by Alix Ohlin
After watching Close-Up I began to film my sister. I had the idea to interview her about our childhood; sometimes I asked her questions about her memories, and sometimes I asked her to play the role of someone other than herself. Most often, I asked her to pretend she was our mother. She was an excellent mimic, and it was curious and fascinating to hear her voice take on the cadence of Marianne’s. She could inhabit our mother simply by shifting her posture in a chair and narrowing her eyes; she captured Marianne’s vanity and her laugh and the lift of her left eyebrow. It helped that they looked quite a bit alike, with the same dark hair and wide-set eyes. It didn’t help that she would only maintain the fiction for a few minutes before she’d get tired of the exercise or collapse into laughter, saying she felt ridiculous, or that she didn’t want to be Marianne in the first place; she wanted to get away from her, not become her. Eventually I cut together several takes of her pretending to be Marianne and then giving up, her face serious and then creased with laughter, serious and creased, a looping repetition of composure and its opposite. I called the film Robin Giggling, and Alice Boryn said it was purposelessly inscrutable and the other students frowned with distaste and Olga, of course, said it was interesting.
Robin laughed often, whether I was filming her or not. That fall, my sophomore year, our apartment was a cheerful place. She rode the bus to high school and came straight to campus every afternoon to practice the piano. At the beginning of the semester, I’d approached a faculty member in the music department and begged him to hear my sister play. He explained that he was very busy, but once he listened to Robin, his expression changed and he agreed to take her on as a pupil. Robin and I had no money to pay for lessons, but this teacher—his name was Boris Dawidoff, and like Olga he was a Russian émigré; I don’t know how it happened that Worthen had attracted them both—suggested that I could register under my name, and Robin could show up instead. It was unethical and inappropriate, possibly grounds for expulsion, yet we didn’t think twice about doing it. If anyone at Worthen questioned why piano classes began to appear on my transcript, I didn’t hear about it. The generosity of this teacher, the risks he took to help my sister, the ease of his solution: we took all of it for granted, not understanding the potential consequences or costs.
Marianne accepted Robin’s decision to live with me with frosty dignity. At Robin’s insistence, we didn’t tell her anything about Hervé; all we said was that we missed each other, and thought being together would make us happy. I still don’t know how much she suspected of the truth; her pride, and Robin’s discomfort, made the subject impossible to discuss. Marianne agreed to the guardianship and then proceeded to give us the silent treatment, never calling or writing to see how things were. We were unperturbed. If anything, we were glad to be free of her temper and moods. What she intended as punishment felt to us like relief.
Our main issue was money. Now that I was living off campus, we needed to pay rent, and although Emma’s apartment was cheap by most standards, it cost more than I was bringing in from the lab. This was how we came to be employed at the group home.
Robin was the one who saw the flyer, handwritten in blue ballpoint, on a community bulletin board at the Stop & Shop. Need part-time help with simple tasks: a job description so basic even we seemed qualified for it. She tore a strip off the bottom and called the number, and the next day we both had interviews.
The group home—it was technically the Freedom Within Limits Residential Program, but nobody called it that—was located on a quiet street behind a strip mall that housed a pizza place and a dry cleaner. The couple who ran it introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Dean Smith, and I never learned whether Dean Smith was a hyphenated name, or the husband’s name, or if the wife had a first name of her own. Harried and brusque, they hired us immediately, dispensing commands in terse sentences that made it clear they had no time for small talk. Mrs. Dean Smith was the director and looked after the house and meals, and Mr. Dean Smith looked after the grounds.
Downstairs there was a kitchen and a living room filled optimistically with books and board games; in all the time we spent there, I never saw anybody take them off the shelves. Instead the residents huddled in front of an old television that received three channels clearly and two more blurred with snow. Upstairs were four bedrooms, each with bunkbeds. Some kids stayed for a week, others for months. Once they were eighteen, they had to leave; some treated their coming birthday like a release from prison, while others dreaded it, as it meant they’d soon be homeless.
Robin and I worked ten hours a week. The contrast with the computer lab, where I still worked also, was severe: instead of white-roomed silence, the group home was all jangled disruption, screaming laughter of teenagers, the clatter of dishes and endless chores. Much of our time was spent assembling meals: squishing tuna fish and mayonnaise in a giant vat, or layering lasagna noodles and sauce and cheese into sheet pans. We’d show up on a winter afternoon, stomp the snow from our boots, and take our instructions from a chore list posted on the yellowing refrigerator. If there wasn’t cooking to do, we’d sweep and vacuum, or wash and fold laundry, or do piles of dishes.
When cooking we wore hairnets and gloves, but that didn’t deter the boys in the home from acting like we were superstars. Once they learned our names they called us the Birds, and greeted us with whistles and songs. “What did you bring us, Birds?” they’d ask, though we never brought them anything.
One of them, Bernard, wouldn’t speak to us but stood on the stairs or in the hall, watching as we worked, sometimes braving a smile. He was tall and thin, with big brown eyes and frizzy brown hair like a dandelion gone to seed, and so quiet that for the first few months I couldn’t tell whether he was brain-damaged, or mute, or just shy.
As for the girls, if they noticed us at all it was to roll their eyes at our thrift-store clothes and ponytailed hair. They wore bright sweatshirts and jeans appliqued with flowers and painted their nails fluorescent colors and teased their hair to great heights. A girl named Kristina told Robin she’d be pretty if she fixed herself up a little. Robin stopped on the staircase—she was carrying a load of dirty sheets and towels down to the basement—and said, “I don’t have time for that.”
It was true. We hustled between school and work and piano and the library. We grabbed dinner at the group home, making ourselves sandwiches from the leftovers and devouring them as we trudged back to the apartment in the cold. Sometimes I saw my old roommate Helen between classes and we’d wave to one another and make vague plans to get together that neither of us followed up on.
“So you’re off campus now?” she asked once, and I nodded.
“Is it lonely?” she asked, and I shook my head.
On campus, I knew, there were parties and jokes and people falling in love and breaking up, but all those activities seemed to take place in an alternate dimension, from which I was now separated by a barrier, very thin but nonetheless real, like a cell membrane. That Worthen wasn’t mine anymore, and I didn’t cross back into it; I had no urge to do so.
18.
In a physics textbook I read that Marie Curie’s papers were, decades later, still radioactive. She and her husband Pierre had collected numerous dangerous elements—thorium, uranium, plutonium—in their home laboratory, and the elements glowed at night; Curie wrote in her autobiography that they were beautiful, “like faint, fairy lights.” She carried them around, glowing, in the pockets of her white lab coat. I found a lab coat for sale at the thrift store and had Robin wear it while she made coffee in the kitchen. I turned off the overhead lights and slipped travel flashlights into the pockets.
“But what should I do?” Robin asked.
“Don’t do anything,” I said. “Think about something else.”
The resulting film, Marie Makes Coffee, was grainy and out of focus. I used black-and-white film which I damaged by singeing it in places with a
Bic lighter, feeling the thrill of destruction as the tiny flame licked the edges.
“I don’t see the point of this,” said the woman in my class who never saw the point of anything.
“Is this about the reclamation of feminist role models?” Alice Boryn asked.
I nodded, thinking it seemed like the right answer, but it wasn’t really true. I mainly wanted to capture the radioactive fairy lights, to put them on film as I’d seen them in my head while reading. She sighed. In her class, we were supposed to defend and dissect our projects, to be articulate about film theory and technique, and although I was an enthusiastic maker of films, I said nothing during critiques of my own work or that of others. It wasn’t because I had no thoughts. Rather, it was because I had so many thoughts, and they jostled inside my head as I planned and rehearsed them; by the time I was prepared to speak, the discussion had moved on to someone else, leaving only my silence behind.
Alice Boryn asked me to come to her office hours. She was a red-headed woman from the South, given to cursing in class. Although I didn’t realize it until later, she’d recently been denied tenure for never finishing her own film, a documentary about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and her freewheeling attitude probably arose from the fact that her time on campus was coming to an end.
“Olga thinks you’re talented,” she told me. I was standing across from her desk—she hadn’t invited me to sit down, and I was too shy to do so anyway. I was late for a shift at the group home. “I’m not so sure, myself.”
For moment my mind went blank, overwhelmed by the thought that Olga had praised me. As much as the praise itself, I was amazed that she’d thought about me enough to discuss me with someone else, that my existence had registered on her at all. I still thought of myself as invisible, as I had striven to be for most of my childhood. I remember Alice Boryn was wearing bright red lipstick that had worn off in the middle, and her cheeks were clouded with freckles that darkened her face as if she’d been slapped. I craved her approval and was also scared of her, and the only way I could keep going with my films was to say as little as possible to her, lest I humiliate myself.
Now she was waiting for me to speak. I considered, discarded, paused. Finally I said, “I’m not so sure either.”
She grimaced, and tented her fingers beneath her freckled chin. “I’m going to give you some advice,” she said. “I get that you’ve got this persona going, this outsider artist thing or whatever it is.”
“It’s not a persona,” I said, confused.
“Olga says you’re bright, and I know you work hard. But life isn’t just about working hard. Trust me, I know. You’re going to need more than just your work. You’re going to need to sell it. Sell yourself. Do you know what I mean?”
I didn’t. I scratched the back of my head, which I often did when I was nervous. After a stressful class my hair would be tangled in knots. Once Robin had to cut a whole section out, because it had grown too matted to fix. In this moment I felt not just nervous but accused, without understanding the accusation or knowing how to defend myself.
“I’m just kind of shy,” I said finally, my throat constricted.
Again she sighed. “I’m trying to tell you something bigger,” she said. “You’re interested in self-invention, I can see that. You’re interested in postures of greatness. You need to take these fascinations and put them to work for you. Don’t be a mouse.”
I stared at her. I had never articulated these ideas before and felt myself swamped by them, by the possibility that she knew things about me that I hadn’t known myself. Though I had happily made my films and shared them with the class, even listened to the critiques with interest, I’d never thought much about others interpreting the images in such a broad fashion, finding strands or themes. It’s strange to think about it now, the innocence of my self-absorption, which I didn’t recognize until it was taken from me, a door swinging forever open on its hinge.
“Am I getting through to you at all?” Alice Boryn said.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
It was clear to both of us that I was lying. She sighed irritably.
“Anyway,” she said. “Try to talk more in class.”
19.
The conversation had the opposite effect than she intended. Her attention made me so self-conscious that I stopped going to class at all, and almost failed; it took an intervention from Olga, and a paper I wrote for extra credit, to rescue my grade. Later, when I heard Alice Boryn had left Worthen to teach at a community college on Long Island, I was relieved.
But Boryn wasn’t the only reason I had trouble with school that semester; I was distracted by other events as well. One afternoon in March I walked to my shift at the group home. The day was unusually mild and sunny, and remnants of soot-encrusted snow were collapsing on the sidewalk. As I neared, I could see two residents standing on the porch smoking, and two more below them, throwing melting snowballs at each other in a front yard turning rapidly to mud. Only when I was almost at the building did I understand that it wasn’t a snowball fight but an argument with snow as prop; also, it wasn’t two residents, but one resident—Bernard—and my sister. The smokers, Kristina and Jennifer, stood with their arms crossed, expressions slightly bored, as if watching a TV show that was only semi-entertaining. Every few seconds one of them would lean forward to tap ash from her cigarette, then cross her arms again.
“Why would you do that?” Robin yelled, her face contorted. She threw a clump of snow that disintegrated halfway between them. For a second Bernard looked like he wanted to laugh, but stopped himself. Though he was very thin his clothes were still small on him, pants an inch too short, sleeves shrunken above his wrists, which made him look younger than he was. They stood almost ten feet apart, facing off, as if in some ceremony or ritual.
“I had to,” Bernard mumbled, without conviction.
“Oh, come on,” Robin said. She was wearing an old blue ski jacket of mine over a flowered sundress and rubber rain boots, an outfit for three different seasons, and her hair was in two long braids. Braids made it easier to put on the hairnets Mrs. Dean Smith required in the kitchen.
“What’s going on?” I said. So far as I knew, they’d never had a conversation that extended beyond hello. It embarrasses me now to remember how oblivious I was, especially when I consider what Bernard’s life was like then, and how much he meant to each of us later on.
“He’s leaving the home,” she said without looking in my direction.
I couldn’t see why it was our business. The mid-afternoon sun had slipped behind the house, casting the yard in shadow, but Bernard, wearing no jacket, hugged his arms around himself. “My moms has a place now,” he said. “I can stay with her.”
“Great,” I said.
“It’s not great,” Robin said. “It’s the opposite of great.” She was crying, and when I stepped closer, she waved me off as if whatever were happening were my fault. Kristina and Jennifer stamped out their cigarettes and opened the door to the house with its telltale squeak; Mr. Dean Smith was supposed to oil its hinge but never got around to it.
“What the hell is going on?” I said, and Kristina called helpfully, before disappearing inside, “They in love.”
* * *
—
That night, after we finished our shift, I confronted my sister, who confessed that she and Bernard had been seeing each other since November. When I was at the computer lab or the library or in class, they’d go for walks; he sometimes met her at school and rode the bus with her to her piano lessons. From beneath the dresser in her room she drew out a shoebox and showed me, with tender, fluttering pride, a pile of drawings he’d made for and of her: Robin in profile, her eyes focused on something in the distance; Robin at the piano, her fingers a blur of movement. They were pretty good, I had to admit. Robin said Bernard was gentle
and sweet. Once they went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; he liked Titian, she said. She’d been taking him to the public library to look at art books. She’d even been giving him some of her group-home wages—money she’d told me she’d spent on sheet music and school supplies—so he could buy things. When I asked what kind of things, she said, “Amenities.”
It turned out “amenities” meant Cokes, bags of chips, and comic books. Why, I asked her, had she kept all this from me?
“I didn’t think you’d approve.”
“I don’t approve,” I said immediately, though I wasn’t sure why. Bernard was fifteen and I’d barely ever heard him speak. I didn’t know if he went to school, or where. My objection was largely to the secrecy itself, which excluded me from her life after she’d moved to Worthen and changed so much in mine.
“You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not Marianne.”
The thought was repulsive. “Of course I’m not Marianne!” I said.
Robin burst into tears. She was upset, she told me, because his mother’s new apartment was in Baltimore and Bernard planned to join her there. “It’s my mom,” he kept saying to Robin, and no matter how much she reminded him of the things his mother had done—drugs, never having food in the house, asking him to steal things for her—to get him placed in foster care originally, he wouldn’t be dissuaded. Robin couldn’t believe it, and neither could I. She and I had left our mother behind and found ourselves happier for it; nothing, we thought then, would ever bring us back to her. We hadn’t even gone home for Christmas that year, lying to Marianne that we’d been invited to the home of a wealthy classmate in Connecticut; raising no objection, she mailed us drugstore chocolates and Joyeux Noël cards.
