With Alison present, I relax, as if a protective spell has been cast and nothing can go seriously wrong. The spell is put to an immediate and severe test when Tom shows up with M as his date. I heard a few months ago that M and Marc did not marry, but by the time this news reached me, a welcome layer of distance had formed between me and everything M-related, to the point that my first thought, on learning that she and Marc had broken up, was that their behavior as a couple had gone from statistically compliant to statistically aberrant. Always surprising, even to a counter like me.
To my relief, my distance from M holds fast even now, with her physically in my presence—or is it my sister’s protective spell? Alison takes my arm, and I feel her warmth and strength and calm flowing into me. She brought a keg of beer in her car, and we all drink a fair amount. I make a fire in my firepit and we sit around it and Tom holds M’s hand and kisses her cheek but I feel nothing; memories of my agony over M are like gray grabs from a stranger’s life. My sister keeps her arm around me while also pouring drinks and maintaining happiness among my guests—it’s one of her impressionist’s gifts to know when people are happy or not happy just by looking at them, whereas I’m more likely to speculate about how many hairs their eyebrows contain. I often notice that M is not smiling as we sit beside the firepit, but does that mean she’s unhappy? People don’t have to smile to be happy—sometimes they smile to hide unhappiness. But I don’t know what percentage of smiles are happy smiles versus unhappiness-cover-up smiles, and self-reporting would be inherently flawed, since a person smiling to mask unhappiness would be unlikely to admit, when asked, that they are unhappy.
When it’s late and dark and I’ve had several cups of beer and am in a giddy state over the obvious verdict that the party has gone well—people are clearly having fun, it’s already a success even though it’s still going on, so there is nothing left to worry about, and I can relax and have fun, too—I run into M coming out of my bathroom. I don’t mean that literally, but there’s a funny moment when we stand in my hall looking at each other.
“I like your girlfriend,” she says.
“She’s my sister.”
“Oh,” she says. “Tom isn’t my boyfriend, either.”
“He may not realize that.”
I’m aware, even through my new distance from M, of how strange it is to see her inside my house—a situation I imagined for so long and with such longing. Deep in my closet, I still have the box full of possible x values I acquired last year in hopes of making M fall in love with me.
“Hey,” I say. “Can I show you something, just for the hell of it?”
“Sure.”
She stands in the middle of my bedroom while I dig out the box. “Here,” I say. “This is a box of seemingly random items. I’m wondering if, when you look at them, anything in particular happens.”
I’d meant for M to pick up the objects one by one and plug them into the socket of the equation that is her, to determine, hypothetically, whether any one of them happened to be x. Not because it matters, but because I hate to leave an equation unsolved. Since I haven’t instructed M to remove the items one by one, she just leans over the box and stares at the jumble: the rose-crocheted dish towel; the small porcelain cat; the rainbow yarn sculpture on a Popsicle-stick cross; the oversize marble with a splash of turquoise in it.
“What is all this?” she asks, laughing.
“Just random stuff.”
“What’s supposed to happen when I look at it?”
“If it happened, you would know,” I say, laughing, too.
“How were the objects acquired?”
“I mostly bought them. At Walmart.”
“Then they aren’t random,” she says. “They represent a series of choices made by a particular person in a particular place. They could be diagrammed mathematically.”