Sorority

by Genevieve Sly Crane

  —That doesn’t sound so terrible, he said. He almost sounded disappointed.

  —No, she said. It was. It was terrible. I tripped, and fell, and I popped out of my bikini.

  —Oh my god, Roman said.

  He broke into a run, his tie flapping over his shoulder. Frantically, she followed, her dress catching between her legs, her hair flagging behind her shoulders, losing its curl.

  —It wasn’t that bad! she yelled. Roman!

  She chased him through the club crowd until she saw Sebastian, sitting up on the putting green, picking at a scab on his ankle, his face expressionless, with a metal flagstick impaled in his right eye. He wasn’t crying. Was he too shocked to cry? Dr. Houghton sat next to the boy, gingerly holding the other end of the flagstick.

  —Hi, Roman, Sebastian said cheerfully.

  Roman lurched sideways, as if he were going to faint. Mr. Cline grabbed him by the shoulder.

  —Keep your nerve, he said.

  Corinne breathlessly gripped at his arm. He was panting, staring at his little brother.

  —Why won’t somebody pull it out? Roman shouted.

  —We can’t do that, son, Mr. Cline said. He settled Roman in a wicker chair away from the scene.

  —Why won’t someone call an ambulance! Corinne shrieked.

  The crowd stared at her.

  —The ambulance is coming, Adam said. You would have known that if you’d been here ten minutes ago.

  Corinne looked for her parents and couldn’t find them. They’d already gone home. She found a frantic waiter and told him to call her house and tell Yvette to come. She was in possession of a strangely sobering alacrity that stunned her. She was too drunk to feel so aware. Nobody seemed capable of looking at Sebastian with the exception of Dr. Houghton, yet they all gathered around him like some sort of bizarre wagon train barrier between the boy and the elements.

  —Remarkable, the doctor muttered. Truly remarkable. Tell me again how it happened?

  And Sebastian recounted how he had been running with the flag as if it were a spear, had caught his foot in a hole, and had fallen on it, with part of the flag jamming itself into his eye before his free elbow hit the green and stopped the rest from entering.

  —Am I going to have to get a shot at the hospital? Sebastian asked.

  His blond hair was shining. There were grass stains on his knees and a tiny spatter of blood was on his white polo. Corinne wondered wildly at how there wasn’t enough blood. Maybe it was a joke.

  Dr. Houghton was not one to sugarcoat, and certainly not one to lie to a child.

  —I’m sure you’ll get several shots, he told the boy.

  Only then did Sebastian start to cry out of his good eye.

  —Keep both eyes closed, sonny, the doctor said. When you move one, the other goes with it.

  And so Sebastian wept with his good eye closed, still picking at the scab on his ankle.

  The red and white lights of the ambulance strobed over the hedges, and the paramedics sprang out before the brakes were completely thrown. Corinne thought, stupidly, of how the tires would destroy the appearance of the green, and then was immediately ashamed that this had occurred to her at all. Another thought intruded: Margot had died a year ago, freakishly young. Surely, people had to have a quota for tragedy. Wasn’t it possible, then, that Sebastian would be fine because Margot was already the one shitty death in the periphery of Corinne’s life?

  Roman was stewarded closer to Sebastian. He couldn’t look at his brother’s face. He glanced down, turned ashen, and then looked away.

  —He’s going to be a freak! Roman shouted.

  It seemed a bad idea at this point to put him in the ambulance alone with his brother, and so Dr. Houghton volunteered to join them. The paramedics carefully negotiated the sitting little boy onto a stretcher while the doctor maneuvered with them, still holding the other end of the metal flag. They moved at a nauseatingly slow pace. Finally, the doors shut on the strange diorama of the three of them: barefoot Roman, Cycloptic child, and doctor in a sport coat. Everyone watched the ambulance leave.

  There were mutterings. The bartenders were dismissed; the band disappeared. Questioning children were hushed. Fathers somberly finished their drinks. The crowd ebbed off into the parking lot. Engines turned over one by one, and soon only a few members remained. Lights began flicking off in the ballroom.

  Yvette found her, unmoving, on the putting green where Sebastian had been.

  —Oh, honey, she said. She picked flecks of grass out of Corinne’s hair.

  —What mess did you get yourself into?

  She couldn’t speak.

  —It’s just a silly pageant, Yvette said. It was a mistake. It’s not like half of God’s world doesn’t have breasts on them. Corinne leaned on Yvette. It was her last summer on that putting green.

  —They won’t care in one week, Yvette continued. They’re all too busy with their divorces and DUIs to pay attention.

  —Why do terrible things happen? Corinne asked, and Yvette, who had already met many terrible things, who lived them in colossal family losses and daily discriminations, who was unaware of the misfortune in either of their futures, looked at Corinne and thought, Stupid Child. Stupid, lucky child that I love.

  They didn’t know then that in three years Corinne’s family would lose the house, and her father would serve a two-year sentence for a white-collar crime that she still wouldn’t understand the mechanics of, not a decade later. They didn’t know that Yvette’s sister had lupus, or that, six years out, Corinne’s mother would check herself into rehab, then out, then in again, over and over, until she ran out of money but not out of gin. And it was impossible to know, twelve years out, Sebastian would be drinking on the top deck of the club, looking passable with his prosthetic eye, wondering if the little girl he’d chucked golf balls at, now a beautiful waifish thing in a black dress, would forgive him for his past indiscretions and follow him onto the dark of the fairway.

  20

  Occlusion

  -DEIRDRE-

  September 2009

  I’ve been looking for her. Not that I believe in reincarnation, not logically. Not that I’m religious. But surely, out of six billion, her print may be identical in someone else’s palm. It is also not completely impossible to discover her in another person, another object. Unlikely, but not impossible.

  • • •

  At first I thought I saw a refurbished version of her in a faceless mannequin displayed in the thrift shop off Delancey Street. She wore a miniskirt and knee socks, like a teenage porn star, but the hair was what got me: a long, black braid, drifting down the side, and also the narrow little breasts covered by a tank top, and the long, tapering fingers. The inside of the shop smelled like wet newspaper, the linoleum gouged and linty. I wove a disinterested route around the racks, eyes on the mannequin, trying to look like I had a purpose.

  —Need help? asked the sour woman at the register.

  I still looked young enough for every shop owner to think I was about to scoop a pair of jeans into my coat and run.

  —How much is that? I asked. I pointed at the mannequin.

  —The skirt or the socks?

  —No, not that, I said, the whole thing.

  Saying mannequin felt perverse.

  The woman came out from behind the register. Her chin was unusually shiny, as if she’d had it polished. Her T-shirt advertised a surf club in Verona Beach and her bare thighs were dented with cellulite. A pink roll of fat poked over the lip of her jeans.

  —What do you want to do with it? Did Ted send you? she said.

  I had no clue who Ted was.

  —You can tell that twisted bastard to get himself castrated, she said.

  That sounded fair, so I left.

  • • •

  In the first year the mornings were the hardest, because I’d wake up and forget that she was dead. Then, simultaneously: guilt about forgetting, fury that I had to remember at all. There would always
be a new clue designed to destroy me. Once it was her hairbrush, then her photograph in the composite, then her sociology textbook, unread. What if, when something reminds me of her, it isn’t a reminder? What if it is Margot calling out to me?

  • • •

  —You know what would help? Marcia said. Visit Nathan and Kyra. Go see the baby. It’ll distract you.

  The equation was silly. Death could be solved by life. She must have come from a family that bought a replacement dog as soon as they buried the last one.

  —Soon, I said. But I need to buy her a gift first. She must be broke.

  —Oh, I think she’s got plenty, Marcia said, suddenly sour, but I wasn’t interested in asking what she meant by that.

  • • •

  One afternoon on the back patio a catbird approached me. She was a cocky little thing, with black eyes and a sleek gray body. Her head was small and smooth, without those funny Mohawk tufts that stick up on titmice.

  —What does it feel like to be a bird in the rain? I asked her.

  She blinked at me.

  —What I mean is, does it bother you? Does it weigh you down?

  She dipped her sharp little beak into her right wing and dug frenetically at an itch, which I took to say, no, not really, it’s not such a bother at all.

  —Are you scared? I asked her.

  She puffed her chest.

  —Are you missing something?

  She departed.

  • • •

  She did not seem dead. She seemed taken. She seemed transfigured.

  • • •

  All of my memories took on a tawny glow. In one we were putting in our service hours for the sorority by raking leaves at an assisted living facility for the mildly deranged. Geese were migrating overhead in urgent V’s. Dumber birds sat on telephone wire, spaced out like notes on sheet music. The trees here had been carefully planted in increments: an architect had planned ahead for roots, for shade, for unused benches. What a meticulous life.

  None of the deranged came outside.

  A round-faced man stood at his window and watched us the whole afternoon, his breath fogging the glass, then pressing his cheek against it and fogging it up again. We scooped leaves into enormous black contractor bags—body bags, Margot called them—and at one point she shoved a handful of debris down the back of my shirt, which I know, surely, I must have hated—the itch of it—but now I can’t remember it that way even if I try. She was playful.

  We found an empty purple lighter and an eggshell and bright slivers of feathers hidden in the piles, and showed our discoveries to each other as if we were doing an anthropological examination on a planet unknown.

  The man at the window waved at us, tentatively, and she waved back in enormous arcs. He beamed, pumping both arms at her, as if she was an old friend awaiting him at baggage claim.

  —That’s nice of you, I said, but I didn’t wave with her.

  The man was elated, savoring the feeling of being seen by her. Please, I thought, don’t let him come outside.

  —Sometimes, Deirdre, you have to be nicer than you want to be, she sermonized, and I must have thought she was being preachy but in the memory I can only see her as profound.

  • • •

  On harder days, I’d feel like she was just around the corner or in the next room. I walked faster, quieter, so as not to scare her. I called her name and no one answered.

  • • •

  Someone was driving her car, or her car’s doppelgänger, down Craven Street. Her ancient purple Honda had an unmistakable eroding pattern of rust at the seam. The back windows were steaming. The headrest hid the driver. I followed it onto Route 10, where the road widened and I darted to the right lane and peered. The tint was so heavy it was probably illegal. All I could see was the spectral outline of a face. I waved frantically. The Honda sped up. I followed as far as Vernon and then it disappeared down a long, muddy driveway.

  • • •

  Amanda bookmarked passages from Job in her kooky Bible and left it at my door. Instead I flipped to John and read of Lazarus. Lazarus, who’d been so lucky. All Jesus had to say was Lazarus, come out! and he popped out of his cave in his shroud like it was Groundhog Day. I reread the passage over and over. Lazarus was dead in one verse, alive in another. I could kill him and bring him back with a flick of the iris.

  Later, Jesus said: He who loves his life loses it. It sounded like a threat. I tried to picture a guy in sandals saying it, his hand resting on the head of a child, a sheep nibbling at the tasseled rope around his tunic. Putting children into the scene only made it seem more sinister. I wanted to ask her: How much did you love your life when you lost it?

  • • •

  I remember how, after I saw Tremaine Bechetti throw himself off an overpass, she googled him. Now, as her disciple, I googled, too. There were two Margot Grace Glenns. One had already died in 1947, at the age of sixty-six, down in Orlando. Wife of Thomas, mother of Marie and Edie. So that was impossible, of course, because if she had been uncreative enough to have a past life with the same name surely she wouldn’t have chosen a life with a husband and two children in Florida, of all places.

  The other Margot Grace Glen had dropped an n and lived as an orthodontist in Minnesota. I called the practice.

  —Monarch Orthodontics, a woman lisped.

  I clutched at the phone, stricken. What more was there to say?

  —Monarch Orthodontics? the woman said again.

  —Is this Dr. Glen? I whispered.

  —She’s with a patient, the voice said. May I ask who’s calling?

  —I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake.

  I hung up and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I ran a paper towel under the sink and pressed it hard against my face. When I pulled it away, two half-moons of mascara smiled at me. The shower radio bellowed about a dealership liquidation sale SALE SALE!!! My hands were bloodless. I ran them under water, too hot water, and studied the prints.

  • • •

  Maybe all of life is split in two.

  There is the guileless side, where nothing is missing and it’s a little boring in its ease, so we build problems for distraction.

  The other side is about the losing of things, and we build problems because we think the answers will solve the ache.

  The problems she’d constructed for herself were horrifically obvious in hindsight. Of course she was a druggie. Of course she used me as a distraction. Of course I was her enabler, I was her neglecter, and, on the worst days, her executioner.

  If I hadn’t gone to work that night— Some days I couldn’t finish the sentence. If I hadn’t gone to work that night, she would have shared her doses with me.

  • • •

  I thought of her parents. Her father was a contractor and not a great communicator unless it came to drywall or the Patriots, but her mother could wax so poetic that Margot used to refer to her as artistically depressed. She’s probably bedridden now, curled into piles of blankets just as her daughter used to do. When Margot introduced me to her mother she called me her best friend. I don’t know what I’d expected. Her mother blinked too much and spoke like she was recovering from laryngitis. It was like talking to a psychic.

  Margot told me how no one else knew that she was adopted. She said she had no interest in her biological parents, and I believed her. Life for Margot began when her mother held her for the first time. She told me how her parents spent the first night with her in a dusty hotel near the airport, and whenever a plane took off the legend was that she wouldn’t cry, but she would shut her eyes and frown deeply, like a nun interrupted from her prayers. She saved her tears for her father. She cried whenever he tried to come near her until she was nearly five months old.

  I clutch at these tiny details and try to climb into the night: her parents look like pale, sore thumbs in Phoenix. Margot’s mother is sweating and nervous, mixing formula over the bathroom sink, treating it as if it were alchemy. Her clumsy father is lying
on one of the double beds, watching the little body wriggle in the detachable car seat, patiently waiting for a sense of kinship, like a bear ready to swipe at the first glimpse of trout.

  • • •

  Now the Delancey Street mannequin wore a sequined dress in magenta. It wasn’t the same. The long braid had been coiled against the skull. I couldn’t see the legs or breasts. The fingers, I noticed, were fused together, pointed like spades. I didn’t go back inside. Over and over, I lost her.

  • • •

  But other days I couldn’t walk a mile without seeing her new manifestation. A knock-kneed girl with an oversize backpack and hair skidding out of a ponytail waited for the bus. She rocked side to side and swung her lunch bag from one hand to the other while her mother read the paper, oblivious to her sway. The girl dropped into a hunch and stared under the bus-stop bench and studied until she reached under and came away with a piece of used gum, which she quickly popped into her mouth and chewed, her mother unaware. Impossible, I thought, and kept walking.

  • • •

  We stood on the back patio. In the memory it was nighttime, but somehow I could see the trees for yards, and the floodlights from the side of the house poured an amber light upon her face, and she passed to me and said, Do you think he knew he was going to die when he fell?

  This was after I’d seen Tremaine Bechetti die on I-95. She was feeling more introspective than crass, my favorite version of her.

  —I don’t think so, I said. I think we all know we’re going to die but we always think we have a shot at living when it’s happening.

  —Down to the last synapse, she said.

  —Denial, I said.

  —It’s a shame.

  —Let’s talk about something else.

  —Did I spook you?

  I couldn’t see beyond the floodlight after she said it. Trees rustled invisible.

  —People are just unfinished ghosts, she said.

  • • •

  My sisters sat in the dining room and planned philanthropy events, mixer themes, and Bid Day shirts. One snuck a kitten into the house and hid it from Nicole. One slept with another’s boyfriend. One yelled at her mom over the phone about her embarrassing Facebook posts. They were so wonderfully banal. They stood on the other side of the shroud and looked at me like, really? Why the drama?