Read Online She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan - Free Book Online

dead.”
    â€œDid you drink it?” my mother asked. “Did you drink the milk?”
    â€œI drank it. It tastes like milk.” There was a pause. “Being dead doesn’t change the way things taste.”
    â€œNora,” my mother said,“I want you to stop. I want you to drink the milk and go to sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
    â€œWhy should I need sleep?” Aunt Nora said. “I’m dead. I’m not tired. I’ve got all this energy! Maybe I’ll make the children sock puppets.”
    Aunt Nora was a seamstress. She worked at Lillian’s Bridal Salon in Newtown Square, which was just down the street from the place where I took piano lessons in the mid-1960s. After my lesson I would often walk over to the salon and watch her sewing veils.
    Aunt Nora was the one person with whom I had thought my secret would be secure. Like me, she seemed to live in a world of her own, although the reasons for her distance from the world were unimaginable to me, at least they were when I was a child.
    I would go to her apartment sometimes and sit on the floor in front of her grandmother’s clock, eating the cookies she baked (shaped like Scottie dogs, or stars, or running men), and think about telling her. I formed the sentences in my mind.
    Aunt Nora, what would you do if I told you I didn’t feel like myself, but
like someone else? Well, not someone else, exactly, but myself, me as a girl. It’s
the person everyone thinks I am that isn’t real.
    What would she have said? Would she have put me on a stool and have me raise my arms into the air and take my soundings with a tape measure? Would she have taught me to sew, how to make darts and pleats? Would she have shown me how to curl my hair, how to make cookies shaped like dogs, how to move through the world as a woman bearing an inconceivable grief?
It’s all right, Jennifer. You just
try not to think about it.
    But I remained silent. I knew what she’d say.
    I sat on the floor and listened to her clock chime.
    Sometimes Nora showed me the dances she was learning in her dance class. She’d put on a crazy record from the 1940s called “Old Vienna,” which featured an accordion band and a narrator describing a landslide of falling strudel. To this music, Nora did the tango. Sometimes I danced with her.
    â€œBy order of zee emperor, zere will be no strudel eating on zee mountain
today. . . .”
    Nora’s life had changed when she married my uncle Francis at age thirty-five. It was as if, after all her long years alone, the sun had finally decided to shine in her life.
    There are black-and-white pictures taken of her during that time, in which she stands by the sea with Francis, holding a spotted beach ball. She wears an expression I never saw firsthand—a look of complete contentment and joy, the look of a woman who finally finds that she does exist after a lifetime of believing that she does not.
    Uncle Francis died less than a year after they were married, of a brain hemorrhage.
    Soon Aunt Nora was working as a seamstress again, sewing together white dresses for other women to wear at other weddings.
    When my mother went to her apartment the morning after she’d received the phone call in which Nora explained that she was dead, she opened the door to find the place empty. Aunt Nora had vanished without a trace.
    My mother called around, checked a few hospitals. It didn’t take long to find her. Apparently Nora had the wherewithal, at some point, to call 911 and explain the situation.
    It was midafternoon before my mother finally arrived at Bryn Mawr Hospital. There was Nora, tied to the bed. She broke down in tears when she saw her sister.
    â€œEleanor, I’m so sorry,” she said. “The milk didn’t work.”

Come Down in Time (Spring 1979)
    I looked up at the top of the piano. The bartender placed another Guinness at the end of the long row of beers