When I lie on the floor and watch her get ready to go out on Friday nights, I have to admit I'm impressed by her beauty. I find myself doing whatever she tells meâI run to get her mascara, I lend her my hair clips, I search the kitchen for spring water so she won't have to wash her face with ordinary tap water like the rest of us. I'm her slave and I don't even like her. I can only guess what it's like for some unsuspecting individual to see her for the first time; it's perfectly understandable how fast somebody like that could fall under her spell, how easily they might be taken in by what is only skin deep.
Rosarie pretends to be good when it suits her. She comes home at midnight, the time of her curfew, kisses our mother and grandmother good night and goes upstairs, as if she were the last person on earth to consider breaking the rules. But as soon as everyone's asleep, she climbs back out her window, like a blackbird, finally free of us, flying down Maple Street, with her long hair trailing behind her. She goes off with her boyfriends, taking as much delight in breaking their hearts as she does in winning them. Everyone knows she swims in Lantern Lake with no clothes on and steals flowers from Mrs. Gage's perennial beds and lipsticks from the pharmacy. She torments the other girls in town by not caring what they think of her. When it comes right down to it, the only opinion that matters to her is her own.
In the morning, when Rosarie finally gets out of bed, she combs her hair. She yawns and doesn't notice what falls out from among the strands: fireflies, petals, white moths, heartache. When some new boy follows Rosarie home, our grandmother never lets him past the front door. She shakes her mop at the lovelorn boys in our yard and tells them they're too young to be pining after someone, especially if that someone is our selfish Rosarie. As far as my grandmother is concerned, those boys are nothing but moths caught up in a spider's web, but I have compassion for them. I bring them Cokes with ice and listen to their sad stories; I offer them consolation, along with cookies and chips. Someday they'll think fondly of me, the ugly little sister who sat beside them on the grass, or maybe they won't remember me; they'll only recall the sweet sodas they drank as they looked into Rosarie's window, hoping for a glimpse of her beautiful face.
You would think that what has happened in our family would show up in my sister in some way, that her complexion would turn yellow. or her dark eyes would be dulled, or her red mouth would fade to an ugly white pucker, but none of that has happened. Unfortunately, the same is not true for me. You can see everything in my face, which is why people tend to stay away from me. The ones who are frightened by what they see call me names behind my back, and I don't blame them. Even the biggest fool could take one look at my miserable complexion and sorrowful features and know well enough to avoid me. Even someone like that could see bad luck written all over my face.
Some people might guess I took a dislike to Collie's father to get back at my own father for leaving us the way he did, and that I was looking for somebody to hurt, but that wasn't the case. My father made certain choices because he was sick. It was too bad that my sister was the one who found him. My grandmother and I were up in the attic, going through the belongings she'd brought when she came to stay with us. If it had been me who opened the garage door, everything else would have been easier. I would have known that he loved us, now and forever, but my sister didn't understand, and our mother's reaction was worse. She didn't speak for six weeks after our father died, not even when Rosarie burned his clothes on the back patio. Rosarie poured lighter fluid over everything and lit it up so high that the leaves of the mimosa trees caught on fire and Collie's father, who is a volunteer fireman, with one of those blue globes he sticks to the top of his car, which allows him to speed to the scene of a fire, jumped over Mrs. Gage's fence and came running to ensure that our house wasn't burning to the ground.
This year the leaves of the mimosas have come back blackened, black feathers hanging from the branches, falling on the slate and on our bare feet as if there were a flock of blackbirds living above us. Collie and I sit on the patio to study the mimosas almost every evening. We don't have to speak about the way my father died: we don't have to talk at all. Silence doesn't frighten us. We can just look at each other and recognize that there is pain in this world, even on beautiful nights when twilight settles in our backyards, sifting through the grass and the hedges. We take a blanket out there and look up through the black mimosas; we call out the names of the constellations we know until we're too tired and dizzy to look up anymore.
I probably would have been on the patio gazing at stars that night if Collie hadn't come down with a fever. But he was home in bed, and it was no fun being alone in the dark. As a matter of fact, it was kind of scary, with those sour black leaves and so many stars you could never hope to count them all, not if you tried for a thousand years. My sister had a new boyfriend, Brendan Derry, who seemed to think that Rosarie belonged to him, and he wanted her to spend every second of her free time with him. Poor Brendan didn't have a clue that he'd be gone before long, another speck in my sister's romantic history Still, Rosarie liked a good time, even when she was breaking somebody's heart, and I knew she wouldn't be back for hours. I felt free to go into her room and turn on the TV she'd gotten as a Christmas present from one of her boyfriends the day before she dumped him. None of us remembered his name anymore, but the TV worked great.
I threw myself down on her unmade bed without bothering to take off my shoes. Rosarie was the lazy sister, she was the rude sister, but she was the sister who had everything, and I was the one watching TV all alone. I had brought a bowl of popcorn with me to her room, even though I knew Rosarie would kill me if she found a single kernel in her bed. Frankly, I didn't care if popcorn accumulated on the sheets. I could be mean, too, after all. I could be selfish and thoughtless when I tried, or at least that's what people around here said. Maybe that's because everybody was crying at my father's funeral except for me. When you do things like that, when you stand there and shut your mind until all you can hear is the humming of bees, people think you don't have any feelings. They think what they see is what you feel deep inside.
As I sprawled out on the bed with nothing to do but eat popcorn and envy my sister, my mother came in to say good night. She was still pretty, and she wasn't old, but she wasn't the same as she used to be. She hardly ever talked anymore. Just the bare essentials. Just Pass
the green beans
and
You have a dentist appointment
and Don't
forget to shut the front door when you leave.
Sometimes I'd catch my mother staring across the yards, watching Collie's parents as they worked out in the garden, laughing and having so much fun. I knew what she was thinking. She'd been shortchanged, with my father and all. She was forty-six years old and living with her mother and her two thankless daughters, and how had that happened? Once she'd figured that out, she'd probably start talking, but for now, she was keeping it simple. She sat on the edge of Rosarie's bed and ran her hand through my hair, even though her fingers caught on the snarls at the base of my neck. Those knots hurt, but it had been so long since anyone had touched me, I didn't complain. I have terrible hair that sticks up where it shouldn't and makes me even uglier than I already am. When I see Rosarie's beautiful long dark hair, I want to pull it out, and every time I feel that jealousy. I know my true self. In spite of everything Rosarie's done and how selfish she is, I'm far worse than she'll ever be.
After my mother went to bed, I stayed in Rosarie's room, eating popcorn and making a mess. I could feel myself curdling; I was a sour pudding, a recipe made of envy and spite, green at the edges. When I feel that kind of badness inside me, I am capable of anything. I really am. I opened the window even though it was raining. I did it on purpose, just to see something of my sister's be ruined. I let raindrops splatter all over Rosarie's pillow; and her white quilt, and her night table where she keeps her jewelry box, the one my father gave her for her sixteenth birthday, a gift she now says is nothing but a piece of junk.
I had the TV on, but I was busy sorting through my sister's jewelry, the tangled gold necklaces various lovestruck boys had given her, the earrings missing crystals and beads, the silver rings she wore on all of her fingers. When his picture came on, I wasn't really listening. I just looked up and there he was, as if the image that should have been cast in the mirror had somehow arisen on my sister's TV screen. I reached over and turned up the sound. It was one of those real-life crime shows, and although I had missed most of what they'd said about him, I did hear his name. It wasn't Ethan Ford, that was the strangest part, it was something entirely different, but that was definitely his face, the one with no reflection, so I wrote down the number to call.
I sat on Rosarie's bed for a while, and after a time I went out her window. By then it had stopped raining, and the streets were wet and shining, as if stars had been mixed in with the asphalt. My father did what he did because he didn't want to drag us through any more pain, but it seems I'm the only one who understands that he acted out of love, except for our family doctor, Dr. Abbot, who said that courage took place in all sorts of ways you could never even imagine. We were standing in the driveway after my father's funeral when Dr. Abbot said that, but I don't think anyone else heard him. They were heartsick, stuck in their own disbelief, but not me. I always expected the worst. I was born to be that way, and when it came to Collie's father, I have to say I wasn't as surprised as somebody else might have been to discover that Ethan Ford wasn't everything he pretended to be.
I went down to Hannah's Coffee Shoppe on the corner of Front Street and Lincoln Avenue. I could see Rosarie in there, having a grand old time with her friends. Brendan Derry was all over her: he looked so proud and pleased with himself, but that wouldn't last. By next week he'd start to appear chalky, he'd cry himself to sleep and wonder what on earth he'd done wrong. I thought about talking the situation over with Rosarie, confiding what I'd seen on TV, but she always made me feel stupid, so after a while I just decided by myself I went to the pay phone in the parking lot and made the call. When I got home, my grandmother was waiting for me. She was sitting in the kitchen with the black candles she'd found in my room and the rest of the supplies I'd sent away for, and she wasn't happy.
“What is this supposed to be?” she asked me, but she knew. The manufacturer's advertisement swore that if used properly these items would dissolve the curtain that separated this world from the next, but I wasn't so sure. I had been trying to contact my father for nearly a year, and so far I'd had no results.
“Nothing,” I said, which was pretty much the truth.
“You can't change what meant to be.” my grandmother told me.
My grandmother was usually right about such matters. I sat down and had a cup of tea with her and thought about her advice. My hands had been shaking ever since I'd gotten back from the phone booth outside the coffee shop, but my grandmother didn't seem to notice. I feared I might just have changed what was meant to be with the phone call I'd made, or maybe my seeing Collie's father's photograph on TV and calling in was a part of what was meant to be in the first place, and now I'd never know which one it was. Not for sure. I'd simply have to live with the doubt hanging over me.
“You, for instance,” my grandmother went on, “were meant to be beautiful.”
I laughed. “I don't think so.”
I had found if you didn't expect much, you weren't disappointed as much. That's probably why I liked Collie; he was the opposite of me. He saw the best in everybody. When I tried to get him to hate someone at school, he'd shake his head and laugh, and there wasn't anything I could do to get him riled up and vicious the way I was sometimes.
“If you know something bad about someone, do you have an obligation to turn them in?” I asked my grandmother when she came to sit down at the table with me.
“Sometimes.” That was the kind of answer my grandmother always gave, the kind that gave you room to move around in but didn't quite offer you any peace of mind, so that the answer wound up being more work than the question had ever been in the first place. She knew there were things that could never be explained, and that people had obligations in this world. When my father got sick, she moved here from Hartford, Connecticut, and she must have left her cat behind, the one she loved so much, because Rosarie is allergic to dander. She left almost everything to take care of us, and I had to wonder how many people would be willing to do that.
I guess if I had one good quality it would be my loyalty. I take after my grandmother that way. I had never turned my sister in no matter what she did wrong. I had found plenty of evidence in her room when I was snooping around and trying on her clothes. I'd discovered marijuana and condoms. I'd examined her birth control pills and the packets of love letters that were filled with details I didn't understand, but I never did tell a soul. On this night I stopped off in Rosarie's room to think things over; the truth was, I went there because my room was too childish for the sort of things I had to think about. I guess I was mad at my sister or wanted to get back at her in some way for sitting in Hannah's, sharing a plate of French fries with a boy who was in love with her and having fun when I had to make a decision that could ruin people's lives. I must have been angry, because before I left her room to go to bed, I locked her window so she couldn't sneak back in.