can be pretty hard to live here.” We were at a stoplight, and I thought he might turn around and crack a smile. But he did not turn around. Rather, he began pounding his steering wheel. One fist, pounding steadily but slowly, terrible little intervals of silence in between. Bam! . . . Bam! . . . Bam! I got out then, said this was close enough, thank you very much, and gave the guy a really good tip, though he did not deserve one at all. I walked away thinking, What happened to this man? Why is he not like the cabbie I had earlier, who had a picture of his daughter on his dashboard, who pointed out tourist attractions in his thickly accented English, who sang a little song to himself as we waited for the light to change, who waved at and then laughed with another cabbie who pulled up beside him? Surely the angry man did not emerge from the womb shaking his fist. Who did this to him?
Pretty obvious memory to have pop into my head, as I drew closer to the house where my sister lived. Though of course what she pounded was not the steering wheel but herself.
CAROLINE WAS SITTING AT HER DRAFTING BOARD, looking at blueprints for an addition she was doing to someone’s house. I looked at the finely drawn lines on the big white pages and said, “Funny how we both ended up doing kind of the same thing.”
“What do you mean?” Caroline erased something, penciled in a correction.
“I mean, you know . . . making things out of raw materials. I use cloth, you use wood.”
She looked up. “You know what I think? I think it’s very different. I think I focus on seeing the actual substructure. You take things as they are and chop them up to re-create a new whole. And then you say, ‘See? That’s what it is!’ ”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I want to know the truth of what’s beneath. You want to transform things into something comfortable and beautiful, but not what they are.” She stared at me, a little smile on her face. And then her smile faded and she said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. It’s just . . . I’m in such a bad mood. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it’s good for you to be in a bad mood.”
She moved from her desk to sprawl out in a chair. “I’m so sick of this. I am. I am so sick of myself. You know what happened this morning? I toasted half a bagel. So far so good, huh?”
I smiled.
“And then I wanted to have it on a beautiful dish, I just wanted to have something beautiful to eat on because I’m trying to do what my therapist says and nurture and reward myself. So I have these cute little saucers I bought in an antiques store, cherries all over them, and I took one down from the cupboard, and here comes the big finger from the sky, pointing at me. Put that back! That’s a saucer! You can’t eat a bagel on a saucer! She looked up at me, sighed. “All the time, this voice: Wrong. Stupid. That is not for you. It is for everyone else, not you. And Laura, I want you to know, I really want you to be clear about this: It’s not how I want to be. I look up at the night sky and see the same beauty you do. I mean . . . torch singers, little red potatoes, the sight of a kid running down the street with her tongue sticking out of her mouth . . . I get that.
“I want you to know that whenever I go to a museum, everything in my head gets pushed away. It doesn’t matter what I look at : ancient pottery bowls, period rooms, sculptures—doesn’t matter. The whole time I’m there, everything pecking away at my soul bows to greater considerations. I stand in front of a little French oil of a woman at a food market and all you can see is one slice of her cheek and her coat and hat and her shoes, and everything about her comes to me: where she lives, her little overheated apartment, the half circle of camembert wrapped in butcher paper in her refrigerator, the split in the lining of her shoe, the water level when she takes a bath, the little pink roses on her teacup, how she’ll buy the