The Beginner's Goodbye

There used to be a dairy outlet over on Reisterstown Road, with a lighted white glass sign outside reading FIRST WITH THE CARRIAGE TRADE. It showed the silhouette of a woman wheeling a baby carriage – a witticism, I guess – and she was just galloping along, taking huge confident strides in a dress that flared below her knees although we were in the era of miniskirts. Whenever my family drove past that sign, I thought of my sister. This was before my sister had reached her teens, even, but still I thought of her, for Nandina seemed to have been born lanky, and ungainly, and lacking in all fashion sense. I’m not saying she was unattractive. She had clear grey eyes, and excellent skin and shiny brown hair that she wore pulled straight back from her forehead with a single silver barrette. But the barrette tells you everything: she wore it still, although she would be forty on her next birthday. An ageing girl, was what she was, and had been from earliest childhood. Her shoes were Mary Janes, as flat as scows in order to minimize her height. Her elbows jutted like coat hangers, and her legs descended as straight as reeds to her ping-pong-ball ankle bones.

She drove me home from the hospital the afternoon that Dorothy died, and I sat beside her envying her imperviousness. She kept both hands on the steering wheel at the ten and two o’clock positions, just as our father had taught her all those years ago. Her posture was impeccable. (She had never been one of those women who imagine that slouching makes them look shorter.) At first she attempted some small talk – hot day, no rain in the forecast, pity the poor farmers – but when she saw that I wasn’t up to it, she stopped. That was one good thing about Nandina. She wasn’t bothered by silence.