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74 chapter twenty-four merry and lucy Once, for a brief time, Merry came to live in the woods with me. This was upstate, in a cold winter climate. Together we made ice wine—I had learned to ferment it myself in jelly jars. Sometimes,when we would boil the jars to sanitize them, Merry would get scalded. She almost looked happy when it happened. Yes, it is the only time I remember her looking happy—when she was burned. From childhood she liked to self-harm. I did not identify with this affliction though I never would judge it. As for Merry, she seemed to think that I did judge her. “Why are you yelling at me with your eyes?” she would say. Then I would ask her,in genuine curiosity,how it felt to be burned on her arm, and whether her body had feeling. Never any reply. I would turn to my cleaning with vigor. Sometimes, it seemed Merry just wanted to get away from me, though I was the one providing her with the creature comforts of home. She would go outside and run into the snowbanks head-first—crash right into them 75 with no worries about the ice that inside them formed in late winter. She looked like a mummy wrapped in so many clothes that she’d brought in a trunk. (I noticed,but did not comment, that it was a trunk of mine—or rather the one of our mother’s I had kept at the end of my bed as a child.) She wore wool pants, knitted sweaters, rabbit caps. As she ran past me to sprint head-first into an icy snowbank, I caught a whiff of Old Spice. “Where are you going, Merry?” I asked. It was freezing . Though I was enraptured by my life in the forest, I was not impervious to cold. Yet I could not resist still sometimes wearing my costume: my pencil skirt, white blouse, and pumps. Yes, this was a total indulgence, but in it I found great comfort and bliss. As I stood with chattering teeth, wishing I could get back to my doll-making, Merry would run and run and run in the woods. Around a hemlock tree (somehow it had escaped death—and no hemlock ecologist yet had found it, though I wrote letter upon letter to them) she ran circles again and again. “God!” she yelled. “I miss taking drugs!” She really seemed angry. I ran toward her then,because she was my sister. “Merry ,Merry,”I said.“Come back in,and I’ll make you supper. I’ll make you tea. If you just let goodness into your heart . . .” She threw herself onto the ground again in histrionics. She banged her fists into the snow. “Pills,” she muttered. “Pills pills pills pills pills.”There was a long silence. “Vodka?” she said. 76 “I don’t have any.”This was a lie. I stood there watching as she curled into a ball, and then she froze. Right before my eyes she turned into an icecube. It was so small. Just when I was about to pick it up, maybe taste it— what would my sister taste like, I wondered, did someone mean taste better or worse than someone sad—she turned back to human. She neither moved nor spoke for a while. “What’s wrong, Merry?” I asked. Finally, she spoke. “I’m going to tell you something,” she started. But I can’t tell you what she next said. Fill it in, with the worst thing you could imagine: _________________________ ____________. “You don’t know anything,” she finished in the coldest voice I ever had heard or dreamed. “You don’t know how to live.” I felt the beginning of horror coming along. I never had made much of the fact that I had no memories after the age of seventeen. It was as if I had been asleep my whole life—enchanted, if you will. I had found it quite pleasing. Who wouldn’t? Really, who needs all those happy memories? It would have been selfish to hoard them from people who have none—or worse. But I had been wrong. And I realized that the city-ghost had attempted to portent this moment to me . . . to portent this moment . . . shining on white horses they come with crosses and stars . . . my mind began to stumble.To make no sense. 77 Then a new light filled my vision. An...

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