The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (35 page)

The girls slide into one another and lock in place until Birdie steps back and says, “I’d like to say a few words.” She may not understand Birdie’s devotion to Louise, but Tess is humbled by the sincerity of it. She bows her head in respect.

The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul….

When Birdie finishes reciting the entire Twenty-Third Psalm by heart, she shrugs and tells her sister’s amazed face, “I’ve been reading the Bible. It’s not as bad as it used to be. Do you want to say something?”

Her knee-jerk reaction is to repeat one of her mother’s favorite expressions—“That’s the way the cookie crumbles”—but she’d been working on forgiving Louise the way I’d suggested she should. Tess knows that if a woman wasn’t loved by her mother, she’ll go one of two ways when she herself becomes a mom. Either she’ll make it her life’s work to bestow upon her children the love she never received, or she’ll treat her babies the same harsh way she’d been treated. Louise took route two.

Tessie was just seven years old at the time. She’d come home crying from the park with a bloody cut below the knee. She was still young enough to hope, like Birdie, that
this
would be the time that her mother would tend to her the way she saw the other mommies in the neighborhood tend to their kids. Louise would express dismay, sit Tess down on the edge of the bathtub to ever so gently wash off the boo-boo with warm water, brush it with iodine, and cover it with care and a Band-Aid. Give her a little kiss maybe, and tell her how brave she was before she sent her on her way. But when Tess came wailing to Louise that afternoon, her mother was in the midst of scrubbing the kitchen floor. She glanced up at her daughter’s bleeding leg and barked out, “You think that’s bad? When I was a kid, I fell off the monkey bars at school and broke an arm and a leg. I laid there for two hours until a nun found me and called my ma who told her I was supposed to be home doing the wash and shouldn’t have been playing on the monkey bars in the first place.” Louise wrung out her rag in the bucket. “Sister Elizabeth found me and dropped me off at the hospital. I was in traction for a month. When Ma finally came to visit, she bitched the whole time about the bill.” Tessie got only a glimpse at the profound pain in Louise’s eyes before she told her, “You know where the Band-Aids are,” and went back to her scrubbing.

Tess looks at the golden cube in her sister’s hands and decides to recite an Atticus quote from the book that means so much to
her
. “‘You never understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.’” It was the best she could do.

When the two of them step into the icy water, Birdie kisses the golden box before she lifts up the adhesive flap the way Will had showed her. She remains dry-eyed when she tips the box and says, “Dust to dust…,” but Tess finds herself welling up when the water claims what remained of the woman who never loved them.

The house emptied shortly after a feast of pork chops, apple sauce, mashed potatoes, and steamed baby corn, carrots, and green beans. Henry’s playing poker at Teeter’s house. He has a sister that Haddie is friends with so they drove off together. Will is plying his trade. The Finley girls are in the kitchen, busy cleaning up. Like the old days. With a twist. Birdie rinses the dishes
too
thoroughly in water so steamy that it curls her pixie-cut, dyed blond hair as she scours stains off pots that Tess had thought were permanent. She shoves her hand down the garbage disposal to scrape the blades clean with a lemon. Attacks the sink with the Dutch cleanser until it shines.

She pauses at one point to tell Tessie, who’s been drying the pots and wiping down the yellow tile counters, “Almost done here. Where are the rest of your cleaning supplies? Your powder-room sink needs work.”

Tess needs to intervene or her sister might stay up half the night cleaning. She places her hand on Birdie’s back and says, “But I’ve been so looking forward to the two of us cuddling and talking. How about you leave the sink ’til tomorrow? Can you do that?”

A fine sweat breaks out on the side of Birdie’s nose.

“Don’t make me play the cancer card,” Tess says. “Go upstairs and take a shower.” She doesn’t tell her sister to relax. That’s what people who don’t know any better tell people like them. “Please? I’ll be right behind you.”

Birdie’s arms start to shake. She’s fighting the compulsion, but the effort to overcome the tug of war is monumental. She chews her lip, looks at her sister, and then back at the powder room, and then back at her sister, and chews her lip harder.

Tessie removes the sponge from her sister’s hand and tosses it in the sink. Birdie picks it up and puts it in its proper place, adjusts it three more times, and says with clenched fists, “Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. But if you love your family, you’d post an out-of-order sign on the powder-room door. That sink is a breeding ground for malaria,” before she stomps toward the staircase.

After Tessie lets Garbo out, she makes two cups of Ovaltine and brings them up to the guest room that she’s readied, she hopes, to her sister’s liking. Her suitcases have already been emptied, her foldables put away perfectly in the oak chest, or hung in the closet on color-coded padded hangers that she’d brought along. She is quite the clothes horse.

Birdie pads into the bedroom in a pretty, frilly nightgown, still damp from the shower. She throws back the new quilt that covers the brass bed, points at the sheets, and says, “Get in. Age before beauty.”

After Tess gets cozy beside her, they sip their Ovaltine and talk nonstop.

When Will comes home after work, he knocks on the bedroom door, pokes his head in, and says, “Good night, girls. Love the milk mustaches,” and shuts the door behind him.

Birdie says, “He smells like fried onions and he’s stupidly cheerful, but I like him.”

Tess says, “Yeah, me too,” and resumes describing her cancer ordeal to her medical transcriptionist sister, who, of course, wants to hear every little detail and see her scars. When she lifts up her cows-sipping-
café-au-lait
-on-the-
Champs-Élysées
nightie, Birdie inspects Dr. Whaley’s handiwork and says, “I’ve seen worse, a lot worse.”

Tess wants to know more about her work and asks, “Do you enjoy it?”

“It’s a mixed bag. I think I have half the diseases I’m typing up, and most of the doctors have God complexes, but I can do it from home and I’m really, really good at it.”

Tessie doesn’t doubt that. Birdie can’t help but be insanely thorough. “And how’s life in Boca Raton?”

“Not terrible. But I still wake up every morning feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Palm trees are weird, and palmetto bugs were created by Satan.”

They compare symptoms next. It’s one of the ways they bond.

Birdie’s tells Tess that the delusions had disappeared with cutting-edge medication, that she’d learned to manage her struggles with food years ago, but, “As you saw today…the OCD and panic attacks are still a problem.”

Tess tells her how Louise’s belittling voice is not as loud as it used to be, and that her flashbacks—other than the one she’s having now about the many nights the Finley sisters spent doing the same thing they’re doing—seem to be less frequent, but she still deals with depression, and panic attacks too. “But I haven’t dissociated in a while.”

“At least, you don’t think you have.”

Tess laughs. She’d forgotten how funny her sister could be when she feels secure.

The subject changes to talk of friends of the imaginary sort. Birdie grins and says, “Do you think Bee and Grace are buddies? I bet they are.”

(“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.”)

“I’m making an effort to be more social,” Tess confesses, “but I’m not good at it. I’m awkward. Not like you.” When she’s on the right medication, Birdie is more at ease around what the girls call, “NPs”—Normal People.

“My shrink says it’s important that I get out of the house and mingle if I don’t want to exacerbate my agoraphobia, so I take night classes at the community college near my apartment. That’s fine, until we go out afterwards for coffee. I don’t have much in common with people who don’t need to count or clean or do things four times or always sit as close as possible to an exit.” Birdie gulps down the remainder of her Ovaltine. “Esther? The old woman I told you about who lives in the apartment below me? She taught me how to play Mahjong and I clean her apartment for her once a week, so sometimes I can convince myself I have a real friend, but I don’t, not really.”

“You have me, Bird.”

“I know, Tessie, I know.”

“You could move back.”

This was an ongoing request in their on-again-off-again conversations throughout the years. Whenever she’d brought it up in the past, Birdie was still dealing with her rivalry issues and she’d flat-out refuse. Tess hopes they’re beyond that now. It would be wonderful to know she could be at her sister’s side quickly if she needed to be, and vice versa.

“You have your poker winnings and you can do your transcribing from anywhere,” Tess says. “And you wouldn’t have to worry about finding somewhere to live right off. You could stay with us until you found a place of your own. You could be the weird aunt!” She ruffles her sister’s hair so it’s sticking out every which way. “Our Humane Society is top drawer, so there’d be no problem when it came to adopting cats. The resale shop carries lots of strange outfits, and you…might even meet the man of your dreams! One of the best psychiatric facilities in the country is right up the road. Maybe they host a happy hour on Friday nights!”

When Birdie playfully smacks her with a throw pillow, Tess laughs, but it’s tinged with sadness. As wonderful as the moving-home scenario was, they’re both wondering how long they can maintain this closeness before one of them gets their feelings hurt and puts the brakes on the relationship until they can gather up enough courage to try again.

Birdie says, “Enough about me. So what’s going on with you and Will?”

After a tearful Tess shares her suspicions with her, Birdie hugs her and says, “Men. Bah. You can’t live with ’em, and you can’t move furniture without them.” That was one of Louise’s old gripes. “Are you
sure
he’s cheating?”

“No, not positive.” Tess blows her nose. “I’ve been all over the place. When we stopped making love, I thought, at first, he was just sick of me and all my problems. I didn’t suspect he was having an affair until he started giving me lame excuses about why he was coming home late on Wednesday nights. Then a month or so later, he blurted out that his lack of interest didn’t have anything to do with me. He told me he was being so distant because he was having a midlife crisis and that he was impotent. He had a lot of the classic symptoms, so I wanted to believe that, but now…,” she starts to well up again.

“Do you suspect someone?” Birdie asks.

“The hostess at the diner. Connie Lushman.”

Birdie purses her lips. “Why does that name sound so familiar?”

“Will was engaged to her when we met at Arthur Murray.”

“Ahhh…right. You have any proof they’re messing around besides him not coming home late on Wednesday nights?”

Tess tells her about the smell of Tabu and the long blond hairs she finds on Will’s shirts, and then she asks the one who knows her like no other, “Do you think I’m just being paranoid? Or as Will likes to say, making one of my erroneous assumptions?”

Birdie takes a minute to consider all that Tess has shared with her. She knows that her opinions matter to her, especially the medical ones. “A midlife crisis
can
be disabling, and they’re real individual in nature. I’ve typed up reports where men have affairs like it’s their job, and others who experience a radical downswing in their love life. There could also be other reasons why Will might be holding back.”

“Like…?”

“Stress. Or he could think of you as too fragile. That happens a lot in cancer cases. Husbands get afraid they’ll break their sick wives. Or maybe he’s a little nervous to try again after such a long time. What if he failed?” Birdie runs the tip of her tongue across her top lip and connects with the milk mustache. “Or you could be right and he
is
messing around. Have you tried talking to him?”

“He’s not big on conversation, never has been. I tried a couple of times to draw him out before I got sick, but he would suddenly need to go to work or start snoring, and when I had to have the surgeries and then radiation I stopped trying because what if he admitted he
was
having an affair? I couldn’t face knowing the truth, not then.”

Birdie takes Tessie’s hands in hers and says, “All I can tell you is that when he looks at you, there’s love in his eyes. And no offense meant, but…he doesn’t seem smart enough to pull off an affair. That takes timing, execution, and attention to detail. His barn door was open when he left for work tonight.”

Tess had noticed that as well, but how many times can you remind a guy?

Birdie regroups. “Besides the hair and perfume, which is totally circumstantial, by the way, you got any other proof that Connie’s makin’ a play for Will?”

“The girls at the diner talk about their love lives all the time, but Connie doesn’t, and I know she’s involved with somebody. I overhead Otto say that she has a boyfriend and he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t miss much of anything.”

“And Otto is…?”

“The dishwasher.” Tess fills her in on his obsession with the CIA and the Planet Argon, his dedication and fondness for Will, how he’d stalked the girl from the resale shop, and finally, his heart-rending breakup with his Russian mail-order bride.

“Other than the obvious paranoia, he sounds romantic, like a take-charge kind of guy,” Birdie says a little dreamy, like Tess had just described the dashing lead character in a Barbara Cartland novel.

“I don’t…I can’t keep….” Tess rolls onto her back and tugs the covers over her face. “I have to find out if Will’s cheating on me. Time’s running out.”