by Karen Bender
When she was too young to play, Vivien sat on the root with Lena. Sometimes Lena chose a child or team and cheered at sporadic moments; Vivien wanted to join in, so she cheered, too. Lena cheered with great exuberance, which confused the other children. They’d slow down, trying to figure out what was going on. But Lena and Vivien enjoyed hearing the joyous sound of their own cheering.
One day, when Vivien was four, she decided to play. She slid off the root and walked over to the group, as though she knew that she belonged. The children were playing tag, their faces damp and flushed. Lena watched her sister and yelped, “Viv!”
Ella was watering the lawn; she lay down the hose when she heard Lena. The girl had got up from the root and was standing beside it, staring at her sister. She looked as if she had been pressed into the air like a butterfly into glass. Everyone had stopped running.
“I want to be a cowboy,” Vivien announced in a deep voice, like a radio announcer. She expected everyone to listen to her. The older children—seven, nine, ten, thirteen—swung above her like sunflowers. Vivien was wearing a little pink cotton dress. Looking serious and determined, she fingered the sash and said, “Now.”
Laughter swept through the group.
“She’s too small.”
“Just put her on Fred’s team.”
“You, Vivien,” called one of the girls, “just run with them. Everyone, try not to step on her.”
Vivien looked around, flushed, and clapped her hands. Then she saw Lena standing by the root, staring at her.
The street was quiet; Lena walked toward the group. Ella felt a warning within her. She pretended to water the fuchsia bush, but she was watching; she had to watch. Lena lurched forward with the same determination Vivien had shown; she was trying to copy her sister. When she reached Vivien, she gripped her hand and said, “I want to play too!”
The other children began negotiating.
“Lena can’t play. It’s too hard.”
“She gets in the way.”
“Tell her to go sit on that tree again.”
Vivien jumped up and down. “She can hold the It place,” she said. “She can hold It.”
Lena was assigned the task of holding a branch that would serve as the It place. If a child touched the branch, he was safe.
Her hands trembled as she took the branch. They told her to stand on the curb by a tree, and there she stood. In the course of the game, children ran to her, touched the branch, ran away. She grew excited whenever they ran toward her. “Go!” she exclaimed. “Go!” Vivien circled away from her team to bubble around Lena, jumping to touch the branch just to touch it.
The sky grew dark. Lena sat on the curb, and the branch reached up as though it were growing from her hands. When it was time for dinner, she ran into the house still holding it aloft.
“Did you have a nice time?” Ella asked, hopefully.
Lena was ten years old. Her eyes were filled with tears. “I held It today!” she screeched with joy.
From that day on, Lena and Vivien joined the children in the street. They went together, as though lifted there by the same sudden wind. Lena would hold a branch or a shoe or rope for the others to reach or grab. She still burst into cheers, and occasionally Vivien joined her. Vivien sometimes cheered for a member of the other team just so that Lena wasn’t cheering all by herself.
Ella watched Vivien run. She ran with the ferocity of a younger sister, as though trying very hard to imprint herself on the world. She was competitive in a way that astonished Ella. If someone caught her just before she crossed the finish line, she would erupt in a violent scream. Sometimes the other children stepped back and let her run, her untied sash winging behind her. Her desire for mastery was immense.
Yet Vivien was linked by an invisible rope to her sister. Ella could see that they were attuned to each other, like a couple that had been married for a long time. Vivien might be engaged in a game, but she always flew back to Lena the moment before Lena would begin to complain or cry. She went to Lena in one clean movement and stood beside her, stroking her hip with a comforting motion. Lena would calm down.
Ella noticed, too, that Lena might decide at odd moments to stop playing. “Bye!” she’d announce, turning and heading toward the house. Vivien followed close behind, as though she did not want to be left alone.
When Vivien began school, Lena swooped down on her like wind. The first day, Lena gripped her sister’s hand and pretended to walk her to school. She was twelve, and Vivien was six, and Lena was bursting with pride. The walk took twice as long as it should have, because Lena had to show Vivien the many landmarks along the way. “This is my purple school tree,” Lena said, as they passed a jacaranda on La Rancha Street. The tree stretched up, aglow with purple blossoms. Vivien nodded, drinking in the tree’s new title, even though she’d seen it hundreds of times. Ella walked two steps behind them, supervising, but they pretended they were walking alone, like big girls.
When they reached the school, they first took Vivien to the primary-grade bungalow. She stood, a little anxious, before her mother and sister. She was wearing a pink check dress and neatly buckled black patent leather shoes; she had buckled them herself. She looked like a tiny, worried pink general.
Lena understood that she was to continue her day by herself. She backed away and began to hum while sucking on her hand. Ella felt as though their different futures divided her into two separate people. It made her feel confused, for she was afraid she would say the wrong thing to each. “We’ll pick you up at three,” she said, bending to quickly kiss Vivien. Vivien turned and ran into the first-grade yard.
At the end of each school day, Lena no longer had to wait alone for her mother. Vivien was always sitting right beside her on the steps. Lena would drape an arm around Vivien’s small shoulders, and they would sit very still, like rulers of an invisible kingdom.
“How was your day?” Ella asked, as soon as she arrived.
“Viv helped me find my quarter,” Lena announced.
“I looked inside her shoe,” Vivien explained.
“Good for you,” said Ella. “Lena, did you buy your lunch with your quarter?”
“Yes.”
“Was it good?”
“Yes!”
“Vivien, let’s see your lovely drawing—”
“It was lost and she found it!” Lena burst in.
Ella once visited school during recess to drop something off with Vivien’s teacher. She saw Lena gripping the wire fence that separated the lower grade area from upper grades; she was watching her sister play with the girls in her class. Vivien was jumping rope, and the other girls were counting, their voices chiming together like seagulls’ cries. Lena’s hands clutched the wire fence, and she shook it slowly, a big, silent motion; it shimmered. Her face was dark.
Lena became more aggressive. One day, Ella found her robbing Vivien from her classmates during recess; she was tugging Vivien to an empty area of the playground. As Ella watched, Vivien knelt before Lena and tied her shoe. On another day, Ella found Lena roaming the long metal tables in the cafeteria at lunchtime, looking for her sister. When she found her, she sat beside her and organized the food in a little row. The red Jell-O went behind the milk container, the milk behind the hamburger on its bun. When Ella came up to them, she heard Lena saying, “First, bite your burger. Then, sip your milk. Then Jell-O.”
Vivien was six years old. She listened to Lena’s instructions as though her sister was describing the true rules of the world. But she was not merely listening. The intensity of her desire to obey Lena made her seem physically smaller.
Ella sat beside them. “What are you two doing?” she asked.
Shock passed over both girls like a shadow. They looked at her as though she were an intruder.
“Hi!” Lena said.
“I’ve brought your sweater, Lena. You forgot it.”
“Thank you,” said Lena. But it was clear that they wanted her to go. They were embarrassed, as if their m
other had caught them in a private act.
Ella began to see Vivien disappear. The change was slow, barely perceptible. Her work at school, which had placed her at the top of the class, became careless. Her handwriting began to shift—from the cursive she had earnestly tried to master to a loose scrawl. Teachers wrote sad evaluations: Vivien does not complete her homework. Vivien does not speak in class. Soon, she started to walk like Lena, her shoulders hunched as though against a constant chill. While Lena struggled to create light in herself, Vivien was willing her own light to grow dim.
Ella saw it clearly on her visit to Vivien’s second-grade class on Parents’ Day. When the teacher handed a folder of Vivien’s work to Ella, she did not smile, as the first-grade teacher had. Nor did Ella recognize her daughter. She had to scan the room before she saw the small auburn-haired girl slumped in her seat. Her hair had the brilliant sheen of Vivien’s, and her dress was the yellow one Vivien had worn to school that day. But this girl’s arms were wrapped around her body, as though to protect it from violent weather. Her face was slack with sadness. She did not speak during the entire period. Her head remained bowed.
When Ella and Vivien walked home at the end of the day, Ella was afraid to look too closely at the world. It seemed brighter, magnified, as though seen through the goggle eyes of a giant. The roses and magnolias blooming in neighbors’ gardens looked stiff, as if cut from red and orange construction paper in someone’s childish dream. The world was sharp, and her fantasies had no place in it. Vivien in the classroom was not the girl Ella knew. But who could she be? Ella walked quickly, afraid to let herself think.
Ella looked at her daughter, and her love flowed and flowed out toward her. When Vivien glanced up, her face looked apologetic. It was as if they both understood some unspoken deal had been broken, and neither knew what to say.
“Why didn’t you speak in class?” asked Ella.
“I don’t know.”
“The teacher likes you—”
“I have nothing to say.”
Vivien walked fast, like a small soldier, her eyes on the pavement. Ella stopped her and knelt and held Vivien’s delicate face in her hands.
“You are so wonderful,” she said. “So smart. You must use it. You have so much to say.”
The words sounded flat as she spoke them, but Ella believed them fully and intensely.
Helene’s School of Dance had opened in the space above Lou’s Shoes, and the blue neon boot outside Lou’s Shoes was joined by a pink neon tutu with a single, shapely leg and pointed foot. Helen’s sign seemed to Ella rather eerie, as Ella felt it would be more enticing to have a sign that featured a whole person. However, she grew used to it. The new sign made Lou feel competitive, as he enjoyed having the only neon display on the street. But Ella convinced him that it might bring in more customers. “They see the leg, then they see the boot. Maybe they’ll think the boot will make their leg look good.” Lou gave her a skeptical look, but he had no choice in the matter. He did stock a few pairs of tap and ballet shoes for any dancers who might wander in.
Helene’s School of Dance did not seem to specialize in any particular dance form. Ella thought that many of the students heading up to the studio looked surprisingly heavy, and she started to categorize them. The large-hipped ones were belly dancers, because they needed to lose weight in that area. The small ones were ballet dancers, because they could be believable fairies on stage. The overfriendly ones, who shouted “Hi!” to her, were tap dancers, because they liked to make a lot of noise. During classes there was the sound of thunder on the ceiling of Lou’s shop, and a few times Ella went up to look in at a class. The sight of ten or fifteen girls moving in unison was so strange and surprisingly beautiful, Ella did not know what to feel.
Ella and Lou decided to separate Vivien and Lena for a while. Ella kept thinking about Vivien’s sad face as Lena told her what food to eat in the cafeteria. That was not the expression of the girl who ran so eagerly across the finish line that the other children stepped back, awed. So one day she told Vivien that her father had some exciting tasks for her in the store. “He thinks you’d do a great job as a salesgirl,” she said.
Vivien was seven years old. Her first reaction was dismay. Shifting from one leg to the other, she asked, “Why do I need a job?”
Ella did not want to tell her the actual reason. “You can make many valuable contributions,” she said.
Ella took her to the store on the afternoon that Lena would be at a birthday party with her special class. She and Lou had bought a pair of blue patent leather shoes for Vivien, and Lou handed them to her as she walked in. “If these shoes fit,” said Lou, grandly, “you’re hired.” Vivien sat down, and Lou knelt before her and lovingly slid her feet into the shoes, as though he were a prince.
“What do you know? You’re hired!” said Lou, beaming. He shook her hand.
They decided that it was important to have a child in the store for two hours, a couple days after school. Vivien was to organize the shoelaces by color, say hello to the people who came in, and carry out any other duties that she, as Store Child, found necessary.
Ella meanwhile tried to keep Lena away from the store. But Lena was developing a keen ability to detect the opportunities denied her. She immediately learned that Tuesdays and Thursdays were Vivien’s job days, and on those days she would burst out of her after-school class and demand to know where her sister was.
First, Ella tried lying. “She has a doctor’s appointment.”
“No!” Lena jumped up and down. The wooden step rattled under her anger.
“Fine,” said Ella. Her own anger began to unfurl. “She’s at her job.”
“I want a job.”
“We’ll go home,” said Ella, “and you can help me wash the vegetables . . .”
“No!” Lena ran down the stairs and refused to speak to her mother as they walked home.
The afternoons when Lena was alone were awful. Lena angrily roamed around the yard. She headed back and forth, toward nobody, and her hands were open, waiting to grab. She broke off magnolia blossoms and left a trail of torn flowers behind her, a fragrant, zigzag trail across the yard.
Away from Lena, Vivien became restless. After she finished her tasks, she wandered around the store, humming listlessly. To Ella, this churning was better than sadness; she waited.
One day, Vivien disappeared. She did this swiftly, skillfully, as though she had long been nurturing the talent to escape from her parents’ world. Neither Lou nor Ella saw her go. Vivien was suddenly gone.
Ella searched the back room, the parking lot; she walked the length of the block in front of the store. Finally, she climbed the stairs to the dance studio. There was Vivien, sitting cross-legged in a corner, watching the class. Students ran and leaped in a swift rhythm across the floor. The teacher shouted, “One, two, three!” The room reeked of sweat. Vivien was sitting absolutely still; the quick rise and fall of her chest was her only movement.
Ella went over and touched her shoulder. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” said Ella.
Vivien glanced up, upset at having been interrupted. Her face held an expression of certainty that was almost too large for her.
“I’m here,” she said.
Taking dance classes became Vivien’s job. Her schedule was arranged around children’s dance classes; she took whatever was offered that day—ballet, tap, belly-dancing. For each class, she needed different shoes and costumes, and Lou was able to get them at cost. Vivien would slip into the studio to join the skinny little girls posing sexily in black high-heeled tap shoes or solemnly in flesh-colored tights. Each group followed the teacher’s movements like a hopeful tribe.
One day, Ella visited tap class when the girls were skipping in a diagonal line across the room. The air was ragged with arrhythmic clattering. Because all the girls were dressed alike, it took her a moment to find Vivien. And it was the way Vivien moved that told Ella who she was. The other girls held back in their moveme
nts, but Vivien threw herself into them as though trying to eat the air. The teacher and students recognized her talent; reverently, they gave her room. She danced the way she had played tag, but with even more fervor. It was as though she were hurling herself forward into her special place in the world. She moved to the corner, where she did a little turn of her own creation. Her eyes were set on the image of herself in the mirror, on the adept little stranger there.
Lena, in her loneliness, was slowly tearing apart the magnolias in the backyard, and Ella decided it was time to bring her to the store.
On the first visit, Lena gripped Ella’s hand tightly as they walked in. She stepped with caution, as though the floor were made of ice. Vivien had just finished a tap class, and was sitting there, her face flushed, in her regular clothes. Lena stopped short and studied Vivien’s rosy face as though she had not been introduced to her before.
“Are you busy?” Lena asked Vivien.
Vivien looked at her. “No.”
Lena moved closer, until she stood over Vivien. “I want a job,” she said. “Viv. Give me a job.”
Vivien got up, whispered in Lena’s ear, and led her out of the main room.
After a few minutes, Ella was curious; she checked all over and finally heard the girls’ voices coming from the stockroom. The door was locked. Bending down, Ella looked through the keyhole and saw Lena standing and Vivien sitting on a chair.
She knocked. The girls shrieked.
“We’re busy!” cried Vivien.
“It’s secret!” added Lena. “It’s called Dress!” She paused. “Go away,” she said to the door; there was a great, melting pleasure in her voice.
It was that tone in Lena’s voice which kept Ella at the keyhole. Dress appeared to be a sort of game. Scattered around Lena and Vivien, Ella saw, lay an assortment of merchandise from the store. There were shiny galoshes, silk-covered high heels, fluffy bedroom slippers, black office shoes. There were heavy dark shoelaces for men, sparkly ones for children. There were women’s silk stockings in pink, blue, and metallic colors. Brightly colored cloths for shoe polishing. Accessories for bridal shoes: white satin bows, silver buckles, white sequin clips. The girls had never taken such an interest in the merchandise. Ella crouched down to be more comfortable. She was perfectly still.
