Evening by Nessa Rapoport

Author:Nessa Rapoport [Nessa Rapoport]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640094093
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2020-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTH

DAY

EIGHT

TOO LATE. TOO LATE.

When I wake up, it is past noon. The dream has invaded my brain like a shifty criminal. I dress furiously, as the melodrama of Tam’s note casts a baffling shadow over my lost morning.

Downstairs, I take a detour to the kitchen, lured by the tang of my mother’s soup. I dip my finger into the pot and screech.

“Tam! I mean, Eve!” My mother corrects her exclamation automatically. Not that my sister was the type to contaminate the soup.

I am clobbered by the recognition that I no longer know what type Tam was.

“Do you need a bandage?” says my mother.

She is cooking. She knows where the bandages are. My mother has returned, at least for Friday night dinner, a command performance even after the divorce. “Families that eat together”—she adapted the proverb to suit herself.

“We start at six,” she reminds me. “Sharp. You don’t want to incur Nana’s wrath.”

“Added wrath.”

“We count on Nana to hold things together,” my mother says. “And her wrath over our missteps is one reliable way.”

“Our missteps?” I emphasize the pronoun.

“You’re not the only one she thinks is out of line.”

“Was it hard to be her daughter?” I want my mother to surrender.

“You mean, is it hard? It isn’t Nana’s fault she gave birth to a hedonist. Even as we were fighting, I felt sorry for her. I was not the right daughter for my mother.”

Touché.

Nana’s austerity is intrinsic to her character. She asks little and requires less of the material world, for which I do admire her. All her life, my grandmother has been made uneasy by her mother’s native lushness. Nana’s ancestors passed along a Canadian thriftiness that resists the unruly heart. From time to time, Nana will announce: She has no patience for shilly-shallying and dilly-dallying.

Before Confederation, my family was in Canada. Nana has always conducted herself as the last heir of the British Empire. She pronounces the “h” in “white” or “why” like the Anglophile teachers of my childhood and has the chief attribute of aristocracy: no awareness whatever of her patrician carriage and habit of thought.

We were never rich but earned a stature that felt like wealth. Nana’s cousins inhabited Canada from Victoria to St. John’s, where they held the offices of council member or alderman. Such attainments were, as Nana’s bearing implied, only to be expected. Her work as a scientist was unique to the point of talk, and yet if I questioned her about her accomplishments, she claimed they had all merely happened to her, a matter of luck or timing.

It is a maxim in the study of women’s lives that remarkable women will ascribe their success to providence, rather than concede their struggle, over many years, against adversity. However skillfully I introduce the subject of her ambition or gift, Nana remains infuriatingly vague. Great-Aunt Abby says that by the time Nana was three, everyone knew she was brilliant, “a flash.” I love the slang, which evokes the sepia photograph of Nana, Abby, and Nell decked out in identical organza dresses, ringlets adorning their small, serious faces.

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.