Sandy Olson-HillASSISTED LIVINGMy sister, Cathy, is outlining the baby Jesus on her efficiency window with a bar of soap. "I asked you for cigarettes." She says as she looks with emphasis at my hands hanging empty explanations over the center's crayoned sidewalk and penciled graffiti walls. "But I had to check them in at the office?" "Why am I a child?" "Listen, I'm not doing this." "Please Sharon." She lays her hand on mine to quench the fire, the sun behind her clouds stumbling into sky. " Let's not argue." Into the apartment, between discarded laundry and beer bottle discord, Cathy tallies old inequities. "I could be married too, you know." Walking through the living room she points at the shelves of dolls, at the stacks of odds and endings, "a really cute guy gave me these… you just don't know him." "Shari look" She moves this behind that and these between those before dusting off the shadows from a balding angel's wings. "Mama's remember?" I nod. I don't care. Preoccupied in duty, I locate dated papers, prescriptions of Risperdal, and Lithium folding ancient snakes between dusty medicine bottles. "You are," I hold the pills up where she can't miss my intention, "taking these, right?" The doorbell rings a reprieve. So she ignores me collecting, then perusing, the bags and packages mapping plastic distance between us. From the last sack, the laundered clothes surface as my sister stretches thick skin between tight jeans in the smudged bathroom mirror, "a hot guy's coming over after you leave." You don't know him echoes as I slide crushed bills under a cup on her counter. "Will you," I am striding towards the door when she asks, "stay until I'm asleep?" With the china angel clenched into her fist, she waits someplace inside somewhere: dreaming of past boys, longing for lost men, while I am drowning in the pause; inside the moment when my silence speaks stiletto through the eyes of dolls lining rows of accusation walls. Outside; the afternoon slices through the window's lint bright Jesus. And when I hear the crash, I don't stay to see her gathering the ceramic glass between the present and the past. And I don't stay to watch the halos from her fingers bleeding, awkward wings of grieving, splinters. * * * A SLICE OF BRILLIANT COLOR"Why don't you call before you come?" she asks, as I stand outside her trailer. A rope serves as a door handle. I can't as I remind her. "You have no phone." It does not matter. This week she is a government agent and the Pope is the anti-Christ. "Where are your meds?" I ask . "I don't need them. I need a good lawyer", she says in the song we sing for the games we live. She is going to sue the cable company and the radio stations. They are eating her head. I have come to do my duty, drop off cigarettes and run as fast as I can from her illness. She was. She is my sister, whose limbs entwined, whose head nestled next to mine, hair entangled in dreams willed upward beyond the weight of expectancy into the realm of extraordinary. I am leaving now. She needs what she has and has what she needs. She has forgotten I am here. With broom in hand and the agility the absence of drugs has given her, she crosses the red clay to argue with a neighbor. The clay rises, a dusky rose climbing her frame like an exotic web encircling. The warrior to the canvas. She is a slice of brilliant color amidst a landscape of opaque indifference.
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