Friday night at midnight Saturday morning my sister picked me up. I threw my bags into her back seat and got into the front, accepting from her hand a plate of still-warm oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (milk in a travel mug awaited me also). "How much for the whole weekend?" she asked. This took me a minute to process, making me as difficult to joke or communicate at all with as our mother.
I know my role as aunt, so as soon as we got into CLH's apartment I called for my niece. Kitty is, of course, adorable and purrfect and my sister has her picture up everywhere and I told CLH about the psychologist in Maus. When CLH first adopted her, she said she had intended a grey cat but Kitty's purr won her over. Maybe because she expected the sleek prettiness of a grey cat, she said--at the time--that Kitty's coat looked like a bad dye job. She looks like a tortoiseshell to me, and the purr really is something, and of course she is the prettiest kitty ever.
Over the weekend, the weather was flawlessly, perfectly gorgeous--as it would be the whole week until the last day--and we went to see Thomas Gainsborough at the MFA and to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (I had never been) and she showed me all the community gardens in the Fens behind MFA. Also we went on the Swan Boats, me for the first time. The Gainsborough was not so much what I like, a bunch of portraits. CLH prefers people to landscapes, or did for Gainsborough anyway, which makes sense since that was his fame. What I remember is that one of the pieces is the cover of the Penguin edition of Sense and Sensibility.
I learned at least two things about my sister: that "Sense and Sensibility" is also one of her favorite movies and that blue sky through green leaves is also one of her favorite colors. I am so glad to know we have such vital things in common.
We talked about Margaret Dashwood and reinvented the course of the Volga and I told her about Emma Thompson's and Ang Lee's two commentaries. We talked about Margaret Atwood too and why CLH didn't crack Oryx and Crake and how we both didn't like Blind Assassin. We wandered up Newbury Street and along Charles Street and I asked how her friend's restaurant Vesuvius is going and she knew what I meant because we were passing it but its name is Torch and she cracked up. Well, it had something to do with fire (isn't Vesuvius the restaurant in "The Sopranos"?) We ate lunch at the Gardner and somewhere on Boylston near Dartmouth and dinner at the Top of the Hub and a picnic from Whole Foods on the Esplanade.
Also we looked at the photographs she had from our aunt who died a year ago. She had already culled her favorites and I selected some for me. (I want a scanner. Now.) I have photographs of my father in the Army, and how he got in needing glasses that thick I don't know. I have photographs of my paternal grandparents traveling to see my father off to Korea, with Bump-bump not wanting have his photograph taken and slouching in work pants, shirt, and cap, and my grandmother properly suited, befitting the honor of the occasion. Among the photographs is one of me as a 14-year-old boy, which is my favorite.
We called our mother from lunch on Boylston. It was her and BDL's anniversary, which the Good Daughter remembered. They weren't home, so we nattered into their answering machine, so I got to score as many GD points as CLH did. Heh.
We called our father from the Esplanade two days later. RSH told CLH something so ridiculous she spluttered with incredulous laughter, and this is how her relationship with our parents is so much better than mine. If Dad had told me the same thing, on my own, I would have said, "Oh really?" and fumbled for better follow-up questions. Whereas when our father told CLH that as one of his duties as quartermaster of his branch of the VFW, he was going to call Bingo once a month, she could laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. He has retired and lives in Florida, yet he distinguishes himself as somehow other than a Florida retiree. And he will continue to do so even though he is Mr. Bingo. That's funny. He cannot enunciate for shit, such that when a friend would telephone the house and Dad would answer, the friend would almost invariably ask, once we got on the phone, "Did I wake up your father?" and ask timidly, because he's scary-sounding too. Yet he has to call letters and numbers clearly enough that a bunch of Florida retirees can understand him. That's funny too. So CLH laughed. I wouldn't've laughed, for fear of hurting his feelings. It makes me a fairly boring conversationalist. CLH, on the other hand, knew she could tease him without hurting his feelings, so did.
One night we went to the Top of the Hub to eat. I had been to the top of the Pru (and the Hancock) several times, but I had never eaten there. I have to have a clothing tangent here--it becomes pertinent (to me) later on. When I dressed Saturday morning in a short natural linen unwaisted skirt, I discovered my sleeveless button-down L.L. Bean shirt was stained. CLH lent me a fitted short-sleeved ribbed t-shirt. Fitted, as in would betray my belly if I forewent sucking it in and would inescapably betray the fact of my bosom. I wore it, having recently realized (or decided) that baggy is only acceptable over skinny, because baggy over bulge makes you look fatter where fitted over not actually fat yet but not skinny either just makes me look like me. CLH said that I looked like an After photograph in "What Not to Wear." That made me happy. For dinner, I wore my own long ivory sueded Nearly Perfect Skirt (only nearly because there's a seam down the center) and another loan from my sister of a fitted three-quarter sleeved (which I pushed above the elbow because I am only human), ribbed, slightly shiny, scoop-necked shirt. When I emerged, she said, "I don't think I've ever seen you look sexier." Whoo! "It reminds me of a day I was home from college, in the early summer, and I saw you out the kitchen window walking to the clothesline in this white bathing suit. It must have been the year everything changed about you, because I exclaimed something or other and BJWL looked out at you and back and me and said 'yep.'" I told her, laughing, that I remember that white bathing suit; on the day she remembers I would have been 16 or 17 (I was a late bloomer). I tried to find it again for years and I only just recently ditched white as my tank bathing suit color in deference to it. Its primary attraction for me was that it had side panels of dense mesh so I tanned on my sides too, though less.
There were plans for Walden Pond or a whalewatch, and the weather was so beautiful it might have been criminal to stay in the city and not be near water, but it was a really good time with my sister. Also I got to pay for meals with her--but I still carried everything. We decided that I am a camel in a china shop. One of my mother's more frequent exclamations is that I am a bull in a china shop. Since historically CLH has paid and I have carried, I have been the camel for years. Thus, camel in a china shop. My family role. I'll see if ACOA has such a listing.