A Pebble of Regret

The old woman has been sleeping in her lounge chair all day. She wakes up periodically to eat cold leftover blintzes, but nods off after noshing and naps luxuriantly unless someone comes down to check on her. Her daughter, so devoted, asks if she needs something to drink, but my sister doesn't respond. She's breathing, but just stares into space and moves her mouth around. No words come out. It may be a mini-stroke. She's going to need a transfusion of new blood from charitable young people who have red blood cells to spare. She needs, as they say, a new lease on life.

I call her after the procedure to assure myself that she's still my sister, even with the blood of nameless college students and dental assistants flowing in her veins. I tell her that I'm coming to California and will see her on November 16th.

          "Do you remember what day that is?" I ask, in the infantilizing, self-satisfied tone of someone
          who already knows the answer to her own question.
          "Daddy's birthday," she blurts out with sudden alacrity.

There is something about her saying the word "Daddy" that fills me with an unaccountable joy. She is, after all, the only person in the world who can say that to me. She is the only other person in the world who had that relationship with our gentle, distracted father, almost forty years gone. It's an album of memory we share, even though we are more than ten years apart. Even though she was a Depression and War baby and I was a child of the American ascendancy. It was only after he died, during one of those long, gossipy coffee-and-danish storytelling sessions in the house of mourning, that I discovered that his father, our Budapest-born grandfather Ludwig, had died in 1935, the year my sister was born. I had always thought he died in 1945, the year I was born. I had always thought she had a grandfather I didn't have, the ultimate bigger piece of cake. But, as it turned out, we were both lost girls with no doting grandpa to buy us penny candy. There was comfort in that.

Between the two of us lay a vast windblown steppe empty of brothers and sisters, a no man's land where there was a family, but I wasn't in it. I have amnesia for a life I never experienced. I can't get a feel for it. FDR, war news, radio. Our parents young and hopeful. She in her Persian lamb jacket. He with his fedora at a jaunty angle. My sister learning her long division in the same classrooms of the same school I would much later attend. They seem to have managed just fine without me and this feeling imparts a yearning and produces a pebble of regret that precipitates out of the joy I feel when I hear "Daddy's birthday." All those birthdays before I was born. Ten years when it was just the three of them.

Some people are worriers, other people regret. Worriers are oriented towards the future and all the dangers that are lurking there, the plane crash, the diagnosis, all the catastrophes to come. We regretters are vulnerable to sadness and self-blame. We are magnetized by the past, the missed opportunities, the cruelties, all the failures already in the bank accruing interest. The man I live with is inclined towards worry. He sees possible losses driving in his direction on the wrong side of the road, coming for him. I am a regretter by trade. I encounter loss bushwacking my way through the past. He and I try to meet for morning coffee in the parlor of the present. When he gets too far out ahead of himself, I try to call him back to now. When I retreat into an unforgiving black hole of self-recrimination, he invites me back up to the fresh air of this moment before 8:24 becomes 8:25 and I miss the whole thing.

          He says, "I got my worry from my mother. Where'd you get your regret"? I say, "I found it all
          by myself in the empty space between my sister and me, the virgin terrain."

I wonder...what questions can I ask when I see her in California next week? What details can I fill in while there's still a chance? Maybe...what did you talk about at the dinner table when it was just the three of you eating the pot roast?


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