Ten — My Sister Knew

Ten — My Sister Knew

Noor knew. She had known longer than me, having arrived at the accurate assessment of the situation through the pragmatism I mentioned earlier — the ability to look at a thing clearly and make a sensible decision about how to relate to it. She had made her decision. She loved him, I believe, but at a controlled distance, the distance set not by hostility but by the specific self-preservation of a person who has identified a hazard and adjusted her trajectory accordingly.

She never said any of this directly. Noor was not a person who named things directly — she was sideways in her intelligences, which meant that the important things she communicated arrived through small gestures rather than statements. A hand on my arm in the kitchen after a dinner that had gone badly. The shared look across the table when the counterweight appeared. The way she would sometimes, in the aftermath of these moments, find something slightly funny about the situation — not laughing at the pain, but locating in the absurdity of it the small aperture through which it was survivable.

She said to me once — we were in her room, I had come in after a dinner I would rather not describe, I was sitting on her floor and she was at her desk and we had been quiet together for a while — she said: "You know it's not about you."

I said: "I know."

She said: "No, I mean you actually know. You're not just saying it."

I said: "I'm not sure."

She turned in her chair and looked at me with the expression she reserved for things she considered important enough to deliver without sideways: "He can't give what he doesn't have. That's not your failure. That's just the inventory."

The inventory. I have turned this word over many times since. The inventory of a person: the available stock, the things that can be given because they are present, the things that cannot be given because they are absent. He could not give what was not in the inventory. The inventory was not my fault. The gap between what I needed and what was in the inventory was not a comment on my worth. It was simply the difference between two numbers.

I knew this. I believed it some days and did not believe it other days, which is, I think, the most honest thing that can be said about this kind of knowledge: it is not permanent. It requires maintenance. On the days when the maintenance fails, the old belief reasserts itself — the belief that the gap is mine, that the empty bucket is a reflection of the bucket rather than the well, that if I were different the well would produce water.

Noor was right. The inventory was not mine. I am still, on certain days, arguing with her about it.