The Sisters Montclair

by Cathy Holton

  Alice turned her head slowly and looked at her, her expression a mixture of shocked disapproval and consternation. “I’m not talking about physical altercations,” she said. “Girls and boys didn’t fist fight in my day. It was considered a sign of bad breeding. I’m talking about how I liked playing with boys, I wanted to be one of them, I envied them their carefree ways and their freedom. It always seemed to me that my Cousin Dob got away with murder while I was the one stuck having to obey the rules and regulations.” She raised her voice in a high, wheedling tone. “Young ladies don’t do this, young ladies don’t do that,” she said, as if imitating a scolding adult.

  Bad breeding. It was the kind of comment Stella would have expected someone from Alice’s social class to make. She had a sudden desire to shock the old lady, to watch her eyes widen and her chin tremble. Where would Stella have been if she hadn’t learned to fight in those early days, what would have happened to her if she hadn’t known how to take care of herself, to pack up with others to survive the pimps, dealers, and perverts? People like Alice Whittington had no idea how the other ninety percent of the world lived. Money smoothed the way, made troubles bearable, took away the suffocating daily worries and fears. It created an artificial world where everything was shiny clean and fair.

  “Of course, there was one boy I never much cared for. Charlie Gaskins. You may have heard of him. His family lived next door to us down on the river.”

  “Let me guess,” Stella said. “Is Gaskins Park named for him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it,” Stella said.

  “He used to throw rocks at me over the fence and Mother wouldn’t let me heave them back.”

  A boy who threw rocks. How terrible.

  Stella didn’t finish the rest of her sandwich. She wrapped it up in a napkin for later. Outside the window, the distant whine of a leaf-blower broke the mid-day stillness.

  Alice ate slowly and when she had finished her lunch, she sat back with her hands in her lap. “I’ll have my ice cream now,” she said.

  Stella stood and gathered the plates. “What kind?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Consider yourself surprised,” Stella said, taking the plates to the sink and flipping on the hot water. She poured detergent into the water until foamy mounds appeared, and then she tossed the bottle back under the sink.

  The girl’s voice was low and smooth like water running in a brook and Alice had to turn her head to hear it. The girl didn’t shout and bully her like the other caregivers, talking to her like she was a belligerent child. She spoke in a normal voice which meant that Alice couldn’t hear her at all unless she turned her head so her good ear might catch the wispy threads of the girl’s voice, or faced her so she might read her lips. Usually low-talkers irritated Alice but the girl spoke with heart, she wasn’t condescending, and so Alice was willing to put up with the extra work involved with sitting beside her at lunch.

  Besides, despite her admission of fistfights on the playground, there was something gentle about the girl, something she took great pains to hide, that made Alice feel vaguely protective of her. She was the kind who would give her last dollar to a bum on the street corner, the kind who took in every stray dog or cat who showed up at her door. She had seen the girl’s arm when she lifted her sleeve that day in the library, had seen the claw marks and silvery scars, and she’d known immediately that the girl was a cat lover. Alice couldn’t abide cats, and she really wasn’t too fond of dogs either, at least not in the house.

  One of her boys had had a dog, hadn’t he? No, that’s right. Bill wouldn’t allow dogs. They were dirty and they carried disease in their saliva, he’d said. Bill. Funny, how at times like this, she could hear his voice but could not see his face. Memory was both a curse, and a blessing, coming as it did now in unexpected and irrepressible swells. It was probably her age, which she constantly forgot, (she was always amazed at her withered image in the mirror) that caused the daydreams to come to her, shiny and reflective, like shards of broken glass.

  She was overcome suddenly by a wave of intense recollection, a memory of the man she had loved in her youth. She remembered his green eyes, and the small silvery scar below his right eyebrow, and the width of his chest and shoulders, covered by a sheen of sweat, as he reared above her. And yet she could not remember his face. Only the intense emotion aroused in her by his hands, by his mouth. Remembering now those first tentative attempts at lovemaking, his practiced movements and her own gradual ratcheting of desire, she was suffused by a delicate shame.

  She might not have married Bill. Her life could have taken a different track altogether. In her youth she had conjured this incessantly, this shadowy other-life that could have been hers, imagining a life free of duty and restraint, but with its own achievements and pitfalls. Yet who’s to say this other life would have been any different? Who’s to say that, regardless of the path she took, she wouldn’t wind up learning the same thing about herself? That caution and duty were what she would always choose to build her life on, what she would always come back to.

  And now the girl was talking, she could hear the tinkling lilt of her voice, and turning her head, Alice caught the tail end of what she’d said. It was faint and muffled, like talking underwater, and Alice could barely make it out. Already the memory of the man she’d loved was fading, was gone. The girl was smiling, her lip ring glinting beneath the overhead lights and her black hair falling around her familiar face. There was a bitter taste in Alice’s mouth. She felt a growing sense of alarm. The girl had awakened something in her; Alice could feel it low and rumbling.

  She felt a shift, a sudden dislodging, and a surge of memories like a rockslide, came tumbling down around her, crushing her with their weight.

  Charlie Gaskins had a stutter and so Alice’s mother would not let her throw rocks at him. Alice would be standing at the edge of her yard down near the river and Charlie would come out and start lobbing stones over the fence and mewling like a cat. If she retaliated, he would go inside and call to his mother, and she would go next door and complain to Mother.

  “Shame on you,” Mrs. Gaskins would hiss at Alice as she walked by. “Shame on you, a big girl like you, picking on an afflicted child.”

  Alice wanted to shout, “Shame on your afflicted child for throwing stones at me,” but she would clamp her mouth shut and keep quiet.

  And later when she went to Marymount Academy for Girls with Charlie’s twin sister, Adele, it was the same thing. Mrs. Gaskins could not bear for the other girls to be mean to Adele, even though Adele spoke perfectly well and had no need of parental protection. The result of all of this was that Adele and Charlie grew up as mean as snakes. No one wanted to play with them.

  It was Adele who first came up with the Sugar and Spice Parties. None of the other girls wanted to go to Adele’s parties and so Mrs. Gaskins would get on the phone and call around to their mothers, and at the appointed time, the cars would pull up in front of the Gaskins house and out would step girls with big bows in their hair, walking dejectedly toward the Gaskins front door.

  If Mrs. Gaskins was present, Adele would be catty to the other girls, and would have temper tantrums if she lost at games. But when Mrs. Gaskins left the room, Alice would walk up and stick her fist in Adele’s face and say, “We don’t like you. We’re only here because our mothers made us comes.” Alice was the only one who could make Adele cry.

  When Alice was a senior in high school and had long out-grown Sugar and Spice Parties, Adele was still having her mother call around to make sure her invited guests showed up. At one particular party in October of 1932, Alice brought her sister, Laura. It was a Cat Rat Party; the senior girls were Cats and had been assigned to care for a freshman sister, known as a Rat. Alice had insisted that she be assigned to Laura because she knew she was the only one who could handle her. Laura wasn’t like other girls.

  And because she knew this, and because the other girls knew it too, Alice was apprehensive
this particular evening, feeling herself to be outgunned and outmaneuvered. She stood at the edge of the grand room with its mullioned windows overlooking the river, searching for Laura who had slipped away not long after they arrived. A crowd of senior girls and their Rats were dancing to “I’ve Got the World on a String.” Alice wore a black leotard and tights and ballet slippers and she had carefully painted whiskers on her face with a charcoal stick. Laura had dressed in a pink tutu with her long slender legs encased in white tights and her blonde hair lying loose around her shoulders and cascading down her back. She had refused to paint her face with whiskers, even at Mother’s insistence that, “all the other girls will be painted up and you will look like a fool.”

  And now she was gone, she had disappeared into the crowd, and Alice had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. The last thing Mother had said to her as they left the house was, “Don’t let her out of your sight.”

  She made her way slowly around the room, adopting a false, casual manner, stopping to sample hors d’oeuvres and chat with several of the girls. Laura was not in the room. Alice was certain of that. The next logical place to look would be the kitchen where her sister could often be found sitting and chatting with the servants, and if she wasn’t there, chances were good she’d given Alice the slip, and had left the house for an assignation with some unknown beau.

  Heat rose in her face at this thought, followed by a quick stab of anger at her sister, and at her mother for making her responsible for Laura’s actions. Always responsible for Laura. Always having to stop her from making some catastrophic mistake that would bring shame and despair down on the rest of them.

  “Looking for someone?” Adele stood at the edge of a group of girls who were all staring at Alice.

  Alice sipped her punch. “No,” she said.

  “Because if you’re looking for your sister, I saw her disappear up the stairs with my brother not five minutes after you got here.”

  Alice stared at her above the rim of her punch glass. She set the glass down carefully on a table. “Maybe you should have said something.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because your brother is three years older than my sister.”

  “What difference does that make? Your sister will go with anyone.”

  For a moment Alice thought she might strike her. Her hand tingled with the imagined slap, the weight of her flesh against Adele’s rouged cheek. But then she saw the faces of the girls arrayed behind Adele, their expressions closed, accusing.

  “My sister is a good girl,” Alice said serenely.

  “She’s not,” Adele said.

  “Everybody knows she’s not.”

  “My mother says she’s boy crazy.”

  “My mother says girls like her always end badly.”

  “Your mothers are a bunch of jealous old biddies,” Alice said, turning away from them.

  She could feel the weight of their eyes as she climbed the stairs. She walked slowly, deliberately, with no apparent concern. At the top of the stairs, out of view of the living room, she paused. She heard giggling at the end of the hallway, and she followed the sound to a closed door. Turning the knob, she put her shoulder against the door and shoved hard to open it.

  Laura sat on the edge of the bed, naked from the waist up, her pink tutu bunched around her hips. Her lips were red and swollen and her hair rose like a cloud around her lovely face with its expression of guileless innocence.

  “Sister,” she said sweetly.

  Charlie Gaskins knelt in front for her. “G-get out!” he said.

  Alice picked up a wooden globe and hurled it at him. She followed this with a copy of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” and “The Divine Comedy” which caught him in the temple, causing him to cry out and hold his head in his hands. She crossed the room and took Laura by the arm and yanked her upright, pulling up the straps of her tutu. She pushed her sister ahead of her into the hallway. In the doorway, she turned and looked at Charlie.

  “If you touch my sister again I’ll kill you.”

  They went quickly down the backstairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door into the cool night air. Laura was crying softly. Her hair glowed in the moonlight.

  “I like him,” she said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “He’s nice.”

  “No, he isn’t.” Alice took Laura by the shoulders and shook her. “He’s not nice,” she said. “And it’s the fact that you don’t see this that makes you so dangerous.”

  “I’m sorry, Sister.”

  She seemed so innocent, so completely bewildered by her crime that Alice couldn’t bear it. She let her go.

  “Stop crying. Fix your hair.” She stroked Laura’s cheek, laying her fingers on the small birthmark on her neck.

  Laura nuzzled her face against Alice’s hand. She sighed. “I feel sorry for him,” she said.

  Alice took Laura’s hands and held them tightly. “Promise me you won’t see him again. Promise me you won’t be alone with him.”

  “All right.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  Alice helped her fix her hair. She brushed the tears off Laura’s cheeks. “Don’t tell Mother.”

  “I won’t,” Laura said. She took Alice’s hand in both her own. “You’re a good sister,” she said. “You look out for me.”

  “I’ll always look out for you,” Alice said.

  Stella wasn’t sure if she had offended Alice by asking too many questions at lunch. Or maybe it was her laughter when Alice mentioned that her sister had a “tender heart.” Adeline had the least tender heart of anyone Stella could imagine but sisters were often loyal to one another, and Alice might not take kindly to any criticism of Adeline, however slight.

  Or maybe it was something else Stella had said or done that had caused Alice to sit quietly through the remainder of lunch, slowly eating her ice cream and staring at the wall. Alice seemed a very private person, the kind who set wide boundaries around herself, and Stella wondered now if she had trespassed those boundaries in some crucial, although unintentional, way.

  Yet, whatever it was that had upset her during lunch seemed to pass. Alice seemed herself again as soon as they left the kitchen and walked down the wide hallway to the bedroom. As she lay down for her nap, she looked up at Stella with her cold pale eyes and said, “Night, night.”

  Stella smiled. “Sweet dreams,” she said.

  She went out into the sunroom to do her homework. Despite being behind in all of her classes, she couldn’t bring herself to open her backpack. Instead she sat staring drowsily out the long windows, wondering if she should just go ahead and chuck it all, drop out of school, quit fucking around and get a full-time job, something that would at least allow her to pay rent and maybe buy a good used car. She had lasted longer in school than anyone predicted; she had nothing to prove to anyone. Not even to herself.

  She was so far behind now, she would probably never catch up and she was tired of the grind, the worry over money, the constant stress over trying to keep up. Last night Josh had come into the kitchen as she was packing her lunch for Alice’s and he had bitched her out about not contributing for groceries. Or anything else, for that matter. And really, she couldn’t blame him. She was nothing more than a kept woman, something she had always sworn she’d never be. She’d sworn she’d never become dependent on a man like her mother had been, and yet here she was, making the same mistakes Candy had made. How was that for family tradition?

  No, it seemed dropping out was her only option. It was time to grow up, to step into the real world of forty-hour work weeks and groceries and bills stacked up on the kitchen table.

  And yet. She paused, considering.

  To give up the dream now filled her with a sense of dejection. The truth of the matter was she could see herself counseling troubled girls. She could imagine herself making a difference in patients’ lives. Dr. Nightingale. It had a nice ring to it.

  And besides,
if she dropped out now, she would still have two years of school loans to pay off. A crushing, unforgivable debt and nothing to show for it.

  She sighed and pulled her backpack toward her. She took out her Psychology of Gender textbook, and spent the next thirty minutes reading and making careful notes. She would send an email to Professor Dillard this evening explaining her absence from class today. She would ask Luke Morgan on Tuesday if she could copy his notes. This thought, so casually arrived at this morning, now roused a wave of unexpected nervousness. She put her pen down and rubbed her eyes, trying to imagine how she would ask him. After class? During class? Follow him out into the quad where the giggling sorority girls wouldn’t see her? She was so caught up trying to imagine how she would ambush him without appearing nervous or desperate that she only gradually became aware of whispering on the monitor.

  Immediately, she stopped daydreaming and listened.

  It was a low, repetitive sound. More like a murmur or a meditative chant. As she listened, Stella gradually became aware of individual words.

  Oh Lord, no. No.

  It was Alice’s voice. Low and anguished, but still Alice. Stella was relieved to realize this, and yet the suffering was so intense that Stella felt a catch in her throat, listening.

  Oh Lord, Laura.

  Stella closed her book.

  Please. Oh Lord, please.

  Stella shoved the book in her backpack. She got up and walked down the long, wide hallway to the bedroom but by the time she arrived, Alice was lying quietly on her back, sleeping peacefully.

  She slept for a long time and after she awoke, Alice seemed groggy and confused. Twice she called Stella, Mary Ann, and as they walked through the living room on their afternoon walk, Alice stopped and looked at a collection of photographs on a long sofa table. She pointed to one silver frame and Stella picked it up so she could see it better.

  “Who is that woman and those two children?” Alice said.

  Stella looked at the photo. “Isn’t that your sister?”