But she’s been checking her phone a whole lot less anyway, which means, two weeks after the wallpaper afternoon, that she’s already waited well into the evening before finally reading and responding to a text message from her sister Grace: “CALL ME!” Grace answering the phone and railing against Clemence for being so hard to reach these days. “How am Ieven supposed to know you’re alive?” she asks. Clemence has stopped using social media. “Ikeep checking for updates,” says Grace, “but there’s been nothing since that bird at your backyard feeder last May. What’s going on there?”
Clemence explains that she’s abandoned the virtual realm for the actual, for things that can be touched and held, and whose satisfactions are much less ephemeral.
Grace tells her she sounds like a space cadet. “Anyway, Clem, Prudence is pregnant.” Confidential. This is supposed to be the kind of call where two sisters discuss the third sister in concerned tones, and pretend it isn’t gossip.
“She told you?” Clemence has only just come home after spending the afternoon in the library hard at workon Puddicombe’s index. It’s stuffy in her apartment, and she walks across the room to open up the door.
“She toldyou?” Grace is asking.
And Clemence says, “Yes,” without thinking. Without thinking about how this is Grace’s trigger, being left out of the trinity. She’s going to flip, and she does, because Prudence hasn’t said a word to her yet. “Why did Ihave to hear it from Mom?”
“Ithink it’s been complicated,” says Clemence. “Idon’t know. You could ask her.”
“Idon’t want to have to ask her,” says Grace. “How come you got to hear it first? You haven’t lived in town for seven years, and all of a sudden you’re the centre of the loop.”
Don’t tell Grace she’s being childish. Don’t tell Grace she’s being childish.“Grace, you’re being childish,” says Clemence’s worst self, and Grace explodes. Clemence sets her phone down on the table and goes to put the kettle on.
Picking up the phone again a few minutes later to hear Grace saying, “Do you know what Imean?”
Clemence says, “Ido. You’re right.”
Grace says, “It means a lot to hear you say that.”
“Of course.” Clemence settling down on her bed, whose lumpiness she’s grown accustomed to. The only thing adorning it is a crisp white sheet, and it feels cool against her skin. And Grace is talking about their sister now, how their mother isn’t sure how Prudence is taking it.
“Well, Prudence isn’t even sure how she’s taking it. It was an accident.”
“It was?”
“The fertility awareness method.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Grace, who often returns to her tirade on the heteronormative privilege of the nuclear family. “Do you know what I’d have to do to get pregnant by accident? How far out of my way I’d have to go? It’s not fair.”
“Maybe you should have married Sandro.”
Grace says, “Gross.” There are phones ringing in the background.
“You’re at work.” Grace is a social worker.
“I’m on my dinner break,” says Grace.
The kettle is boiling, and Clemence gets up again to fill her teapot. “Why don’t you call Prudence and talk to her?” she suggests.
“You know Ican’t do that.” Prudence is occupied all hours of the day by her children’s activities, and once the children are in bed, she’s too tired to talk. “Besides, Ididn’t want to talk to her. Iwanted to talkabouther.”
Clemence says, “Fair enough.” She places the lid on her teapot. “The twins are okay?”
“The twins are fine. They’re at Mandarin tonight.”
“You’re not Chinese.”
“If Iwas, they’d probably know Mandarin already. Anyway, it’s the only program we could get them into. It’s a skill, at least. Looks good on a CV.”
“They’re four years old!”
“Clemence, they’re three.”
“No, Iknew that.” She hadn’t. “But isn’t that even more absurd?”
