by Timothy Schirmer

       Fifteen years ago my sister married an Italian boy, equal parts smug and charming, unreasonably handsome.  To see this young man was to see beauty clogged in someone who didn’t deserve it.  This boy worked a pear orchard in Northernmost Africa.  His and my sister’s paths had crossed while swaging across Europe.  My sister assured our mother that her newfound home was a short boat ride to Spain.  We all thought she was sacrificing too much for this boy.  Father said she would come to her senses eventually; the hard days would work their way into her with a curative effect.

       But my sister was happy living in the ‘old world’, climbing ladders all day with her nose up in the blossoms, dropping fruits into pails.  Mornings they ate sweet biscuits with sliced pears.  At sunset they stewed pears in honey like the Romans had; this was once, her husband explained, the only way for a Roman to eat a pear.  One assumed sex was had like a meal, neither rushed nor leisurely, two or three times a day, he being the kind of man who used orgasms to recalibrate his ambitions.

       After the harvest my sister would wrap whole volumes of dazzling pears in tissue paper, snuggle them into fancy gift boxes and slingshot the pears all across the globe.  Those flawed—with nicks, dents or soft spots—they sold in town at a discount and kept some for themselves.  Those grossly imperfect—doomed from the start, twisted messes or sauce under the skin—she bestowed to clans of barefooted children who danced at the gates; in one of her letters she described these children: dark and scuffed as unwashed plums.  Flighty and wild like the birds.

       Eventually, I too met a man.  We married quickly and had three sons, one right after the other.  Though I had always hoped to avoid those trite suburban benchmarks—we came to measure our life in thread counts, inches around the waist, square-footage, horsepower.  These measurements fell around us as nets fall from the trees over forest creatures, and we lived (even happily) within their confines, keeping us from the wild, the wild from us.  But every day I thought of my sister who had made a lusty and savage adventure of her life.

       When our third son was born my sister surprised us with a visit.  Five years she had been away from America.  She arrived in a simple muslin dress, her only glamour in the leanness of her body, her deeply bronzed skin.  Though she came without her husband, she talked lovingly of him, of how he had found his way into a circle of people who were both bohemian and strangely powerful.  The Dragonflies, she called these people.  We did not ask.  She smiled at the children but did not care to hold them.  A quietness resided in my sister that was not there before.  My father guessed serenity.  I guessed anxiety.  My mother said, she’s not a girl anymore, that’s all.  On the last evening of her visit she vehemently scolded us for eating imitation butter, for drinking skim milk; then she laughed—a quavering maudlin laughter—and she said, what the hell difference does it make, what do I know?

       In her letters, for the longest time, she claimed to be happier than ever, at the core of a simple formula.  A white woman in Africa basking in a web of pears that stretched out forever.  She wrote again and again to say that she didn’t miss her former life, she didn’t miss America at all, and she wasn’t ever returning for more than a visit.

       Several years ago my sister fell out of touch for a terrifying length of time.  Incommunicado is the only word she uses now to explain that year when her signal had faded.  And a mischievous smile, not of the mouth but of the eyes.  From a town in Northern Italy my parents received one cryptic postcard (typed, nothing hand-written).  TRAVELING.  MUCH LOVE. One evening a crazed woman knocked at my parent’s door, gibberish spewing from her mouth, and my mother swore to have heard my sister’s name thinly laced in this woman’s rant.  My father said, no darling, you’re imagining things.  We were a few days shy of purchasing plane tickets when there came a lengthy hand-written letter telling the story of a gluttonous bug that had picked the locks on the trees, plague had found the orchard, the pears were done.  My sister and her husband were living farther south, away from the sea, raising crops for a church.

       She returned to us with one large suitcase, fine lines etched into her forehead, around her eyes.  The life she had lived with her very pretty husband, she said, was rotted as the trees that once dropped whole tides of pears; never again would she hear of him, nor he of her.

       My sister lives in her girlhood bedroom, rides a bike to a coffeehouse where she works with a tribe of lazy children half her age.  We have her over for dinner.  She doesn’t mention the butter or milk.  I am certain from the look in her eyes that she sees the richness in my life, the deep value in the children, in the real estate, in the labyrinth we’ve built for ourselves.  See the swimming pool, like a turquoise jewel pressed into the grass.  See the car in the car in the garage, like a diamond in its box.  Jealousy takes its swift clean bites from the heart.  I know.

       But my sister isn’t altogether unhappy, she has her secrets; she herself is an object of intrigue.  What life did she live in Africa?  Was it the one in her letters?  You look at someone and you see that they have flooded their former lungs, a tidal wave of secrets receding to the edges of the soul.  There is something precise—a love? a crime? a reckless evening?—a morsel vaulted deep inside her, she clings to it like a divine meal she enjoyed many years ago, all of it passed through her body, but oh, the memory!  The pears!  The man!  The children who danced at the gates!  And the rest of it that she kept for herself.  Don’t I want whole years that were mine, braided with the salt smell of the sea and a lust that yielded to nothing?   It is unclear as to which one of us has missed her chance.