As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel by Elizabeth Poliner Page A

listening. Brisket, potatoes, and green beans came next, and while the meal was being eaten she didn’t even attempt to engage in small talk with Bec, who, seated beside her, kept turning Vivie’s way, a caring and constant vigil Vivie knew the whole family assumed was needed.
    By dessert the talk focused on the impending wedding and it was Ada who then dominated, telling them what food she’d like at the reception, how the tables at the synagogue were to be arranged, whom she’d like to invite, which tailor she’d already visited to get fitted for a dress. She barely paused between sentences. Her excitement and sense of importance were on grand display, and there was Vivie, quiet at the other end of the table, comprehending what the moment meant to Ada while simultaneously thinking about the upcoming week at work, which patients would be coming on which days, Frances and Thomas again on Monday, a wheezing but lovable Mable Stump on Tuesday, a new patient, a fellow named Leo Cohen, with some kind of chronic cough, on Thursday. She thought of Tillie, too, her sad desperation, and a sense of tenderness for everybody she knew through her work with Dr. Shapiro, the world’s wounded, filled her heart. Ada was blabbing on and on but to Vivie all that talk didn’t really matter.
    Until suddenly it did. “You’re not always going to feel this big,” she told Ada, abruptly interrupting her sister’s eager monologue. These were the first words she’d directed Ada’s way since the betrayal and they came out in a voice Vivie didn’t know she had: confident and clear.
    The talk in the room stopped.
    “What? What did you say?” Ada asked, obviously surprised to hear Vivie address her.
    “You’re not always going to feel so big,” Vivie repeated, her voice still full with the truth of her words. She was well aware that everyone was staring at her and that no one looked particularly happy to be doing so.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Ada asked. She held her hand at her collar bone and she tipped back slightly, as if knocked off-kilter by Vivie’s words.
    “Now’s the time to be happy,” Vivie answered. “Ada, enjoy your happiness while you have it. That’s all I’m saying. Be happy, Ada. Be happy right now.”
    Around her the staring faces looked confused, as did Ada’s. Then Ada nodded, said, “Thanks, I am happy. Very happy,” and in the next moment the monologue of the bride-to-be resumed. Vivie sighed.
      
     
    Six months after Davy’s death, my aunt recalled her words to my mother that evening so long ago. Back then she’d meant to upset her, to pull her down a peg or two. “Enjoy your happiness while you have it,” she’d told her younger sister, which wasn’t so bad a thing to say, really, but was just bad enough, enough to cause Ada’s flushed face to blanch. As the years progressed, and Vivie married a man she adored, it was obvious to Vivie that Ada’s happiness had in fact shrunk, long before Davy’s death, and her long-ago warning had come to seem like a bit of prescience rather than the bit of hate it really was. By then Vivie no longer felt such hatred, only compassion as she saw Ada’s confused dissatisfaction take root. Ada obviously felt stuck in a rut but was cursed, Vivie could see, with the inability to fully understand it much less pull herself out of it. But after Davy’s death, the idea that she had wanted Ada to suffer—even back then, when such a desire was understandable—haunted Vivie. She wondered if she’d really released all that early hate. “I’m so sad for you,” she told her sister over and over again.
    “What’s that?” Ada once responded when Vivie called to say the words yet one more time. “Who’s this?” she then asked, the bewilderment in her voice part and parcel of the tailspin, Vivie knew, of such a severe, unacceptable loss.
    “It’s Vivie,” Vivie told her, saying her name slowly, as if it were a foreign word.
    “Oh. Vivie,” Ada