The Orphan Sister (3 page)

Skinny was puzzling; he often escaped his tank, though the cover latched on the outside. Sometimes I found him under the bed; sometimes bathing in light on my dining room table. Feet had convinced me to keep him. Feet liked snakes. He also read my journal—the main reason we broke up. He read what I’d written about our sex, that I preferred talking with my friend Eli to sleeping with Feet, that he drooled excessively when, well, attending to my needs. I have always felt that anyone who read my journal (and my sisters had done so, especially when they were afraid I was possibly suicidal) would have to be responsible for what he or she read. Odette and Olivia could handle it. Feet couldn’t. He ranted at me, complaining that I didn’t like sex (not true), that I spent too much time with my animals and Eli. That I didn’t know just how good I had it. We fought vociferously, outside his dumpy graduate student housing, a cinder-block wonder two blocks from campus. When we finally broke up, it felt dirtier than anything else about our relationship, and I was still washing my hands of it all.

Anyway, now I had Skinny as part of the entourage. I’m fine with snakes, but I don’t think they’re meant to live in tanks, and Skinny required a massive tank, since he was a massive snake. I also minded buying frozen rats and baby chicks, but Skinny needed to eat. I helped him shed by letting him rub against the knobby oak table legs in the dining area of the cottage; my father once watched with a combination of admiration and what appeared to be feigned disgust.

It was a hidden side of my father; he loved being with the
animals, becoming as soft and fresh as Skinny with his new skin. He played tree for Skinny, eyebrows animated with the sensory delight of a huge snake wrapping and climbing. He was willing to look unsure of himself with animals—lying on the floor with the dogs, discussing things in barks and growls. Dad with my menagerie was younger, mischievous, unembarrassed by dog hair on his good sweaters. I remembered him as our childhood tree when he came to the carriage house—our rock to climb, my sisters and I playing in the water in the lake. He refused to communicate with Cheese, the only animal he didn’t trust. But Ella was his secret love.

Once when he thought I wasn’t in the carriage house—which had been his alternative lair when it wasn’t the guesthouse—he came by to talk to Ella and told her all kinds of things, including how
lovely
she was, what a
good
dog, what a good
listener,
what a
beauty.
I’d listened from the bathroom trying not to laugh at my stodgy, serious father’s sweet tone, and then emerged with a towel on my head, pretending I hadn’t heard anything.

Still standing at the sideboard, I checked the other book, the Accounts. To my disgust, my mother—who had lived part of the sixties as a young woman, who had had her own career and an apartment in the Village and beatnik friends and who had smoked pot and designed her own Marimekko dresses and danced at Hepburn-like happenings—my mother submitted to having an allowance. My father recorded, on the front page of every month, what she was allowed to spend. She kept the books, paid the taxes, paid the gardener and the milkman, back before the money when
we had two bottles of cream-top delivered in a silver, insulated box by the front door at our tiny, proud two-bedroom Tudor in Oakville, New Jersey. We girls shared the second bedroom and rotated outfits, fighting over who would get the one new dress of the season, bickering over socks. Wrestling for a tiny taste of independence. Later came the money. And Princeton, where Dad grew up, which was close enough to his new position as Chief of Pediatric surgery at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital. Now the monthly allowance was absurd, what some people made in a year, but still, everything was accounted for. The bank accounts were in Dad’s name, and he wrote out a check each month for Mother, like some fifties throwback, as if he didn’t trust her.

I don’t know why she allowed it. I don’t know why she didn’t leave him when he jealously asked about her daily activities and then left for golf weekends without providing a number or bringing his cell phone. I once read that the jealous could anticipate their own guilt; surely Dad didn’t really mind what Mom did with her hours when he wasn’t there, unless he was asking in an obscured sort of language of love.

Sure, he had a beeper, but we knew better than to call pretending we were related to work. She had a busy life—and now that I’d seen it up close, I knew it rivaled a professional life, but it wasn’t one—and she deserved one. Or maybe I just wanted her to want one. Odette and Olivia thought she was fine, that she had
enough;
neither of them had the same flood of fear when Dad was late. I imagined she still smelled the collars of his shirts when he came home for dinner, breathing him in like a woman in love.

The Accounts showed a lot of expenditures this month. Two parties, one a joint baby shower for my sisters—just over, virgin
mint juleps and all—and one an anniversary party for my parents, to be held in three weeks. It would be catered, of course, with tents in the backyard and a dance floor. A jazz band that also played standards. My mother had given me a CD and asked me whether they were good. The New Black Eagles. They were fabulous, I told her, wondering whether I could bring myself to wear something formal. Whether I was willing to wear heels to humor her. Whether I could bring my friend Eli, now that Feet was history and I was tired of dating unsuitable men. Odette said she’d set me up with a sweet, young intern, but I said no without needing any words.

“Nothing here,” I called to my mother from the kitchen door.

“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” she said, as the phone rang. She made an entrance with an armload of roses, clippers, and thick leather garden gloves. She smelled green. I answered the phone, as requested: “Lord residence, Clementine speaking.”

It was Olivia. Her voice was strangely nasal, as if she’d been crying. Since she was pregnant, she’d been more visibly different from Odette, in a way even those who were not part of our trinity might observe. Olivia’s belly grew up against her ribs in a firm half-sphere like an embedded balloon. Odette had a pillow, the bottom curved like a teardrop. Odette’s azure blue eyes looked tired; Olivia’s were vivid and wary. Odette was working with a midwife-doctor team, but Olivia was having none of that nonsense. She told me she wouldn’t mind a C-section. Odette was shocked.

“Clem,” said Olivia. She sighed.

“Is it about Dad?” Knowing it was.

“Is Mom okay?” she hedged.

“She doesn’t seem to care that Dad’s AWOL.”

Olivia was quiet. I tried to read the quiet.

“What? What?” I asked. “Do you know what happened? Is he okay? Why are you suddenly unreadable?” She knew what I meant—I couldn’t know what she knew.

“No. I mean he’s okay. I mean, I don’t know exactly what happened.”

I was the only one skilled at holding a secret for long. I knew her need to tell was almost physical, almost autonomic. She was suppressing a tell-sneeze.

“Still,” I said. “You can’t fool your sister.”

I’d felt this need myself, but I was good at resisting. I imagined it was squared with my sisters; an exponential urge.

“Clem, I know why Dad’s gone.”

My heart started anticipating fight or flight.

“Okay—so where is he?” I asked, thinking, again, that he could accidentally have stepped in front of a bus; that he went to his parents’ former house, wherever that was. That he was at their graves right now, communing with the dead.

He could have fallen in a manhole in Manhattan. He could be having an affair with a prostitute in Red Hook. It happened all the time, respectable men, afraid of growing old. I thought it, but I didn’t believe it. Heart attack, I thought again. If he had a heart attack, if he died, I’d never have a chance to be his favorite, even for a moment.

“I don’t know where he is,” she said. “Just why he’s gone.”

I was speechless.

“He did something,” she said, and now I could tell this wasn’t pregnancy congestion; she’d been full-on sobbing. “A long time ago, actually. And I’m not going to be the one to tell Mom.”

“Olivia?” I pushed away all my odd fantasies. This sounded real.

She didn’t answer.

“What did he do? Embezzle? Have an affair? Fake his medical license? Murder someone?”

“It isn’t funny, Clem. He left me a message,” she sighed dramatically. I couldn’t read her sigh. I hated that.

“Okay, okay, so what did he say? Where the hell is he?”
Why you?
I wondered. But Olivia had always been the tiniest hair ahead. Loved more by a fraction of a nose. I’d suspected it, and now I knew it. She got the first heavy-as-a-fist hug hello. She’d been born first by a minute. I was last, though the family joke was that I was still a middle child. Olivia’s birthday phone call was first. Dad trusted her just the smallest bit more—no one else would ever notice, but I read it as well as the secret language of my sisters’ faces.

I remembered, swimming in my own little lake of self-sympathy, that one year when we were kids, he brought us gifts from a conference—I’d gotten a pen that contained a floating, plastic, small intestine with a sandwich that moved through if you tilted the barrel. I thought it was the best thing ever, making throw-up jokes with abandon. Odette received her very own reflex hammer (with a drug-company name etched into the handle), and tested it on us each. I hated that funny-bone sensation. Olivia’s souvenir, however, was a real stethoscope. A real one. For listening to real hearts. He gave her something functional and
grown-up and different. He trusted her more, and because I’d been eight or nine and prone to bathroom jokes, I hadn’t realized until later how unfair it had been.

Then my sister Olivia said something akin to blasphemy, something so horrible coming from her I half expected a thunderclap.

“I can’t tell you,” said Olivia. “But I listened to his message and then I did a little digging. And he’s an asshole. We’d be better off if he were dead.”

H
ere are some words I would use to describe my father: stubborn, loyal, handsome, secretive, important, distinguished, powerful, charismatic, bossy, charming, brilliant, unfair, prejudiced, magnanimous, uneven (with long legs and a short, bullish torso), and occasionally, in small and dangerous ways, spiteful. I’d kept a journal, my version of a confidant, since I was ten and had probably used each of those words in my rantings. Also, in the past two years, perhaps just because we’d fought so long in our quiet ways and then I came home—and saw him up close more than I had in about a decade—he was beginning to shrink, both physically and in terms of his power over me. He was getting old.

For all my resentments, I loved the man. I loved the way his hair was slightly too long and too wild. I loved the way he clasped my hands when he greeted me, as though I were an honored guest. I loved that he actually cared what I did with my life, enough to be nearly constantly peeved with me.

On the day I came home to live in the carriage house, Dad helped me lug my bags and pets inside. He lowered a suitcase and held open his arms inside as if to call the air in as welcome. He carried the sedated Ella into the house and set her atop the throw
pillows on the couch, tucking a cashmere blanket around her. I relinquished a tiny gasp—dog on furniture.

“She’s special,” he said, patting Ella, who panted and drooled and twitched with a desire to leave the realm of chemical sleep.

“Like you,” he finished, turning quickly back to the door as if encumbered by the emotion.

In the doorway he looked out and said, “Remember those neighbors who kept sheep?”

“The Bells. They had goats, Dad. They were having a go at cheese, remember?”

“No, it was sheep.” He stomped his foot, a recalcitrant child. “Well, that’s it then,” he finished, and trudged off, leaving me to rebalance my internal scales. It was goats, I knew it was goats; we’d had to shoo them off the driveway more than once. Maybe that was the first time I thought Dad might be more than just a little forgetful. I had neither of his parents as reference of aging, so I just thought about it, patting my sleepy dogs in turn.

We never met our parental grandparents; Dad kept the details of his family contained like internal organs, vulnerable to light and air, safe only in the confines of translucent muscle, fat, skin, and skeleton. Dad’s parents died long before we were born, late babies that we were; my mother was forty and Dad was forty-four, and Dad obscured all the rest of the family history, genetics and stories alike, as if they were valuable, volatile secrets. In third grade all three of us had to make family trees, and Dad wouldn’t even tell me whether we had any aunts or uncles on his side of the family. In our room, Odette said, “He was an immaculate conception,” and Olivia and I laughed and tried not to think about our parents having sex.

Though my mother liked to say we were New Yorkers like her—she was Upper East Side raised with a driver and a doorman—we were actually born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in the Riverview Medical Center, because we were four weeks early and Mom and Dad were down the shore at a cousin’s engagement party. Mom’s ob-gyn had said it was safe to travel. To this day Mom says it was eating excessive quantities of shrimp cocktail that started her labor; she couldn’t stop dipping them in the spicy sauce, it was as if we craved the iodine. Even thinking about that, I imagine it was O&O, my sisters, who demanded that luxurious overindulgence in a single prenatal voice. I was probably content with cranberry-orange juice mixed with seltzer, and little toasts with red-pepper toppings. I wouldn’t have complained, even though I don’t like red peppers.