The Story Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

  SPRING IN NEW York was exceptionally beautiful. The trees in Central Park were a liquid green. When the wind shook the branches, pockets of green showered the ground. There were splotches falling onto the pages of Elv’s book, a crisscross of pollen and print. She was sitting on a bench outside the zoo. She was noticeably pregnant by the end of the season. Women going past often stopped to congratulate her. She smiled, thanked them, then returned her attentions to her book. She was reading about children the same way she had once devoured information about dogs. She knew absolutely nothing about them. They were an utter mystery. How had her mother ever managed the three of them, so close in age? How had she known how to cure a fever, a bee sting, a spider’s bite? How to make a bed, fix a perfect grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, pour a glass of milk without spilling a drop? You’ll understand everything you need to when your child is born, Elv’s ama had written to her. Don’t worry so much. But she hadn’t understood how to be a daughter or a sister or the beloved of a man who couldn’t turn away from his fatal flaw. How could she ever understand a child?

  She was in a bad way after Lorry. Her grief was immense, overpowering. It didn’t help that she had to leave their apartment. The building Lorry owned turned out to have been an inheritance from his grandmother, and it went directly to his brother upon his death. Michael sent a notarized letter asking Elv to move out, although he allowed her to stay until after the funeral. It was held at Our Lady of Sorrow. There was a surprisingly large crowd, all his hoodlum friends who had done nothing to save him, the old ladies who had adored him when he was a boy, the cousins he’d never mentioned. One of those cousins had looked stunned when Elv mentioned foster homes. “Lorry and Michael were never in foster homes. Their grandmother raised them. I don’t know what you’re talking about! She was a saint. Their parents were in a house fire, and Mimi took them in. She did a great job. It was this neighborhood that got to them, all the drugs floating around.”

  She heard another cousin talking about how good Lorry had been to his grandmother. He’d lived with her for the last three years of her life and had taken excellent care of the old lady, shoveling snow, maintaining the building, making certain she got to her doctor’s appointments. People said that on the last day of her life Mimi was seen on the street for the first time in months. Lorry had carried her downstairs so she could sit on a bench in the sunlight. She had waved at everyone who passed by. She was a good-natured, friendly woman who had butted into everyone’s business and wished everyone well. Lorry had been the light of her life. “Good-bye,” she had called in a small voice, until the sunlight began to fade and Lorry took her back to her top-floor apartment.

  Elv wore a black coat and high boots and a black scarf to the funeral. The weather was dreadful and the church seemed unheated. She didn’t know the priest or the other mourners. Pete Smith had driven her and was waiting in his parked car on the street. She went up to Michael, one of many who waited in a long line to offer him their sympathies. Everyone acted as if Elv was a stranger. There’d been many women before her, and several of Lorry’s old flames were in attendance, weeping, gathering in sad little groups.

  “I told you he was a mistake,” Michael said. “You should have listened.”

  “I didn’t know about your grandmother,” Elv said.

  “That was Lorry. You never knew what to believe.”

  “Did he talk to you much about his life underground?” Elv asked.

  Michael said something to a friend of Lorry’s who was standing nearby and they both laughed. Then Michael took Elv by the arm. It had been a long time since they had both been at Westfield, sneaking cigarettes behind the stable. They walked away from the crowd, stopping beneath one of the pine boughs that was drooping, snow-laden.

  “What did he tell you?” Michael wanted to know.

  Elv shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. Everything between her and Lorry had been private, a world big enough for two.

  “Did he tell you that bullshit about how he lived with the Mole People?”

  “No,” Elv said, defensive. She had a lump in her throat. Sometimes all of New York City smelled ashy, the way it had been underground below Penn Station. “He just told me some stories.”

  “Yeah, he was good at that. He liked telling people what they wanted to hear,” Michael said fondly. “That was my brother. My grandmother raised us and we paid her back by being wiseasses and getting into trouble. I’ve gotta say he made up for it at the end. He took good care of her.”

  “Right,” Elv said, dazed.

  “One thing that’s true. I never saw him with another woman after he got together with you.”

  “Now you’re probably bullshitting me.” She glanced up, trying to gauge whether or not she could really believe him. She seriously didn’t know what to believe anymore.

  “I mean it. It was you, Elv.”

  She glanced away. She felt burning hot standing there in the snow. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. If it wasn’t for me, you never would have met him, so I guess I’m to blame for the whole thing. The least I can do is be honest with you. Plus, you wrote a good term paper.”

  Elv tried to smile. “Right,” she said again.

  SHE OFTEN SPENT time in Central Park after he was gone. She had a ritual of taking the subway in on Sundays after she visited his grave. By now the lilacs in the park were abloom. The air was soft with humidity. Elv read for a while, then closed her book and strolled along the paths. The air smelled like hay and manure, jungle smells wafting up from the zoo. She yearned for the sound of wolves, but in the warm weather they had always hunkered down in the shade of the rocks, silent and wary. It was only in winter that you could hear them howling, the plaintive call sounding like unrequited love. Sometimes she felt Lorry was beside her, walking with her, although he would never be so quiet. He was a talker and she had loved listening to him. She had asked for stories and that was what he’d given her. She missed him so much she couldn’t think of anything but him. That’s what love was. That’s what it had turned out to be. She stopped at the entrance to the underpass where they used to meet during the winter she lived with her grandmother. It was filthy in there, pitch-dark. Elv was afraid to go farther. She saw a bundle of rags. It seemed as if someone was living there. She walked around it, through the green glint of light cast by the trees, past the patch of woods where Lorry said he’d buried his dog. She always stopped there and said a prayer. She wasn’t even certain how to pray, but she did her best. Claire was better at it; she’d known what to say, whereas Elv had needed to invent words, she’d needed a whole new language to even begin to get across what she felt.

  Not far away was the meadow where the horse had fallen on the runaway day so long ago. Elv had gotten out of the police car and walked across the lawn. She hadn’t felt afraid. That was the amazing thing. She’d usually been so scared, but when she was with Claire her fear abated. Her sister had been in the upended carriage, watching, sure of her. Claire had understood why Elv had fallen to her knees. She knew what it was like to carry the past wherever you went, sewn to your skin. Elv wished her sister was with her now, sprawled out in the grass, underneath the lace-work pattern of shadows. She was afraid, and she wanted to be with someone who loved her, but since she couldn’t think of who that might be, she lay down in the grass by herself and finished reading her book.

  THE SUMMER WAS exceedingly hot. Elv still tried to get to the cemetery every day, but her ankles were swelling and the trip was getting more difficult. She had to take two buses from the apartment Pete had found for her in Forest Hills. It was a nice neighborhood. A nice building. Her grandmother helped with the rent, sending a check every month. Elv took photographs of herself pregnant and sent them to Natalia in return. She wrote to her grandmother each week, short, cheerful letters. She didn’t let on that she was exhausted or that she suffered from excruciating bouts of loneliness.

  At the cemetery there were concrete benches along the n
arrow paths behind the rectory and very little sunlight. Hostas and ferns grew but not much else. It was the sort of dark garden where there were spiderwebs and peepers in the damp gulleys even though it was in the middle of the city, with buses rumbling by on the other side of the walls. Elv asked the grounds crew if she could pay to have a rosebush planted, but they said it would be a waste of time. There wasn’t any sun behind the church, and the high walls wouldn’t let in enough light.

  Pete Smith had found her a job as well as an apartment, not an easy task to accomplish considering that she was a pregnant woman with no education or skills. She worked at an animal shelter. She did intakes and fed the dogs and took them for walks and checked references and referrals. Elv soon taught herself how to type and use the word processor. But she preferred to spend time with the dogs. She tried some of the training techniques she had learned from Adrian Bean, and several seemingly hopeless cases were adopted after she’d had a hand in their training. It was soothing not to be with people, to accomplish something on the dogs’ behalf. They watched her with their dark eyes, waiting patiently for her attention. When they whimpered, Elv crooned to them in a sweet, high voice. She sang to them when she took them out in the shelter’s small yard in the evenings before she went home. Sometimes the children who lived in the apartment house behind the shelter swore they heard faeries singing. They opened their windows and leaned their elbows on the sills, but all they could see were brick walls, a crisscross of telephone wires, the darkening sky, a woman tossing a ball for a few dogs.

  When Elv thought about Pollo, the first dog she’d trained, she felt a sharp pang of loss. She guessed that if she had to write down the most important quality in a person or a dog, it would be loyalty. All the rest didn’t matter. That’s what she’d come to believe. It didn’t matter at all.

  She thought a lot about Meg. She wished she could sit down and talk to her, knowing what she knew now. She wished she could trade places with her, that she could wake the dead, unwind time. One night she dreamed of Meg, who was exactly the same, only she couldn’t speak. Se nom brava gig, Elv said in the language she’d forgotten in her waking life. Dream talk should have worked in a dream, but Meg disappeared and no one answered her. Elv woke up in a sweat. It occurred to her then that she had invented Arnish because she couldn’t speak. She had accused Meg of being jealous, but she’d been the jealous one. She was jealous that Meg didn’t know what she knew, that some sins were unspeakable and unpardonable.

  Pregnant women have urges, and Elv had the urge to go back to Westfield. She kept thinking about the red leaves, the way the snow had fallen as if she were in a snow globe, the rabbits she would see early in the morning, the hawks that perched in the trees. She took the bus from Forty-second Street one day, only a few weeks before her due date. It was a longer ride than she’d imagined, and once she’d had to ask the bus driver to pull over so she could get out and be sick by the side of the road. The bus was hot and stuffy, and the ride into the mountains was bumpy. She got out in the town, which was still just as small and as dead as it had been when she’d been trapped in New Hampshire. She went to the taxi stand and told the sole driver she wanted to go to the Westfield School. It had been closed for years, he said. Everything had been sold, including the horses; the buildings had been abandoned. There’d been a lawsuit and the state had stepped in, and no one had ever bought the property when it was put up at auction.

  Elv walked over to the town hall and the clerk helped her track down the couple who’d taken Jack, the old horse she’d loved. They kept him in a field, and there was a small barn for him in the winter. The wife said it would be fine if she visited and gave her instructions on how to get to their farm. It wasn’t a far walk, down the road a mile and a half. When Elv got to the field she was transported back to the day when the grass was so green, when Lorry walked toward her and the rest of the world dropped away. She stood at the fence. There was Jack, his big head bowed, grazing on meadow grass.

  “Hey,” Elv said. She got up onto the first rung of the fence and clucked her tongue. There were gnats and blackflies in the air. Everything smelled like grass. Jack came shambling over. “Hey there, buddy. It’s me. Elv.”

  The old horse rubbed his big head against her. His back was swayed but he looked beautiful against the sky. The woman who’d bought him waved and came down the driveway. She was an animal lover and couldn’t have poor Jack taken away for horsemeat. The other horses had all been sold to riding stables around the state, but no one had wanted Jack because he was so old.

  “I think he remembers you,” she said to Elv. Jack was eating out of Elv’s hands. She’d brought along a package of oatmeal cookies she’d purchased at the general store in town. Claire had said that cookies were what the horses at the stable in North Point Harbor liked best.

  “Nah,” Elv said. “He wouldn’t remember me. My sister was a rider. Not me. I just liked horses. He looks happy here.”

  The woman gave Elv a lift back to town. She waited in the shade for the bus and thought about the pond where she and Lorry had swam, how he had fucked her in the car and in the water, how she hadn’t wanted to go back to school, how she’d been so young and stupid and so unlucky and lucky all at the same time. When the bus came, she got on slowly. Her ankles were enormously swollen, and she was tired. She wouldn’t return to this town. She was never going to ride down dirt roads searching for that pond. She was never going to see Jack again, or climb the fence to explore the grounds of the school, or find the bones of the bird necklace she’d made that night when she sat with Claire at the kitchen table. She got a seat and looked out at the trees and thought what a long way it seemed to New York, and how her mother had driven here once in a blinding snowstorm and she had refused to see her. How she’d watched from the window, too prideful to call out to her mother, too young to know how few chances there would be to do so.

  SHE SPENT THE Fourth of July going from one hardware store to another in Forest Hills, searching for an air conditioner she might buy on time. Nobody trusted anybody and everything was sold out anyway. She wound up with a lousy fan that merely spread the heat around. She put cold compresses on her head and drank OJ with ice and broke out in a heat rash. Then Pete arrived with an air conditioner in his car. She said he’d done enough, she didn’t want to trouble him any more, but he’d said, “That’s what kids are for. To cause you trouble.” So when the time came, she phoned him. It was embarrassing, but she didn’t have anyone else to call. He’d waited in the hallway at Queens County, pacing, as though he were her father rather than a stranger. When they came to tell him the baby was a girl, he shouted “Hurray!” and clapped a few other men waiting in the lounge on the back, then went to phone Natalia.

  “Six pounds, six ounces,” he told her. “Perfect in every way.” It was the middle of the night in Paris and Natalia had been asleep, but she was grateful for Pete’s call. She took out all the photographs Elv had sent her over the years. She especially loved the pregnant ones—there was one in which Elv had lifted up her shirt to show off her enormous belly. She had a beautiful grin on her face. Tell me it won’t stay this way, she’d written to her ama. Promise me this baby will come out.

  At first Natalia didn’t tell Claire about the baby. If she tried to bring up Elv’s name, Claire would shrug off the conversation or make an excuse to leave the room. Natalia hadn’t pressed her, but now things had changed. She knocked on the bedroom door and Claire answered wearing a T-shirt and underwear. Her hair was knotted and she looked rumpled, but she hadn’t been asleep. She’d been reading Kafka, the master of unhappiness and self-punishment, a genius when it came to revealing the many ways in which people were unable to see the fundamental nature of those closest to them. Just as Claire suspected: human beings were mysterious creatures who hid their true centers, like onions with layer after layer of translucent skin. Claire liked to read the same book over and over again until it was familiar and there were no surprises.

  “Sit dow
n,” Natalia suggested after Claire had let her into the bedroom.

  “I just got up,” Claire said. She was pale, out of sorts, a true insomniac. She had grown bored at the shop. She knew the other salesgirls pitied her. Lucie and Jeanne both had boyfriends and social lives. They brought her more and more hand-me-downs, as if that would change her fate. Sometimes she left the bundles of clothes they brought in the bin in the courtyard without even checking to see what was inside.

  The fact that her grandmother had come to talk to her now made her anxious. Claire expected bad news. It was the middle of the night, after all. She was convinced to perch at the foot of her bed and listen. Though it was July she kept the windows closed. The room was airless and hot. She didn’t mind.

  Natalia explained that she hadn’t wanted to upset Claire by bringing up her sister’s name but there was a time and a place for everything, and this was the time to tell Claire that her sister had had a child.

  “She’s still with him?” Claire fleetingly thought about the night she’d opened the door to find them in bed when she’d had such a terrible fever. Her face flushed.

  Natalia shook her head. No, that man was gone. Dead.

  “I pity the child,” Claire said.

  “Claire!”

  “Well, I do! What do you want me to say? That I’m happy for her? That I wish her all the luck in the world?”

  “You can say what you want.” Natalia’s face was ashen. She had never been more concerned about Claire than she was at that moment, or more ashamed. “But Elv knows how to love someone. Can you say the same for yourself?”

  ELV’S LITTLE GIRL had black hair, like all the Story sisters. Her eyes, however, were dark, like her father’s. Even as a newborn she could easily be comforted as soon as she heard the words Once upon a time. The nurses in the maternity ward had been amazed. They all declared her to be the most beautiful child ever seen in a New York City hospital, and her mother couldn’t have agreed more. Elv named her Megann, for her mother and sister, but she called her Mimi, which was the name Lorry had favored.