Demonology (32 page)

Now this portrait of her cat, Pointdexter, twelve years old —he slept on my face when I stayed at her place in 1984 —Pointdexter
with the brain tumor, Pointdexter with the phenobarbital habit. That morning —All Saints’ Day —he stood entirely motionless
before his empty dish. His need was clear. His dignity was immense. Well, except for the seizures. Pointdexter had these seizures.
He was possessed. He was a demon. He would bounce off the walls, he would get up
a head of steam,
mouth frothing, and run straight at the wall, smack into it, shake off the ghosts, and
start again. His screeches were unearthly. Phenobarbital was prescribed. My sister medicated him preemptively before any other
chore, before diplomatic initiatives on matters of cereal allocation.
Hold on you guys, I’ll be with you in a second.
Drugging the cat, slipping him the Mickey Finn in the Science Diet, feeding the kids, then getting out the door, pecking
her boyfriend on the cheek (he was stumbling sleepily down the stairs).

She printed snapshots. At this photo lab. She’d sold cameras (mnemonic devices) for years, and then she’d been kicked upstairs
to the lab. Once she sold a camera to Pete Townshend, the musician. She told him —in her way both casual and rebellious —that
she didn’t really like The Who. Later, from her job at the lab, she used to bring home
other peoples pictures,
e.g., an envelope of photographs of the Pope. Had she been out to Giants Stadium to use her tele-photo lens to photograph
John Paul II? No, she’d just printed up an extra batch of, say, Agnes Venditi’s or Joey Mueller’s photos.
Caveat emptor.
Who knew what else she’d swiped? Those Jerry Garcia pix from the show right before he died? Garcia’s eyes squeezed tightly
shut, as he sang in that heartbroken, exhausted voice of his? Or: somebody’s trip to the Caribbean or to the Liberty Bell
in Philly? Or: her neighbor’s private documentations of love? Who knew? She’d get on the phone at work and gab, call up her
friends, call up my family, printing pictures while gabbing, sheet after sheet of negatives, of memories. Oh, and circa Halloween,
she was working in the lab with some new, exotic chemicals. She had a wicked headache.

* * *

My sister didn’t pay much attention to the church calendar. Too busy. Too busy to concentrate on theologies, too busy to go
to the doctor, too busy to deal with her finances, her credit-card debt, etc. Too busy. (And maybe afraid, too.) She was unclear
on this day set aside for Gods awesome tabernacle, unclear on the feast for the departed faithful, didn’t know about the church
of the Middle Ages, didn’t know about the particulars of the Druidic ritual of Halloween —it was a Hallmark thing, a marketing
event —or how All Saints’ Day emerged as an alternative to Halloween. She was not much preoccupied with nor attendant to articulations
of loss, nor interested in how this feast in the church calendar was hewn into two separate holy days, one for the saints,
that great cloud of witnesses,
one for the dearly departed, the regular old believers. She didn’t know of any attachments that bound together these constituencies,
didn’t know, e.g., that God would
wipe away all tears from our eyes and there would be no more death,
according to the evening’s reading from the book of Revelation. All this academic stuff was lost on her, though she sang
in the church choir, and though on All Saints’ Day, a guy from the church choir happened to come into the camera store, just
to say hi, a sort of an angel (let’s say), and she said,
Hey Bob, you know, I never asked you what you do.

To which Bob replied,
I’m a designer.

My sister:
What do you design?

Bob:
Steel wool.

She believed him.

She was really small. She barely held down her clothes. Five feet tall. Tiny hands and feet. Here’s a photo from my
brothers wedding (two weeks before Halloween); we were dancing on the dance floor, she and I. She liked to
pogo
sometimes. It was the dance we preferred when dancing together. We created mayhem on the dance floor. Scared people off.
We were demons for dance, for noise and excitement. So at my brother’s wedding reception I hoisted her up onto my shoulder,
and she was so light, just as I remembered from years before, twenty years of dances, still tiny, and I wanted to crowd-surf
her across the reception, pass her across upraised hands, I wanted to impose her on older couples, gentlemen in their cummerbunds,
old guys with tennis elbow or arthritis, with red faces and gin blossoms; they would smile, passing my sister hither, to the
microphone, where the wedding band was playing, where she would suddenly burst into song, into some sort of reconcil-iatory
song, backed by the wedding band, and there would be stills of this moment, flashbulbs popping, a spotlight on her face, a
tiny bit of reverb on her microphone, she would smile and concentrate and sing. Unfortunately, the situation around us, on
the dance floor, was more complicated than this. Her boyfriend was about to have back surgery. He wasn’t going to do any heavy
lifting. And my nephew was too little to hold her up. And my brother was preoccupied with his duties as groom. So instead
I twirled her once and put her down. We were laughing, out of breath.

On All Saints’ Day she had lunch with Bob the angelic designer of steel wool (maybe he had a crush on her) or with the younger
guys from the lab (because she was a middle-aged free spirit), and then she printed more photos of Columbus Day parades across
Jersey, or photos of other
peoples kids dressed as Pocahontas or as the Lion King, and then at 5:30 she started home, a commute of forty-five minutes,
Morristown to Hackettstown, on two-laners. She knew every turn. Here’s the local news photo that never was: my sister slumped
over the wheel of her Plymouth Saturn after having run smack into a local deer. All along those roads the deer were upended,
disemboweled, set upon by crows and hawks, and my sister on the way back from work, or on the way home from a bar, must have
grazed an entire herd of them at one time or another, missed them narrowly, frozen in the headlights of her car, on the shoulders
of the meandering back roads, pulverized.

Her boy lives on air. Disdains food. My niece, meanwhile, will eat only candy. By dinnertime, they had probably made a dent
in the orange plastic bucket with the Three Musketeers, the Cadbury’s, Hot Tamales, Kit Kats, Jujyfruits, Baby Ruths, Bubble
Yum —at least my niece had. They had insisted on bringing a sampling of this booty to school and from there to their afterschool
play group. Neither of them wanted to eat anything; they complained about the whole idea of supper, and thus my sister offered,
instead, to take them to the
McDonaldLand play area
on the main drag in Hackettstown, where she would buy them a Happy Meal, or equivalent, a hamburger topped with
American processed cheese food,
and, as an afterthought, she would insist on their each trying a little bit of a salad from the brand-new McDonald’s salad
bar. She had to make a deal to get the kids to accept the salad. She suggested six mouthfuls of lettuce each and drew a hard
line there, but then she allowed herself to be talked down to two mouthfuls each. They ate
indoors at first, the three of them, and then went out to the playground, where there were slides and jungle gyms in the reds
and yellows of Ray Kroc’s empire. My sister made the usual conversation,
How did the other kids make out on Halloween? What happened at school?
and she thought of her boyfriend, fresh from spinal surgery, who had limped downstairs in the morning to give her a kiss,
and then she thought about
bills, bills, bills,
as she caught my niece at the foot of a slide. It was time to go sing. Home by nine.

My sister as she played the guitar
in the late sixties with her hair in braids; she played it before anyone else in my family, wandering around the chords,
“House of the Rising Sun”or “Blackbird,”on classical guitar, sticking to the open chords of guitar tablature. It never occurred
to me to wonder about which instruments were used on those AM songs of the period (the Beatles with their sitars and cornets,
Brian Wilson with his theremin), not until my sister started to play the guitar. (All of us sang —we used to sing and dance
in the living room when my parents were married, especially to
Abbey Road
and
Bridge Over Troubled Water.)
And when she got divorced she started hanging around this bar where they had live music, this Jersey bar, and then she started
hanging around at a local record label, an indy operation, and then she started
managing a band
(on top of everything else), and then she started to sing again. She joined the choir at St. James Church of Hackettstown
and she started to sing, and after singing she started to pray —prayer and song being, I guess, styles of the same beseech-ment.

I don’t know what songs they rehearsed at choir rehearsal, but Bob was there, as were others, Donna, Frank, Eileen, and Tim
(I’m making the names up), and I know that the choir was warm and friendly, though perhaps a little bit out of tune. It was
one of those Charles Ives small-town choruses that slip in and out of pitch, that misses exits and entrances. But they had
a good time rehearsing, with the kids monkeying around in the pews, the kids climbing sacrilegiously over that furniture,
dashing up the aisle to the altar and back, as somebody kept half an eye on them (five of the whelps in all) and after the
last notes ricocheted around the choir loft, my sister offered her summation of the proceedings,
Totally cool! Totally cool!,
and now the intolerable part of this story begins —with joy and excitement and a church interior. My sister and her kids
drove from St. James to her house, her condo, this picturesque drive home, Hackettstown as if lifted from picture postcards
of autumn, the park with its streams and ponds and lighted walkways, leaves in the streetlamps, in the headlights, leaves
three or four days past their peak, the sound of leaves in the breeze, the construction crane by her place (they were digging
up the road), the crane swaying above a fork in the road, a left turn after the fast-food depots, and then into her parking
spot in front of the condo. The porch by the front door with the Halloween pumpkins: a cats face complete with whiskers, a
clown, a jack-o’-lantern. My sister closed the front door of her house behind her. Bolted it. Her daughter reminded her to
light the pumpkins. Just inside the front door, Pointdexter, on the top step, waiting.

Her keys on the kitchen table. Her coat in the closet. She sent the kids upstairs to get into their pajamas. She called up
to her boyfriend, who was in bed reading a textbook,
What are you doing in bed, you total slug!
and then, after checking the messages on the answering machine, looking at the mail, she trudged up to my niece’s room to
kiss her good night. Endearments passed between them. My sister loved her kids, above all, and in spite of all the work and
the hardships, in spite of my nieces reputation as a firecracker, in spite of my nephews sometimes diabolical smarts. She
loved them. There were endearments, therefore, lengthy and repetitive, as there would have been with my nephew, too. And my
sister kissed her daughter multiply, because my niece is a little impish redhead, and its hard
not
to kiss her.
Look, it’s late, so I cant read to you tonight, okay?
My niece protested temporarily, and then my sister arranged the stuffed animals around her daughter (for the sake of arranging),
and plumped a feather pillow, and switched off the bedside lamp on the bedside table, and she made sure the night-light underneath
the table (a plug-in shaped like a ghost) was illumined, and then on the way out the door she stopped for a second. And looked
back. The tableau of domesticity was what she last contemplated. Or maybe she was composing endearments for my nephew. Or
maybe she wasn’t looking back at my niece at all. Maybe she was lost in this next tempest.

Out of nowhere. All of a sudden. All at once. In an instant. Without warning. In no time. Helter-skelter.
In the twinkling of an eye.
Figurative language isn’t up to the task. My sister’s legs gave out, and she fell over toward my niece’s
desk, by the door, dislodging a pile of toys and dolls (a Barbie in evening wear, a posable Tinkerbell doll), colliding with
the desk, sweeping its contents off with her, toppling onto the floor, falling heavily, her head by the door. My niece, startled,
rose up from under covers.

More photos: my sister, my brother and I,
back in our single digits,
dressed in matching, or nearly matching outfits (there was a naval flavor to our look), playing with my aunt’s basset hound
—my sister grinning mischievously; or: my sister, my father, my brother and I, in my dads Karmann-Ghia, just before she totaled
it on the straightaway on Fishers Island (she skidded, she said,
on antifreeze or something slippery
);
or: my sister, with her newborn daughter in her lap, sitting on the floor of her living room —mother and daughter with the
same bemused impatience.

My sister started to seize.

The report of her fall
was, of course, loud enough to stir her boyfriend from the next room. He was out of bed fast. (Despite physical pain associated
with his recent surgery.) I imagine there was a second in which other possibilities occurred to him —hoax, argument, accident,
anything —but quickly the worst of these seemed most likely. You know these things somewhere. You know immediately the content
of all middle-of-the-night telephone calls. He was out of bed. And my niece called out to her brother, to my nephew, next
door. She called my nephews name, plaintively, like it was a question.

* * *

My sister’s hands balled up. Her heels drumming on the carpeting. Her muscles all like nautical lines, pulling tight against
cleats. Her jaw clenched. Her heart rattling desperately. Fibrillating. If it was a conventional seizure, she was unconscious
for this part —maybe even unconscious throughout —because of reduced blood flow to the brain, because of the fibrillation,
because of her heart condition; which is to say that my sister’s
mitral valve prolapse
—technical feature of her
broken heart
—was here engendering an arrhythmia, and now, if not already, she began to hemorrhage internally. Her son stood in the doorway,
in his pajamas, shifting from one foot to the other (there was a draft in the hall). Her daughter knelt at the foot of the
bed, staring, and my sister’s boyfriend watched, as my poor sister shook, and he held her head, and then changed his mind
and bolted for the phone.