Mrs. Reese, the social worker of the hospital, a middle-aged woman with dark, reddish-black straight hair pulled tight into a chignon, shook hands peculiarly; she stuck her hand out with the wrist bent like a gooseneck, and the two sisters hesitated, not quite knowing how to grasp a hand offered so.

Yvette extended her own hand slowly, palm up, and unthinking, almost lifted the woman’s hand to her lips to kiss it. Her sister noticed the movement upwards,
and realized precisely what Yvette had almost done; they had lived together so closely for so long they could nearly read each other’s thoughts. While very
different in their personalities, they seemed yet on the way to becoming one creature. If the two sat together quietly in a room, in a minute or two they
would be breathing in unison.

Mrs. Reese squeezed the dry hand, hoping to communicate warmth. It was her mission not only for her work but as a person. But it was obvious both sisters
had shrunk away in spirit from her already. She could feel it. Oh, dear.

She smiled widely, and held her hand out to the other sister, Yvonne. The
hospital rarely sent her to speak to a family in this section of the hospital
since it was all private suites and expensive. The staff called this section
the Gold Coast. There were usually many foreign patients, particularly Arabs,
here. A security man would visit when the patient had been admitted and was
settled, to advise him or her not to keep any valuables in the room; send these
home with your family, he’d say. If you can’t the hospital will allow you to
have them placed in the institution’s safe for a small fee, just like in a
large hotel. The patient had a bigger menu to choose from each morning, as well
as the privilege to have a family member (or private duty nurse) stay 24 hours
a day in the room and sleep there if he wanted; there was a comfortable sofa as
well as recliner. The social worker decided these two women did not look like
money -- to put it mildly! -- the fatter one sitting there in stretch cotton
lycra pants that were beginning to pill, and the clothes of the other no
better, a shapeless corduroy skirt and t-shirt. They appeared to be both in
their mid to late forties. The sister in pants also wore a jeweled clip in her
long hair, and foolishly bright red lipstick. The other had no jewelry at all,
and no makeup on her long plain face. Her hair, longer than her sister’s and
threaded with gray, had been braided then stuffed into a rubber band.

“So you’re your mother’s caretakers,” Mrs. Reese said. “You’ve been, for --
how long? oh, yes, that’s a long time,” she acknowledged as one sister held up
some fingers. “Yes, I see. You’ve done quite a bit of work, both of you,
naturally. But of course because she’s your mother and you love her. I’m so
sorry she’s sick. This, now, must be very difficult.” She spoke delicately,
and deliberately glanced over at the much older lady in the high bed, who lay
simply covered with wires and tubes. Two machines hovered by her head, one
vacuum-pumping oxygen into her chest. A plastic mouthpiece was taped into her
open mouth. The machines made a lot of noise. Mrs. Reese went over and closed
the door, then returned to the women.

The sisters just looked at her.

“How have you been feeling about it? I hoped I could be some help to you,” she
prompted. They looked puzzled.

“I guess we feel okay,” Yvette said.

“What’s this all about?” said Yvonne. “You’re a social worker?” She tilted her
head so the hairclip glinted.

Mrs. Reese sat down in a chair and pulled it closer to them. “Yes. You’ve
taken care of your mom very, very well and I guess now everything’s going to
change, isn’t it? We don’t last forever; we just aren’t made to. Your mother
was certainly lucky to have two daughters who would do so much for her when she
needed it.”

Yvette said, drawing her gray braid around with both hands, “What’s going to
change?” and Yvonne, in a distracted way, began bleating, “What? What?” with
her eyes widening. Mrs. Reese automatically reached out a hand and put it on
Yvonne’s arm, to calm her. She turned to Yvette.

“The doctor did say that he was going to move your mother upstairs to
intensive care, didn’t he?” Yvette nodded, with a frown. “Well, he also
explained to you that it was necessary because her lungs can’t get enough
oxygen, even with the ventilator. Her blood pressure is dropping, and her heart
is slowing down.”

“So what do they do next?” Yvette demanded.

She shook her head. “It could be a day or more, or just a few hours, the
doctor said.” Mrs. Reese stopped and waited.

“A few hours, and then what?”

They’re in denial, Mrs. Reese thought. Or maybe they are absolutely in the
dark. Is it possible? When you look at that woman’s face, not to know?
Earlier, the nurse had shown her, Mrs. Reese, there was mottling on the hands
and feet already. She knew what that meant. Aloud, but in a small voice, she
said: “This is terminal, dear. I’m so sorry.”

The lifting and dropping of Yvonne’s hands and arms that began made Mrs. Reese
think of birds getting ready to fly. Yvonne’s head snapped to look at Yvette.
They both stood suddenly from their chairs in a convulsive movement, staring at
each other.

Yvonne turned on Mrs. Reese. “Nobody told us her cancer was terminal.” Her
voice was a little shrieky with accusation. “When the ambulance came, and we
told the paramedics that she just kept sleeping on and on, they asked us if it
was supposed to be terminal. We said no!”

“Not once did her doctor ever call it that,” Yvette declared. “She gets better
every time. And goes home,” she added.

“Oh, my dears.... I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“You’re not a doctor. You don’t know!” Yvette said. Her face pinked up, with
rage.

But Mrs. Reese stopped her: “She knew.”

And everything stopped. The idea that their mother had known the end was
coming but did not mention this to them was too vivid a betrayal. Mrs. Reese
wished she hadn’t said it. Rage, perhaps the only force holding them intact
just then, she had snatched away, and they began to come apart as she watched.
The very skin of their faces drew and crumpled. Yvette turned gray. “Sit,” Mrs.
Reese commanded. “Lean forward. Put your head down.”

“What is there now?” Yvonne was saying. Her thin arms, waving randomly, seemed
too loose to stay on.

Yvette, then Yvonne, began crying loudly, sobbing and catching their breath
again with an agonized intake. To Mrs. Reese it sounded like the hee-hawing of
donkeys. She put her arm around one, then the other when she could manage to
gather her in, and let them continue.

The crew of nurses and orderlies who arrived to move the mother met up with an
angry daughter army of two. Who actually did not attempt to stop them, only
hurled abuse as they positioned the gurney alongside the hospital bed, and
loosened the sheets underneath the mother, rolling the edges to grasp so they
had a sheet to lift with. “On three,” instructed a tall nurse. They counted,
and boosted the patient onto the gurney.

“One, you’re an idiot!” screeched Yvonne.

“Two -- you’re fucking stupid idiots! Probably she’ll die before you get
upstairs, or you’ll let her slide off the cot,” sneered Yvette. “And three -- “

“Three, our mother would kill you if she saw what dirty hands you all touched
her with.”

“If she isn’t okay when you get upstairs -- which is pretty likely, the way
you’re letting that machine roll all over the place -- we will know every one
of your names.”

“Absolutely,” Yvonne said.

“This place has the worst staff. You’re all disgusting to me.”

The sisters waited until the staff and the gurney had rolled out, then after a
minute or so they ran down the hall and punched the elevator button. It opened
hummingly, rolling its layered steel doors back. It was empty. Good. The mother
and her entourage had gone ahead already, in another elevator. Yvonne chose the
button for the intensive care floor, and then they stood expectantly, biting
their lips.

It was at least half an hour before they were actually permitted in their
mother’s new room, and this was rather disheartening. Also, the extra staff
that did the move had departed, and only an I.C.U. nurse was there. It rather
took the wind out of their sails. They had lost the psychological moment. They
stood by the bed and regarded their mother. “They took long enough,” Yvette
said. “Anything could’ve happened to her while they took so long fooling
around, and we wouldn’t have been there.”

Yvonne, feeling the beginnings of some promising grumbling, opened her mouth
to rejoin, but could think of nothing. Yvette said nothing more, either, and
they simply stood looking at the patient, and then the machines she was
connected to, for as long as they were permitted to stay in the room while the
intensive care unit breathed its very efficient air conditioning around them.

They ate crackers and cheese in the cafeteria, sitting together on the same
side of the table. Yvette had coffee while Yvonne drank Coke. “How can you
drink anything cold?” Yvette asked. “It was so freezing up there.”

“I was thirstier than coffee. Sometimes it leaves me thirstier than when I
started, you know?”

Yvette did know, so merely nodded. “It was dry up there, too.”

“When are we allowed to go in again?”

Yvette looked at her watch. “Eight o’clock. So we’ll stay here a little
longer.”

“Eight o’clock.”

“You should eat some more. Maybe some fruit, Yvonne,” Yvette instructed. Her
sister grimaced. “I nearly passed out myself -- you want to do that too?” Yvette demanded.

“Will you eat part of it?”

“Right.”

They returned in a while upstairs, and when the nurse -- or guard dog as they
dubbed her -- summoned them, they returned to their station beside the mother.
As long as they were just waiting, everything seemed as usual. They did not get
upset again. When they entered the room, the nurses were tilting the bed with
an electronic positioner. The head of the bed was considerably below the foot,
and the nurses returned the bed to a normal position. Yvonne looked at it
curiously.

The younger nurse, looking very weary, took the time to speak to the sisters
to give them an update on the mother’s condition. The blood pressure, she said,
had gotten very low. To keep an adequate blood supply to the brain, they’d had
to elevate the mother’s feet and lower her head and keep it that way for some
time. Yvette and Yvonne didn’t really know what this indicated, what it might
mean. They nodded. After the nurses left, Yvette thought her mother’s eyes,
which occasionally opened, looked swollen; not the eyelids, but the eyeballs,
distended. She decided it was an illusion. The face was certainly puffy; that
was it.

No one tried to make them leave the ICU now. It had been about twelve
hours since their mother had entered intensive care. A nurse would come in,
adjust a few things, stand and observe the mother for a minute, then step out
of their way. A doctor came in a couple of times. He was the attending doctor,
not the oncologist their mother had been treated by for years; that doctor was
too far across town and was on the staff of another hospital, not this one near
their home. This attending doctor spoke softly and reasonably to them. He
seemed very young, like the nurse. He said their mother was in no pain. (The
sisters didn’t think so either.) He said it was almost as if she were already
dead. The sisters nodded. The machines -- which they had noticed for some hours
were showing gradually lowering numbers -- were not doing much of anything for
the mother now and they, the daughters, could say when it was time to stop
them. He would do it when they felt it was all right. They nodded, but did not
say, “Now.” The numbers, Yvette remarked to Yvonne, were still very high. What
right did they have to disturb their mother’s machines? They just wanted to
stay there numbly.

A critical number on the heart monitor was reached, and a bell rang somewhere.
Three doctors rushed in with some sort of cart and began looking the mother
over; they called to each other different instructions. The sisters stepped
back, relieved someone was feeling urgently about the situation. But when one
doctor called “Lidocaine!” and reached out, another person stepped into the
room, a petite woman wearing a raincoat, and held out her hand.

“Don’t do any more,” she said. Her voice was sweet and sure. The I.C.U. nurse
behind her was nodding at the doctors. The doctor looked at the woman, dropped
his hand and withdrew the crash cart. The other doctors examined the monitors,
fiddled with them a little, then left too. The woman walked up to the bed and
leaned over the mother. Her hair, short and fluffily curled, swung forward. She
placed her hand on the mother’s purpling upper arm. “Goodbye,” she whispered.

The machines, everybody saw, had slowed to single digits.

Yvonne and Yvette could hardly look at this woman. They could smell her,
however. She smelled good. Like gardenias. The woman turned and approached them
and softly grabbed each sister by an elbow, then let go; rather theatrically,
Yvonne thought. “How are you holding up?” the perfumed woman whispered.

Yvette’s throat made a phlegmy noise. She yanked herself from the woman’s
touch. “I hate you!” she shrieked at Anna, who happened to be her -- and
Yvonne’s -- younger sister. Yvonne burst into loud tears behind them. As
Yvette fled from the room, braid flapping, Anna turned to Yvonne, and held out
her gardenia-flavored arms, making a sort of sad coo. Yvonne’s glance crawled
up from her cupped hands.

“Oh, Yvonne,” Anna coaxed.

In the days succeeding, Anna began arranging everything for the funeral. Her
husband Carl, a clean-cut man a few years her elder, had come into town with
her. They had come just in time, he said to Yvette and Yvonne. He smiled
continually, and mostly stood back and watched his small neat wife do like a
whirlwind. An attractive, girlish whirlwind. She was considerably younger than
her sisters, by about 15 years. But this was not the key to their differences.
In the old family house where Yvette and Yvonne had lived and taken care of
their mother, Anna headed for the telephone and usurped it. She and Carl were
staying in a motel, not wanting to barge in on the two sisters. But Yvette took
a wet soapy cloth to the receiver before calling her hairdresser. The plastic
smelled faintly of the other sister.

The funeral took place and went correctly and well. The mother had not been an
ostentatious person and would have wanted only the proper religious ritual, not
anything showy or dramatic. There was a large buffet for friends and extended
family at the house. Anna offered plates to Yvette and Yvonne, who were both
sick and could not look at the food. Yvette, who was feeling weak, waved
Anna away nervously. Yvonne flumped down in a chair in the game room. Anna sat
beside her with a plate of ham which her husband had sliced nice and thin.
Yvonne moaned and turned her head away, like a child, each time Anna brought a
fork close to her mouth. But Anna persisted, bringing another plate, this time
of kippers, sardines and crackers. She laid a fragment of the sardine on a
saltine and held it up. Yvonne stuck her tongue out. It accidentally touched
the sardine, and Yvonne was surprised, relishing the salt. It wakened her
hunger. Anna fed her, approving. “You never tried them before?” Yvonne,
engrossed in the crunch and heavenly taste, shook her head.

That evening, when nearly all the visitors had gone, Yvette found she could
manage some thin vegetable soup. She sat alone in the dining room and ate with
her head over the bowl. She had cried all through the funeral mass and several
times since, and wanted to go straight to bed without thinking about anything.
But something still disturbed her field of vision. No -- not vision. Her field
of sensation. It was Anna. Anna did not belong here, and it made Yvette feel
worse than strange, what with her mother’s death. Why did she have to endure
both at once?

Anna stopped in Yvette’s room late that night to see her. Yvette allowed
herself to be hugged and kissed. She would be gone soon, anyway, and leave her
and Yvonne in peace. “Why don’t you come down soon for a week or so?”

Yvette blinked. “Where?”

“To my house, silly. We could swim, and go shopping, and things. You could get
a haircut, something really sharp, and a makeover...” She was touching Yvette’s
hair. “Think of all the time you have now.”

Yvette had trouble being civil in her answer, but thought she had stayed on
the right side of the line. On the day of your mother’s funeral, you shouldn’t
be nasty.

The next morning Yvonne wandered around the house helplessly. It had been her
work formerly to make breakfast for their mother and help her with a bed bath.
She had nothing to do now. She went and found Yvette. Yvette looked at her with
understanding and jumped out of bed. “We’ll start organizing things here,” she
said. “We’ll ... send her wigs to the cancer organization, and start going
through her clothes. And thinking about her property and what to do about
everything.”

“Well, Anna already called the lawyer, and he’ll be letting us know about most
of that,” Yvonne said.

Yvette paused. “Someone made her frigging queen, didn’t they?”

“But I don’t even want to deal with all of that. It’s too hard. I feel like I
can’t move.”

“She doesn’t know how it feels, does she,” Yvette said. “We’ve cried so much
it feels like you could fall out the other side of yourself. I feel like I’m
not all here.”

“Exactly,” cried Yvonne. “And she doesn’t know! She hasn’t been here.” She
looked at Yvette with awe and horror. Yvette nodded. “Nothing is the same!”
Yvonne exclaimed. “There’s nothing left here!”

By mutual agreement, they didn’t try to do much of anything the next few days,
just washed their dishes and clothes, and a few ordinary things.

Anna was still in town a week later, although Carl had gone home. She had met
with the lawyer several times. The mother’s estate was divided evenly between
the three sisters. Not that Yvette or Yvonne cared much. Anna appeared at the
house one afternoon and found only Yvonne home, and this was fortunate, since
if both had been home she wouldn’t have been able to budge either one. It had to be divide and conquer.
Yvonne was coaxed out to lunch with her, and they went afterwards to a nail salon, which
Yvonne had never done. She was pleased with her pretty pink nails. She mocked
herself, silently, as the manicurist finished her: “This, and sardines! What a
new life!”

They returned to the house, and Yvette was already home. Yvonne was tired,
having spent a long day with her young sister, and was actually tired of her
company too. It was a relief to see good old Yvette curled into the big easy
chair in the front room watching tv with her bare feet on the furniture. Her
hair was undone and a little greasy. She looked embarrassed when the two walked
in looking nice.

Anna chattered about their afternoon while Yvette scooted around to hide her
big feet. Yvonne sank smilingly into a chair: The tv room was dim and she
deliberately did not turn on any lamp, since this could make Anna uneasy and
leave, with any luck. It had been a pleasant afternoon. Now get out of here, Yvonne thought to herself.

It worked soon enough, and Anna left. Yvette turned to her sister and said,
“Don’t ever do that to me again. She’s the same as a stranger, and I don’t want
my privacy intruded on by her.”

Yvonne was stunned. “What did I do? I couldn’t say goodbye to her at the door,
you know, especially since she gave me a manicure and lunch! It doesn’t matter
if she’s here for a second or two; she’s gone now! What’s the big problem?”

But Yvette was nettled. Something female in her had been challenged and
judged, and found lacking. “Just... nothing. Forget it. You don’t know what
she’s like.”

They were silent for a while, then Yvette burst out again: “She’s always
trying to fix me! To make me just like her! She’s got a nerve.”

And: “She hates the way I dress, the way I act, the way I sit and stand and eat
and drink, and smell,” Yvette commented later.

Yvonne was growing angry too. “You always say I don’t understand anything.”
She was envious of the enmity between the other two, but at the same time,
felt herself stupid for feeling so. So she vented this on Yvette: “You’re
really critical too.” She, unlike Yvette, spoke quietly, very quietly. This was
her tactic.

They were silent again. Then, with a loud guffaw, Yvette said, “Did you see
the undershorts Carl had on the day of the funeral?”

Yvonne gasped. “Yes!” she shrieked. “His pants kept slipping because he
doesn’t know what a belt is for! They looked like an old woman’s girdle, all
white cotton, and seamed and shaped!” The two laughed heartily

“And his nose hair! Did you see!” screamed Yvette. Yvonne responded with a
whoop. They kept laughing.

“And did you see -- “ Each one kept adding. They laughed until their stomachs
hurt. “Oooh, whoo,” Yvette moaned, holding her stomach in pain. They rested,
breathed, then at a glance one at the other, broke out in fresh hilarity.
Yvette’s laughs were manly, almost gross. Yvonne sighed happily, giggling every
now and then. She stretched out her arms and catching sight of her new nails,
wiggled them. Pretty, she thought. She glanced at her sister, who was
scratching her dirty feet. Their laughter died down gradually.

Yvette grunted and clambered out of the easy chair. “And she thinks she’s all
that and a bag of -- pork rinds,” she said loudly, on her way to the kitchen.
She returned with a glass of apple juice and stood regarding her sister from
the doorway.

“I am so glad you’re here,Yvonne,” she said. She drank some juice. “Even
though -- she gulped slightly -- “Mom’s not here, we’ve got a, well, a family.
Not everything’s changed after all.” She humphed, embarrassed by her speech,
and sat down again quickly in the chair. “Don’t you think so?”