Dawn Raffel - In the Year of Long Division

She says, “Mother loved you better.”

I say, “Have another napkin. Have a sponge.”

She says, “The times I saved your neck.”

She says, “The husband and the house.”

She says, “You don’t have any biscuits left. I looked.”

ACTUALLY, my sister has never had soup at my kitchen table. I will not allow soup in my house.

I NEVER seem to have postage.

SHE is in the argument I’m having with my husband where I bang the drawers and run the tap and rattle forks and knives and dishes piled in the sink.

He says, “Try opening your ears.”

He says, “Besides and furthermore.”

He says, “In fact, in fact, in fact.”

WE keep an extra box of biscuits in each and every cupboard — just in case.

SHE is in my address book inside my bedside table. She is listed under s in all the spaces. She is listed under t and u to catch the overflow, and when I dial wrong old numbers on the Touch-Tone, she still answers anyway.

I AM afraid of dirty dishes, empty boxes, paper wrappers, bread crumbs, termites, leaks, and stains.

ALSO crackers.

MY sister’s latest letter says that she has dyed her hair.

EACH week I shine the woodwork, polish doorknobs, open windows, vacuum carpets, beat the rugs. I pack up boxes full of books and cheese and dry goods that I have around the house and seal the boxes tight with tape, and I see to it that my husband bleeds the radiators clean.

HE says, “Go answer it yourself.”

I WASH down contraceptive pills.

SHE is in the water glass. She is in the bathroom sink. She is in the toothpaste tube. She has my nose.

WE are always low on bleach.

SHE says, “Who can see your face across a telephone long distance?”

She says, “Can’t you come and see me?”

I say, “Glad to hear that you received the scarf.”

She says, “I’ve got a sofa here.”

She says, “I’ll let you have the bed.”

She says, “I loved you like a mother would and would you even recognize my face?”

I say, “The wash is in the dryer.” I say, “Something’s in the oven.” I say, “All the floors need wax.” I say, “The fridge is on the blink.” I say, “The thermostat just broke.” I say, “The tub is overflowing.” I say, “You must see I cannot leave my house in this condition when you know that I am here and all alone, all by myself.”

WHAT my mother is saying to me about pearls is that you must rub them against your teeth. “Like this,” my mother is saying to me, demonstrating, moving an earring over her lowers. “Friction.”

I am engaged to be married. The shoes are flat. The dress needs something else, my mother says, some accessory or accent. The veil could stand a press.

We are in my mother’s master bedroom, where we are looking in my mother’s box of jewels; at least, that is where I have been looking. Sun is coming through the windowpanes, showing up motes.

It is dazzling.

I have sometimes seen men turn and watch my mother as she’s walking on the sidewalk. I believe this happens often.

My mother says that she has always followed certain necessary rules, which she has tried to teach to me: Break your rolls; powder your feet; don’t eat foods with seeds in public places.

I love the things that sparkle in this box my mother has. I love the box, which is lined with ruby velvet.

“It’s a trick,” my mother says, “which a woman ought to know.” My mother puts the earring back. I see her lipstick on it. “If there isn’t grit, it’s paste,” she says.

“If things we owned could talk,” my mother said to me last week as she was teaching me to recognize the sound of fine crystal.

I watch my mother fiddle with a clasp. “These are real,” my mother says, and holds the strand against my throat. “See? See how delicate? How right?”

But I am trying to pick out something shiny.

“Look,” I tell my mother. “I think the dress wants something else.”

“Listen here,” my mother says to me. “Trust me.”

I have my finger on a ring I used to notice on my mother’s slender hand. It is opal. “Go ahead,” my mother says. “It’s yours.”

My mother has told me not to mix gold with silver.

“They are knotted in between,” my mother is telling me. “They can be restrung,” she says. “See the subtle luster?”

She says, “Really, you should give a thing a chance.”

“Just this once,” my mother says.

“Never mind,” my mother says to me. “Forget I mentioned anything.” She starts to ball the pearls up in her palm, and this action makes a noise.

“Mama?” I say.

“What now?” my mother says.

IT looked at first to be an office of some sort, dimly, even sleepily, lit. To look at it, she thought, what with the windows of it gated, what with the door of it secured, you would have thought it deserted.

She checked the address. She checked the address again. This was not an office district. That the number on the door was the same as the one on the dampened scrap — the blurred scrawl the signature of Mr. Edward’s fountain pen and less than reliable, these days, grip — well! — it didn’t serve to reassure her, did not, as she would doubtless have said had she had a companion, inspire in her confidence or faith. This whole block! Its shotgun houses scattershot, slatted and weedy, a stronghold, it seemed, of vacant lots, not a body in a yard, the sense of insects pervasive.

Often, as now, she shaped her thoughts as if for someone else.

She knew she did.

She knocked, of course. Of course, she touched her hair, a habit she had failed, somewhere along the way, to lose. It was not for lack of not quite effort but urging. Under a hat, her face, still good, she thought, if not quite young, partook of shade. Her pocketbook, embattled leather warrior, was guarding a hip.

There was a bell to the side of the door. She found it — the bell, the buzzer. Whatever it was, it was mounted in tin, and was crooked as the step on which she stood. She rang or buzzed — either. She would say to Mr. Edward — what would she say? Composing, composing herself. That who should answer but dogs, or dog? She tended to exaggerate. The barking and the scratching, however, were real, the sound of dogs’ paws, of the nails of the paws of a carnivorous animal on wood.

The door swung in. A nose poked out. A long-legged man appeared in the doorframe. To see them both, the man, the dog, graying and angular, sniffing, you might as well think it true, what was said about the looking-alike, attraction or living the means to it.

“Good morning,” she said, though it was, in fact, later than this.

The man just stood, he with his shirt a fright, the tails of it tortured. The face bespoke illness, why else to be creased and flushed this way, or maybe of only a recent, likely fully-dressed inebriated nap.

“Come in,” the man said.

And so she did. It was almost as if she could see herself. With a hand to the hair, to the hat, to the battered pocketbook — still and all tasteful — here she was: She was a woman with a mission, a woman with a scarcely perceptible limp, as if merely a slightly lazy stride (persuaded thus, she soldiered on). She was a woman with a scrap to the dog.

The dog began to circle.

“Do you know who I am?” she said, and, stepping back, “Does that dog bite?”

It was scarcely lazy.

“No,” the man said. “Sit. I said sit.”

There was nowhere a chair. There was a lingering gloom, promoted, she thought, by smell: disinfectant and dog and a masculine essence and something else familiar that she could not identify, nevertheless. What appeared to be a medical examining table, covered unhygienically, she’d had to have added, had anyone asked, the wrinkled paper seeming much the worse for what she’d had to have said had been multiple uses — this table, this was the point, for there was no time to waste, for she was here about business, personal in nature though it was, point being it was out in plain sight. There was nothing like a stethoscope, nothing like a needle or gauze. There was no framed medical diploma. There was, she saw, stacked, a supply of dispensable towels, coarse, such as might be dispensed near a sink in a not-so-gentle, public, even flea-ridden, place.