Little Sister

by MacDonald, Patricia

  “No. Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Just to jazz them up a little.”

  “We like them plain,” said Francie. “What’s wrong with having them plain?” There was an edge in her voice.

  “Plain is fine,” said Beth, reminding herself that it was Francie’s company.

  For a few moments there was silence in the kitchen as Beth set the table for three and Francie formed the meat into patties. Then Francie said, “Do you use lots of spices in Philadelphia?”

  Beth stifled a smile at the way the question was put. “Well, I have my own business there, so lots of nights I don’t bother to cook. I’m just too tired.”

  “I know what you mean,” Francie said in agreement. She frowned in concentration as she molded the meat.

  There was another silence between them, and then Francie said, “It must be weird living in the city.”

  Beth laid down the fork and napkin in her hand. “I’ve been very happy there. It’s been a good place to live.”

  “I guess you must miss it already,” said Francie, carefully placing the meat on the broiler rack in readiness for cooking.

  “Not too much,” said Beth. “Not yet.” As she said it, though, she thought of Mike. He had seemed so far away on the phone yesterday. He had been very solicitous of her, but she had felt, as they were talking, as if it had been months, rather than days, since she had seen him. She felt a sudden desire to be home, to be normal, that was like a little ache inside her.

  Maybe I should call him again, Beth thought as she began to tear lettuce leaves into a green Pyrex bowl. Francie had said that they didn’t need salad, but Beth had insisted that it was no trouble to make. No, she thought, don’t bug him. You’ve got plenty to do around here. Get it done, and you can be home again. That’s what you really should do.

  Beth finished the salad and pushed it back on the counter. “What time did you tell Andrew to come?”

  “Six.”

  “Six? Lord, isn’t that a little early?”

  “That’s when we eat,” said Francie.

  “Fine,” said Beth. “Six it is. I forgot how things are done around here. Look,” she said, “I’ve got a lot to do, so I’m going to get started.”

  Leaving Francie in the kitchen, Beth picked up an empty grocery bag, went down the hall and reluctantly opened the door to the room which her parents had shared. She felt like an intruder in the dark, stuffy room, though she knew that neither of them would ever return to it. The room was neat except for one of her father’s shirts, which lay at the foot of the bed, two pens still clipped to the pocket. She looked around the room. Everything else in it was exactly the same as it had been when her mother was alive. For a moment she had the terrible thought that perhaps he had never bothered to clean out her mother’s things, and it made her feel almost faint with dismay. She walked to the closet and opened the door with trepidation. Only men’s clothes hung there. She let out a sigh of relief and then looked in again. The clothes would have to be sorted and folded into boxes. She did not feel like doing that right now. She reached up to the top shelf of the closet and pulled down a shoebox with one ripped corner. The contents clinked and shifted as she moved it, so she knew it didn’t contain shoes. She put the box down on the bed without opening it. Then she walked over to her father’s bureau and opened the top drawer. The drawer was filled with a daunting jumble of items. She took the drawer out of the bureau and dumped it onto the bedspread beside the shoebox.

  As she looked down at the motley assortment, she was dimly aware of the doorbell’s ringing, and then she heard Francie’s footsteps clattering down the stairs in response. Sir Lancelot has arrived, she thought with a smile.

  She sat down on the bed and opened the top of the shoebox. It was filled with a sparse selection of men’s jewelry, army memorabilia, and other scraps of things such as toothpicks, matchbooks, and loose change. A wave of inertia swept over Beth as she began to pick through this collection. Every single item required a decision. Was it old or new? Valuable or worthless, gold or brass? There were broken watches and medals with ribbons attached. She knew that they must be mementos of something, but she had no idea of what. Weariness engulfed her, and she felt like putting the lid back on the box and just turning her back on it. Do it now, she told herself. Get it done. It won’t just go away.

  She began to sort, throwing everything that she was in doubt about into the empty brown bag and trying to keep only the things she was certain were of value. After a little while the odor of the hamburgers cooking filled the house. She realized that she was hungry when her stomach growled, but she doggedly kept on with her task, trying to get as much done as she could before supper. She looked at the clock on the night table before she unplugged it and decided to put it in a pile designated for the church. Six o’clock. What an ungodly hour to have dinner. It was the very time that they had always eaten when she was a girl.

  Opening another drawer in the bureau, Beth found the old, battered wallet that her father had always carried. It had a rubber band around it. Someone must have put it in there after he had been taken away by the undertaker. Beth removed the rubber band, opened it up and looked inside. There were a few wrinkled dollar bills in the billfold and a couple of cards in the pocket. She pulled them out. There was his faded Social Security card, his driver’s license, and an ID card from the electric company with a photo on it of him, pale and scowling, that made him look like a convict. There was an insurance agent’s calling card, and Beth dimly remembered speaking to the man after the funeral. He had tried to explain the terms of her father’s small life insurance policy to her, although she had not felt like listening. The wallet also held a yellow paid receipt for a local plumber and one picture, a wallet-size school portrait of Francie. It was the only photo he carried. As if she and her mother did not exist, had never existed.

  Beth stared at it for a moment, the old familiar resentment churning inside her. Gripping the wallet tightly, she pulled out the money and put that on the bureau. “More junk,” she muttered, tossing the wallet and the rest of its contents into the garbage can.

  She was suddenly aware that the cooking smells had faded away in the house. Opening the bedroom door, she listened and could hear Francie’s and Andrew’s voices in the kitchen. She heard another sound as well: the scraping of silverware against plates.

  After closing the bedroom door behind her, Beth walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Francie and Andrew were seated at the table, finishing up their meal. Two serving plates on the table held the hamburgers and potatoes, although the juice from the hamburgers was congealing around the meat. The salad which Beth had made was sitting, wilted and untouched, on the counter. Beth’s place at the table was empty except for the silverware she herself had placed there.

  This dinner was my idea, Beth thought. My idea to ask him here, to be nice, for Francie’s sake. Suddenly, like the one witch not invited to Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Beth wanted to get even.

  “Noah thinks he’s going to send his songs to Kenny Rogers and then Kenny is going to fly him to Nashville,” Andrew was saying with a sneer.

  “Do you want some pie?” Francie asked. “I made it.” She suddenly noticed that Beth was in the room. “Hi,” she said. Then she turned back to Andrew.

  Andrew looked quickly from Francie to Beth, who was still standing in the doorway, her arms rigid at her sides. Then he shrugged. “Sure. I guess so.”

  “Good,” said Francie happily, pushing her chair back and going to the refrigerator.

  “How ya doin’?” Andrew asked Beth, watching her stony expression with wary eyes.

  “Hello, Andrew,” Beth said in a tart voice.

  She strode across the kitchen and reached in front of Francie, who was cutting the pie on the countertop. Without saying, “Excuse me,” Beth jerked a plate from the cabinet above Francie’s head and slammed the cabinet door shut. She walked over to the salad bowl and heaped some on her plate. A slice o
f cucumber flew up and landed on the edge of Francie’s pie. Beth ignored it and walked over to the table. Francie made a noise of protest that stuck in her throat. She looked at Beth, who had dropped her plate on the table and stabbed a hamburger with her fork.

  Francie carried the two dishes of pie to the table and put one in front of Andrew and one in front of herself.

  “These are burned,” said Beth, dumping the hamburger on her own plate.

  Two red spots appeared on Francie’s cheeks, but she said nothing.

  Andrew began to gobble down his dessert. “Good pie,” he said through a mouthful of food.

  “Thanks,” said Francie. “It’s a pie I always used to make for my—”

  “What grade are you in school, Andrew?” Beth interrupted as she tore her potato apart with her fork and knife.

  Andrew swallowed the pie as if it were a wad of wet papier-mache and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He looked quickly over at Francie, who was staring down at her plate, her mouth turned down in a bitter line.

  “I’m a—uh, sophomore,” said Andrew.

  Beth nodded as if she were a state trooper examining an expired registration. “A sophomore,” she repeated.

  “Yes,” he said. He frowned at Francie, but the girl’s eyes were riveted to the bottle of milk on the table. Her face was white except for the spots of red in her cheeks.

  “You go to school and work, too, is that it?”

  “What do you mean?” said Andrew, nervously folding the comer of his paper napkin into triangle upon triangle. His eyes narrowed as he looked at her.

  “At the Seven-Eleven. You do work there, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I work there.”

  “Part-time,” Francie cried in a shrill voice. She slammed her hand down on the table. “Mind your own business.”

  Beth put down her fork and stared coldly at her sister. “I was just making conversation. This may surprise you, but civilized people often make conversation at dinner.”

  Francie’s eyes glinted behind her glasses, and she gripped her fork so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  Andrew stood up from the table. “That was really good, babe. But I’ve got to get going.”

  “No, don’t go,” Francie wailed.

  “Thanks for having me,” he said to Beth with just the hint of a sneer on his face.

  Beth nodded stiffly, unable to meet his eyes. Francie stood up and slammed her chair against the table. Without another word to Beth she followed Andrew out of the kitchen.

  “Good night, Andrew,” Beth said. There was no reply from either of them. Beth sat alone in the kitchen, staring at the salt shaker and forcing down her dinner. After a minute she heard the front door close and then the sound of her sister’s footsteps heading up the stairs.

  “Francie,” she called out.

  There was a moment of silence, and then a sullen voice said, “What?”

  “Get in here and clean up this mess. I’m not going to clean up after you and your little friend.”

  Francie stomped into the kitchen and began to throw the plates into the sink.

  “What a bitch,” she muttered.

  “Pardon me,” said Beth, “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Francie snapped.

  “I didn’t hear you when you called me for dinner either,” said Beth.

  “I don’t have to call you for dinner.”

  “No, obviously.”

  “Thanks for ruining everything,” said Francie. She turned and jerked the faucets on full blast. “Bitch.”

  “I’ll do my dishes later,” said Beth, getting up from the table.

  She went into the living room and sat down in a chair by the window. She picked up a book and pretended to read it, but her heart was pounding, and the words were a blur on the page.

  Very mature, she told herself. You really handled that situation beautifully. Why didn’t you just dump their plates in their laps, just so there would be no mistaking how you felt? What’s a good temper tantrum without a little food throwing? And all this because they ate a hamburger without waiting for you.

  Beth put the book face down on her lap and turned her head to look out the window at the night sky. The stars seemed to swim before her eyes.

  Suddenly she heard the water stop running in the kitchen. After a few minutes she heard Francie coming down the hall. She felt an urge to call out to her, to try to make up. It had been wrong to spoil the evening, to run Andrew off, now for the second time. But as she saw Francie pass the doorway she could not force the words out. Francie started up the stairs to her room.

  “Good night, Francie,” Beth said, but her voice was harsh. She had not meant it to sound that way.

  Francie kept going and did not reply.

  Chapter 6

  ANDREW FELT THE CHILL OF THE NIGHT cutting through his coat as he walked, head down, his body angled forward. It was as if icy hands were closing around his narrow chest, squeezing him, making it hard to breathe. The walk itself did not tire him. He was used to walking. He walked everywhere. But he was hurrying to get back, and the food from that miserable dinner roiled in his stomach, threatening to rise up and choke him.

  Car headlights appeared behind him, in the distance, and Andrew whirled around, sticking out his thumb. The car whizzed past him. “Fucking bastard pricks,” Andrew muttered after the car, and jammed his hands back in his pockets. He smacked his arms against his sides as he increased his pace.

  He forced himself to go faster and faster, sometimes breaking into a run, until he could actually feel himself sweating despite the cold temperature. The night was still and quiet but not safe. He tried to clear his mind of everything but his progress. But every now and then the trees would rustle, and it seemed to him that the night was whispering to him some low words of warning that he could not decipher. He had to get back.

  As he finally reached the house he looked up and saw a dark silhouette hovering in the front window beside the sheer curtains. The silhouette disappeared as he got closer. Checking around on all sides like a spy, Andrew started toward the back of the house, but he did not go in the back door. Instead, he lifted the sloping metal doors to the cellar and scurried down the cinder-block steps. The cellar was dark and smelled moldy. He made his way by habit to the light cord and pulled it on. A dim bulb was illuminated, throwing a weak greenish light on the cold cellar.

  Quickly and mechanically Andrew began to remove his clothes. He folded and piled them neatly on a white enamel-topped table that stood against one wall. He stood there, naked and shivering, under a shower head that protruded from a length of pipes along one wall over a drain in the cellar floor. Gritting his teeth, he turned on the faucets and waited for the blast of lukewarm water to hit his goosefleshed skin. Almost as soon as the blast came and he had begun to lather himself with the soap that rested on a little plate attached to one of the pipes, he thought he heard noises coming from the floors above. It was as if someone were shouting his name in a high, frightened voice. Andrew shut off the water and demanded in an angry voice, “What?”

  There was no reply. Andrew clenched the faucet handles and turned them on again. He rinsed himself quickly and stepped from beneath the shower. There was silence in the house.

  Andrew rubbed himself dry with the scratchy towel which hung on another nearby pipe. Then he dressed in the clothes which had been placed on the enamel table. After slipping on his shoes again, he pulled off the light chain, groped his way to the cellar stairs, and then climbed to the door at the top. When he arrived there, he knocked twice and then began to drum his fingers on the stair rail in annoyance.

  A soft voice came through the door. “Andrew, is that you?”

  “Open up,” he snapped. “Of course it’s me.” / saw you in the window, he thought. You waited until you saw me.

  “Just a minute.” He heard the bolt being drawn back, and then the door opened. She poked her head around the corner, a limp ribbon holding back h
er frowsy, dirty blond hair. “Peekaboo,” she said.

  Andrew tried to push the door open, but Leonora Vincent raised her arm to look at her watch, thus blocking his exit. Andrew stared at the arm for a moment, thinking of snapping it back, like a turnstile.

  “Seven o’clock,” she said. “My goodness.”

  “Get out of the way, Mother,” he said.

  Leonora lowered her arm, and her son squeezed past her, making sure not to brush against her.

  “I had to stay late at the store tonight,” said Andrew, starting down the hall. “Mr. Temple had some meeting to go to.” He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. After taking out a bottle of ice water, he poured some into a glass and began to drink it.

  Leonora followed him and stood in the doorway. She was wearing a huge, shapeless sweater, a tight pair of stretch pants, and scuff slippers. “I think our Mr. Temple is being too demanding of your time,” she said.

  “I didn’t care about staying,” he said, gulping down the water and starting toward the door where she stood.

  “Wait. Not so fast,” she said, pushing a hand into his chest. He backed away from her touch. “I have your supper all ready for you.” She shuffled over to the oven, reached in, and produced a plate with a grayish mixture of fish and macaroni on it that made Andrew feel as if he were going to be sick.

  “I had a sandwich at the store,” he said.

  Her face fell into a pout. “I saved this for you,” she said. “You need to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said in a tight little voice, turning his back on her.

  “I didn’t think we were so wealthy that we could just throw food away,” she said, shaking her head as she opened the refrigerator and stuffed the plate inside.

  Andrew bolted from the room and started down the hall, but she was behind him in an instant. “I’m going to have to speak to Mr. Temple,” she said. “I think he is taking advantage of you because you are such a good worker. The very next time I see him I am going to say—”

  “Don’t say anything,” Andrew snarled as he went into the living room and snapped on the television set. He flopped down on a chair and focused his eyes on the screen.