Two Sisters

by Jeffrey Anderson

and estrangements and reconciliations, vacations to mountains and forests and island getaways, trips to relatives and friends in far off cities. As these dramas became more elaborate and required more than ten actors, the storyteller began to recruit the other’s fingers into the play, positioning them as needed and moving them about with nudges and tweaks that eventually became pushes and pulls and quick shoves. In one of her plays, Brooke brought her foot up onto her knee and pretended it was a car—a station wagon like the one Father drove—with her five toes as Brooke (the big toe) and Leah (second toe, a little taller than the big toe, just as Leah was about to surpass Brooke in actual height) and two kids (the next two toes, one boy and one girl) and Roscoe, their Boston terrier (the little toe). Everything was going just fine with this toe family riding around in the foot car seeing the sights until a cow (Brooke’s fist) ran out into the road in front of the car and her foot swerved and crashed into the rocks. Leah gasped. Brooke frowned. Things looked bad for several long seconds of stillness in the wake of the crash. Then, joy of joys, here comes the ambulance of Brooke’s other foot racing across country roads with five skilled ambulance attendants arrayed across the front seat and they get to the crash site and jump out and pull first Roscoe then the two kids then Leah and finally Brooke from the wreckage. And everyone survived, to live happily ever after, though the station wagon was a total loss.

  Sometime early in the week, they discovered the voyeuristic pleasure of eavesdropping on conversations from above. During a pause in one of their joint games, Brooke raised one finger to freeze Leah, tilted her head and looked toward the shadows passing above, then translated for Leah what was being said, mouthing the words and adding facial expressions and body language to indicate different speakers and the tone of their words. I don’t care if he’s just being a kid! Brooke mouthed, puffing her chest out and miming patriarchal authority. He will not run on the pier! Then Brooke pulled her head down onto her shoulders in a cower of wifely obedience. I’ll hold his hand next time. Please don’t spank him. Brooke mouthed contritely. Then suddenly she rolled her head back and started wailing in spasms, rubbing her eyes with her fists and kicking her feet. The spanking had occurred despite the wife’s pleas.

  Leah was mesmerized. She’d never listened in on a conversation before. She didn’t know it was possible.

  The shadows above moved on. Brooke dried her eyes of imaginary tears. Her face and body lost their artificial tension, and she grinned at Leah. She slapped the back of her hand three times to let Leah know how many swats the little boy had gotten from his father. Then she shrugged—one of the world’s infinite small dramas overheard and recorded forever within the two sisters.

  And in this way, eavesdropping on private exchanges from above became their main activity in the cave. This pursuit was enhanced by the fact that there was a bench in the shade of the pier market only a few feet to one side of where they sat hidden below. People—mostly couples, sometimes families with children, sometimes groups of fishermen returning from their efforts on the seaside end of the pier—would pause there to escape the sun and sometimes exchange words of idle conversation or intense emotion, which Brooke would “translate” for Leah.

  Dem suckers ain’t bitin’ today!

  Yep.

  Dat water too hot.

  Yep.

  Dat sun too bright.

  Yep.

  Da tide all wrong.

  Yep.

  You say anythin’ but yep?

  Yep.

  How ’bout I throw you in da ocean?

  Yep.

  That pair of shadows moved on.

  Leah stifled her laugh.

  They waited for another story to descend from above, but the shadows all just moved past without pausing. The afternoon was hot, not conducive to pausing for conversation on the sun-baked pier. Brooke pulled Leah’s wrist into her lap. Leah tilted her head back against the rock wall and closed her eyes. Brooke sent Leah’s wrist into a paradise of tender touch. Leah’s whole body and finally her mind followed that wrist’s euphoria, arrived in her white fantasy world.

  “So where would you like to go, Madame?” the white gazelle asked.

  “Why, here is just fine,” Leah responded.

  “But here is somewhere,” the gazelle said. He had a long pair of spiral horns arcing out beyond his head, of unimaginable length and beauty, all brilliant white and somehow visible despite the white surrounding world. “We have to go there to get here,” he said.

  “How can we go there?” Leah asked.

  “On my back,” the gazelle said. “I’ll take you.”

  “But we’re already there,” Leah said.

  “Because I brought you,” the gazelle said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I guess,” Leah said, though she didn’t remember who brought her here.

  “I’ll do so again, if you like,” the gazelle said.

  “Please do.”

  And then they were flying, out over the white sea and in the white clouds. But it wasn’t on the gazelle’s back she rode but on a bird’s, a huge bird big as an airplane, so big she didn’t feel motion but saw it in the passing of the white clouds over the white sea. She couldn’t remember where she’d come from and didn’t know where she was going, but it was enough just to be on the back of this bird flying somewhere.

  Then she was on the sand, white sand soft as powder the exact temperature of her skin. A white seahorse stood on white legs beside her. They were both looking out at the placid white water.

  “Did you have a good trip?” the seahorse asked.

  “When?”

  “Just now,” he said. “Before you were here.”

  “I don’t remember,” Leah said. “I think I’ve always been here.”

  “No, that’s not possible,” the seahorse replied. “This is only a stopover. No one stays.”

  “I’m the Queen,” Leah said. “I can stay if I wish.”

  “Even the Queen has rules,” the seahorse said.

  “And who makes those rules?”

  The seahorse was stumped. “Why, I don’t know. It’s just always been so.”

  Leah nodded. They looked out on the white sea. White dolphins crested above the white waves. Leah pointed to one of the dolphins. “I think I know that one.” She waved.

  “Maybe he brought you here,” the seahorse said.

  “Maybe,” Leah said.

  Someone tugged at her arm. Leah woke with a start.

  Brooke put her hand over Leah’s mouth to stifle her alarm and pointed toward the deck above. She smiled an apology for having startled Leah then held up two fingers to indicate a couple and twined those fingers to indicate lovers and puckered her lips to indicate young lovers.

  Leah, fully back now, giggled silently.

  How will you tell your parents? Brooke held her hands loosely cupped beneath her chin in girlish coquetry.

  I’ll just tell them. Brooke mouthed stiff-backed in toy-soldier boldness.

  But they hate me! They’ll never let us be together!

  I don’t care what they think. They can accept our marriage or suffer the consequences.

  But your scholarship! Your apartment! Your car! Brooke wrung her hands and scrunched up her face in an exaggerated whine, then mouthed with a wink. Your trust fund!

  Suddenly stiff-backed again in rigid resolve: I love you, Sandy. That’s all that matters.

  More lip puckering, then more puckering, then more puckering. Brooke got tired of the lips and slid one of her hands up under her T-shirt, though surely she couldn’t see the figures to know that. For that matter, how did she know the kissing?

  I don’t want to destroy your life. Brooke mouthed with the downcast eyes of dejection and sacrificial surrender.

  You’ve not destroyed my life. Brooke beaming and clutching the shoulders of an imaginary person, speaking intently into her eyes. You’ve made my life—made it whole, made it worth living.

  Oh, I love you, Edward!

  Kissin
g, moon-eyes, kissing, moon-eyes. Brooke grew bored with all that, slid her hands again under her T-shirt, tried to move these two along. Soon after, Edward and Sandy did move along, their shadows passing above as they headed for their room, their future, and whatever secret ecstasies they might uncover there.

  That night lying together in their pjs atop the sheets on Brooke’s lower bunk, Leah turned from her book and asked her sister—using her simplified and intuitive sign language, not the elaborate formal one they forced her to use at school—What is love?

  Brooke smiled as the heart Leah shaped with her hands lingered long after the question. Then she answered simply, using the same shorthand sign language, “I don’t know.”

  Leah frowned in disappointment.

  So Brooke took her sister’s hand and raised it to her cheek, freshly washed with astringent to ward off the blackheads that kept forming there. She rubbed Leah’s hand lightly across her cheek.

  Leah seemed confused. The face was appearance, looks, not love.

  Then Brooke moved her sister’s hand down to her chest, placed it over her heart.

  Leah felt the thumping beneath the light fabric of the cotton nightshirt. But that was life not love. Everyone had a heart pumping blood. Everyone had life. Not everyone had love. She didn’t have love, not like in her books, not like in the scenes played out on the T.V. and in the cinema and on the boardwalk above them. She looked up from her hand in Brooke’s still pressed over her sister’s heart and gave a look of ongoing confusion and doubt. This love remained a dense mystery.

  Brooke gazed into her sister’s bafflement and finally recognized it as