by Paloma Meir
“Good, we agree.” I smiled and so much wanted to make her laugh again. “Your hair though.” I took my hand off her chin and ran it through her choppy locks. I thought of how I had woken wanting to kiss her and run my fingers through the hair now in my hands. “It’s not perfect.” She laughed though tears still ran from her drowsy eyes. “What have you done? It’s an inch longer on one side.”
“I could put it in a ponytail.”
“No ponytails. You’re going to have to get a haircut tomorrow and you’re...” I stopped myself from instructing her to go back to her pretty clothes. I instinctively knew that would be pushing it. A rush of anger filled me, and I wanted to kill the person who had harmed her.
“I’ll go tomorrow.” She put her head on my chest and laid her arm across me calming me down from my rage.
“Everything’s going to be all right.” I ran my hand through her hair again.
“You’re so silly. Is anything ever really all right anywhere?"
“Are you a follower of Diogenes? I always thought of you as a Kierkegaard girl.”
“I know they’re philosophers, but I’ve never read them. How do you know so much about everything? I’m sleepy.”
“Not even the tip of an iceberg is what I know,” I smiled and looked down at the top of her head. “Diogenes was an ornery Greek who preferred to drink from his hands instead of a bowl. Kierkegaard believed a life of pleasure balanced with ethics, lead to a life of faith. It’s a big theory. I’ll get you the book from my room.” I moved forward to get up, but she held me back. “I’m not “leaving you," I’m getting you a book.”
“You can get it later. Stay here. Explain it to me.” She linked her arm through mine and put her head on my shoulder. I suspected she had closed her eyes ready to sleep, but I couldn’t see from my position.
“Okay, but I don’t know much about philosophy beyond Aristotle and only because of his thoughts on science. I read up on Kierkegaard because he once said, and I’m paraphrasing, that life could only be lived forward and seen only backwards. I thought that maybe he had some answers. He did but not the ones I’m looking for.”
I carried on explaining a philosophy that didn’t really interest me as my mind went to all the questions I hadn’t thought of before. Why hadn’t anyone called the police? Why hadn’t my sister told anyone? Why would her mother forbid them from telling anyone? Nothing made sense, and I knew I wouldn’t get answers from the one who seemed to be sleeping on my shoulder.
“You’ve really committed to talking to her when she’s asleep.” Danny surprised me by saying. I glanced at the door and saw I hadn't shut it when I came home.
I looked up at him and wondered how much of my philosophy talk he had heard. His eyes were red, and he had what looked like a pillow mark across his face.
“She was a little agitated, upset? I can’t really describe it.”
“Humming a lot?” He kneeled in front of her and put his hand on her shoulder, “Zelda wake-up, let’s go home. Come on baby.” She rubbed her head against my shoulder but otherwise didn’t move.
“Let her sleep. She likes naps. It’s all the sugar she eats.”
“I know that.” He sat down beside her, lifted her off of me and placed her on him. She woke for a moment, said hello and nuzzled into him, practically crawling onto his lap and going back to sleep. “No more staying up all night, too much for her. Dude, I’m in your house.”
“I would show you around but you seem stuck. I thought I would make it to college without every having a friend over. Good to have you here.” I didn’t know if chaotic emotional energy was contagious, but I felt overwhelmed by the day. “Not to go all soft on you.”
“I get it.” Zelda's head popped up, “All good baby?” His calling her “baby” made me feel like I was stuck in a low budget film from the seventies.
“Serge doesn’t like my hair.” She laughed and sat up.
“What?” He looked over at me with squinted eyes and a tilt of his head.
“I didn’t know you were a troublemaker Zelda.” I poked her in the ribs. “Context is everything.”
“He was teasing. I’m sure he loves my hair. Who wouldn’t?” She ran her hands through the tangled layers still laughing.
“Have you ever thought of changing your name to Narcissi?”
“Stop it.” She poked me back, and turned back to Danny and hugged him, “She called you and now you’re here, the way it’s supposed to be.”
“This is the way it’s going to be now. Let’s go before you fall back asleep. My house.”
“Okay.” They stood up, still wrapped around one another. “The bluest eyes you have.” She took his hand and ran it across her cheek.
“I love you baby,” he said to her.
“I love you,” she said to him.
They stood in front of me, arms around each other smiling into each other’s eyes, not moving, not leaving, frozen in their newfound “love”, making me feel like a spy in my home.
“You two were heading back to your house, Danny?”
“Right. Thanks.” They walked towards the door.
“Hey Zelda are you leaving me?” I couldn’t resist. She looked my way and giggled.
“I didn’t know you two were so playful with each other.” Danny said as he closed the door behind him.
…
“Serge,” my mother said as she sat beside me, and Carolina tried to sneak past me to go upstairs to her room. I looked at her with what I wished were gamma rays to disintegrate her on contact. I stood up to follow her and have my talk with her but my mother held me back, “I should have said this years ago. What you’ve done is wrong. My brother was the same way with my girlfriends growing up, treating my sleepover parties as if they were a candy shop. You are so much like Robert.”
“I don’t remember your brother Robert or any of your family or Dad’s family because we don’t see them, and we’re not allowed to ask about them.” I knew what she was getting at, but I didn’t want to talk about it because she was wrong on so many levels.
“I see what you’re doing, and I’ll indulge you for a moment. We have never withheld familial information from you or your sister, but I can see why you felt that way. I’ll answer any questions you have but back to Zelda for now.”
“Didn’t Carolina tell you what happened to her in the kitchen? Because what you’re talking about right now is meaningless in comparison to that.” My eyes felt heavy like my sleepless friends that had left.
“Let’s stick to the subject at hand Serge. She has a long road ahead of her but what just happened? We will deal with that now.”
“Mom, she stayed up all night. She was talking nonsense. She even admitted it.”
“You’ve been amusing yourself with her for years. She’s an innocent girl. You’ve toyed with her. It was unfair. If I weren’t so drunk I would have said something sooner. Why would you try to awaken those feelings in her if you had no intention of returning them? Just like my brother.”
“I treat her the same way I treat Carolina. She’s like a sister to me.”
“If you treated your sister the way you treated Zelda, my drinking wouldn’t have been the biggest problem in our home,” she laughed.
“I appreciate you getting sober and I’m supportive, but I’m not ready to joke about it.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t understand. She was sweet, is sweet like nobody else, and that’s it. Nobody understands this. In all the... I don’t know.... turmoil in our family, she sat beside me calm, serene like an angel. I never “toyed” with her. I would never do anything to hurt or mislead her. She never had those feelings for me, and I never had them for her.” I wasn’t going to tell her about the brief window of possibility. I didn’t see myself ever telling anyone about that.
“I do understand. It’s going to be okay now.” She ran her hand through my hair.
“I love you, Mom.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek and walked up the stairs to
destroy my sister.
…
I opened the door to my sister’s room without knocking as she had done to me countless times. She sat on her bed, her knees tucked up to her chest and head down as if she had been waiting for me. I took a good look at her and my anger vanished. I hated myself for not being able to hold on to it. It was obvious bad decisions had been made but not with malicious intent.
“You’re going to tell me everything, something you should have done months ago, but first I need to know if I’ve ever done anything to mislead Zelda.”
“Did Mom talk to you? She thinks that you’ve been taking her from my room in the middle of the night to have sex with her.” She looked at me with wide eyes as if she were relieved I wasn’t yelling at her. “Something about her brother Robert.”
I wondered if I could have ever done that. I shook the thought out of my head. “She didn’t mention sex. She made it sound like we were in a novel from the Victorian era, and I had been “toying” with her affections. You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’ve answered it before. No Serge, she doesn’t feel that way about you, she never has. She’s possessive of you like Anthony is with her. She thinks of you as an older brother, more than a brother, I can’t explain it. She feels very connected to you. I don’t think she’s ever even noticed how attractive you are. You’re not the only one who can split people. She thinks you’re brainy, a little geeky.”
“Geeky? I’m a world class athlete.”
“Did you come in here looking for compliments? You want to hear of her undying love for you? I heard what she said downstairs as well as you did. It may very well be undying love, but it’s platonic. Haven’t you ever noticed that she always wants you to be with us? She never had any friends before us. She attached to you. She’s spoiled, and not used to not having what she wants. You reject her most of the time.”
“I don’t reject her. I’m busy.” I sat down on the edge of her unmade bed.
“I’m sure she thinks of herself as busy too. What is the point of this conversation? It doesn’t matter anymore. She loves Danny, and in case you haven’t noticed, he loves her. "No one has ever experienced love like we have” to quote her.” She rolled her eyes. “Maybe it’s you and not her, maybe you have an undying love. Genetics gave you all the intelligence and looks, and left me with nothing.” She stared out her window and shook her head. “You understand everyone but yourself.”
I looked at her closely. I had never considered her looks before. She was a pretty girl with her dark hair but to be truthful, it was always a mess, frizzy. Zelda was always applying conditioners to it and brushing it out. Her face was pretty like our mothers, wide set eyes more of a hazel than dark like mine, cute small features and a mouth like a Cupid’s bow. She looked like she was from another era, maybe the twenties.
She had been awkward as a child the way that Zelda was, all bones and crazy hair. In some ways she still looked like a child. What must it have been like for her to have her best friend evolve into essentially Venus on a half shell while she stayed child-like? I had no doubt that she would one day be an attractive woman, but she would never be like her friend, but most girls wouldn’t have that experience either. Zelda was an anomaly, her beauty almost a birth defect the way I had always thought of my brain, too random to be of any statistical importance.
“You’re wrong. You’re pretty Carolina, still awkward, but you’ll grow out of that. Brains, intelligence? In any other family you would be the golden child. You got stuck with me for a brother. Don’t waste time with those thoughts, okay?”
“Still awkward?” She laughed, “That’s what I like best about you, Serge. You’re incapable of lying. I’m just feeling sorry for myself... This isn’t what you came into talk about. Let’s get it over with. Danny didn’t tell me how much he told you. He’s so funny the way he’s trying to organize every aspect of her life, taking her outburst and putting a positive spin on it. “It’s good this happened. We can get it out of the way." He actually said that on the phone. I don’t even know what he was talking about.”
“They have a long term plan.” I knew all of this was too much for him. “He’ll be all right." I said more to myself. “Never mind. Start from the beginning.” I thought of leaving her room. Maybe I didn’t want to know anything anymore.
“You aren’t going to like any of this, not just the rape. Don’t ever say that word to her.” She took the pillow beside her and held it to her stomach. “It’s my fault. She didn’t want to go. I was so mean to her on the bus. I wish she had gotten off at the stop and left me to go on alone. I told her she was stupid because she questioned my drinking. She liked to drink too. It starts with that.” She paused, but I didn’t rush her this time.
“It started on her birthday. That’s not true. I started the year before. I don’t know why. There was always so much alcohol in our house. I would put some in my thermos for school. My classes were so dull. I didn’t tell her, and I didn’t do it too much.”
“How could you have done that with our mother the way she was?” I knew that was a bad question and would put her on the defensive. “Sorry go on.”
“As Zelda said on the bus 'it has a biological element' I mocked her when she said that. I know how sensitive she is about her intelligence. I tried to hurt her...” She looked like she was about to cry. “I was so jealous of her. She has everything. I never felt that way about her until Danny. It was like, exactly how perfect of a life could one person have?”
“A rich life isn’t a perfect life.” I would do well to remember that in the future.
“It seems like it sometimes. Anyway she doesn’t have a perfect life anymore, and I ruined it.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but you didn’t ruin her life. She’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that.”
“In fact, I do know that. You’re too close to see it. I understand her.” Saying I understood her made me feel like I had revealed too much of myself for reasons I didn’t actually understand.
“I stole two little bottles of Kahlua from the liquor store, and we drank them on the bus. I don’t think she had eaten. Maybe that’s why it hit her so hard? We met John and walked down to the beach. He was with a bunch of his friends and this older guy. Zelda was really weird and tipsy. We always called it tipsy. We never got drunk, ever.” She took a deep breath, “She could be so snobby about John’s friends. Spider, the one that raped her, wasn’t a friend. Nobody knew him. Everyone thought someone else knew him, but that wasn’t true. He just wandered down to the beach with us.”
“Do you have any food?” I sat down at her desk hungry, the taco’s with Danny having been eaten hours before.
“I might have a granola bar in the drawer.”
“Thanks.” I opened her desk drawer to find not a granola bar but a protein bar. I disliked the texture of protein bars, but I wasn’t about to go downstairs and find something else to eat. I opened the wrapper and ate it quickly because she seemed to be waiting for me to finish eating it before resuming the story.
“Spider latched onto Zelda, talking to her, and handed her a bottle of Tequila. He tried to touch her hair. She swatted his hand away and gave him that look. You know how she squints her face when she doesn’t like something? She was mostly laughing. I didn’t think anything about it because who thinks about things like that? She’s not the kind of girl that’s afraid to stand up for herself. She’s shy or timid. I was hungry, so John and I went to get pizza. This is where everything gets really bad.” She pulled the pillow tighter to her stomach and stared off not much differently than Zelda had earlier.
“It’s okay, Carolina. It was foggy out, and there was a line at the pizza stand, right? That’s what Danny said to me.” I prompted her, hoping to pull her out of her dreamy state.
“Zelda and Danny don’t know much of the next part, and it's going to stay that way. Can you promise me that?”
“No. Seriously, do you ever learn? No mor
e secrets.”
“Okay, she was raped and now she has PTSD. Bye Serge.”
“What is wrong with you? What happened on the beach isn’t your fault, but everything else is. You and your secrets, look what you did to her.”
“You have it reversed. What happened on the beach was my fault, everything else? Not my fault. You want her to know? You want her to end up in a mental institution or kill herself? Fine, it’s up to you.” She screamed at me, her eyes practically bulged out of her head.
“Stop being so dramatic. The worst is over. She has doctors.” I wondered why Danny’s father and Zelda had used the plural.
“Okay Serge the Truth Seeker. We went back with the pizza and Zelda and Spider weren’t on the beach anymore. I asked where they went and John’s friends laughed and told us Zelda was hanging all over Spider, kissing him and they left together. No coercion, she walked off with him. How do you think she’ll take that piece of news? Will it be good for her to know that?”
