Kissing Cousins: A Memory by Hortense Calisher

loaded with time. Nor the roadways out there, chatty with advices on death. Nor those mountains of handicraft which, if carefully swapped with a neighbor, will keep both of you anchored to the sliding Florida earth. A nurse knows better, at least most of the time. And I have had a household from which the habitués have slid one by one.
    “No. C’ose not. Sista chose it.”
    I have the distinct sensation that I have lanced a boil. Though I have had no medical training of any kind.
    But now she is pleading with me. “Hon’—Rachel never had much.”
    So that’s why I disliked her. As the rich dislike the poor.
    “You were the elder, weren’t you, Katie?”
    “Nita was, by three years. But after a while, people didn’t think so.”
    She says this equably, as an observed fact. I want to scoop up and tally the resentment she should have had.
    “Because she was—so dependent on you. Didn’t she have a typing agency once?”
    “She went into debt over it. Mahma kept paying for it and didn’t tell me. I’d just been made supervisor and couldn’t get home much. My own head supervisor was a battle-axe.” She made the kind of impish face that kids make behind the gym teacher’s back. “Taught me how to be … And then I did get home, and found out. Mahma didn’t have any more money. She’d been giving Ayron, too—he was just starting out. And she’d simply come to the end of what they had … But all that was later, hon’.”
    “I remember! There was talk about it in the family. That was when you took on special cases—Sundays and holidays. And everybody except Daddy said you were too ambitious.”
    She chuckled. “So I was. To them.”
    “And that you would ruin your health.”
    “I ’most did. But then, you know, I’d been in the awmy, where health wasn’t exactly”—she gave me a look, tender but critical. “Your family—I have to say it, dollin’. The whole lot of them on your father’s side. Beck and I often said it. They were the healthiest hypochondriacs we ever saw.”
    And suddenly we begin to laugh and laugh. I can hear our joint cackle almost separate from my half of it. Oh, what a release—and yes, a joining—for aren’t I creeping up now, almost Katie’s contemporary?
    “It was just that they were always so interested, ” I gasped. “In what life could do to them.”
    As the laughter ebbs, she, too, leans back, released, and I think to myself, we could founder here; we could stay on memory’s cute side, on the pawky side of the folklore, the kind that people love to buy—and why not? After all, hon’—you didn’t die of that diphtheria.
    But hadn’t I been taught—only realizing now that my fond, fussy hypochondriacs had been the ones to teach me—that my early rescue gave me an extra obligation to life, to report on life?
    We had forgotten the other chair. That’s what a chair can do—look immanent. What a family of chairs we had been, each demanding that its history be kept up!
    “‘Later,’ you said, Katie. Later than what?”
    “Oh—for Sista, I meant.”
    It comes slowly—why?
    “She was a right pretty little thing, to start. Chubby always, but also—you know—fat oriented.” There was a professional tinge to Katie’s words now; after a period of mourning, those facts become memory, too. “How I tried to keep after her about the fat, but you knew Sista. Even those last months when the fat was around the heart like a—I saw the report, I made them show me it—but Rachel would say, ‘I just cain’t eat without butter to my bread.’”
    I could hear the plaint, the intonation.
    “I tried to restrain her—but it was all she had.”
    What about—men? I find I can’t say it. We reserve a certain priggishness for our elders, for their own silly sake—even with a woman who can label her own skeleton. Or because where there is a Sista, there is the other sister—whose history is also lurking here?
    “Rachel bore the brunt of our move North, you