Sleight (17 page)

NOVEMBER.

O
n Lark’s first evening inYork, after the episode in the chambers, the sisters had hugged and exchanged a few sentences about Lark’s family, Clef’s recovery. Lark had remembered pictures of Nene this time, three of them. A reading Nene on the porch swing, Drew beside her. Ankle-deep Nene in the lake. A Halloween Nene, her tinman a wrapped-in-foil, heart-in-hand affair. The child was arresting. In each picture, the day reflected in her eyes starkly, but not vacant. It wasn’t their color but something else, something in another register, that marked her unmistakably as Lark’s. Clef made noises, ahhs and cooings, noises she supposed one made about an only niece. The sisters had been uncomfortable, too, during the couple of weeks Lark had spent in NewYork. When they’d spoken at all, it had been about Lark’s Needs. They had avoided the personal, or at least the frictional. After the photographs, a long silence played between them. They said goodnight. Lark left with Byrne, Clef with Kitchen.

Lark’s second day in York, she’d asked Clef outside. Clef had stepped into her tall boots, zippered them up the length of her calves, and swung a multicolored scarf three times around her neck. Kitchen had given it to her the previous Christmas; he’d had it made in purples, oranges, and magentas to clash irreverently with her hair. Kitchen loved that about Clef. Her hair. How it moved. “On its own,” he’d say, “like an animal.” And of course the color. In Tokyo, he told her, the girls were always trying to get to red, and that they shouldn’t.

After walking the first quarter mile in silence, Clef, impatient—determined not to let nothing happen again—turned to her older sister.

“Lark, when did you stop loving me?”

“Don’t do this.” Lark was cold. She hadn’t brought clothes worthy of the weather. Maybe Byrne would lend her something.

“Well, when?”

“You were my touchstone, Clef. My rosary, my worry doll, my abacus. How could I stop loving you?” Lark was teasing only the tiniest bit. She looked at the fingers on her left hand, tapped the thumb against each of the others in turn. In the gray afternoon, they were a vibrant, quaint blue: five faded virgins. “I just … I learned to stop counting on you.” That was funny; she would remember that.

“Lark, what are we doing?”

“I don’t know. I’m here because nothing else has worked.”

“And me? Why am I here?”

“Because this does?” Lark was guessing.

“It doesn’t. It promises to, and then …”

“What about Kitchen? Does he work?” Lark didn’t expect an answer. This was the first jab. It was small, a swipe at the side, and she expected Clef to block.

“Why, does Drew?” Clef paused, then softened. “He … he looks kind—I mean, with Nene, in the picture.” They were stopped at a crosswalk. Finding herself suddenly shy, Clef studied the red palm’s blinking DON’T. DON’T. She asked, “What is marriage … like?” DON’T. The red hand became a white body and shone frozenly at them: STEP.

Lark and Clef started across. Before the far curb, a pothole floating diseased yellow leaves gaped; they leapt across it in tandem. Lark hadn’t anticipated this question, her and Drew. It pleased her—also, hurt. That morning she had felt his absence in pangs. When she’d woken in Byrne’s bed. When he’d called to her from the kitchen. His offer of weak coffee. Stupid.

How long had it been since she’d talked with another woman? This was Clef, her sister. But a lifetime had grown up between them—her daughter’s. Lark would try to describe her marriage honestly.

“Every day, someone asks you for a piece of yourself. So you, I, I cut it off and hand it over. Partly because Drew, he has the only balm that works on the wound.” Lark thought for a moment. “The one he’s continually asking me to self-inflict.”

“Why are you
like
that?” Clef’s timidity was gone. She looked disgusted. Lark remembered the look.

“Like what?”

Clef started walking a little faster, as if to distance herself from Lark’s influence. Her sister could pollute anything with description.

“So narcissistic, so focused on your own darkness. You’re incapable of letting anything be … simple.”

“Something’s simple?” Lark felt like taunting. It was one of the minor brutalities once expected of her. They used to do this banter with humor. No more.

“Love is supposed to be.”

“And you’ve found that to be true?” Unspoken was their overlap: Kitchen.
Don’t go messing ’round another woman’s Kitchen
—Drew had made that joke once. Clef must’ve thought it was why they hadn’t spoken. Hell, it
had
been Clef’s reason. Was she still ashamed? Probably. What had Lark felt? Undeserving. Of fidelity, love—all of it. It was she who should apologize, for underplaying her part in Clef’s defining drama. No. Another lie. Lark could easily work up anger at Clef. Her little sister had always dismissed the damage she caused as warranted; Kitchen just wasn’t the worst she’d done. Lark pushed. “Well, how about it Clef, is love simple?”

“Yeah. No. Some days.” Clef slowed again and tossed her unruly scarf back over her shoulder. “But you don’t have those days.”

They were walking beside an old townhouse. Lark remembered the style—Federal—from one of Fern’s lectures. The house was well-preserved: two rows of windows evenly divided a plain brick façade, five on top, four below; a fan-light spanned the central door; slatted shutters; white trim; simple wrought-iron fence. Civility. Restraint. Graciousness. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

“You didn’t call, Clef. Not once in six years. You didn’t come to clean up after Mom. You haven’t met my husband or my daughter. How can you presume to know what kinds of days I’ve had?”

And there it was.

Two months after Lark had left Monk, their mother hanged herself. Their father had passed away four years earlier, while the sisters had still been at the academy. Heart attack. They’d gone home for a week, worn navy. Their mother insisted: no black for them. The day after his funeral, they received casseroles at the front door and invited the elderly and middle-aged neighbors who carried them to come into the dining room for ever-brewing Darjeeling. Relieved of their red beans and rice, their thrice-baked macaroni, their green bean almondine, the women who had spent years scowling at the girls weeding the front yard in their Sunday denim had taken their hands and patted them. They’d said, “Take care of your poor, poor mother.” Some of them said pawh. Pawh muthah. Lark mocked them once they’d gone. She was good at “the Southern,” and had done it since grade school to make Newton howl. Clef’s laughter was, after a few seconds, mildly hysterical. That night, Lark had brushed and braided her sister’s hair as if they were little. They were not: Clef was fifteen, Lark nineteen. And they were on their own—their mother, after the cemetery, had tucked herself away in her room. Very away. The girls had headed back to Boston that Wednesday, although not before bagging, labeling, and freezing all the womanly kindness in meal-sized portions.

Within six months, their mother had committed herself to an expensive institution in the mountains of North Georgia—a spa for the inconsolable. Twice, they’d borrowed a car to make the sixteen-hour trip. Twice, she’d refused to see them.

Clef and Lark’s parents were perhaps enigmatic. Lark didn’t know. They’d transplanted themselves from Pittsburgh when Newton had gotten his professorship. Jillian Scrye had been hired as a research assistant by a friend in his department a year later. She had a PhD, but it was the seventies, the South, she wanted a family. There were limits. They were solid people, and good. They loved their work. They loved each other. They found, after two successful attempts at procreation and one unsuccessful, that there was a finite amount of love to be parceled out. After the miscarriage of their third child, the boy tried for three times, they scratched up what was left for their two daughters, who grew every day more unlike them. But that it was scratch was evident. The girls tended, as the Scryes had imagined they would, toward art—and as artists, they were uninterested in the finite.

Jillian had tried. She’d faded in and out as a mother, occasionally spending a summer canoeing, helping to chart moon and stars on the attic walls, catching fireflies and smearing their luminous abdomens onto her daughters’ faces like war paint, only to follow with a fall of missed performances and unsigned report cards. Newton would’ve done better, but wasn’t expected to. Their mother regularly disappeared inside her research, and if Newton was putting together a publication, she spent nights for a month working up his figures with him, leaving the girls to themselves. She seemed relieved when sleight took to her daughters. Even appreciated it, to a point. She always said she’d like to see it all on paper—how interesting it would be without the bodies.

When she swung, Clef was on tour. Lark had been still in New York, newly unemployed. She didn’t go to the institution; Jillian had prepaid her death, Lark wasn’t needed. So she bought a Greyhound ticket to Atlanta. She arrived, reeking of the gin-drunk beside her, with a bag of clothes and a small boxful of dead Needs. The house of her childhood was unlivable. She didn’t waste what little money she had reinstating utilities. For weeks, she combed through the dark house for things to sell. Furniture. Her mother’s piano, her violin. The good china. Her parents’ microscopes. The telescope. Books. She swam laps across the lake in the evenings to allay her sweat, stench, a coagulating depression. It took four months to clear away the debris of her mother’s loss. She’d lived there ever since.

“You gave me your book.” Clef was defending herself. She hadn’t called in six years, it was true. But neither had Lark. Four years ago her sister had sent that—that Soul—with a card alerting her to Nene’s birth. But Clef, who hadn’t been aware of Lark’s pregnancy or her marriage, read in the Soul’s hollowness an accusation, and had sent it back. Then, in August, Lark had shown up in New York, ostensibly to take care of her, and had left the book, setting off this slow-motion detonation, or whatever it was. West’s interest. Her own architectures. Lark, always wanting attention. Getting it.

“And you got rid of it the f-first chance you got. Okay, Clef, I admit it. Love isn’t simple for me, no. I get sad.”

“Are we talking about sadness?” If so, Clef would refuse. Lark had been doing sad for a long time, it was clearly not a worthwhile endeavor. She pulled a pair of gloves out of her pockets and flung them at her sister, who was by this time shaking. Lark snatched them out of the air.

“Th-thank you.” Lark pulled on the gloves as they walked on, considering. “I think we are.”

“Well, I don’t want to.” Clef bit her bottom lip, and Lark pulled up short to examine her.

Her lips were violet. That was death. Her face was porcelain. Decorum. Her eyes were wet. Guilt. Maybe the wind. Her hair was brushfire. That was Clef. Lark reached out and put her borrowed, lavender cashmere hands over her sister’s ears. She pulled Clef’s head close.

“You are a dear, sweet idiot with a brick will. I have always loved you.” Clef could hear Lark, but pretended not to. She hadn’t thought she was cold, but the sudden warmth made her head throb.

On her third day in York, Lark began the morning in chamber one with the others. Monk’s director led, and though soft-spoken, he was thorough and the class was good. He had joined Monk a year after she’d left. In a letter from Fern, who—unasked—updated her on sleight developments, Lark had learned that her old director, Imke Kleist, had returned to Germany. As far as Lark knew, as far as Fern had shared, none of the thirty-one registered troupes currently had a female director. When Lark quit there had been only three, and they’d been in their fifties. Women vanishing, not replacing themselves. A pattern of what? Only some wrong thing.

She didn’t want to like this new director, and she deduced from murmurings that he wasn’t respected. He kept offering the combinations to the troupes with question marks.
And then a lateral after the missive? Yes. And then a rowing, or should we go to the grail next? The grail, right.
The questions were unnecessary and irritating; he knew what to do with their bodies.

On that day he paid particular attention to Lark. His verbal corrections were dead-on—she
was
hyperextending both legs and back to achieve a compensatory balance. She
was
forcing it,
did
need to ratchet everything down. Not that she could. She had never affected anything other than plough horse. And it was worse now that her technique was off—she worked as if a bucket of sweat could weigh in against years of stagnation, of motherhood. Nevertheless, he tried to help her. While she was struggling against a difficult floor gesture, he knelt down and placed one hand on her hipbone and another on the inside of her opposite thigh, his surprisingly strong thumb compressing the taut line of her sartorius. He opened her like a walnut—releasing, in one burst, six years’ bound tension from her lumbar spine: L5, S1.

After class, Lark withdrew to an empty chamber to try out one of Clef’s architectures. At rest, the design was long and strict on one side, curved and giving on the other. Harp. She’d never worked with one that so clearly embodied opposed properties. Her sister had talent. Somehow, though, the architecture was familiar. Not harp then, maybe saw?
²⁷
Whichever, Lark knew exactly how to start the first manipulation. She picked up the tight side and stood its end on her lifted knee. But before she could scythe it across the space left by her spiraling torso, Monk’s director walked in.