Violation by Sallie Tisdale

Author:Sallie Tisdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990437093
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Published: 2016-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

Violation

MY SISTER WRITES TO ME OFTEN THESE DAYS, THOUGH most of our communication is business. Our father died several months ago and she is his executor. Back and forth my brother and sister and I go about annuities and armchairs, social security numbers and thank-you notes, the debris of death. This kind of business, weighing the heft of memory, is never indifferent. The armchairs, the thank-you notes—each leads us back to something else, things of vaguer shape and sharper meaning.

She is angry. She is especially angry about my newest book, and she is also just angry. A river of old pain long staunched slides out easily now, in brief fragments, disjointed rambles, long commentaries. In the dismantling of houses and bank account, we dismantle long decades of false courtesy, too.

Almost all this talk, these complaints and sorrows, come to me by e-mail. E-mail is a strange construct for such strong feelings, but these odd missives are what I have. In the midst of her coded address at the top of my screen, I see the time she sent the note. Often she writes to me after midnight. I imagine her alone at the desk in her dining room in the poised silence of the night, her eyes intent, while her teenage daughter sleeps and the jittery dog shifts at her feet. I imagine the pool of light reflected on the French doors behind her, blanking the empty yard, shading the day’s dishes, the dog’s bowl, the emptiness. I imagine this, knowing the room, the dog. The night. Knowing her.

She has no idea, I think, how artless her words are, how revealing, and so she sends them into the ether assuming they will never return. They slip in a series of resentful taps onto the screen shimmering before her. That screen, that dim room, seems to be such a private and solitary place. It is exactly this privacy, this solitude, I violate.

She hates my “nasty little book,” she writes one night. “You are airing family business in public—like it is the truth, when it is your opinion.” Later: “That book really hurt. Those were your thoughts, not necessarily truths.” Another day: “I have to live in this town, not you. I don’t think a lot should have been said, whether true or not.” A few days later: “Don’t use my name in a book again without my permission.”

She is sixteen months younger than I, truly my little sister, still half a head shorter than I. When she is angry, she moves, and her words roll across a room or the page in one long, unpunctuated injury. They arrive in my study heavy and solid, as all words are. With what she believes to be vapor, she protests the permanence of what I say.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.