Does our mind survive us? by Dr Martinho Correia - HTML preview

A Multitude of Sins

I t was at the point where even her brother was talking. Gary. The one who had pierced his nose at fourteen and then went through a bisex-ual phase their mother was still recovering from.

“Uteri tend to shrivel at your age, Shari-Bo-Bari. Like prunes.” He took a declarative bite of the appetizer his wife, Cohen, had brought–cream cheese spread on Ritz with dollops of fig jam. Cohen hadn’t let her uterus shrivel, evidenced by Tina and baby Markie who was currently trying to suck the fur off Cyrus, Shari’s mother’s Golden Re-triever.

“I don’t think uteri is a word,” Shari said, not quite convinced be-cause she’d never been the book-learning type. She knew that was part of the problem too. She wasn’t classically smart, nor classically pretty. The least she could do was be classically equipped with working female or-gans so she could get through one Christmas without feeling all shades of wrong. But if it weren’t her lack of offspring, she was sure it would have been her lack of something else that would have invoked Gary’s crit-icisms.

“It’s not,” Cohen spoke through the curls of Tina’s head. The two-year-old was fat and not classically anything either. Still, it seemed the other adults graciously ignored this fact as if all suffering from a collec-tive case of cognitive dissonance. But not Shari. She often daydreamed of journaling out her woes and one day giving the leather-bound book to Tina as a show of goodwill from one non-classical to another. “Avoid carbs” always seemed to linger somewhere around page two.

Cyrus sighed noisily on the carpet as the baby-sized parasite soaked his fur in drool. “I feel you, buddy,” Shari thought and wanted to say, but she wasn’t the type to say everything she felt. She left that to Gary.

“It’s a word,” Gary said noncommittally because he was back at their mother’s card table with the hors d’oeuvres. She had them concentrically

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arranged on her white tablecloth trimmed with tiny Christmas trees, and Shari spotted a fig-colored stain near the right of Cohen’s offering.

“How’s work?” Shari asked, the verbal equivalent of Cyrus’s white flag of a sigh.

Gary jumped on that train–yet another opportunity to school the ladies in the wild world of finance, something they couldn’t possibly have the bandwidth or brainpower to fully understand. To be fair, Shari couldn’t do math to save her life, and Cohen looked as if somebody had asked her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance backward. But still.

As he mulled over mortgage rates and his investment portfolio, Shari found her father’s ghost standing near the television Gary used to throw pieces of bologna at.

“Hey, Kid.”

“Hey, Dad.”

He hadn’t changed in the ten years since she last saw him. He wore the same outfit: a pair of Wranglers and a white V-neck T-shirt, at least one size too tight. He had been embarrassed to be dressed like that all those years ago, and he looked sheepish about it now.

“You look nice,” she said firmly, her eyes squarely meeting his. He nodded slowly and smiled. “I mean your son hasn’t met an ugly Christ-mas sweater he refuses to wear, and he’s not even being ironic about it.” They both looked over at Gary who had delicately placed his plate down beside him on the loveseat as he orchestrated the rise and fall of the mar-ket with his hands. His sweater was chunky and featured a misshapen elf that matched the one on Cohen’s lanky frame. She looked as if she might nod off into Tina’s curls.

“Don’t give your brother a hard time,” her dad said, doing something he would have never done before. He sat down, crisscrossed applesauce, and wrung out his hands.

“I think you’re reading this situation wrong, if ever so slightly,” Shari said, eyebrow cocked and loaded.

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“No, I’m not. You’re the smarter one, the more reasonable one. There’s a lot more there than he lets on.” Shari looked over at Gary who had managed to fig his pants even though the plate was scooted away from him. As his body worked in crescendo with all his financial might, she saw what her father could so easily see. Her brother was just a man in a chunky elf sweater with two kids under three and a wife who looked like she had figured this all out months ago. It broke Shari’s heart a little bit because, besides the nose ring, sexual escapades, and overall bad sense of style, her brother wasn’t a bad man. At least he hadn’t cheated on his wife. His family.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Well, that’s worrisome,” she smirked, wringing her hands to his rhythm.

“Worst mistake of my life.”

“Is that so?” Shari asked, looking him straight in the eyes again. It was always easy to do with her father, whereas she could never keep her gaze on anyone else for very long. It felt uncomfortable, like holding her lids open for too long would invite someone in who would never leave.

“You know I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

“But did you mean to do it?” They both knew he had. He was the type of man who loved her mother, a woman who was insistent the names of her children rhymed, but it was the sort of love he had been taught as a child, one that involved pacifying his wife more than reveal-ing his hand.

“I regret it. All of it.” His emphasis on the last part was directed to-wards her, the part she had played. She hadn’t meant to be there. The idea of it started to break earth in the back of her head, and she wiped the sweat off her palms onto the too-tight black pants she found on clear-ance at Old Navy–another point of contention for Gary who believed grown women should shop at “real” stores.

There she watched it unfurl and grow until it took over her mother’s basement living room and became her present reality.

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She was twenty-eight again and Steve had broken her heart. It was the final hope of ever finding somebody and settling down. She wanted babies. Or baby. Or maybe just a dog. But if she were honest, she wanted another human she could look at, no matter how small or new, just so she’d stop feeling so alone.

He had done it at their favorite restaurant, which was a double slap in the face. She loved La Fonte’s, if not for their alfredo sauce, then for Vinny who always seemed to seek them out to serve them. He was old, a throwback to when people considered waiting tables a job you could find honor in. That also broke her heart.

“You are everything, Share,” he had said, using his nickname for her. “And I’m just not sure I’m ready for...everything right now.” The emphasis made her feel like an elephant sitting on the opposite side of the booth. The lighting seemed to grow lighter, and for the first time, she could see what she had missed for nearly two years now. His face couldn’t be trust-ed.

He had worn a rumpled Polo and smelled like body odor mollified with the smooth scent of pine. She had missed this, too, or maybe she had chosen to look away because it was easier than being alone.

They had left La Fonte’s, going their separate ways after an awkward hug where she swallowed too much of his horrible smell. She sat in her car thinking of where she could go, but she no longer had any friends. Her whole life had become Steve.

So, she went to her parents’ house a few streets away. She wasn’t prone to popping in on them anymore, but she needed something. Fa-miliarity.

She spotted a red Honda a few doors down from their house. It caught her eye because its front fender was dented and most of the street drove cars in muted tones, not wanting to bring attention to themselves like the people who drove them. Shari had grown up in the neighbor-hood, and the term “white bread” always played heavily whenever she

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came back to visit. Not that her current life had managed to birth any flair. Her eyes burned when she started to think of Steve.

She went in the back way, feeling bold even though she knew her par-ents wouldn’t care. It was unlocked, as usual, and still made that funky creaking sound as she nudged it open. She paused, feeling bodies inside even though she couldn’t see them. Their car wasn’t in the driveway, but she knew they’d been cleaning out the garage, evidenced by the boxes of their kids’ random childhood things they had been delivering like Santa. Shari had stacked them in the hallway of her apartment, risking a broken bone each time she ventured down it.

She smelled them before she saw them. Or maybe it was more like she smelled her. It was the musky scent of a strange person inside the wrong house. And something was crawling and calculated inside of Shari that hinted a warning at her, a warning she refused to heed. Because when she went into the living room, she couldn’t unsee what she saw.

The woman was holding her father, cradling him in his white under-shirt like one would cradle a baby. That was hard to process for Shari. It would have been easier (she imagined) to see her father doing something much lewder with this woman, but the idea of someone who wasn’t her mother being able to console him was an affront to the family they had been all these years.

Everything tasted like a lie.

“Get out!” Shari almost looked up and around like her father and this woman did based on the sheer volume of the demand, but she soon realized it came from her own body. The woman looked caught, con-fused, but obliged, releasing Shari’s father and standing abruptly. She was everyone and no one simply because Shari’s brain couldn’t understand what she saw. Maybe she had red hair, light blonde? She was bigger-boned than her mother, fatter too.

That smell.

Before Shari knew what she was doing, she could feel the woman be-neath her hands. She was pushing her out of the living room, face as be-6 ERICKA CLAY

wildered as the one staring back at her. The woman sputtered, trying to say something to Shari’s father but Shari kept pushing, an animal desire taking hold of her. The woman lost something, an earring maybe–is that what she was mumbling about? But Shari didn’t stop until the woman stumbled over the back door’s threshold and was walking, dazed, to the red Honda a few houses down.

Shari closed the door and let her anger do the talking.

“What is wrong with you.” It wasn’t a question but a quiet growl. He didn’t look up. He wasn’t man enough, Shari thought. She spotted the earring on the floor, a ridiculous round hoop number with plastic beads in disarray. It was the opposite of everything her mother was, making her even angrier. She pocketed it and turned back to her father.

“I hate you,” is all she could muster to say. She walked out of the house, following the trail of the woman’s strange scent, and drove home to her apartment. Two days later, her mother called. Her dad was dead.

“I suppose I deserved it,” his ghost said now, as Gary greedily latched on to an entirely new, but favorite topic–the benefits of breastfeeding. Her father looked like he meant it–a man in his undershirt, sitting at his daughter’s feet. Shari swallowed the nauseating thought of cradling him herself.

“No. And I don’t hate you. That’s not what I was feeling. I was just...angry, I guess. Sad. Why?” It was the question she knew he wouldn’t answer, and she didn’t even need him to. She had lived long enough to know that people had their reasons, even when they lied to themselves, pretending reasons were more than enough to break a heart.

“Love covers a multitude of sins,” he said, his knees now at his lips.

“What?”

“Love covers a multitude of sins.”

“Where’d you get that one? A needle-point pillow?”

“The Bible.” He said it with quiet recognition. He had never been a religious man. They had never been a religious family. But something about the way he said it reminded her of her mother, how she had taken

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care of Shari’s grandmother when the woman had gotten cancer at seven-ty-two and was helpless against the way the disease ravaged her insides.

It was her mother’s face, the love that shone as she hovered and per-spired that summer. Her only goal to make her mother feel as human as possible.

Shari didn’t even think of Steve.

“You should throw it away now,” her father said, but Shari wasn’t sure she could. The earring. In some weird way, it was the last real connection she had to her father.

“Thoughts, Shari?” Shari looked up, her mother’s finished basement struggling to make sense. Cohen had spoken, Cohen whose lap was now child-free, her tired eyes searching Shari’s.

“Oh, I don’t know–”

“She doesn’t agree with you,” Gary said. He had helped himself to stretching out on his mother’s reclining loveseat, hands propped behind his head. “She’s no dummy. She knows breast is best.” Her sister-in-law rolled her eyes at him, Cohen whose feminist leanings and New England roots tended to crop up from time to time. How they were still together, Shari had no clue.

She went to say something to her father but the stairs were creaking. Her mother, so slight and small and lightly dusted in flour, trekked down the stairs. She was ghostly and beautiful, and when Shari went to look at her father, he wouldn’t look up. He wouldn’t look her mother in the eyes.

It was time suspended–her brother and his wife locked in a perpetual argument about breast milk as their children lay frozen on the floor. Her mother parked mid-way on the stairs–older, a little wiser, but certainly worn from the choices her dead husband made years ago.

“What have you learned?” Shari asked, the question its own entity, taking its space in the room.

Her father looked like he was going to avoid her question but a de-feated sigh left his chest.

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“I learned I should have loved every moment of this,” he said, looking up and lightly scanning the people in the room. “I should have realized what God had given me.” Shari looked at what he was looking at, and when she turned back to him, he was gone.

She sat and time renewed–her mother making her way downstairs, Cyrus sharing a defeated whine as Markie fisted more fur to swallow, and her brother turning towards her, looking her straight in the eye. Shari saw the scared little boy he’d always been right inside his pupils.

And for the first time, she didn’t look away.

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