Strange Sisters

by Fletcher Flora

  But it wasn't. It was his. He took two steps and grasped her by the hair, jerking her head back above the strained arch of her throat, and she brought the ice-pick around and up, and the slim spike slipped into him smoothly at an angle just below the apex of the inverted V of his ribs. His breath sucked through his lips with a shrill, ragged sound that was like a reversed whinny, and he wrapped both hands around the protruding handle of the pick and looked down at it in an attitude of stunned, incredulous wonder. Then, without looking at her again, he released his held breath in a long sigh and folded slowly in the middle.

  Lifting her skirt, she stepped over the body and went back into the living room. She stood in the middle of the room, almost in the identical position in which she had waited a little while ago for him to return from the kitchen with her Sidecar. Now he was in the kitchen again, and she was waiting again, but this time he would not come out even though she waited forever. The thought struck her as very funny, and she began to laugh silently, her body shaking with a swelling inner storm that .she felt must surely rock the room. After a while, the swelling of laughter began to diminish, and she tried to think, to think clearly, to decide what would now be best for her to do. She had no real faith in any course of action, no hope that anything on earth could save her now, but she still fought with a sort of instinctive tenacity to gather and secure the remnants of whatever might be left.

  The glass. She had touched the glass, and it would have her prints on it. If it were discovered that she'd been here, or had even known Angus Brunn, the police would take her fingerprints and compare them with those they would have lifted from the glass, and that would be the end of her. She saw the glass lying on its side on the carpet by the sofa, and she went over and picked it up. After wiping it on the skirt of her dress, she let it drop onto the sofa and left it lying there.

  Next, she thought of the ice-pick, but she couldn't bear the thought of returning to the kitchen, and she decided, anyhow, that the handle was too rough to take fingerprints. She had heard that they could be lifted only from smooth surfaces. She couldn't recall having touched anything else, except possibly the working surface of the kitchen cabinet, and she was certain that those would be blurred. Yes, she remembered distinctly drawing her fingers off the surface in a way that would have left them blurred.

  Nothing remained, then, but to get her wrap and leave. Moving with a jerk, she went into the bedroom and found the wrap lying across the bed. Putting it on, she went back through the living room and out into the hall, using the skirt of her dress again to handle the knob. She felt rather clever, thinking of things like that, taking precautions, but all the time she knew that it was just chopping wood and that nothing would come of them but the same disaster that would have come without them, though maybe at a different time in a little different way.

  On the street, she began to walk without conscious direction or purpose. She walked three blocks, and then, still without any conscious purpose, turned ninety degrees and walked until she saw a cab cruising toward the downtown area. This made her think of Jacqueline, and she wondered why she hadn't thought of Jacqueline before, and now she left a sudden terrible need to get to her as quickly as she could, as if a second lost might be the difference between security and destruction. She waved at the cab, but by that time it had gone too far past her for the driver to see her frantic gesture. She quickened her step until she was almost running, and several blocks farther on she found another available cab stopped for a red light. Getting into the cab before the light changed, she gave the cabbie Jacqueline's address and leaned back in the seat. Only then, suddenly aware of her burning lungs, did she realize the desperate pace she had maintained for the long blocks.

  On both sides of her, beyond glass, the dappled city passed. Dappled. She liked the echoes of the word in her mind. Every once in a while, there would be a word like that, one that she immediately liked, and then she would pause, as she did now, to take a new direction from it, on whatever tangent of thought it suggested. Dappled with light and darkness, the splashes of intermittent light from street lamps and signs and unshaded windows, the deep cast shadows of buildings that seemed to crowd in upon the street in fear of the night and the aberrations of the night. People in the dappled city, moving from darkness to light to darkness. She watched them as she passed, finding and losing them in half a dozen ticks of the meter, and she began to wonder which of them were living, as she was, behind a personal translucent barrier through which light filtered dimly when there was any light at all. She thought of them in stock terms, the brutal little classifications that focused on a particular and left everything else out. Winos, dipsos, nymphos, homos. Felons, vagrants, whores and hoods. Then there were those with no barriers. The normal people. The non-aberrant, the undeviated, the good, clean partisans of orthodox sin. These, she thought, were the ones with the mentionable neuroses, the ones who had tuberculosis as opposed to leprosy, and she was suddenly rocked again by the silent, hysterical laughter. Sinking teeth into her lower hp, she laid her head back and closed her eyes, but she immediately saw Angus Brunn wrap both hands around the handle of the ice-pick and fold over slowly in the middle, so she opened her eyes again and sat staring blankly ahead past the right ear of the cabbie until he stopped at the curb in front of Jacqueline's apartment house.

  She paid the fare and crossed over and through the heavy glass door into the small lobby. The single elevator was up, and she didn't wait, walking back to the stairs and ascending quickly. The stairs seemed interminable, stretching up forever, as if, now that she was so near Jacqueline, there were a kind of inanimate conspiracy to prevent her ever arriving. She had a heady feeling, a sense of treading air, and unconsciously she took hold of the bannister, moving the hand forward with every step to pull herself upward against the resistance of intangibles.

  On the right floor at last, before the right door, she pressed a button and listened to the faint, measured strokes of chimes. There was no response, and she pressed again, leaning forward in a posture of intense concentration to follow the repetition of ordered tones. But it was no use. She rang again and again, but Jacqueline didn't come. The blond door, the final impediment in the conspiracy that had permitted her to advance against odds to defeat, remained closed.

  She wondered where Jacqueline could be, and she could think of a number of possible places. Obviously, she couldn't tour the city, or even the likely restricted area, searching for her, and besides, now that the conspiracy against her was manifest, she was inclined to accept the futility of struggling against it any longer. She was tired. She was more tired than she could remember ever being before, and there was nothing to be done but to make the long uptown trip to her own small apartment.

  On the street again, she found another cab and returned through the dappled city. In her own apartment, she undressed and stood for a moment before the mirror on the back of her closet door, but now she saw herself distorted by her relationship with Angus Brunn, an ugly corruption of what she had been. She turned off the light and got into bed and lay there on her back in the darkness trying to make her mind adhere to the unmenacing present, detached from everything that had approached this moment or would develop from it, and therefore powerless to foretell consequences.

  Sometime during the swing shift of the earth's movement around the sun, she went to sleep, and when she came awake in the morning, lying very still in the painful period of precarious readjustment, the lines of the poem were already running through her mind. Not all of them. She was already up to the third stanza. The poem was like that. It would be in her waking mind at one point or another, and she thought it was because the preceding lines had already run through while she was still asleep. This morning, only the third and fourth stanzas were left:

  Oh a deal of pains he's taken and a pretty price he's paid

  To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;

  But they've pulled the beggar's hat off for the world to see and stare,

&nb
sp; And they're taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.

  Now 'tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,

  And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,

  And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare

  He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

  Chapter 2

  She always thought of it as her hair, of course; instead of his hair. Not that the gender really mattered at all, because in the end it came to the same thing.

  She'd discovered the poem by accident a long time ago. She'd been in one of her depression periods, and this one had gone on and on with no sign of lifting, and she'd gone into the public library back home because she'd just happened to approach it, and it seemed like a good place to go. It was very quiet there, cool dusk in the stacks, with great stains of sunlight on the floor of the reading section and dust particles suspended in the shafts slanting down from the high windows.

  She'd taken the thin volume off the shelf, and it had fallen open in her hand right to the poem, as if it were pointed at her. Anyhow, she was sensitive to ideas of reference, and she always believed that it was pointed. The poem was a kind of revelation, and she never forgot it. She remembered it word for word, and sometimes when she was alone at night she lay in bed and repeated it to herself, and sometimes, on her bad days, which were frequent, she awoke in the morning, as she had now, with the lines in her mind.

  Portland was a prison, she knew. She hadn't ever been in prison, although it now seemed that she might go there; but that didn't matter, because prison, like hair, could be taken to mean something else entirely. That was the thing about the poem. You could make it mean just about whatever you wanted it to, and so there wasn't any use getting technical.

  As far as she was concerned, because of her idea of reference, it had only one meaning, however. That was why she always remembered it exactly, even without ever referring back to it again, and why she repeated it to herself at night and at the beginning of her bad days. Not that it brought her any comfort or made the bad day any the less bad. On the contrary, it deepened her depression and hardened her despair. It was like pressing on a sore place, repeating the poem or just thinking it, and that's why she did it.

  Thinking back, which she often did in spite of the fact that she knew it was bad for her, she had the feeling that everything had begun with the scent of flowers. Beyond the scent, far back in the mists of beginning, there was the shadow of a man who had been her father, but in her mind he was someone who had had nothing to do with anything. He had died of something, and he had been buried someplace, but this was academic knowledge, devoid of significance. She realized, naturally, that this was irrational, that some part of her was of necessity a development of some part of him, but the realization didn't give him any more substance in her mind. He was before the beginning, and the beginning was the scent of flowers.

  There was, first, the scent of lilies, and it was strange that this scent which signified the beginning for her should have signified the end for someone else. The lilies lay in the living room in a large spray on top of her mother's casket, and the scent filled the room to the point of suffocation and crept out through all the house and even out into the yard. She had gone out into the yard to get away from it, but it had followed her there.

  She always had a sense of guilt about her mother's death, because she hadn't felt sufficient grief. But that wasn't exactly true. At first, she had felt very intense and genuine grief, even if it was in large part loneliness and terror of loneliness, but then Aunt Stella had arrived, and after that it was impossible to feel anything except a consuming sense of anticipation that was almost as terrifying in its own way as the loneliness had been.

  Aunt Stella was beautiful. She was certainly the most beautiful creature God had ever made, and it was difficult to believe that she was really the younger sister of the thin, bitter, bone-tired woman who lay, no longer tired nor bitter nor anything at all, under the weight of lilies, in the living room. Aunt Stella was twenty-eight at the time, but she could have passed for less. Her hair was shoulder length and loose, and it shone in the light almost like silver. Her eyes were blue and wide and soft with a kind of secret laughter, and her mouth was wide, too, and soft, too, and it seemed always to tremble slightly with the same laughter that was in the eyes.

  There were so many beautiful things about Aunt Stella— or, as she insisted upon being called with a delicious familiarity that was nearly sufficient to burst the heart, just Stella. But more beautiful than everything else, perhaps, were her hands. Long, narrow hands with long, scarlet-tipped fingers, wonderfully certain and talented and incredibly gentle. Cupping your face or stroking your cheek, they achieved in a touch an intimacy that was a wild, singing delight. As a matter of fact, Stella was naturally accomplished in the achievement of intimacy. She was other things, too, of course. She was kind and generous and full of fun, and she was about as bad for a starved and lonely girl as anything that could possibly have happened.

  It was the scent that Stella wore, more than the scent of lilies, although they were inextricably mixed, that signified the beginning. Simply because Stella was herself the beginning, and the scent was the first thing known of her. It preceded her into the room where Kathy sat, and it stood waiting, sharp and light and strangely penetrating, like something alive, for Kathy's attention. The scent was common enough, the essence of a common flower fixed in ambergris, but Kathy could never remember the name of it, would never be able to as long as she lived, because naming it would have destroyed it, would have established it as the ordinary thing it really was.

  "You must be Kathryn," Aunt Stella said, and Kathy looked up with sudden, breathless expectancy at the beautiful woman filled with secret laughter.

  "Yes."

  "Did your mother call you that? Kathryn?"

  "Mostly."

  “What else did she call you? A pet name?"

  "Yes. Kitten."

  The slender arches of brows were extended for a moment above Aunt Stella's eyes, and her silent laughter grew briefly to the stature of husky sound.

  "Oh, I don't believe I like that. Kitten, I mean. I think a girl should be called something she can grow up with, don't you?"

  "I guess so."

  "What would you like me to call you?"

  "I don't know. I haven't thought about it."

  "How about Kathy? It's a nice name, and it uses part of your real one. Do you think you would like that?"

  The affectionate diminutive acquired on her lips a quality of magic. It swelled and sang in the house of death.

  "Yes, I'd like that very much."

  "Good. That's settled, then. And you must call me Stella. I'm afraid I couldn't bear being called Aunt. Let me hear you say my name once, just to make us better acquainted.

  Kathy tried to force the name through the hard, hurting constriction in her throat, but the monstrous familiarity with such a shimmering, charming woman was more than she could manage. The sound came out a dry, strangled gasp, and Stella's voice in response was edged with alarm.

  "Oh, now. You're not going to cry, are you?"

  "No."

  "No doubt it's just that I'm strange. Do you think you could learn to like me?"

  "I like you already."

  The laugh again, the husky amplification of the inner secret. "That's nice. Then you should be able to say my name. Why don't you try again?"

  This time she accomplished it. "Stella," she said, and the sound was like the closing of a door that would never be opened again, a small sound, definitive, shutting away everything that had gone before and making of the woman under the lilies a kind of static improbability, as if she had been a corpse from the beginning. .

  Stella turned and dropped into an overstuffed chair, a sad construction of lumps and squeaks and worn plush. Her narrow skirt slipped up over shining, silken knees.

  "That's better. Come here, Kathy."

>   Kathy went and stood beside her, and for the first time she felt the enchantment of Stella's long, slender hands, reacting to the delicate touch of fingers with an intensity that made her tremble. The fingers touched her hair, her temple, traced on her cheek four fines so light that the) seemed no more than a suggestion of contact.

  "Would you like to come live with me from now on Kathy?"

  "Oh, yes."

  Now there was a rueful quality in Stella's voice. She lifted her shoulders and let them drop with a sigh. "That's good, because there doesn't seem to be any way out of it Oh, well, what the hell! Maybe a little responsibility will be good for me. But I shouldn't swear in front of you should I? Did your mother ever swear?"

  "Once in a while. When she got very angry about something."

  "Oh, sure. Only under sufficient provocation, I'll bet your mother didn't like me, Kathy. She didn't approve of me. Did you know that?"

  "No."

  "Well, she didn't. If she had, she could've made an easier time of it for herself and for you, too. Then you and I could have been friends long ago. But no matter now. Did you know I was married once?"

  "No."

  "I was. The man's name was Lonnie, and he was very handsome and exciting, but he didn't do the kind of thing! people approve of. With their help, he died young, so you see it's not only the good it happens to. But, anyhow, he left me lots of money, and it will be fun to have you help me spend some of it. Would you like lots of money to spend?'

  "I think so."

  "Good." The light, electric hand moved again, hair and temple and cheek. "You're really quite pretty, you know. Something done with your hair and a few attractive frocks will make a big difference. How old are you, Kathy?"