the marriage. I’ve been to the lawyer; the papers are being drawn up; I’m going to move to San Francisco. Seriously, it’s over and done with.”
“Jane, stop it. What happened?” Emily consciously slows her quickening breath until it stops full stop.
“It was just a one time deal, Em. He swore…” Jane breathes deeply, once, twice, and continues. “He swore it was just the once. Just the one time mistake.”
“Well, then…” The thought meanders, neglected and lost; silence can’t say what Emily won’t. “Do you have to? Do you have to leave him? I mean, seven years… it’s a long time.” She winces with each word; breath and words rasp painfully, and she hopes Jane doesn’t notice.
“Seriously, Em, how can I? How could I?” What of self-respect and self-worth and self-esteem? She loved him, she did; but how could she live with him, with it? Every day, in and out, it would be there, unforgiven, in the air. There are rules for this sort of thing because the shades of gray slope downwards to black.
“And don’t give me that slope-to-black bullshit. You live with what you can live with and get on with it. We all have to; it’s really the only thing we can do,” Emily says. Jane sits down wearily, at the table, staring into her empty cup, twisting, twining shreds of napkin. Emily stands, moves to the cupboard, and returns with a bottle and one glass, shrugging apologetically.
Jane takes the bottle from Emily, uncorks it, pours some into the glass and passes the bottle back. “That’s not how things really work,” she says. Emily takes a long drag straight from the bottle and leans against the counter. Knowing that the strength of her grief might seem unnatural even to Jane, she looks out the window.
“The crows keep coming in earlier and earlier. Look, there’s frickin’ hundreds.” Thousands. Huge ones, like the ravens at the Tower. The ones that will one day make it fall, should they ever leave. But the London boy she was with, the one she met there and fucked there, said that the beefeaters clip their wings; the Tower won’t fall. It was a short trip but long enough to get lonely. It was that day, the day Emily returned, Jane was working late so she sent Adam to pick Emily up at the airport. That was the day, Emily thought, the day that was to change everything only to find that everything had already changed.
“So,” he said, as if he wasn’t beginning a sentence. “Emily, Jane will kill me if she knew I mentioned anything, but … we’ve got big news. The news.” With his characteristic exuberance and the natural youthfulness of a bridegroom, the axe fell. Adam was ecstatic, Jane glowing, and everything had changed while Emily was away.
The wine warms her as coffee never could, and looking at Emily, Jane suddenly sees not the grown and married woman but the lustful eighteen-year-old, gleefully gushing to Jane of trysts and sex and secrets. Happy even in their unhappiness, tumultuous teen years had been easy when hard and golden when easy because there was always the other, always a sister, through lives so closely intertwined.
Outside, the kitchen glow is weak against a thick, feathery blackness. The crow-filled trees stretch out black against the dark blue black sky. Jane tips the nearly empty wine bottle into her glass and sees for the first time that Emily, now sitting at the table, is crying. The kitchen chair scrapes the floor, a red skirt mingles with black slacks. Stained crimson with expensive black. In their old way, as if she fell and scrapped her knee, Jane comforts Emily, sister arms intertwined in sister arms. It’s only a moment, but perhaps it’s timeless. Both sisters think of nothing in that fleeting moment except other tears their eyes have cried, and where, and why. A June day; while she read on the porch, he walked up, leaned on the railing, and began talking like it was the most natural thing in the world for two strangers to do, and for seven and a half minutes or so there was no one else. He was smart; she liked that. They had read many of the same books. They both thought that Jackie Brown was the best Tarantino. For seven and a half minutes or so there was no one else. Until the inevitable, “So, Emily, is Jane ready or what?” But Jane was farther back, years away, dwelling on tall and awkward, gentlemanly boys; the rich one with the prim mother; another who saved for months to give her the bracelet that she gave to Emily. Other men she could have married, other lives she could have lead. Not a moment is wasted on seven years.
“I know. I know.” Jane murmurs, knowing nothing, and Emily can’t help but think of Michael and Freddo that New Year’s Eve in Cuba, of that scene on the lake, of fishing and hail marys. Jane pulls back into her own private grief. “I know. It’s horrible. Seriously, this isn’t how my life is supposed to be.”
“Nothing’s supposed to be anything. These are the things we’re given, Jane,” Emily says, also stepping away, towards the window, “the things we have to live with.” The things we have to deny with every breath of every day. She turns to look out at the western horizon and wipes away the last of her tears. Darkness has completely settled; crows are indistinguishable from a rustling night. Jane, at the window facing east, sees two headlights blurry in her tears sweep through the night and slow to a stop. She throws the napkins in the trash and takes the glass and mug to the sink. She runs the water, squirts the soap, grateful that she can’t tuck her hair behind her ears, grateful that amber locks tumble down, across her cheeks; she stares in the sink.
Jane assumes it’s Emily’s husband, Emily assumes it’s not. Facing the window farthest from her sister, Emily has remained uncharacteristically still, but both sisters hear the brakes, the door, the key in the lock.
Vertigo begins to grip Emily; the kitchen seems to be full of yellow sullen smoke, like the sun obscured by haze and pollution, like old whore petticoats dissolving to a paradise. Not you, she thinks. Nor him. Oppressive silence, like prison walls, comforts those who find little comfort elsewhere. The front door opens and he calls through the silent house.
The moment was transitory, the remembrances fleeting, and understanding illusory.
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