The Cousins Read Free Page B

Olivia’s parents had had for over forty years, and tried to throw out all the family photographs. “You’ll never look at them,” she had snapped as Olivia adamantly carried them away.
    How could anyone be so heartless as to destroy a family’s history? How could she not want to keep the childhood picture of her mother Lila with her ruffled dress and solemn face, of Aunt Julia with the big bow in her hair . . . Olivia remembered reading about how some Holocaust survivors had kept pictures of their parents hidden inside the soles of their shoes through all the horrible years until the Liberation. But second wives, and their husbands, had been obliterating the existence of first wives for centuries. It was probably part of nature. As for Grace, after Olivia’s father’s death she had gone back to her children from her first marriage, and she and Olivia had not been in contact in two years.
    “I think I want to be buried here,” Olivia said. “With my mother and the grandparents. Some sense of continuity. Will you remember?”
    “It won’t be for a long time,” Melissa said.
    “So?”
    “Okay.” Melissa looked uncomfortable. Her own mother was buried here, with a place waiting for her father, Uncle David, but like all the other cousins who had moved away, Melissa and her husband had bought a family plot in their hometown. Jenny and her husband had done the same, as had Kenny.
    The mourners were walking to the limousines, and Melissa headed back, but Olivia stood for a moment looking over the neat rows of headstones lined up into the distance until they finally disappeared into the low mist of the damp, darkening winter afternoon. Many, many generations ago there had been only one cemetery, and everyone was buried there. Now there was no room, and even if there had been, people had gone away. The past seemed so simple. It made her feel sad.
    * * *
    Back at Aunt Julia’s apartment the relatives were eating ravenously from a buffet. Olivia wasn’t hungry. She looked around. There was the covered silver candy dish from the living room in Mandelay, and the four antique side chairs with needlepoint seats, which the children never sat on because they were itchy. And there next to the phone sat the TTY with its computer screen and keyboard, which Julia had used for her long-distance talks with Taylor.
    In the living room Aunt Myra, Jenny’s mother, the youngest of the aunts, who had no sisters anymore, was sitting close to her two older brothers and her sister-in-law, looking small and vulnerable. The “girl” cousins were talking about their children and schools, the “boy” cousins were talking about the family business (because even though most of them had chosen other occupations, the whole family still got money from it) and no one was discussing the departed.
    Grady and Taylor were sitting by themselves in a corner, conversing rapidly in sign language, their faces bright and animated, the way they were only with each other. Her graceful hands flew like two tan birds. What were they saying? They had had a habit since childhood of signing instead of speaking when other people were around, mischievously hiding in their private, secret world. A world none of the others had tried hard enough to enter. . . .
    Olivia remembered how, during those long summers at Mandelay, after what the family referred to as the Tragedy, all the cousins had tried to learn sign language so they could continue to talk to Taylor. They had approached it with the brief enthusiasm of children, and afterward, when they all grew up and scattered, they had forgotten most of it. Taylor had been their little pet, their toy. Olivia remembered Jenny at fourteen, sitting so patiently and setting Taylor’s silky flaxen hair into curls, because while Jenny was always trying to straighten her own dark tangled mop and look like Taylor, Taylor wanted only to look like Jenny. In her own way Jenny had spoken to Taylor through the language of her