Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,40
audience—instantly endearing herself to their attention-hungry sister. Someone from the other side was trying to reach Izzy. Did the letter M mean anything to her? Mami? Izzy had offered up. Or, maybe, tío Manolo, a favorite uncle who succumbed to liver cancer? Then there’s ex-husband Mark, diagnosed with a brain tumor, dead before the year was out. Or maybe it was Maritza, but wait, Maritza isn’t dead. . .
Ay, Izzy, honey, that is the oldest trick! Does M mean anything to you? the sisters mimicked and scoffed. A safe bet when everyone in the world has to have a mother!
Why was Izzy messing around with this possibly bogus new-agey evangelist-type character? The sisterhood put their heads together. The evangelist was Izzy’s kind of person. Someone who hung out at the fringes—where Izzy went to cast her bread upon the waters, feed the dragons. Seriously, did Izzy have any friends who weren’t going through or recovering from some trauma or other? It’s like if there’s a fire, Izzy couldn’t just stand at a respectful distance and warm herself. Of course not. How borrrring! Watch this! she’d howl, leaping into the flames. Izzy needs help.
There was a simpler explanation, Antonia—the selfish one, the one to break off from the group conclusion—argued. Izzy was grieving the loss of their parents. Yes, their deaths had been timely, Papi in his nineties, Mami, mid-eighties. But Izzy had been left with no one and nothing to fill the void. Until recently, when she came up with her migrant-art-in-the-boonies scheme. Antonia hadn’t heard their sister this excited since . . . since forever. Mona shook her head, exasperated with Antonia’s reluctance to accept that their sister has an actual disease. Mona does have her MSW, in case anyone in the family cares to notice. Antonia, meanwhile, has no training in psychology and so wouldn’t know. The highs are highs, but the crash is sure to come. Classic bipolar.
But Antonia keeps vacillating on what she thinks of Izzy’s moods. Sometimes it seems that Izzy is just suffering from the chronic malaise that comes with being alive. Even in Kyoto— / hearing the cuckoo’s cry— / I long for Kyoto, one of Antonia’s favorite haikus and one she loves to quote to her sisters. We all have to make peace with that longing, learn to live with the holes in our hearts. It’s the kind of remark that might have gone over well in her classes. But not with Mona and Tilly, who take her to task, Mona claiming that Antonia is in denial about the seriousness of their sister’s illness, Tilly cursing her into compliance: Just go along with the fucking program for once!
Antonia has to defer to Mona’s expertise. Still, it’s a shame how every grand passion has been co-opted by some pathology or other. Indignation is now wounded narcissism. Outrage, an issue with anger management. Revenge, a post-traumatic stress disorder. These old-time passions only exist anymore in Russian novels and on stage, especially in the Met operas broadcast at the Town Hall Theatre. As Madame Butterfly stabs herself in despair or Desdemona spends her last virtuous breaths singing, the victim of Otello’s jealous rage, Antonia weeps with abandon, embarrassed when the lights come up and she is surrounded by her dry-eyed fellow audience members. Catharsis, that’s what she feels, a term she often used when teaching Greek tragedy to her students. Once again, she is reminded how much she misses them.
The medium on tape offers the kind of popularized consolations that would normally irritate Antonia, but instead she finds herself listening closely. How to recognize signs from your spirit loved ones. “Heaven winks,” the medium calls them. You find a penny or a dime and the date on it means something. Antonia is always finding pennies, but she has never thought to check the date. You turn on the radio and your special song is playing. A stranger comes in your life and you find yourself responding not as you would but as your loved one would—
Antonia almost goes off the road when she hears this one.
Her former bad-cop self would have resisted getting involved with Estela’s predicament. It isn’t exactly that Antonia is hard-nosed; it’s more that people get under her skin too easily—part of the problem. And right now, in her life, Antonia is operating so close to the bone, she has no surplus to throw upon needy waters.
But here she is already planning to call Estela this evening to check in. How are