Elegies for Uncanny Girls

by Jennifer Colville

  Instead she asks, “Did it ever bother you that Mom always thought you had to do the same things I did?”

  “No,” Alex says with a defensive tinge in his voice that makes Susan realize he has thought about it. “She encouraged us to do the art because she loved it, because she probably wanted to do it herself.”

  “Well, she should have been an artist, then, and left us alone.”

  “There’s still time,” Alex says, a little annoyed. “It’s not like her life is over.”

  Susan thinks this might be true. Last summer, on a visit home, she’d come across one of her mother’s creations in a consignment shop in Cedar Rapids. There were the painted paper birds, delicately stitched onto a wire frame made to look like a birdcage. The birds hovered outside the cage, in a variation on a theme—as if to say, “We’re not trapped. It’s our choice to belong to a home.”

  And then on this last visit, after Susan had been away for nearly two years, her mother had changed. She didn’t rush so much—she actually sat still, and looked at Susan, as if ready to listen. At dinner, there was a new kind of smile on her father’s face when he looked at her mother—and the wine bottle—when had they started drinking wine? In fact, her mother was wobbly when she leaned over, grabbed Susan’s hand under the table, and said, “I try, but I never say the right things with you.” Susan noticed that her eyes were shivering, like her brother’s—there was that glossiness of tears forming, and that feathery expand and contract.

  Susan had tried to hold on to this, even if, upon reflection, she could have used it much earlier on. That night in her old bedroom in Iowa, she’d opened the window to let in the air with its crush of cicada sound and humidity, its intense aliveness. And things her mother had said floated back to her. They hovered. Sharp and out of context.

  She’d said:

  I think you do things to prove to yourself that you can do them and not because you really want to.

  Or,

  Writers have to be really driven, and you’re not like that. I don’t think driven people are happy.

  Or, when Susan was excited to go back to school again:

  I suppose you need to do that. I just hope your brother doesn’t think he has to do the same thing.

  Back at the dining room table Alex has grown cocky. Susan can tell he’s preparing to say something when he stands up from his chair—he says things in transit so people don’t see them coming and so he can make a quick getaway.

  “Who’s to say Mom isn’t an artist,” he starts tentatively.

  And then, bam, adds…

  “We don’t all need awards and degrees to make ourselves real.”

  “If you’re a woman in a patriarchy,” Susan says, “who needs to support herself, who doesn’t have a nice sugar mama, actually, they help.”

  Bam.

  “Well, if it’s still such a patriarchy, why do I have a sugar mama?”

  Bam, sort of….

  And then her brother is gone, out the sliding glass door. She can see him reach in his pocket for cigarettes, pretending everything is cool, as he does, or truly shaking it off and leaving Susan to wallow in her evil sisterhood.

  Alone, Susan goes back to thinking about her mother, but also about how it would be too hard to be any mother. If she were her mother she might have done the same things. She might have told Alex that if his older sister had learned to read and speak quickly he could get tutors—he could learn fast too. Or that if his sister could draw and win art prizes, he could take lessons—he could win some too. And if his sister got a scholarship and went out of state for college he definitely should do that, even if he said no, slammed doors, and began sinking into a deep well of apathy and high school suspensions. Even if it meant that she, the mother, would have to fill out his college applications for him, and she and Susan would have to drive him halfway across the country, depressed and hungover, and deposit him on his campus of fairy tale turrets and creeping ivy, a campus he soon grew to love, a much more prestigious school than Susan went to, and that Susan was so jealous of.

  Susan had filled out one out-of-state college application, fearfully, and covertly, and when she got accepted with a partial scholarship, her announcement was met with surprise and fear. Fear that there wouldn’t be enough money? Fear that she wouldn’t succeed?

  But Susan has to admit, it was her mother, her mother who gave up school to marry her father, to raise Susan and her brother, who finally joined her side. It was her mother who fought for her, who finally got her beloved father to change his mind.

  She knows her mother fought for her.

  She was her mother’s only child for four whole years.

  Her mother had carried her in her belly for nine months.

  At one point she’d been everything.

  Now Susan wonders if her mother hadn’t been able to look in the right way at her brother either. Her brother wasn’t lacking just because he was younger or fundamentally agreeable, or because he wanted to be like Susan, like a girl. He wasn’t lacking anything until first their mother and then Susan looked at it that way. Maybe her mother looked at Alex too much through the lens of the original sister, just as she seemed to look at Susan too much through the lens of herself, through the lens of what she had, or hadn’t imagined she could do.

  Now Susan is suddenly in motion, as if she’s grabbed on to something hard and useful. The walls and furniture have started to solidify and become one place instead of two, and she gains enough leverage to get up and help Melinda who’s been chopping, blending, and wrestling with the root baby in the kitchen.

  Standing next to Melinda with her hands in the dishwater, she sees it, a tiny painting she did for the brother in college, a silly painting—a still life of a photo, the Man Ray eye, with teardrops attached to the ends of each eyelash in crystalline bits of glue. Why did she make a painting of a photograph? It was a pop art phase, she thinks, or maybe a comment on how we see the same things over and over, as if we have only one or two templates in the brain? Anyway, it wasn’t very successful. The paint is flat in some places, muddy in others, yet her brother has found a place for it on his wall.

  When Melinda, Alex, and Susan sit back down at the old kitchen table, Susan tries to be an adult. They’re older now, and she should let go of her mother, who she can’t truly understand, who is a different person now than she used to be. Alex has things that Susan doesn’t. He’s even moved ahead of her, or was always ahead of her in terms of generosity, and seeing outside of himself.

  He’s shaken his irritation off, or so it seems, and is offering her a glass of wine.

  Susan notices that he has a hard wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. So does she, but his is bigger.

  She knows she should tell him how much she likes his beautiful photographs, but instead she asks, “Do you remember when I tried to put mascara on you and you fell into the wastebasket?”

  Melinda gasps and smiles, and Alex, lifted by her interest, meets Susan’s eyes, says, “No. What happened?”

  Susan exclaims with joy and terror, “I thought I permanently damaged you. Mom thought I had ruined your eyes!” and Alex looks a little worried about where the story is going, so Susan says, “But I obviously didn’t.”

  She gestures to the walls of the house, to the photographs, and the clutter and Melinda. And her brother, who has been ready to be her friend since she walked in the front door, settles into his seat and says, “Tell me what happened.” And Susan, aligning herself with Alex, begins.

  Caroline

  In the picnic area behind the swimming pool, shielded by a small pocket made by pomegranate trees, we folded paper into prisms and wrote names of boys under folds we colored like peacock feathers. To land a boy you picked a number and watched your friend’s fingers open and shut the prism—nineteen, twenty times—felt your face flush as you leaned over and unfolded one of the petals. Your friend held your future in her hands and the boy you would ride into it, as if he were a chariot. We’d be asleep, lik
e some of our mothers; or driving, with a whip.

  But the revealed boy—even the one you secretly wanted—paled in comparison to the conjuring, the making of the prism, the secrecy, and the power of your friend’s fingers, voice, breath. Inside our folds—under our arms and behind our knees—we also loved one another. Remember? The one who was you, but different. The one you were supposed to leave behind.

  I loved Caroline. Caroline, because we didn’t go to the same school and had to wait for each other, in stiff winter clothing, for summer when we could be mostly naked.

  School was bad for many reasons, one of which was that I only had one pair of jeans with the right insignia embroidered into the small front pocket. That horse’s head I imagined would make me run fast, or gallop along the beach like the girl with long flowing hair who wore these jeans in the commercial. Instead it put me in with two girls with similar jeans and through the long school months we walked in a defensive wall, arms linked against boys and their bad words—bitch, douche, snatch, slut—or against other girls and their lesser outfits.

  During sixth grade our movements nearly stopped. We walked in our wall, or sat in a circle on the playground trading stickers. A yellow heart for a red balloon, a boring teddy bear for a fat rainbow attached to a cloud. I didn’t dare trade for what I really wanted—the stickers from boutiques that Melissa Carlyle owned: the Mylar disco ball, the mood stickers filled with swirls of oil that seemed intricately connected to her royal essence.

  And it was the year the school nurse marched into our classroom and sent the boys out into the hall. She was on a hunt for the bandit girl who was clogging the toilets with maxi pads. She held one up. Exhibit A. I was surprised to see that the pad looked harmless, like a small boat made of clouds. I imagined I’d put one between my legs and sail into a different, more dangerous land.

  Summer was another land. Of public swimming pools, and vacations with Caroline’s family to the beach in California. For four years we’d caravanned across two states, hot and sticky inside cars without air conditioning, surrounded by the smell of siblings, and car food—dank apples and raisins that stuck to our legs like large moles.

  Among the welter we kept our status as rulers by reminding each other we owned the only two pairs of roller skates among five brothers and sisters—and we envisioned California, where we’d skate free along the sidewalks that wrapped around our campgrounds. Our background: a soft-rock album cover—a silhouetted palm tree and a fuzzy orange-and-yellow sunset. We’d be miniature roller-skating Amazons—our legs, strong from swim team, would glisten with coconut oil.

  Of course our parents usually made us share our roller skates.

  So for this we devised a plan.

  We took off one skate each, tossed the other over our shoulder to a waiting brother or sister, and joined ourselves in motion by skating on our inside legs and holding each other’s waists for balance. We had to force our legs in because they kept moving out, as if our combined body was doing the splits, and we had to keep our inside legs hitched up for one, two, four seconds until we fell into each other like heavy flamingos. We would skate and crash. Skate and crash. We made a pocket of stunted motion—until we sealed ourselves together by being stupid and the same.

  And we were the same. The summer we were seven, we each lost a front tooth in the same week. Our swim team bathing suit was the same bright blue, so when we dove underwater our bodies blurred into identical rippled sea creatures. The woman who sold us ice cream said, “You must be sisters.” And once, after a sleepover, Caroline’s mother told us that we’d talked to each other while we slept. She’d heard our voices at three o’clock, but when she went to check on us our eyes were closed, our lips gently moving. We were talking in our dreams!

  After this I was afraid to sleep over. Not that night, but the weekend before, I had a dream I didn’t want Caroline’s mother to hear.

  I’d dreamed of weddings. Of everything so white, as if I’d been trapped by the tiny white dots of a TV screen, or buried in a hole in the snow. I was at my aunt’s wedding, standing below a huge cake, when the cake fell over—the four-story cake that was the shape of a woman in a wedding dress. It hit the ground and exploded as if it had been shot. That’s when Paul’s face came to me, panting, as if he’d run miles to catch up. I woke up in the dark and said, “I’ll marry your brother so we can be sisters.” Caroline rolled over and mumbled, “I do.”

  The last summer we went to the beach was between sixth grade and junior high. It was the summer our mothers ganged up on us. There was a plan afoot. We felt it! We were separately persuaded to leave our swim team suits at home—the one-piece racers that made our bodies safely one solid unit. Caroline’s mom had bought her a green string bikini, and I was there the day she pulled it out of the shopping bag, slowly, like a slippery eel, and dangled it in front of Caroline’s eyes.

  I’d bargained for a fat bikini that fit tight across the top and flattened me out. Still, there was my stomach. Moony and separate. Loitering between the upper and lower parts—in dialogue with nothing.

  This summer we wore our T-shirts until the last possible moment, until we saw the ocean.

  Driving into the parking lot, everyone tried to see it first, but it wasn’t like spotting the swimming pool as we approached in our carpool at home, it wasn’t that single thing we could point to. It was a wide blue band that saw us. Had us surrounded. It made us scream as we ran down the beach, and finally pull off our shirts as if making a sacrifice. And then we ran faster. As the beach hit a steeper slope, as our feet began running without us. We sharpened ourselves into sleek spears of motion because our brothers were behind us, trying hard to catch up.

  Although I didn’t mind this year about Caroline’s brother Paul.

  We tried to play our tricks on Paul while he slept. Toothpaste mustache, painted toenails, or bicycle-pump-in-belly-button—a stunt that made a great farting noise. But Paul was older than my brother who slept through most things and, when he did wake up, was excited by the attention and ready to try the farting-belly-button trick on himself. Paul set traps at his door; tin cans that clattered over when we tried to sneak up on him. Paul would scream ferociously if he woke to find us near his bed. He had wild hair streaked by the sun, and he once told me I had beautiful arms.

  I felt him running behind me, and I paused. I let him tag me on the back.

  And that was when Caroline lost the top of her bikini.

  She was ahead of me, so I didn’t see it happen, but I imagine it like something from Ovid. The wave enfolding her like a hand of watery fingers, untying the bikini and tossing it gleefully, a flimsy piece of seaweed; a god’s laughter booming up along the shore.

  I remember how the beach looked junkier than usual, littered with wrappers and cigarette butts, and one slimy flesh-colored balloon. I remember the feeling as I stopped and didn’t rush in that something had shifted. California, the beach, and nature had conspired with our mothers. The world was doubly exposed and slightly outside of us—no longer in alignment with our desires.

  Caroline stood waist deep, in a pause between waves. She was a blank space, pulled out of motion and stuck. The wave must have hit her from behind because her hair was slicked forward in the style we called the sea creature for its resemblance to an octopus, attached to and sucking on a head.

  Paul lifted his arm and pointed. He laughed in loud loose goose honks and I laughed too, for just a moment.

  I laughed the way we did every summer, stopping on the boardwalk to point at the woman on a sign with breasts made of light—two red bulbs flashing on and off in the centers.

  I laughed as Caroline threw down her hands to reveal two semibreasts, pink and puckered like baby mouths.

  I laughed because although my bandage bikini flattened me out, underneath my breasts were growing like individual organisms in their own idiosyncratic ways.

  I laughed because I felt the slap of the waves hit her frame, the punches of my own laughter, Caroline’s
blood burning up through my skin.

  And I didn’t help when Caroline launched toward Paul, took him underwater, and then rose, I hoped, like a new kind of creature born out of the sea. She ran up the beach, fast, her body blurred to a bright white streak. She ran to what looked like the edge of the world. The seam where the sky met the uneven line of sand.

  I walked up the beach slowly, and lay down next to Caroline, but at a distance. She’d found her T-shirt and bunched it into accordion ridges across her chest.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She sat up and shrugged. “About what?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  After a while she mumbled, “We could bury them,” and I felt relieved, remembering the game in which we buried our brother and sister in the sand and then surprised them by saying, “We now pronounce you man and wife.” She reached over, squeezed my arm too tightly, and used it as leverage to pull herself to her feet. We ran back down the beach toward our siblings, chanting, “We’re going to marry you, we’re going to bury you!”

  Halfway down the beach we dug two shallow grooves like graves, and when the holes were dug my brother Alex lay right down, and Emily ran. Paul chased her and tickled her until she was laughing and crying hard enough to be forced into place.

  I scooped the sand onto Emily’s stomach very gently and collected seashells to place in a bridal crown around her head.

  Alex, lying calmly next to her, said, “Don’t worry, Emily, we can always get a divorce.” He looked at her, batting his long eyelashes, and smiled.

  And then I had an idea.

  I looked at Caroline and said, “Now bury us.”

  Caroline lifted up her arm and pointed to where the waves broke, where the sand was heavy with water.

  “There,” she said, looking at me, and I knew she’d heard me laugh.