The Wrong Sister

by Caroline Leavitt

  Daniel slowed but he kept going. “You don’t love me, but that’s all right. There’s an art to loving. Have you read that book? The Art of Loving? Erich Fromm? I’ll bring you a copy.” He looked over at me. His voice was smooth, modulated. It sounded liquid. “Don’t you think I have enough love for both of us?”

  I looked out at the road, bordered by tall grassy fields. Cars hummed behind and ahead of us. “You’re not going to take me home?”

  “Of course I am. But not while you’re this upset. We have to talk this out. Talking solves things. The problem with Rose and me was we never talked it out toward the end.” He turned the wheel. “I’ll park the car and we’ll talk. How about that?”

  “I want to go home. Now.”

  “No one will love you like I do.” His voice was matter of fact. He turned to look at me. “You have very pretty hair, all misted in the rain like that. Hair to write a poem about.”

  “Please. I don’t feel good. I have to go home.”

  “Listen to me, Stella—.”

  “Let me out. I have to get out.” I gripped the door handle. He leaned across and grabbed at my hand. “Stella, listen—” he said. “Listen to me—you don’t understand—” but I couldn’t listen.

  I couldn’t understand. Not anymore. I opened the car door. The road spun out before me. Less than a foot away was the grass, and then, without thinking, I tumbled from the car.

  I curled up and hit the pavement and a bolt of pain zigzagged through me. I rolled toward the grass. I was soaking wet; my tights were torn. I could hear Daniel shouting at me, trying to stop the car, to pull over. The other cars were honking, but I got up, and I saw his car, and then I saw him getting out, coming after me, and then I was all legs and arms and jagged breath, running.

  This was suburbia after all, not the country Daniel had proclaimed it. There were lit houses and convenience stores and an open all night Store 24 where as soon as I ran inside, the cashier, a clean-scrubbed girl with a blonde ponytail, reached for the phone and held it out to me. My tights were ripped. I had a gash across one arm and my mascara raccooned along my eyes.

  My dress and stockings were torn, and my shoes, ballerina flats from Pappagallo with ribbon soles, the same shoes that had cost me two weeks’ allowance, were ruined. The thin soles had come right off and one of my feet was bleeding. I told her I was all right, that I all I wanted to do was call a cab and go home. “Honey, you sure?’ she said.

  It didn’t take me long to get home. The cab driver was an older man who didn’t seem the least bit surprised by my appearance. He didn’t say a single word to me except ,“That will be $10.50,” when we got to my house. As soon as I got out of the cab, he sped away.

  The lights were out except for the one my mother kept on at night, to let prowlers know this was not an empty house, even when it sometimes was. It was 11:00 p.m. My mother wouldn’t be home until morning. Rose would still be out, if she came home at all. I let myself in as quietly as I could and walked toward my room, wanting only to burrow under the quilt, to sleep, to forget everything about my life, when there, suddenly, was Rose, in the corridor.

  I waited for her to tell me that she had told me so, that I got what I deserved, that the real question was just who did I think I was? Or maybe she would leave me to my own devices and instead go to the phone and call Daniel and demand an explanation. I wavered in the hall. I felt myself listing. Behind me, the phone rang, a sound stinging the air, and for the first time that I could remember in a long time, Rose didn’t rush to answer it. And then Rose moved forward and for a moment, because her face was so unreadable, I thought she was going to strike me, and I put my hands up, to shield my face.

  Her arms hooped about me. I felt her warmth, the slow slide of her hair as it spilled against me. She led me toward the bathroom, not letting go. She kept whispering, ignoring the doorbell, which made me jump. She whispered but it might have been Morse code because all I could hear was the soothing hiss of sound, mesmerizing me. She took off my clothes and wadded them into the trash. Then she drew me a bath, all the while still whispering to me.

  The doorbell stopped. The phone was silent. She held up one finger for me to wait and disappeared, and when she came back, she held up a blue packet with some French writing scribbled across it. She tore the top and then poured cobalt-colored crystals into the bath, stroking one hand through the water until it bubbled up blue. There was the smell and tang of citrus. She helped me step in, lowering me into the tub as gently as a fine piece of silk.

  The phone rang again and I stiffened. I tried to talk, but she simply put her hand to my mouth. “Shhhh,” she said.

  And when I started to cry, she sluiced back my hair with her fingers. “We’re always sisters,” she said quietly, and then I shut my eyes, and then I didn’t hear the phone anymore. Instead, I gripped at the hand she offered me, I held fast to her, even as the slow steady waves of the bath water washed over me like a tide.

  The Last Vacation

  He wouldn’t come out of the water. Sadie sat on the beach blanket, slathered in a greasy skin of lotion, as breaded with sand as a cutlet, hot and itchy and tired. The sun was in her eyes but still, she watched her father’s head bobbing out in the ocean. He was so far apart from the other swimmers, he seemed alone.

  The beach was cooling down. People were gathering their things: blankets, beach rafts, and the squirming hands of their kids. They were heading out to the drive-ins, the restaurants, the shade of their own cottages. They walked past Sadie and her mother, shifting the sands, laughing and talking. Sadie brushed herself off. Her mother, Louise, shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand and frowned. “He always does this,” Louise said wearily. “Once again, we’re going to be the last ones on this beach.” She stood up, tugging down the high-cut legs of her red two-piece, her stomach brown and flat, her long pale hair unfurling like a flag to her waist. Louise was 39 years old and men on the beach still looked at her, women still turned their heads, appraising, more than they did at Sadie, who was built like a swizzle straw, whose suit was plain and one-piece and deep blue, with padding at the bust, whose hair wasn’t the thick gold gloss of her mother’s but a dirtier blonde fizz to her chin.

  Louise scanned the horizon and waved. “Yoo hoo, Bill,” she said weakly. She glumly sat down. She rested her chin on her knees.

  “There. Here he comes,” Sadie pointed. Her father began swimming back to the shore, stepping onto the sand, water sluicing from his plaid boxers, his black hair slicked back. He was freckled and tanned both. He was thin and sharp featured. He shook the water from him, sprinkling them with droplets, the way a dog might. “Cut it out!” Sadie said, and he laughed and kept shaking. The water droplets made her feel hotter than ever. She got out of his way. He shook at her again deliberately and then picked up the blanket.

  “We’d better get going if we’re going to make our reservations,” Louise said. “I still have to shower off this salt.”

  “It’s too late to go out,” he said. “Let’s just eat at home.”

  “It’s not a vacation if I have to cook.”

  “Well, Louise, it’s not a vacation if I have to pay for something we can do ourselves.” Bill gathered up the beach things. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Sadie knew this scenario. Hot weather. Hot tempers. Nobody and nothing ever really cooling down.

  Every July since she could remember, it went this way. Her family rented a cottage on Cape Cod for two weeks. You always knew what you were getting. Yarmouth or Hyannis Port. A too-small box of a cottage with no air conditioning, the windows flung open for the nonexistent “nice fresh breeze” Louise assured everyone was about to come in any moment. Pine needle lawns and no front porch. Crowded beaches buzzing with horseflies and kids and the tinny scratch of radios, the high point of the day being when the ice cream truck came, and all of this because they couldn’t afford the more deserted, genteel richness of Truro.

  For two weeks, they all had a routine. Beach in
the morning, lunch at home, more beach, maybe a little shopping and then, the one thing that gave Bill real pleasure, a drive-in movie at night, where they all sat silently together. They were all exhausted by the heat, by the things they did each day as if they had to do them. The first thing they did was hit the Cape library and stock up on books, as thick as fists. Bill grabbed nonfiction, Sadie and Louise dreamily devoured novels. Sadie liked to read on the beach, getting lost in what she was reading. She wasn’t stuck on a hot beach with her parents. She was in love in Paris. She was walking on the moon. She was anywhere and everywhere else.

  “Let me see,” Louise said, tapping Sadie. Paris vanished. A toddler screamed. Louise peered over Sadie’s shoulder. Bill looked up, distracted. “Is your book good?” Sadie finally asked him. He shrugged and turned a page, looked down.

  This was the year Sadie was 16, the summer she had her first boyfriend. His name was Danny. He had gone to Sadie’s school, but they didn’t share classes, and he almost always had a pretty blonde girlfriend on his arm who looked right through Sadie, the same way he did. He was smart and funny and going to MIT on full scholarship in the fall, and there was no reason for him to be interested in Sadie. He never spoke to Sadie, not until the first day of summer, when he came into the Sweet Dreams bakery where she was working, her hair a nimbus of curls, her pink uniform dusted with sugar, and he suddenly seemed to see her. He blinked, shaking his head, as if he were trying to clear something.

  “I know you,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets. He looked down at the cupcakes. “Sadie.” It startled her, hearing him say her name. It worked its way deep into her bones. “You’re always reading,” he said. She drew back, stung, but then she saw that he was smiling at her, that he kept smiling even after he bought a dozen chocolate chip cookies. “Reading’s good for you,” he said and bit into a cookie. He stopped at the door, considering, and then opened it, and left.

  Every day after that, he came in for cookies. He took his time. He talked about MIT, about the stars and sometimes, too, about his mother, a divorcee who went out every night to the Holiday Inn to husband hunt. “People think I’m a golden boy, but it’s not that at all,” he told Sadie. “We don’t have money. I had to work hard to get into school, even harder to get a scholarship, and every day, over my head, like this drumbeat, I keep hearing, ‘You can’t fuck this up, you can’t fuck this up.’” He leaned on the counter. “You’re a good listener. You understand me.”

  She couldn’t tell him that he was making her so nervous she couldn’t speak. Not with words, anyway. Instead, she tucked in extra chocolate cookies into his bag, a pair of mint clouds and a macaroon, her own whole sweet language. The air sugared around them, sweeter and sweeter the more he came in for cookies, and then one day, he came and put his hands, broad and flat and beautiful, on the glass case, making prints she’d have to wipe off. “I didn’t come for brownies,” he said. “I came for you.”

  She blinked at him, shocked. “I’m not blonde,” she blurted, and then flushed, humiliated. He laughed. “Who wants you to be?”

  She shrugged. “Well, your other girlfriends—”

  “I like you because you’re different. I’d like to get to know you.”

  She swallowed. “I’d like to get to know you, too.”

  “So let’s do something.”

  She stood still.

  “Say a movie. Say something to eat afterwards. Say this Friday.” He waited. “Say yes.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You’re too young to date,” Bill told her that evening.

  “She is not,” Louise said. She was giddy. She acted as if it were happening to her and not Sadie. “I can take you shopping, buy you a dress.”

  “No one wears dresses.”

  “Well, they should.”

  Bill frowned. “She’s too young,” he repeated.

  Louise met his gaze. “I was her age when I fell in love.”

  Sadie moved away from both of them. She knew her mother didn’t mean with her father.

  Sadie’s parents were a couple but Sadie didn’t know why or how. They slept in twin beds with a red maple nightstand smack in the middle, the same way as those 1950s sitcoms everyone was always making fun of. They didn’t hold hands or do more than peck kisses at each other and late at night, the only murmur of voices Sadie ever heard was coming from the radio, from one of the talk shows her mother loved to listen to.

  Sadie knew how her parents had met. Louise told her it was at an adult camp, a month after Louise had been jilted by the man she really loved. Sadie had seen his picture, a gleaming blond with a mischievous smile, who had run off and married someone else, and if Sadie wondered why Louise kept the photo, she didn’t ask. According to Louise, Bill had fallen in love with her at first sight. He hadn’t cared that her eyes were red from crying, that the name she sometimes murmured wasn’t his. “I was 28 and already an old maid,” Louise told Sadie, and so, two months later, she and Bill were married, and a year later, Sadie arrived.

  Early on, Sadie knew her father wasn’t like other fathers. She couldn’t remember him reading her a story, taking her to the park or the zoo or anything other than a movie, and that didn’t count because he was silent then, and they always saw movies he wanted to see and he didn’t like to talk about them afterwards, either. He didn’t laugh with her or hug her much or ask her what she had done that day. He didn’t have a passion for golf or badminton the way some of the other fathers did, men who took their girls with them and taught them a little something.

  Instead, Sadie’s father’s passion was for the vegetable garden that took up half their backyard, and when she even got close to it, he shouted at her so loudly that she burst into tears.

  He spent hours ordering seeds from catalogs, whole weekends mulching and planting and spraying, whistling to himself. It was Louise who filled Sadie’s days, who took her shopping and out to eat, who sat for hours talking to her. Louise who made dresses for Sadie’s dolls and brushed Sadie’s hair.

  Bill was gone before Sadie even woke in the morning. When he came home, he sat in the leather chair in the living room and read the paper, or a book, and after dinner, he went to his den and worked. When she thought of it now, she could remember two nice things he had done for her. When she was ten, he had confronted the librarian who had refused to let Sadie into the adult section. “This is my daughter and she has my permission to be anywhere she wants. And when she can read these books, she can take out whatever book she wants,” he said. He guided Sadie towards the adult books. “Don’t you dare try to stop her.” And once, when Sadie was coloring a picture, he walked behind her and put his hand on her hair, stroking it, and when she turned around, starting, he was already in the other room. Two nice things. It didn’t seem like very much.

  One night, when she was five, she woke to hear her parents arguing. “Who’s her nursery school teacher?” Louise shouted. “What’s her favorite thing to do? You don’t know, do you? You don’t have a clue?” Sadie pressed her ear against the wall. Her father’s voice was low, insistent, muffled.

  “Wrong,” Louise shouted. “Everything about you is wrong.”

  Hearing them argue made her afraid. Suddenly, she saw ghosts in the closet, a big black dog growling just under the bed. She got up and switched on her light and then she padded into her parents’ room, her flowered flannel nightgown frilling about her knees.

  The room was dark. Her parents had stopped arguing. She crawled into Louise’s bed.

  Even at night, her mother smelled of gardenia and powder. Sadie snuggled against Louise, who sighed, and then Sadie slept.

  It became a habit. She’d go to bed and wake up and crawl in bed with Louise, who never seemed to mind, who never told her she was too big a girl for such nonsense.

  And then one day, Bill asked if Sadie would sleep with him, too. “You used to sleep in my arms when you were a baby,” he said.

  Sadie blinked at him. Her heart hammered in her chest. />
  “Don’t you think I can keep away the boogie man as well as your mother?” He sat in the kitchen chair. He looked defeated and sad, and Sadie suddenly felt so responsible she couldn’t bear it. “Yes,” she said.

  “Ah, that’s my girl,” he said. He ruffled her hair, leaving the kitchen, and as soon as he did, the enormity of what she had done struck her like a blow.

  The night Sadie was to sleep in her father’s bed, he came home at 6:00, the way he usually did, but he was smiling. “Hi Sadie,” he said. The three of them ate dinner as if nothing were wrong. Lamb chops and baby peas and bright yellow corn from the can, Green Giant, the kind Sadie liked. Chocolate pudding peaked with Cool Whip for dessert. Sadie dallied that night, brushing each tooth, washing her face two times, getting in and out of three different pairs of pajamas. Sadie padded into her parents’ room. They were both in bed, reading, both in pajamas, both smiling. “Here’s our girl,” her father said. Sadie climbed across her mother and into his bed. Sadie curled toward the wall and he curled against her, and where her mother was soft and warm, her father was angular and unyielding. Sadie felt the press of him against her.

  “Nighty night,” her mother said, switching off the light. Sadie’s eyes flew open. Her father flung one arm about her, trapping her. Sadie pretended to be asleep. She made her breathing long and even. She snored, and then her father hoisted himself up. She felt his breath on her face, and then he lowered himself down again. He stroked her hair and then he slept.

  Sadie didn’t sleep. She didn’t like her father’s breath on the back of her neck. Sadie didn’t like his body so close to hers. She shifted, but she wouldn’t turn toward him. She didn’t want to see him facing her. Sadie kept her eyes open, and on her mother, in the bed next to them. She tried to will Louise to open her eyes, to see her discomfort and rescue her. Come on, she begged.