All right, so this story is called "Tiger Mending."
And the impetus for this story, because they all kind of
come from a different little spot,
is there was a magazine called "Black Book."
Maybe, it just recently folded?
Does that sound right?
They paired writers and artists, and I ended up
working with a wonderful painter named Amy Cutler, who
was working in gouache.
I'm not even sure how to say it.
And she makes these very fairy tale influenced paintings,
often about women doing some sort of work.
And there are women with chairs on their heads,
or there are women crossing bridges
with strange things coming out of their bodies.
And they're just very dreamlike, and compelling,
and they're very detailed.
So she had a painting, and the painting
was called "Tiger Mending," and the image of the painting
is one of the central images in the story,
and I wanted to try to explain what that image came from.
So, that was where this came from.
"My sister got the job.
She's the overachiever, and she went
to Med school for two years before she decided she wanted
to be a gifted seamstress.
"What?"
They said, on the day she left.
"A surgeon," they told her, "you could be a tremendous surgeon."
But she said she didn't like the late hours,
she got too tired around midnight.
She has small motor skills better than a machine.
She'll fix your handkerchiefs so well
you can't even see the stitches, like she became one
with a handkerchief.
I once split my lip jumping from the tree,
and she sewed it up with ice and a needle
she'd run through the fire.
I barely even had a scar, just the thinnest white line.
So, of course when the two women came through the sewing school
they spotted her first.
She was working on her final exam, a lime-colored ball
gown with tiny diamonds sewn into the collar.
And she was fully absorbed in it,
constructing infinitesimal loops,
while they hovered with their severe hair and heady tree
smell.
"Like bamboo," my sister said, watching her work.
My sister is so steady she didn't even flinch,
but everyone else in class seized upon the distraction,
staring at the two Amazonian women, both six feet tall
and strikingly beautiful.
When I met them later, I felt I'd landed
straight inside a magazine ad.
At the time I was working at Burger King, as block manager.
There were two on the block.
And I took any distraction offered me and used it
to its hilt. Once, a guy came in and ordered a Big Mac,
and for two days I told that story to every customer,
and it's not a good story.
There's so rarely any intrigue in the shaberdash world
of burger warming, you take what you can get.
But my sister was born with supernatural focus,
and the two women watched her and her alone.
Who can compete?
My sister has won all the contests
she's ever been in, not because she's
such an outrageous competitor, but because she's
so focused in this gentle way.
Why not win?
Sometimes it's all you need to run the fastest,
or to play the clearest piano, or to ace
the standardized test; pausing at each question
until it has slid through your mind
to exit as a penciled-in circle.
In low, sweet voices, the women asked my sister
if she'd like to see Asia.
She finally looked up from her work.
"Is there a sewing job there?"
They nodded.
She said she'd love to see Asia, she'd never left America.
They said, "Well, it's a highly unusual job."
"May I bring my sister?"
She said.
"She's never traveled either."
The two women glanced at each other.
"What does your sister do?"
They asked.
"She's manager of the Burger Kings down on Fourth."
Their disapproval was faint but palpable,
especially in the upper lip.
"She would simply keep you company.
What we are offering you," they said, "is a position
of tremendous privilege.
Aren't you interested in hearing about it first?"
My sister nodded lightly.
"It sounds very interesting," she said,
"but I cannot travel without my sister."
This is true.
My sister, the one with that incredible focus,
has a terrible fear of airplanes.
Terrible, incapacitating.
The only way she can relax on a flight,
is if I am there because I am always,
always having some sort of crisis.
And she focuses in, and fixes me and forgets her own concerns.
I become her ripped hemline.
In general, I call her every night
and we talk for an hour, which is 45 minutes of me
and 50 minutes of her stirring her tea.
Which she steeps with a kind of zen patience
that would make Buddhists sit up in envy,
and then breathe through their envy,
and then move past their envy.
I'm really, really lucky she's my sister, otherwise no one
like her would give someone like me the time of day.
The two Amazonian women, lousy with confidence,
with their ridiculous cheekbones in these long yellow print
dresses said, "OK."
They observed my sister's hands, quiet in her lap.
"Do you get along with animals?"
They asked.
And she said yes, she loved every animal.
"Do you have allergies to cats?"
They asked.
And she said no, she was allergic only to pine nuts.
The slightly taller one reached into her dress pocket.
A pocket so well hidden inside the fabric,
it was like she was reaching into the ether of space,
and from it her hand returned with an airplane ticket.
"We are very happy to have found you," they said.
"The additional ticket will arrive tomorrow."
My sister smiled.
I know her, she was probably terrified to see that ticket,
and also she really wanted to return to the diamond loops.
She probably wasn't even that curious about the new job yet.
She was, and is stubbornly, mind-numbingly interested
in the present moment.
When we were kids, I used to come home
and she'd be at the living room window.
It was the best window in the apartment,
looking out in the far distance on the tip of a mountain.
For years, I tried to get her to play with me,
but she was unplayable.
She stared out that window, never moving for hours.
By night, when she had returned, I'd usually injured myself
in some way or another, and I'd ask her about it
while she tended to me.
She said the reason she could pay acute attention now,
was because of the window.
"It empties me out," she said.
Which scared me.
"No," she said to my frightened face
as she sat on the edge of my bed and ran a washcloth
over my forehead.
"It's good," she said.
"It makes room for other things."
"Me?"
I asked, with hope.
And she nodded, "You."
We had no parents by that point.
One had left, and the other died at the hands
of a surgeon, which is the real reason my sister stopped
medical school.
That night, she called me up and told
me to quit my job, which is what I've been praying for months,
that somehow I'd get a magical phone call telling
me to quit my job because I was going on an exciting vacation.
I threw down my B.K. apron, packed,
and prepared as long as an account of my life complaints
as I could.
On the plane I asked my sister what we
were doing, what her job was?
But she refolded her tray table and said nothing.
"Asia."
I said, "What country?"
She stared out the porthole.
It was the pilot who told us as we buckled our seat belts.
We were heading to Kuala Lumpur, straight
into the heart of Malaysia.
"Wait, where is Malaysia again?"
I whispered.
And my sister drew a map on the napkin, beneath her ginger ale.
During the flight, I drank Bloody Mary's
while my sister embroidered a doily.
Even the other passengers seemed soothed by watching her work.
I whispered all my problems into her ear,
and she returned them to me in slow sentences
that did the work of a lullaby.
My eyes grew heavy.
During the descent, she gave the doily
to the man across the aisle, worried about his ailing son,
and the needlework was so elegant,
it made him feel better just to hold it.
That's the thing with handmade items.
They still have the person's mark on them,
and when you hold them, you feel less alone.
This is why everyone who eats a Whopper,
leaves a little more depressed than they
were when they came in.
At the airport curbside, a friendly driver
picked us up and took us to a cheerful, green hotel, where
we found a note on the bed telling my sister
to be ready at 6:00 AM sharp.
It didn't say I could come, but bright and early
the next morning, scrubbed and fed,
we faced the two Amazons in the lobby, who looked scornfully
at me and my unsteady hands.
I sort of pick at my hair a lot.
And asked my sister why I was there.
"Can't she watch?" she asked.
And they said they weren't sure.
"She," they said, "might be too anxious."
"I swear, I won't touch anything."
I said.
"This is a private operation," they said.
My sister breathed.
"I work best when she's nearby," she said, "please?"
And like usual, it was the way she said it,
in that gentle voice that had a back to it.
They opened the car door.
"Thank you," my sister said.
They blindfolded us for reasons of security,
and we drove for more than an hour
down winding, screeching roads parking finally in a place that
smelled of garlic and fruit.
In front of a stone mansion, two more women
dressed in printed robes waved as we removed our blindfolds.
These two were short, delicate, calm.
They led us into the living room and we
hadn't been there for 10 minutes, when
we heard the moaning.
A bad moaning sound.
A real bad, real mournful moaning coming from the North,
outside, that reminded me of the worst loneliness, the worst
long, lonely night.
The Amazonian with the short shining cap of hair, nodded.
"Those are the tigers," she said.
"What tigers?"
I said.
"Shh," she said.
I will call her Sloan, for no reason
except that it's a good name for an intimidating person.
Sloan said "Shh, quiet now."
She took my sister by the shoulders
and led her to the wide window that looked out on the land.
As if she knew, instinctively, how wise
it was to place my sister at a window.
"Watch."
Sloan whispered.
I stood behind.
The two women from the front walked into view
and settled on the ground near some clumps of ferns.
They waited.
They were very still minded, like my sister
that stillness of mind, that ability I will never
have to sit still.
That ability to have the hands forget their hands.
They closed their eyes, and the moaning I had heard before
got louder.
And then in the distance, I mean way off,
the moaning grew even louder, almost unbearable to hear,
and limping from the side lumbered two enormous tigers.
Wailing, as if they were dying.
As they got closer, you could see
that their backs were split open, sort of peeled,
as if someone had torn them in two.
The fur was matted, and the stripes
hung loose like packing tape ripped off their bodies.
The women did not seem to move but two glittering needles
worked their way out of their knuckles,
climbing up out of their hands.
And one of the tigers stepped closer.
I thought I'd lose it.
He was easily four times the first woman's size,
and she was small, a tiger's snack.
But he limped over in his giantness,
and fell into her lap.
Then his heavy striped head sunk to the ground.
She smoothed the stripe back over,
and the moment she pierced his fur
with the needle, those big cat eyes dripped over with tears.
It was very powerful.
It brought me to tears too.
Those expert hands, as steady as if he were a pair of pants,
while the tiger's enormous head hung to the ground.
My sister didn't move, but I had cried and cried
seeing the giant broken animal, resting
in the lap of the small, precise woman.
It is so often surprising who rescues you
at your lowest moment.
When our father died in surgery the jerk at the liquor store,
suddenly became the nicest man alive
and gave us free cranberry juice for a year.
"What happened to them?"
I asked them.
"Why are they like that?"
She lifted her chin slightly.
"We do not know, but they emerged from the forests,
peeling.
More and more of them always torn at the central stripe."
"Do they ever eat people?"
"Not so far," she said, "but they
do not respond well to fidgeting."
She said, watching me clear out my thumbnail
with my other thumbnail.
"Well, I'm not doing it."
"You have not been asked."
"They're so sad," said my sister.
"Well, wouldn't you be?" said Sloan, "If you were a tiger
unpeeling?"
She put a hand on my sister's shoulder.
When the mending was done, all four women and beasts
sat in the sun for at least half an hour.
Tiger's chests heaving, women's hands clutched in their fur.
The day grew warm.
In the distance, the moaning began again,
and two more tigers limped up while the first two
stretched out and slept.
The woman sewed the next two, and the next one
had a bloody rip across its white belly.
After a few hours of work, the women
put their needles away, the tigers raised themselves up,
and without any lick or acknowledgment,
walked off deep into that place where tigers live.
The women returned to the house.
Inside they smelled so deeply and earthly of cat,
that they were almost unrecognizable.
They also seemed lighter, nearly giddy.
It was lunchtime.
They joined us at the table, where
Sloan served an amazing soup of curry and prawns.
"It is an honor," said Sloan, "to mend the tigers."
"I see," said my sister.
"You will need very little training
since your skill level is already so high."
But my sister seemed frightened, in a way I hadn't seen before.
She didn't eat much of her soup, when
she returned her eyes to the window
to the tangles of fluttering leaves.
"I would have to go find out," she said.
Finally when the chef returned with a tray of mango tartlets.
"Find out what?"
"Why they unpeel?" she said.
She hung her head as if she was ashamed of her interest.
"You're a mender," said Sloan gently, "not a zoologist."
"I support my sister's interest in the source."
I said.
Sloan flinched every time I opened my mouth.
"The source."
My sister echoed.
"The world has changed," said Sloan,
passing a mango tartlet to me reluctantly,
which I ate pronto.
It was unlike my sister to need the cause,
she was fine, usually, with just how things were.
But she whispered to me as we roamed
outside looking for clues, of which we found none.
She whispered that she felt something
dangerous in the unpeeling, and she
felt she would have to know about it in order
to sew the tigers suitably.
"I'm not worried about the sewing," she said,
"I'm worried about the gesture I place inside the thread."
I nodded.
"I'm a good fighter is all.
I don't care about thread gestures,
but I am very willing to throw a punch at some tiger asshole,
if need be."
We spent the rest of the day outside.
But there were no tigers to be seen.
Where they lived was somewhere far, far off.
And the journey they took to arrive here,
must have been the worst time in their lives ripped open
like that, suddenly prey to vultures or other predators.
When they were usually the ones to instill fear.
We slept that night at the mansion,
in feather beds so soft, I found them impossible to sleep in.
Come morning, Sloan had my sister join the two women
outside, and I cried again, watching the big tiger
head at her feet while she sewed with her usual stillness.
The three together were unusually productive,
and sewn tigers piled up around them.
But instead of that giddiness that
showed up in the other women, my sister
grew heavier that afternoon.
And she said she was sure she was doing something wrong.
"Oh no," said Sloan, serving us tea.
"You were remarkable."
"I'm missing something," said my sister.
"I'm missing something important."
Sloan retired for a nap, but I snuck out.
I had been warned, but really they were treating me like shit
anyway.
I walked a long distance, but I'm a sturdy walker,
and I trusted where my feet went.
And I did not like the sight of my sister
staring into her teacup.
I did not like the feeling it gave me of worrying.
Before I left, I sat her in front of the window
and told her to empty herself.
And her eyes were grateful, in a way
I was used to feeling in my own face,
but was not accustomed to seeing in hers.
I walked for hours and the wet air clung to my shirt and hair.
I took a nap inside some ferns.
The sun was setting, and I would have walked all night.
But when I reached a cluster of trees,
something felt different.
There was no wailing yet, but I could feel the stirring
before the wailing, which is almost worse.
I swear I could hear the dread.
I climbed up a tree, and waited.
I don't know what I expected.
People, I guess, people with knives cutting in.
I did not expect to see the tigers themselves,
jumpy, agitated, yawning their mouths beyond wide,
the wildness in their eyes.
And finally the yawning so large and insistent that they
split their own backs in two.
They all did it, one after the other,
as if they wanted to pull the fur off their backs.
And then amazed at what they'd done, the wailing began.
One by one, they left the trees and began their slow journey
to be mended.
It left me with the oddest, most unsettled feeling.
I walked back when it was night, under a half moon,
and found my sister still at the window.
"They do it to themselves."
I whispered to her.
And she took my hand, her face lightened.
"Thank you," she said.
She tried to hug me, but I pulled away.
"No," I said.
And in the morning I left for the airport.