I call my mother; it is evening there.  No one answers the phone and I launch into my standard message that I must have left a hundred times over…feeling foolish because I know she is screening her calls and will pick up at any moment, but it is more embarrassing to leave messages that consist of “Are you there?” in the off-chance she is not home.  She does pick up.  I hear the TV in the background and the sounds of her playing Internet Scrabble.  She complains about my younger sister and about holiday plans and all the ordinary things that need to be said at least once every week or two.  When she gets particularly heated or laughs too hard her face presses the buttons on the phone and I am jolted with an impossibly loud electronic *beep*.

The doorbell rings and she excuses herself, putting down the phone somewhere where I can hear that it is my sister and her daughter.  My sister, who lives in a swirl of chaos that sucks in everything around her, asks complainingly why doesn’t my mother answer her phone and I hear coats and shoes and imagine how the cold late November air rushes into the house from outside.  My sister says that my niece is probably hungry because “the cat ate her dinner…I’m not the one who put the bowl of beef stew on the floor and went off lolly-gagging”.  My mother goes to make some eggs and all of a sudden I am remembered and my sister picks up the phone and starts talking, but not really to me.  She always speaks with emphatic force and false bravado and the sense that she is addressing an audience or perhaps a video-camera, unseen, just out of sight.  She starts talking about the complicated logistics of her existence, something about Dwayne’s van and So-and-So’s dump truck and ice and Watertown and picking up this or that kid and I just listen and after awhile I don’t focus on what she is saying but how she is saying it.  I used to think her peculiar accent was terribly affected and perhaps it was at first, but now it is simply how she speaks, like every rural hard-living woman in Central New York.  I am only two years older but I don’t have that accent at all—I sound like my mother, who doesn’t sound like her family at all, either.  My grandfather still has a thick Finnish accent, sixty years after learning English.  My grandmother sounded oddly Appalachian without the Southern drawl, with a sort of pleasant precision.  My mother inherited the pleasant precision; she still answers the phone and talks to salespeople with an air of refinement and cashmere sweaters and luncheon afternoons, even if she were covered in cat hair and baby spit and dirt from the garden.

In fact, my sister sounds exactly like me, the mechanics of our vocal cords and speaking apparatus being exactly the same and underneath her dropped G’s and hard turns of phrase there is an aura of plummy smoothness not quite completely covered by the upstate New York…is that what I sound like?  I wonder.  The phone conversation has completely wandered off and I am left with a little mirror shining a bit of light into myself.  It’s almost as if I am there, the quiet observer, the role I have played my entire life, my sister and mother being the more volatile relationship and me simply existing and wondering and waiting for something to happen next.