A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,40
own waiting room, waiting for us.”
CHAPTER
7
FOR EIGHTEEN DAYS Natasha slept as if her lidded dreamland were her true home, to which she was repatriated for fifteen hours a day. So what, then, could Sonja do? Natasha was here, safe, alive, and real enough to begin resenting. In the flat white light of morning she entered her sister’s bedroom, a cup of hot tea in her hand, and inspected her sister’s body as she might a corpse, or a comatose patient, or someone whom she had, once, long ago, envied. Her gaze crawled the curves of Natasha’s hips, the odd angle of elbows she could unhinge and bend at will, the bitten rims of fingernails, her legs, still long, still lithe, and the little brown hairs on her forearms, which, when they had first appeared in puberty, Sonja had used as evidence to convince Natasha she was turning into a boy. Natasha’s skin said what she wouldn’t. The scars of habitual heroin use webbed her toes. A buckshot of cigarette burns stippled her left shoulder. If Sonja found these scars on a patient in the hospital, she wouldn’t feel pity, but in Natasha’s bedroom, she felt it all over. For eighteen days she went to wake Natasha and turned back, afraid of the dreams her sister would rise from, leaving no alarm louder than a cup of tea cooling on the nightstand.
But Natasha wasn’t right. On the eighteenth evening, standing at the cutting board, chopping two onions and a potato, Sonja broached the subject. “I think you should talk to a psychiatrist or someone.”
From the look her sister gave her, she might have announced they’d be eating the cutting board for dinner.
“I just think it would be good for you to talk with someone. About what happened in Italy. About what it’s like being home,” Sonja said.
“Talking doesn’t do anything.”
“It might do one or two things.” Sonja punctuated her sentence with a chop.
“All the words in the world won’t put those onion halves back together.”
“The human mind is a little more complex than a yellow onion.”
Natasha held back her hair as she lit a cigarette from the hot plate her father had, twelve years earlier, purchased secondhand from a woman who would never find a flame that cooked an egg quite as well. “Some of us would be lucky to have something as large as a yellow onion between our ears.”
Sonja could see her sister backing away from her, from the subject, from whatever had happened in Italy. “Think of the mind as a muscle or bone instead,” she said, looking down to address the more respectful audience of cubed potatoes. “Emotional and mental trauma doesn’t heal itself any more than a broken bone left unset.”
Natasha nodded to the cutting board. “You talk those potatoes and onions into jumping in that frying pan and I’ll talk with a psychiatrist.”
Despite its monumental aggravation, Natasha’s resistance was a good sign, wasn’t it? The obstinacy was a pillar running alongside her spine that would support her when not lodged firmly in Sonja’s hindquarters. And while she might yearn for a little civility to grease the rusty gears of their relationship, she gladly endured the backtalk and eye-rolls to know that Natasha hadn’t lost the ability to drive her fucking crazy. Her sister was a snarky chain-smoking hermit crab that emerged from her shell in the safety of Sonja’s presence. When Natasha believed she was alone—those days when Sonja slammed the front door and stayed to spy on her—she searched for thicker shells. It was awful, watching Natasha through the keyhole as she divided her room into smaller increments of shelter. She moved the desk, bed, and bureau like a child arranging the furniture into a make-believe castle, even encircling the structure with a moat of water glasses. On the keyhole’s far side, Sonja prayed it would keep the dragons at bay; her heart, as if drawn on a piece of paper in her chest, crumpled every time. When she returned in the evening, the fortress was disassembled and the pieces of furniture had returned to their white rectangles of wall space. She never mentioned what she’d seen, holding it as a reminder to be gentle and patient as she prepared dinner. She whispered sweet nothings to the potatoes and onions, but the little fuckers were as stubborn as her sister, the great big fucker.
Natasha relented when Sonja pointed out that compared with her inexhaustible exhortations, a chat with a psychiatrist would be as pleasant