Once We Were Sisters by Sheila Kohler

Author:Sheila Kohler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-07T16:38:10+00:00

XXIV

BLOODSUCKERS

Mother says my sister and I have both married vultures, bloodsuckers. Mother does not mince her words.

When the headwaiter bends forward politely in a restaurant and asks if all is well, she will reply, “No, it is not! Service is terrible here!”

I have not initially told my own mother or even my sister what has happened to me, as I know from experience how Mother reacts. Perhaps I sense what she will say and do not want to hear it. She has never really approved of Michael, who is outspoken and often critical of her and the people around her, who live on her largesse.

One night, Michael drank an entire bottle of vodka and announced that he had something he had to tell me. We were in our double bed in the big yellow bedroom in the house I had bought in Pithiviers. The windows were open to the warm night, and you could hear the sound of the river running under the old mill, as it had done for hundreds of years. A nightingale sang its sweet song in a tree. In the soft light of the bedside lamp his Russian face looked raw, blotchy, unfinished, crinkling up like a child’s, the slanting brown-green eyes small as slits.

He held me in his arms and quoted Baudelaire: I was his child, his sister, his friend. I was his soul, his other. He had to be frank with me, he said. He had always told me the truth. He could not lie any longer.

“What on earth is it?” I asked, appalled.

He sat up in the dim light, pulling at his remaining blond locks, and said he had fallen in love with someone else. He did not know what to do. He loved me so much. He loved us both. I held him in my arms, and together we wept at this calamity that had befallen us.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, I walked beneath the willow trees, not the weeping kind that lined the bank of the river that ran under the old mill. All I wanted, really, was to die, or so I thought.

I was strangely without anger or blame, or rather if I blamed anyone, it was myself. Had I loved this man as I should have? Had I not sinned grievously, too? What about the frog letter? What about my lack of desire for this young handsome man? What about my longing to escape into a world of fantasy?

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