My first cousin is rich and I am poor; that is the way it is always been. Not always, not when we were kids. If we hadn’t been kids together, we wouldn’t even know each other now.
Some of my friends say that my cousin makes a god out of money, but I tell them to spell that backwards and then they’d have it right. Raina uses money for insulation; she lives behind its barricades and sends it out like a good dog to retrieve the things that keep her secure inside her house that is as big as the Giant’s castle in Jack and the Beanstalk: art for its walls, for instance, the kind that is bought because of its resale value, or to complement the colours of oriental rugs and silk draperies, a practice that can have unfortunate results sometimes. Raina told me she was at a dinner party once where a reproduction of Gustav Moreau’s Salome was the most prominent thing in the dining room. “I could hardly force down my sushi,” she said to me. “Although the gore dripping from the severed head of John the Baptist really set off the crimson motif in her tablecloth.”
Money brings Raina period furniture and the latest imitations of period furniture; it gives her the gardener who tends to her imported trees and titled flowers. It regularly summons a depressed middle-aged woman called Mrs. Mahoney to come in to clean, and to get paid under the table so that she won’t loose a precious cent of the $600 a month Welfare gives her for her rent and her utilities, and the bread and eggs and sardines she lives on. It is responsible for the two vehicles in Raina’s quadruple garage, one big enough to contain the entire cast of Cats (as long as they kept their tails tight to their bodies), the other as small and chic as one of Raina’s purses. But the most important thing the good dog money brings Raina is her wardrobe. Raina’s closets could hold most of the world’s homosexuals in denial, and each one is a transvestite’s dream.
I, on the other hand, wander the world like St. Francis of Asissi, who went barefoot and half-naked in all seasons because he wanted to experience God as intimately as possible. Of course, I have a lot more clothes than St. Francis ever did, but in my cousin’s world I am considered as naked as a jay bird because I don’t own a single stitch of designer clothing. Except for some of Raina’s cast-offs, but she is so much smaller than I am that most of these end up going to Jumpin’ Jessie. Jessie begs on the streets sometimes, and I worry that one day Raina will see her in one of her old Dolce and Gabbana dresses, and then all hell will break loose.
But Raina is rarely in my neighborhood. It distresses her even to pick me up there; the sights and sounds and smells of poverty put fear into her belly. But Raina, I say, just look at the people, look them in the eyes, why don’t you–come for a walk with me and I’ll introduce you. To Connor, who plays the fiddle as though he invented it, taunting the strings until they get angry enough to throw back his own rage at him in a wild wild tune, or weep out the memory of his wife’s suicide. To Billy, who got his head beaten in so many times in a foster home in Salmon Cove that he is the best tea leaf reader in town–he can pull your future right out of the air as if it were a dandelion spore floating by. To Jessie, who is as mad as three waltzing mice and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld. And to Martha, who would love you like a child. Her daughter was killed by a drunk driver when she was three, and you are so tiny and thin and big-eyed you could be her girl grown up a little.
Raina tells me I am crazier than Jessie for even suggesting such a thing. This is because she thinks poverty is contagious and doesn’t want to risk catching it. So usually I take my bike or the bus and meet her at the shops. This is because, in my mind, on the rare occasions Raina does pull up in front of my house, she is driving a Brinks truck and motioning wildly with a pistol for me to hurry up, hurry up, get in. And then we speed away out of what she refers to as “the ghetto.” It hurts me to go tearing off like that because I love where I live; I love the people, even the ones I don’t particularly like. Maybe because it is easier to look through the rags of poverty and see who is under there. You can hardly ever get the rich out from inside their suits and dresses, or their cars and houses. And you can never get into their country unless you have a designer label on what you are wearing. The labels are like bar codes: the rich swipe you with their eyes the same way the check-out girl at the supermarket runs the bar code on the thing you are buying over the scanner to find out what it’s worth.
Whenever Raina is driving me, she always slows down when we cross the road that is the demarcation line between Raina and Them, between East and West Belfast, between Israel and Palestine. Not much, though; Raina never really relaxes until we are inside the Great Mall. And why does Raina the Rich take her poor cousin shopping with her? One of the reasons is that neither of us has any sisters, or brothers for that matter, although everyone always thinks we’re sisters. Our families lived across the street from each other in the suburb where we grew up. Her mother and mine were the sisters, twins joined at the soul from birth. When they married, even their husbands couldn’t separate them and they ended up living a stone’s throw from each other. Their daughters couldn’t separate them either. Raina’s mother and my mother spent more time with each other than with us, although we were often with them when they were together, especially when we were small. But there was such a thick, brilliant web connecting them, and we were never more than slight objects on its perimeter, quivering on gossamer-thin lines. I was happy with the Kool-Aid and cookies we got when I nagged often enough and loud enough, but Raina usually didn’t even eat hers. She was a thin child and so was I, but eventually I took on a woman’s shape.
I guess I didn’t really care that much about my mother. I suppose I loved her; I was sad when she died, and I think of her often, but she was always too far away to be meaningful. And besides, the world was big and rich and warm and full of things to attach to, for a moment or an hour, or even years sometimes. One summer’s day when I was ten, a blue and yellow butterfly spent part of an afternoon on the back of my hand; it would go away and ruffle the skirts of my mother’s roses, her Madame del Bards and Charlottes, her Ravels and Annas, but I kept my arm outstretched and it came back to me three or four times. I hardly breathed while it sat on the back of my dirty brown hand; it was so lovely and foreign and fragile I couldn’t understand why it wanted to be with me. At school we sometimes played a game called statues during recess, so it was fairly easy for me to stand without moving, like a tree or the wrought-iron Pan that my mother had placed in the middle of her rose garden. Even when I was a child and didn’t know that he was the god of wild things, Pan seemed incongruous to me standing among the rows of tailor-made blossoms. He looked as if he was at the wrong party.
The feel of the blue and yellow butterfly on the skin of my hand is the only thing I remember about that summer, although Raina says it was the summer we got our first two-piece bathing suits and thought we were the coolest chicks at the neighborhood pool.
Even when we were kids Raina was planning her getaway to the new suburbs walled like medieval towns. While I was down playing in the graveyard at the bottom of our street because it had trees big enough for climbing and a brook with water spiders blurring its surface in their haste to get away from my outstretched fingers, Raina was in her room reading Vogue and Vanity Fair and Chatelaine and all the other magazines that told her what to eat and wear and do to end up like the women in the ads. The ads were Raina’s favourite part of the magazines. I found the sleek, sure remote women in them intimidating; I also thought they were like Sleeping Beauty, lovely but sad because they had to stay as still as statues, locked up between the pages of a magazine until the prince came.
Occasionally there was a man in the pictures. Usually he was standing to one side gazing in awe at the woman’s beauty, with a rose in his outstretched hand; sometimes he was behind her with his hands resting lightly on her waist, but he never had his arms all the way around her because then you wouldn’t be able to see her Chanel bathing suit in all its glorious detail. That is how I knew he wasn’t the prince, only a courtier.
The other reason Raina asks me to go shopping with her is because I carry her bags and keep tabs on where she lays her Prada purse and her Alfred Sung sunglasses, not that she ever asks me to. But I do it anyway because she becomes so forgetful in the shops; she moves in a trance from piles of sequined blouses that cost more than I make in a week to racks of dresses so fantastically constructed that you know they could go dancing without anyone inside them; indeed, they look as though if you did get inside them you would be lost because they are so much more than you are; you must fit their shape, move to accommodate their darts and kick pleats, perhaps even cut your breasts and fill them with plastic so they will sit high and tight on your chest and not interfere with a neckline that is as wide as the Amazon and plunges to the navel; no, these dresses are not about to make allowances for you.
Raina moves up and down the marble floors of her temples of haute couture as though she is walking underwater; she moves as one bewitched, in thrall. One day I watched her stand for fifteen minutes looking in a glass case at jeweled butterfly hair clips and tiny gauze-covered handbags with enamelled dragonflies on them. I once saw a Brazilian butterfly that was as big as a bird and the colour of the sky in the Yukon, where I taught on a reserve years ago. But the butterfly was dead and under glass like the hair clips. If I had Raina’s money, I would go to South America and find that butterfly, clipped to the throat of some gingko-green tree deep in the rainforest. (Perhaps I would even stretch out my arms and hold my breath.) Raina hardly ever goes anywhere though. If she does, it’s on a cruise ship, or she and her husband fly straight to a compound in some hot country where he can golf and she can lie by the pool in her Ralph Lauren suit, with enough sun screen on to protect her from the radiation of a million nuclear bombs.
Yesterday’s outing was a dose of what Raina calls “retail therapy.”
“I’m really down,” she said when she called me, “can you go shopping?” Raina had been to the funeral home the night before; her husband’s partner’s mother had died.
“I didn’t know you knew Harry’s mother,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re upset.”
“I never laid eyes on the woman,” said Raina. “There was a picture of her on top of the casket, though, from when she was in her forties. She looked kind of like Vivien Leigh back then.”
“Why didn’t they put a more recent picture of her on it?” I asked, but Raina didn’t answer.
“What I’m upset about,” said Raina, “is that Harry’s wife had on that black Misura suit I was going to buy, you know, the top and pants with the gold lining and the ribs down the front.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t think she shopped at Mavericks and Molls.”
“I didn’t think so either,” said Raina,” but it’s the only shop that carries that line. She must have gone in there.” Like a thief in the night, I thought to myself. Raina owns Mavericks and Molls even though she doesn’t really, but she is the only one in her set who wears certain clothes from certain shops, and woe betide anyone who dares to encroach on her territory. I almost felt sorry for Harry’s wife, but like everyone else, I was born with a finite amount of compassion and I decided she didn’t really need any of mine.
Actually, we are all born with an infinite amount of everything, but for some reason each of us decides we are in the red in some area. Compassion is my area. I’ve given a lot of it away, and some days I think I can feel my nails scratch the bottom of the barrel when I reach down for more. I’m like some nineteenth-century outport shopkeeper, worrying about the flour and the sugar and the salt beef running out before the ship carrying provisions can get through the ice in the spring. But then Billy comes over and makes tea, and after we drink it he rips open my tea bag and dumps the grounds in my cup, and tells me to flip it over and spin it around three times. And then he turns the cup right side up and looks in it, and says he sees a rainbow and the bluebird of happiness. And I feel the barrel start to fill up again.
Raina found the suit that Harry’s wife had on at the funeral home; there was one left and it was in her size. Mavericks and Molls had had only two of the suits to begin with; there are never more than one or two of anything in such shops. The people that buy their clothes in these places are the kind of people who don’t want to meet themselves on the street. That was a favourite expression of my mother’s. “If you get that dress, you’ll end up meeting yourself on the street,” she’d say when I was a teenager and she and Raina’s mother and I were out shopping. I loved that expression; indeed, I even liked the idea of meeting myself on the street. “Hi,” I’d imagine myself saying, “want to go get a Coke?”
“I’m just going to try it on,” Raina said, “come on,” and we both went into one of the dressing rooms. I’m not comfortable watching Raina undress, but I can’t tell her this, and I can’t say that the dressing room is not big enough for both of us because an entire third-world family could live there quite comfortably. The dressing rooms in Mavericks and Molls have faux Chippendale chairs and mirrors that are slightly smoky and lit so that even I look like Miss Cosmic Universe in them. And big terra cotta urns full of pussy willows, which someone has sprayed with gold paint. “Who would paint the lily,” I said to my cousin, “or gild refined gold?” “What?” Raina said. But I didn’t answer her because I knew she would forget I had ever spoken in a matter of seconds. Which she did.
The reason I don’t like to see Raina naked, or semi-naked, is because Raina is 43 but she has the body of a 14-year-old. And there is not a mark on her face, not a wrinkle or a line or a spot of discoloration. But Raina has never had surgery and she rarely exercises. And she lives on toast and salads. But there she is, with her adolescent breasts and her unblemished skin, and her tiny face under the black bob that makes her look like a French urchin. I saw a foetus in a bottle once, floating in formaldehyde with its rudimentary thumb in its undefined mouth; its skin shone like Raina’s does. She says she owes her skin to Clinque, but I tried some of Raina’s leftover Clinique once and my skin is the way you would expect a 43 year-old woman’s skin to be. Perhaps I didn’t have enough faith in it. “Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as an ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee” I tell her, and she rolls her eyes. Sometimes I say, I know you made a pact with the devil, what did he look like? Like Ralph Fiennes, she says, or “Mel Gibson.” Or I say, there’s a picture in your attic, isn’t there, and it probably looks like Bette Davis the night before she died. The answer to which is “I don’t have an attic. Attics are passe.”
I have an attic; my house is one hundred and four years old and looks it. Its attic used to be the maid’s quarters, but I have made it into a study where I mark the papers of the men and women in my adult literacy class. They were once children who had to go out to work, in factories or on fishing boats, or as ladies’ maids and scullery boys to the wealthy. And now when their grandchildren ask to be read a bedtime story, the black marks on the white page look like something they have left dirty, and the shame of it sends them to my classes. One of the papers I read last night had tear stains on it. It belongs to Mrs. Frances O’Leary, who cried in class once, after she had written her signature for the first time.
Raina said, “So how does it look?” The suit fit her like a glove; or, rather she fit the suit as if it was her mother’s womb. “Perfect,” I said. I always say this, because it is always true. Raina is built like a hanger and the clothes love her for it. “Does it look better on me?” said Raina. “Of course it does,” I said, even though I hadn’t seen it on Harry’s wife. But I’ve met the woman; she’s in her early thirties and slim enough, but her two babies poked her belly out a bit while they were in residence, and they pulled her breasts down when she was feeding them, and so she is a little bulgy here and there.
Raina put the suit back on the rack and tried on a blouse that made her look like the youngest daughter in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. One of the clerks came over and whispered, “You know, that line of blouses is the favourite of a famous pop diva,” and then he named her. “That slut can’t even sing,” I said to him, and he stared at me in horror. “But she’s one of the richest and most powerful women in America,” he said, and then he looked at Raina for confirmation. She nodded. “Do you like the blouse?” I asked her. “Do you?” said Raina. “Yes,” I said, “but just remember, you’ll be sharing it with a lesser individual.” Raina sings like a lark in the morning, and she’s never been a slut.
Raina’s husband is only the second man she’s ever slept with. The first one is a secret she won’t tell even me. There was a boy once, one summer when we were in our late teens. He was tall and slender, and he had black hair like Raina’s and the same pale face; they even walked alike, two swans moving over a lake. The boy liked to draw; he went away in the fall to art school and never came back. In Raina’s bedroom there is a sketch of a young man’s naked back; above his shoulder is the arched neck of a young woman. Her face is not in the picture, only the edge of her cheek, a strand of black hair defining its curve. Raina says she picked it up from a street vendor in Cuba.
Before we left Mavericks and Molls, Raina asked me if I wanted anything. I almost said, “Sure, I’ll take that lame gown in the corner, the one that says fifteen hundred dollars on the tag, even though between you and me and the wall, I know for a fact that if you take the middle man, or men, or women, out of the equation, it would say fifty bucks.” Which would be mainly the cost of the fabric. Every time Raina tries something on, I see tiny brown hands stitching it up around her. Children’s hands, hands that should be catching water spiders or whatever children’s hands like to do in those countries. Sometimes the hands belong to small women with glass bangles on their wrists and naked babies clinging to their legs. But I never say these things to Raina anymore. It only distresses her; she says, “Well, what can I do about it? That’s the way the world is; how would it help anyone if I walked around nude?” And then I think about Sumeria and Babylon, and Persia and Egypt, and Greece and Rome, and the United States of America, and I marvel at the great cycles that change the face, but never the heart, of humankind.
But Raina is very soft underneath her Donna Karan jacket, at least when it comes to those she loves. When I was in the hospital for six weeks last year, she came every night even though she has been terrified of hospitals ever since her mother died in one. And when her 15-year-old Portuguese water dog, Dali, kicked the bucket, Raina wore a black band around her arm for a month, even though people thought she was protesting something and stopped inviting her to parties for awhile.
Dali had been sick for a long time, sick and senile and deaf and two-thirds blind. On the morning of his death he started barking uncontrollably and dragging himself by his front legs around the house, urinating as he went. He didn’t recognize Raina or her husband. “It’s time, Raina,” her husband said, but she said “Oh no, he’s just having a bad day.” In the end, Raina’s husband made her go to their bedroom so he could pick Dali up and put him in the back of their SUV, after he put plastic down over the flooring. He collected me on the way to the vet’s. Raina called me after, crying. “How did it go,” she said, “was it quick?”
“He was asleep in 15 seconds,” I said. “By the way, they’ll have his urn for you on Friday.”
“Oh.” she said. “You know, I was thinking that we should go out and buy a really nice container for Dali’s ashes. I saw some wide-mouth bottles made of milk glass at one of the craft galleries, with angels on their lids, don’t you think one of those would look perfect on the mantelpiece?”
“Perfect.” I said. “A sarcophagus fit for a prince of dogs. And the queen of mantelpieces.”
I lied to Raina about Dali’s death. The vet was a young man, an Egyptian; his eyes were a lot like Dali’s, and by the time the dog was dead they were overflowing like the Nile in spring.
Raina’s husband carried Dali into the clinic and put him on the table, handed the vet’s assistant his gold card and left. I told the girl I was staying and she went back to the reception area. And then I went to Dali; he was lying still with his eyes closed, and I cradled his head in my arms and said “never mind Dali, it’s all right, it’s fine, you’re a good, good boy.” The vet took a needle from his cabinet and filled it with a clear liquid, and then he came and stuck it into the dog’s leg; a few moments later I felt Dali go limp. The vet and I looked at each other over the body and made sad faces, and he started to take off his gloves.
And then Dali raised his head and looked straight at me, and his black eyes were full of anguish. And a noise crinkled the antiseptic air; the thin high keening of one betrayed. I put my arms back around him and began crooning a lullaby Raina used to sing to him when he was a puppy, but he wasn’t buying it. Before I knew what was happening, the dog gathered up all the strength he had left in his dying body and made a great lunge, and we both toppled from the altar of compassionate death onto the thin linoleum underneath. And suddenly Dali wasn’t senile anymore; he was watching the vet with eyes like a hawk’s; every time the poor guy got within a foot of him, Dali twisted in my arms and shook and moaned. The vet was sweating and so was his patient; I was dry as dust because I wasn’t really there. It didn’t seem like the place to be, after all.
“I can’t believe this,” said the vet. He crouched down and put an empty needle inside another vein in Dali’s leg; when he removed it, it was full of what looked like strawberry jelly. “His blood is so thick,” the vet said, “that the narcotic couldn’t get to his heart. I don’t know why he’s lived this long.”
“Because his mistress loved him,” I said, “and Love is stronger than Death.”
“Well I have got something here that is stronger than love or death,” said the vet. “It is designed to kill an elephant or at least a cow.” So he got the biggest needle in the clinic and filled it full, and I had to practically sit on Dali while the vet stuck it straight into his heart. And when he did, the dog slumped over and the sphincter muscle in his anus relaxed and I got shit all over my jeans, but I was happier than I’d ever been in my life, or at least within recent memory. The vet and I embraced and I took his tears home with me on my cheek, and when I got there I drank the bottle of Dom Perignon that Raina had given me for Christmas. I was saving it for my friend Sam’s wedding, but death can be like a wedding sometimes.
Later I went over to Connor’s. He lives across the street from me in a run-down Edwardian with his three-legged dog, Laslow. Laslow growled when I went in because I forgot to change my jeans. “You’re drunk,” Connor said, and I said “yeah, but not drunk enough.” And then I told him about Dali and he went into the kitchen and got a bottle of sherry and two glasses and we went up to his bedroom. The last thing I remember before I passed out was Connor playing “She Moved Through the Fair” and me trying to sing it, but screwing up the last stanza, on purpose I guess, who knows?
I dreamt that last night that my dead dog came in
So softly he entered that his feet made no din
He lay down beside me, and this he did say
It will not be long, love, till our wedding day
I had taken off my jeans and Laslow was in bed with me; I sang it to him and he licked my face. Raina would like Laslow, although she’d probably want to get him a prosthetic leg. By Givinchy.
The next morning Connor made me put on his ratty old robe and then he lifted me up in his arms and carried me down over the crooked stairs, murmuring into my hair, “You are the snowflake that never touches the earth, you are the linnet in the spring,” and other things that he used to say to his wife until the night she hanged herself while he was with another woman. Jessie was in the kitchen making scrambled eggs and I thought I was going to throw up, but then she turned around and said, “Look, look what I got at the Sally Ann this morning for two bucks!” It was a rhinestone brooch, and she had it on the lapel of a plaid woods shirt; the shirt hung down over a pair of purple harem pants which were busy serenading the plastic violets on the table. And the sun was shining in through the stained glass window on which somebody had scrawled “Jesus Never Fails” with a black marker; there were rainbow butterflies all over the walls, and suddenly I felt like dancing. So I did, with a three-legged dog and a crazy old woman. And a man who can play “Mary’s Wedding” and step a credible jig at the same time.
I bet Tommy Hilfinger can’t do that.