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hollow. I flush the toilet.
    Downstairs, I tell my sister I wish she could stay in New York a little longer, that next time she comes, we’ll visit our playground.
    “When we’re older, we’ll have more time for each other,” she says.
    “The best arrangement for elderly people is two siblings living together,” I say.
    “When our husbands are dead and we’re just trouble to our kids, we’ll still have each other,” she says.
    So I tell her this Greek thing. “It’s ancient Greece,” I say. “Your house is on fire. Your mother and father are in it. And your child, husband, and sister. Who do you save?”
    “Your child,” my sister says. “Of course, your child.”
    “Wrong! You can always get another child.”
    “Your parents?”
    “Nope! Your parents are at the end of their lives anyway.”
    “Your husband, so you can make more children?”
    “No way! You can always find another husband. According to the ancient Greeks, you save your sister. That relationship is irreplaceable. You can never have another sister.”
    “That’s a classic example of sophistry,” my sister says. “Reasoning that seems okay but leads to a false conclusion. Yeah. Definitely. That’s sophistry. I think I remember that. The Greeks were famous for it.”
    The phone rings at 6:30 a.m. my sister. “Hullo? Hullo?” No one is there. I know it’s
    “Coffee too hot?” I ask.
    “Ummm,” she squeezes out.
    I take the portable into the kitchen and put my coffee up too. We’ll talk about yesterday. We’ll talk about tomorrow. We’ll talk about our parents, our men, our kids, our work. We’ll talk about our weight, the wisdom of keeping a food diary, how good veggies poached in broth can be and whether we should go to a spa.
    “You can have real coffee at the Birdwing Spa in Minnesota,” I’ll say.
    “Yeah, but you have to go to Minnesota.”
    “The Regency House Spa is near you. I’d come down.”
    “I can’t live a week with no animal products.”
    “What about the Kripalu?”
    “It has cinder-block walls, and they don’t let you talk during meals.”
    “Know anything about the Tennessee Fitness Spa?”
    “Is that, by chance, in Tennessee?”
    We talk till she has to leave to see a patient or another call comes through, or I have to meet my walking friend. We talk every day. Although her take on our past is fixed in amber and mine has no membrane, she’s my memory. There are things only we know. It was she who taught me how to smoke and hide the evidence and bunch socks in my bra. When I woke my mother to tell her “I think I got my period,” in the Jewish tradition, she slapped my face, then mumbled, “Do you know what to do?”
    “Yes.” I lied, then asked my sister. It was my sister who taught me the facts of life by reading
From Little Acorns
nightly. It was she who beat me up when I howled at the good parts, then kept vigils with me by our bedroom window, waiting for the woman across the alley to take her nightly shower.
    Do I trust her? Does she trust me? I keep a pound of the coffee she loves in my freezer. “I’ve got your coffee,” I remind her when she calls to say she’s coming. Always she packs her own can.
    I don’t know if I could live without my sister. Picturing life without her is not possible. I love her as much as I love me.
Ma
soeur, c’est moi.
    We decide to definitely diet. To launch it, we leave the world behind and head for three nights at a spa. No sooner do we turn into the driveway than my sister is making friends. She makes friends with the doorman, she makes friends with the bellhop, she makes friends with all the waiters and the startled funk aerobics instructor she drags into a corner and thumps her abs at. I hide and I shrivel, I shrink and I pale.
    “Why do you have to make friends with everybody?” I ask.
    “Why are you so unfriendly?” she says.
    On the nature hike I’m last, she’s first. She scales the Ice Glen singing. People keep running back down the