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Title: The House of Mourning (Manuscript ID: 9087211)
Author: Sandy Carlson (Membership ID: 6993649)
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THE OCCASION
"You're wearing that?" Gert's voice cut through the air and burned the back of Isabel's neck where she sat at the dressing table. The imperious tone, the searing "don't embarrass me" undertone, succeeded, as it always had, in decapitating the younger sister's spirits. Looking through the mirror at the dress, hanging from a wire hanger from the closet door, Isabel, though she wished not to, joined her sister's skepticism. Was that the right dress for the occasion? No, Isabel would look foolish. She could do nothing. It was too late. She must wear the dress. "Would you help me get into it?" Isabel turned to face her sister. She felt deeply the shame that caused the question to stick in her throat like a partially chewed slab of meat. Her sister did not answer but turned on her satin-slippered heel and left the room. Isabel studied the sun-filled room, a guestroom in her mother's enormous, empty house, that echoed a tenuous silence now that Gert was out of it. Dust danced in the thick, fluorescent bars of summer sunlight that angled through the windowpanes and bisected the room on their journey to the floor. Their dance was chaotic in the perfumed frenzy that Gert had caused. The corporate, territorial smell always made Isabel feel nervous, inadequate. How did that perfume smell on its many laps through the air system that swept across the sea of cubicles in the office tower where Gert administered insurance policy after insurance policy? The dust danced and Isabel wondered. "I can't believe she's wearing that, Mother," Gert said to the women's aging mother, who was dressing in her room down the hall for the occasion.
"That dress is her," Mother muttered. Isabel heard the voices amid the clatter of the dowager's dresser drawers: stockings, lipstick, foundation, comb, clip-on earrings. Isabel could see in the scrapbook of her mind the woman assembling everything she would need for her costume along the surface of the dresser before she would sit down and assemble herself. A self-repairing Ford, Isabel thought. That dress is her. The process of laying out was, Isabel knew, Mother's way of not forgetting. She would move from one end of the dresser to the other, thinking from head to toe, "What do I need?" and retrieving that thing. In this way, she could think solely of the process of caring for herself, caring for her hair, eyes, ears, teeth, arms, and so on. She could be absorbed in her toilet for hours once Continue
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