She knew I never would.
“Okay,” I told her. “We’ll send it to Annie. I’ll swing by Bullock’s and buy out the department. You work on commission, or something?”
I imagined my oldest sister, by then in her fifties, in this coat that had been modeled that very day by two pretty girls. Annie would wear it to Friday-night services at the temple, explaining that it was a gift from her brother. She’d offer up an arm to any interested party: go ahead, feel. Annie had, as she had aged, developed a weakness for foolishness and grandeur. Her roommate, Bessie Mackintosh, an old school chum, was foolish and grand herself. She’d moved in after Rose had married Ed, and now Annie and Bessie lived in my childhood home, two plump midwestern ladies who had pooled their money and their family china.
“It’s so practical of Annie,” my sister Ida wrote; we were all glad that Annie did not have to live alone. Practical, yes, I agreed. Our last visit home, when I kissed Annie — who’d always seemed perfumed by boiled parsnips — I noticed that she smelled wonderful, like hot spice. Then I kissed Bessie, who did too. Annie told me, looking fondly at her friend, “Bessie is my best girl.” I knew that she would not believe that they smelled the same, that she was in any way like Bessie: who, Annie would say to me, was anything like Bessie?
I sent Annie the original fur, and my other sisters near duplicates. “Thank you for the beautiful coat,” Annie wrote back to me. “We take turns wearing it.” And so I went back to the store — I must have been a running joke by then, it’s amazing my habits didn’t turn up in the gossip columns — and bought the same style in a different, darker animal, and sent it to Bessie. I wasn’t thinking, of course: taking turns was part of the pleasure of the fur, the settling weight, the leftover warmth.
I Will Be a Sister to You
Tuesday nights I kissed my kids and wife and then drove down to the radio studio for the Carter and Sharp Show. A show-business father has access to all kinds of magic working stiffs don’t: my family turned on the radio and — though they’d seen me walk out the door minutes before! — heard my voice in the playroom (or living room, or kitchen, or dance studio; our house was crazy for radios). There he is, plain as day: Daddy.
Jessica tried to explain it to them. Jake, at three, was scientifically inclined and understood how my voice could make it through a bramble of electrical wires and atmosphere and arrive at our house, but was puzzled by the things I said; Nate, two, knew I was pretending but figured I must be hiding in a closet as a joke. As for the baby, she crawled across the floor and tried to turn up the volume, smart girl. Jessica was never sure about letting them listen to their old man talking such nonsense with their uncle Rocky — at home we all got along, so why did I always sound so angry with him Tuesday nights at seven? Sometimes when I got home, they’d grill me.
“How come, Daddy, did you do that?” Jake asked.
“Do what, sweetheart?”
“Hit him?”
“I didn’t,” I said, and he, the literal kid, gave me a dirty look, and said, “I heard.”
At least they weren’t the kids of a matinee idol or screen siren, which would have been worse, according to Jessica: you’d have to watch your parents necking with all kinds of strangers and family friends. That was before Rocky cooked up a romance for me on the radio show: he decided that we’d invite on one of his fake sisters, Ida, who’d always been described as the beauty of the family. (My own Ida was vain, and I’d hoped she’d like this piece of flattery.) The Professor would develop a crush on her from afar: “Tell me, Rocky, is she single?” he’d ask.
“Is she ever!” Rocky would answer, and then, when she showed up (according to the script) she’d be so fat I’d say that calling her single was stretching the truth. Rocky wanted a fat actress, so that the moment she stepped onto the stage the folks in the studio would start laughing, which would set off the audience at home.
“You know someone?” Rocky asked me. “Someone who needs steady work? Could be a regular character. Here’s your chance to cast your own Heloise, Abelard.”
I didn’t.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Rocky, who usually left everything up to the writers and studio bosses. “Someone good,” he mused. “Someone funny and fat.”
Well, of course he was playing a trick on me. I’d show up, and there he’d be in drag — that would make perfect sense, of course. In a movie, who else would play Rocky’s sister but Rocky? Not much of a joke, sure, but he and I were busy married men these days, and we’d take our laughs when we could.
But when I arrived at the afternoon run-through, there was Rock in his street clothes, and, with her back turned to me, a terrifically fat blonde. She was shaped like a fir tree, fatter the farther down you looked. Her ankles seemed to almost cover her tiny black pumps; her hair was platinum, nearly translucent. She and Rocky were reading from the script already, and I could hear that her timing was good, that her voice could go from sultry seductive purr to angry foghorn blare in the same sentence. I felt even worse than usual that we’d given Rocky’s sisters my own sisters’ names.
I walked across the stage to introduce myself. Rocky said to the woman, “Don’t take it hard, Ida honey, you’re just too much woman for a guy like the Professor.”
“No, I’m not, I’m just enough.”
“Hello,” I said. The woman turned and looked at me. She was younger than I’d expected, and her face wasn’t as fat as the rest of her. I couldn’t decide whether this was lucky or a mean trick. “I’m Mike Sharp. Your love interest.”
She laughed, and set her hand on my arm. It reminded me of something. “Is that what you are?”
“So they tell me.”
The woman flexed her eyebrows at me. She had a thin nose that sprang from her face like a swan dive. Otherwise, she looked like a giant, bratty, lovable baby. “Mose,” she said. “Mose. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me.”
And at that I almost fainted like my on-screen self would have, to be reunited with someone he’d thought dead. It took some looking, but there she was: Miriam, Mimi, my giant bratty lovable lost child.
Still, I was the real Mike Sharp, not the celluloid one, and I had my wits about me: I kissed her cheek. I tried to get my arms around her, but I couldn’t. I felt like crying.
She said, “You probably didn’t recognize me because I got my nose fixed.”
“That must be it,” I said gallantly.
She burst out into her beautiful raucous laugh, and that was the moment I did fully, completely recognize her. “Must be,” she said, “because I can’t imagine how else I’ve changed.”
I looked at Rocky, who was beaming, either evilly or paternally: I couldn’t tell. “She’s got the part,” I told him.
“Of course she does!” he said. “Let’s go out to lunch!”
“Sure,” said Mimi.
Her curls were a parody of her old blond wig; I could see how short hair would no longer have suited her. All I could think was, Is lunch a good idea? But I offered her an elbow and said to Rocky, “You’re not invited.”
“No?” Rocky thought he was invited to every meal in the world. “Oh, okay. Old times. I understand.”
“Good,” I said.
I took her to Musso’s, my favorite spot, to a table up front.
“So,” she said, as she struggled into the booth, “I don’t have to ask what you’ve been up to.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio.”
“Carter’s hijacked your sisters, has he?”