Sister

by A. Manette Ansay

  “He’s a goddamn encyclopedia,” Pat complains, her big laugh like an engine that fires but won’t catch. Pat suspects terminology of all kinds: She’s at home with gizmos and doohickeys, whatchamacallits and thingamajiggers, sniggering references to ovens and buns and biscuits. She tells her own half-grown biscuits—three bone-slender white-haired girls—that the baby is in my stomach.

  Uterus, Adam corrects her, and Pat snorts; I blush, the girls roll their pale blue eyes. Three plain little girls with elaborate frilly names: Alinda, Lorentina, Tamela. “My leeches,” Pat calls them, running her hands through their strange white hair. They make me nervous—all children do—and I’m already dreading this evening, when they’ll fill our small house with their shrieky voices, their pounding footsteps. Those spindly pumping arms and legs. Those gap-toothed mouths. “You won’t feel that way about your own,” Adam says, but I worry that I might drop it like a cup, overfeed it like a goldfish, leave it behind in the grocery store the way I’m always doing with my purse. I worry that I won’t love it. I worry that I’ll love it too much. I worry that I’ll look into its eyes and see the figure of a boy, dressed all in white, walking up the driveway toward the house where my brother and I grew up.

  Highway KL links the townships along Lake Michigan like so many rosary beads—Horton, Oneisha, Farbenplatz, Fall Creek, Holly’s Field. Each summer, Sam and I played survival games in the fields along this road, stockpiling food in makeshift forts, estimating how long we could live off the land. We gathered the crisp young shoots of wild asparagus, sweet beans yellowing in the fields, sour gooseberries, tart wild raspberries. We invented a secret language. We carried clumsy stick weapons. At home, we explored my mother’s pantry, dug our hands into the bins of cornmeal and oatmeal and rice, ran our fingers over the jars of pickles and tomatoes and beets in the root cellar; in the attic, we opened her cedar chest to inhale the bitter scent protecting our sweaters and scarves. It seemed that winter was always coming, a new virus constantly making its rounds, another bad influence seeping into the community—rock music, hip-hugger jeans, marijuana cigarettes. My mother looked in our ears and under our tongues, measured our height and weight against the chart in the bathroom closet. Once a week, we were forced to swallow a teaspoon of cod liver oil, just in case.

  What were we preparing for even then? My mother still saves everything: string, rubber bands, slivers of leftover soap, bottles, rags, Christmas cards, our clumsy school projects, worn-out shoes. She collects discount dresses with crooked seams, bargain blouses, coupons. Her purse is heavy as an anvil, bulging with things she might need. Saint Christopher dangles upside down from the rearview mirror of her car; each New Year’s Day she blesses the house with holy water. And when these charms fail, there are always her intuitions, premonitions, dreams, which are true just often enough so that I can’t dismiss them. Even now, she always knows when I’m thinking about her. If I say to Adam, “Maybe I’ll call Mom today,” she’ll call me first. In Baltimore, at the beginning of my first and only semester of college at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, I tried to tell my roommate about my mother’s gift.

  “My mom’s the same way,” Phoebe said. She was from Connecticut, wealthy and agnostic, and despite our differences we’d immediately become friends. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Her teeth were perfectly straight from years of braces; she saw a dermatologist and, she told me privately, a psychotherapist. It was the end of our first week of classes, and we were stripping our beds, getting ready to do our laundry.

  “No, you don’t understand,” I said. “It’s like she has ESP or something,” and I told her how she’d sketched my father’s face the day before she met him. I was showing off a bit. I’d never been to New York City or gone sailing off the coast of the Florida Keys like Phoebe, but I had a mother with a special gift. I’d impressed friends in Horton with this story, and no one had ever questioned it. But Phoebe said, “What does your dad look like?”

  “He’s tall, with brown hair, and he parts it on the side. He sometimes has a mustache.”

  “That could be half the men in the world,” Phoebe said. “Did you ever see the sketch?”

  The drawing hadn’t been saved. The only ones who ever saw it were Auntie Thil and my mother.

  “I don’t think my mother would lie,” I said, hurt.

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just saying people believe what they want to, that’s all.”

  “This is different,” I said. “I’ll prove it. I’ll think about her right now and she’ll call me.”

  “You want to put a dollar on that?” Phoebe said.

  I hesitated; betting was a venial sin.

  “No?”

  “Sure, but you’ll lose.”

  “Let’s see if anybody else wants to bet,” Phoebe said, and she headed for the door. But someone was already knocking. “Telephone, Abby,” she said. “It’s your mom.”

  Phoebe and I stared at each other. If someone had yelled “Boo!” we would have screamed.

  “No way!” Phoebe finally said. “You arranged that in advance.” She never would believe that I hadn’t. But that morning, I’d caught a glimpse of my own beliefs through the eyes of someone else. People believe what they want. That night, as I struggled to undress for bed without exposing anything unnecessary, Phoebe said, “Can I ask you something? Why do you always have a penny pinned to your underwear?” A penny? Could she mean my Saint Benedict medal, which my cousin Monica and I had vowed, along with the rest of Girls’ Catechism, to wear for life? I tried to ex plain: Saint Benedict medals prevented possession by the devil. “Do you think other people are possessed because we don’t wear them?” Phoebe said.

  “No,” I said earnestly.

  “So then it’s just Catholics the devil wants? How come?”

  It seemed as if everything I’d ever believed in was being exposed as wishful thinking, foolish superstition, or, at best, a matter of opinion.

  “Can I ask you another question?” Phoebe asked, after we’d turned out the lights. “If your mother has this gift, why can’t she find out what happened to your brother?”

  The phone rings just as I’m finishing my third jack-o’-lantern, one with a growly expression and a frayed gray stump like a woman’s hat. I pick up the receiver in the hallway, coating it with pumpkin slime; I already know who it has to be. “Happy Halloween,” my mother says. “Are you having a nice weekend?”

  “We’re carving jack-o’-lanterns,” I say, picking a pumpkin seed out of my hair. “Twelve of them.”

  “Twelve!” my mother says, and the pause that follows is her secret, silent laugh, the laugh that is now mine. I’ve always envied women like Pat, with their booming, sexy laughter.

  “I won’t keep you long,” my mother says. “I was just thinking about that jack-o’-lantern you and Sam had, the one so big you both fit inside it. Remember that, Abby?”

  “Not really,” I lie. “I was pretty young.”

  “You were five,” she says. “I’ve got the picture here in front of me. The two of you with just your heads sticking out. Like chicks in an egg. I’ll send it on.”

  “Oh, that’s OK,” I say, but I know it will arrive by certified mail, just like all the other things she’s sent over the past few weeks: Sam’s baby clothes, preserved in cedar chips, his baby blanket, and, most recently, his handmade christening cap and gown wrapped up in acid-free paper. She has saved it all, every last bit, scented with sandalwood, preserved beneath plastic, and I don’t need holy dreams to tell me she means to pass it along to my child in the same way that my grandmother passed Elise’s belongings to me. It was hard for me to remember I’d never known Elise; my grandmother’s memories became, at times, more real than any of my own. Even now, I remember the day of the cannery fire as if I’d actually been there. I remember the day of the funerals. I remember my grandmother’s grief. I don’t want my child to grow up that way, remembering things that belong to other people. It’s too grea
t a responsibility, living up to the perfection—or the imperfection—of the dead.

  Now my mother is describing the day we brought Sam home from his christening. It’s one of her favorite stories. My father lifts Sam out of his white blanket, plucks the lacy cap from his head. There you go, sport! he says in his booming voice, rocketing the baby around the room as my mother and grandmother cry in unison, Support his neck! But when they lay Sam across my lap, I support his neck without being told. I hold out my wrist when she checks the temperature of his milk. I soothe him when he cries in the crib beside my bed, singing little songs. And as I listen to my mother talk, I realize it’s happening again—I remember this, and yet, of course, that’s not possible; I wasn’t even two years old. “You were always a natural mother,” my mother says. “You took such good care of your brother.”

  “Adam’s better with kids than I am,” I say, but my mother doesn’t want to change the subject.

  “I mailed you Sam’s christening gown. Did you get it?”

  “We did.”

  “Your grandmother made that, you know. Now I’m glad I didn’t give it to Monica.”

  “But you should have,” I say. “It’s so beautiful. Someone should use it.”

  “I keep hoping you’ll use it,” my mother says. “I keep hoping you’ll change your mind.”

  “Mom,” I say. “Why do we have to keep fighting about this? If the baby grows up and wants to get baptized, that’s fine, but I’m not going to do it. You know I don’t go to church, and even if I still believed in original sin, which I don’t, I’d have to think long and hard about baptizing my child into a church that doesn’t give women the same rights as men.”

  “I just hope you don’t regret your decision,” my mother says. “It’s a comfort to me now, knowing Sam was baptized. Knowing that even if I won’t get to see him again in this world, we can be reunited in the next.”

  It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her mention the possibility that Sam won’t be found. “I’m glad it’s a comfort to you,” I say, as gently as I can. “But it’s not a comfort to me. I’m not even sure if I believe in an afterlife.”

  “Oh, Abby,” my mother says, her voice full of anguish. “Then what’s the point of anything? How can you live from day to day if you think we just end at death?”

  “Look,” I say, “I’ve got to go now. I’ll call you later, OK?” I hang up, drained, miserable. In the kitchen, Adam is at work on a new jack-o’-lantern, one with a double stem like devil’s horns. I remember sitting in the big pumpkin with Sam, back-to-back. The hard wriggling knobs of his spine. The cool walls of the pumpkin. That damp, secret smell.

  “How’s Mom?” Adam says. I can tell he is pleased with his jack-o’-lanterns; it’s put him in a teasing sort of mood. “Any more holy visions of the baby?”

  “No.”

  “Hallelujah.” He uses a long-handled tweezers to pluck out a perfect oval eye. “Is she mailing us more stuff?” he says, but I’ve got my head in the fridge, so I can pretend I don’t hear. Cheese. Eggs. Milk. I don’t want to talk about anything. “It’s lunchtime,” I tell Adam. “You hungry?”

  He shakes his head no. He is covered with pumpkin guts. He is consumed by his pumpkins, the idea of what his pumpkins will be. Absurdly, I think of Genesis, God bending over his new creation, dividing space, naming names. And he saw that it was good.

  “I’m going to make an omelet,” I say. If I were living in Wisconsin, If I were the person I used to be, I’d be having a baby shower, planned by my mother and Monica. I’d unwrap rubber nipples, disposable diapers, a breast pump, IOU notes for baby-sitting and housework. Monica would loan me clothes her babies had outgrown; she and my mother and Auntie Thil would make me special teas, accompany me to doctor’s appointments, take me on trips to department stores to finger stuffed animals and jangly mobiles. We would make lists of ridiculous names—Garbanzig Rototiller, Chainsaw Elizabeth—before studying the worn Christian Names for Babies book that has been passed family to family for as long as I can remember. Of course, I would be planning the baptism—choosing godparents (my mother and Harv), making a reservation with the priest, preparing an announcement for the Baby News page of the weekly paper. Suddenly I am missing my mother terribly. I want to call her back and tell her I’m sorry, I’ll baptize the baby, I’ll start going to Mass, I’ll do anything she says, just to feel like I’m part of that life again, blessed with that kind of certainty.

  “What else is on the way?” Adam says.

  “Just a photograph. You don’t have to look at it.”

  My voice is as sharp as the sound of the egg cracked against the bowl. Adam gets up and comes over to the stove. “What’s the matter?” he says. I open the shell, and there’s the sudden surprise of a double yolk.

  “Nothing.” I puncture them each with a fork, add milk, beat them a bit too briskly. “My mother. You know.”

  “I don’t know,” Adam says. “What did you talk about?”

  “She wants us to baptize the baby.”

  “So what else is new?” Then he sees my face. “I don’t understand why she keeps after you about it,” he says reasonably. “She knows we don’t go to church.”

  I pour the egg into the hot pan. “That’s not the point,” I say.

  “What is the point?”

  “Salvation.” How can I explain this to Adam, with his blueprints, his careful reasoning, his twice-measured plans? Adam, who rearranges a room again and again, spinning each piece of furniture around himself as if it is a planet and he is the sun, the center, the confident source of gravity. I dump the omelet onto a plate. It falls apart, half cooked, ugly, nothing I want to put in my mouth. “Look,” I say, “what would you think about having a baptism anyway? Just to keep everyone happy? I mean—”

  Adam stares at me as if I’ve developed stigmata. “I would hate it,” he says firmly. “You want to talk religion—fine. What kind of sin is hypocrisy?”

  I scrape my omelet into the sink, turn off the burner, and go down the hallway to our room. The air smells of pumpkin, Adam’s sleep, mine. The intimate odor of our lives. Beside the bed is the cradle he has made entirely by hand, the headboard carved with pineapples, those old pagan symbols of fertility, life. My grandmother’s bed had four tall posts with a pineapple crowning each one. I remember being put down to nap on that bed beside my brother, the sour breath of the dog scorching our faces as we dreamed. Sundays after Mass, we’d burrow deep into the pile of guest coats, inhaling the dizzying clash of perfumes, scratching our cheeks on rhinestone brooches. Above the bed hung a large wooden crucifix. Once, my grandmother lifted it down to show us how the back could pop open to reveal blessed candles (half burned!), holy water, and oil, all that was necessary for an emergency baptism or last rites, the final cleansing of the soul.

  I arrange my body in the center of the bed. The baby settles deeper into me, and I feel the click click of each fine bone in my spine separating. My hips pop too, first the right, then the left, my body coming loose in preparation for birth. “It’ll be even worse than you imagine,” my mother says, “so you might as well not think about it.”

  Just after I dropped out of the conservatory, she dreamed that I appeared in a cherry-colored nightgown and stood beside her bed, not quite close enough to touch. At the time of the dream, I was living in a room in an apartment filled with people I did not know. Downstairs there was a grocery store, where I worked part time, mostly nights and weekends; during the day I looked for a better job, a full-time job. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been hungry. I stole what I could from the grocery; I swallowed glass after glass of cold water to curb my appetite. My brother was still missing, I was a disappointment to my mother and grandmother, and worst of all, I’d confirmed my father’s predictions: I couldn’t make it in the world. One night, I decided that I’d cash my next paycheck and hitchhike to Mexico or Montreal or Alaska, somewhere far enough from where I was so that even God wouldn’t be able to find me.
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  “What’s wrong?” my mother asked my dream self, and I opened my chest and stomach to show her that emptiness there. The next night, I came home from work to find a delivery of fruit and chocolate. Attached was a note from my mother, saying a check for five hundred dollars was in the mail. “Abby, you can never disappear,” she had written. “I will always know where you are, because you will come to tell me.”

  I awaken to the sense of someone moving through the room. It’s late afternoon, already starting to get dark. My heart hammers in my chest even as I tell myself it’s only Adam, it’s all right. How much longer will I wake up at the slightest sound, thinking my brother and his friends have returned to stand beside my bed? It’s guilt, I suppose, that brings them back. Maybe it would help if I told someone what I saw, what I didn’t say, but whom? And after so many years, how could it make a difference? Mrs. Baumbach is dead; Dr. Neidermier has retired to Florida. The drive-in closed, and my mother has told me that even Becker’s is in trouble, threatened by the new Piggly-Wiggly in Holly’s Field. Adam’s weary weight presses the bed beside my legs.

  “You said your mom was sending a photograph,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Nothing. Just Sam and me as kids.”

  Laverne hops up on the bed, teetering between us. The sound of her purr is ridiculously loud.

  “It’s weird,” Adam says, and his voice is soft, musing. “Your mother tells me all about your brother every time she calls. You won’t talk about him even when I ask.”

  “I don’t know what to talk about,” I say, remembering the queasy feeling of having to answer questions, questions. Police with radios; reporters with cameras; detectives with notepads and busy scribbling pens. My mother hovering nearby, afraid I might say the wrong thing, afraid that our family would look as if there were something terribly wrong with us. Afraid of what happens when people begin their talk in a small town like Horton, people who would say it was all my mother’s fault for being a career woman, a women’s libber, a woman who’d lost sight of her duty to her husband. I would have said anything to protect her. I would have said anything to re-create my brother in the image she held up to us all.