Sister Crazy. Emma Richler

silverfish in my veins and the ferocious urge to throw up all over his posh new car, which is littered, nevertheless, with Visa slips and tomato stalks and empty envelopes. The man can’t help it, he marks his territory out and I, today, these days, am the intruder. Get off my land. Come back when you are well, when you are a cowboy again and can roam with me. I don’t know you now.

      Do not cry, Jem, I say to myself. Come on now, do not be a baby. Do not be a girl.

      Besides looking back on good times and trying to fathom them, I write my book in my head. It is a survival book, a book of rules. It won’t be long but it will be very useful. Here is rule number one.

      1. NEVER LEAVE YOUR GLASSES ON THE FLOOR.

      I have discovered there is no loophole to this rule. Even if you say to yourself, okay, I have just set my specs on the floor. I see myself do it, I etch it on my memory. No way I’ll step on them or kick them across the floor. Then it happens. The phone rings and you jump right on top of them or you nap for a minute and shake awake suddenly and swivel your body off the sofa, landing your feet back on the floor. Right onto the specs, goddamnit. So that’s rule number one. Never leave your glasses on the floor. Thank you.

      2. NEVER LEAVE YOUR WINEGLASS ON THE FLOOR.

      Same potential disasters as above.

      When we left the bar that day with our shopping bags, my dad said, ‘Let’s call home. Just in case. We don’t want to have to go out again.’

      My dad has seen enough of the world and he has one vision in his mind. It is of a big sofa with a tomato snack by his side and a mess of newspapers all around him. Soon Mum will call out to him, Darling! Supper. Ah, the best moment of the day.

      Right now, though, what my dad really wants to do is to chuckle over the fact we could not find truffle butter. When Mum wrote this down on our list he was gleeful. He thought this was hilarious and he was pretty determined to be right about this item not existing out there in the western world as he knows it. In the two places we tried, he made me ask for it, truffle butter being two words too girly for him to utter. At the first shop, he even waited outside, only coming in after it was clear my request had not been met. We laughed.

      Before we get to lord it over Mum, my dad has to tackle the public-telephone situation.

      ‘Jem,’ he says, serious now, ‘we’ll try this one.’

      I sigh with anticipation. This will be fun.

      He pushes on the door of the nearest booth, meeting resistance.

      ‘Hey!’ he says. There is a lot of resistance to my dad out there in the physical world. He figures the door business out and drops a coin in after scanning all the instructions wildly and deciding to ignore them. The phone machine swallows the coin and that’s it, no joy. He thumps the machine about three times.

      ‘Goddamnit!’

      I reach in and press coin return and check the slot. ‘Let’s try another one, Dad.’

      In the next booth, I can see through the window that he is doing a lot of crazy thumping and is prepared to jump ship. I open the door and reach through the mayhem to press the button under the coin slot, right near the instruction that reads, Press after each coin entered.

      ‘Oh,’ he says and dials home. He looks back at me in exhilaration. He is about to reveal to Mum the sheer folly of her shopping mission. He can’t wait.

      3. GIVE INSTRUCTIONS A CHANCE.

      Instructions are sometimes written for those with below expected mental capacity. For instance, on a package of plasters, I read in step two, ‘Apply plaster.’ On a tube of skin salve, ‘Apply a little cream.’ Well, why not? But some instructions are useful. On page one of my video-machine booklet, it says, ‘To reduce the risk of fire or shock hazard, do not expose this equipment to rain.’ I do not know who would watch their TV and video out in a field when it is raining but never mind, this is important information for those people who are tempted. ‘Do not exceed the stated dose.’ This, I find, is important news. I remember a time, in dark days, when I was not Joey or the Doc and I was riding in cars on the way to health shops in search of herbal remedies for depression, yes, I remember a time when this was a vital instruction that I intended to ignore. I wanted very much to largely exceed the stated dose. This was exactly my plan before I decided that I did not want anyone else to wear my agnès b. clothes and that I wanted to finish the novel I was reading but mostly the look I imagined on Mum’s face at the sight of my grim and excessively dosed self on the carpet was too unbearable to contemplate. So I put off my date with death. It was a postponement I had in mind, that is all.

      Strange though, I thought, my dad will be okay. He’ll get over it. When you are a cowboy, you see all kinds of things, sudden death and gruesome moments of all varieties, and you just have to endure it all. People depend on you to do this.

      ‘I’ll be darned,’ a cowboy might say over some gory reality, pulling a fresh cheroot from a shirt pocket, maybe tipping his hat back for a second, swiping the heat from his brow. ‘I’ll be darned. Lookee here.’

      When my dad finished his gleeful phone call that day, we chuckled for some time. He bought flowers, white ones which Mum especially likes, on the way home.

      ‘This’ll keep her busy,’ he cracks, in that Wild West fashion. The fact is, he is crazy about her.

      He walks with me. I call it a saunter. My dad has a steadfast, ruminative walk. He takes command of his space. I only ever saw him hurry once, when Mum broke her wrist badly, gardening on a slope, when she was in a state of turmoil over his moodiness. It was a terrible break and he had to drive a long way to a good hospital and I was there too, sitting in the back of the car with my broken-up mother who was making cheery comments to keep us calm, despite a lower arm that looked like bits of snapped kindling. My dad’s back, I could see, was dark with sweat and he was leaning into the steering wheel as if he could impel the vehicle onward this way, or maybe speed us into a happier time zone, a place without injury.

      4. NEVER GARDEN ON A SLOPE WHEN IN A STATE OF TURMOIL.

      My dad walks with me. He is gripping my neck, loosely he thinks, in a manner suggesting fellowship and affection. It feels good although his grip is a little like those sinks in the hair salon, designed to hold your head in place but actually inviting disaster, such as permanent spinal injury and wholesale numbing of the nervous system. But I like walking with my dad this way. The world is ours. No one would dare pull a gun on us, nor even call out a careless remark. Everyone wants to be us, I can tell.

      But who is this man, I cannot help asking myself, who believes that a thump will make a thing function? My dad is a pummeller of dashboards, a boxer of boilers, a rattler of fax machines, telephones, turnstiles and parking meters, a walloper of drinks dispensers, a slapper of remote controls. He is the man you see stabbing a lift button eight or nine times. He is also the one kicking the lawn mower, and pulling and pushing on locked doors, wildly enough to loosen the foundations of a house. It is possible this man had children in order to operate machinery for him. Yes, I think so.

      My dad is a sportswriter. He also writes children’s fiction under a pseudonym. In these books, he writes about small children organizing the world around them despite themselves, a world full of human failures, cranks and despots, some with endearing and poignant flaws, others with thunderous bad taste and hilariously inflated egos. He finds these types, these faltering embarrassing types, really funny. These are his people.

      To relax, my sportswriting dad watches sports on TV. He would like to be watching TV right now and he hears my little sister’s dancing step close by.

      ‘Harriet!’

      My sister dances in. She is five years old and taking ballet classes. She has the right build but lacks discipline. She is a little too exuberant and has no time for the formality of steps.

      ‘Yeee-ess?’

      ‘Will you