My brother’s voice on my phone in the morning, beseeching me to meet him in the city. There is something I should know before being angry, which I am well within my rights to do, he admits in his message, because of the play, the years, what he calls the “Whitman’s Sampler Assortment of Crimes” he’s committed against me, referencing our grandmother’s favorite chocolate without realizing the irony. I’m swayed by the well-placed intimate reference. Besought. His voice weapon and shield; higher-pitched than I remember, from what must be sorrow or lack of sleep. Then something I’ve never heard him say: I’m sorry. The audacity that repulsed me in the evening heals me in the morning and I show up to a public city atrium feeling manipulated, hopeful, confused, weak-willed, undercaffeinated, assuming the worst and hoping for it. Human.
Amid a bank of metal chairs and the sun, a misplaced-looking family consults a map. A couple shares a salad. A well-dressed woman folds a receipt into her purse. The family’s mother says, “I understand.” I see my brother, sitting in the farthest chair, partly obscured by a recycling receptacle, taking a bite from a sandwich. My legs tremble as I walk over, too nervous to call out. Age has receded his hairline and broadened his shoulders. He is almost unrecognizable.
“Hello,” I say, standing over him.
He drags his fingers across the cellophane wrapper to clean them. “Hello.”
“Tom?”
“Greg,” he apologizes. “I think you’re looking for someone else.”
The other tables are brotherless. You won’t find him, my grandmother said. I dial his number.
Yards away, the well-dressed woman answers her phone.
I watch her speak and hear my brother in the earpiece. “Are you here?” he says.
“Tom?”
The woman snaps her purse closed and stands, turns in my direction.
At an empty table I sit in a chair that hurts instantly as my brother walks toward me wearing a prim blouse tucked into black work pants: his movement edits the courtyard’s sound; the lost family’s reorganizations gone, the honking of morning trucks gone, to include only the tapping of heeled boots as I notice the obvious things first; the slimmer cheeks and neck but then as this figure comes closer I notice deeper, more familiar, stranger, the dark skin familiar, the flashing eyes familiar, the simple eyeliner and lip gloss new, my understanding has almost caught up by the time they reach the table—a woman, who moves like water being poured from a delicate vase.
The other chair squeaks as she sits. Her perfume finds me.
“You can hang up now,” she says.
The family, oblivious to anyone having metamorphic moments nearby, asks one another how important it is to see the museum and the church in one day. Could they do one in the morning, before the airport? But the flight is so early. Well, whose fault is that?
“Do you work here?” I say.
“I keep an office on the tenth floor. I like being around businesspeople. No one bothers me. They’re more polite than artists and don’t ask questions.”
“You’ve always liked your space,” I say.
The mother of the tourist family stands above us. “Do you know how to get to City Market?” The woman I am sitting with gives careful, patient directions, as I study her for anything that remains of the person I used to know, the endless capacity with strangers even while wagging her heel underneath the table in anticipation of the mother leaving. The elegant hands, the voice that has always sounded like stacked bars of light. She concludes, “The city is a grid meant to baffle us all,” to make the mother grin before she rejoins her family.
I experience the sensation of walking out into the sun after a long movie. My eyes won’t adjust. “You’re a woman,” I say.
She says, “Yes.”
“Do you have a new name?”
“Simone.”
“Simone,” I say. “Where did it come from?”
“I just liked it,” she says, looking uncomfortable.
“Did you have a ceremony? It seems like the kind of thing that calls for a ceremony.”
She nods. “A few of us gathered upstate. I have a house there now.”
I swallow the pain this puts in my heart. “A house,” I say. We avoid each other’s eyes as we speak.
“Would you like me to tell you about it? It sits on acres of land. If you can believe it, I dig around in the earth. Me. I’m not going to be joining the garden club anytime soon but there have been carrots.”
My laugh punctures the politeness. She relaxes.
“We made food and sat on the lawn. I was nervous, but a friend of mine had recently been through cancer and I thought, if she can be here … It was a filthy gorgeous day. I mean really it was greedy of us. Slight breeze. Air you could get drunk on. Even the grass was shining. The food was good, well, the food was okay. We did our best but the steak kebabs were dry. Another friend made a silly remark when she walked outside—a silly joke, but we were crying with laughter. Do you remember, a million years ago, when the old lady walked through the screen door? It was like that. Everyone in a good mood on the same day. I didn’t want it to end. It felt like a sin when the sun set. But then the yard was filled with fireflies. I’d been in the city for so long I forgot about fireflies. I stood in the center of the lawn, everyone stood around me. I said, ‘I’m Simone.’ Everyone said, ‘Hi, Simone.’ That was it. We sat down and ate the crappy kebabs.”
She pantomimes eating kebab. Her wrists are thin and mapped with veins, like mine. She holds this woman’s grace and the person I used to know’s ability to entertain with an offhanded gesture. She is simultaneous. Wholly present. Wholly past. Wholly grandmother. Wholly bird. I struggle to lace up my understanding.
At this hour the atrium contains only a few stray businesspeople, zagging to their particular doors. The couple at the table next to us gathers their things. Their kids run around the trash bin and the father yells, “Be careful.”
Simone and I leave the sitting area and walk to a glass-walled restaurant. I am aware of her form, the rustling of materials next to me, as we move into the café, as we wait for the waiter to pull the table out from the wall, as Simone slides in and crosses her legs. After we order, she asks what I like about the groom and I tell her he doesn’t have to be drunk to dance.
“How nice,” she says, concern showing through her honeyed tone.
I tell her he’s exact, a literalist. He taught me the right way to say experiment. “Ex-spear-i-ment, not, ex-pear-i-ment.”
“Experiment,” Simone says, not understanding.
“You’re saying it the way I do,” I say. “Say: Ex-per-iment.”
“That’s what I think I am saying. Ex-spear-iment.”
We say the word back and forth until each of us forgets which way is correct. I tell her that he asked me to marry him on our fifth date.
We’re not accustomed to having meals together, so one of us talks while the other steals bites from her plate: ahi salad in her case, soup and a panini half in mine. When it’s my turn to speak I am more expansive than normal so she has time to eat. She replies and I take my own careful bites. We work together to avoid silence and in this painstaking way get through the details of our lives, half of our meals. Then the conversation launches, we each find an easy listener in the other, and I lose track of who is eating, speaking. I’ve never been to this restaurant whose fixtures, counters, and tables are built from glass, yet in it I realize everything can have a new name. Perhaps our relationship could, as well. We could be sisters who travel upstate, I think, then shelve the thought, as familial dread grows.
Omitting the visit from our grandmother, I tell Simone about the wedding, Rose, that the groom’s family are academics. Each of them looks perpetually poised to ask a question after a great deal of thought. They’re rich enough that each of them only has to be good at one thing.
“Must be a nice change from our family,” she says.
“Do you know what they do when they’re upset with one another?” I say. “I mean, furious, livid-upset?”
“What?”
I sip water, pause for effect. “Nothing. Not a fucking thing.”
“How do people live like that?” she says. “Granny would burn the house down.”
I study her face for an indication there is more behind the reference. “She would.”
The conversation shifts. We perform irreverent jokes about unfunny, unjokable things, and unreel tiny parts of ourselves, testing, unreeling more, within fingertip’s distance but not touching, almost like holding hands.
“I never felt altogether boy,” she says. “I hated the places on me that weren’t soft. It was more manageable as a kid because then we’re all androgynous, but puberty came, and suddenly everyone’s differences emerged. What my body produced felt incorrect. I prayed to be one of those guys who couldn’t grow a beard, but the stubble grew almost as fast as I could shave. So much hair in our family.”
“All those cuts,” I say, and she says, “The cuts. I was jealous of how easy your body was. I wanted shoulders like yours. When the play did well, I was able to go to Europe. I started taking hormones, got work done, and liked it, so I got more. I finally felt like I was arriving. But everything has a price. I don’t mean money. I didn’t think I’d be able to see anyone from my old life again.”
With my old life I am formered. “So you wrote a play about my life, won awards, took the money, and disappeared.”
“I didn’t think you’d forgive me. It’s not your way. You’re so good at holding grudges. It’s one of your superpowers.”
“You didn’t give me a chance, though, did you? What do I do now? Do I mourn for my brother?”
“Maybe,” she says. “He’s not coming back.”
A group of tourists walk by trailing the chintzy-clean smell of people who’ve scrubbed with products that can function as shampoo and toothpaste. What I perceive as her lack of loyalty to a person I love bothers me in a way that is impossible to articulate. “Did you mourn for him, for us?”
“I mourned through my whole childhood. I’m over it. I was relieved.”
“Simone,” I say, and she says, “Simone.”
“You’re used to the idea,” I say. “But I’m only now hearing about it.”
“Transition takes time.”
“Adrian said that last night,” I say. “He protected you. Do the actors know?”
“Legally, for the sake of my career, there are essentially two people: Simone, a person in the world, and Tom, the author of plays, most notably, Parakeet. Tom the playwright is elusive and mercurial. This arrangement might change in the future, but for now it works.”
“We were coming to meet you last night,” I say. “Your actors would have seen Simone.”
“They’ve met me. You’d be amazed how easy it is for a middle-aged woman to slip in and out of a room unnoticed.”
We finish our meals. Simone searches for the waiter.
“The actors were terrible,” I say. “Especially Present Day Luna.”
“You’ve always hated people who are similar to you.”
Little-sister aggravation heats me. “You got a few details wrong,” I say. “We didn’t notice the man enter. And Yuna was a grad student. She was going into her second year.”
Simone shifts in her seat. “I did the best with what I could remember.”
“From my memory? I don’t remember you asking, or even visiting the hospital. Not then or when Granny died. Engineering…,” I say, punishing, “… was what she was studying.”
“It’s fiction.” Simone hands her plate to the waiter.
“It’s not,” I say. “It’s my life. You got famous from it.”
We split the check, walk to the street, and linger on the sidewalk. Anxiety I experienced whenever I left Tom has transferred to her. I want to hold everything on the street close to me.
“Can I see your house upstate?”
A dog passes, attached to a leash held by a stooped man. A waiter dashes from the restaurant to the street to hail a cab. “Let’s go slow here,” she says.
“Did you miss me?”
“I wish I could come to the wedding.” She guesses my thoughts. “But for obvious reasons,” she displays herself, “it’s not the best idea.”
On the corner, a man throws a baby into the air, catches him, throws again.
Simone starts a cigarette. “How old are you now, thirty-six? I guess that makes me almost forty.”
“You look good,” I say.
“You look like hell,” she says. Too quickly.
“Sorry if I’m bothering you,” I say.
“You’re not bothering me,” she says simply.
“I’m kidding. How could I be bothering you? I never see you.”
“Right,” she says, not understanding.
My anger blooms. “Is this how people apologize for using their sister’s life in a play?”
“I hear that you’re upset.” She exhales smoke. “It was easier to talk about what I witnessed than what I went through. It was, just, easier.”
“Your childhood was my childhood.”
“It wasn’t.” She is managing me. “You clearly don’t understand.”
“You knew you were becoming a woman. Give me time.”
“I didn’t become a woman.” Her eyes clouding over. Something slipping away. “I’m not sure why I thought this would work. What is the first thing you said?” She mimics my voice. “Where do my memories go?”
A pocket of quiet. Both of us breathing. We are arguing over who has it worse, which is at least what siblings do. I’m torn between wanting to yell and wanting to hold her, but anger makes me a snake. “Who fucking cares what my first thought was? You used my life to collect your awards. So brave.”
“Realistic,” she says. “I could get murdered for what I am.” She loses her composure, which I count as victory. She opens the door of an arriving car.
“When did you call that?” I say.
A frowning man jogs past. A moment that means goodbye. She gets into the car. “I don’t know why I thought this would work.”
“You already said that,” I say. I say, “If I told you Granny showed up a few days ago in the form of a bird, to tell me to find you, what would you say?”
“I’d say it sounds like her to show up late and ruin things.” She shuts the door and the car moves down the street. Every stoplight turns green. I watch until it disperses among cabs and pedestrians. Numbed by pain the origin of which I don’t understand, I descend the stairs to the subway where three boys perch on the hull of the subway bench, addressing another who wears a red scarf and searches the tracks for the train. The scarf is the color of Adrian’s. This is the coincidence of cities.
“You got a girlfriend,” one of the boys says. “Who is conveniently never around?”
“That’s right,” the boy with the red scarf says. “Her school’s outside the city. In Long Island or some shit.”
“In school,” one boy says to another. “Okay,” he says. “In school.” He lifts one leg comically above the seat and puts it down.
“She’s going to be a nurse.”
More laughing.
I want to tell him to be silent because he’s making it worse but instead I eat a banana over a trash can and replay Simone’s remark, You look like hell. The last word a chop to the throat.
The lead boy reads texts from someone named Priscilla. A respectful pall grows over their faces. “It would be rad to see you,” he reads. “Hashtag boardwalk, hashtag loser, dollar sign, dollar sign, two lipstick emojis.” He holds up two fingers. “Two.”
The other boys demand to see the phone he hides behind his back.
One advances to deliver a monologue: “Last week I was in the middle of the floor doing applejacks when Priscilla stopped to watch. She was with her friends who live up on Allegheny and I was like”—he sidles up on an invisible girl—“and she was like”—he does a girl batting her eyelashes, squirming with pleasure—“and her friends were like”—he shows his palms to his friends, slides away to give himself and the invisible girl privacy—“it was personal.”
“No, you didn’t,” the boys say.
“How come I did, though?”
The boy in the red scarf slices through the air with a definitive no. “You all are suspicious. You don’t believe shit.”
“Look, look, look.” The lead boy stands on the bench. “If you say you got a girlfriend who’s never around, I’m gonna ask questions like, does she exist?”
The other boys help:
“Or, is she ugly?”
“Does she have a lazy eye? Or a hang jaw?”
“Hold up,” says the boy with the red scarf. “What’s a hang jaw?”
The lead boy lets his bottom jaw hang slack. Red Scarf shakes his head as his friends laugh. He hides a smile by checking for the train again.
“Is she an alien?” one of his friends says.
“Listen.” The lead boy claps everyone to order: “Either your girl is ugly, has a hang jaw, or doesn’t exist.”
“Look, look, look,” Red Scarf says. “She’s not ugly or an alien. She’s from Long Island.”
They hit one another and repeat it. Red Scarf has to stand and take it as they collect tears with their fingertips. There’s no reasoning with them through laughter this thick. “She’s from Long Island,” they say to one another.
A sign hangs over the platform. NOT FEELING LIKE YOURSELF? it reads. TELL A POLICE OFFICER.
I recognize a woman in a tweed coat as the trumpeter from the previous night. A dainty purse hangs from a chain on her shoulder. Without her trumpet she appears vulnerable, like seeing an acquaintance in their underwear. She catches me staring.
“No trumpet tonight,” I say, by way of explanation.
She gives her purse a rattle. “Night off.”
We smile at each other.
“I sense it, though,” she says after a moment. “Is the weird thing. By my side, like I’m still carrying it.” She gestures to the area around her left hip.
“Phantom limb,” I say.
“Right.”
Like a god the train enters the station, sanctifying every kid being given a hard time. I follow the boys on, certain Red Scarf is hoping the change of venue will cease the teasing. My ears brace for the peal of more laughter. None comes. Suddenly polite, the boys take seats near the door and I hold the pole. When the train lurches forward, a baby throws its doll. A father flutters across the car to catch it. So many parts of the doll are round that it builds momentum over the soiled floor. Strangers lean from their seats to help. It takes a few people but the doll is returned to the baby. The father is flustered and grateful. “Thank you,” he keeps saying to everyone, even to people who didn’t help, like me.
I will do a head-clearing shot of whiskey at the bar before bed. It will be a quiet day. I will eat breakfast in the pleasing room off the lobby. Maybe I’ll run on the treadmill. Get a massage. Get trapped for hours in the Inn’s moody elevator. Pick up my bouquet from the most ardent florist in the city. A dish of strawberries. Rolled newspaper in the hallway.
The train rumbles through the tunnel. Everyone is settled. Everyone is doing okay.
On Friday, the groom will arrive along with our families and we will eat shrimp at the rehearsal dinner. His normalcy will be a welcome relief from my bizarre, cracked relations. On Saturday I will be a woman in a dress stepping over a threshold into married life. A bride. I will finally leave my family behind.
I did what you asked, Granny. Release me.
Someone says: “She’s from Long Island.”
The boys done in by laughter again.