Sine Die

Of Geometry, Sex, and Death

Dear Republic,

We almost never publish pieces as long as this one but couldn’t resist the way that the great Mary L. Tabor braids the threads of the story together.

At 9:00am EST tomorrow (Sunday), we talk with Jacob Siegel on his The Information State.

-ROL

SINE DIE

I see the two women at the bar, yellow silk, split skirts, dark hair, beautiful long thin legs.

The two women were at the bar, thinking they were in Hong Kong, pretending. (Much of what they do is pretending—it is how they get on with one another.) Today they pretended that they were Asian, that their hair was long and straight, that they could smoke without harm, that they could drink and stay in control but still get high, that their skin was the beautiful mellow beige of Asian women, that they could lie in the sun without burning. They talked and laughed. They wore their hair pulled back against their heads, made smooth with gel so they had the look of straight hair. They went shopping and bought yellow silk blouses and skirts, went to a seamstress who cut the slits in their skirts, who tightened the silk against their hips.

The only way to tell them apart is the younger sister’s small bones, tiny points, exposed; the older’s small round stomach. They bought high-heeled shoes and wore them even though both had inherited their mother’s feet—one with the hammer toe, both with the bone that widened at the ball, that had become a bunion as they grew older. One sister’s bunion was worse than the other’s. The bunions, hidden in the narrow vamps of their shoes, hurt. They did not care. They were pretending and they were good at it.

It had taken them a long time to learn. It began when they were children, when they pretended they could fly by riding on each other’s feet, when they pretended they were fine cooks like their mother, cooked mushrooms on toast and created a delightful meal for themselves without their mother’s help, when their parents were not home, when the older sister was babysitting the younger. It was when they were children—like other children—that the pretending became an integral part of their play. But unlike other children, the pretending became so essential to their relationship they could not, would not, outgrow it because, while they were children, one of them got sick. They didn’t talk about the sickness; they pretended, the way their parents pretended, that it did not exist, but the sickness was the source of all their pretending now, the unspoken source.

The two sisters left the bar and went down Baltimore street, the street where the strippers took off their clothes inside the bars. They didn’t go into any of these bars but they liked to walk down the street. So they walked, watched the eyes of the men on them, knowing this was dangerous. But the older sister was strong, a powerful, sick, fearless woman who told the younger sister not to be afraid. She said, “Pretend you belong, that you own the street. Anyone can go anywhere if she acts like she owns the place.”

1

This way of walking, of turning a street corner, of entering a room, is something you can learn by pretending. It’s the key to everything. That’s why we do it when we’re little—so we can learn.

I am not sure when I am pretending and when I am not. I had a sister, three years older than I, who died. I have trouble remembering her. To help with this I think of remembering and forgetting as two sides of a right triangle. I think of the third side, the hypotenuse, as pretending. It is this third side that helps me accept the not knowing, the intangibility of the truth.

sine curve

In Trigonometry, the graph of the equation y = sin x is called the sine curve, an elegant mathematical tool for defining the relationship of the sides of a right triangle. It is an infinite (sine die) pattern of undulating curves with an infinite number of points that plot changes in the triangle, including a point where no triangle exists—a flat line.

On the right triangle, let us call the two sisters sides A and B; A is the older sister; B, the younger; they are bound to one another in a right angle, an essential (sine qua non) element. Their relationship, the unknowns and knowns of each to the other, is defined by the sine curve. The unknowns reveal themselves as knowns, as points on the sine curve by calculating the relationships of A to B to C. Side C is the pretending. I think of the sisters (A and B) interchangeably as remembering and forgetting, for as I’ve said the two are hard to tell apart, the way the sisters looked alike that day on their walk down Baltimore Street.

2

The two women were not whores. They were not wild.

The only thing they had ever done together with abandon was the time they cut their long hair short and had it permed, which made their curly hair curlier—and them, ridiculous. Then, like now, they did not know exactly what they were doing, and their hair bloomed into unexpected Afros when it dried. Since puberty, each had rolled her hair and sat under dryers. Neither knew that she had naturally curly hair because both had straight hair as children. The curls came with puberty when all those rollers became essential to their pretense of appearance. In this sense, the truth about their hair was a secret neither had known—that they discovered with a silly mistake, the permanent solution on their hair. The tameness of the mistake and the resulting discovery contrasted with the seriousness of the pretending that defined their relationship and the current adventure.

For now they both knew there were other secrets. Neither knew what the other had done that could have been wild, that they had not done together. Both sisters, who were married, believed that the other had never had an affair. But on Baltimore Street each sister looked at the other wondering if this were true. Had neither actually had an affair?

The older one, the one who was sick, thought, My sickness is like an affair. It seduces me to live even though I know the doctor will cut off my leg soon (this, my sister doesn’t know). It repels me because I would rather die than live deformed. I am infatuated by my secret. When I am ready to tell, my horror will hold my sister near me. What has my sister kept secret? she wondered. To find out, she lied, “We tell each other everything. I would know if you had done something. I would see it in your face, hear it in your voice.”

The younger knew that was not true because she had had an affair with a married man, a lawyer, many years ago before she was married—and not told. She wondered, Would I sleep with the lawyer now? Now that I am married?

So she was not as innocent as she pretended. Did her sister know this? She was reminded of when they were both teenagers: The older had made her a costume like the yellow silk outfit she was wearing now. Her sister had called it “the gypsy costume.” Now the younger saw that the gypsy costume really was the outfit of a whore, with the low-cut blouse, the skirt with a slit up the side, on a fourteen-year-old girl. The skin-tight skirt, which the thin little girl wore well, pretending to be older. Her thin body suited the outfit, the scarf her sister put around her forehead, a larger scarf around her shoulders atop the off-the-shoulder blouse. Who was pretending? Was it the little girl? Her seventeen-year-old sister? Both, the woman now realized. They were dreaming the shared secret, desire.

The sisters’ most powerful secret was something each knew but would not, could not express—the power of the older over the younger. Both were aware of it. Neither knew how it would play out.

3

My sister is dead. She died three years after our mother died. My father is sick—but because I am left, I am the only one who knows about this. My father doesn’t remember that my mother (his wife) and my sister (his daughter) have died. He has severe memory loss—Parkinson’s Disease. He is sine cure (without cure). The doctors simply say, to clarify, “Senility.” But I think he is mad with grief. I am forty years old, married to a man I love. Like my father, I am not sure what I know. I often pretend—now that my sister and mother have died and now that my father can’t remember those facts—I pretend that another man loves me, a man who has no connection to any of these losses. My husband, who I think no longer desires me, went through it all with me—all I’ve lost. I want to forget, to pretend. Perhaps the other man is real. Perhaps my husband desires me. My father sometimes says, out of the blue it seems—is he trying to remember or forget when he says this? — “The circumstances are extenuating.”

4

Now a man approached them. Secretly the younger sister hoped they would meet an ordinary man who himself was floating down the street looking for solace while they were floating looking for danger. Secretly the older sister hoped they would meet a man looking for danger. She was dangerous because she was dying from the diabetes she’d had since she was twelve—in the ’50s, after insulin had been discovered. But the disease is still sine cure—like the older sister’s desire for danger, and her need to take the younger one along.

They walked together, laughing, the younger one feeling safe beside the older who knew what to do, how to handle herself, how to handle men, how to put them off as she did when the men who looked perverse or sick came close. She did this with a turn of her head, a swift lift of her chin, a look of disdain. It was effective, in the style of a professional hooker, and they were safe in the open street, in front of the bars where the strippers stripped. The unwanted men would turn their heads away, look in the bars, seeming to know they could not afford this whore.

But when the one in the suit, looking as if he’d come from a convention downtown, wearing the name tag he’d forgotten to take off, walked by—things began to happen.

He looked ordinary, not handsome, but clean, corporate. He was made ridiculous by the name tag he was wearing, one’s name on one’s sleeve so to speak, though the tag was clipped to his right breast pocket, ‘Donald Belson.’ The tag made him seem lost, though that was not how he looked. He looked secure, eager to explore. But the forgotten name tag made the younger sister think of one of her children on a field trip, wandering from the group, and she wanted to talk to him, the way she would to a lost child, to get him back to his group, to the other suited men who had forgotten to take off their conference i.d. badges. She watched him take it off when a prostitute called him by name. But she did not speak when he approached them.

5

What had he seen in them? He thought they were hookers. He was seeing the sights he’d read about in the guidebook, which said to stay away from this neighborhood but that it was safe to go onto “The Block,” the one section of Baltimore Street where the strip joints were, where the prostitutes wandered, but took their Johns elsewhere. “The Block” where Blaze Star used to perform at the Palace Theatre. It was worth one trip if you were careful. He’d read about Blaze Star in the paper. Wasn’t she the one who went with that congressman? Wasn’t she the one in a movie with Paul Newman? Yes, he was saying to himself—I can do this. I might see Blaze Star. No one will know and I’ll do it. Not everyone who comes to Baltimore Street buys a whore. And what if I did? Like pretending. What would be the harm? He’s a man after all. He can take care of himself.

This was what he was thinking when the two sisters walked by. The older sister spoke. “Where are you from?”

“Iowa. Here on a farm conference.”

“You don’t look like a farmer,” said the younger one. Her husband was from Iowa and she was emboldened now to speak, by the name tag, by her sister’s boldness, by the calm voice of the man.

He wondered if they were fooling with him like the ones who’d called him by name before he’d put the name tag in his pocket, but he saw the fear in the younger sister’s eyes, saw that their clothes were pressed—and clean, like their hands, their hair. He said, repeating himself because he was nervous, “I’m from Iowa, a farmer, corn mainly.” He stopped to see what they would do.

6

The older sister was cynical, thought the man was dangerous, while the younger thought him safe, knowing that he was from Iowa where streets like this did not exist.

Now we can tell the two sisters apart: Disbelief (A) and belief (B). This was the way the two of them could be named on the street that day. Their relationship defined: Cynic (A) and innocent (B). The farmer (C) was pretending.

7

I was no longer innocent when the doctors cut off my sister’s leg: knee, shin, foot (hammer toe and bunion). I was guilty. I said to one of my nieces—the wild, drinking, crazy one, the one most like my sister, my sister’s child in every way—I said, “Give me a cigarette.” This doesn’t sound like much. But I hadn’t smoked in twelve years. I had tried to be well.

That night I bought a pack, smoked seven in a row, fast. Binge smoked. Sat outside on my patio in a plastic white chair, drank red wine, then ruby port. Smoked seven more, went upstairs to the bathroom, sick with nicotine and booze and grief.

The next morning, the morning after the surgery to cut off her leg while she was thrashing in her crib-bed in the Intensive Care Unit, I called him, the married man I had slept with before I married my husband. I was sober-smoking-hungover-crazy. I called and said, “See me, anytime, anywhere.” I didn’t tell him what was wrong.

He said, “Sure, our old place.”

“Yeah,” I said, “our old place. Dark, lots of wood. We’ll drink that Scotch you like?”

He said, “Four o’clock.”

I said, “And I’m smoking.”

He said, “Smoking what?”

“Oh, give me a break.”

“Well, I was hoping.” Because he smoked weed. He’d do it in public, at hockey games with his corporate lawyer friends, the ones who did criminal law, pro bono, to keep their hands in, to know the judges. He was a criminal lawyer. Had connections. He said the corporate guys brought the stuff to the games, said he never had to pay for it. And those clients in Romania—the Communist Mafia—at least that’s what I’d always thought because of the way he talked about them. He’d say, “They change their offices like clothes.” Like crooks.

He was dangerous.

Like my sister who was dangerous and wild—and dying.

8

They’d walked together down Baltimore Street before the city cleaned it up. They’d put on the silk yellow blouses and skirts and the high heels that hurt their feet. This was before the amputation, before the older sister’s foot was cut off, the calf and knee and lower thigh, all cut off. The diabetes that killed her. Before all that.

9

I was in alien corn, like Ruth who lay at the feet of Boaz.

I wanted to lie down at the lawyer’s feet. The lawyer, who drank too much Scotch, had been married too long to a woman he said he didn’t love. The lawyer who said he loved me—the woman out of control, the way I—and my sister, too—had been that day we wore the yellow silk—not a good color for either of us, the color of my sister’s skin when she’d lain on the gurney, life sliding away.

An emergency—when I called the lawyer. Did this man, the lawyer, love me? What could he know about love? His father was an alcoholic who’d abandoned him; his mother, a nervous woman who searched his drawers, lifted the extension when he talked with girls. And I was smoking cigarettes that with my low body weight made me high, gave me that out-of-control feeling I yearned for.

10

In the bar at the Hay Adams in downtown D.C., the lawyer said, “I had the most detailed dream about you last night. A party you organized with your husband—you, with long hair—you—and your friends—I thought you didn’t have any—and Claire.” The wife he said he no longer desired. “You and Claire sang a song together, or maybe a poem, cheek to cheek and almost kissed after you finished. I never stopped holding my breath. You were so beautiful. Such a strange dream. Not the beautiful part, but the whole thing.” I understood: He was dreaming desire.

I told him my dream: “A woman dreams of her niece, her sister’s child, who is lost. The woman and her sister can’t find her. They know she is very smart in an odd, quirky sort of way. She is little, barely four. And somehow someone said something to her that confused her and caused her to go away. The woman and her sister are searching for the child, worried she is dead. It is very hot outside. They find her lying on a rooftop, safe and asleep and they take her home.” I saw: abandon.

11

The two sisters can go any place. They are pretending, after all.

They walked with Donald Belson past the first four strip joints, past the bars, the noise, the men in suits with name tags, forgotten to be removed, past the prostitutes. Can one tell who is a prostitute and who is not, for they were dressed like whores, weren’t they? They walked off Baltimore Street. The silliness (or was it the seriousness?) of the game the three of them were playing could no longer be denied. So they decided, Why not take the game to a better neighborhood, to an upscale bar and restaurant?

Now they were not in Baltimore; they were in the Hay Adams near the White House in D.C.

“May I buy you both dinner?” the farmer asked.

“Drinks first,” said the older sister.

“Yes, I’ll have a Scotch,” said the younger.

“You don’t drink Scotch,” said the older. “She’ll have an apricot Brandy Sour.”

“A Scotch for the lady,” he said to the waiter and turned to the older sister, “And for you?”

“A stinger,” she said. But she was off balance now. Her sister drank Scotch.

As if hearing the question in her sister’s mind, the younger said, “I drank Scotch at the congressional retreat at the Greenbrier. All the men drank Scotch.”

“Retreat?” he asked and then before she could answer, “Congress is a perpetual retreat from reality.”

So, he was a conservative. She was a liberal, an administrative legislative aide to a senator; a high-paying job with a low-paying name, an oxymoron of sorts because it sounds like a secretary but most of these senior aides are the brains behind their senators. This fact lies unspoken. Like the power of the older sister.

She went along. “A sinecure, yes. I met a lobbyist for nuclear power there. He looked much like you, fair-haired, weathered hands. He had been the head of the plant in Ohio—a nuclear engineer with a law degree. He was about fifty at the time; I was thirty-six and I kissed him in the elevator, or rather he kissed me, but I wanted him to kiss me after three hours of knowing him.”

“Did you have an affair?” said the older sister.

“If I tried to kiss you, would you let me?” the farmer asked the younger.

“Yes,” and he leaned across the table, disturbing the triangle their seating had created.

Let us call them now again side A for the older sister, side B for the younger, side C for the farmer. When side A heard about the man at the Greenbrier, she felt smaller. When sides B and C came closer, Side A felt smaller still, in danger. She felt she was disappearing the way she would disappear when she died.

Did her sister not see this? If anyone was to have an affair, it must be she. So she stood, the right angle between her and her sister still in place but her length extended. The angle between the man and her sister widened.

“What will you do if I leave?” said the older to the younger.

But the younger was feeling brazen now. The game continues, she thought. “Sleep with him if he can afford a beautiful room here,” she said and she laughed. Nothing about her was in character. She was out of control but safe because her sister was with her. She knew her sister would not allow her to do this with a man neither knew, had reason to trust. And the issue of adultery. That was there, as well. Had she committed adultery? Had she in some sense committed adultery when she kissed the nuclear engineer at the Greenbrier? She was considering this while she watched her sister consider this brazen, dangerous thing she had said.

12

So I met the lawyer at the Hay Adams and then called him the day after and said again, “Meet me.” I didn’t expect he would. I expected him to be busy with work, or excuses because I was not offering the expected. I was not offering myself at all. I wanted a retreat from reality. I was interested in talk and talk alone and he knew it the way he’d always known since I had discovered he was married after I slept with him. After all, I am married; my husband loves me; I love my husband—and the lawyer knew that. But he said, “I can be on the subway in twenty minutes.” Then he called back and said, “I can’t wait. I’m leaving now. I’ll be at the other place we used to meet. I’ll be there when you come.” I was alarmed. What had I done? What was he thinking? More to the point, what was I, when I said, “I’ll leave now”? I drove to the familiar corner, where the subway stop is, at the Booeymonger restaurant, a joint where we used to eat oozing sandwiches with sprouts and cheese and avocado, healthy fattening like the oxymoron of our relationship: honest betrayal. Like the relationship of the two sisters. Why did he make me think about my dying sister? I was pretending she was not in the hospital, that she did not need me—the wild, all-knowing sister in her shroud. The way I was willing to see him made me think abandon.

I began to count on his surreptitious phone calls when my husband was at work, before I left for the hospital to visit my sister. I began to count on hearing from him. I needed him. That’s what I told myself. I was at home because I had become a political consultant after many years on the Hill and now had found time for myself by parceling out my talents in hourly rates. I could choose not to work and often did, deciding which hours of the day I would help a particular company manage its way through the maze of committees and subcommittees considering its fate in some oddly worded legislation that would inadvertently (sine care) put the firm out of business, kill it.

On the day my sister died, I didn’t go to the hospital.

The day before, I went with him to his apartment, to see it, to talk. This was the apartment he kept in town near his office. His family house was a farm beyond the suburbs. At the apartment, I said odd things. “Let me see your refrigerator.” I noted the contents: Maille French Dijon Mustard (a good brand, the one I used. Had I told him about it in passing? Had I been sharing recipes with him, told about what I had been cooking for dinner? Of course not. Was he reading my mind? Did the mustard mean we had some deep connection of taste, of desire?) Packaged ham (that looked as if it had been there a while, had that creamy white cast to the inside of the plastic.) But I said nothing, continued noting. Unsalted butter (the kind I used to make pastry, Land O’ Lakes. Why would a man living in an apartment alone have unsalted butter in sticks? — though he did have a wife on the farm where he was planting trees. He would have something in a tub, something he could smear quickly on a bagel or bread and get out. I was impressed by his butter.) The little refrigerator was crusted over with ice where the ice cube tray hung in its small metal compartment from the top of the refrigerator. I suggested, “Let’s defrost it.” He laughed, agreed; then he kissed me. I hadn’t expected this. We had talked about the attraction between us the way two analytical people will talk most anything to death to avoid doing anything. It had been a good ploy. And he was so trustworthy in that untrustworthy way of his (having been married when we’d first met and not told me about it until after we’d slept together at the Tabard Inn). But he always answered my calls—after I married my husband. Often left his office to meet me when I needed him, and we’d agreed long ago our time was past. He ran a finger across my hand occasionally but nothing more. I had felt safe in the apartment with him, didn’t think anything would happen, was sure of it. After all, he was still married, kept the apartment for convenience, near his office. Or did he have regular affairs? I asked. He told me, No. He told me he loved me. The kiss frightened me. My back did bend with my intake of breath and life and being desired, but my mouth did not give the way I had thought it would. He stepped back, apologized. Then took it back.

The next day, the day she died, I sat with my coffee and waited for him to call. He had said he was going out to the farm to plant trees, wouldn’t call. I looked up at my skylight in my kitchen, saw it was raining, drops all over the plastic dome that revealed the great aged oak in my backyard. I hoped he’d gone to work, knew his calendar was clear, hoped he’d abandoned the tree-planting project. I was weakening, understanding the nature of seduction, how it worked. How the older sister had seduced the younger in the same way, by oxymoron, by withdrawn giving. He’d taken refuge and made me crazy.

13

The day the two sisters walked on Baltimore Street neither sister had understood what the other needed.

The younger had trusted the older to extract them. She believed her sister would never leave her in a difficult situation. Now she knew her sister would abandon her.

The older had the feeling of getting smaller in the presence of the farmer. She had had this feeling before—when the younger sister married. She had felt abandoned then, and never told. She wanted her sister to betray her husband. She wanted that secret to be theirs. She wanted to be present for it. What should she do now when she was getting what she wanted? She said, ignoring the farmer, “So you are a whore. The pretending is over.”

The younger sister, thinking this was part of the game, said, “Yes, I’m a whore.”

The farmer was confused. He did not want a whore. He wanted sex with this clean, young woman. He wanted safe sex that no one at home would ever know about. “I’m not paying for this,” he said. “I’ll pay for the room but nothing else.”

“If he pays for the room, you’re a whore,” said the older sister. “I’ll pay for the room.”

“But that will make you my pimp,” said the younger and laughed, but she was now afraid of both her sister and the farmer. “I can take care of myself,” she said to her sister. “Leave. It’s time for you to leave.”

“And what will you do when I leave forever?” said the older one, referring to her sickness, the unspoken source of all the pretending.

The younger sister had to escape the game. She began to daydream. She dreamt that a man with the beige skin of Asians, with wire framed glasses, with a long braid of straight black hair, a barefoot man who wore white jeans and a white shirt was on a wooden dance floor with a woman in yellow silks. They began a dance he called the labyrinth, movement they created on the floor with no speech. The man spoke only once at the beginning of the dance: “I think the rules will become obvious.” And the two began to dance in front of the younger sister as if she were not there. She felt she had disappeared, that they could not see her but she could see them. The two swirled around one another touching with shoulders and heads and backs, no hands. They leaned on one another in a discord of dance, moving away and then in, without pattern, coming closer to her. Though they could not see her, she was pulled into the dance, into the triangle of movement, of the touching of bodies, her elbow on the back of the man, her sister’s breast on her back. Then the three would swirl apart and the sisters would come together, leaning on each other’s backs, first the younger leaning hard to bend the sister’s back, then the older reversing the pressure until the man re-entered and led them in a discord of leaning and touching parts of their bodies, legs, arms, backs, buttocks, breasts, coupling and uncoupling as if pulled by the gravity of one object to another, one body part to another and in the midst of the discord, the younger sister saw the bodies connect and then part, pulled together and apart, and she saw that her sister was dying, getting smaller whenever the man in white approached. She saw that she too was dying, that she got smaller, experienced little deaths whenever either approached and she knew that she was alone, that she was the observer, who could see what her sister and the stranger could not, that the dance keeps on dancing and that discord is pattern.

Her sister said, “What’s wrong with you?”

But the younger sister got up from the table, ran from the Hay Adams, from the farmer, from her sister, outside to the street. Men and women in suits, carrying briefcases, hurried by her. They walked briskly, with purpose. She was in their way. They knew where they were going, what they were doing. She was alone. Where could she go? Inside her head, she said over and over again one word: abandon.

14

I wanted the lawyer.

I pretended I could forget my sister in her hospital crib-bed.

And all that day, while the clouds and rain interspersed, never clearing but never falling into a full downpour either, I waited for him to call. I could not do my work, while my sister was dying, while I waited for the lawyer to call. I, a grown woman, waited like a school girl by the phone for the sex-charged conversation that I thought no longer existed in my marriage. The day before, I could tell that the lawyer could not bear to be without me the way I could not bear to be without him. It was mutual, this longing that neither of us understood. But today he bore it well. I could not reach him because he was at home or he would have called. I saw the triteness and the horror (my sister) of my situation. High-heeled shoes, hammer toe and bunion, hidden in the vamp, yellow silks, flying on each other’s feet. He was in control, wasn’t he? Or was he? If anyone was to have an affair, it must be she. I felt foolish and depraved. But the longing for him would not go away the whole day—So, you’re a whore.—even though I knew that if I actually slept with him, if I committed adultery, I could no longer live with myself because I loved my husband, who loved but no longer desired me. Or was it that I no longer desired him? Bodies connect and then part. If anyone was to have an affair—If he pays for the room—I’ll pay, I’ll pay. I didn’t want to remember her face. I wanted the lawyer. I needed the lawyer.

How could I be so out of control and he so capable of restoring his? We had seemed alike the day before—hard to tell apart, like the two sisters on Baltimore Street. Like remembering and forgetting. Like sides A and B of the right triangle. Forever. Like my sister and me.

And then the call came that my sister had died.

Epilogue

On the sine curve of the right triangle, I am unable to plot the unknowns. I had thought I could do this, that I could see the two women at the bar—that I could pretend the way they did—that I could tell the story of the younger sister and the lawyer—that I would know when I was pretending and when I was not, that I could forget the way my father has. But the sine curve continues to undulate sine die. The sine qua non of my triangle is gone. Side A disappeared. Side C disappeared and I am side B, a flat line—like the flat line on my sister’s heart monitor when she died on the gurney where I last saw her. Though she was naked beneath a yellow sheet, though desire had disappeared from her face, she had the arrogant look of a person who could go anywhere. My father, who stood with me by her side, said, “Out of order, out of order,” over and over again.

Mary L. Tabor published her debut story collection, The Woman Who Never Cooked (which includes "Sine Die"), to critical acclaim following a distinguished career in journalism, corporate communications, and motherhood. Her memoir, (Re)Making Love, was praised for its candor and elegance, tracing a midlife transformation with uncommon clarity and insight. Her novel Who By Fire, now reissued by Empress Editions, is widely regarded as her most ambitious work. Lauded by Pulitzer Prize–winning writers and critics alike, it demonstrates her gift for layered narrative and emotional depth. Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has called it “a lyric meditation on love and desire,” while International Herald Tribune critic Michael Johnson wrote that it “ranks her alongside the finest novelists working today.”