him in the family loop. He always pretended he didn’t mind, and they loved him for it. He always returned their calls. He was a better daughter than she was, and bringing him into the fold had been her greatest familial achievement.
There had been some explaining to do and blame to accept and tears to count as they rolled down her mother’s face. Her mother wasn’t a pretty crier either.
In comparison to that, the fact that her services were no longer needed at Anderson-Smith and Co. didn’t bother her in the least. It was not only accounting that she didn’t care for, but accountants too. She had never taken delight in correcting people’s faulty sums in public meetings or whipping out a solar-powered key chain calculator at restaurants. In fact, she was pretty sure she was done with the field altogether. It hadn’t been her choice in the first place. Her father had steered her towards it after seeing she had a knack for numbers and little interest in anything at all.
That she was broke didn’t bother her either. In fact, in her mind, Kate wasn’t broke…yet. She had some outstanding salary to collect, some vacation pay coming to her and a tiny amount saved in a house fund. She was going to be broke, no doubt, and soon. But not today.
Today she could still take herself over to the fancy coffee shop, where they sprinkled cinnamon on absolutely everything, to buy a little treat to cheer herself up. She was rather fond of cinnamon.
She sat at a window table, with her plant at her feet and her hands wrapped around an enormous steaming cup, and felt satisfied. Changing her relationship status had not changed her life. She had thought it might. She was busting to be something, somebody new and/or improved. But she was still waking up in a beige-walled bedroom, albeit alone, and walking over to her beige-walled office and sitting in her beige-walled cubicle to count the seconds that make up an eight-hour day, all 28,800 of them. But this, this was a change. Whatever she might be and never be, she was no longer an accountant in the employ of Anderson-Smith. She was sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of the morning with all of the other people who don’t go to work from nine to five. People who live a different life. It was a step in the right direction, even if it was not one she’d made proactively. Staring at the people walking down the street in no apparent hurry, she was happy.
For about ten minutes. Then she saw a woman walking down the street who seemed in a very big hurry indeed. Someone familiar, and Kate realized that she had a big “I told you so” coming to her.
It was likely she had more than one. She had become quite the spectacular failure in the work department, but there was one to come from a most unpleasant source. A screeching, gloating, judgmental source who had just seen Kate and her plant sitting in the café window.
She took a long, slow sip of her coffee and tried to savour it on a level that would carry her through what was about to happen. Opening her eyes, she saw her sister still there, standing in the window, waiting to be acknowledged. Kate smiled and gave a little wave. Tracy gestured towards the plant with her thumb, and Kate just gave a little shrug, watching her sister turn back towards the café entrance.
Tracy knew. It wasn’t the ficus’s fault, the plant had simply been confirmation. No, she’d known it the minute she’d looked over and seen Kate sitting there. There were no secrets from Tracy, or Hawk-Eye, as their father had dubbed her. The girl had an uncanny knack for sizing you up in a heartbeat and an evil habit of broadcasting your innermost secrets in stereo. Kate remembered:
Walking out of the bathroom one day shortly after her twelfth birthday; “OH MY GOD! You’ve got your PERIOD!”
At sixteen, running up the stairs, brown bag in hand; “OH MY GOD! You’re on the PILL!”
At twenty-three, sitting down to dinner, dry-eyed and tight-lipped: “OH MY GOD! He DUMPED YOU!”
Thinking about it, she couldn’t recall any event in her life that hadn’t been conveyed to her family in this way. Older and wiser, Tracy had been the narrator of Kate’s life for over a quarter century.
Not that Kate wouldn’t have liked to get a word in edgewise every once in a while, to set some things straight. It is the privilege of family to know every single thing and understand absolutely nothing. But trying to stop Tracy was as productive as trying to slow down a freight train by blowing on it.
No, Kate had learned, it was so much easier to just sit there glassy-eyed and take it. Being Tracy’s little sister was the only job she’d never managed not to lose, and as much as it pained her to admit it, she wouldn’t quit this one either.
Draining the last of her cup even as her bladder protested, she ran her finger around the inside rim, collecting the last of the sweetness as her sister’s shoes clacked closer to her table.
Kate sucked the finger clean and sat up straight. She was ready now. “Hi, Trace.”
“OH MY GOD! They SACKED you!”
* * *
Mini sandwiches. Jesus. A culinary dropkick to the spirit of post-menopausal woman everywhere. The grey hairs, the nannies, the tea cozy and house slipper set.
A food reflective of the women they are made by and for. Fragile, bland antiquities trotted out for praise at celebrations and funerals.
Considered the height of elegance to those who wouldn’t know elegance if it came up and bit them in the ass, if you asked Glyniss.
She turned her eyes from the tiered silver tray laden with sandwiches never classified as tasty, but dainty. And who the hell would want to eat dainty food? Who wants to ensure their survival through the consumption of the sickening combination of eggs and mayonnaise served up on a plate in miniature Swiss rolls? Or via pimento and asparagus spears stuck at a jaunty angle from duck liver pâté sitting on a cracker?
“Who eats these things?” she asked her luncheon companions.
“Women of a certain age, dear,” replied the woman to her left, a tiny, straight-backed, proper sort of woman. All silver hair and pearls. The kind of lady who removes her coins from a change purse that closes with a crisp and satisfying snap. “And like it or not, that means you.”
Glyniss did not like it at all. She had hoped that having successfully (more or less) raised her sons and left her job behind, she would be afforded the blessing of quickly shedding her mortal coil, never to be burdened with the grey pubic hair, creaking joints or moderate incontinence a long life would ensure.
She was quite tiny herself. Glyniss had never bothered the world by taking up too much space with her presence. She doubted it would even notice if she up and disappeared. But if her last physical results were to be believed, her farewell was going to be a slow fade. Healthy as a horse, her doctor had informed her, only to top that unwelcome comparison by predicting that “It’s your mind that will go before that heart of yours gives out. Ha Ha.”
More’s the pity.
Of course, that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to Aunt Agathe, the family matriarch and sergeant major, who was for all intents and purposes the mother Glyniss never had.
To clarify, Glyniss did have a mother. A flighty, jealous and beautiful creature who could never decide which was worse, that her daughters should turn out not to be beautiful, or that they would.
Glyniss’s DNA, it seemed, had chosen the option less likely to end in the consumption of a poisoned apple, and assembled itself in a plain and pale formation. A clumsy, shy one at that.
So she was starved and taunted and threatened until she was abandoned altogether, leaving Aunt Agathe to instruct and encourage and make sure Glyniss’s life was not only sustained, but amounted to something.
It was also not the sort of thing she would ever say in front of her sister, Helen.
Helen had decided to emerge from the birth canal much like Athena through Zeus’s skull. A fully formed Amazon, Helen had hit the earth blonde and beautiful, somehow armored and immune to their mother’s jealousies and neglectfulness. Helen hadn’t cried when she’d woke one morning to find their mother had left, or when the letter