c3

Go refilled my beer, refilled her beer. Her left eyelid drooped slightly. It was exactly noon, 12–00, and I wondered how long she'd been drinking. She's had a bumpy decade. My speculative sister, she of the rocket-science brain and the rodeo spirit, dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan in the late "90s. She was one of the original dot-com phenoms – made crazy money for two years, then took the Internet bubble bath in 2000. Go remained unflappable. She was closer to twenty than thirty; she was fine. For act two, she got her degree and joined the gray-suited world of investment banking. She was midlevel, nothing flashy, nothing blameful, but she lost her job – fast – with the 2008 financial meltdown. I didn'd even know she'd left New York until she phoned me from Mom's house: I give up. I begged her, cajoled her to return, hearing nothing but peeved silence on the other end. After I hung up, I made an anxious pilgrimage to her apartment in the Bowery and saw Gary, her beloved ficus tree, yellow-dead on the fire escape, and knew she'd never come back.
The Bar seemed to cheer her up. She handled the books, she poured the beers. She stole from the tip jar semi-regularly, but then she did more work than me. We never talked about our old lives. We were Dunnes, and we were done, and strangely content about it.
"So, what?" Go said, her usual way of beginning a conversation.
"Eh."
"Eh, what? Eh, bad? You look bad."
I shrugged a yes; she scanned my face.
"Amy?" she asked. It was an easy question. I shrugged again – a confirmation this time, a whatcha gonna do? shrug.
Go gave me her amused face, both elbows on the bar, hands cradling chin, hunkering down for an incisive dissection of my marriage. Go, an expert panel of one. "What about her?"
"Bad day. It's just a bad day."
"Don'd let her worry you." Go lit a cigarette. She smoked exactly one a day. "Women are crazy." Go didn'd consider herself part of the general category of women, a word she used derisively.
I blew Go's smoke back to its owner. "It's our anniversary today. Five years."
"Wow." My sister cocked her head back. She'd been a bridesmaid, all in violet – "the gorgeous, raven-haired, amethyst-draped dame," Amy's mother had dubbed her – but anniversaries weren'd something she'd remember. "Jeez. Fuck. Dude. That came fast." She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch. "She going to do one of her, uh, what do you call it, not scavenger hunt—"
"Treasure hunt," I said.
My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also actual games of amusement, and for our anniversary she always set up an elaborate treasure hunt, with each clue leading to the hiding place of the next clue until I reached the end, and my present. It was what her dad always did for her mom on their anniversary, and don'd think I don'd see the gender roles here, that I don'd get the hint. But I did not grow up in Amy's household, I grew up in mine, and the last present I remember my dad giving my mom was an iron, set on the kitchen counter, no wrapping paper.
"Should we make a wager on how pissed she's going to get at you this year?" Go asked, smiling over the rim of her beer.
The problem with Amy's treasure hunts: I never figured out the clues. Our first anniversary, back in New York, I went two for seven. That was my best year. The opening parley: This place is a bit of a hole in the wall,
But we had a great kiss there one Tuesday last fall.
Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.
"An Irish bar in a not-so-Irish place," Amy nudged.
I bit the side of my lip, started a shrug, scanning our living room as if the answer might appear. She gave me another very long minute.
"We were lost in the rain," she said in a voice that was pleading on the way to peeved.
I finished the shrug.
"McMann's, Nick. Remember, when we got lost in the rain in Chinatown trying to find that dim sum place, and it was supposed to be near the statue of Confucius but it turns out there are two statues of Confucius, and we ended up at that random Irish bar all soaking wet, and we slammed a few whiskeys, and you grabbed me and kissed me, and it was—"
"Right! You should have done a clue with Confucius, I would have gotten that."
"The statue wasn'd the point. The place was the point. The moment. I just thought it was special." She said these last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching.
"It was special." I pulled her to me and kissed her. "That smooch right there was my special anniversary reenactment. Let's go do it again at McMann's."
At McMann's, the bartender, a big, bearded bear-kid, saw us come in and grinned, poured us both whiskeys, and pushed over the next clue.
When I'm down and feeling blue
There's only one place that will do.
That one turned out to be the Alice in Wonderland statue at Central Park, which Amy had told me – she'd told me, she knew she'd told me many times – lightened her moods as a child. I do not remember any of those conversations. I'm being honest here, I just don'd. I have a dash of ADD, and I"ve always found my wife a bit dazzling, in the purest sense of the word: to lose clear vision, especially from looking at bright light. It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn'd always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn'd.
By the time we got to the end of the day, to exchanging our actual presents – the traditional paper presents for the first year of marriage – Amy was not speaking to me.
"I love you, Amy. You know I love you," I said, tailing her in and out of the family packs of dazed tourists parked in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious and openmouthed. Amy was slipping through the Central Park crowds, maneuvering between laser-eyed joggers and scissor-legged skaters, kneeling parents and toddlers careering like drunks, always just ahead of me, tight-lipped, hurrying nowhere. Me trying to catch up, grab her arm. She stopped finally, gave me a face unmoved as I explained myself, one mental finger tamping down my exasperation: "Amy, I don'd get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn'd mean I don'd love our life together."
A nearby clown blew up a balloon animal, a man bought a rose, a child licked an ice cream cone, and a genuine tradition was born, one I'd never forget: Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort. Happy anniversary, asshole.
"I'm guessing –five years – she's going to get really pissed," Go continued. "So I hope you got her a really good present."
"On the to-do list."
"What's the, like, symbol, for five years? Paper?"
"Paper is first year," I said. At the end of Year One's unexpectedly wrenching treasure hunt, Amy presented me with a set of posh stationery, my initials embossed at the top, the paper so creamy I expected my fingers to come away moist. In return, I'd presented my wife with a bright red dime-store paper kite, picturing the park, picnics, warm summer gusts. Neither of us liked our presents; we'd each have preferred the other's. It was a reverse O. Henry.
"Silver?" guessed Go. "Bronze? Scrimshaw? Help me out."
"Wood," I said. "There's no romantic present for wood."
At the other end of the bar, Sue neatly folded her newspaper and left it on the bartop with her empty mug and a five-dollar bill. We all exchanged silent smiles as she walked out.
"I got it," Go said. "Go home, fuck her brains out, then smack her with your penis and scream, “There's some wood for you, bitch!”
We laughed. Then we both flushed pink in our cheeks in the same spot. It was the kind of raunchy, unsisterly joke that Go enjoyed tossing at me like a grenade. It was also the reason why, in high school, there were always rumors that we secretly screwed. Twincest. We were too tight: our inside jokes, our edge-of-the-party whispers. I'm pretty sure I don'd need to say this, but you are not Go, you might misconstrue, so I will: My sister and I have never screwed or even thought of screwing. We just really like each other.
Go was now pantomiming dick-slapping my wife.