by Christie Cochrell
“My life is a sham.”
Maud was making blackberry clafoutis with vanilla and brandy, and making pronouncements as she mixed the eggs with the liquid ingredients, downing a goodish slug of the St-Rémy from the bottle before putting the cork back in.
“I’m not fooling myself any longer.”
Another glug.
“I. Am. Not. Fooling. Anyone.”
Lowery ignored Maud as usual, shaggy head down, going on studying his lines for the Stoppard (a revival of The Real Thing, at the little theater up in the redwoods) in a spill of early summer sunlight through the breakfast nook window.
“I’m all about frivolity. Vacuity. Frittery—have I just made that up? I don’t care anyway, it fits way, way, too well.”
Oh here we go again, I thought, rolling my eyes to high heaven behind Maud’s back, but made some kind of sympathetic nonverbal acknowledgement of sisterly accord which she ignored in turn, of course.
Families can be the loneliest places on earth.
What was Maud making clafoutis for, anyway, at this ungodly hour, unless to prove what a sham her life really was? And what would she have asked of life instead, I wanted to scream out at her if I had any energy or staying power for one of the arguments she loved to have. A drama queen indeed, she should have been the one to take up theater full time rather than calm old Lowery, who loved only the flat, sardonic lines of his favorite playwrights.
“One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” (Pinter)
“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.” (Stoppard)
The French concoction popped into the oven with the shark oven mitt I’d given Maud for her birthday, and she’d so far refrained from giving to Goodwill, everyone checked the time as if choreographed and dashed out of the sunny kitchen (exit stage left with indistinct curses) to rush through showers and dressing. A fine June morning, and all of the Bagshaw clan now underway.
Lowery’s girlfriend Kyra had stayed the night, and those two would be taking off in her electric Vauxhall Vivaro sportive camper van to somewhere restful in the great outdoors, possibly Pfeiffer Beach or Pinnacles. They loved to “get away,” not ever especially get to anywhere in particular, though a long-stroke massage at Esalen on the cliffs of Big Sur had been discussed last night. Kyra’s twelve-year-old daughter Gisella would be left behind as usual to “keep me company,” as they put it.
Maud had taken Koda her Akita puppy (not allowed in the kitchen, “ever!”) out to the back yard for a good energetic romp with Tug-n-Toss ball until the clafoutis was set and golden brown. Then she’d be off on her Kawasaki Ninja motorbike in her deep purple horseback riding helmet to the cupcake bakery in midtown where she composed lyrical verse in buttercream. (Okay, was sham so far-fetched after all?)
Our mother, Corrie, had been off since before sunrise at her very un-sham job with NOAA, analyzing weather patterns, upper-air maps and soundings. Dad was as always out of town somewhere and likely out of the country, advising high-level clients on foreign trade, commerce—things as mysterious and important in their own way as air masses, heat balance, positive vorticity.
And Aunt Leonie would be upstairs in her capacious corner suite with microwave and mini-fridge, channeling Madame Arcati from the Noël Coward play, and favorite Parisian singers. Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker with her coterie (Colette, Frida Kahlo, Grace Kelly), her adopted children and her cheetah, Chiquita. Leonie’d be cavorting with Josephine the Black Pearl in her 15th century castle, dancing the Charleston with necklaces of shells, or spying for the French Resistance at embassy parties back in WWII.
So that left me and Gisella—the forgat. (A word that has also been left behind. Used eight times in the King James Bible, but hardly ever since then.)
I, Rhoslan (Roz), had been laid up with a debilitating case of long Covid for almost a year now. Fatigue, brain fog (though Maud claimed I was born with brain fog), dizziness (ditto), headaches, post-exertional malaise as they’d sweetly named it, muscle and joint pain, sleep problems . . . and so forth. I hadn’t been able to go back to my classes in comparative religions, or to do anything much. I was feeling distinctly forgat. Not sham, though, since I didn’t pretend to have a life at all.
“There’s so much you can do from home these days, Roz—” Gisella told me vigorously. Her vigor exhausted me, often.
“Well sure, like lie and rot.” I’d heard too many clever lines from Lowery to be serious without adding a little barbed humor. (“Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” Stoppard again.)
“No,” the girl insisted, my practical good fairy. “Lots of things.” She started reading to me from an article. “Offer bookkeeping services, write resumes, teach English as a second language or teach people something you’re good at, get paid for taking surveys of all kinds, stream gaming sessions, get paid to watch movies or tutor kids online, or even have NASA pay you to stay in bed all day. There’s more . . .”
Her enthusiasm and the energetic list exhausted me just trying to take in, the way Maud’s drama queen pronouncements did. I held up my hand in a “stop” gesture, and closed my eyes. Went back to mental dog-paddling, lazing around an imagined celadon green pool up in the hills somewhere. I’d seen glass tile lining pools online, and liked to picture it shimmering soundlessly behind my dissociating eyes.
Mostly I liked to lie around and collect words. Follow their meanings back into the past, into odd byways. Could I get paid for that? I wondered lazily.
When Gisella had retreated further into her iPad, researching the NASA option for me, I looked up “sham,” since that was on today’s menu. Its meaning, intended to deceive, false. Its derivation, probably a dialectical form of shame. “Sham-fight, for exercise or practice,” from Latinized form of Greek skiamakhia, shadow-fighting.
What else than that was I doing?
* * *
I might have seemed (as was my way, post-fog) to dismiss my young marrer (good word from Northern English/Scottish meaning friend, companion, or workmate), but in fact her words stayed with me through the day, and played through my head as I dozed, making honey like buzzy stippled golden bees. Thoughts happened that way now, looming abruptly like dark trees/masts/Cumbrian heavy horses in a heavy bank of mist, sinister apparitions, or else buzzed and buzzed, edges fuzzy, small wings a blur of motion, thick with pollen, make-believe as Tinkerbell, Titania, the swarm of angels on the heads of pins. I’d become a bee-whisperer, a wild thyme honey thief, living without definition in the buzz and blur (thus seeking all those definitions from Merriam-Webster et al).
Marrer literally means to laugh, in French. Probably borrowed from Spanish marear (to get dizzy), with semantic shift to get dizzy/to be bored—and then, via antiphrasis, rhetorically saying the opposite, to be amused. Gisella did amuse me, and liven things when I got bored, and she certainly didn’t fit that other definition of the dizzy word, “one that mars especially by rendering or doing carelessly or imperfectly.” Quite the opposite, in fact. Maybe it fit me, as her companion, though even marring took more energy than I could summon currently.
But okay—idea coming! (like in Maud’s retro fortune-telling ball, with floating answers which appear out of nowhere, lazily drifting up like swimmy fish out of the bubbles and the aqueous amniotic sac). Or like the train approaching warning, “The steady amber light will be followed by twin flashing red lights, which mean you must stop.” I’d realized I did want to do something. I didn’t want to live a sham-full life, like my sister. I didn’t want to be merely forgat. So I needed to plunge back into the fortune-telling ball, my fins and tail floating like one of those transparent fish I’d seen images of, or like Cleo the Goldfish from Pinocchio, and find something, follow the trail of bubbles up to the surface, BE, and DO. (Or doo-bee-doo-bee-doo, as Frank Sinatra crooned famously in “Strangers in the Night,” before Scooby-Doo and his cousin were born.)
So I would mull, and see what came.
* * *
“My life’s a travesty,” Maud moaned, dusting a batch of Flemish waffles with powdered sugar. Egg yolks, orange zest, butter, whipped cream. Gaufres à la Flamande, her preoccupation of the morning.
I did my best to look benevolent and ministerial (or even apostolic) as I weighed up her words, but probably only looked greedy for the plate of warm waffles she’d just set on the kitchen table.
“Why’s that?” I asked kindly, mouth full.
“Why should you even have to ask?” she emoted, over-the-top as Judith Bliss in that other Noël Coward play Lowery was in last year.
“Well I do ask,” I persisted, wanting genuinely to know what botheration she was grappling with so strenuously.
“Oh, Roz, Roz,” said she, as if she were Celia berating cousin Rosalind in As You Like It. “I can’t even tell you how paltry and how meaningless it is, all that I do.”
“Okay—so you don’t like your job,” I said crushingly, feeding a bit of waffle to adorable Koda, who’d snuck in through the open kitchen door, and getting my hand slapped for it before Maud evicted the big puppy. “At least you have a job. A life.” I saw she’d managed to sweep me up in her sensationalizing.
Gisella looked at me across the table over her Hermione Granger glasses a little disappointedly, I imagined, as if to remind me that I, too, could join the world again if only I chose to. I gave her a quelling look in turn, not ready to give up berating my exasperating sister. Lowery and Kyra had spent the night off somewhere in the camper van, so Maud’s full, undiluted energy was by default focused at me.
Eventually she went away, to shower and dogwalk and hie her to the cupcakery, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Almost as soon as she’d gone, and Gisella and Koda and I had settled in the den, me in my deep celadon pool under the outspread branches of an old preacher-man oak up on the quiet hill, my mind cleared momentarily . . . longer . . . and thoughts rushed in. (Like fools, maybe, but beggars can’t be choosers.)
So anyway, IDEA!—amber lights, red flashing lights, action.
“Gisella,” I hallooed her, from across the big wood-paneled room muffled by Aunt Leonie’s vast Turkish rug, ancient, cinnabar red, kind to the feet, flotsam from her first marriage.
She looked up from her iPad screen.
“Would you be able to set up a blog for me?”
She looked completely jazzed.
“Will you be monetizing?”
“I’ll be blogging,” I retorted, not admitting I had no idea what she meant.
“Sure, but why not make some money while you’re at it?”
“Well . . . sure.” Why not indeed?
“What is your blog?”
“Duh. The Brain Fog Blog.”
She looked startled and laughed, but then said “Cool.”
“I’ll want to have first-hand impressions (me), links (you), medical advice, home remedies, nutritious remedies, more links (thank you), meditations and restful images, interesting articles (that I might ask people to write), helpful chats or forums, whatever they’re called . . .” I thought out loud, and ideas kept spinning off. I started feeling dizzy, just trying to keep up. “I’ll have to go slow, and take lots and lots of breaks, I know.”
“But I can help. And I can be your CTO, or COO—”
“Well, sure—part of the brain trust.” The acronyms meant nothing to me, and I guessed wouldn’t have even back in my clear-headed days. I was a whole word kind of gal, other than BLT and TGIF. “I’ll need your help a lot, I know. Thanks, Gisella.” She was much smarter than me already, a whiz kid with an immense IQ. (All right, already, wrong again).
I was actually excited about something for the first time in ages, and I figured I could do this. I spent the morning looking for images of perfect glass-tiled pools, after listening to my colleague’s lecture on royalty free photos and copyright. Then I carefully puzzled out a couple of screen-length pages on what I thought about floating in celadon above the world, and off we went.
* * *
“My life is a farce,” Maud exclaimed petulantly two mornings later, whisking the heck out of some batter for a lemon curd teacake.
“What do you suggest instead?” I asked unsympathetically, fed up with her going bananas just because.
Lowery went on reading. Aunt Leonie, who had come downstairs for breakfast for a change, smelling the BLT egg bake Kyra had made, dressed in a long African print duster, hair a curled bob like one of those old actresses’ (the beauty salon one of the only places she ventured out to, anymore), looked at me down her long nose as if I’d committed a heresy. Or snapped. When had I stopped respecting my elders? No matter that I was twenty and a month, and might be thought beyond scolding.
“Now, dear,” she said to Maud, “don’t let her give you lip. Let your freak flag fly, if you need to.” Leonie had been a hippie extraordinaire, back when, family legend had it, and had even hung out with Garcia, Joplin, and Hendrix, before she’d married a French film distributor and gotten chic. Now, in her increasingly dotty years, she’d become notorious for mixing metaphors and spheres.
“Thank you, Auntie, but I only need to get a life,” Maud wailed. “I am a has-been, well before thirty! Démodée—débaclée—désolée—”
“Man troubles,” Aunt Leonie murmured knowingly, but Maud brandished the whisk at that, letting lemon curd fly.
“No man. No need for men. I need to do something for me, all by myself. Channel my inner Atalanta or White Buffalo Woman. I am nothing, no one, a perfect blank. I need to change.”
Leonie studied her.
“Yes, dear, a little warm beige foundation might help . . . L’Oreal’s radiant serum is just the thing, I find.”
Kyra, steady and calm as Lowery, but more alert to pending crises, as a resource-challenged speech pathologist in an underfunded school, interrupted just then with cheerful diplomacy and a practical, unrelated question, at the same time handing Aunt Leonie a teacup and the sugar bowl, the needed distraction of Lady Grey whole leaf black tea. Blue mallow blossoms, bergamot, and citrus warded off successfully the eruption from over by the stove about to blast us all.
* * *
A couple of days later, I found Maud on the porch, brushing Koda’s furry black head.
“What would you think about baking for a good cause?”
“Huh,” she snorted, disparagingly. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, really. It turns out I can get a matching grant for nonprofits, to do some good for those like me suffering from long Covid, brain fog. So if you were to sell some of your wonderful desserts, and contribute the proceeds to GoFundMe . . .” I stole a look at her; her high-arched auburn brows were drawn together in a frown. “Gisella’s idea,” I added hurriedly. “That kid’s amazing. I’ve just started a blog, thanks to her help—and hope to gather information and all kinds of helpful stuff all in one place . . . along with ramblings of my own. Wise words, and lissome sentences. The words that get me through. Some of Lowery’s favorites—Wilde and Wilder, Chekhov, Shaw. And mine—old charming Pooh and Piglet . . . Dr. Seuss.”
And the beguiling thought I’d found in one of Lowery’s playscripts the day before, something that entered into my celadon underwater world nicely, along with Cleo the Goldfish: Lost objects from another life are restored to you in the belly of a carp. (Stoppard again.)
I shrugged, and finished my sales pitch. “Whatever comes, dizzy or no. I can’t help thinking it might help someone, somehow.”
My sister looked at me suspiciously, eyebrows now raised, sure I couldn’t be serious. That there was no way I could mean it—or, more to the point, be up to it.
“Look,” I said, fighting her look (think blue, against the evil eye). “I know you’ve been thinking your life is meaningless. A sham—a farce—a travesty, if I remember right? This might just help turn it around, if you really think that. We could do lots of good, between us. I’ll do all that I can . . . and you could really help. You know you love to bake, but as things stand, you just end up giving or throwing away most of your wonderful pièces de résistance, for no reason.”
“That’s known as generosity, Rhoslan.”
“So can’t you just be generous to me?”
“And you can build up a customer base!” Gisella put in eagerly as she came out onto the porch, having overheard us. “You can sell things yourself once we get a Web page going.”
“Forget it, kids,” Maud said, rising to leave. “It’s not as if I don’t have enough on my plate already.”
“I’d say there’s nothing really stopping you from stepping up to your plate, and sharing what’s on it,” I called after her—having listened way too often, clearly, to Aunt Leonie’s mixed metaphors.
* * *
Over the next weeks we made plans for a virtual auction, and a book sale (for which a couple of Mom’s friends had made tons—it surely felt like tons—of donations). Gisella had taken up dog walking in her spare time, donating her profits to our nonprofit. Lowery and Kyra had gotten involved, distributing flyers at the theater and the underfunded school, as well as writing things for me. Our parents had written a check, for my birthday, and in addition got me a new laptop, with voice typing.
Amidst all this, Maud was now feeling forgat. She’d gone rather quiet.
“So you really want to hire me?” she asked me offhandedly one day.
“Well, co-opt you, I guess would be fairer. It’s not as if we can pay you, or anything.”
“But you can take orders for cakes and things, and use the money for your nonprofit? Most of the others seem to be joining in.”
“Aunt Leonie as well. She’s given me a Jacques Brel autograph for the auction, and a first pressing of Janis Joplin’s Pearl LP . . . besides having a lot of influential friends who want to help.”
“Rich, don’t you mean?” Maud said dryly.
“Not just that, though. She’s got that admirer in ‘major gifts’ in Monterey, who has some great ideas and contacts for us—and also wants to take Leonie to Cancun.”
“No way!” she exclaimed, surprised at the latter as I had been. But then she laughed, and said with admiration for our feisty aunt, “You go, girl!”
“I think she is going,” I confided, having heard her talking about luggage, a new tankini suit.
“I’m glad,” Maud smiled. “And I’m going to join in the family fun as well, I think. How can I possibly resist the chance to bake my gloom and doom away?” She added in a stage whisper, “You’re probably crazy . . .”
“‘Stark raving sane,’ as Stoppard says. Just the occasional smidgen of fog, to keep me honest. And that seems to be getting better, recently.”
“Deal,” she said, shaking my hand. “I’ll make you a London Fog Cake for the auction, with Earl Grey buttercream icing . . . something I’ve just discovered is a thing. And maybe one with Lady Grey icing instead, in Leonie’s honor, and another with a chocolate base. And then we’ll go from there.”
I was immensely touched, and gave her a big hug—something that hadn’t happened for ages.
“Thanks, Maud. I don’t know what to say.”
“Of course you don’t—that’s why we’re doing this, remember?”
We both laughed at the giddy renewal of sisterhood, the world spinning away from where we’d been just a few weeks before, the crazy things that happen when you let them and don’t waste your energy fighting against.
“Thank you, Rhoslan,” she said, arm still around me. “I was honestly feeling lost, somehow entirely up in the air. Like that time I was little—no, you weren’t there yet, just Lowery—and I had to pretend to be the gutsy big sister for him, when we got stopped way up on top of the big ferris wheel on the Boardwalk. It was a creepy foggy day, and we were stuck up there not moving for at least ten minutes though it seemed like all our lives, and it was really cold and wobbly and there we were all alone and I couldn’t help wondering if we’d ever get down to the ground again. I hated being there, being ‘in charge’; wanted only, desperately, to get out of that damp, unfriendly place—out of the fog. I’ve just remembered that.” She squeezed me a little, again.
“I never liked the ferris wheel,” I admitted to her.
“But OMG!” She spun me suddenly towards her, her best melodramatic self again. “I’ve just realized that that was fog! And being so dizzy and out of touch—it’s got to be like brain fog, right? What you’ve been going through?” Her eyes pleaded with me, needing to be reassured that we were in on this together, bound by our deep, inborn ties. Something transcending neglect, and daily quarrels, and vast differences in character. Something cardinal. Something only us.
I hugged her one more time, then found my laptop and began transcribing what she’d said. It was, simply, perfect.
© 2025 Christie Cochrell All rights reserved.
Click or tap here to see Christie Cochrell’s profile.
Use the “Leave a Comment” form below to submit comments on this piece.