by Alix Ohlin
“And now I’ll never see him again,” Robin concluded, twisting her hands.
I recognized her distress. How could I not? I had just lived through it myself. I cradled her head in my lap and told her I understood, her tears wetting my shirt, her long hair tickling my arms. Sometimes I can still feel the weight of her body against mine, damp with heartbreak, beautiful Robin, sixteen.
20.
A month later Mrs. Dean Smith phoned us, yelling, her spittle making static on the phone. She called Robin and me liars and thieves. She’d always known we were strange and couldn’t be trusted.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Are we fired?”
“You bet your behind you’re fired,” she said. “And don’t be asking for references, neither. You’re lucky I don’t go to the police.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You should thank me for not calling the police!”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t ever show your weirdo faces around here again!” she added, and hung up.
It was nine in the evening, and Robin was sitting on the couch with one leg curled beneath her, bent over geometry homework. Her piano lessons were going well, but she was barely passing her classes at school. She seemed to study, but I think she just stared at her books while her mind wandered. Whenever I looked at her papers or tests the first section was done perfectly until the letters or numbers loosened around the edges as she got distracted, with the bottom of the page always blank. Nice start, her teachers sometimes wrote, what happened? Others, less sympathetic, assigned poor grades without comment. Now I could tell, from how hard she appeared to be concentrating, that she was faking.
“Do you know what that was about?” I asked.
She put her pencil down. “Bernard needed some help for his trip,” she said.
“Some help.”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “They keep some cash in the kitchen cupboard—you know the one where that big coffee pot is?”
“Robin, did you take it?”
“No, of course not!”
“But you told your boyfriend about it.”
She didn’t say anything. I was furious, and told her so, and we argued. How were we going to pay our rent? Robin’s teacher had recommended her for a special summer program—how would we pay for that? We needed this job, badly. Robin had no defense; she told me to stop yelling, that she knew it was a problem, and she’d fix it, somehow.
“How?” I said cruelly. “By calling Hervé?”
Once I spoke I heard how mean it was, and wished I could take it back; I could see the imprint of the words on my sister’s face, as clearly as if I’d slapped her. She ran out of the apartment. It was a warm night and the lilacs were blooming, a sweet and wistful fragrance that carried through our open windows. After a few hours I pulled on my jacket and went looking for her. More than anything I was afraid that she’d gotten on a bus to Baltimore and I’d never see her again. I’d orbited my life around hers and if she left, all that remained would be an empty circle. I checked the convenience store, the campus, the piano studios: she was nowhere. On a bench by the bus stop a man slept under newspapers that rustled with his breath. At the factory, trucks began rumbling into the parking lot. The sun came up, and she was still nowhere. After long hours without sleeping I eventually went to class, though I sat through my lectures in a daze, and when I returned to the apartment she was sitting on the couch, studying, as if the previous twenty-four hours had never happened. Her face was pale and set. She told me that she’d found a job washing dishes at the Chinese restaurant at the strip mall, and that she’d collected a few job listings for me. She planned to work full-time until the end of June, and showed me her calculations for what she would earn: enough to pay for her summer program and half the rent.
“Please don’t send me home,” she said.
I was stricken; I’d never meant her to feel so threatened. “You never have to go back there,” I told her, and she sighed like a pardoned prisoner.
21.
My junior and senior years at Worthen passed quickly, in a density of work and classes. My mind was engaged by my studies, stretching itself so palpably that it felt physical. I worked for Olga on her book, and I made a series of short films. Olga encouraged me to find a different subject than my sister, a good idea because Robin was so busy herself. Instead, I approached my old roommate Helen, who greeted me with casual warmth, as if I hadn’t completely absented myself from her life. My films were a study of the women’s track team, and I spent hours at Helen’s practices and meets. I wanted to capture the strength and grace of these athletes, the exactitude of their movements; in one film, I intercut them with stills from Eadweard Muybridge, the nineteenth-century photographer who had been hired by a wealthy patron to figure out whether, when horses run, their four feet ever leave the ground at the same time. (They do.) “So you’re saying we’re like horses?” Helen said, amused.
Flustered, I tried to explain that no, this was not the point, it was about trying to capture the fluidity of movement itself, but Helen interrupted me, laughing. “I don’t need to hear the theory,” she said. “I was just giving you a hard time.”
However much footage I shot of the women in their tracksuits, laughing and stretching before and after the meets, the images I found most entrancing were their faces as they ran, furrowed and intense, cheeks flattened and rippling, teeth bared, stripped of all self-consciousness. In retrospect, I see that I was trying to capture the same concentration I’d observed on Robin’s face when she was playing the piano, but at the time I thought that I had found an entirely new subject, a departure. In my senior presentation I talked about Muybridge and the camera’s male gaze and how I wanted to position these athletes, in their physical prowess and ambition, as running away from that gaze; I stammered with hesitation but kept going, and Olga was pleased.
In those two years Robin and I rarely went to Montreal, and Marianne didn’t visit us at Worthen. We settled into distance from our mother as if this had been our home all along. In fact we rarely even talked about her, no longer finding her life as fascinating as we did when we were children. In spite of all the time we spent working and studying, we nonetheless grew part of a social circle; we were invited to parties thrown by Helen and her friends, who treated Robin as a kind of mascot. “I wish my little sister could come live with me,” one of them said sadly at a party, “our parents are assholes too,” and for the first time I could tell that some people envied us. Robin’s friends from high school were Laotian twins who bonded with her over their ignorance of American history; they were all three close to failing civics and often gathered in our living room to go over the basics, sometimes receiving tutoring help from the track team, who sang them the song from Schoolhouse Rock about how a bill becomes a law. At Helen’s urging I went on two dates with a very tall boy on the track team, Billy, who bent down to kiss me from his great height, the milliseconds before he made contact ticking by in frightening slow motion. The kiss was not unpleasant, but it sparked nothing in me. In melodramatic moments I confided to Robin that I was forever scarred by my experience with Gordon, and would never fall in love again, and she nodded, feeling likewise permanently broken. We were tragic heroines together, undone by love, but steadfast in our bond.
* * *
—
In the fall of my senior year, two things happened. One day when I was at work at the computer lab, talking to Richard about Scorsese—I confessed that I’d fallen asleep during Mean Streets, and he was teasing me about it—Professor Boris Dawidoff came in. He was a middle-aged man with red-veined skin and a significant stomach who nonetheless carried himself with an air of elegance; he always wore a blazer and scarf knotted in the European style. Robin didn’t think he liked her; he’d told her she didn’t practice enough and that her interpretations were amateurish.
More technique, less show, he would tell her, rapping on the piano with a conductor’s baton he kept for that purpose. She said she felt like he was restraining himself from tapping her on the fingers directly, that he knew she felt this and did it to instill fear in her, to make her cower. “I won’t let him get to me,” she told me, in a tone that suggested the opposite was true. Because of him she practiced more than she ever had, although she complained about the dryness of the music he made her play, steering her away from the Romantics she loved and toward the Baroque.
Now he stood in front of me in the lab. We hadn’t had a conversation since I’d first approached him about teaching Robin, two years earlier. Richard discreetly went back to his office, and Dawidoff sat down next to me.
“Have you thought about where your sister will go to school?” he said.
I hadn’t. If I’d considered the future at all, it was to panic about my own. Worthen had been my whole life, and in seven months it would eject me. All I knew was that I wouldn’t go back to Montreal.
“We need to start setting up auditions,” he went on. “Bloomington, Cincinnati. Juilliard.”
Seeing my blank face, he ran his hands through his grey hair and nodded as if my reaction had confirmed his suspicions. “With your permission, I will take over,” he said. “I have friends at these institutions. There are financial aid packages as well, if that is your concern.”
“Okay,” I said.
He sighed, and pursed his lips. “Your sister,” he said, “should be supported in her aspirations.”
I was offended. “I do support her,” I said. “I support her all the time.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said condescendingly. “But what you offer may not be enough.”
Before long, Robin began to come back to the apartment later and later at night, as they spent long hours together rehearsing her audition pieces. It was Dawidoff who took her to Juilliard and Berklee, navigating the process with assurance. As he shepherded her into the future, I built my own in line with it. I applied to film schools in New York and Boston, asking Olga for help. She offered little advice, only agreeing to write me a letter of recommendation, and I understood that I was not the prodigy to her that Robin was to Dawidoff. I wasn’t surprised by this. It seemed only right that the world found my sister as exceptional as I did, and myself as ordinary.
“Holy shit!” Helen said when we told her that Robin had been accepted to Juilliard. “That’s amazing!” The track team threw us a party, where we drank Red Stripe and danced to the Fugees. At three in the morning Helen and her friends requested a concert. Robin blushed and declined, but they persisted, pestering her good-naturedly until she gave in, leading us over to the music building; it was locked, but Robin produced a key that Dawidoff had given her, and we sat on the floor while she splayed herself across the keyboard, lushly, loosely playing Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. She was wearing a New York Mets T-shirt that had belonged to Bernard and the same jean skirt and Converse shoes she’d had on the day she arrived at Worthen. She looked like any other teenage girl, but when she began to play her features settled and her face became suddenly more adult. Although I knew how much she practiced, I was still sometimes surprised by her intense, almost devotional seriousness; it was like realizing your sister was a nun, betrothed to God. The music flooded the room: ripples of sound that spread out from her in waves, cresting and ebbing; the waves hit me in my chest and kept going, a tidal force. The word that came to my mind was gigantic. Next to her talent, anything I had ever made or would make was a miniature, of tiny and passing import. From the movement of my sister’s hands came something enormous and majestic, big enough to fill us all, and when she finished, the silence in the room still seemed to bristle and quiver. One of the girls was crying.
“Jesus Christ,” said a hurdler named Samantha. “That is freaking unbelievable.”
My sister stood up from the piano bench and curtsied, drunkenly, before pivoting sharply to the left and leaning against a music stand, which fell over with a clatter. Knowing what was coming, I grabbed a trash can and ran to her, feeling her collapse into my arms. She sat on the floor and threw up into the can as I held her hair out of the way. Her hands clutching mine were clammy and cold, and she moaned a little, wordlessly.
“You’ll be okay,” I told her.
“Oh, God, I’m spinning,” she said. “Don’t let go.”
“I won’t,” I said. In my pocket was an envelope I hadn’t told anyone about yet, an acceptance; I was going to New York too.
* * *
—
Marianne finally did come to Worthen, for my graduation. When she stepped out of her rental car in front of the apartment, we were so shocked at her appearance that we didn’t know what to say. She’d gained a great deal of weight, and for the first time in her life she looked frumpy and old, though she was only forty. Her unstyled hair hung limply to her shoulders above a blue button-down shirt and a baggy pair of pants with an elastic waist. She stood in the center of our living room, taking in our furnishings with some of her old imperiousness. “That couch is hideous,” she said. We were reassured by this, her meanness a constant from our childhood. She’d brought us presents, clothes of hers that didn’t fit anymore and, for each of us, a fancy bookmark of thin, flat gold.
“They were gifts from my grandmother,” she said, “when I was a girl. I used to get high marks.” Her eyes glimmered with tears, and Robin and I looked at each other, confused. Robin stepped closer, as if to hug her, but Marianne shook her head. “Is there a decent restaurant,” she said, “in this stupid American town?”
We went to the Italian place where I had once eaten with Gordon and his parents. Marianne ordered a bottle of wine and drank it all herself. She didn’t mention Hervé. She did say that she’d switched to a new job as an account manager at a small firm and no longer traveled, and when we congratulated her on the promotion she raised an eyebrow and said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
We didn’t discuss the future or the past. We’d told her on the phone that we were moving to New York that summer, having cobbled together enough in the way of scholarships and student loans, and she’d said only, “Fine.”
She asked if we wanted dessert and then seemed aggravated when we accepted. The tiramisu we chose puddled on our plates in a congealing sauce. I sat on my hands; Robin tapped the sides of her seat with her fingers.
Marianne’s eyes watered when she looked at the bill. “You girls,” she said, “you’ve always sucked me dry.”
I saw Robin stiffen, and it was her discomfort that made me speak, more than my own. Or perhaps, I think now, I was emboldened by Marianne’s weakness, her middle-aged ugliness, which made her seem vulnerable as she never had before.
“We’ve taken nothing from you,” I said. “You’ve given us nothing. All you think about is yourself.”
If Marianne was shocked by this attack, so uncharacteristic of me, she didn’t show it. She rolled her eyes as if it were an argument we were in the habit of conducting, as if she’d heard it all before. This made me even angrier.
“Someday you’ll understand,” she said condescendingly. “Perhaps when you have children of your own, you’ll know what sacrifice being a mother is.”
“What would you know about being a mother?” I said, raising my voice. If the restaurant hadn’t been crowded I would have attracted attention, but all around us families were laughing, bantering, congratulating their children with noisy praise. “I’ve been more a mother to Robin than you,” I went on, surprised to hear my own voice snapping off each word with clear articulation.
I felt Robin’s hand on my arm, but what shut me up was Marianne’s laughter, which filled the restaurant even above the noise of the other tables; it came in gales, loud and fake, like an actress in an old movie. She laughed and laughed, and other people loo
ked at us; the waitress approached to collect the bill and timidly stepped away.
Then Marianne stopped, as abruptly as she’d started, picked up her napkin, and fussily folded it into a neat, perfect square. Her expression was no longer angry or upset, but simply neutral; she seemed to have forgotten the entire conversation while we were still in the middle of it. She looked very strange. I noticed that her neck had developed a wattle beneath her chin, and the skin there was twitching with her pulse. The weakness that had emboldened me now shamed and confused me. I felt like a cat that had leapt on a mouse, thrilled to play, only to be disappointed because it died too soon.
Marianne paid the check and drove us home in silence. She sat through my graduation the next day and made it clear she wouldn’t be attending Robin’s from high school, which was the following month. When she left, she kissed us each on both cheeks, formal as a stranger, her lips pursing the air.
Better in every way was the farewell party we threw at our apartment. Emma drove back from Great Barrington to celebrate with us, bringing with her a large block of milky homemade cheese; Richard and his wife came, wearing identical khakis and blue polos, and only after they left did I discover an envelope they’d addressed to me, with an astoundingly large check inside, more zeros than I’d ever seen in my life, and a note that said, Use this for your future. The track team came and so did a couple of people from my film classes and the Laotian twins and the Chinese family who owned the restaurant where Robin still worked. Olga and Boris arrived together and stayed for fifteen minutes, smoking cigarettes on the porch and speaking only to each other before departing, as mysterious to me as they’d always been. At midnight, gathering empties into a garbage bag, I sobbed at the thought of leaving Worthen, which seemed to me then the most perfect place in the world.
