Гвен Купер - Love Saves The Day

Laura stands, and Anise and Laura look at each other for a long moment. I can tell from the way Laura’s eyes widen that she’s remembering things, too. “My God,” Anise finally says. “You look just like her. I’d forgotten.”

“Not the eyes,” Laura replies. “She always said I had my father’s eyes.”

Anise’s laugh is loud and hoarse-sounding. “We won’t hold that against you.” She crosses the room in only three long steps and wraps her arms around Laura. She seems to grow taller, so that all of Laura is folded up into her hug. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible thing to lose your mother, especially when she was so young.” Anise’s eyes over Laura’s shoulder are shiny with water. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.” She pulls back to look at Laura. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for her funeral.”

Laura takes a step back from Anise. “I know how hard it can be to reach you when you’re overseas.”

“I have a cell phone now,” Anise says. “I don’t think you would have had trouble reaching me, if you’d really wanted to.”

Anise looks at Laura, who seems to shrink a bit until it looks almost like she and Anise are the same size. Anise’s words sound like an accusation, but then she smiles and adds, “You must have gotten your stubbornness from your father, too.”

Laura doesn’t seem to know what to say to this. Josh, who’s been standing there watching them asks, “Anise, what are you drinking?”

“Just some tea with lemon, if you’ve got it,” she tells him and Josh disappears into the kitchen.

“Have a seat,” Laura says, and Anise perches on the shorter end of the couch. Now that she’s closer to me, I realize how familiar she smells. There was a hint of this same smell on the bird-clothes Sarah kept in the back of her closet.

Anise notices me sniffing her leg and grins. “Prudence!” Putting one hand beneath my nose, she says, “It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, baby doll.” She begins petting me almost before I know what’s happening, but her fingers are so skilled they find all the good places behind my ears and under my chin that I’m helpless to protest. I fall to the ground and flip onto my back, sad when Anise pulls her hand away too soon. “Look at this apartment,” she says, her bright eyes darting around the room. Then she laughs. “Sarah must have hated this place.”

Laura laughs, too, in an unthinking way that seems to surprise her. “You’re right,” she tells Anise. “My mother said buildings like this look more like hotels than homes. But then,” she adds, “I remember her complaining about how hard the stairs in her building were on her knees whenever it rained.”

“It stinks getting older,” Anise agrees cheerfully. The little lines around her eyes crinkle as she smiles again. “Your whole life you’re young, and that’s all you know how to be. That’s all you remember being. Everything anybody says to you starts with, You’re young. You’re young so you don’t know any better. You’re too young to know what being tired feels like . And then one day they stop saying it. You realize it’s been years since anybody called you young. These days everything people say to me begins with, At our age. At our age, who has the energy to run around Asia with a rock band? ” Josh has returned with two cups of tea, handing one to Anise and the other to Laura. Anise sips at hers and says, “I don’t think I’ll ever be the grown-up your mother already was at nineteen, but she also had a gift for staying young. That’s tough to pull off. I appreciate it more every day.”

Laura drinks from her teacup, too, but doesn’t respond to this. Josh walks across the room to fiddle with something next to the TV, and music fills the room. Anise is also silent for a moment, then says, “Is this Sarah’s copy of Country Life ?”

Josh looks surprised. “It is,” he tells her. “How did you know?”

“Because I gave it to her.” She puts her teacup down on the coffee table. “Before I moved to California. You always recognize the crackle of your own records.”

“We have a bunch of her records and things upstairs,” Josh says. “You guys should look through them.”

Laura’s face tightens. But Anise says, “I’d love that, if it’s okay with you?”

She looks over to Laura, who hesitates before nodding and putting her teacup on the table next to Anise’s. Standing, she says, “Come on. I’ll show you where everything is.”

My fur prickles as I follow everyone into the room with the Sarah-boxes. I haven’t been in here since before I got sick. Even now, knowing that it doesn’t matter if everything in them stays in the right place because remembering things won’t bring Sarah back, it’s hard for me to watch Anise take things out.

Still, it’s nice to hear her talk about Sarah. She has memories that are different from Laura’s and mine. She exclaims over the box of matchbook toys ( I can’t believe she kept them all these years! ) and tells Laura stories about the places she and Sarah used to go and the things that happened to them there. She also tells Laura stories that Laura is too young to remember. “We had your fourth birthday party at Ear Wax. You wouldn’t stop trying to rip up record covers, and it drove your mom nuts. She was always so patient with you, though. More patient than I would have been.” She looks through Sarah’s collection of black disks like they’re old friends. “I remember you !” she exclaims a few times. Laughing, she pulls something from one stiff cardboard holder. It’s not a black disk, but a colorful one that looks just like Anise except smaller! The cut-out is Anise holding a guitar and throwing her head back with her hair flying around behind her. There’s a hole right in the middle that lets you put it on the special table Sarah had, just like the black disks. “I always told your mom these picture disks would never be worth anything,” she says to Laura. “But she insisted on holding on to them.”

“She put most of this stuff into storage when we moved into the apartment on Stanton.” Laura shakes her head. “I could never figure out why she kept it all.”

Anise’s eyes narrow in confusion. “Why does anybody keep anything? To help you remember.” Then she looks around this room, which is still empty except for the Sarah-boxes, and doesn’t say anything else until she sees the black garbage bag with the bird-clothes. “No way !” she says happily. “ Look at all these! I made most of these for your mom, you know. We had disco outfits for when we went to her kind of clubs”—Anise makes a face—“and all these little punk-rock-girl clothes for when she came with me to the places where I played.” She holds up a shirt that looks like it’s been clawed up, held together with silver safety pins. “Did you know your mom was a drag king for about thirty seconds back in the day?”

Laura has been sitting cross-legged on the floor with me in her lap, watching as Anise looks through everything but not doing much herself. I feel her surprise in the sudden slight movement of her arms and shoulders as she says, “Wait, what?”

Anise laughs. “ Nobody wanted to give a girl DJ a break back then. It used to kill me to see Sarah spending so many hours at Alphaville, making audition tapes nobody would listen to. So one day I came up with the idea of dressing her like a guy. Neither of us had much in the way of a chest”—Anise looks down at her own skinny shape—“and she was so tall anyway that all it took was some clever needlework. In the clothes I made, and with her hair up under a hat, she looked like a very pretty boy.” Anise’s smile is gentle. “I never saw anyone as beautiful as your mother who was so completely unaware of how beautiful she was. Like it was nothing. The first time I met her was in a store where she was trying on dresses. She came out of that dressing room looking like a model, but you could tell just by looking at her that she didn’t see it when she looked in the mirror.” Anise makes a funny face and sticks out her tongue. “I thought somebody should tell her what a knockout she was.”