Refund

by Karen E. Bender

  My parents were the ones who started helping Betsy hide her bad hand. After my mother hemmed the bottom of Betsy’s coats, she would sew the extra material to one sleeve. Betsy always had sleeves that were too long for her. I thought all her coats looked like they were coming alive and taking over her body. My mother took forever with those sleeves. I hated watching her with Betsy. Because of her hand, Betsy possessed my parents in a way that I did not. Sometimes when I played with Betsy, I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands; but the sight of me with gigantic hands always seemed to annoy my mother. “You don’t want to look like a waif,” she said, and she rolled my coat sleeves all the way to the elbow.

  Helping Betsy with her bad hand was the only thing I could do right that summer. Betsy was only eleven, a year younger than me, but she had become pretty. The sun went into her skin, and she held it easily, her hair, knees, glowing. Everyone knew her walk at our junior high school, a slow, watery step, her hair lifting and slapping her shoulders. Betsy understood something that I didn’t, and as her older sister, it was my job to stop this.

  That was the summer when my father moved from his bed to the couch every morning and when my mother tried to figure out what was wrong with him. It was 1973. Sometimes he was the one who waited in the gas lines, sometimes it was my mother. In the car he read books about success. They had words like Win and Conquer and Pinnacle in the titles. He and my mother ran a tutoring business for high school students, and students had maybe gotten smarter, somehow, and now nobody seemed to need much help.

  The books made my father tired. After he read them, my father came home and lay down on the couch. He watched the news reports. Before he felt tired, I used to sit with him on that couch and watch Sherylline Rivers talk disasters: My father would say two things to me, either “Listen, Sally,” or “This is sick.” “Listen, Sally,” included anything in the Middle East and teenagers who were more successful than I was. “This is sick” included everything else. I wanted to sit on that couch until my father organized the world for me.

  Now he didn’t want us in the den, so we sat where the carpet turned from rust to brown and watched him. It was Betsy’s idea to toss balls of paper with messages at our sleeping father. She wanted to see how far she could throw a ball of paper if it was placed on her bad hand. She said that if the messages hit him, maybe he would feel better. We scribbled notes we thought might work: The Greatest Father in the Universe!, Smile!, Hugs and Kisses!, We Luv You! I crumpled up Smile! and put it carefully on her bad hand.

  She reached her arm back and served Smile!, full force, into the den. The ball bonked our father on the forehead.

  He opened his eyes. We waited for him to thank us.

  I knew our father was different when he woke up after our message hit him. He didn’t instruct us about the world, something he would usually do. He threw back the blanket and sat up.

  “Enough, girls,” he said. “Out.”

  Hearing our father talk that way sent Betsy all the way across the yard. She put her towel as far from the den as she could. She said she was going to make a project of thoroughly reading all of her Seventeens.

  I couldn’t decide where to sit. I didn’t know what we had done wrong. Sometimes I sat with her across the yard. Sometimes I sat on the edge of the den, like an anchor.

  Our mother began to walk through the house. She walked hard through each room, as though into a wind. She was different, too. When she looked at us, she wasn’t in her face; she was somewhere with our father.

  When my mother yelled at my father to get up or see a doctor, I ran to Betsy, who was involved in her Seventeens.

  “What do we do!” I yelled at her.

  She turned the page on a quiz on kissable lip gloss. “How should I know?” she asked.

  I started to walk away until we heard our mother’s voice rise again, louder than I had ever heard it.

  Betsy jumped up. She began to run, arms flapping. I ran, too. She turned on the sprinklers. “Doe,” she sang. “A deer. A female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun . . .”

  “Me, a name I call myself . . .” We ran. We ran over the water; we ran as though we had practiced. I followed her around the yard, over the magazines, cover girls all wavy under the water.

  We ran as far from the house as we could. We sang so loud our voices blurred. The house shimmered through the water. It almost looked beautiful.

  BEFORE MY FATHER GOT TIRED, HE TOOK US DRIVING. HE WANTED to take us somewhere we had never seen. Sometimes he reached over the seat to us, his arm waved in front of our faces, and Betsy and I would decide what to put in his hand. “Guess what this is,” we’d say, giving him anything—a shoe, a comic book.

  I hated the game the moment Betsy put her bad hand into his. My father would rub her bad hand gently, as though he were trying to erase something, and then his fingers would close completely over her. “It’s . . . a banana,” my father would say. “A croissant.” Betsy would fall into the seat, giggling. “Wrong,” she’d say. “It’s a boomerang tip.” Sometimes I would also put my hand into his. He would lightly lace his fingers into mine. “This is—um,” he would say, thinking. I waited for him to tell me something special I could be.

  I had to be good at something. I was the older sister. That’s what I could do. My favorite older sister job with Betsy was when I was in charge of her bad hand. Before we played, she put her hand into my lap. I had so many ideas. We pushed it into Play-Doh to see the dents it made. We molded chocolate chip cookie dough around it to make a cookie that was full of air.

  When Betsy was six, we were sitting in the yard, and I was holding her bad hand, wondering what would happen if we put on a sprinkler, when she took it away and put it in her lap.

  “Why is it different on me?”

  “What? What’s different?”

  “Tell me.”

  I repeated what our father had told me. You’re the same as me, you just can’t take piano lessons.

  She began to bang her bad hand on the grass.

  “Give me a thumb,” she said to me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Come on,” she said. She put her bad hand into my lap.

  I had no idea what to do.

  I took her into our bedroom, and we looked through our closet. My Potato Head. Clue. Nothing seemed right. Our fifty-two-color marker set.

  “Sit,” I said. I held her bad hand in mine, and I began to draw. Bumps of aqua, olive green, burgundy. I wanted to find the color combination that would make her fingers sprout.

  When I was finished, Betsy had five colorful fingers drawn on her bad hand. We had a good day. I carried her around the yard; we sang. I lifted her up, she giggled, her bad hand raised like a beautiful flower.

  When she woke up the next morning, the colors had run. Her hand looked like it had been beaten up. “What did you do!” I shrieked. I was afraid I had deformed Betsy in a new, horrible way; now she would also be purple. But as soon as we had cleaned her off, Betsy turned around and put it in my lap.

  “Do it again,” she said.

  BETSY’S HAND WASN’T EXACTLY A HAND. HER ARM JUST ENDED IN a point, like a tail end of whipped cream. I thought it looked like Betsy’s arm just didn’t want to stop when it entered the world. I thought her arm sensed something wonderful in the world and was shooting right out to meet it. Like Betsy. She seemed always to have some new way to leave me behind. A few days after we had been sitting at the gate, she stood up and said, “I’m going to the beach.”

  That was an older sister’s idea. She went ahead and stole it.

  Betsy headed out the next day. I couldn’t believe it. I sat in the backyard and waited; I was afraid of the world. I opened the gate and started walking, walked until I hit the busy street. At the intersection, I stopped, feeling the car wind on my arms. I stood there, hoping, lifted my arms. But I was grounded without Betsy. There was nothing to do but turn around and go home.

  The next day, I let her pull me with her. We took the blu
e bus to Santa Monica. We dropped off the bus and looked. The sand rolled, bluish-white, to the flat silver of the Pacific Ocean. Betsy pushed out toward the water so fast I thought she’d belly-down the air, skid toward the sparkling blue.

  I was slower. The fear started from nothing sometimes. I felt it rise through my body. Betsy looked fine, flapping out the towel; all I could think of was our father pulling at me, trying to bring me back home. “The ocean’s polluted, Sherylline Rivers said,” I told her.

  “It is not,” said Betsy.

  I started unfolding the bus schedule. Betsy chewed her hair, watching me. “Wait,” she said.

  She grabbed my arm and started walking. She led me past a few lifeguard stations and up a hill. From the top of the hill, I saw a group of boys standing and pissing into a ditch.

  “How incredibly gross,” I said.

  The boys were standing in a zigzag row along the ditch, which was shallow but dark with something I didn’t want to think about. We were far enough away to lose the smell, but we could see the thin yellow lines go down into the ditch. We had put our towels on the top of the hill and had watched the boys walk up to the ditch. They had unzipped themselves quickly and stood, hips forward, all aiming for the same place.

  Betsy pointed at her discovery. “The one on the right could be named Tim,” she said. “Beside him might be Gus, and across could be Harvey.” I was impressed; that was more information than I knew about any boy.

  “Lie down,” said Betsy, and we did; she said we could hold them on the lengths of our arms. She said if we could get all the boys in our arms, they would be ours. We lay facedown, fingertips touching, but we couldn’t quite do it; there were a couple of boys that kept getting away from us.

  I breathed slowly, my chest pressing into the sand. I decided that I needed these boys to turn all at once and call: Sally. I imagined their voices filling me until I rose above them all. But the boys just stood, holding themselves, looking into the air. “John’s cute. Will’s a grosso. I don’t know about Ed,” said Betsy. Her good hand was in mine, hot and sticky. I could feel the air in my palm, and she pushed toward them, let go.

  WE MADE IT TO THE HILL BY TEN EVERY DAY; WE COULD SPEND FOREVER watching the boys. They came by twos or threes to the ditch and left quickly; after a few days, we knew them all. “There’s the cute guy we saw yesterday, the one who thinks he’s James Dean,” Betsy might say. “Okay. He’s . . . I think he’s . . . okay. He’s going. God, what did he drink this morning?”

  That was the fun part.

  “Grape Kool-Aid,” I said. “A gallon.”

  “Minute Maid, instant,” said Betsy.

  James Dean yanked his shorts shut. He was replaced by Fonz Wannabe.

  “Lemonade,” I said. We watched, open-mouthed, as he went and went and went.

  The hill was the one place in the world where I began to feel light. My father was far away, in the den with the curtains shut, but we were at the top of this hill. For a few hours a day, I felt like the manager of everything. The sun burned my arms gold. The sand was warm under my stomach. Sometimes I imagined a random cloud floating by and landing on my perfect hand. We sat for hours, waiting to see who would walk up next. Betsy and I made up things the boys would say if they liked us.

  “You are a total foxy babe,” said Betsy.

  “You are one hunk o’woman,” I tried.

  “You are a chick from my dream life,” she said.

  Betsy and I rolled close to each other. For a second we owned the boys. We owned the rumpled shadows on the sand; we owned the water, a scatter of diamonds; we owned the sun. We owned all of it.

  She leaned forward and quickly kissed me on the lips.

  “Ow,” I said, though it didn’t hurt.

  She kissed me again. She didn’t bump my nose that time either.

  “Ow,” I said, again.

  Betsy rolled away. I loved her.

  “Ow,” she said.

  UP ON THE HILL, BETSY AND I NEVER TALKED ABOUT OUR FATHER. WE did that only on the long block between our house and the bus stop; then, we discussed our various theories about what was wrong with him.

  One day I told her I thought he wasn’t doing anything because he was part of a contest. “Like how much TV you can watch,” I said. “He’s going to win a trip to Hawaii for four.”

  “No,” said Betsy. “But maybe he’s getting ready to go on Anything for Money.”

  “He’s going to win the car,” I shrieked.

  We hugged each other and jumped up and down. We were proud of our father. But the idea did not seem right when we got closer to the house. Our father was not going to Hawaii.

  I moved closer to Betsy. “There’s a bug on your shoulder!” I shrieked.

  “There is not,” she said.

  “Yes!” I shrieked. I swatted an invisible bug off her back and left my hand there. She didn’t move.

  We also had different theories about what would make our father feel better. That day, I decided the answer was French braids. Betsy pulled her Seventeen from her tote bag, and we sat on the curb, braiding each other’s hair. We marched up to the house, arm in arm, giggling. We looked like new people. He was going to love us. I began to knock, but Betsy grabbed me, hard.

  “He’s not going to like them,” said Betsy.

  “Yes, he will,” I said.

  “No,” she squeaked. “He’s not going to know who we are.”

  I didn’t know why I believed her, but it seemed better than believing myself. We destroyed our French braids in a little thunderstorm of work, quickly and viciously. We stood by the front door, quietly. Betsy put her hand on my back.

  “There’s a bug on you,” she said.

  WHEN BETSY WAS EIGHT, I TRIED TO SUCK HER FINGERS OUT. WE SAT, backs pressed against old games of Clue and Candy Land in our bedroom closet, legs tucked so our knees hit our chins. First I kissed her bad hand. I was delicate as a suitor: a circle of kisses around her wrist. “Eat it,” she said. Her bad hand was spongy and a little salty. My mouth rode it as though it were corn on the cob. I thought of fingers. I bent down and tried to wish them out of her, making us, finally, the same.

  “What?” she asked, excited.

  I wiped her on the carpet and inspected: nothing.

  “What?” asked Betsy. She was three years from becoming pretty. She put her bad hand in my lap.

  “Please,” she said to me.

  IT HAPPENED BY THE SNACK STAND. BETSY WAS PLUCKING STRAWS out of the container while I held our drinks. A row of boys leaned against a wall that said in loopy, black writing, NO FAT CHICKS.

  Betsy was struggling with the straw container. One of the boys, with a cute cotton candy pouf of brown hair, walked right up to her. He slapped a hand on the metal container. A few straws rumbled down. He plucked them out, very gently; then he held them out to Betsy as though they were a bouquet.

  Betsy looked at the straws and, slowly, at the boy. He was just standing there, being a boy, but that was too much for me. I stared down at the sand. Betsy took the straw from him. And then she ran to me.

  “What!”

  “He said his name was Barry and he hung out at Station 5,” she said.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  We ran across the sand, the ice in our drinks jingling.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He likes you,” I said.

  She shrieked. “Do you think he’s cute?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” she said. She stabbed her straw into her drink top. The boy was still there, watching. It took too long for him to disappear.

  BETSY AND I BOTH CRAWLED INTO MY BED AT NIGHT. SHE LIKED TO run her bad hand along my arms. Starting at my wrist, she slid it up to my elbow; then she stopped and slid back down again. We wrapped our legs around each other, Betsy smoothing me over and over, and often fell asleep like that, my mouth wet against her hair.

  Sometimes, when we held
each other, she would try to figure things out. “Daddy chopped them off when I was born,” she whispered. “He came into the hospital and chopped them off with a knife.” Or, “Mommy shoved them back in when I was a baby. Probably when I was crying too hard.” Her imaginary good hand was destroyed by can openers or car washes; it was savaged by parents or music teachers; but it was never ruined by me. I waited for her to say it—“You, Sally, slammed it in a car door”—but, instead, she just looked at me, waiting for my answer.

  “That is totally whacked,” was what I usually told her.

  “Really?” she asked me. “You think so, Sally?”

  AFTER BETSY HAD BEEN PICKED AT THE SNACK STAND, I DECIDED there had to be a change in our boy-watching. “The one who could be Jake looks too much like Donny Osmond,” I said. “The one who could be Hugh has weird lips.” Now all I could see were the mistakes in the boys. Pat’s tubby stomach. Brian’s spindly legs.

  Betsy seemed loosened from her body, able to fly out and away whenever the chance came. “The one who might be Fred is a total hunkola,” she said. “The one who could be Jeff has cool hair.”

  I told her she was blind. Or just sick. I was the older sister. I knew these things. She shrugged. Since the day of the boy by the snack stand, she was spending a lot of time looking in mirrors. I think she was wondering why she had been picked.

  The day she went down, we were debating the one who could be Earl. “The most disgusting thing on the planet,” I said. “I mean, if I were born looking like that, I wouldn’t ever leave the house . . .”