Other Shepards

by Adele Griffin

  “There’s probably more to France than bad periwinkles,” Annie says. “You could go back when you’re older.”

  “Our parents stopped traveling after Geneva was born. Before that, they went all over the world.”

  “We were named for the places we were conceived in,” Geneva adds. “Our Uncle Nelson told us so last time he visited. Remember Holland? How he pointed his cigar at you and said, ‘Lucky they decided to baptize you for the country, otherwise we’d be calling you Antwerp, my girl,’ and then Mom went, ‘Oh, quiet, Nelson, you ridiculous drunk,’ and then she grabbed away his wine glass and some spilled on the rug—cigar ash, I mean, not wine—and Uncle Nelson stomped it in, not on purpose, although Mom said it was, secretly.”

  We laugh together. The parents always had maintained that they named us for places they liked to remember, but until Uncle Nelson’s giveaway, we had never understood why our names had been singled out above other favorites, like Paris and India. Now I take new appreciation in my name, knowing that it is so intimate.

  “But after a while they stopped traveling,” I tell Annie. “It was harder, I guess, with a new family. Now we rarely go anywhere at all.”

  “Too bad for you. Of course, my friends Dana and Ryan Hubbard vacation every year in Saint Germaine. The good life, hmm?”

  “The Hubbards!” I suck in my breath. “How do you know the Hubbards?” The Hubbards are old friends of the parents. They have rented our bungalow in Saint Germaine since before I can remember. The parents never sold the bungalow—once I heard Mom tell Brett and Carla that renting is a better investment, but I am sure there are other, more intricate reasons for their holding onto that property.

  The Hubbards are nothing more to me than their blandly smiling faces in some slides and photographs, an entry in Dad’s address book, and the occasional letter that arrives in the mail and contains a few boring paragraphs comparing the weather in Saint Germaine with Seattle’s.

  The notes always end with a P.S. request that Geneva and I come visit them in either place, but the parents tell us they’re just being polite—who would really want to look after two young girls, especially during their holiday? So I have never met the Hubbards, and they remain part of another life, built into the dark and secret passages of a different family’s history.

  “I’ve known the Hubbards forever,” Annie says. “I painted a mural for them in the pantry of their house down in Saint Germaine. An elm tree.”

  “Their pantry? You mean our pantry—it’s our house—they rent it from us!” I turn to my sister. “That’s so strange, don’t you think so, Geneva? I mean, here she’s been to Saint Germaine, and met the Hubbards even, and we didn’t know.”

  “I always wanted to see Saint Germaine!” Geneva bursts out. “It looks so adorable in the pictures. We’ve never been to Seattle, either, not that I really want to go there, I hear there’s lots of traffic jams. But I especially want to visit Saint Germaine, more than the shore. More than anywhere.”

  “Be quiet, stupid. We can never go there.”

  “You be quiet, you said so your stupid self that you wanted to visit.” She looks at Annie. “They all used to visit every year, sometimes twice a year. Mom and Dad said it’s the most beautiful place on earth. There’s tons of slides and pictures of them, on the fishing boat, or at Starling Cove, or—”

  “The parents would never take us there! There are a million places to go instead of there!”

  “Don’t shout at me, Holland, I’m right here next to you!” Geneva shouts. “And you don’t need to try and make me feel bad when I know you want to see it, too, okay? Just because something happened there seven years before I was even born doesn’t mean I can’t wonder what Saint Germaine’s like, especially since I’ve seen all those pictures of it, and even Brett and Carla stayed at the house last year, and—”

  “Time out.” Annie makes a referee’s signal. “Listen, I wouldn’t have brought up Saint Germaine at all if I knew it meant witnessing this shouting match. Let’s get back to work. Holland, since you’re taller, would you wipe over the parts of the wall Geneva can’t reach? Cooperation counts on this project.”

  “Sorry, Holland. I didn’t mean to shout,” Geneva mutters, which is so uncharacteristic that I say sorry back.

  “What are they like?” I ask after a few minutes.

  “Who?”

  “The Hubbards, Annie. Are they nice?”

  “Oh, you should meet them, they’re a pair,” Annie says. “I bet they would love to meet you.”

  “The parents wouldn’t let us,” Geneva says through gritted teeth. “They have their own way of doing things, which mostly means doing nothing.”

  I give up on the conversation and attack the wall with my rag. The radio moans through one cozy love song after another. I imagine Louis Littlebird standing under the arches of Washington Square Park. He holds a bunch of daisies behind his back and offers them to me as I swing up to greet him, just like in that deodorant commercial. I press my nose into his neck and my cheek brushes the leather of his jacket; my laugh is an unfamiliar, throaty gurgle that I’m sure I could perfect in real life. In my fantasies, I am as Ick as I want to be.

  “I’m starving,” Geneva says, breaking into my daydreams.

  “Didn’t you pack lunch?” Annie asks. “Eat that.” Geneva frowns; it was not the answer she had hoped for. Annie cooking up omelettes, Annie springing for lunch at Les Deux Gamins—I am sure this is what Geneva wanted. But we unwrap our brown bag lunches without argument and eat our cheese sandwiches, grapes, and shortbread cookies. Geneva talks with her mouth full, firing questions at Annie as she continues to clean the walls.

  “How much are you getting paid?” Geneva asks.

  “Enough,” Annie answers. “Standard rate.”

  “Is art your full-time job?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Uptown.”

  “How high? Seventies, Eighties, Nineties?”

  She jabs her thumb northward. “A little higher.” Geneva and I share a look; we have never heard of anyone living higher than Professor Nolan, a friend of Dad’s who lives on 121st Street. Then Geneva resumes her silly questions.

  “Are you and Jack married?”

  “No.”

  “Have you talked about getting married?”

  “You know, I don’t think about it.”

  “Do you miss him, like right now do you?”

  Annie pauses in her work. “Not so much, because I always feel like I’m with him, even when I’m not.”

  After lunch, we start priming. Annie is tireless, spinning on the toes of her ugly shoes as she directs our brush strokes. Priming the walls with our base coat takes up most of the early afternoon. After we are finished I am exhausted, ready to lounge in the den with a cool drink in one hand and the remote control in the other.

  “So,” Annie says as she stands in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips, surveying our work, “who’s ready for a downtown adventure? We have time.” She pops the paint-thickened roller from its handle and wraps it in newspaper before dropping it in the trash.

  “Adventure, adventure!” Geneva executes a poorly skilled Irish step dance around the kitchen. “Let’s go!”

  “I don’t know.” I hold my breath, indecisive. “People might report us, since we should be in school.”

  “This is New York,” Annie says. “People are too busy with their own lives to care about yours. Of course, anybody who wants to stay home or go back to school is certainly allowed.”

  Geneva needs no coaxing. I decide I have to follow, if only to baby-sit.

  six

  mr. depass and miss pia

  THE E TRAIN CARRIES a handful of weary passengers who stare at us as we slide into the plastic seats. A few senior citizens, a man eating from a bag of rust-colored chips, and a couple with matching purple Kool-Aid dyed hair and silver rings stuck in their bellybuttons all stare a moment and then dismi
ss us. I wonder how I appear to strangers: a prissy Catholic-school girl wearing a boiled wool jacket (I couldn’t find my windbreaker) and jeans.

  “We’ll get off at Spring Street,” Annie says. “Decent shopping there.”

  “Shopping?” Geneva asks. Her hands are packaged neatly on her lap. She hadn’t planned on taking the subway; nor had I, but it’s easier for me to adjust to the unexpected than it is for my sister. She looks as if she might be sick. To Geneva, a subway is a filthy, hissing, germ-infested beast far more dangerous than his brother—the barely domesticated but tolerable taxicab. Annie’s insistence that subways are quicker was the last word over Geneva’s protest. Now she chews her lip and tightens herself into the smallest amount of space that her body will permit.

  The advertisements pasted to the subway walls are the wallpaper of a world more edgy than the manicured lap dogs and chicken-wire-ringed shrubbery of our neighborhood. HANDS ARE MEANT FOR HOLDING bellows the type block across one poster, showing a black-and-white photograph of a knuckle-clubbed fist. Phone numbers and addresses of local battered women’s shelters are printed in large type below the fist. Another poster advises people to get regular checkups for the diseases they might or might not have. Still another bulletin lectures on the dangers of needle-sharing. Geneva’s eyes are buggy, staring at the forlorn faces of poster board junkies.

  “I hate this subway,” she whispers. “I need to wash my hands.”

  “Nowhere to wash on the subway. You’ll have to suck it up and wait till we get off,” Annie answers. We both look at her, startled. Did Annie actually hear the secret voice?

  “How much longer?” Geneva asks in the same pitch, testing Annie.

  “More soon than later,” Annie answers, and she opens her face into a giant kidlike yawn, to prove how disinterested she is in Geneva’s needs.

  Geneva tucks her hands in her armpits and whispers Hail Marys until the subway stops at Spring Street.

  Soho is packed with its usual mix of self-consciously fashionable locals and frowzy tourists. The smell of roasted peanuts and spicy falafels wafts from the street vendors’ grills and drifts through the air.

  “Let’s hit the vintage stores,” Annie says after we stop at a diner and wait while Geneva runs into the rest room. Soho has sent a jolt of exhilaration through Annie. As soon as Geneva emerges, Annie breaks into a stride down the street, and it becomes impossible for Geneva and me to keep pace without taking a few jogging steps every half block. Annie holds her chin up and keeps her hands pushed inside her blazer pockets. It is a deliberate gesture; she does not want to hold our hands. Annie does not touch, I have noticed. It might be one of the reasons Geneva has been so quick to adore her.

  “Good shops are hard to find since this part of town’s so commercial lately. The true clotheshound will prevail. I remember once when I was about your age, Holland, I wore a tutu to a Valentine’s Day dance, a semiformal. I found it in a store called the Basement Boutique, but the tulle had gone ratty. So I bought a length of dark blue chenille at one of the fabric shops in Alphabet City, and I recovered the whole dress. Tulle is like a canvas, a base coat. Chenille, on the other hand, sets a mood.”

  “Did you wear ballet shoes, too?” Geneva asks breathlessly.

  “Tap shoes, actually, with the taps still in,” Annie answers. “I made the most noise on the dance floor, even if I didn’t have the best moves. Jack wore a painted tuxedo T-shirt. I guess that sounds awful now, but we thought we were stunning. Here it is.” She stops at the corner of a brick-bunkered side street. We stare at the outside of a glass door so filthy I cannot see in.

  “Five-Star Vintage Clothing and Consignment,” I read the words scrolled on the shop’s torn awning. “In a class by itself.”

  “Hello!” Annie calls as we step inside the shop. “Mr. DePass?”

  A man behind the counter does not look up from his newspaper. He wears his graying hair loose over his shoulders and his checker-and-rhinestone shirt gives him the look of some kind of cowboy poet.

  “Mr. DePass!” Annie exclaims. She tucks her arms in front of her chest, surveying him. Her feet in their strappy shoes rock back and forth.

  Mr. DePass eventually glances up at us. I catch a twinkle of his bejeweled fingers as he flips them through his hair. “Yeah?” He peers forward and looks at us.

  “I haven’t been here in so long,” Annie says apologetically. “But it smells exactly the same.” I sniff the air politely and inhale a faint scent of carbon paper and feet.

  “We’re just going to look around,” I say to Mr. DePass.

  “Feel free,” he answers, focusing back on his paper.

  “Something’s changed,” Annie says, moving into the crowded heart of the store. “Is the lower level where the on-sale clothes are?” She runs her hands along the racks of soft fabrics.

  “Does the lower level have sales?” I raise my voice. Poor old Mr. DePass seems to be going deaf. He looks up, startled, and shakes his head.

  “Sales in back. The basement’s my music studio now,” he answers. He points to me, and I notice that, in addition to his assortment of rings, he wears black fingernail polish. “You.” He smiles at me, flashing a jumbled row of teeth. “I know you from somewhere, sometime a while back, right?”

  “I don’t think so.” I pretend to ponder his features, although I am certain that I have never seen the man before in my life.

  “Come look at this, guys.” Annie’s voice calls out from the back of the store. Mr. DePass nods.

  “Might be I’m wrong. Probably seen one too many faces come through my shop.” He dismisses me with a wave. “Go on, have a look in back. I just got a pile of loot from the East End Theater Company that’ll interest you.”

  Geneva and I find Annie surveying a mountain of clothing piled on a folding chair. “This place is still as big a mess as ever,” she says happily. “I never get back here anymore, since I moved. Look—spectacular.” She points to a royal blue jacket trimmed with gold braid. “Try it on.”

  “Me?” I am already shedding my wool coat to slide one arm, then the next, through the blue-and-gold-striped satin lining. “It’s loose.”

  The mottled mirror reflects a girl lost deep inside a pageant style blazer. The longer I look, though, the more I see myself in the coat, and the more the coat becomes me. “I’m sure I don’t have enough money,” I say.

  “Bet you could swap it,” Annie says. “For the one you walked in with.” I hear Geneva’s delighted intake of breath at the nerve of the suggestion.

  “Mom would be angry,” I say. “That is, even if Mr. DePass wants my Ambrose coat to begin with.”

  “Holland, hand it over. Geneva, go check.” I toss my wool jacket to Geneva, who trots to the front of the store.

  “I’m making her an accomplice,” I say.

  “What’s the use of having a sister if she can’t be an accomplice?”

  “Holland,” Geneva calls. “He says come up here so he can make sure we’re talking about the same jacket.”

  Mr. DePass’s ornamented fingers are rubbing the sleeve of my jacket as we approach. “It’s a decent quality wool here,” he says. “There’s enough to take down the cuffs, too. I got a customer, he does an Audrey Hepburn act down at the Chateau Hip, I bet he’d pay some good money for this. It’s a trade, if you want to walk out in what you got on.”

  “Deal,” I say before my logical mind can stop me. I feel the compulsive twinge of a gambler about to play a crucial stack of chips. Not only will Mom be furious, not only am I setting a bad example for my little sister, but somehow I feel that I have succumbed to the temptation of Annie, and I have become her accomplice just as Geneva has become mine.

  When I walk back into daylight I feel altered, and I do not know which is the braver act, wearing my new jacket or leaving my old one behind.

  “You look cool,” Geneva says. “I saw a hat in there I liked. Maybe this weekend we can come down here and get it.”

  “It’s far to wal
k.”

  “We could take the subway,” she says. “It’s easier to take a subway to a place you want to go than to somewhere boring. I like Soho. Annie’s right, no one pays attention to us. Ooh, look at that place—‘Miss Pia’s Psychic Readings and Advice.’” Geneva points across the street to a ground-level storefront. “I have money. I want a fortune.”

  “Go get one then,” Annie says. “But hurry. I can’t hang out all day.” When I look over at Annie, I notice that her hair is clumping around her shoulders and that her face and neck glow in the rich afternoon sunlight.

  “I know that shop,” she says.

  “It’s probably a ripoff.”

  “Only for skeptics,” Annie says in such a way that I can’t tell if she herself is a skeptic or not.

  We watch Geneva cross the street and slide through the door of the fortune teller’s shop. She reappears inside the glass picture window, now speaking with Miss Pia, a plump psychic who wears her hair in two braids.

  Geneva places some bills on the table between them, then seats herself in the curve-backed chair opposite Miss Pia.

  Annie watches, then strides across the street, paying no mind to the charging traffic. A cab driver honks and curses as I rush after her, and I raise my hand in meek apology. Despite her confident stories, I doubt that Annie was the most protective baby-sitter in the city.

  “I’m going on a trip,” Geneva announces, not turning around as we duck through the sateen curtains and into the psychic’s lair.

  “It’s late and Annie wants to go,” I whisper. A psychic is the last thing Geneva needs—someone to help her troll for nightmares and attach meaning to her ghostly visions. I only hope my sister doesn’t bring up her sightings of the mayor.

  “Shhh.” The woman puts her finger to her lips and regards me haughtily. “You’re creating negative energy.”

  “Sorry,” I say, taking a step back. I look over at Annie, who stands in the curtained shadows and stares down at her watch, tapping its face.

  “Your sister’s a doubter,” Miss Pia tattles on me to Geneva. “Remove yourself from this skepticalness so I can see your inner light clearer.” The back of Geneva’s head moves slightly, realigning herself outside the beam of my negative energy.