Sister (5 page)

 

At breakfast the next day, my father announced he had decided to turn the southwest corner of the basement into a bedroom, with wood-paneled walls and a lowered ceiling and a special subfloor to resist the damp. This was going to be Sam's bedroom. I would remain in our old room upstairs, which my mother would help me redecorate. Sam stared into his cornflakes, and I looked down too, embarrassed, ashamed, as my mother explained I was growing up, perhaps faster than she and my father had realized, and it was time for me and Sam to sleep in rooms of our own. Nobody mentioned my bright white sling, and I wondered for an odd moment if it was part of a terrible dream, something that I had imagined. But the ache in my shoulder was real. When I'd finished eating, my father pulled me into his lap, and I perched on his knee for a polite moment, uneasy as a cat waiting to be put down, gathering strength for the leap.

After breakfast, in a controlled and careful voice, my mother explained how bad he felt about the night before. “It frightens him to think about his little girl growing up,” she said. She was washing the breakfast dishes with extra vigor. I had been excused from table chores, and now I fumbled with the thought of having made my father afraid.

“But why?” I said. He had taken Sam to the lumberyard to pick up materials for the new room.

My mother sighed. “Because you'll be a young lady pretty soon, and you'll have boyfriends and dates, and then you'll start
wanting a family of your own.” She stopped, considering. “It makes him feel old, I guess. Maybe a little uncomfortable. People didn't talk about things like this when your father was a boy. It's scary for him, that's all.”

I put my head down on the table. I didn't feel like a person who might make another person afraid, but then again, I didn't really feel like myself either.

“Not that it's an excuse,” my mother said quickly. “Not that what he did wasn't overreacting. But he didn't mean it, sweetheart, do you understand? He asked me to make sure to tell you that.”

I tried to nod without hurting my shoulder. My mother gave me two aspirins and a cup of tea with a tablespoon of whiskey. “Why don't you go back to bed,” she said. “I'll be up in a bit to see how you're doing.”

I finished my tea and went to bed, and I didn't wake up until late in the afternoon, when the sound of hammering poked me out of my sleep. Soon I heard the scream of the circular saw biting wood, and I realized my father had already started working in the basement.

“How did you sleep?” my mother said. She was standing in the doorway, and as I turned my head I saw that the bedroom was filled with flowers: gladioli, zinnias, hollyhocks, dahlias, lilies. Each bunch was clasped in a tin can or a jelly jar, and they perched in every crevice of my bookshelf and desk, even peeking from the drawers of my dresser. The cedar chest at the foot of my bed was covered with more bouquets, only these were held by my mother's good vases, the crystal she got when she married. I didn't need to go outside to know my mother's flower gardens all were bare, each blind stalk buried deep within the greenery of the leaves.

My father wouldn't let me help with Sam's new bedroom in the basement. “You'll hurt yourself,” he said sternly if I picked up a board with my good arm. “That's too heavy for you.” But
he gave Sam bigger boards to carry, even though Sam was smaller than me, and if he complained, my father said, “Aw, that's light as a feather. Where's your muscle, son?” He seemed to be constantly guiding Sam's arm with his own broad hand, gripping the back of Sam's neck, moving Sam's body through a particular set of motions that would result in an even cut, a sharp angle, a flush edge. “Not like that, like
that
,” he'd say, and he made Sam repeat each thing over and over until he had done it perfectly, twice. Often, my father lost his temper; Sam didn't have much of a knack for carpentry. He carried the hammer with two hands the way my mother insisted we carry her heirloom plates. He winced each time the head hit the nail. He plugged his ears when my father ran the circular saw. “Don't act like such a girl,” my father told him. “That little bit of noise is nothing.” And Sam unplugged his ears, set his teeth against the grinding sound.

One week before school started, my mother took me back to see Dr. Neidermier, who raised and lowered my arm and said I could stop wearing the sling as long as my shoulder felt OK. When we got back home, I ran upstairs to tell Sam and discovered his bed was missing, and his dresser too. His posters. His little blue floor rug. The room smelled different. It was as if he'd never lived there. I sneaked downstairs past the kitchen, where I was supposed to set the table for supper, and crept down the basement stairs, using my keenest spy stealth. The new bedroom walls were completely finished; the door to the bedroom was closed. I put my hand to the knob and eased my way inside, my feet padding over the rubbery brown indoor/outdoor carpet that now covered the floor. There was Sam's bed, his dresser, new shelves made of cinder blocks and wood, spray-painted brown. The closet, which had been merely a skeletal shape, was now a real closet, with a set of sliding doors. I opened them up, and there were Sam's clothes, hanging in a cluster. A dehumidifier hummed in one corner of the room. Everything smelled of harsh, fresh paint.

When I heard footsteps coming down the basement stairs, I
slipped into the closet and crouched beside the shoes, pulling the doors closed behind me. I could see perfectly through the slender crevice between them, and when Sam and my father came in, I felt a lurch of adrenaline. Without the cumbersome sling I was myself again, graceful and whole. I breathed the doors open, inch by inch, and I thought about all the time Sam and I had spent developing potions that would make us invisible, blending chokecherry blossoms and pounded-up stones, beer stolen from the little refrigerator my father kept in his workshop, our own spit. Mixture after mixture we rubbed on our skin, and still we could see each other, squinting hopefully as we stood eye-to-eye, waiting for one of us to fade. Now it seemed I was finally invisible as I walked toward them, slowly, step by step. They were putting up new posters of airplanes and motorcycles, a
HORTON WILDCATS
pennant that had once been my father's. I was close enough to reach out and tap them on the shoulders and still neither one of them saw that I was there.

T
he fall I started junior high, my mother, who had never worked outside our home before, took a part-time job at a weekly advertiser called the
Sell It Now
! Three times a week, she drove twenty-five miles to Cedarton in our “second car,” a rusted Oldsmobile that conked out in a dramatic cloud of smoke if you let it idle too long. Years before, on the way home from the grocery store, Sam had spilled a gallon of milk across the back seat. Even now, and especially in wet weather, it gave off a moist, cheesy smell. But my mother didn't seem to mind. “It runs,” she said, and if she ever envied my father's Ford, with its sleek blue sheen, its air-conditioned silence, I never heard her mention it.

One Saturday in September, just after she got the job, she invited me and Sam to come along and see where she worked. It hadn't been too long ago that my father had taken us to see his office at Fountain Ford, and I remembered the thick gray carpet, the water cooler with its magic hot and cold, the magnificent fish wandering the tank in the lobby, my father's name, G
ORDON
S
CHILLER
, in gold block letters on his desk. The other men greeted him with shouts—
Hey there, Gordy! Gordo!
—and they shook
Sam's hand and told my father I was good-looking, and one of them bought us paper cups of hot chocolate from a machine. It made me proud to see my father that way, surrounded by people who admired him, the tie we'd given him for Father's Day dividing his chest in a fat splash of gold. His voice, which at home seemed too loud, too forceful, rang out like a bell in the vast showroom, drawing everybody to the sound. Outside the plate-glass windows, beautiful cars had been lined up in perfect shiny rows, and my father walked us up and down the aisles of the lot, one hand on the back of each of our necks, quizzing Sam on the names of various different models. “Maybe someday you'll come work for your old man—how would you like that?” he asked. I knew Sam wanted to be a famous artist or an actor or a daredevil stuntman, but he didn't tell my father that. I wanted to be a nurse or a veterinarian; still, I hoped my father would ask if I wanted to work for him too. Later, behind the closed door of his office, he showed us all the plaques he'd been awarded for his outstanding service to Ford. “My dad sure had nothing like this to show for himself,” he said, and he gave Sam a poke on the shoulder. “Remember what I'm telling you. You've got to work to get ahead in this world. Nobody's going to hand you anything.”

It was hard not to be disappointed when my mother unlocked the door to the windowless room she shared with four other people. When Sam said he was thirsty, she poured us each a plastic cup of water from the bathroom sink; I sipped it politely as she spoke about her work, bending seriously over a mock-up, planning the layout of the center page. But I felt vaguely uncomfortable, shy, as though I were listening to a familiar stranger, perhaps a friend of the family, someone I almost didn't know. Until that moment, it had seemed like the only things that happened to my mother were the things that happened to us. She felt my scraped knee and Sam's burned finger; she sweated our fevers, suffered our bad dreams. There was nothing that belonged to her
alone except her past, and even that she shared easily, telling stories about her childhood until Sam and I remembered them as our own.

The night she first told us about the
Sell It Now
!, she had made a special dinner of lamb chops and boiled new potatoes, the first of the fall crop. She'd applied for the job in secret, she said, because she had wanted to surprise us. She hoped we would all be able to help out a little more around the house, because she would be pretty busy for a while. Sam and I nodded and said we would, but my father stopped eating, which was not a good sign.

“I can't believe you'd go behind my back on this,” he said. My mother kept on eating like nothing was wrong, which was not a good sign either. Sam and I looked at our plates. “I thought we agreed there was no need for you to work.”

“I just want something that gives me the same satisfaction your job gives you.”

“What about us? Don't we give you any satisfaction?”

“Of
course
,” my mother said. “But the kids are growing up and you're always at the lot and I don't just want to sit around, getting older. I want to meet people. I want to learn new things.”

“The reason I'm at the lot so much is so that you can take it easy if you want. Don't I provide for us well enough? Don't we have a comfortable life?”

“It isn't that,” my mother said. “There's more to life than being comfortable.”

“Well, excuse me,” my father said, “if my best isn't good enough for this family.”

He stood up, grabbed his coat from its hook in the hall. The door slammed, and then we listened to the gravelly sound of his car moving down the driveway. “Don't worry,” my mother told us. “He'll get used to the idea. Your father is a little old-fashioned, that's all.”

But he didn't get used to it. His anger bubbled and simmered
like a thick soup, filling the house with its smell, and every now and then it boiled over into a fresh argument. Sam and I sat close to the TV, the volume turned up as loud as we dared, and still we could hear them fighting in the kitchen as my mother got ready to leave for work.

“I'm asking you to resign, Therese,” my father said. “For me.”

“This isn't about you, for a change.”

“Where's all this coming from? We never had a quarrel until you started this career woman crap.”

“We never had a quarrel because I never asked for anything you didn't want. I'm asking for this. This one thing. Three nights a week, Gordon; it's not like I'm neglecting you.”

“What about the kids?” my father said. “What about Abby? A girl that age needs her mother's supervision when the young bucks come sniffing around.”

“
Gordon
,” my mother said.

“Young
bucks
,” Sam whispered, and he made kissing noises into his hand.

“Shut up,” I said. That males of any species might show an interest in me—or I in them—was something I still considered ludicrous. Boys were ungirls, ill-mannered, unpredictable. In the hallways at school I hugged the rows of metal lockers to avoid their sharp shoulders, their swinging hands. In biology, when we had to choose microscope partners, I quickly picked another girl; at lunch, I sat on the “girls' side” of the cafeteria. Boys were citizens of another, stronger country. If you opened your mouth to speak in class, a boy would say it first. When you raised your hand, the teacher's gaze flew past it, straight into the waiting glove of a boy's eager palm.

Sometimes, falling asleep at night, I tried to remember if the differences I was noticing between boys and girls had always been there. Perhaps the shock of starting junior high had caused my perception of things to change, the way my father's binoculars changed after I dropped them, knocking loose the fragile prism
inside. But tucked in the cedar chest up in the attic, I found the outfits my mother had made for Sam and me when we were very small. A green and red checked suit for Sam; a green and red checked dress for me. Twin yellow play pants, with flowers sewn over the pocket on mine and a sailboat sewn over the pocket on Sam's, so that people could tell who was the girl and who was the boy. It had always pleased me when people got it wrong. This happened frequently after the first of each month, when Auntie Thil came over to cut our hair in the style that she and my mother hopefully called a pixie. “Look at the little pixies,” my mother would say afterward, and we'd struggle up into her lap, adoring and eager as puppies. I'd close my eyes, divided between the pleasure I felt at my mother's attention and the fear that, perhaps, Sam loved her more than me. I thought about this often, and at night, in the bedroom we still shared back then, I'd pose hypothetical questions for him, whispering across the dark space between our beds.

Me and Mom are attacked by mad dogs and you can only save one of us. Who do you pick
?

Me and Mom are drowning and you're in a boat, but there's only room for one more person. Who will you save
?

Pretending he was asleep didn't help—I demanded an answer. “You,” he'd finally say, and only then could I sleep, bigger and brighter and stronger because there was someone who loved me best. With everyone else I felt my inadequacies, which I knew were abundant and terrible. I was nothing at all like the girls in the books we read in Sunday school, girls who were pretty and good, who dedicated their lives to worthy causes. I was too heavy and my voice was too loud and my hair wouldn't curl no matter what. I asked too many questions. My teachers said I had a tendency to “carry things too far.”

“You can call me Mom,” I told Sam one afternoon while we were playing dress-up. I was in third grade, Sam in second. We'd had to play dress-up in secret ever since the time my father
came home from work and found Sam and me in Mom's high heels, wobbling between the window and the full-length mirror in their bedroom. Our hair was sprayed to stand on end; our lips were puckered red hearts. “
Hel-loh-oh
!” we trilled. One look, and we knew we had done something wrong.

“For heaven's sake, Gordon, they're
children
,” my mother had said, but my father said it wasn't healthy for a boy of any age to put on lipstick and a dress. Still, I loved to outline Sam's lips in red, to highlight his deep-set eyes with lavender and blue, to clip earrings to the tops of his ears so the weight made them fold down like a little lamb's. I loved to dress him up in the clothes my mother had worn back when she and my father still went out dancing on Saturday nights. High on the closet shelf were the trophies they'd won, lined up like grinning gold teeth. Sometimes they'd sit at the supper table long after Sam and I had been excused, recalling those competitions, friends of my father's they'd double-dated with, plans they'd made before my father started working such long hours at Fountain, before Sam and I came along. Then you could see how it must have been when they'd first fallen in love, back when my mother was barely eighteen and my father was thirty-two, capable, confident, picking her up in his shiny new T-bird. There was something between them that changed the color of the light, brightening the dusk, and, perhaps, they'd clasp hands between the dirty dishes.

“Say Mom,” I told Sam. He looked just like a doll, so sturdy and small in a pink speckled dress, and I wanted him all for myself.

“That's dumb,” he said, but he changed his mind when I offered him a quarter. At supper that night, he said, “Thank you, Mom,” when I passed him the scalloped potatoes. My father, intent on the TV, didn't notice, but my mother got the expression she wore just before she said something that might trigger an argument.

“Your sister's name is Abby,” she told Sam.

“I know.” He looked down, the potatoes plumping his
cheeks. My father snapped his fingers, meaning that we should be quiet so he could hear the evening news.

“I am your mom,” my mother said to Sam, and I hated her then because I knew she was right, that long ago she'd made Sam up deep within her body, and for this reason he would always be a part of her in a way he would never be a part of me. I got up and ran through the house, slamming doors: the kitchen door, the hallway door, the heavy front door, which shook the warped porch floorboards and scattered the cats from the cool, dark earth beneath them. I climbed high into a pear tree and stared out over the fields toward Horton and its hazy light, the summer moon ripening in the distance. It seemed to me then that I had nothing of value, that I would never be anyone interesting or important.

After a while, the porch light snapped on and my mother came outside. She had told me once how she had felt when she first came to live in this house, my father's childhood home, and how she did things, deliberate little things, to make it her own: tying back the front curtains with a knot instead of a bow, interspersing yellow tulips among the red ones in the flower bed. Now I watched as she began flaking paint from the old porch railing with her thumbnail until the brown beneath it appeared, grew longer, proof beyond a doubt that she had been there.

 

My parents never lingered at the table anymore. The moment my mother sat down to relax, my father picked at her, pointing out things around the house that she needed to do. “You're not being sensible about this job thing, Therese,” he said. “You're needed here. To go all that distance is hardly worth the little bit of money you make.”

“You could help out now and then,” my mother said.

“That's not cost-effective,” my father said. “You want me to stay home and put on an apron so we can live on the seventy-five dollars and change you bring home each week?”

But I didn't mind helping out; it made me feel important, and my mother always thanked me and told me what a good job I had done. It was 1977, and a few of my friends' mothers worked too. It didn't seem like such a big deal to me. “And it isn't,” my mother assured me. My grandmother disagreed. Even Auntie Thil couldn't understand why my mother wouldn't just admit the whole thing had been a mistake. “Olaf would never let me work,” she said proudly. “I don't think he'd be able to find his way around the house if I weren't there.”

We were at my grandmother's, still sluggish from a big noon dinner. My mother and my grandmother and Auntie Thil were playing cards at the kitchen table; underneath, Monica and I were setting up a line of dominoes, hoping they'd forget we were there and talk about something more interesting. Their legs hung down like prison bars, and we felt deliciously trapped, safe. “Gordon's a big boy,” my mother said. “He had an apartment before we got married.”