Little Sister

by Barbara Gowdy

  “But he thinks he’s so smart,” Rose said. Here at last was a subject she could contribute to.

  “He doesn’t own a single book. I’ve never seen him read even the newspaper.”

  “His grammar is bad,” Rose said.

  Shannon crossed to the back window, which had a view of Major Tom under his shelter. “That is one well-hung pony,” she said.

  “What?” Rose said, and then she understood and covered her mouth and said, “I know!”

  Shannon pointed to the fruit bowl. “Can we have that banana?”

  They went out to the paddock, and Shannon straddled the top rail. “People think ponies and horses only like apples, but they like bananas better,” she said. “Come on, boy,” she said, wagging the banana. Major Tom moseyed over. He tugged the banana out of its skin and chewed as he chewed everything: thoroughly and rhythmically, his mouth making the clopping sound of hooves on pavement. “Good boy,” Shannon said. “Hungry boy.” She hurled the skin toward the manure pile. “Is that your property?” she asked. “That bush?” She was looking at the woods beyond the cornfield.

  “It belongs to the farm on the other concession,” Rose said.

  Shannon jumped to the ground. “Let’s check it out.”

  “I’m not allowed in the corn, only the first row,” Rose said. The restriction shamed her. “My parents are afraid Ava and I will get lost.”

  “One,” Shannon said, “I’ve been in a hundred cornfields. Two, my third eye sees for ten miles.”

  The corn was higher than it appeared from outside. “Twelve feet,” Shannon judged. Above them the stalks rattled. Down where they were it was windless and humid, prickly when they changed rows, which they kept doing, angling right, correcting a mistake, Rose worried, but Shannon strode confidently—she had a bowlegged cowboy walk, reassuring in itself—and soon the corn thinned, and they climbed a split-rail fence and entered the woods. Rose patted the wrinkled gray bark of the bulky tree nearest her. “It’s like an elephant leg,” she said.

  “It’s a beech,” Shannon said. “This is an old beech and sugar maple bush. Nobody uses it. Look at all the branches lying everywhere. You could heat a house for an entire winter with what’s right here in front of us.”

  They kept walking. The farther they went in, the cooler it got. Shannon picked up a stick and pointed at plants, naming them. A pretty, pale mushroom like a dollhouse lamp was called destroying angel and was one of the deadliest poisons known to mankind. “It tastes like radishes,” Shannon said. “Put some in your enemy’s salad, and twelve hours later he’s a corpse.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” Rose asked. She was greatly impressed. She had never met a genius before.

  “Mostly?” Shannon said. She whacked a tree with her stick. “From my dad. He’s a commercial fisherman. He had the third eye, but the government destroyed it. You know how? Pumping mind-control chemicals into his well.”

  They came to an open area bordered on one side by a collapsing rock wall. “This is a good place to build a lean-to,” Shannon said and started clearing the ground of stones and twigs. Rose joined in enthusiastically, glad to be useful. They collected long branches, stomped off the unusable parts, and leaned the straight parts against the rocks. Between the branches they stuffed leaves and ferns. The ferns broke from their stems with clean snaps, like celery. “The Indians built lean-tos for shelter on their hunting trips,” Shannon said. “The tribe that lived right here, where we are, was the Oneida. People think it was the Ojibwa, but it was the Oneida.”

  They crawled in and lay on their backs with their knees bent. Shannon opened her hands to the sprays of light—they hadn’t filled in every gap after all—and admired her rings. “I should lend you my book on ring power,” she said. “If you’re a reader, that is.”

  “I am,” Rose said. It hadn’t occurred to her that Shannon would want anything to do with her outside of their forced arrangement. “I have lots of books. I have one on the power of the stars and constellations.”

  Shannon squirmed her arm down between their bodies and got hold of Rose’s hand. “Shut your eyes. I’m going to see if we can have a spirit vision together. Are your eyes shut?”

  “Yes,” Rose said.

  Shannon spoke in a tone of incantation: “It’s the year 1786. We’re Oneida Indian sisters on a hunting trip. We’re the only females. We sleep with our knives because you never know about certain sex-crazed warriors.”

  Rose flinched.

  “Don’t move,” Shannon said. “We do the cooking. We gut fish and scrape hides. We keep the fire going. We never let the fire go out. We pick blueberries and edible plants.”

  This was better. Rose could see this. She was an Oneida Indian girl. A sensation like a cool mist tingled her skin.

  “We make wampum with porcupine quills and with the sinews and the claws of bears.”

  Her voice was lost to the clamor of singing women, a kind of yelling-singing. Rose couldn’t understand the words. She stood barefoot on a smooth rock across from a naked baby girl who lay propped up in a crib. The bottom of the crib was wrapped in white fur. Smoky planks of light fell between the trees. Dogs barked. An old man danced in a tight circle and stabbed his spear at the air. The baby gurgled. Her bristly hair seemed to be on fire, but that was an effect of the sun.

  “I need my medicine bag,” Shannon said in her regular voice.

  Rose returned to herself. “What?”

  “I wasn’t seeing anything,” Shannon said and let go of Rose’s hand.

  “I was,” Rose said. She described the baby and the singing women, the old man.

  Shannon scratched her neck. “That isn’t what I was saying. I was saying we were in a canoe.”

  “I was in a woods. Not this one. The trees were taller. The sun was setting.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Was it a spirit vision?”

  “It sounds like it. I didn’t think you had enough power in you to go off on your own, though. Interesting.”

  “How long did it last for?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Really? What time is it?”

  They ran back. But their arrival scarcely registered next to the disaster under way—Ava crying on the rag rug, her antique doll, Olga, decapitated, the pieces that had been her china head strewn on the counter. “It broke,” was Fiona’s explanation. She and Gordon were trying to match the pieces together.

  “Brianna Grace kicked her,” Ava wept.

  The accused sat at the kitchen table nibbling one of the Oreos she had stuffed in her purse. Shannon went over. “Did you kick her doll?” she said.

  Brianna Grace nodded. Shannon slapped her.

  “Hey!” Gordon yelled.

  Brianna Grace lifted her purse over her head and put it on the table. Her cheek was pink from the slap. She stood, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and kicked Shannon in the shin.

  “Like that!” Ava cried.

  Another slap.

  “Girls, stop it!” Fiona yelled.

  Brianna Grace flew into a clawing, punching fury.

  “Keep pressing there,” Gordon directed Fiona, and like a man shoving onto a crowded subway, he pushed himself between the combatants. Shannon went to the window. Brianna Grace climbed back in her chair and fingered a cookie from her purse. Gordon rejoined Fiona. “Apologies for the interruption,” he said.

  It was the type of incident that would have sunk Ava to the floor had she not already been there. It stopped her crying, at least. Rose sat next to her and jiggled her foot. Shannon left the kitchen and could be heard opening the French doors to the living room.

  Rose found her doing the jigsaw puzzle. “Do you like jigsaw puzzles?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Shannon said. She frowned at the scattered pieces, and after a moment Rose knelt across from her and continued work on Popeye’s spinach can. She thought Shannon might be embarrassed by Brianna Grace, or maybe she was still angry. Rose thought it was nice of S
hannon to have come to Ava’s defense, but the fight—the abrupt start and stop as much as the silent ferocity—left her feeling estranged.

  When the dining room clock struck five, Shannon groaned, “What’s taking them so long?” and got up. Rose followed her to the kitchen. Fiona and Gordon were using masking tape to hold the glued pieces together. Olga looked like a burn victim. “You wait, she’ll be good as new,” Gordon promised a stupefied Ava.

  He put Olga in a plastic shopping bag, and he and the stepdaughters left, the plan being for him to paint the doll in his workshop.

  On the next riding-lesson day he brought Olga back. The lines in the crimped brown china that represented hair were hidden, but the lines on her face were visible and therefore, if you were Ava, worse than shattered. She traced them with her finger.

  “Are you happy, Red?”

  Ava nodded.

  Nobody asked where he had left the stepdaughters. They weren’t welcome. Fiona had tried talking Ava into giving Brianna Grace a second chance, but the prospect of her returning was dreadful to Ava, and Rose had taken Ava’s side. The fight had shaken her, and she hoped never to see either girl again.

  And yet on the morning of Olga’s return she found herself wishing Shannon had come, and after the lesson she walked Gordon to his truck and told him about Shannon offering to lend her a book.

  “If she gives it to me, I’ll bring it by,” he said.

  “Or I could get it from your place. My dad could drive me.”

  “How about I have her call you?” He started the engine.

  There was no call that day or the next. The third day, another riding-lesson day, Rose said to Gordon, “I guess Shannon’s busy.”

  “She hasn’t called?” he said. “Well, that’s Shannon for you. Why don’t you call?”

  Because now that Shannon knew Rose wanted her to call, Rose had to wait. Unless Ava backed down, and then her mother and Shannon’s mother could make the arrangements and leave Rose out of it.

  She tried bribing Ava with a charm bracelet Ava had always coveted. The charms were different breeds of dog, the eyes colored stones. When that didn’t work she appealed to her sister’s tender heart: “Brianna Grace doesn’t have any friends. We’re her only friends.”

  “What if she throws the china plates?” Ava said. She was reorganizing her shelves to fill the space left by Olga, banished to the underwear drawer.

  “Mom won’t let her do that.”

  “She’ll do it all of a sudden.”

  “We’ll put the plates away.”

  “What if she kicks you? She almost kicked me!”

  “No, she didn’t. When?”

  “When she was here!” Ava swung her leg around jerkily. “She was going like this! Like this!”

  “Okay,” Rose said. “Calm down.”

  She developed an aversion to Ava’s sensitivities, a disgust. She couldn’t play with her. She said that she wanted to concentrate on her art, and she drew sketches of the barn and the vegetable garden and, secretly, from memory, of Shannon. When normally she would be monitoring the riding lessons, she walked into the cornfield but always got lost and emerged, sweating and hyperventilating, either on the highway or at the edge of the neighbor’s mustard property. She lay in the meadow behind the barn and said, “It’s the year 1786. I’m an Oneida Indian girl. I sleep with my knife.” But without Shannon lying next to her, holding her hand, she was a white girl in the year 1982, and the knife was a stick.

  SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2005

  After Ava died, Rose very seldom remembered her nighttime dreams. For her, sleep at night was a blank, a kind of death. Since the onset of the episodes, however, she’d been having dreams that carried right into her first waking minutes. This morning’s dream was that the brothers knew about her spirit vision, and the brother who was Iroquois said, “White people like being reincarnated Indians, that way they can take our culture and our lands and not feel bad.”

  Rose woke up protesting. “The girl wasn’t me,” she said out loud. “I couldn’t speak the language.”

  She never thought about the vision or Shannon, or anything having to do with the farm, not if she could help it. But the dream brought the vision to her with an animation and clarity she couldn’t avoid—the singing women and dancing man, the naked baby, that entire coherent world belonging to someone else—and she wondered if her brain hadn’t resurrected it because it was like an episode. She wondered if, in fact, it hadn’t been an episode, an inaugural flare-up sparked by something other than thunder and lightning, some force (Shannon’s third eye?) strong enough to dispense with the preliminaries and send her back through time.

  Had she really believed in Shannon’s third eye, though? She couldn’t remember, but Shannon’s belief might have been enough. She allowed herself to dwell on Shannon, to remember her rings and magnetic-repulsion theory, and even to imagine her as a mother with a bunch of smart, hooligan kids. The last time Rose saw her was at Ava’s funeral in the company of the woman from Bert’s grocery store. Brianna Grace she spotted in the late nineties pitching foldable colanders on TV, all stylish and lively, recognizable only after the cohost said her name.

  Rose peered at her clock radio. A quarter past ten. She found 680 News, climbed out of bed, and opened the drapes. Fluffy cumulus clouds sat on the horizon.

  She checked her phone messages. There were four from Victor. The first—“Why aren’t you answering?”—made her feel hounded, and she sped through the rest. “Me again—” “I tried the landline—” “Unless you’ve been abducted, or you’ve—”

  “Married Lloyd,” she said, amazed by how completely she’d infiltrated that fantasy after dropping Lloyd off at his apartment. She’d been preparing for bed when she’d finally thought of Victor and their nightly chats. She’d had trouble envisioning his face, and this had seemed like a good enough reason not to call him until the morning. Now that it was morning, she still couldn’t quite arrange his features into a person she recognized.

  The radio meteorologist was issuing a storm warning for between two and three o’clock. Well, Rose had already planned to leave the house earlier than she normally did on Sunday afternoons, since having an episode at home, with Fiona there, was out of the question. An episode at home or any place other than the theater office might not even be possible, but she wasn’t willing to test that theory and risk nothing happening.

  Windows—standing at them, opening them—she now associated with cigarettes, and she mentally tracked her Du Mauriers to her briefcase on the kitchen counter. If you’d told her a week ago that she, a fanatical nonsmoker, would crave cigarettes . . . How about if you’d told her she would become obsessively protective of a stranger’s fetus? She gazed at the disk of ground in the middle of the lawn where neither grass nor weeds grew and attempted to draw from that little crop circle a moral direction. All she came up with was an excuse, an apologetic, you put a barren woman in the body of a pregnant woman and she’s bound to feel something.

  What she felt at the moment was concern over Harriet’s state of mind. You’re okay, you’re okay, she said over and over, pushing the words against the limits of her skull until she had at least convinced herself.

  It was one of Fiona’s clear mornings. She had showered and dressed and eaten her cereal. At present, in full view of Charles across the road, she was sweeping the front porch of the leaves and twigs brought down by the storms.

  “You should have a vicious hangover,” Rose told her.

  “I never get hangovers,” Fiona said.

  “You never drink.”

  “I drank in my day. I had to keep up with your father.” She turned her back to the road and started sweeping the top stair. “Your father couldn’t hold his liquor, not like I could. I could walk a straight line with a full glass on my head. I won a contest at the Galway.”

  Rose’s father had been notorious for holding his liquor, and while the Galway was a nice touch, Rose didn’t doubt that the story was a delusion i
n line with other recent delusions where Fiona bragged of never-before-mentioned talents. “I’d have loved to see you,” she said.

  “I won a silver dollar,” Fiona said. She lengthened her back and neck, demonstrating her contest-winning form. Or perhaps this display was for the benefit of Charles.

  She had made coffee, but Rose’s stomach was unsettled, and she filled her mug with Pellegrino and took it and her cigarettes to the den. She opened the window and smoked, watching the sky. After three or four puffs she extinguished the cigarette on the outside wall and sat at her desk and Googled weather network. Its forecast was the same as 680’s.

  She Googled spirit visions and read that they were more ecstatic and supernatural, more religious, than the feeling of being an Oneida Indian girl among natural, authentic surroundings. She tried to remember if she’d felt as though she was inside the girl. Not really, she concluded. She might have had another experience altogether, something between a spirit vision and an episode. She liked the idea of a precedent, a psychic lineage, but it was also possible that she’d just fallen asleep.

  She Googled baby in the womb. Up came a full-screen photograph of a fetus at eight weeks. She clicked on “Nine weeks.” The fetus had earlobes, fingers, shoulders. At ten weeks the vital organs were fully formed.

  You can know too much, she told herself. Magnify a dust mite and you get an elephant. She leaned back in her chair, exhausted. Always exhausted, always queasy. She prodded her belly. It had never been what you would call flat, but now it seemed bloated. Did she have a sympathetic pregnancy? How pathetic that would be! How competitive and self-absorbed!

  She went over to the sofa and lay down. Victor called as she was drifting off.