by Karen White
A heavy thrumming bass from a radio blared as an old white pickup truck with giant tires slowly passed in front of the house. It slowed to a stop and the driver leaned out, his cigarette hanging from his fingers, which drummed against the door to the beat of the music.
The volume lowered as the driver leaned out of the car and shouted my name. “Eleanor!”
I stayed on the porch, recognizing Rocky Cooper, a boy I’d gone to high school with. A boy who’d once appointed himself my partner in crime. I lifted my hand in greeting, wanting him to move on. I peered past him toward the passenger seat to a man I didn’t recognize who was raising a bottle to his lips.
“Hey, Rocky.”
“Haven’t seen you in a long time,” he said, his once boyish face now darkened to leather by the South Carolina sun. I’d heard he worked in construction now, flitting in and out of jobs depending on his sobriety. “Thought you’d moved away. Then again, I don’t get back to Edisto too often.” He smirked. “Somebody’s always complainin’ about somethin’.”
I nodded, as if I agreed. “Been working. Keeping busy.” I stayed where I was, hoping he’d get the hint.
He jerked his head toward his companion. “Me and Jimmy was planning on going out for some fun tonight. Why don’t you hop on in and join us?”
I tried to make my smile genuine. “I’d like to, but I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
He looked behind me to where Eve and Glen still sat, then returned his gaze to me. “Looks like a real party.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
Jimmy lifted his bottle in a salute as Rocky gunned the engine, the music returning to its previous volume, the throbbing tempo lingering long after I could no longer see the truck.
“Sure miss having him around,” Eve said primly.
“Me, too,” I replied without any hint of sarcasm as I headed toward the door. “I’m going to reheat a slice of pizza.”
Her voice called me back. “You haven’t asked me when the baby’s due.”
I felt like someone had poured a large bucket of iced water down my back. I faced her, surprised to see the uncertainty there. “I thought you had to see the doctor first to confirm a due date.”
“We will. But my guess would be January.” Her look was almost hopeful. “You’ll be an aunt in January.”
I was suspicious of this olive branch, wondering if it would snap back and slap me. “A winter baby, then. That’ll be nice for you, not having to go through the last months of pregnancy in the heat of summer.”
“And I can wear some of Glen’s sweaters in the cold weather to save money on maternity clothes.” She leaned her head on Glen’s shoulder as her hands rested on her flat belly.
“Great,” I said. “I’m going to go eat my dinner now.”
I quickly opened the door, letting it slam behind me as if I could shut out the memory of when I’d died and come back to life, and how I still couldn’t figure out why.
Eve
I sat in my wheelchair, facing the dining room sideboard, which hadn’t been used for food in years. It was an antique, from our mother’s family, and had probably once been worth something. But years of neglect and a broken hinge on the front successfully hid any potential.
Mama had been using it for storage space for her costume making, a necessity since the arthritis in her knees made climbing up and down the stairs to the bins that lined the walls in her bedroom impossible. And now that I’d pretty much taken over her business, I realized that I’d have to do the same thing. Either that or wait until Eleanor or Glen came home to fetch things for me.
I stared in dismay at the crammed interior of the sideboard, with scraps of fabrics, bead boxes, several pairs of scissors, and glue bottles—a few which appeared either empty or so old that their contents would be useless—and even magazine clippings. Mama had once subscribed to Vogue when we could afford it. I knew her mother had had a subscription while Mama was growing up in Charleston, before she met Daddy, and that Grandmother—whom I’d never met even though she’d died less than a year before—had used the magazine to plan her wardrobe. Mama had just used it to get ideas for costumes. I knew these clippings had been pulled from the magazines in doctors’ offices when nobody had been looking. Eleanor and I had simply looked away, accustomed for too long to Mama’s idiosyncrasies.
The slamming of a drawer and then the sound of hard footfalls came from upstairs. I hadn’t meant to make Eleanor angry. Or maybe I had. It was almost a relief to see the old spark in her. It was her fault, really. I wanted my sister back. The girl she’d been before Daddy died; the girl with the easy laugh and the brave heart. Even the wild girl she’d become afterward would have been preferable to the ghost she was now. Maybe that’s what she was. She had died that day, after all. Maybe she just hadn’t realized yet that she wasn’t still dead.
Her bedroom door opened and I listened as she stomped across the hall to the bathroom, and then the door slammed shut. I sighed, then leaned forward into the cabinet, the sound of the television annoying me more than usual. Mama did little else these days, and it took all I had not to yell at her and tell her that the less she moved, the less she’d be able to move. I did my physical therapy every day for that reason. I might be confined to my wheelchair, but I refused to be a prisoner in my own life. Sometimes I felt as if I were living in a haunted house, cohabiting with the spirits of the walking dead.
I peered into the back of the cabinet. A rectangular package—what looked to be a dress pattern—had slid behind one of the drawers and was trapped between the drawer and the back of the sideboard. Pressing the side of my face against the front, I leaned forward with my outstretched hand and, grasping the corner, tugged until it came loose. Sitting back in my chair, I looked down to see what I’d rediscovered and felt a smile curl my lips.
“Eleanor!” I shouted, then waited until the bathroom door opened, her footsteps hurried as she ran down the stairs.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, her face flushed from the cold water she’d been splashing on her face, which still couldn’t hide her red-rimmed and swollen eyes.
“Look what I found.” I handed over the dress pattern.
I could tell by the way her face softened that she recognized it, too. “My suit,” she said softly.
It was a Vogue pattern that she and I had picked out at the fabric store on her fourteenth birthday, a classic women’s suit with a Chanel silhouette of pencil skirt and bracelet-length sleeves. It was the suit she would have worn for her interview at Juilliard, and I was going to make it for her when she was old enough to wear it and I was old enough to operate my mother’s sewing machine. We had purchased it about a month before our father died, a month before Eleanor had closed up the piano and stopped dreaming.
“I can’t believe we still have this,” she said, her fingers gripping it tightly. She looked over at me with uncertain eyes, as if she wasn’t sure if we were sharing a memory or if I was tossing her dreams up in the air to see them scatter like confetti.
“It’s still a beautiful pattern,” I said. “With a more updated fabric, of course. No one wears those colors in plaid anymore.”
We looked at each other, our smiles fading, as if realizing simultaneously that we didn’t do that anymore, that the last thing we’d been in agreement on was a trip to see who could climb the highest in an oak tree.
“No, probably not,” she said. “If you’re going through stuff to give away, I guess you can toss this in the pile.”
Don’t, I wanted to yell at her. Don’t, don’t, don’t. She had made her own purgatory, with me her fellow prisoner. Except she seemed to think that I had the key to our cell. Maybe I did, but I didn’t spend my time dwelling on it. It wasn’t my nature. Eleanor needed to find her own escape, make her own key. Because I was growing weary of watching her fling herself against her li
fe like a moth to a light.
“Sure,” I said, wanting my words to sting, if only to see if I could resurrect that spark again. “I’ll just give it away, since I don’t see anybody in this house needing it.”
“Are we expecting visitors?” Mama called from the family room.
Eleanor placed the pattern on top of the sideboard as we both turned toward the front window. A black Mercedes sedan had just parked in front of the house, and an impossibly pink little girl was climbing from the backseat, something clutched in her hands. We watched as the driver exited the car and took the girl’s hand before they both climbed the steps to the front door.
“Oh,” Eleanor said, nervously glancing at the stairs as if looking for an escape. Then she bolted for the front door and threw it open before the visitors could press the doorbell and discover it was broken.
She smiled the smile I hadn’t seen in a long time as she spoke to the little girl first. “Hello, Gigi. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
“You forgot your purse. You left it in my room.”
I recognized the old brown leather satchel that Eleanor had been using as a purse.
The man placed his hand on top of the girl’s head, and the gesture made me stare a little harder, move a little closer. It had been an unconscious movement, but it said so much about this man and how he felt about the world.
I could see that Eleanor was trying to move them all back onto the porch, so I wheeled my chair closer so they could see me from the doorway.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us, Eleanor?”
She stood so still that for a moment I thought she would refuse. But then she took a step back, opening the door wider. “This is Finn Beaufain and his daughter, Genevieve. It seems I left my purse at their house this afternoon when I went to pick up the car.”
I nodded hello, studying the man. I stared at him a little longer than necessary, wondering why he seemed so familiar. He was tall and lanky, like Glen, and I assumed he probably played tennis or ran or both. But his eyes were an unusual shade of gray, the kind of eyes that seemed friendly and easily readable until you got to know the man. Shadows clung to him in the way they clung to Eleanor, and I wondered if they’d recognized this in each other.
“This is my sister, Eve Hamilton,” Eleanor continued, and Finn took my hand in a firm clasp and shook it.
“It’s a pleasure meeting you,” he said. His voice was deep and accented with old Charleston, sounding very much like our mother’s. She’d used it to her advantage to gain customers for her costume designing, making them feel that class and prestige could be stitched into each seam. But Finn Beaufain had no need for his accent to impress others. His bearing and those eyes commanded all the attention and deference he needed.
Genevieve took my hand, too, and shook it. I found I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She reminded me of an angel in one of Raphael’s paintings, with perfect pink and white skin and wide gray eyes like her father’s that seemed to miss nothing. But it was her smile that was truly captivating, a smile that suggested things might not be all right in her world but she’d chosen to smile anyway.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said. She leaned forward, as if to study me more closely. “You look like an Eve,” she said, tilting her head. “Eleanor said that I could call her Ellie because she definitely looks more like an Ellie.”
My gaze shot to Eleanor. Ellie had become the name I’d associated with my lost sister, the sister with the infectious laugh and mischievous bent who could play the piano as if the music tethered her to heaven. I studied her face, wondering if hearing the name had conjured Ellie’s spirit, but I saw only Eleanor.
Our mother approached the door, smoothing down her hair, which hadn’t seen a comb all day, and running her fingers down her housecoat as if to make sure everything had been buttoned properly. Her slippers slapped across the wood floor, but all of us had been raised too well to allow our expressions to register anything besides a polite regard.
“I’m Dianne Murray, Eleanor and Eve’s mother. It’s so good to finally meet you.” She made the statement sound more like an accusation, as if Mr. Beaufain should have issued an invitation long before now to meet her. “I used to be an Alston. I believe my father, James Ravenel Alston, and your grandfather were classmates at Porter-Gaud.”
Finn’s face betrayed no emotion at the blatant name-dropping as he grasped my mother’s offered fingertips as if she stood in the foyer of a grand mansion and wore a ball gown. Judging from Finn’s expression, one could believe he saw her that way, too.
“I see where your daughters received their good looks, Mrs. Murray,” he said, his Southern drawl a little more pronounced as he spoke to her, as if he were an actor in a play. Which, I supposed, we all were.
Mama actually blushed, as did Eleanor, and just as I thought the moment couldn’t get any worse for my sister, Glen returned from his run, tanned and muscular and drenched in sweat. He must have noticed the Mercedes at the curb, because he opened the door with caution, peering inside like a child watching the lid of a jack-in-the-box.
Flushing scarlet, Eleanor made the introductions again, and I watched as Glen took his measure of Finn Beaufain. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. We’ve been curious about the man who demands such long hours from his employees.”
Nobody said anything for an extremely long moment as we all tried to decide where to look.
Finn’s eyebrows rose. “Eleanor is an extremely conscientious employee who makes sure the work gets done regardless of how long it takes. Which is one of the reasons why I thought of her for assisting with my great-aunt’s care.” He smiled at Eleanor, whose color was now a faded shade of rose.
Glen moved to stand closer to Eleanor, and I wondered if anybody else could see the way she leaned toward him, like a magnet searching for true north. Glen, still breathing heavily from his run, was working his jaw, tasting his words first. Before he could say anything else, I rolled my wheelchair closer. “We all appreciate the opportunity that you’ve given Eleanor.”
“Especially now that Eve is expecting,” Mama said, unwilling to be left out of the conversation.
Finn shot a glance at my sister, something like realization crossing his face. “Congratulations, to both of you,” he said to Glen and me.
My sister wore her Eleanor smile, the bland smile she put on to face the world in the same way a widow would wear black. Go, I wanted to shout at her. Run. Whatever she thought she felt for Glen was part of a life that no longer existed, or maybe never had. And I had given her the perfect escape with my pregnancy. But just because we were sisters didn’t make me a fair jailer. I sat back quietly and just watched.
“I wasn’t aware you didn’t have a cell phone, Eleanor,” Finn continued. “I would like to be able to reach you when you’re with Aunt Helena, so I’m going to go ahead and get you one—at my expense, since I’m requesting it.”
He wasn’t asking, like he was accustomed to giving orders and people following without question. Eleanor bristled but didn’t argue, and I could see it pained her. It reminded me of the times as a child when our father would remind her to practice the piano. She practiced all the time, but on her own schedule, and only balked when told to do it. I had secretly admired this about her, wishing that my mother’s requests wouldn’t send such fissures of alarm through me. It was as if I’d known, even then, that what Eleanor had was real and solid. And that what I had, the looks and the pretty costumes, was like powdered sand in a windstorm.
It was probably why, when Eleanor wanted to play chicken with cars or hitchhike to Myrtle Beach, I was her willing accomplice. I needed to believe that I had a little bit of Eleanor in me.
Genevieve tugged on her father’s hand. “It’s getting dark and we haven’t stopped for ice cream yet.”
Finn smiled down at his daughter, and it was in that unguarded moment that I knew
why he seemed so familiar to me. He was that boy on Edisto who never joined our group, who sat in church and stared at Eleanor instead of me. I remembered still how much that had bothered me, and how I’d worn more and more outrageous outfits to church so he’d notice me.
“It’s a pleasure meeting you all,” he said politely as he led his daughter to the door.
I watched him carefully as they walked out onto the porch before giving a final wave as they tucked themselves into the black car. But Eleanor was looking at Glen, and then he was touching the small of her back as he followed her inside.
Go! I shouted to no one at all. Run!
But nobody did. Instead they both joined my mother on the couch in front of the television set. Slowly, I wheeled myself to the sofa and waited for Glen to lift me and place me next to him, my hand holding his tightly as I thought again of the unused suit pattern and how nothing had turned out the way it was supposed to.
CHAPTER 10
Eleanor
As a child, I spent long hours with Lucy watching Dah Georgie make her sweetgrass baskets. She’d give us a nickel for each bundle of grass, palmetto leaves, and pine needles we would collect for her, and then we’d sit at her feet watching her build her baskets. There was a rhythm to it that sank into my skin as she fed layer into layer, adding rushel for color, using pine needles and palmetto strips to start. It was like watching a symphony being written, or a painting being painted, as each layer revealed more and more of the artist. Dah Georgie called the basket patterns names like Dreams of Rivers and Path of Tears, but all the baskets with lids she’d call secret keepers.
She taught us that building baskets was like building a life, finding materials from different places—bits and pieces with their own purpose—and creating a vessel that could pour out or keep in. I thought about this now, driving to Edisto, wondering what sort of basket my life would be and what it would be named.
