Sister

by A. Manette Ansay

  My mother went over to the table, picked up a can of beer, set it down. “You’re not drinking this, are you, Sam?” she said.

  Sam ignored her, shook his long hair across his eyes. Girl hair, my father called it. For weeks, he’d been trying to shame Sam into getting it cut.

  “Sam?” my mother said. “I asked you a question.”

  My father looked annoyed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “I can’t believe you’re giving a thirteen-year-old beer,” my mother said.

  “Don’t come in here telling me what I can and cannot give my son,” he said. “If it were up to you, Therese, he’d be wearing a goddamn skirt.”

  “Gordon—” my mother began, but my father had turned to me. “So what’s wrong with you?” he said, interrupting my mother.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “The doctor doesn’t know,” my mother said.

  “Is she…what’s that thing girls get? Where they don’t eat.” For a moment, his voice was concerned; he met my mother’s gaze.

  “No. Thank God.” They were silent for a moment, considering what to do with me.

  “Well,” my father said. He cuffed my shoulder playfully. “It doesn’t sound too serious.”

  “Can I go now?” I said. The room seemed too warm, and it smelled faintly of turpentine, an odor that always made me queasy. My mother grabbed me by the sleeve again, as if she thought I might float away. “I’ll come with you,” she snapped, “seeing it doesn’t look like your father’s going to help.”

  “What do you want me to do?” my father said.

  “For starters,” my mother said, “I want you to stop giving alcohol to a minor.” She swept the beer cans from the table with the back of her hand; they foamed on the carpeting before my father could retrieve them. Back in the house, in the cold mud room, she slipped my coat from my shoulders and spun me around to face her. “What do you want me to do for you? Tell me.” She rubbed my shoulders hard, as if she were trying to warm me. “Because if you don’t, I’ll have to decide, and I might be deciding wrong. Maybe you need to see another doctor. Maybe you just need a change of pace. More exercise. Vitamins.” She waited for me to agree or disagree. “Please,” she said, and I finally opened my mouth to speak. But the sleepiness lapped my chest, the back of my neck. “I just want to sleep,” I told her, and she released me, exhaling a white flag of steam.

  I woke up because something was wrong with my big toe. There was a snap, and then the smaller toes next to it stung. I sat up, picked the rubber band from between my toes. “Jerk,” I told Sam, without malice. He still had the same giggle he’d had when he was six. A late bloomer, my father called him, pinching back his slender elbows until they touched, or pinning him helplessly in the crook of his arm as Sam fought back silently, furiously, hopelessly. Sometimes he’d grab Sam by his long hair, lift until he rose up on tiptoe. “You see, sport, why short hair is an advantage?” he’d say. The room was dim; it was late afternoon, and I felt peaceful and good, the way I always felt after I woke up.

  “They’re fighting about us,” Sam said.

  I rolled my eyes. “What else is new?” We listened for a moment; my mother’s quick bursts of speech, my father’s low rumble. The sounds seemed to settle in the corners of the room. My mother was quoting statistics that said people were more likely to become alcoholics if they started drinking young; my father said it was fine for a boy to have one beer with his dad, and that the kid they should be worrying about was me, and if my mother cared about me she wouldn’t have started that goddamn business when it was perfectly clear I needed more attention. “You’re turning her into Mathilde,” he told my mother, and I thought about Auntie Thil: her nervousness, her adolescent hospitalization, which was spoken about in whispers or not at all. Maybe my mother would send me to a hospital. I thought about how I’d look wearing a long white gown. The priest would come to visit me; my eyes would burn dark and fierce and holy, as my worldly body wasted away. One day, gold light would spin a ring around my head, sprout from the tips of my fingers. Then I would be whisked up to heaven. I imagined my father and Sam bending over my corpse, their faces torn with regret.

  “What’s beer taste like?” I asked.

  Sam made a face. “Sour. Like somebody else’s spit.”

  “How do you know what somebody else’s spit tastes like?”

  He raised an eyebrow lewdly. “I know all about girls.”

  “What are we like?” I asked, because I really wanted to know.

  “Not you,” he said, blushing, and I snapped him with the rubber band. He snapped me back, and I grabbed him; we were wrestling around on the bed when we heard footsteps on the stairs. Instantly we let go of each other; Sam slouched to the other corner of my room, and I lay back on my pillow. When my father stepped into the room, he seemed to grow larger against the backdrop of my white wicker furniture; his breathing sucked up all the available air. My mother stood beside him. She was saying something. “Listen to me,” my mother was saying. “Have you even heard one word I’ve said?”

  “What if she doesn’t want to go?” Sam said. His voice was too loud, shaking.

  “Stay out of this,” my father said.

  “To the hospital?” I said.

  All three of them looked at me. “To live at Grandma’s, stupid!” Sam shouted. “And they can’t make you go if you don’t want.” His voice cracked on the word want; perhaps it was changing after all. I looked at him, at my mother and father. They wanted a decision from me. They were waiting to hear what I had to say. I couldn’t tell if the sound I was hearing was my own heart beating or the collective sound of theirs. So much noise! I thought of my grandmother’s quiet rooms, the regular tick of her kitchen clock, the soft slap of cards on the kitchen table.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  Sam kicked my white wicker rocking chair so hard it swung to and fro long after he’d stormed out.

  My grandmother prepared the bedroom in the attic, the one that had been my mother’s when she was growing up. Auntie Thil’s old room was directly below; across the hall was a room filled with the things that had belonged to Mary and Elise. My grandmother slept in the first-floor bedroom, always on the left side of her marriage bed, which was worn lower than the right side, where my grandfather had slept. The departed were present in a quiet, constant way: in the funeral photographs lining the hallway between the kitchen and the living room; in the quilt, stitched by Mary, spread across my grandmother’s bed; in Elise’s piano that my grandmother kept tuned. She’d collected recordings of all the pieces Elise had played; my favorite was “Für Elise,” and I listened to it again and again. My grandmother told me that Elise had liked to pretend Beethoven had written it for her.

  My mother drove me out to Oneisha the Sunday before Halloween, and it could have been any other Sunday, except that Sam wasn’t with us. He’d announced that from now on he planned to attend Mass with my father, who went—or, at least, pretended to go—to Saint John’s in Fall Creek, a larger, more modern parish, where Masses took only forty minutes. My father didn’t like Saint Ignatius’s hour-long services or my grandmother’s custom of having us say the Rosary together in the afternoon. He’d come along every once in a while, if Uncle Olaf was going to be there too. Then, after my grandmother’s big dinner, while the rest of us cleaned up, the men took the boys—Sam and my cousin Harv—into the living room to watch football on TV.

  “But your grandmother’s expecting you,” my mother told Sam. “You should have said something earlier.”

  Sam stared pointedly at the TV.

  “Leave him be,” my father said in his end-of-discussion voice. “He’s old enough to hang out with his old man if he wants.” He leaned past my mother to kiss me good-bye, a loud smack that scratched my cheek.

  “’Bye,” I called to Sam, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t worry about him, sweetheart,” my father said. “You just rest up and feel better, OK?”

&nb
sp; My mother drove at her usual swift pace, keeping toward the center line to avoid the soft, crumbling shoulder of Highway KL. Horton, at six thousand people, was one of the larger cities in the area, and now we were heading north toward the smaller townships: Ooston, Farbenplatz, Holly’s Field, Oneisha. The sky was low and gray and bright, and the air tasted of the brittle snow that spattered against the windows. My mother’s car had no heat, and it was cold even with the blankets spread across our knees. There were no other cars, and the fields were nearly empty. Occasionally there were horses, but they stood motionless, facing north without expression. We passed the burned-out cannery site, where Mary and Elise had died; I’d never once seen my mother turn her head to look at it. When we crossed the railroad tracks at the south edge of Oneisha, I jumped, startled back into myself after all that smoothness. “Funny how it always gets you,” my mother said. “Those tracks. They’re the last thing you’d expect.”

  When I didn’t answer, she said, “Remember, I said I might decide wrong. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “You should have someone with you all the time, till you’re feeling better again.”

  I nodded, but she wasn’t seeing me.

  “Maybe I should have cut back my hours, stayed home with you for a while, but we’ve made such an investment, Cindy and me—”

  “Mom, it’s OK,” I said, and I meant it.

  “I just can’t be dependent on your father like I used to be.” She stopped, made a wry face. “I’m not the little girl he married. There’s more to my life now than him saying, Jump, and me saying, How high?” The highway had dissolved into Main Street, and she drove slowly now, edging past the row of nearly identical houses until she reached the intersection. Jack-o’-lanterns leered out of windows, perched on porch steps. Someone had erected a corn-husk man; he pushed a real wheelbarrow filled with pumpkins and gourds. “Maybe you’ll feel better just getting out of Horton for a bit,” she said. “You can spend time with your cousins—won’t it be nice to have them next door? You and Monica can run back and forth, make popcorn, sleep over.”

  We turned onto Fox Ranch Road, passing Saint Ignatius and, beside it, the cemetery, with its low, sculpted graves. Each winter, it disappeared beneath the snow until spring, when it erupted with geraniums and tiny American flags. Across the street was the low brick rectory where Father Van Dan lived and, beside it, a cottage occupied by the two elderly nuns. On the other side was Geena Baumbach’s cheery yellow house; she was the rectory housekeeper and her front yard was cluttered with rusted swing sets, a teeter-totter, a slide that tipped over whenever it stormed, and a few plank benches for young mothers to sit on while their children argued turns. In summer, the nuns were outside every day, working in their vegetable garden. Sometimes they’d cross behind the rectory to the swing set, where they’d arc toward the sky like blackbirds, weighted down by their strict religious garb.

  My grandmother’s house and Auntie Thil’s tan brick ranch were next door to one another, divided by a single shared driveway. Jakey, my grandmother’s old yellow dog, was lying in the middle of it; he barked once for show before ambling out of the way so we could pull in and park. “Where’s your brother today?” my grandmother called from the door. “He isn’t sick?”

  “Oh, no,” my mother said cheerfully, lightly, as if Sam hadn’t been coming along for Mass and Sunday dinner in Oneisha ever since he was born. “He’s going to Saint John’s with Gordon.”

  “I see,” my grandmother said, but it was clear she didn’t.

  “I think it’s nice he and Gordon have some time together, don’t you?” my mother said. She carried my suitcase inside, as my grandmother held the door. But then, instead of putting it down, she escaped up the long, narrow stairs toward the attic. The house looked oddly unfamiliar to me, though Sam and I had explored every odd-shaped closet, every corner from the attic to the musty cellar. I tried to understand that this was where I would live, the place I’d go to sleep every night, away from my parents and my brother.

  “Things all right at home?” my grandmother asked me gently, kindly. I never could lie to my grandmother; I shook my head. No.

  “Your mother has too many irons in the fire,” my grandmother said. “Starting that business…I don’t know.” It was 1980, and in Horton, Wisconsin, married women didn’t do things like start their own businesses. “If it was a question of money, I could understand,” she said. “But that isn’t it, then, is it?”

  My mother came back down the stairs. “What isn’t a question of money?” she said.

  “Your job,” my grandmother said.

  “Business is booming, thank you for asking,” my mother said.

  “Therese,” my grandmother said. “Nobody’s criticizing you. We’re just concerned, that’s all.”

  “We’ll be late for Mass,” I said quickly, and neither my mother nor my grandmother said anything more. My grandmother stuck two stuffed Cornish hens into the oven, and we walked up the street to Saint Ignatius; by the time we returned, the house was thick with the smell of roasting hens. I chewed and chewed, but the food had no taste, and I slipped what I could to Jakey, who was begging beneath the table. Halfway through dinner I asked to be excused, and my mother walked with me up the stairs to my new room. It was cold and smelled of cedar; I shivered as I pulled off my jeans and stepped into my long underwear. She tucked the covers under my chin and listened to me say my prayers, her eyes bright with tears. “I wish I had something nice to leave with you,” she said. “A ring or something.” She looked at her hands, which were bare except for her wedding ring. Her ears were not pierced. Her hair was cropped close, practical hair, which my father called mannish. “If you want to come home, just call and I’ll come get you. I’ll come get you right away—OK, honey?” She looked like someone familiar, someone I should know, and I was about to say her name, but I was already sleeping.

  For weeks I slept, rarely leaving my room except to use the bathroom or eat. Those were the weeks I did not even remember my dreams. When I slept, it was as if the world I’d lived in blinked closed along with me. Years later, I would encounter the word truncation in a music composition class; it referred to lifting out a group of notes so neatly that when you played the piece through, it was as if they’d never been there. At last I had a word to describe those weeks of sleep. I ate breakfast; I ate supper. There was nothing in between—no fights between my father and mother, no slamming doors between my father and Sam, none of my father’s remarks about my weight or my clothes or the dirty minds of boys. Believe me, sweetheart, he’d say, I was a boy once. I know. No Dolly Parton jokes, his heavy arm draped over my shoulders. No questions that made me uncomfortable: Do you have a boyfriend yet? Been doing any smooching? I never could tell how serious he was—after all, I was not allowed to date until I turned sixteen. No makeup or high heels or panty hose. No bikini swimming suits.

  Sometimes I’d come downstairs for breakfast and my father would look at my face, at my body, as if he were seeing me for the first time. My God, Therese, she’s growing up! he’d say, and he’d give a low wolf whistle. Where did our little girl go? I’m right here, Dad, I wanted to say, but I wasn’t really sure anymore. A year before, at the beginning of eighth grade, my mother had taken me shopping for school clothes; she’d waited outside the JC Penny dressing room, insisting I come out to model the jeans and blouses and sweaters we’d chosen. In the three-way mirrors, my breasts looked huge—they were already much bigger than my mother’s—and my stomach stuck out no matter how hard I tried to suck it in. “Stop doing that,” my mother told me. “You have a perfectly lovely figure.”

  “I’m fat,” I said. “Even Dad says so.” I’d learned not to eat dessert in front of him, sneaking back to the kitchen for a scoop of ice cream or a cookie before I went to bed. If he caught me, he’d say, A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.

  “He’s being ridiculous.”

  “Ma
ybe he’s just being honest,” I snapped.

  “Abby,” my mother said. We were alone in front of the mirrors. Everywhere I looked, a dozen Abigail Schillers seemed to be looking back at me. “You are a lovely young woman.”

  “Mom,” I said. I couldn’t bear the sound of that word, woman.

  “Your whole life is ahead of you, and I think your father is a little jealous of that. Maybe curious about it too, because soon you’ll be leaving us both behind. We’ll never know you the way we did when you were a little girl.”

  She stood next to me in front of the mirror. “I’m jealous,” she said. “I was never as pretty as you. Remember, the great artists didn’t paint skinny beanpoles like me.”

  She convinced me to tuck the blouse into my jeans, ran back out into the racks to fetch a rust-colored vest. “Put this on,” she said, and even I had to admit it was flattering. She made me buy two, in different colors. “It’s so nice,” she said, “to have my own money to spoil my kid if I want.”

  “I thought you said I was a woman,” I said, trying to maintain my sullen cool but smiling in spite of myself.

  “You’ll always be my kid,” my mother said. “Woman or not.”

  The next day, I chose that outfit to wear to school, and when my mother complimented me at breakfast, I spun around like a model. But my father put down his toast. “My God,” he said in a small, strange voice. “Therese, are those her real breasts?”

  Sam giggled, and I blushed the color of my vest.

  “Gordon,” my mother said, furious, “she’s fourteen, she’s not a child anymore,” and as they fought, I grabbed my backpack and slammed out of the house, ran down to the foot of the driveway to wait for the bus. At school, I carried my books in front of my chest; I sat slouched over in my chair. I hated the world and everybody in it. I wished I were invisible. I wished that I could simply disappear.

  My mother had arranged for me to take a temporary leave from school. The agreement was that she would collect my assignments once a week and I would mail them back to my teachers, keeping up with my classes independently. I did this fairly regularly at first, then rarely, then finally not at all. Once, I did turn in a paper called “Volcanoes” for my sophomore science class. After a brief factual introduction cribbed from the World Book Encyclopedia, I wrote pages of vivid prose about a girl who had the magical powers of Jesus and lived inside Mount Vesuvius, untouched by the heat or the fumes. My midsemester report card showed a neat row of F’s, which reminded me of merry little flags. I forgot how to write in cursive, a memory lapse that would prove permanent. My textbooks mildewed in my bedroom closet; mice nibbled the covers to lace.