Sissy sips her soda. “Eva?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t Dad fill the pool?”
“Because he’s an asshole, that’s why.”
“Eva?”
“What?”
“Did Mom go where Vicki went?”
Eva squats down, to eye level. “No,” she says plainly. “Mom didn’t go where Vicki went.”
“Maybe Mom was kidnapped.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Why do you conflate things?”
Sissy looks at her strangely. “Maybe,” Sissy says finally, “Mom was kidnapped and that’s why she hasn’t called.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Eva says, impatient to be on her way, and, at the mention of their mother, annoyed again. “Mom’s probably still in Italy with Dr. Finley like she was when she wrote to us. That’s the truth, Sissy. Mom is gone and she isn’t coming back, so you might as well just forget about her.”
Sissy follows her sister down the hall. Eva picks up her purse from the living room chair and opens it. She stands in front of the mirror and applies a coat of orange lip gloss.
“Eva?” Sissy lingers in the doorway.
“Jesus Christ, what ?” She smacks her lips together.
“Do you ever get lonely?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You don’t?”
Eva primps her hair. Her chest constricts again, though this time she ignores it. “Everyone gets lonely, I guess.”
“What do you do when you are, then?”
Eva checks the clock—just about three, just about the time he’ll finish—and takes her keys from her purse. “I don’t know,” she says, heading out the door. “I just pretend I’m not.”
Sissy does conflate everything; it’s a mark of her character and disposition, one that she will not rid herself of in all her lifetime. Gypsies and birds and ghosts, her mother and Vicki. What she cannot fully understand becomes a mass of threaded contradictions within her, dancing around in her mind until they form a lover’s knot.
After Eva leaves, the day grows as long as a shadow. By four the house will begin to feel ominous. In the kitchen, the basement door will become a gateway to a place filled with cobwebby terror, unspeakable dread. In the living room, Sissy will be certain someone lurks just outside the window: a mystery man, a murderer. Upstairs, the shuttered closet in Sissy’s room will suddenly hold too many secrets; each slat will cause her worry. She will find refuge in Eva’s room, the room that is, according to the red-lettered sign on the door, STRICTLY OFF-LIMITS! On Eva’s walls there hang posters of exotic places—Italy, Spain, France— Eva has always wanted to travel to, though she laments frequently that she’ll never get away from this town and from these people, though what people she refers to exactly is mostly anyone’s guess. Clothes cover the carpet, piles of books litter the bureau. The room smells of cinnamon and lemon candles. Eva’s jewelry box stands always open. Black and white with two silver clasps on each side, the box holds a dancer, a ballerina dressed in a white tutu and frozen on pointed toes. Sissy will wind the back of the box and listen, absorbed, as the ballerina turns in circles.
She stays away from the open window in the hallway and the attic door. She races down the steps. In the kitchen, Sissy quarters an onion and places each wedge at a corner of the living room, an act designed, her mother said, to keep away evil. Natalia performed this ritual every time there was misfortune—a fight with Frank, a tiff with Mr. Schultz, the migraines plaguing Edna Stone. Worry, Natalia warned, has no sense of boundaries or distance; it simply lurks, waiting to find you. There were constant rituals, in fact—digging a hole in the dirt and filling it with coins to bring money, rubbing vinegar on foreheads to chase away headaches—all designed to keep disaster at bay.
Not quite satisfied with the onion cutting, and the tears it has caused, Sissy crosses herself, throws salt over her shoulder. There will be no worry, not in a near-empty vulnerable house.
She eats a hot dog, makes a mess with the ketchup.
She turns on the television to Scooby-Doo. This much she knows, even when she is alone: If she had a dog, the world would be better. If she had a dog, she wouldn’t ever feel lonely.
In the living room, the light filters through the curtains. Dust floats in the air. It will be after dark when Eva arrives home, if she arrives home at all, her hair mussed, the smell of a man all over her, though this will not register to Sissy until years afterward—the deceit, the lovely lies of summer.
Unlike Rocky, the mutt down the street who nips at the neighbors and who used to scare Natalia half to death, Scooby-Doo is a bona fide coward; still, he chases a phantom.
Sissy yearns for her mother. She thinks of Vicki, despite—Last summer, the girls were inseparable, which made the mothers happy. Both women didn’t do well with many of the other women in the neighborhood, those who wanted to sit and gossip over iced tea and talk about how they loathed their children’s teachers, or their mothers-in-law, or their husbands. Natalia would have none of that public airing of grievances. She preferred a certain measure of appearance, of not saying too much to any one person. Natalia was that sort of woman—whatever awkwardness she may have once felt as a youngster had transformed itself into a formality that often grew more pronounced when a neighbor showed up, inexplicably holding a crumb cake. “Strangers,” she often said. “I don’t know why they would want to sit and talk.”
Except for Ginny Anderson. They met at the school’s bingo night, and the women hit it off. In the weeks following, Ginny would stop by for coffee and they’d talk while the girls were left to solidify their friendship. “Go outside,” Natalia would say, patting the children on the back with her palm, nudging them forward. “Go play”
Last summer, the girls hunted the neighborhood. They transformed themselves into private eyes and schoolmarms, Indians and cowboys, wardens and prisoners, dancers and thieves. They were sharks who circled around in the pool. They were dead swans, floating on the water. They were divers, plunging down to the bottom of the sea in search of gold doubloons. They planned routes, drew maps, knew shortcuts through alleyways and hedges and broken fences. They worked out elaborate rescue plans. They brought chalk to mark trees.
They shared blood and claimed sisterhood. They told stories until they erupted in laughter and Eva had to bang on the wall and yell for them to be quiet.
Together they made entire worlds from nothing. Throughout the long summer, they were always running away, always finding a way home.
But Precious! Sissy will never get over the incident involving Precious, one that led to the dissolution of friendship. A gift from her mother, a porcelain doll that had traveled as Natalia’s first mate on a boat years before, Precious was Sissy’s most beloved possession: her peasant dress the color of pumpkins, her lips painted red, her hair long and black and still smelling faintly of ocean salt and faraway places. When Vicki wanted to play with Precious, Sissy adamantly refused, and when she refused again, Vicki engaged the doll in a tug-of-war, until it broke, literally, in two.
In her anger, Sissy threw her half at Vicki, missing, hitting the wall. And then on the floor was Precious’s shattered face, her tiny hands disembodied. In the middle of the night, to avenge the horrific incident, Sissy snuck into her mother’s sewing room, unsheathed the metal scissors, and lopped off Vicki’s hair as she slept. How her hands trembled as the blade went down, catching the moonlight; Vicki woke, felt her head, and screamed so loudly the entire house woke up. And this was followed by Vicki leaving at three in the morning, and by Mrs. Anderson’s anger. Sissy’s punishment ensued: three days alone in her room, like a common criminal.
A secret Sissy holds: She saw Vicki on the day of the disappearance, and this is a thought that, despite her hatred, she worries like a strand of hair. If Vicki is really gone, if she didn’t just run away, could Sissy have stopped any bad luck and misfortune? Could she have called out, offered reconciliation, a game of hopscotch on the pavement? Instead,
she let Vicki ride by the house and watched, resolute, angry, as Vicki stood up on the pedals and popped a wheelie with her new bike, the Desert Rose. “Later, Gator,” Vicki said, and Sissy stood with a cocky expression as Vicki disappeared down the hill, out of sight. How her thoughts circle around what might have been, what was and is. She wonders if what she saw was a real or a phantom girl.
Maybe Sissy’s mother, that Gypsy soul, stole Vicki away, and all of this and none of this makes sense in Sissy’s mind, and all of this and none of this seems real.
Scooby-Doo shivers in fright. “Scooby-Dooby-Doo!” he says.
Sissy finishes her hot dog.
The light filters low.
She steps outside and heads to the park.
“Fucking children,” Eva says to no one but herself. She flips on the radio to drown out her thoughts, to drown out Sissy’s incessant questions. She tires of having to engage Sissy in what their father deems useful summer activities: 4-H, which resulted in Sissy practically reduced to a catatonic state after witnessing the birth of a breached goat; reading days at the library; and, before the Anderson girl’s disappearance, trips to the park, where, overwrought with boredom, Eva languished while Sissy ran around the monkey bars like an animal or dreamily walked off on her own, away from other children, as if the day weren’t able to sustain and bolster her. She is tired of Sissy, tired of chores and this too-domesticated summer, which is not the summer she imagined at all.
Eva rolls down the windows. She fans her skirt and lifts her thighs from the seat; they release like duct tape. She can feel the moisture between her legs, the heat. She touches herself, briefly, wondering if she should have showered again, but then dismisses this thought. She has no intention of going back into that house. Eva drives out the carport and down the alley, refusing to be magnanimous and rescue Sissy from loneliness. To do so would make Eva lonely, too. To do so would be like scurrying into a dark hole.
This is not to be the summer of tears. This is the summer of Eva and her man. This is the summer she will follow advice bestowed upon her the day her mother left, when Eva’s pleading became so urgent Natalia stopped packing and thought to explain. “Don’t give up your freedom,” Natalia said. “The day you give up your freedom, the day you lock yourself away, is the day you disappear. In your own skin, you vanish.”
Perhaps her mother was also thinking of Sissy, who was, after all, the accidental outcome of birth control gone awry. That day, as Natalia lugged her suitcases down the narrow hallway on the first floor and into the kitchen, she thought to add: “And for Christ’s sake, Eva, please make sure you use some protection.” She paused then, and her voice softened. “Whatever you think of me, I still worry about you.”
With that, she left Eva stunned and broken, barely able to speak.
Since that day, Eva has joined countless women in America and gone on birth control. She has developed a reputation in the process. The girls at school know Eva. They have heard rumors that Eva struts around ready to straddle most of the boys. They hold a polite distance that Eva interprets as simple jealousy. The boys know Eva, too: Alex and Greg and Ralphie and Brian Kearns, George and Yusuf, the exchange student. She and George did it in the boys’ locker room, Eva distributing her weight on a flat wooden bench while he fumbled with her bra and slathered her neck with his mouth. At the park, she and Alex did it missionary-style. Alex’s back seemed to carry the weight of the stars, a celestial, magical boy. She and Yusuf did it under the bleachers, her face touching the support beams, the smell of dusty wood seeping into her nostrils as he pushed from behind. Brian, the boy who confessed he masturbated to his mother’s Sears catalog—his favorite was on page eighty-seven, a blonde in a blue teddy—did it with Eva behind the eighteen-wheeler at Orr’s department store on Main. In a manner of speaking. He may be thinking of the model, Eva thought; he may be wishing for hair that is flaxen instead of dark chocolate. He touched Eva once, quietly convulsed, and then made countless apologies.
Each boy has taught her something about control, the lack of it, the getting and keeping of it. She must feign recklessness with the stoner, be sensitive with the shy one, a beast with the foreigner, whatever is necessary. It has somehow become a mark of survival to know when to hold a distance, when to move closer, and when to stay away altogether. She has not yet had the thought that Natalia has had a hundred times: People, even those in love, push and push their bodies together and still find themselves exhausted, consumed—after everything, they can only right themselves, put on their clothing, and walk out into the world again, alone.
But Eva won’t be with any more boys as foolish as her sister, as naïve-sounding and young. Thoughts of her man absorb her; they leave her breathless and wet. The road stretches past lawns fierce with heat, so fierce that it is as though everything—the houses, the pavement, and Eva herself—might simply burn away. The sunlight spills down, pressing against everything, and she wants her man even more. He has asked her many times to simply call him Peter. He has asked and she has promised not to tell, and he has sealed all this talk with kisses and has extended his arm around her shoulder and said, “That’s my girl.”
She rummages under the seat and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She takes a deep drag, exhales out the window. She says his name now, keeps it on the tip of her tongue, the aspirated, breathy P: Pete, Pete, Peter. And yet she cannot help but think Mr. Fulton.
A horn sounds. Eva glances over to the oncoming lane of traffic. She stumps out the cigarette and brushes away smoke before Mr. Nealy their neighbor, sends up a wave. His hunched posture is evidence of a man too old to be driving without the aid of glasses, if at all, and his habit is to lick his lips as he pushes down on the gas pedal. As he passes, he turns briefly and squints, as if his face weren’t already wrinkled like a cabbage. He drives ten miles under the speed limit, his boat of a Buick chugging by Eva’s Honda Civic. It was Mr. Nealy who spoke to her father at a neighborhood picnic a few weeks ago, that day when ants bit ankles and Sissy was tortured and outcast from a group of children who had taken to calling her Mr. Ed. Eva listened as Mr. Nealy prattled on about Dallas, and how all the actresses strutted around braless. “The paper decreed it’s a jiggle show,” he said grimly. “Girls running around today, all wanting to be noticed. You can’t not notice.” He seemed to wait for her father to agree and hold fast to wholesome values, but her father remained silent. Later, at home, her father demanded that Eva not swagger so.
Eva plans a necessary lie. If Mr. Nealy should see her father and mention that he saw her on this day when she was told to stay at home and watch her sister, Eva will say she only went to the grocery store for milk, butter, and eggs, all of which they are in dire need of getting. She cannot bear the thought of her father taking the car keys as punishment. Nor can she bear the thought of irritating him more. She has spent most of her time staying out of his way. How angry he often becomes with the girls, how bitter when things aren’t just right, when chores aren’t done and the house is left a mess. His outbursts happen with greater frequency and seem directed at what Eva hasn’t done correctly: Sissy hasn’t been wearing sensible clothes, or Eva has been wrong to let Sissy excavate only the toffee bits from the ice cream, or dinner wasn’t nutritionally balanced, or she has once again managed to turn his T-shirt a shade of pink. It is as if, in Natalia’s absence, Eva is supposed to become Miss Manners, Betty Crocker, Ann Landers, Mrs. Brady, and Alice the maid, all rolled into one. And when she fails, when things aren’t the way they should be, she must work through the winds of her father’s moods, only to have them replaced with a silence that clamps down to the bone, forcing Eva to gnaw her way out of it.
He would be happy if she never left the house. He would be happy if she were just like Natalia.
Eva winces. Mr. Nealy’s car is barely visible in her rearview mirror, and she changes the radio station, opting for the Beatles. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music.
Pete, Peter, Petey. No, she d
ecides, not Petey. Petey suggests a fumbling boy, like Brian with his fantasies and George with his sloppy fingers. She thinks of Peter’s broad face that is more complicated than attractive—a pronounced nose; round glasses that accentuate his green eyes; a mass of wavy hair; pale skin that suggests he spends all his days indoors. He is a man with political convictions, a man who lived through the protests of the sixties and came out on the other side wiser, and, according to him, only mildly cynical and scathed. “The country,” he told her over the phone one night, “is going to hell. We were better when we were younger. We never thought our ideas would collapse under us.”
“You’re at your best now,” she assured him, and she was surprised— genuinely surprised—when he laughed. “Maybe you are,” he said. “But I’m not.”
She checks her face in the mirror and wonders what Peter sees that she cannot see yet in herself. She smudges her eye shadow—copper and rose blend. Satisfied, she sings. She passes homes of those she knows, parents of students who attend Watson High. She passes winding streets: Brandywine, Ellwine, Copeland, Main. She passes the firehouse. At the light by the 7-Eleven, she turns and drives over the metal bridge and holds the wheel tighter as the car judders. Below, she can see the rows of dark buildings, long covered with soot, the blast furnaces that spew out an orange-red flame. She scrunches lower in her seat. Somewhere below, her father is checking pipes and lines and fixing damaged equipment. She speeds up, exits the bridge. “I am going, I am gone,” she sings. She waves her hand out the window, feels bold again.
She loops around the public library with its wide, squat steps, its functional design and brick columns. The sight of the library still thrills her, the thought of that early June day when she first ran into Peter outside of classes, how everything started from that brief encounter, when he held a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road and told her his baby had destroyed his copy, crayon marks on half the pages.
How did I get so lucky? she wonders. How lucky to be able to pick between the boy’s love and the man’s love and pick the man, with his expansive thoughts and reading! He has told her things, such things! He speaks of Thoreau and Emerson and Donne, Nixon and Johnson. In conversation, he has treated her as an equal. He thrills her, he alarms her, when he whispers, “Here, like this,” and “Go down.” He appeases her when she, feeling brave, speaks tentatively of home, her father, but never of that night. He almost never disagrees that institutions are oppressive to today’s youth, that they obliterate every imaginative thought. Once, over Sunday dinner, Eva told her father “The ozone is a factor,” and Frank Kisch responded plainly, “What kind of shit are you learning in school?”
Precious Page 3
