The
house’s every room suffused with the aromatic perfume of curry, so insistently
pervasive as to have been absorbed beyond the immediate sense of these two
women, sitting at cards with unswallowed cream liqueur slowly crawling back to
consolidate in the tiny blown bellies of their glasses.
Mother:
Fold.
Sister:
Fold? You can’t fold. There is no folding.
Mother
(laughing): Watch me.
She
turns and blows at the nearby lamp, watching the random dance of dust’s bright
motes.
Mother:
Hmf. Dust. The dust of us.
and
lifts the tiny glass to her mouth.
Sister:
Well I wouldn’t...
Mother
(emphatic): Yeah.
Pause.
Mother:
Yeah.
Sister:
Another hand?
She
shakes her head.
Mother
(her mind elsewhere): Do you remember the first curry I ever made, or tried
to make anyway? The first curry I attempted?
Sister:
Would I remember that? I would’ve thought that would’ve been before I was born.
How would I remember that? You mean the story of it, or
Mother:
Oh God no, this was when you and your sister were little kids, but no I’d
never, no, no. That was my first attempt, I remember. I remember it very
clearly. Or, well, I don’t recall the curry itself, but you guys were, you came
in the house and you were holding your noses like
pinching
her nose with drama and mock distaste
Mother:
this was something completely new for you, the smell of it
laughing
Mother:
and you were running all over the house squealing about it, and Judas chasing
you all over, up and down the stairs.
Sister
(laughing): Really? God I don’t remember that at all. Jeez.
Mother:
And all I could think about was that there was no way, I mean, if that was your
reaction to the smell of it, how on earth was I going to get you to eat
it. Neither of you even wanted to stay in the house.
laughing
hard.
Mother:
At one point I found your sister hiding under a chair, trying to get away from
the smell.
Her
daughter absently shuffles the deck of cards before re-inserting them into
their carton.
Sister:
Did we eat it?
Mother:
Oh my no. No, no you did not eat it. Hmm. No we ended up going out for
dinner that night. We did eventually get there but I have no memory of that at
all. Just that, I remember that first time.
She
speaks from behind the finger she rubs across her teeth.
Pause.
Mother:
This year she’s been gone as much of her life again as she had.
and
before she can resolve the words themselves her daughter knows exactly what she
means, between them now the sharing of this sadness, irreducible and unceasing.
