I would swear, if I didn't know her better that she is wearing tinted contacts. Even in the dim light her eyes like twin zircons seem almost to glow with a hard electric light. Very different from our mother's dark brown eyes, and not at all like mine which are hazel, though Laura says they're green. Bernadette turns sixty today but the skin of her face is tight as a drum. If I didn't know her I would swear she's had some work done. Her hands, long and bony with bold blue veins dance in a pas de deux while she explains to Laura her method of making pastry. She has always talked with her hands, often waving them in mad choreography to her quiet but clearly tense and focused voice. The nails are cut short, like Laura's, but blunt and square like a man's, unlike my girlfriend who still tries to keep her unpainted nails filed in a soft oval shape. In her thirties, while my sister was raising me, she bit them chronically. I never guessed that I might have been the reason. I know for a fact that she has never painted them, nor ever touched her face with one stroke of makeup. Laura is almost as austere. Rarely, like this evening, will she brush on a courtesy of mascara and lipstick, though she usually goes to work plain face. She says it's a role model for the female patients in her care, especially those who feel pressured to tart themselves up as an indication that they are recovering. One ring, an opal, adorns my sister's wedding ring finger. Laura has one fine gold chain and two sets of gold hoop earrings, two large and two small, that she often wears. Bernadette has never worn jewelry. Just this one single ring she inherited from our mother. I just put it on her finger yesterday after we got home from the cremation and she quietly let me do it, her eyes lowered as though in reverence of the woman whose role she usurped in my upbringing. When she returns to the convent she will likely have to take it off and hide it in the back of her bottom drawer.
My sister knows what she is saying when she talks about baking. My mouth still waters when I remember her pies: apple, pumpkin, lemon meringue, strawberry and her f'ait accompli, pear pie. She learned how to make pear pie when she was studying painting in Provence, on a scholarship, years before I was born. She has told me that she stopped painting when she started nursing school. She never thought she had talent but having seen some of her landscapes hanging in the house I would care to differ. Monet might have learned something from her. Entering nursing school and the Roman Catholic Church happened coincidentally for her.
This was my favourite pie to watch her make, her gentle and sure way of skinning and gutting the Bartlett pears as though they were squabs for the roasting, and how she would skillfully slice and overlap them in a mesmerizing symmetry, a fruit mandala on the pastry shell. I have not yet extorted from her a promise that she will bake one while she is with us. Her short steel grey hair frames her broad square face and enhances the small lines that surround her eyes and mouth. She is not wearing the little steel-rim glasses that usually soften the impact of her eyes. I don't know why but only now I have noticed this.
In a gentle sing-song voice, rather like a little girl's, Bernadette says, "But you have to use cold water if you want the pastry to turn out right. Really cold water. Ice cold water. Ice water. Not cold from the tap. You have to use actual ice water and add it gradually to the dough," and she grasps her hands together as though the two dancers are struggling with mutual reluctance to make love, "And you work it", she thrusts one hand against the other, "And you work it", she thrusts again, "And you work it" until it's all smooth and even, like velvet." Her hands suddenly relax as though the two lovers have exhausted themselves and must rest now, sated, lying apart on the restaurant table and then she gently caresses with her forefinger the large oval fire opal. I am also certain that if she were alone she would lift it to her lips and gently kiss it. Instead she reaches for her glass of red wine.
My sister is a virgin. She admitted this to me, proudly, just before the funeral service. I don't know why. This is something I have never cared to know about Bernadette. Though I can't say that I'm surprised. We were at breakfast. I had boiled some eggs and prepared toast and just while she was spreading Robertson's Seville Orange marmalade on her multigrain toast she said calmly, without expression, "You know I'm a virgin." It wasn't a question, but a statement. A fact that she wanted to establish. Did you ever have a boyfriend, I asked. "No, I was too busy looking after you and Mom." No girlfriends either? I asked, really testing the water. "I never was a lesbian. Not that there is anything wrong with being that way, but no I've always been alone." You've never minded? I asked. "Can't miss what I've never experienced, I guess. And now, I mean when you think of my age and my holy vocation, and the obvious fact that I have never been at all what they call pretty, well, it isn't even just too late to think about it, better to not even consider it." Don't you get lonely sometimes? I asked. "Oh, I don't know" she replied. "Doesn't everyone?" then added as a postscript, "Don't you?"
I admitted to her that Laura has two gay siblings, a brother and sister. Both are in committed relationships. Last summer her brother married his partner. I didn't boycott the wedding as she still insists. I was tired. There was a fire alarm in our building at two o'clock in the morning the night before. Unlike my girlfriend I was not able to go back to sleep once we were re-admitted into the building. I envy Laura's capacity for sleep. When we were having breakfast I couldn't keep my eyes open. She asked me to try, bribing me with cup after cup of my favourite Peruvian roast. When I went into the bedroom to change my clothes I passed out on the bed. Nothing she could do could get me to move. She still doesn't believe that I wasn't faking it and now she thinks I'm homophobic.
Laura watches my sister as though she has been backed into a corner and is discreetly seeking a route of escape. In the soft restaurant light her dark blue eyes seem almost black, and dart quickly back and forth like those of a squirrel facing a viper. This will be the first time they have met and Bernadette has already spent three days in our apartment. Laura was away at her parents' since just before the funeral, presumably to give Bernadette and me "some space." I only just restrained myself from begging her to stay. I have never pressured her for anything. I know better. Bernadette was puzzled by her absence and mentioned that since my girlfriend's a nurse why wouldn't she want to support me during my mother's death. I explained that Laura is a psychiatric nurse and Bernadette retorted, "A nurse is a nurse is a nurse. Shame on her!"
"Do you enjoy baking, dear?" My sister asks her, backing off a little.
Smiling she replies, "I've never baked anything in my life." I know very well this smile and I almost want to warn my sister.
"Not even cookies?" Bernadette's eyes widen like neon cat's eye marbles.
"Not even chocolate chip." Laura's hard ass grin softens as she adds, "But I love eating them."
"And it's going to be Christmas the day after tomorrow. Oh, my dear, but you must, but you must let me do some baking while I am with you. At least a batch of cookies for Christmas Day. It's too late to make shortbread--it needs a couple of weeks to age and fruit cake is out, but dear we'll bake some cookies together, chocolate chip and walnut, and maybe some butter tarts--has Barry ever told you about my butter tarts?--, just like I used to bake for your man here", and my sister gestures towards me, not knowing what to call me in relation to Laura since we are not really or exactly married.
"Bernadette", says my sister with a tolerant smile and voice like flint, like a stone swaddled in velvet, "I'm simply not going to have time. But yes, do please bake something while you are with us. Just tell me what you need and we can go shopping together for the ingredients. We'd be delighted. And I know that Barry won't complain, will you hon'?"
I say nothing while I can feel my lips automatically twist into that helpless halfwit smile that has always embarrassed me. What Laura calls my shit-eating smile. It is what Bernadette, who raised me, used to call my cat that caught the canary smile. For me, the smile of a small boy who has just shit his pants. Like when she caught me sticking my finger in the jar of peanut butter, more times than once: "Ah, there's your cat that caught the canary smile. How about if I cut off your finger and feed it to the gold fish?" She never punished me for anything. Instead she would make me a peanut butter sandwich and force from me a promise that I would not stick my finger or a knife or spoon that I'd already licked into the peanut butter. From then on she bought me my own small jar of Kraft smooth peanut butter. And my own small jar of Smucker's strawberry jam. It was always Smucker's, always strawberry. She never caught me sticking again my finger in anything. I was simply very careful to not be seen. I didn't do it as often, but neither could I explain to the old goodie-goodie two shoes of a ridiculous sister of mine that peanut butter and jam taste best licked from the finger, but only if the source is forbidden.
She would have been already thirty-five to my ten years of existence. And chewing her nails like they were pumpkin seeds. If the weather was nice, she would take my hand and guide me to the door, wait for me to put on shoes and a jacket if it wasn't warm, then walk with me in the neighbourhood, her hand lightly resting on my upper back, to give our Mother some time to herself. We would come home with the sound of the TV seeping out from under Mom's shut bedroom door. Bernadette would begin making a pie and I would sit and watch her for a while before running to my room to play video games.
Once or twice, when she wasn't away in the hospital, I thought I heard Mom talking on the phone in her room just at the top of the stairs. I went back one day and listened by the door. She sounded like she was laughing. Then swearing. I never heard her swear. The laughing resumed, then followed by curse words and mumbling. I really wanted to know who she was talking to. I always wanted to open her door, say hi, walk in and sit with her on the bed. I never touched my mother. She always sat or stood at a distance and I was relieved since I often didn't like much the smell coming off her. Her greying dark hair was usually unwashed and tussled and her shapeless body wrapped in a dingy yellow housecoat. Usually she would smile wanly and say, "Well, Barry, what is new today?" Rather like a distant aunt who wasn't comfortable around kids. Bernadette would come in the room and serve breakfast, kiss Mom good morning on the cheek then put her arm around my shoulder and hold me close. She was always gentle but firm with Mom, as though Bernadette was both her mother and mine.
Mother more than once referred to us as the two bookends of her life. She would have been eighteen at Bernadette's birth, having just dropped out of high school to raise her with help from our grandmother. When I came along she was a recent widow, her third husband, my father, wealthy and much older, having just died from a stroke. She would have been already forty-three. I was just in kindergarten the first time she was hospitalized, her first of many therapeutic stays in a mental health facility.
I am told that I look exactly like the old man. That I especially have his eyes. I have seen him in photos, a slender, athletic man with broad shoulders, suntan and a winning smile. I did not inherit his smile. I am told he was over seventy when he died. Bernadette, who never met him, would tease me about being too serious all the time. Only knowing the old man from a few flattering pbotos Bernadette and I have never talked about him, and Mom has said very little about my father. He did make sure we were well taken care of. We always lived in the same comfy house, rather a small mansion in the wealthy neighbourhoods. I didn't have to lift a finger to work or borrow one single dime from the government to get through university.
The waiter arrives finally for our order. Laura grimaces with well concealed impatience and Bernadette fixes on the young man her scary bright eyes. "My, aren't you a handsome young guy", she says and our server, a beautiful youth of around twenty flushes and smiles, allegedly the way I would smile when caught with my finger in the peanut butter. "I'll bet you're never lonely on Valentine's Day."
"Berny, he's not on the menu," I say, laughing off my embarrassment, though it is clear she isn't really flirting with him. Not even ten years in the convent have cured her of making embarrassing comments to strangers. Laura has her look that says if she was alone at home she would be rolling all over the floor right now in fits of convulsive laughter.
Bernadette took care of us both. She was our mother's mother. She had been away somewhere in Africa working as a nurse when I was born. She never met my father, and didn't attend the wedding since she said she could never get leave from her duties in the African village where she was posted. On Mom's insistence she eventually came home to assist when I was born. The priests she worked with convinced her that her filial duty trumped her vocation. Bernadette later told me, when I was in high school, that Mom never recovered from post-partum depression, complicated by my father's untimely death. During the same breakfast when she disclosed to me her sixty year virginity Bernadette also said that it was really news of Mom's suicide attempt that convinced her to come home. She tried hanging herself though just two weeks from her posted delivery date. Her sister, my aunt, used her key to get in the house. She climbed, she said, without hesitation up the curved wooden staircase as though she knew exactly where to find her sister. She cut her down from the curtain rod. When the ambulance arrived Mom was already in labour. I wasn't going to trust her for another minute so I was determined to try my luck breathing on my own.
The three plates piled with food are set in front of us, each steaming like a Jurassic landscape. Bernadette views her open face veggie burger as though seeking a piece missing from a jigsaw puzzle. Laura views with indifference her Thai chicken curry. I dread being served farmed salmon. I wait before eating, and Laura waits. Bernadette ignores us both and pops with her fingers a French fry into her mouth.
"Don't wait for me to say grace," she says. "Eat it before it gets cold." We don't respond, and I squeeze a lemon wedge all over my salmon filet, rice and steamed broccoli. The fish in my mouth dissolves into an insipid mush.
"It's farmed," I hear my voice squeeze its way out in a modified indignant whine, more of a growl.
"They made this with frozen vegetables", mutters Laura between punctilious bites of her Thai curry.
"I have never eaten anything more delicious", Bernadette crows in embarrassing celebration. "So this is what's called a Portobello mushroom. And the cheese is just heavenly!"
To hear her, exulting over this less than mediocre fare in a middle brow family chain restaurant, who would guess that she was baking pear pies in France. But baking and not savoury meals were always Bernadette's forte, my sister whom I don't think has ever eaten in a restaurant more elegant than this White Spot, the location she took me to when I was a kid, and her chosen location to celebrate her birthday and remember our mother. Otherwise we would never have come here. Laura almost begged me to get her to change her mind. If only my girlfriend could know the absolute and cruel satisfaction I get watching that sad, pathetic look on her face as she just chokes down her previously frozen vegetables while struggling not to comment on the glass full of plonk that stands, barely tasted, behind her plate.
We have been together for almost a year and I think we both know already that it isn't going to last. Two spoiled rich kids together, as I muttered last week during one of our rapidly increasing squabbles. We never actually fight. We are both vastly too well bred. And that little disagreement wasn't really anything. We couldn't agree about whose turn it was to pay the house cleaner. It's usually Laura and I think she's getting tired of being on the hook.
"I can't believe you have a house maid," Bernadette said this morning. I replied that we had servants when I was a kid. Bernadette replied that there is nothing wrong with cleaning your own mess. "Especially if you're a yuppie with two soft hands." I try manfully not to look at my hands which are of course soft. She has taken to cleaning the apartment, insisting that the cleaner isn't doing her job, that we should let her go. It is days like this that I am so thankful to God, if he really does exist, that my sister's a nun. She would otherwise be living with me.
Bernadette I think was always faithful. Mother was a lapsed Catholic long before I was born. According to Bernadette she tried in her first marriage to reconcile with the church. Her husband was a serial womanizer. He wasn't her biological father but according to Bernadette treated her with all the kindness and discipline that any loving father would feel towards the child of his own flesh. Mother divorced him and was barred from receiving communion. This didn't stop or prevent Bernadette who later admitted that from her early teens aspired towards holy orders. I thought it was because she could never get a date. She insists that God was saving her for himself, which to me is a truly creepy answer.
She has hardly touched her wine till now, half way through her veggie burger, she picks up the glass and holds it up to the light which makes the heart of the wine glow and shine like luminescent blood. "You didn't order wine", she remarks, staring at me accusingly. "What's the matter? The vintages here aren't good enough for my yuppie brother?" Laura's face tightens just a little as she shifts in her booth seat.
"You're actually right," I reply.
"You better believe I'm right, darling baby brother," she says, pausing to swallow in one gulp the remains in her glass. "You know, Barry, we have never discussed this before, but I think it needs to be said." She sets the glass down between us. It is empty, but for one red drop remaining in the bottom. "You and I have had very different upbringings. I was ten the first time that Mom got married, and you know we were dirt poor and on welfare. When I reappeared in the picture to help raise you, no, not to help raise you, but to raise you-you know I am really your mother when you think about it-you were already born with a silver spoon in your mouth." Looking at Laura she adds, "You both were." She keeps staring at us, her mouth stupidly half open while her pale blue eyes gather up and shoot out the light in our faces."
"Do go on, Bernadette," Laura says, her voice calm and her eyes hard like dark blue beach rocks.
"I've already said it", she says. Picking up her glass she stares at the red drop in the bottom, puts it back down.
Laura says, "I can't believe it."
"Can't believe what?" I say.
"Our waiter. He just kissed the other waiter. On the lips."
"They must be boyfriends," says Bernadette, almost shouting. Our waiter turns and looks in our direction, smiling.
"That's so unprofessional," I say.
"And if one of them was a girl?" Laura says.
"It'd still be unprofessional."
"Sure."
"Laura, please, don't start."
Bernadette says, "I for one think it's beautiful."
"You are a nun," I say.
"And a Catholic," says Laura.
"Doesn't stop me from thinking for myself."
I have never told Laura this, but I will tonight, in bed, well out of my sister's earshot. She's right. I never tell her anything. I am a lousy communicator. Like a lot of men. I am going to 'fess all to my girlfriend. I am going to tell her all about Seth, my college roommate, my college gay roommate. Seth, one of the most handsome and needy males who ever befriended me. About his pathetic and unrequited crush on me. To shut him up I finally, after more beers than I could number, went to bed with him. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. Would I have done it without alcohol? Likely not. Did I want to repeat the experience? And this is the question I cannot answer, or perhaps won't answer. Seth, all New York brash Jewish sophistication, was my hero, and my one and only. This changed everything between us. He was the one who lost interest in the friendship, who withdrew, became distant and hard to reach. Gone were the all night intimate chats. Next month he moved out. I never saw or heard from him again.
We are all having chocolate cake for dessert.
"This was Mom's favourite," Bernadette says. She has just finished her third glass of wine. My sister, unused to alcohol, is a cheap drunk and I have cut her off. She is already almost three sheets to the wind. "You know, when we used to come here with her? She always ordered the chocolate cake. I never made it at home. I don't know why." How long has she been crying. It seems that the tears have been running down her face for quite a while now. She shivers, then begins to whimper. "I miss her." She begins to openly tremble. "I hardly ever saw her, you know. After I ended my novitiate. I feel so bad about this. Then she died in the hospital like that and I wasn't there to hold her hand or anything. The Mother Superior just wouldn't let me go, not till it was too late." The whimper ascends to a thin little wail. "I miss my mommy. I miss my mommy." Laura leaves my side and plants herself next to my sister and puts her arms around her. Bernadette is now sobbing openly, "I want my mommy! I want my mommy! I want my mommy!" and Laura rocks her back and forth in her arms.
I sit paralysed and alone on my side of the table. Not knowing what to do I shovel some cake in my mouth. It tastes a bit strange. One woman comforting another. When we get home I will tell Laura everything about Seth my gay roommate. I will tell her everything and censor nothing. Then I am going to ask her to marry me. I might even tell my sister Bernadette.
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