Sister (7 page)

 

Halloween fell on a Wednesday, and my mother asked if I would mind staying home to wait for trick-or-treaters while she worked late at the
Sell It Now
! This year, for the first time, my father would be in charge of Halloween, driving Sam to Horton, watching closely while he approached each house, rang the bell, came back with a miniature chocolate bar or a fistful of sweet hard candy. There had been icy rumors about razor blades in apples, arsenic in Pixy Stix. Even Girl Scout cookies weren't safe; someone had discovered a pin. “You check everything before he eats it,” my mother told my father. “Nothing unwrapped, nothing homemade. I'm
serious
, Gordon,” she said, because my father had started to laugh.

“You worry too much,” he said. “Sam's not afraid of that horse crap, are you, Sam?” and Sam looked between my mother and my father, anxiety creasing his forehead.

Other years, my mother would have driven us into Horton and dropped us off at the band shell, with strict orders to return by nine o'clock. We were never late. After curfew, the high school kids roamed the streets, the sweet tooth of childhood gnawing in their throats. They couldn't go trick-or-treating anymore; they were too old, too angry, stiff-legged in their freshly washed jeans. A few of the biggest boys dressed up as girls, while the girls painted their faces in the usual ways—white lipstick, green eyeliner, blush the color of beef. To us, they had become a part of the terror, no less essential than witches and demons. If they found a younger kid scurrying between the houses, the next day at school that child would be without candy, humble, eager for even a few stale pieces of chicken corn.

This year, I had planned to be an angel, my wings pinned
into a clever V to minimize wind resistance. But as my mother pointed out, a lot of kids my age would also be staying home, and I began to enjoy the idea of answering the door, looking over the costumes, deciding if they were worth one candy bar or two. So on Halloween night, I put on my everyday jeans and helped turn Sam into a vampire bat, stapling black streamers to the arms of his shirt for the air to ripple like wings. With his white plastic fangs and spiky bat ears, he looked the way I imagined a real-life vampire bat would. But just as he was ready to try his first flight off the couch, my father announced that costumes were for sissies. “You can be your old man, how's that?” he told Sam, scrunching his company hat over Sam's cardboard ears. It was a blue baseball cap, with a bent visor and
Fountain Ford
scrawled across its brim. “Dad!” I said, but Sam did not say anything, not even when my father plucked the streamers from his arms and took away his plastic jack-o'-lantern, the hollow kind all the other kids had, and gave him a brown grocery bag instead. “It'll hold more,” my father explained. “This is a bag that means business.”

Sam spit out his fangs. “Maybe I should carry a briefcase or something,” he said, tilting the visor to hide his eyes. “So it looks more like a costume.”

“Not necessary!” my father said. He was bristling with enthusiasm, clapping his hands together the way we'd seen him do at Fountain Ford when talking with the other salesmen about a hot deal. I could see how it was going to be, my father hustling Sam door to door, block to block, jeering him on when he stopped to catch his breath. Sam would have more candy than he'd ever had with me—my father would make sure of it. He winked as he guided Sam out the front door, his hand at the back of Sam's neck. I did not say good-bye; I was angry with my father, but even more so with Sam, because he did not fight back. The door slammed shut, forcing in a puff of air, rich with wood smoke and damp.

I finished the dishes and wandered around the house, waiting for trick-or-treaters. I looked out the windows. I opened the refrigerator door and closed it. I examined the row of family pictures hanging on the stairway wall. My parents' wedding portrait. My mother's high school graduation, a picture of my grandmother, Auntie Thil and Uncle Olaf. A snapshot my mother had taken of Sam and me when we were very small, sitting back-to-back in a gigantic pumpkin my father had bought from our neighbors. There were no pictures of my father's parents or his younger brother, Arnold, who had died in the war. No, he said, when we asked, he did not miss them. “How could I miss anybody when I have such a fine family right here?”

Sam's favorite cat, Rose, rubbed against my legs, but when I tried to pick her up she switched her tail and stalked away. To console myself, I began to eat the miniature Snickers bars from the candy bowl. The taste was flat and chalky, the way something on sale would taste. It didn't taste as good as trick-or-treat candy, which was sweeter because you sensed it wasn't really yours, something deliciously stolen. I imagined Sam in my father's baseball cap, holding out his ugly grocery bag, and I ate a few more Snickers, mixing the remaining ones with my fingers so it looked like there were more. My mother had said we probably wouldn't get many trick-or-treaters anyway. Our house was too far from Horton, set back from the highway. The trick-or-treaters we did get usually came just as we were ready for bed, kids from the neighboring farms huddled close for warmth in the open bed of somebody's pickup. The glowing end of a cigarette watched from the cab, a red devil's eye.

Tonight the first group of trick-or-treaters didn't arrive until well after dark. I had long given up sitting by the door and was watching a Charlie Brown special and nibbling Snickers bars when I heard footsteps on the porch. I ran into the kitchen and peeked carefully through the window: a group of clowns and one
tiny, shivering fairy. When I opened the door they all just looked at me, shifting foot to foot.

“What do you say?” I said, because it didn't seem fair they should get something for nothing.

“Please,” the fairy chirped. The older ones tittered a few “
trick-or-treats
” and held out their plastic jack-o'-lanterns. I wondered how I looked to them, too big to go trick-or-treating, perhaps, but not big enough to be mistaken for a grown-up. They had come in a rusted blue station wagon that was idling by the shed, and when they ran back and opened the doors I heard a woman's shrill voice telling them to hurry up and shut the goddamn doors, did they want to freeze her ass?

Suddenly it seemed that every five minutes I'd hear a knock at the door. There were witches and elves and Martians; there were ingenious salt and pepper shakers, a martini, an airplane, even a Tweety bird with real chicken feathers. I began to worry about running out of candy, and I wished that I hadn't eaten so much of it myself. I was jittery from the sugar, and every time I heard a new group at the door, the sound tickled my spine like a burst of electricity.

At precisely nine o'clock I gave the last Snickers bar to a rabbit; his sister scowled at me through her ballerina eyes when I handed her an apple, still cold from the crisper. “It's all I have,” I pleaded. The rabbit giggled and scampered toward the waiting truck. The ballerina held her stare an extra moment before pivoting elaborately, then stomping down the steps, her long braid swinging. I shut the door, locked it, and turned off the porch light. I considered putting a sign on the door saying
Sorry, just ran out
, but Uncle Olaf did that every year so he wouldn't have to pay for candy, and last year he'd gotten his windows soaped. Maybe there would be no more trick-or-treaters. With that, I heard another car creeping up the drive. I ran around the house turning off lights, until everything was dark. The car hesitated in the courtyard, then turned and headed back toward the road. I was re
lieved. It was nine-fifteen; my father and Sam would be home soon. Maybe we could give away some of Sam's candy, the kinds he didn't like. I found a flashlight in the kitchen drawer and amused myself by letting the cats chase the floating white circle of light across the floor. The furniture loomed in the silence, the couch and the chairs rubbing shadows. The big fern rustled from the cold air seeping in beneath the front window.

By ten o'clock I had started to worry. My father and Sam should have been home by nine-thirty, and I wondered if they'd been in an accident. There hadn't been any trick-or-treaters for a while, but I still didn't want to turn on the lights. To pass the time I went upstairs and changed into my nightgown and slippers and robe, leaving the flashlight, still lit, on my bed. When I picked it up, it flickered uneasily. I turned it off to save the batteries. Outside, the wind had blown back the clouds to reveal a nearly perfect full moon, and after a moment I could see everything clearly. I was heading back toward the stairs, stepping through the dappled patterns made by the moonlight, when I heard another knock at the door.

It startled me because I hadn't heard a car. It was almost ten-thirty, and I figured whoever it was would give up quickly. But that didn't happen. Somebody began to knock. Then I heard the screen door open; the person pounded on the inner door. I crept down the stairs to the living room window, wondering if it was anyone we knew. But when I looked out into the courtyard, there was no car. I went into the dining room and cupped my hand to the glass, looking down the long driveway to the road, but I couldn't see a car down there either. Whoever it was had come by foot.

I didn't know whether or not to be afraid, and I wished desperately for my father and Sam to come home. After a while, the pounding stopped and the screen door closed, almost gently. I heard the porch steps creak, the low murmur of a man's voice, and then I saw a shape outside the living room window. I dropped
to the floor, listening as it moved around the house, testing each of the windows, one by one. The cats listened too, their green eyes glowing. If someone got inside, they would disappear like shadows and wait patiently for whatever was happening to me to be finished, so they could return to their favorite chairs and lick their paws. I hated them then. I wanted to put my hands around their smooth, smug throats and squeeze. And I hated my mother and my father and even Sam, who had left me at risk, all alone.

Now someone was working on the back door, making quiet, careful sounds, worrying at the lock, jiggling it, cajoling it, until I heard the bolt slide back with a hollow crack. I got to my feet and backed into the kitchen, thinking I would get a knife from the drawer, but then I decided that the sound of the drawer opening would reveal that someone was home. Instead, I reached for the largest cast-iron pan hanging on the wall. Just as I was lifting it down, the kitchen light snapped on, and I spun too hard too fast, the heavy pan jerking my body toward a man. The pan sailed past him, hit the wall, dropped straight to the floor, and bounced in a cloud of plaster. “Jesus Christ,” the man said, and he was my father, and he was laughing. Sam peeked out from behind him, his eyes huge and terrible beneath my father's
Fountain Ford
cap. “I locked the damn keys in the car,” my father said. “We had to hitch back with some kids, and when you wouldn't answer the door…”

He was limp with his laughter, leaning against the wall beside the dent where the pan had landed. “How are we going to explain this to your mother?” he gasped. “She's going to think you've gone crazy.”

“I am not crazy,” I said, and I was dizzy with what I thought was pure embarrassment; I hadn't learned, yet, to recognize rage. “How was I supposed to know it was you?”

“Well, Christ, Abby, who else would it be?”

“A rapist,” I yelled. “Or a
sodomist
!” My father stopped laughing. He stared at me, incredulous, as if I'd just done some
thing obscene. “
Honey
,” he said awkwardly. My body was trembling beneath me, and with all my will I forced it to stay whole, to carry me step by step through the kitchen, past my father, past my brother, until I reached the stairway. There, shame broke over me in hot, sharp waves, and I took the stairs two at a time. In my room, I got into bed without taking off my robe, without turning on the light. After a while, Sam came in and sat at the foot of the bed with his bag of trick-or-treat candy, as if he wasn't sure whether to stay with me or go back downstairs to my father. I could hear his breathing, ragged and thick, as if he was crying too. “I thought you were going to kill me,” I finally said, and then he crawled up the length of the bed and got under the covers beside me, the way he used to do. The candy bag rested, stone heavy, on my chest.

“Look,” he said, but I didn't need to reach inside to understand it was more candy than either of us could possibly have imagined. I sat up and upended the bag across our legs. The contents slithered and spread, glittering in the moonlight like a blanket of jewels.

“Do you think some of them are poisoned?” Sam asked, and he sat up too.

I picked up a tiny carton of Junior mints and turned it over in my palm, but there was no way to tell. “We ought to turn on the light,” I finally said, but neither of us did. Sam was the first to begin to eat; it was some sort of cookie, homemade, with lots of chocolate chips. He held it out to me, and I opened my mouth, bracing, bracing hard for the stab of the pin or the muffled whiff of poison, the edge of the razor biting bone.

T
hough my mother had lived in Horton since before Sam and I were born, she still referred to Oneisha as
home
, drawing out the word so that it sounded like someone's name. Every Sunday after Mass, the three of us ate dinner at my grandmother's house, sometimes joined by Auntie Thil and our cousins, more rarely by my father and Uncle Olaf. The house was a pale pink two-story with a porch that wrapped around it like the snug waist of a girdle. The first floor listed slightly to the left, while the second floor listed slightly to the right, and when you compared them to the strict vertical lines of the porch railing, it made the house appear to be swaying to a gentle internal wind. In summer, squirrels nested in the gutters and rustled in the chimney; in winter, mice made scritching noises behind the walls. My grandmother's cats tracked the sound with their ears, while Sam and I watched, twisting our faces, still young enough to want our own ears to move with that same quick, swiveling grace.

My mother says that, even now, Oneisha hasn't changed. If you stand in front of Saint Ignatius Church, Highway KL and the Fox Ranch Road stretch in four directions like the arms of a cross, narrowing until they vanish at the point where they meet the
horizon. Growing up, I believed these roads wrapped the world like flat, wide ribbon, and that if you followed any one of them, you would eventually find yourself approaching the wooden signs Uncle Olaf had carved to replace the green metal kind issued by the state of Wisconsin:
ONEISHA, POP
. 650. Home was a place you never escaped. Like an enchanted maze, the very steps you hoped might lead you away were, in fact, bringing you back to the same streets you walked with your friends, restless, your sneakers scuffing the pavement, all the while sensing things could change in an instant if only you knew what to look for.

But the year I started high school, I stopped looking and closed my eyes. I slept for hours on end, going to bed right after supper, sleeping through my alarm the next day, falling asleep in school. Friends stopped calling, puzzled by my lack of response to the things in their lives that mattered most—boys, curfews, parents, grades. Someone reported me to the school guidance counselor, who called me in for a few short “consultations.” He was a heavyset man, who chain-smoked as he asked faltering questions about my home life; afterward, he sent my mother notes on pale blue paper, explaining his role in the school system, inviting her to make an appointment to discuss “life's rocky transition called adolescence.” The principal sent notes too, only his were form letters printed on stark school stationery, two parallel columns with
Check Off Items That Apply
at the top. “Grades falling,” my mother read aloud. “Attitude poor. Does not pay attention.” When I began to lose weight, she took me to Dr. Neidermier, who took my pulse and palpated my abdomen before he said hello. I stared at the medical diagram on the wall, a man's head and torso, the skin and muscle peeled away to reveal his various organs. Just above his jellyfish brain,
THE HUMAN ANATOMY
was printed in bold black letters.

“There's nothing wrong with her,” Dr. Neidermier said. I sat motionless on the edge of the examining table, clutching the worn green gown around me. My mother smoothed it over my
knees, as if I were still a little girl and the gown was a fancy little girl's dress. I remembered her driving me to grade school birthday parties, the proud feeling of sitting alone beside her in the front seat like a grown-up. “Her weight's OK. Actually, she could lose another ten, fifteen pounds, no problem.”

“But there must be something the matter,” my mother said. I could see her shoulders rise as if she were pulling herself up by an internal string. After two years at the
Sell It Now
!, she and Cindy Pace had taken out a small-business loan and started their own advertising company. Cindy Pace had a college degree in English; she seemed nice enough to me, but she'd never been married, which, according to my father, meant she wasn't normal. He nick-named her “Windy Face,” because she and my mother talked on the phone so much. At night, he listed all the reasons why A-1 Advertising was going to be a failure, but my mother tuned him out, reading books with titles like
Assert Yourself
! and
Yes, I Can
! As she spoke to Dr. Neidermier, she enunciated each word carefully, a technique, she had explained to me, that would make a person take you seriously. “You don't need a medical degree to understand this child isn't well,” she said.

But Dr. Neidermier was smiling, the way he did at Sunday Mass when he turned around to give the Sign of Peace. “It's her age. You know,” he said, “sweet sixteen and all that.”

“She's barely fifteen. A freshman in high school.”

“Fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty. It's tough for a girl these days,” he said. “Competing with the boys. College. Career.” He winked at me, a gesture that always made me feel I'd missed something. “Join some clubs. Go out for pizza with the boys.” I felt my eyes closing under the bright fluorescent lights. When I opened them, he was gone and my mother was standing in front of me, staring into my face.

“Wake up,” she said. “Concentrate.” Her eyes were hazel, with flecks of brilliant green, and I realized how seldom I looked past the thick curve of her glasses. Her nose, I knew, was a slender
replica of my own, and there was a small pink mole at the corner of one nostril. “What are you thinking,” my mother asked, “when you look at me like that?”

“I don't know,” I said, but I was wondering if I would be able to recognize her if we met on the street in Chicago or New York City or Paris or any of the millions of other places I had never been. I wondered how I could be sure that it really was my mother. This woman's hair, I noticed, was blondish at the temples; didn't my mother have red hair? But who would want to trick me like this, to pretend she was my mother when she wasn't? I began to feel afraid. I closed my eyes again.

“We've got to do something,” my mother said. “You're slipping away as we speak.”

“Yes,” I said. I was tired. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed, where I'd been all afternoon, waking to the intermittent whine of the saw coming from my father's workshop. He had a rare day off from the car lot, and he was spending it making yet another bird feeder with Sam. The backyard rattled with bird feeders and birdhouses; they swung from the trees and from delicately curved stands, they stood at attention on thick posts, they dangled from the clothesline, they stuck like barnacles to the sides of the shed. “Do we really need another one, Gordon?” my mother said, but my father said that Sam needed to practice what he called
the fundamentals
. “Repetition leads to perfection,” he told my mother. “Anybody who can lie around drawing pictures of birds should be able to build a house for them. Right, Sam?”

Sam glowered; he was thirteen, and glowering had become his stock response to my parents, though he still got along all right with me if nobody was watching. “Adolescence,” my father called it, shaking his head as if it were a sad diagnosis. I wondered if adolescence was what I was suffering from too.

“We'll figure this out on our own,” my mother muttered, handing me my clothes. “
Doctors
.” She spat the word. “What do they know?” but I sensed she was more angry with herself for
letting Dr. Neidermier escape so easily. She had done everything the books said to do; what could she have missed? As we drove home, I pressed my forehead against the cold window, watching the town of Horton ripple past like a colorful river. On Main Street, the houses were painted pastel shades of green and blue and yellow; they were small and square, like candy houses, and I imagined I could taste them in the back of my throat, cloyingly sweet but with a bitter core. Outside town, the slender trees dividing the fields were already bare, the leaves blown down too soon, browned with frost. Crows rose from the corn stubble, and just up the road from our house, we passed a flock of wild turkeys near the drainage ditch where Sam and I used to build dams after the heavy spring rains. I remembered the feeling of the icy mud between my toes, the smell of it as we scooped it up and slapped it into a thick brown wall, the delicious panic as the water rose over our ankles, up to our knees.

My mother parked in front of the barn, and I started for the house, but she grabbed me by the sleeve and led me through the maze of bird feeders, car parts, abandoned household appliances, and rusty farm equipment until we reached the shed. Recently, my father had fixed it up as a place where he and Sam could spend time together. According to my father, my mother had done a poor job with Sam; she'd been too soft, too lax, overprotective. Now he was stepping in “to put some hair on Sam's chest,” an expression that was painful considering how slow Sam was to mature. But Sam was changing in other ways. He kept to himself more and more. He lied about things, stupid little things, even when it was easier to tell the truth. He talked back to my mother, picking on her just like my father did, complaining about a meal she'd fixed, refusing to carry his plate to the dishwasher. “Make Abby do it,” he'd say, when she asked him to strip the sheets off his bed or vacuum or wipe the table. And though my father insisted he obey, it was clear that he was really on Sam's side.
“That's why God made girls—right, Sam?” he'd say, winking at my mother so she'd have to take it as a joke.

A sign on the door said
Enter at Your Own Risk
. When my mother and I came in, my father leapt up from beside the metal cabinet where he kept his small tools. Sam was running a plane over a two-by-four again and again, as if he were making a giant spear. One corner of the shed was arranged like a small living room with carpeting, a refrigerator, and two overstuffed chairs. An American flag hung from one wall. Below it was a table made out of a door balanced on three sawhorses, and there were blueprints spread across it like the secret maps Sam and I once had made to find buried treasure, with X marks the spot. Beside the blueprints were two open cans of beer.

“I didn't hear you,” my father said, and he walked toward my mother with careful steps, the way he did when he'd been drinking. “What's the matter—is she really sick?” A perfect dusty handprint clung to the thigh of his coveralls. “What did the doctor say?”

My mother went over to the table, picked up a can of beer, set it down. “You're not drinking this, are you, Sam?” she said.

Sam ignored her, shook his long hair across his eyes. Girl hair, my father called it. For weeks, he'd been trying to shame Sam into getting it cut.

“Sam?” my mother said. “I asked you a question.”

My father looked annoyed. “Don't worry about it,” he said.

“I can't believe you're giving a thirteen-year-old beer,” my mother said.

“Don't come in here telling me what I can and cannot give my son,” he said. “If it were up to you, Therese, he'd be wearing a goddamn skirt.”

“Gordon—” my mother began, but my father had turned to me. “So what's wrong with you?” he said, interrupting my mother.

“Nothing,” I said.

“The doctor doesn't know,” my mother said.

“Is she…what's that thing girls get? Where they don't eat.” For a moment, his voice was concerned; he met my mother's gaze.

“No. Thank God.” They were silent for a moment, considering what to do with me.

“Well,” my father said. He cuffed my shoulder playfully. “It doesn't sound too serious.”

“Can I go now?” I said. The room seemed too warm, and it smelled faintly of turpentine, an odor that always made me queasy. My mother grabbed me by the sleeve again, as if she thought I might float away. “I'll come with you,” she snapped, “seeing it doesn't look like your father's going to help.”

“What do you want me to do?” my father said.

“For starters,” my mother said, “I want you to stop giving alcohol to a minor.” She swept the beer cans from the table with the back of her hand; they foamed on the carpeting before my father could retrieve them. Back in the house, in the cold mud room, she slipped my coat from my shoulders and spun me around to face her. “What do you want me to do for you? Tell me.” She rubbed my shoulders hard, as if she were trying to warm me. “Because if you don't, I'll have to decide, and I might be deciding wrong. Maybe you need to see another doctor. Maybe you just need a change of pace. More exercise. Vitamins.” She waited for me to agree or disagree. “
Please
,” she said, and I finally opened my mouth to speak. But the sleepiness lapped my chest, the back of my neck. “I just want to sleep,” I told her, and she released me, exhaling a white flag of steam.

I woke up because something was wrong with my big toe. There was a snap, and then the smaller toes next to it stung. I sat up, picked the rubber band from between my toes. “Jerk,” I told Sam, without malice. He still had the same giggle he'd had when he was six.
A late bloomer
, my father called him, pinching back his slender elbows until they touched, or pinning him helplessly in
the crook of his arm as Sam fought back silently, furiously, hopelessly. Sometimes he'd grab Sam by his long hair, lift until he rose up on tiptoe. “You see, sport, why short hair is an advantage?” he'd say. The room was dim; it was late afternoon, and I felt peaceful and good, the way I always felt after I woke up.

“They're fighting about us,” Sam said.

I rolled my eyes. “What else is new?” We listened for a moment; my mother's quick bursts of speech, my father's low rumble. The sounds seemed to settle in the corners of the room. My mother was quoting statistics that said people were more likely to become alcoholics if they started drinking young; my father said it was fine for a boy to have one beer with his dad, and that the kid they should be worrying about was me, and if my mother cared about me she wouldn't have started that goddamn business when it was perfectly clear I needed more attention. “You're turning her into Mathilde,” he told my mother, and I thought about Auntie Thil: her nervousness, her adolescent hospitalization, which was spoken about in whispers or not at all. Maybe my mother would send me to a hospital. I thought about how I'd look wearing a long white gown. The priest would come to visit me; my eyes would burn dark and fierce and holy, as my worldly body wasted away. One day, gold light would spin a ring around my head, sprout from the tips of my fingers. Then I would be whisked up to heaven. I imagined my father and Sam bending over my corpse, their faces torn with regret.