Tricks

By the time Sis was fifteen the doctors started calling her problem a gift. Sure, a gift, my parents and I said and suppressed our bitter smiles because the doctors never had to put up with her constant tricks, the card games, the disappearing coins, the magic hat routines. They weren’t the ones who found her in the front yard behind a folding card table strewn with shim shells and half dollars as the neighborhood punks threw pinecones and chanted retard, retard, retard.

Sometimes I lost patience with Sis as the years went on, as she grew old enough to be called a spinster and the doctors started calling the gift Asperger’s syndrome. Take that time I tried to break the news of Mom’s death as Dad muttered and drank Stoli in the kitchen. At first Sis seemed to understand, pursing her lips solemnly, but then she started pulling colored handkerchiefs from my ears, a look of zealous concentration on her face. “I’m trying to have an adult conversation here,” I said, shaking her by the shoulders.

Later that night Sis made Dad’s antique fob watch disappear, the last anniversary gift he ever received from Mom. She seemed oblivious when Dad and I got down on our hands and knees and searched behind the bookcases, underneath the couch, inside the plant pots. “I don’t know how I’m going to handle her alone,” Dad said with his face in his hands once Sis went up to bed. We never did end up finding that goddamn watch.

Then there was that Christmas Eve right before my divorce. The family now reduced to three, we watched a Tony Danza holiday movie as we unwrapped our thermal underwear and socks. Dad was plastered so I tried to confide in Sis about my wife’s leaving, and for a second there was a flicker of sympathy in her eyes. Then she withdrew playing cards from her robe pocket. “Pick a card,” she said, “any card.” Afterward I went to the bathroom and turned on the faucet so no one would hear my weeping.

But now, the day of Dad’s funeral is the final straw. After the burial family and friends are gathered in the living room, sharing remembrances and piling paper plates with Swedish meatballs and potato chips. A cousin smells strongly of model airplane glue. Someone else is insisting that he met Dad during the Tet Offensive, which is impossible. Meanwhile I watch Sis in the corner with her cards, cocktail sauce smeared around her mouth.

She holds her balled-up hands out in front of me. “Right or left,” she says.

“Sis,” I say, teeth clenched. “Please.”

“Right or left,” she says.

I want to slap some sense into this fifty-year-old woman, tell her this is no time for her tricks, but I would never dare. Instead I pick a hand. Sis unfurls her fingers and shows me the antique fob watch. For a second it doesn’t even feel like everything has changed.