Precious (3 page)

She closes her eyes and tries to ignore Eva’s stories.
One more step,
she thinks,
and everything can change.

“Get down!” Eva yells, exhausted.

One scuffed Converse poised in front of the other, a lace dangling precariously off the ledge, Sissy does not get down. Too much is at stake to come down now. The metal rim sags under her weight. One step, then two. She pretends that she is walking high above the world, on a wire. She feels distanced from everything—Eva, her tales of Vicki’s disappearance, the demand of chores, the pull of gravity. She tells herself: One pirouette at death-defying heights and she will bring back not Vicki but her mother. One pirouette and she will return her life to normal.

“Are you listening?” Eva asks. “I said get down, Sissy. Get down now.” Irritated, she stands with her hands on her hips. Could she demand,
Obey?
Could she tell Sissy that occasionally, and more so since their mother left, she has wanted to break Sissy into pieces, rip apart her limbs, devour her in anger? Or worse, could she confess that on those days when she leaves Sissy, she wishes she’d come home to find her sister gone, not quite like the Anderson girl, but gone nonetheless? If their mother were here, none of this would happen. Their mother, Natalia, misses everything, of course. She chose to leave in the cold and snow, preferring it to warm goodbyes and sunshine. She has left Sissy to tears in the nighttime and Eva choking on her sense of sisterly duty.

Sissy holds her arms up high in the air. She thinks only of the next
step, the turn she will ease into, her life afterward transformed. When Eva calls again, Sissy ignores her.

And this—this more than anything—angers Eva more. She is not Sissy’s mother; nor does she wish to be. If Sissy does not want to sleep, Eva will not make her. Nor will she run in the middle of the night to comfort Sissy when she wakes from dreams of old women, her head filled with the sound of scraping fingers, her forehead beaded with sweat. She will not check the closet for monsters and sinister men. And if Sissy somehow falls from the lip of the pool and cracks her head, Eva will only say it serves her right. Today, under the weight of chores and the expectation of her man, she is in no mood. She picks up the rake again and digs into the grass. “It’s not funny,” she says.

“I’m not laughing, am I?” Sissy questions.

If Eva does not find Sissy’s actions amusing, neither does Sissy. Dreaming, she knows, is serious business. At nine, she already senses the world outside her is treacherous, easily broken and shattered. She closes her eyes and conjures the world of her mind and heart. She fills the pool with water, sees the light reflecting off the surface—brilliant, forgiving.

Another step forward. She balances herself and feels a discernible risk. If she comes down, she will be simply herself: a square-bodied girl with unruly split-ended hair the color of blanched cocoa beans, breasts that refuse to grow even though she stuffs her shirt with toilet paper and admires the pretty lie. Plain-looking compared to Eva, more the owner of her father’s build, Sissy, if truth be told, pales in comparison of beauty, just as she often pales in courage. She hates to be alone, unlike Eva who always wants away from the house, away from Sissy.

“Get down!” There is a nastiness in Eva’s voice that surprises Sissy. “Grow the fuck up, will you?”

Up and down,
Sissy thinks.
Get down, grow up.
The water she conjured just a few moments before disappears, leaving only the sagging liner speckled with fake pebbles, the peril of falling. The part of Sissy that is afraid (the part of her that is always afraid) is certain her pirouette
will lead to a sudden, spectacular death.
A blaze of glory.
A fall, a crack against the empty pool liner, the spilling of blood. Her funeral: well attended. Strangers mourning her, wailing into the long night. Carnations laid atop her casket, a stallion to pull her coffin, a feathery plume on the horse’s harness.

But despite the obvious risk at five feet in the air, she tells herself that one turn can undo time. One death-defying pirouette and the world is hers. Eva will stop being agitated, quick to anger, and return to simply being her sister. Her father will fill the pool. Her mother will emerge from the back door and stand on the steps. Tall and lean, her hair long and wavy like Eva’s, though pinned back loosely from her face and sprinkled with gray, her mother will wipe her hands on a kitchen towel and call Sissy in for lunch. Maybe, Sissy reasons, even Vicki Anderson will find her way home, though this is something she throws in begrudgingly to assuage a lingering tie in her heart that comes from once being friends, from those long days together, from the many sleepovers where the girls transformed an entire room into a pile of blankets and then scurried underneath them like moles. She can still see Vicki’s face, her dark eyes illuminated by a flashlight, the shadow under her chin. Vicki asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I don’t know,” Sissy confessed. It seemed pointless to plan her life when her desires changed from day to day.

“Well,” Vicki Anderson told her. “If you don’t have ambition, that’s not my problem. I’m going to join the circus. Or ride on trains. Or dissect a heart. Or be a famous ghost detective and end up on TV. Watch, and you’ll see my name around.”

“Anything is possible,” Sissy said, shrugging.

And today, with the light spilling over her, everything does seem possible if she stays up here, away from the ground.

“I’ve got another story for you,” Eva yells. “A doozy about a sister who kicks her younger sister’s ass.”

“Quiet!” Sissy says, daring, arms raised. She doesn’t need Eva’s stories; she has her own. Tucked beneath her bed is a shoe box that contains
her favorites—Nancy Drew and
Ringling Brothers
and
Circus on Rails
and
Ghost Detectives.
Also in the box she keeps a stolen photograph, yellowed at its scalloped edges, of her mother as a young girl— Natalia with Frank, her head tilted back, a dark dress with a bow around her waist, a daring V-neck. Under that lies a diary filled with secrets and stories—stories that avenge Precious and murder Vicki Anderson five times over. Stories of old women with gnarled fingers and broken teeth. Stories of birds in the night, their iridescent eyes watching everything. Stories of Eva, who Sissy often refers to as Darth Vader, the Evil Overlord. Stories of her mother, to which Sissy has added fantastic twists: instead of leaving, her mother grew white wings and flew away. Instead of not saying goodbye, her mother sent many regretful letters, pages damp from tears. In one tale, Sissy even made a knife tear at her mother’s flesh, but after she penned those lines, she immediately regretted them and blackened out the entire passage with a marker.

A sullen ache settles in her, and she misses what is gone. She flails her arms forward before catching her balance. Her pulse races. To soothe herself, she begins a familiar refrain:
Once upon a time.
Once upon a time, she tells herself, there was a girl perched five thousand feet in the air on a pool top, the daughter of a woman who danced around fires in a country with no name. Sissy strains to complete the story. She does not remember all her mother’s words spoken before bedtime and will, in fact, never remember them entirely—those tales of lost women, wanderers; those who disappeared in ash and dust and were forgotten; a woman left on a street corner, peddling trinkets and reading palms; bits of the stories told in fragments of other languages.
My real mother threatened to sell me once because I didn’t listen,
Natalia once said in a bedtime story.
She could be a real Kurva who shape-shifted like an animal.

Sissy remembers to breathe. She adjusts, readies herself. She begins a turn. She hears crunching leaves, smells almonds and coconut butter. Then, a yank. Her legs wobble and strain, pulled by gravity, and then, she alights—flesh and bone hitting the ground.

Eva stands above her with a look that says it all: She will brook no foolishness. “Queen of the morons,” she says sharply. “I told you to get down and work.”

Sissy rises and brushes pebbles and dirt from her knees. She wipes away blood and rubs a welt that is already forming. The moment is ruined, the day is ruined. Nothing will change. She will only be herself, an inconsolable girl.

Sissy’s bottom lip protrudes slightly, and Eva knows that a serious tantrum is about to come on, as quick and violent as a summer storm.
She’s been brewing this,
Eva thinks.
She’s been brewing this up all day.

Sissy gives an exasperated kick, one directed toward Eva’s shin, and one that lands, miraculously, squarely where she intends. A wave of pain travels through Eva before she swoops forward and smacks Sissy’s face. Then she catches herself. She steps back suddenly, saying, “I’m sorry baby. I didn’t really mean to do that.”

Too stunned to answer, Sissy wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

“For Christ’s sake,” Eva says, bending over, “don’t cry.”

But it is too late, and crying is exactly what Sissy does, although this is not what she wanted to do at all. To cry is to admit that you are wrong, or that you have managed to find yourself somehow terribly alone. When she cries, Eva tells her to toughen up. When she cries, her mother is leaving again. When she cries, she hurts all over, for everything. She chokes back her tears, and, indignantly, says: “You’re
trying
to kill me. You’re trying to goddamn
kill me.”

Eva rights herself. It is senseless, she knows, to argue. “Goddamn kill you, Sissy Kiss?”

“Goddamn it all to hell,” Sissy says, and kicks at the ground. She notices a cicada crawling there. She stomps it with her foot, feeling a guilty pleasure.

“Goddamn it all,” Eva ventures, “to
mother-fucking
hell.”

Sissy’s eyes widen, and Eva senses Sissy will not press the limits of
foul language as far as
that,
despite however much Eva might encourage it behind their father’s back.

Eva takes Sissy’s arm and pulls her closer. With her free hand she straightens Sissy’s KISS T-shirt; it has managed to crawl up on one side, simultaneously scrunching Gene Simmons’s face and revealing skinny flesh and rib. “If I were trying to kill you, Sissy, you’d already be dead by now.”

“Thanks a lot, jerk.”

“Don’t be a Neanderthal.”

“Don’t use big words.”

Eva steps back again and looks Sissy over. Something in her chest constricts and she feels it then—obligation, a pestering love. “You’ll be fine,” she says. “No permanent damage.” She sighs the sigh of the ages and looks over Sissy’s shoulder, down the yard, and out to the alley. “Forget the chores,” she says, finally. “I’ll make up some excuse with Dad. Just go—go inside. There are franks in the fridge. I’m going out.”

“Where?” Sissy asks. “Are you going out with Greg?”

“Absolutely not,” Eva tells her. “And where is none of your business. And God no, not Greg. He’s a juvenile delinquent, practically. Just because
you
adore him—”

“I don’t,” Sissy says. But she has already daydreamed what she has deemed an inevitable wedding: white streamers and pink frosting on the cake (peonies, perhaps, or roses) and Greg’s light blue tuxedo trimmed with velvet, Sissy in tulle, and her father in the back of the reception hall, passing out cigars.

“Earth to sister,” Eva says.

“What?”

“Good God, never mind.” She heads inside, and Sissy follows.

“Eva?”

“What?”

“Is it him? Are you going to meet
him
?” She has come to think of him as the mystery man, the man of magic—lean with a pleasant, wide
face and smile. Only a week ago, he pulled up in the alley, got out of his van, and hugged Eva, who was waiting for him. He presented her with a flower he had hidden behind his back. “Is it him?”

“I told you that’s a secret,” Eva says quietly. “You promised not to tell.”

“I won’t tell. I’m just asking.”

“Not him,” Eva lies.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Do you know you drive me crazy with questions?”

“Are you mad?”

“No, not really. Are you going to tell?”

“No.”

In the kitchen, Eva pulls out a soda from the refrigerator, opens the can, and pours a glass of Coca-Cola. “You know what to do if anyone calls?” Eva asks, leaning against the counter. “If Dad calls on break?
Especially
if Dad calls. I’m indisposed. Say it.”

“I’m indisposed,” Sissy says.

“Not you. Me. I’m indisposed. I’m counting on you not to tattle. Tattletales get their just due.” She hands Sissy the half-finished glass and watches as Sissy drinks the soda and holds it in her mouth for a moment, leaving it to fizzle.

“I already told you I won’t,” Sissy says finally.

“Good. I’m sorry for what I did before.”

“Do you really mean that, or do you just not want me to tell?”

“I mean it.”

“Okay.”

“How much do you love me, kid?”

“Tons,” Sissy says. “I love you tons.”

“You always say that,” Eva tells her. She crosses her arms. “You’re too easy.”

Sissy sips her soda. “Eva?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t Dad fill the pool?”

“Because he’s an asshole, that’s why.”

“Eva?”

“What?”

“Did Mom go where Vicki went?”

Eva squats down, to eye level. “No,” she says plainly. “Mom didn’t go where Vicki went.”

“Maybe Mom was kidnapped.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Why do you conflate things?”

Sissy looks at her strangely. “Maybe,” Sissy says finally, “Mom was kidnapped and that’s why she hasn’t called.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Eva says, impatient to be on her way, and, at the mention of their mother, annoyed again. “Mom’s probably still in Italy with Dr. Finley like she was when she wrote to us. That’s the truth, Sissy. Mom is gone and she isn’t coming back, so you might as well just forget about her.”

Sissy follows her sister down the hall. Eva picks up her purse from the living room chair and opens it. She stands in front of the mirror and applies a coat of orange lip gloss.