Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) Read Online Free PDF Page B

yoga, and when she told me she did it I found it hard to imagine. She didn’t like to do anything she couldn’t spin into multitasking. Nora looked so cute doing tree pose. To hold your balance, you have to focus on a point in the distance, some point, just fix on it, balance on one leg and bend the other so that your foot rests on your calf or thigh. Tree pose requires discipline, a quality she liked, as opposed to
shavasana
, that thing at the end of a yoga session where you lie on the floor and vegetate. I imagine Nora would have said, “Let’s skip that.”
    The dermatologist returned. “Good news. Honey does not have a yeast infection. She has to go on a kangaroo diet.”
    “What?”
    “She has a food allergy, that’s the likely explanation, and she has to eat kangaroo.”
    They make kangaroo into dog food? I don’t know what to say. You can eat kangaroo? Is that legal? I have to call Nora. Honey has to eat kangaroo.
    Nora would love it. Or would she have loved it? Would she have been reading her e-mails while she talked to me? Would I have had a sudden sense that no one was at the other end of the line? She wasn’t really interested in dogs, while I could talk about dogs for the rest of my life. Still, usually when the conversation turns to dogs, you know the party is five minutes from being over.
    When the conversation turns to dogs, you know the party is five minutes from being over.
Maybe Nora would have borrowed that line. Well, she won’t be doing that anymore, will she?
    •  •  •  •
    Now it’s fall and Honey no longer chews her paw. The doctor cured her. Sun Golds, the most perfect tomatoes in the world, are finished for the season and no longer for sale in the Union Square Greenmarket. Pumpkins are everywhere. It’s cool out. I’m wearing my leather jacket.
    Once I mentioned to Nora that I wanted all my personal papers destroyed when I died, and she agreed in words to this effect—I am not quoting exactly, although I know her voice well enough to make it sound that way: “What is there left to say? I’ve said everything.”
    Not hardly. Articles about her are continuing to popup everywhere, often with yet another adorable photo I’ve never seen before. I’ve begun to wonder if she is going to become the Jewish Marilyn Monroe.
    W. H. Auden, who understands everything about the human condition, begins a poem about the loss of his lover with “Stop all the clocks.”
    Yes, stop them for the people I love. For my sister. It would be the decent thing to do.
    But the clocks keep ticking, insulting our grief, forcing us into new realities, cheering us up, making us laugh, taunting us with the possibility of forgetting, zapping us with the pain of remembering.
    It was a privilege to see her out. Perhaps it’s obvious that being there is a privilege when you love someone, but I didn’t know that. It made me a tiny bit braver. About death.
    That, I guess, was her last gift to me. Lopsided gift-giving if ever there was.
    •  •  •  •
    I am saddest when I go to Agata & Valentina, a market in my neighborhood with the most delicious food, and I wander the aisles around sundown thinking about what I want for dinner. Nora loved to think about what shewanted for dinner. She should be here, buying some fresh mozzarella (salted), eyeing a sirloin, considering whether she wants crab cakes.
    No, she wouldn’t be here. I mean, she would probably send someone out for something she fancied. It’s so hard not to know, only to be guessing. Right now I like to think she’s at her desk, waiting for my call or about to call me.

BLAME IT ON THE MOVIES
    M y twenties were one big walkabout.
    There is, on television, a series called
Girls
about young women floundering in their twenties. It is written, directed, and acted by Lena Dunham, who is not on a walkabout. Nevertheless, she captures the very special misery of being in your twenties. Of being clueless, desperate, lost. Looking for love,