Just Breathe. Susan Wiggs
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chair. Sketchbooks and an array of drawing pencils littered a side table. By contrast, Aunt May’s side of the room was painstakingly neat, her knitting basket, TV remote and library stack arranged just so. This had always been a place of familiar things, where she could always find a homemade fig-filled cookie, or lose herself in Gran’s display of World’s Fair souvenirs, or simply sit and listen to the twins’ murmured conversation. It was soothing, yet at the same time there was something stifling about this place. Sarah wondered if the sisters ever felt trapped here.
Because they were twins, the sisters were considered a bit of a novelty, and always had been. Growing up, they had enjoyed the peculiar social status afforded young ladies who happened to be pretty, popular, well-mannered and nearly identical. The story of their birth was the stuff of legend. They were born on the last day of May, at midnight during a terrific storm. The attending doctor swore that one twin was delivered a minute before midnight, and the second a minute after. Hearing this, their parents named them May and June.
Although biologically they were fraternal twins, most casual observers had trouble telling them apart. They had the same graceful drifts of white hair, the same eyes of milk glass blue. Their faces were all but indistinguishable, like two apples side by side, drying in a bowl.
Despite their physical resemblance, the sisters were polar opposites in many ways. Aunt May was conventional and neat as a pin. Gran was considered bohemian in her day; she preferred painting over housework and raising a family. More traditional, Aunt May dressed in calico cotton prints and crocheted shawls; Gran favored overalls and tribal print smocks. Both women, however, spent their lives fanatically devoted to family and community.
“You probably don’t want to talk about your meeting,” Aunt May suggested.
In this family, denial was a fine art. “I’ll spare you the details.”
Gran served the chai in a Raku-fired mug. “You probably need a break from brooding about all this nonsense, anyway.”
Sarah tried to smile back. Relegating her shattered marriage to “all this nonsense” did seem mildly amusing at that.
Her grandmother and great-aunt willingly changed the subject. They chattered on about the things that filled their days. Gran and Aunt May seemed to be completely without ambition or curiosity about the world beyond the quiet, protected bay. They organized things—the annual Primrose Tea. The Historical Society’s benefit banquet. They presided over a monthly bridge tournament and faithfully attended meetings of the garden club. Currently they were preoccupied with projects and plans, as always, working on their presentation on bulbs for the Sunshine Garden Club. And if that didn’t keep them busy enough, they had to get the place ready to host their weekly potluck and bunco game.
Sarah marveled at how seriously they took these social functions, as if they were matters of life and death.
The old women studied Sarah, then exchanged a glance filled with meaning. What was it with twins? Sarah wondered. They had some crazy Vulcan mind link, and seemed capable of holding whole conversations without saying a word.
“What?” Sarah asked.
“You don’t appear to have much patience for things like garden club meetings and bunco evenings.”
“I’m sorry, Gran. Just preoccupied. And tired, I guess.” She tried to look interested. “But if they’re important to you—”
“They’re important to all of humankind,” Aunt May said.
“Garden parties?” Sarah squeaked. “Bunco games?”
“Oh, dear. Now she’s irritated,” Gran said to her sister.
“I’m not irritated. Mystified, maybe, but not irritated.” Deep down, she wondered how it could possibly mean a thing that Reverend Schubert’s birthday party had fresh flowers or that they put out the good china for their potluck.
“Showing respect and thoughtfulness to those we care about is the part that matters. It’s what separates us from the beasts of the field.”
“The cows in Mr. Prendergast’s pasture seem pretty content to me.”
“Are you saying you’d rather be a cow?”
“At the moment, it sounds very appealing to me.” As a cheeky, awkward teenager, Sarah had unleashed her pen, drawing comic satires of the Historical Society’s display of the Drake landing, or creating send-ups of the women of the garden club, chattering away while birds built nests in their fantastically ornamented straw hats.
“Someday you’re going to tick off the wrong person,” her older brother, Kyle, had warned her. He had dedicated his life to pleasing his parents. Every time Sarah attempted to do this, she failed.
But mostly, she realized, she’d failed herself. When you lived your life to please others, there were hidden costs that often outweighed the rewards. Years later, in the wake of the ultimate failure—her marriage—she was finally waking up to that fact. Looking around her grandmother’s house, she wondered if she was seeing a glimpse of her future. The thought depressed her, and she felt the old ladies studying her.
“You’re home, dear,” said Gran.
“Home where you belong,” Aunt May added.
“I never really felt like I belonged here.”
“That’s your choice,” Gran pointed out. “Deciding where you belong is a choice.”
Sarah nodded. “But…I don’t want to be that divorced woman who moves back to her father’s house. That’s just…pathetic.”
“You’re entitled to be pathetic for a while, dear.” Gran smiled gently at her. “No need to rush into anything.”
With her grandmother’s permission to be pathetic, Sarah made her way down the lane to her father’s, passing marshes fringed by wild iris, with the green-draped coastal hills looming in the distance. She parked in the driveway and went into the garage, a handyman’s nirvana with an adjacent workshop. Generations of tools hung on the walls and littered the workbench, and the sharp odor of motor oil tinged the air. A half-dozen projects occupied benches and sawhorses, all related to her father’s new passion—restoring his 1965 Mustang convertible.
“Dad,” she called out. “Hello?”
There was no answer. He’d probably gone into the house. Sarah hesitated, haunted by memories she hadn’t thought about in a very long time.
Her mother used to work in the well-organized garage annex. Jeanie Bradley Moon had been a master spinner and weaver, known for her textiles of cashmere and silk, created on a counterbalance loom of cherrywood. She and Sarah’s father, Nathaniel, had met at a local artisans’ market and were married only a few months later. They’d made a life here together, raised Kyle and Sarah. She still remembered the long, late-night girl-talks with her mom—her rock, the most steady thing in her life. Or so she thought. Now she yearned to talk with her mother again, and the wish felt like a rock crushing her chest. How could her mother just be gone?
Sarah took a deep breath and stepped into her mother’s world, a place of shadows and skeletons now. This was the hardest spot on earth for Sarah to be, because it was where memories of her mother burned the deepest. At the same time, she felt the irresistible pull of remembrance as she looked around the room. It used to be a hive of activity, alive with the clack of the loom and the smooth, quick rhythm of the treadle. But all that had changed eight years before.
Sarah had been a sophomore at Chicago when the call came from her sister-in-law, LaNelle. Kyle and Nathaniel were in shock, so it had fallen to LaNelle to give Sarah the devastating news.
She’d lost her mother.
Sarah had never understood why people used the term “lost” when somebody died. She knew exactly where her mother was—unreachable, untouchable, felled by an aneurysm that was as heartless and indiscriminate as a bolt of lightning. What did you do when the mooring you’d