Little Sister

by Barbara Gowdy

  “I did!”

  “You sort of did? But lucid dreamers always know they’re dreaming.”

  “I knew I was dreaming.”

  “They really know. Every minute.”

  “What about lucid dreams where you’re inside another person’s body?”

  “People have those all the time. They dream they’re an astronaut—”

  “They don’t dream they’re inside an astronaut’s body.”

  “They might.”

  “But they weren’t even like dreams. They were so ordinary. Even after I woke up and thought about them, they were ordinary.” Another thing struck her: she had felt what Harriet had felt physically and emotionally, but she hadn’t thought Harriet’s thoughts, at least not on a conscious level. Meanwhile her own thoughts and feelings had been muted, lurking.

  “Whether you remember having met Harriet Smith is irrelevant,” Victor said. “You heard her name somewhere, and it’s slipped your mind.”

  “It didn’t slip my mind, obviously.”

  “You had two silent migraines.” It was his job and his nature to conclude based on the facts at hand. “A combination of stress and a change in barometric pressure can trigger prodromal symptoms—visual auras, Technicolor dreams, and so on.”

  “They were more than Technicolor. I don’t even want to call them dreams because then you think you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Are you saying they were hallucinations?”

  “I’m saying they were a whole other order of dream.” She would call them something else, she decided. Incidents. Episodes.

  “You’ve got a lot on your plate,” he said. Her mother, he meant. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Why?” No way was she going to tell him about going to Goldfinch.

  “The first storm will hit close to two. The second, hard to say. I’m calling for five, with a ninety percent probability of both.”

  “What about tonight?” To have a dream, an episode, while Harriet slept. To swim blindly in her emotional drift.

  “Clear skies through to midmorning.”

  After they hung up, she Googled out-of-body experience and astral projection and learned that for the most part they were different ways of describing the impression of temporarily leaving your body and hanging around as a ghost. She typed dreaming you are inside someone else and found dozens of stories about alien abduction, body snatching, and past lives. She Googled the movie Being John Malkovich. She’d seen it when it first came out, five or six years ago, but had forgotten the details. A short synopsis read, “Craig enters a door hidden behind a filing cabinet and finds himself in the mind of actor John Malkovich. Craig is able to observe and sense whatever Malkovich does for fifteen minutes before he is ejected.”

  Well, the observing and sensing were the same, but Craig didn’t fall asleep, he got thrown around, and from what Rose could remember he didn’t feel John Malkovich’s feelings. Anyway, Being John Malkovich was fiction.

  She shut her eyes against another wave of weariness. She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair.

  A knock on the door woke her. “It’s open!” she called.

  “Were you napping?” Fiona said.

  “I nodded off,” Rose said. Another regular dreamless sleep, not an episode.

  Fiona waved at the questionnaire. “You should leave that to what’s-his-name. Roger.”

  Their accountant was George. Close, Rose thought, almost an anagram. “How was the house for Angry Men?”

  “Twenty-seven.” When it came to concession and audience figures, Fiona never hesitated. “Nine seniors, eighteen general admission.”

  “Not bad.”

  Fiona went over to the filing cabinets and opened the top drawer. “These are a shambles,” she said. Then, all Irish and sprightly, she said, “A man falls down a toilet. First it gets dark—”

  “Has Lloyd left?”

  “Lloyd?” said Fiona.

  “Is he still here?”

  Fiona’s features strained.

  “The guy we hired. Lloyd.”

  “When?”

  “A week and a half ago. Lloyd, you remember. I was just wondering if he’d left.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have?” Fiona said, back to herself. “We don’t pay him to lock up.” She shut the drawer. “Do you know who he reminds me of?”

  Rose put the questionnaire in her briefcase. “I’ll do this at home,” she said. The nature of her mother’s attraction to Lloyd was something else she didn’t want to talk about. “Okay.” She switched off the air conditioner. “Let’s go.”

  “Crocodile Dundee,” Fiona said.

  MAY 1982

  Rose was dark, Ava fair. Rose big, Ava thin. Rose took after their father, who took after his four maternal uncles, all of them giants with black springy hair, broad faces, and thick glasses that in photographs made their eyes look lost and shrunken at the end of long tunnels. Their father’s vision wasn’t that poor, and when he reached his full height, nobody considered six foot four to be freakishly tall. At university, where he studied theater arts, he played Lennie in Of Mice and Men, and in his Lennie voice he still went around saying, “And live off the fat of the land.” Rose, who had yet to see the movie (their mother thought it was too dark for children), nevertheless knew the next line, and in a man’s gruff voice would say, “Gotta get some money together first.”

  She felt lucky to be the daughter who resembled their father. Of course, she could have done without the myopia. It was Ava who inherited their mother’s eyesight, along with her freckled complexion and her red hair, although Ava’s was several shades lighter, an apricot color. Unlike anyone else in the family, she had green eyes. A fold underneath the lower lids gave her a tired, adult look.

  Rose associated this fold with her sister’s anxiety about the frailness of the physical world. Ava couldn’t watch disaster movies, and despaired of Dorothy’s ramshackle house in The Wizard of Oz even before the tornado yanked off the windows and doors. She hated dirt, clutter, disorder. If somebody touched her shell collection or her papier-mâché parrot or any of her impeccably cared-for dolls, she waited in silent torment until the person’s interest moved on, and then she carefully put the violated item back in place. Not that she was always wringing her hands. She took physical risks. She would climb a tree, and she rode her bike down the steep, winding path to the ravine behind their house. It was the wreckage of beautiful things and the suffering of animals she couldn’t bear. She had a terror of tight, enclosed spaces and believed that animals did as well, all animals, right down to insects, so that eventually their father was obliged to release the family goldfish, Goldie, into the Don River.

  Their parents were much older than other parents. As their father told the story, they were turning into one of those couples who brag about not contributing to overpopulation, when Fiona’s appendix burst. Three months after the surgery, for no known medical reason, she was pregnant with Rose. Five months after giving birth, she was pregnant with Ava. Their father called his girls “The Appendices.”

  Ava’s arrival necessitated a move from their two-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom bungalow. The bungalow had a finished basement and a fenced-in backyard, lots of space but, Fiona’s complaint, no character. She pined after a Victorian house. And then, as time passed, Ava wanted a barn, since Fiona’s allergies ruled out keeping dogs or cats indoors.

  Throughout these years Fiona held on to her job behind the Regal’s snack bar. She took the girls with her to the theater and made sure they spoke softly while the movies played. They became soft-spoken in general and were always being told by their teachers to speak up. Their father was the opposite, a bellower, his so-called stage whisper carrying through the acoustic steel doors into the auditorium. Usually, however, he watched the movie from the projection booth. The girls watched from front-row seats, the first feature, anyway, unless the movie was Adult Accompaniment or Restricted, and then they were sent to the Regal’s kitchen.
A favorite game was making houses from empty supply boxes and positioning them along roads determined by the floor tiles. Between features their mother or father put them to bed on the office sofa, from which, later, they were carried to the car and home.

  One warm June morning a few days before Rose’s eleventh birthday, their father drove the family to take a look at ten acres going for a song only an hour and a half north of Toronto. The property included a windmill, a weathered gray barn, and a two-story redbrick Victorian house with a roof like a Quaker’s hat. “That’s what you call a mansard roof,” yelled the real estate agent. They were all yelling to be heard over the wind. Not for nothing was the property called Windy Acres.

  “It’s like the house in Psycho,” said Fiona.

  “Wait’ll you see inside,” their father said. “You’ll love it.”

  Fiona loved the high ceilings, the oak wainscoting, and the two fireplaces with their antique wrought-iron spits. But the cracked marble-patterned linoleum on the dining room and kitchen floors, and the layers of peeling wallpaper everywhere, thick as magazines, gave her pause. As did the black ants. “I hope those aren’t carpenter ants,” she said.

  “Just your regular house ants,” said the real estate agent. “You can kill them in a day with borax and honey.”

  “No,” said Ava in a small voice.

  “No, what?” said their father.

  “Don’t kill them.”

  “They’re not hurting anybody,” said Rose, who lived in terror of Ava’s misery.

  Their father stroked his hands down his vest. “The ants live,” he declared.

  “If we buy the place,” Fiona said.

  They bought the place. The ants lived. On moving day Ava guarded a quivering line between the porch and the refrigerator.

  Fiona had hired an old woman who looked like a man to replace her behind the snack bar. If she’d left it to her husband, she told people, he’d have hired a centerfold. She said she intended to become a lady of leisure. But there was no leisure to be had at Windy Acres. The next morning she and the girls got straight to work stripping the living room wallpaper. They taped plastic to the baseboards, and then they sponged the walls and let the soapy water soak through. Theoretically, whole panels should have fallen away. In fact, the pieces were the size of candy wrappers and Fiona had to gouge at them with a scraper. The girls, who didn’t have manicures to protect, used their fingernails. Rose relished the prospect of finding money or hidden treasure, whereas it troubled Ava to rip the pretty bluebird-patterned paper, and she winced as if she were peeling dead skin. “Can I go outside?” she finally asked.

  “As long as you stay on the property,” Fiona said. But she still fretted and after about ten minutes sent Rose to make sure her sister was all right.

  Rose walked around the house, calling into the wind, letting it twirl her. She called out over the fields. She went into the barn and called.

  “I’m in the loft!” came Ava’s voice.

  The loft was where a roofing-equipment salesman named Gordon stored his shingles and cedar shakes and rolls of aluminum. In return, Gordon would hire somebody to cut their hay and plow their snow. Their father called Gordon “an odd duck.” He said Gordon always wore a hard hat, even in his house.

  “He must be bald,” Fiona said.

  “Does he wear it when he sleeps?” Rose asked.

  Their father laughed. “That I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Does he wear it in the bathtub?” Ava cried. “I know! Does he wear it when he washes his hair?”

  Since hearing about Gordon’s hard hat, Rose had been entertaining Ava with stories about him being an ogre with no skull above his eyebrows, nothing to cover his brains. She described the brains slopping out, and Gordon stuffing them back before his dog bit off the ends. Because they thought brains looked like intestines, Gordon’s efforts amounted to recapturing sausage links. “But he makes more in a test tube,” Rose said. “He uses worms and his own blood.”

  Ava screamed. “What else?” she asked between her fingers.

  “He strangles people with them. He sleeps with his head in the fridge to keep them fresh.”

  Ava screamed.

  That they had yet to meet the actual man only made the fantasy man more monstrous, and Rose wondered at Ava’s entering the barn by herself, especially with all the rusted, broken farm implements pushed against the cobwebbed walls. “Did you climb up?” she yelled from the bottom of the ladder. The rungs, glowing in a skirt of light, were far apart.

  “I used the other doors!” Ava called.

  Rose went back outside and around to where an earthen ramp led to corrugated metal doors not quite shut. She squeezed into a high, golden space. Up here the wind sounded like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle. Bands of sunlight humped over Gordon’s aluminum rolls and made a thatched pattern on the dusty floor. “Hello!” she called.

  “There’s kittens,” said Ava, appearing from behind the shingles. “You have to be quiet.”

  Rose followed her to a room with low windows, half of them blocked by planks piled at that end. In one corner a tall cupboard leaned. Rose touched its white latch. “This is real ivory,” she said, although she was guessing.

  Ava knelt at a gap between two collapsed hay bales. Rose joined her and saw the gaunt, filthy mother and her kittens: three orange ones and a white one. The orange ones were nursing. The tiny white one was wriggling the wrong way. Ava picked it up and nosed it into the mother’s belly.

  “How did you find them?” Rose whispered.

  “I followed the mother. You can pet her.”

  Rose put out her hand. The mother growled, and Rose snatched her hand back.

  “Rose won’t hurt your babies,” Ava said to the mother. “Rose would never hurt anyone.”

  Rose stood. She told herself that Gordon had changed Ava into a zombie who had lost her fear of dirt and clutter. The real Ava, her corpse, was in the cupboard. Rose went so far as to go over and open the door. Bits of hay, a piece of string. She picked up the string and wound it around her finger.

  They named the mother Duchess after the mother cat in the movie The Aristocats. Despite an aversion to touching meat, Ava fed her chicken and canned tuna until their father got around to buying a bag of dry food.

  The white one, the runt, might not make it, he warned. “That’s why animals have litters,” he said. “In case one or more don’t make it. It’s nature’s way.”

  “I don’t want nature’s way,” Ava said.

  “That’s how it is, honey. There’s not much we can do about it.”

  “We can phone a vet,” Ava said.

  “They’re barn cats,” Fiona said. Her parents had raised pigs. This meant—as Rose understood, but Ava might not—that the piglets Fiona loved and named were slaughtered at six months. “Barn cats fend for themselves,” she said.

  “If they die, they don’t fend for themselves,” Ava said.

  Arrangements were made for a vet to come by the following night.

  Ava spent the morning in the loft. Rose spent it flying a purple-and-red box kite her mother had found under the basement stairs. Anyone could have flown a kite on Windy Acres. There might be a lull for a few hours, but mostly the windmill creaked and the grass slithered in long, angled lines. The local crows, Gordon told their father, weighed down their nests with stones.

  Rose and Ava saw Gordon for the first time after lunch. They were sharpening Popsicle sticks on the cement patio at the back of the house, making the very knives Rose said they would need to stab him with. Ashen clouds swarmed above the barn. Rose thought she heard thunder, but it was a red truck bumping onto their property.

  “That’s him,” gasped Ava before Rose could squint the yellow blur of the driver’s head into a hard hat.

  They crouched behind the rotting flower boxes and watched him swing around to the ramp side of the barn, where he got out. He was a short, wide man in blue overalls. He climbed the ramp, yanked apart the door
s, and entered.

  “I hope he doesn’t scare Duchess,” Ava said.

  They waited. After only a few minutes they heard yelling.

  “What’s the matter?” Ava cried.

  A black cat flew down the ramp. Then Gordon barreled down, waving a shovel. “Go on, scram!” he yelled. He banged the shovel on the flatbed of his truck, and the cat took off into the mustard field.

  Fiona was already out the screen door. She and the girls ran to Gordon, who had dropped the shovel and was studying a gash on his forearm. His arms were chubby and hairless, his face the same. Rose couldn’t tell adults’ ages, but he was clearly a lot younger than the hoary maniac she’d invented.

  “What happened?” their mother said.

  “Ah, I couldn’t grab him.” He looked at Ava and Rose before saying, “He got the kittens.”

  “Stay put,” Fiona ordered the girls, and she followed Gordon into the barn.

  “What does he mean, got?” Ava said.

  “I’m not sure,” Rose lied.

  “I think he means killed.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Ava sat on the ground.

  “It’s dirty there!” Rose cried. She saw obscenity in the splay of her sister’s legs. Thunder roared, real thunder. Fiona and Gordon returned, Fiona with the kittens in her apron. Rose demanded to look. There was no blood, but the limpness, the lifelessness, was unmistakable. She asked why the black cat had killed them.

  “They wasn’t his,” Gordon answered. “He gave ’em a shake, and that was it. Wouldn’t a hurt at all.”

  “Get up, darling,” Fiona said to Ava.

  “What about Duchess?” Rose asked.

  “She. . .” Fiona looked at Gordon.

  “You mean the mother?” he said.

  Rose nodded.

  “He chased her off. I seen her get away.” From his back pocket he tugged a large gray handkerchief and tied it around his wound. “Here comes the rain.”