Juliet Read Free

Janice’sboots and neckline said
come hither
, my clunky shoes and buttoned-up dress most certainly said
get lost
.
    Half a handful of people showed up at the grave, but only Mr. Gallagher, our family lawyer, stayed to talk. Neither Janice nor I had ever met him, but Aunt Rose had talked about him so often and so fondly that the man himself could only be a disappointment.
    “I understand you are a pacifist?” he said to me, as we walked away from the cemetery together.
    “Jules loves to fight,” observed Janice, walking happily in the middle, oblivious to the fact that the brim of her hat was funneling water on both of us, “and throw stuff at people. Did you hear what she did to the Little Mermaid—?”
    “That’s enough,” I said, trying to find a dry spot on my sleeve to wipe my eyes one last time.
    “Oh, don’t be so modest! You were on the front page!”
    “And I hear your business is going very well?” Mr. Gallagher looked at Janice, attempting a smile. “It must be a challenge to make everyone happy?”
    “Happy? Eek!” Janice narrowly avoided stepping in a puddle. “Happiness is the worst threat to my business. Dreams are what it’s all about. Frustrations. Fantasies that never come true. Men that don’t exist. Women you can never have. That’s where the money is, date after date after date—”
    Janice kept talking, but I stopped listening. It was one of the world’s great ironies that my sister was into professional matchmaking, for she was probably the least romantic person I had ever known. Notwithstanding her urge to flirt with every one of them, she saw men as little more than noisy power tools that you plugged in when you needed them and unplugged as soon as the job was done.
    Oddly enough, when we were children, Janice had had an obsession with arranging everything in pairs, two teddy bears, two cushions, two hairbrushes … even on days when we had been fighting, she would put both our dolls next to each other on the shelf overnight, sometimes even with their arms around each other. In that respect it was perhaps not strange that she would choose to make a career out of matchmaking, seeing that she was a genuine Noah at putting people in pairs. The only problem was that, unlike the old patriarch, she had long since forgotten why she did it.
    It was hard to say when things had changed. At some point in high school she had made it her mission to burst every dream I might ever have had about love. Running through boyfriends like economy pantyhose, Janice had taken a peculiar pleasure in grossing me out by describing everybody and everything in a dismissive slang that made me wonder why women consorted with men at all.
    “So,” she had said, rolling pink curlers into my hair on the night before our prom, “this is your last chance.”
    I had looked at her in the mirror, puzzled by her ultimatum but prevented from responding by one of her mint-green mud masks that had dried to a crust on my face.
    “You know”—she had grimaced impatiently—“your last chance to pop the cherry. That’s what prom’s all about. Why do you think the guys dress up? Because they like to dance? Puh
-leez!”
She had glanced at me in the mirror, checking her progress. “If you don’t do it at prom, you know what they say. You’re a prude. Nobody likes a prude.”
    The next morning, I had complained about a stomachache, and as the prom came closer, my pains grew worse. In the end, Aunt Rose had to call the neighbors and tell them that their son had better find himself another date for the evening; meanwhile, Janice was picked up by an athlete called Troy and disappeared in a smoke of squealing tires.
    After listening to my moans all afternoon, Aunt Rose began insisting we go to the emergency room in case it was appendicitis, but Umberto had calmed her down and said that I did not have a fever, and that he was certain it was nothing serious. As he stood there next to my bed later in the evening, looking