The Weight of One Pomegranate

Prologue

My name is Isadora Barnes. I turned seventeen three weeks ago. I am five feet, eight inches tall, and one hundred and twenty-five pounds. I was born on March 10. I have a birthmark the color of spilled coffee on the small of my back.

One of the lesser-known facts about butterflies is that they can see colors unknown to humans. The Xerces butterfly can be identified by the blue patterns on each wing: a color that has never existed on another insect, and will never exist again now that they’re extinct. This was the last thing I ever told Eleni. Fifteen hours later, she was gone.

When our mother told me, her hair was covered in snow. For a second, I thought it was glitter, and that was the last beautiful thing I saw for a while. In the morning light, it looked like something precious, and I had to stop myself from reaching out and catching some of it in my hands as she shook it from her clothes and hair.

In girlhood, Eleni and I were our own planet. We spent our nights paging through an illustrated copy of Anatomy of the Natural World. She showed me splays of bones that made a bird’s wing, the cycle of the migration of a butterfly. Now, in my memory, Eleni twists through the house. Dancing in the kitchen while we ate like half-starved animals, hunched over the plate of olives and bread that tasted of the chill of the refrigerator. She had big, dark eyes and a chipped front tooth that showed when she laughed. She was taller than me at five ten, with broad shoulders and a nervous, edgy way of moving, like she could spook easily.

Eleni and I drank our tea and coffee the same way: with so much milk and sugar it made everyone else gag. I still know the sound of her step on the stairs. Some nights I think I hear her. I know that soon, these small things will be gone, too, as hard as I try to hold onto them. When we were young, we invented a new kind of Morse code. We’d draw a series of circles for an alphabet, and she’d leave me notes: overlapping circles reminding me to bring my science homework home or saying that she loved me. The word she invented for love was a series of small half crescents that eclipsed each other.

She taught me how to roll the grape leaves around a cigar of rice to make dolmades. In my memory, I see her folding it in the center, pressing her thumb over the heart of the leaf to keep it still. She taught me to identify a bird species by their call and to catch a butterfly between two cupped hands so as not to damage the wings. She was the brightest part of me. Anyone I could have become left with her, too.

She had been a long-distance runner in high school, spending her mornings darting through the trails of Lincoln Park at dawn.

She was almost never sick. She spoke three languages and could read four.

She would twist her hair into a loose knot when she was thinking.

She almost never cried.

On January 26, at the age of twenty-two, she went to sleep.

It was the Tuesday night after a normal day. She had two classes: Ethics and Cinema and Anthropology of the Body. Then she got dinner with her best friend, Ćazi. She called me to ask if I had gotten the book she’d sent me. I’d read her the fact I’d found about the butterflies. She’d forgotten her keys. Ćazi had to let her into their student apartment.

She had a pulmonary embolism between 2:45 and 3:15 in the morning. Ćazi said she’d noticed how still Eleni was as she was getting ready for her morning class. When she reached out to wake her, her shoulder was cold. With no warning that this was her last day on Earth, Eleni was gone. Fiddling with the gold of her new wedding ring, the doctor at the ER told my parents that there was no way anyone could have known. Likely, Eleni never felt pain, never knew what was happening. She only went to sleep, and then she no longer existed.

•••

My father stopped speaking almost completely. One morning, he asked me to hand him a plate, and I realized I had started to forget what his voice sounded like. But my mother was the first corporeal ghost. Grief made her shrink in size. In the days following the funeral, I watched her fall into herself. It started slowly. First, she forgot to get dinner, then she didn’t shower for a week. Gradually, she stopped changing her clothes, washing her hair, going out.

Even after Eleni went to the City College of New York, I left her side of the room untouched. All of her things—the old emerald brocade pillows and scuffle of tea-stained books and notebooks, cotton shirts worn so fine at the collar they looked like lace, the big, mahogany bed that matched mine—stayed as she’d left them each winter when she returned to college after the break. When she asked why I never moved anything once she went to New York, I told her the room was big enough, anyway. But really, I was afraid of the loneliness that I knew would come when I moved her things into the guest room.

Our mother used the guest room as an office. It was full of mugs that grew their own ecosystems of moldy tea bags because she forgot to bring them to the kitchen sink. She’d scatter notes for the book she’d been writing for the last twenty-five years. I’d see her walking through the house wearing Eleni’s old T-shirt. I’d awaken at three in the morning to see her crawling into Eleni’s bed, and hear her crying into Eleni’s pillows. I’d stare at the ceiling, not knowing whether I should go to her or pretend to be asleep, to allow her a moment alone with Eleni’s things.

Eleni has been dead for two months and one week now. Some mornings, when I wake up, I’ve forgotten. Then I swing open the bedroom door only to realize that it’s not the door to our room anymore. And something dark and sharp edges its way into my throat and makes it hard to speak. It’s like falling, the remembering. In my dreams, Eleni is lost in strange cities. I’ll see her back, the flash of her light gray coat. She raises her hand—to wave, I think. But when I call to her, she never hears me, and I never can reach her before she disappears. Missing Eleni is like this. Sometimes, I think it is all I can do.



1
At the End of
Everything

My mother swings open the refrigerator door. The blue floor tiles are cracked so we wear slippers to protect our feet. The house has always had a feeling of ruin. Eleni used to joke that it was our haunted house. The windows don’t close right, and the living room is drafty. My parents kept a combination of their furniture from graduate school and the gray armchairs and brocade couches that came with the two-story brick house on the outskirts of DC that they bought several months before Eleni was born.

The garden is full of forgotten rows of carrots and twisted fig trees that grow into the shape of outstretched hands. Eleni said our parents used to dance on the cracked kitchen floors while they made dinner, listening to Etta James on the record player as my father turned my mother around in circles like a marionette. My mom is never hungry anymore, so I’m surprised when she turns to me, her voice airy, and asks what I want for dinner.

“Anything you want to have, Mom.”

Our parents never really cooked. Eleni and I subsisted off food from the deli: artichokes in plastic tubs, jars of pesto mixed with orzo salad. Eleni learned to cook from our Uncle Theo, and when she was thirteen, she took over preparing our meals. She’d make the two of us dinners, then leave out scraps for our mother to pick over when she wandered downstairs from her office, the undone sleeves of her button-down blouses hanging from her wrists like the wings of a strange bird. Usually, our father would join her, absent-minded and exuberant, spearing an olive or asking Eleni to recite what she did that day in Latin. They were like this. Our father once almost walked into traffic while lost in thought about an article he was writing. I often thought of our mother as being not quite human, but something more unworldly—always slipping away from me before I could catch her, always preoccupied with ideas she’d fuss over like they were real and heavy objects everyone else could see, too.

Today, she is wearing a pashmina shawl over my pajama pants. They must have somehow gotten mixed up in the scuffle of laundry. I notice she’s washed her hair and put on her reading glasses.

“Let’s make crepes,” she says.

I watch as she gets out flour and eggs and starts to mix the ingredients together in a cereal bowl. When she pours the batter into the pan, she watches the mixture start to bubble before frowning. “I forgot butter.”

She flips the burnt crepe onto my plate. I taste it and realize she left some shards of eggshell in the batter. She doesn’t seem to notice, taking only a few bites before she sets her picked-over plate down on the counter and wanders upstairs.

I do the dishes and go up to her study. “Mom?”

“Did you know she was not only the first woman to chart the flight course over the Andes, but the youngest pilot to attempt this?”

She’s looking now at her book pages: the first one hundred and fifty pages she’s never finished.

Her voice breaks a little bit. “Eleni used to love to hear about her. She would pretend she was flying when I’d take her on the swings in the park. She wore the pilot hat from her Halloween costume for almost a year, until she got too big for it.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, but she doesn’t look at me, she just keeps staring at the same pile of papers. I don’t know what to say, so I don’t talk. She places her hand over mine and we stand like this for a long time before she drops her hand. I go, hearing her rearranging the papers. It’s like we’ve unraveled all our years of knowing one another since Eleni has been gone. Without her, the three of us stopped trying to hold on.

In the bedroom, I change into a fresh shirt. The egg whites from the crepes had smeared on the hem of my top. I don’t recognize the body in the mirror. My rib cage protrudes awkwardly, my hip bones stick out, and my breasts are basically nonexistent. “Mosquito bites,” my friend Ani once called them.

I cut my hair into a bob over Christmas. Eleni trimmed it for me in the bathtub so the clumps of hair wouldn’t scatter on the floor. After, we both looked in the mirror, and she smiled. “You look so much older now. Like Mom when she was in college.”

I didn’t say anything back, but I gazed at the two of us in the reflection: my short hair, her longer hair, which was a shade darker and straighter than my own. We shared our father’s big nose that looked crooked in the center, the same hazel eyes, and our mother’s high cheekbones. Eleni had a runner’s gait. Her off-kilter grace gave her a kind of charm. Without these things, she would have been too beautiful, but with them, she was more so, somehow. It only emphasized her loveliness.

The bob has started to grow out straggly. I study my face in the mirror. I look like her, but not really. Our faces were two illegible dialects from the same root. Her beauty had not translated over to me. I tuck the edges of my hair under the collar of Eleni’s old shirt. The first month, I wore it almost every day. Now, I only wear it when I miss her the most, or on the nights I can’t sleep, so that the shirt won’t get too worn and lose the sense that it is still hers.

I have never felt like a young person. I don’t know why. When I still went to school, I’d bite my cuticles until they bled. I wore the same clothes every day: black T-shirts, green canvas pants, and sneakers. I rotated three sets through the week. Too many loud noises or movements made me feel dizzy, like I couldn’t breathe. I’d spent most of my recesses sitting under a ginkgo tree by the schoolyard until the tree was struck by lightning and got chopped down. Eleni went to the Mount Washington Preparatory School for the Gifted, too. She graduated my freshman year. I’d watch her shake her hair out of a ponytail or talk to her friends from French Club. She always had a brightness and ease around other people that I didn’t.

Once, a senior clarinetist named Gavin stopped me in the hall. “You’re Eleni’s little sister?”

I nodded.

He was chewing on chunks of beef jerky as he spoke. He had such a hollowed face that I could see his teeth grinding away at it through his thin cheeks. He kept studying me while I watched him grind down the final nub and send it on a slow, bobbing journey down his throat.

“I can’t see it. You’re so different.” As if needing to provide further clarification, he added, “Like, not in a good way. I don’t get how you could come out so freaky.”

He wandered off before I could say what I wanted to, which was that he should go back to huffing glue in the bathroom between classes because the common chemical composite found in his beloved Elmer’s is known to cause ten kinds of birth defects and heart failure, and that if I had to choke down all my food like a snake, I would be less judgmental.

In my seventeen years, I have had two friends who aren’t Eleni. First, Ravi, who I met at eight and who moved to Glasgow when we were thirteen. We didn’t speak much. We would draw chalk outlines of each other’s bodies and fill them in in silence, playing a game we called Guess the Corpse: We would have to guess the letters to a word, and fill in a limb for every letter the other got wrong. He didn’t seem like he knew how to be a person, either, but he was better than me at it. After he left, he sent me a few letters about how he couldn’t bring his cat with him, how much he missed her, and how he didn’t like the food in the UK—but then the letters stopped coming.

I met my second friend, Ani, when I was sixteen. Ani wants to be a violinist. Every Friday morning, she takes the fast train from DC to New York City to take classes at the music academy there. I notice how after these days of training a new light follows her and brings a quiet pride into each of her movements: an airiness, a grace. I try to understand the source of her brightness, the special quality of light that follows everything she does. Every month, for the last year, I’ve gone to her recitals. I watch as she sets her violin into place and prepares to play. The first time I saw her perform, I felt like my scalp and fingers were burning. I got nervous after the last show. The white rose I bought had wilted and lost half the petals, but she put it in her blazer lapel anyway.

This past December, Ani kissed me. It was fast. I felt her hand on my waist, the click of her gold bracelets’ chatter, and then she left. We didn’t talk about it again. I didn’t know what it meant that I liked it. It didn’t feel like a surprise, I guess, that I thought of Ani in these ways. Then I started dropping things around her all the time or repeating stories to hide that I was nervous from the scent of her geranium perfume and the heat of our skin when I brushed against her. Ani has called me once a day for the last two months. Sometimes she doesn’t say anything. I hear her breathing, and we stay like that and listen for a moment before she hangs up.