Sister (17 page)

“These glasses are great,” I told her. “Where did you get them?”

“The Quick Stop. They were free with a ten-dollar gas purchase.”

“You can't even tell,” I said.

“I can tell,” my mother said. “Everything I own came free with something else. Or it was on sale or it had a crack or stain somewhere. Or it was cheaper than the one I really wanted.”

She licked her finger and rubbed it around the rim of her glass. It didn't hum; it squeaked. “What am I going to do?” she said. After Mass, she and my father and I were expected for Christmas dinner at my grandmother's. Thil and Olaf would be there, and Monica and her fiancé, Ray. Only Harv, who was on retreat, would be missing. And Sam, of course. And, it seemed, my father. And now my mother and I. We'd broken our fast with fruitcake, pancakes, whiskey, and Bailey's—how could we show up for Mass and not take Communion? Besides, my mother was still in her robe and slippers, and when we looked at the living room clock we discovered that, somehow, it had become eleven forty-five, and Oneisha was ten miles away.

My mother was crying, little sneaky tears, which she furiously wiped away. “What will your grandmother say when she hears about Gordon?”

“We don't have to tell her today,” I said. “Half the time,
Dad makes some excuse and stays home anyway. She probably won't even notice.”

“But the offertory. Oh my God, think of all those people sitting there, waiting to hear you sing. They'll think you were in an accident or something, they'll think you…” My mother was searching for the worst thing she could think of, and I winced as I saw the options march across her face. “I've made you commit a mortal sin,” she said. “Missing Mass.”

I took a deep breath. This seemed as good a time as any to tell her my life was falling to pieces too. “Mom,” I said, not looking at her. “I haven't been going to Mass. And I haven't been practicing either. I don't think I want to stay at Peabody.”

“Do I seem drunk to you?” she said. “I've never been drunk before. Well, maybe tipsy once or twice. But not like this.”

She hadn't been listening. I didn't know whether to feel disappointed or relieved.

“You seem drunk,” I assured her, and she beamed at me as if I'd told her she was beautiful.

“You get drunk too,” she said.

“OK.”

“But not too drunk. Because you'll have to call your grandmother later. I don't think I can do it. You'll have to tell her something. Tell her we overslept.”

“OK.”

“Why is everything falling apart?” my mother said.

“It isn't,” I said, although it was.

“Maybe your grandmother is right,” my mother said. “Maybe this is all my fault. Maybe I should have stayed home with you kids and kept house and agreed with everything your father said. Maybe that should have been enough.” She stood up, weaving, and headed toward the stairway. “I'm going to take a little nap.”

“You need help?” I said, but she didn't answer. I could hear her moving down the upstairs hall, the creak of the springs as she
sank into bed. Then silence.
Where's Mom
? I heard Sam say, and I jumped up, shivering, and poured the rest of my drink back into the bottle, something my father had always done, saying,
Alcohol kills germs—even mine
. It was noon. In Oneisha, the Mass was beginning without us. My grandmother was sitting in her usual pew, with Auntie Thil and Uncle Olaf and Monica beside her. Father Van Dan was pacing up and down the hall, two nervous altar boys trailing him like woebegone angels. How long, he was wondering, should we wait for Abigail? Somewhere, my father was listening to the radio, steering with his knees the way he liked to do, muttering about gas mileage and shortcuts. Somewhere, my brother was thinking of us or not thinking of us, my brother was alive or he was dead, and it didn't really matter because there was no one to know which it was except maybe God, and God had His hands pressed over His mouth, sucking on the truth like a sour-apple candy, smug as any spoiled child refusing to share.

By the time he was in high school, my brother stopped asking for my mother; it was my father who asked after Sam.
Where is he
? my father would say, coming home from work, coming in from the shed. Perhaps Sam was kept after school? Or maybe he was in his room? Or studying at a friend's? In fact, nobody knew where Sam went on those nights he didn't come home until dawn, those days when he left for school and the principal called to say he had never arrived. Often, we'd sit down to eat without him, because Sam would come home late or not at all. “Where is he, goddamnit!” my father said one night, jabbing his fork into his peas so hard the plate seemed to chime the late hour. “Six-thirty sharp we eat. How many times do I have to tell him that?”

He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I've got work tonight at Fountain,” he said. “I'll be home by nine, and Sam better be here.” But minutes after he'd left the house, he came back inside. His hands were shaking; his arms and jaw were shaking. “That little fucker,” he said. I had never heard him use that word before; I never heard him use it again.

“What happened?” my mother said, but my father did not answer. He opened the refrigerator and stared intently into that cold blue light.

I followed my mother outside. It was dusk, September, and each step shouted with leaves. My father's Ford was parked with its nose to the shed, and my mother stopped behind it. “Sam,” she said. “Get up now, honey, get up,” but I still didn't see him. Then the darkness behind my father's back tires took shape, and my brother crawled out. He was sixteen years old, drunk and laughing. Red and gold leaves were pressed like pleading hands to his face and hair and chest.

 

It was almost four in the afternoon by the time we finally left the house, my mother walking too carefully over the ice. When we reached the car, she handed me the keys, though I didn't feel very well either. “I am never going to make it through this,” she said. She'd been chanting these words like a prayer ever since my grandmother phoned early in the afternoon, worrying about what had happened to us. “We overslept,” I said, and this was partially true. I'd decided to lie down on the couch for a few minutes and had fallen asleep for two hours. When the phone rang, I'd been vaulted into the air by the sudden charged clarity of knowing exactly who was calling and why.

“Well, come for dinner at least,” my grandmother said. “We're happy to wait till you get here.”

I could hear my mother vomiting in the bathroom upstairs.

“Actually,” I said, “Mom's kind of sick. I think she picked up the flu.”

“It could be food poisoning,” my grandmother said. Then, “Does she have a fever?”

“I don't know. I mean, I don't think so. I think she just needs to rest,” I said. “You go ahead and eat. I'm sorry about all this, Grandma. I'll apologize to Father Van Dan. I—”

“Let me speak to your mother.”

“She's getting sick,” I said, truthfully.

“Your father, then.”

“He isn't here.”

My grandmother sighed, and when she spoke, her voice shook with terrible sadness. “Olaf heard a rumor that Gordon was moving out.” My mother was coming down the stairs. Her eyes were red, wet-looking.
Grandma
? she mouthed, and when I nodded
Yes
, she held out her hand for the phone, but I turned away.

My grandmother said, “Is it true?”

I didn't say anything.

“It's all right,” my grandmother said. “Your mother's standing right there, isn't she?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she'll feel better later this afternoon?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Then come over when you're ready,” my grandmother said. “Abigail, please, it's Christmas. I'll be expecting both of you.”

I hung up, and when I told my mother I'd promised we would come later, her face took on the expression people use to face the inevitable: surgery, birth, death. “Do you think I'm still drunk?” she asked.

“Hungover.”

“Drunk is the better part,” she said, and she turned back toward the bathroom.

Now, as I drove down our long gravel driveway, my mother pressed her forehead against the cold window, gulped the damp winter air. It was that delicate time between daylight and dusk when the least brightness seems an exaggeration and the landscape loses its depth. Farmhouses twinkled with red and blue and green Christmas lights, intimate and warm, and they looked almost close enough to touch. We passed a manure spreader out
lined in white lights; a mailbox transformed into an elf's toy shop; a stand of young pine trees, each with a gold star lashed to its tip, so that it seemed like a small constellation was hanging only inches above the snowy fields. Just before we crossed the railroad tracks into town, my mother finally lifted her head.

“‘Welcome to Oneisha,'” she said, reading the sign that Uncle Olaf had made years before. Now it was riddled with bullet holes, spackled with ice.

“Oh, God,” I said, and I started to laugh because the Hornleins' rooftop was bustling with its usual arrangement of reindeer, and—look!—there was the faded grinning Santa at the Klopps', and, at the Pfiels', the electric-green swing set, quarreling with elves. Over the years, I had come to know each of these decorations by heart, and I loved them because they were familiar to me, because I had been taught to admire them. Now I saw them with the eyes of an outsider. The town looked like a carnival—garish, sparkly, a child playing fancy in rhinestones and glitter.

My mother was laughing too, a bit ruefully, as if it hurt her head. “Let's drive by the crèche,” she said, and I turned into the Saint Ignatius parking lot. The crèche was life-size, made of wood, and it stood on a cordoned-off section of asphalt beside the front entrance to the church. There were real bales of hay, evergreen boughs for the floor and the roof, and metal poles for the stanchions. Every few years, all the figures were repainted: white sheep, brown mules, a dark-haired Joseph, a blond and blue-eyed Jesus. The animals wore exaggeratedly human expressions of piety, while the wise men looked at their feet like shy boys at a dance, wondering what to do next. As I pulled up close, my mother's face was bathed in the light of the floodlamps. Together we stared at the crèche. How deliciously warm and sleepy Baby Jesus looked!

“Where's Mary?” my mother said suddenly. “Look, they moved her all the way to the back!”

It was true; Baby Jesus was alone in the foreground, while
Mary knelt, open-armed, beside three candy-pink pigs, a brilliant red rooster. Even Joseph could have touched Jesus from where he stood, his arm resting on the back of a steer. “Can't let a mother get too close. Might sissify the boy,” my mother said. She was imitating my father's voice. I had never heard her so bitter. “Let's go,” she said, and I pulled away and continued up the street to my grandmother's house.

It was truly dark now, the gunmetal blackness of winter. As we pulled into the driveway, my grandmother opened the front door, waiting. Behind her, the light from the hallway blazed like flames, and yet there she stood, untouched. I thought of a story she'd told me once about a saint who had been thrown into a room of fire. There he'd lived for three days and three nights before emerging, healthy and whole. “Thank goodness,” my grandmother said when we came up the walk. “I was afraid you wouldn't come.”

“Merry Christmas!” my mother said, accepting my grandmother's kiss.

The remnants of the meal were still on the kitchen table: the half-eaten carcass of the turkey, a few slaughtered pies, green beans congealing in margarine. Why weren't the dishes already done? Where was Uncle Olaf? Where were Monica and her fiancé? Auntie Thil was there, but she was flushed, nervous. Her hands shook as she took our coats and carried them down the hall to my grandmother's bedroom. “Here, sit,” my grandmother said, leading us into the living room. “I've sent the others home. I thought we could pray together, come up with a solution to all of this.”

“To all of what?” my mother said.

“I know that Gordon's left you,” my grandmother said, and my mother stepped back as if someone had struck her. “First your child, now your husband. What's next—I suppose a divorce?”

My mother glanced over at me, a brief terrible look that said,
Traitor
. Then she turned and walked out of the house, leaving
the door open behind her. After a moment, Auntie Thil walked down the hall and closed it softly. I thought about my mother's coat, lying limp, dormant, across my grandmother's bed. I thought of the car keys, a cold lump in my pocket, and I wondered where my mother would go. My grandmother reached for my hand, and I pulled it away without thinking, staring at her as if she were someone I'd never seen before.
What right do you have to judge her or anyone
? I wanted to say, except that I was actually saying it, each word torn from my throat.

“Abigail?” my grandmother said. “What did you say?”

I ran down the hall, grabbed our coats, and I left my grandmother's house. Outside, the frozen darkness was pulsing with Christmas lights, bloody red, sickly green. The familiar street looked sinister, a fun house of mirrors and lights from which there was no escape. Where had my mother gone? I checked behind my auntie Thil's house, where the iced-over pond gleamed like an eye. I could see my uncle Olaf watching TV in the den, and I stared at him through the window the way once, at a county fair, I'd stared—fascinated, horrified—into a cow's stomach, which had been fitted with a transparent panel. I walked behind my grandmother's house and came up the side yard and onto the street, where I started toward the hazy glow of the floodlights surrounding the crèche at the church.