The Orphan Sister (8 page)

“He
wants
to be proud of me. I do love him.”

“I know you love him,” said Eli. “But sometimes I’m not sure you
like
him all that much.”

“Neither am I.” I tasted a scallion, the slippery sliver between my teeth like the taste of a pond, like the taste of something slightly disgusting, and slightly wonderful.

W
e moved to Princeton when we were eleven. We had been ordinary girls, except for being triplets, in Oakville. There the questions at school were about why I didn’t look like them, whether I had been held back a grade, how we could all be the same age, and, in shrieking, giggling, private sessions in friends’ houses, how our parents had conceived us all at the same time. In Princeton, there were questions of objects and services; basically, we were measured by our wealth.

Suddenly we had our own rooms. Mine was on the third floor; in a moment of extravagant fairness, my mother had us draw straws to choose our rooms, and I won first pick—the longest piece of a cut, red-and-white-striped bendy straw from a box of one hundred. I wasn’t sure, despite trying to listen, whether my sisters wanted the top room, but it had the most privacy, and its own bathroom, and secret eaves with short doors and tiny, silver-chained latches.

“I want the third-floor suite,” I said, feeling grandiose. “Can the bathroom be mine, too?”

“Yes,” said my mother. “But the other two rooms are for your father—he wants an office up there.”

The idea of sharing a floor with my father made me nervous.
What if I was taking a bath and he needed to use the bathroom? Still, he was home so rarely, it was worth it. What if my father was different around just me—would I recognize him? Would I want or eschew the possibility of unplanned attention? Without testing this in my sisters’ heads, I wasn’t sure.

I wondered why he traveled so much, but knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. He had recently attended an alternative-anesthesia seminar in Las Vegas; he’d let me keep the wax ear marked with acupuncture points and Mandarin characters telling what they were for. He’d pointed to a red dot with his long-fingered hands, saying, “I think this one’s for the spleen, and this one’s for the tickle spot.” Then he’d tickled my armpits, making me squeal and twist away.

Dad was absent during our relocation, so my mother was left to instruct the movers, six short, powerful Irishmen wearing green T-shirts and flirting with all of us, where to deposit our things. They hauled crates of books atop their heads, stepping heavily up three flights of stairs, grinning and winking. I loved their accents.

There were nine bedrooms in the house, and eleven bathrooms, so there was no dearth of choices, but mine was clearly the most secluded, like a penthouse in a posh hotel. My windows were original glass from 1910, and they blushed mottled and uneven sunlight. We chose wallpaper from catalogs; we picked rugs and curtains (I chose a mint-green, lacy fabric labeled Spring Fever, and my mother laughed a short sound of surprise when she saw the price, but bought them anyway).

We had been ordinary girls, and now we were rich girls. Of course, the other girls at our school were richer; their mothers
didn’t keep Accounts books, didn’t bring them to Nordstrom but limit their expenditures, looking nervously in a tiny notebook, mumbling about sales tax. They shopped at the Lilly Pulitzer flagship store in Manhattan; they bought chunky, white-framed sunglasses at a counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. Still, our house was huge, and there was a gardening crew, and a cook and a cleaning service, and we had ponies.

My sisters took to it all with natural ease—not that they were greedy, they were just adaptable. While before we had gossiped wistfully about birthday parties at the roller rink in Montvale, now we were invited into air-conditioned limos that conveyed us to Broadway and hip plays at the Little Red School House. I wore my Gap jeans and polo shirt from Nordstrom, my sneakers from a former life instead of pumps—who could walk in pumps? And besides, our mother didn’t want to cast away our old clothes just because we were living in a state of endowment.

“Those jeans still clothe you,” she said to us when we told her in concert how our classmates all wore Jordache instead of Gap. “You aren’t going naked, but we aren’t spending more unless we need to. We
have
, but that makes us all the more responsible,” she said, squinting at the parsley she was chopping in the new kitchen, which had a walk-in fridge and so many cabinets and drawers that half were empty.

We played hide-and-seek, climbing up above the water glasses where our new friends would never look for us.

At first, we three went to the same parties, all had the same friends, before we branched out, before we were differentiated—me, and them. Until I met my friends Sophie and Mary, I was part of The Clump of girls, the vaguely popular group—neither most
nor least. I felt that I was acting. My sisters felt secure—it was a distinct imbalance. They couldn’t comfort me, though, or didn’t want to. Sophie and Mary changed things for me—a pair of girls who wore dark lipstick and cast spells from a book of Wiccan magic and had their palms read in Greenwich Village—and who also read books all the time and liked not just riding horses, but caring for them.

After we rode the trails together, we sat on our ponies—mine was a fat, black, walleyed sweetie named Giselle who seemed asleep except when there were sugar cubes. We groomed them and French-braided their tails and read aloud to each other and our animals from a collection of Elisabeth Bishop poems, not entirely understanding.

I wasn’t part of The Clump anymore, but in sixth grade I tried out for the school musical, even though that was a highly Clumplike activity. Mary and Sophie scoffed, but they respected me for doing something I wanted. I wanted to sing. I wanted to act. I wanted to be on Broadway, though I was shy and my classmates were stunned, sitting like flies waiting to be shooed from a windowsill in the auditorium, when I belted out the audition song, “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” from
Guys and Dolls
, with passion, volume, and surprising talent. I’d been singing to the Beatles, warbling along with Ella Fitzgerald records our father kept in a wooden crate beside the record player he’d built himself, balancing the arm in a pool of glorious liquid mercury.

My sisters tried out, too, and won parts as Hot Box girls. To everyone’s surprise, I was cast in the starring role of Sarah, the missionary who falls in love with a gangster. And to my pleasure and mortification, Sky Masterson, my romantic partner, was
played by Grey Munro, who had moved from South Africa in fifth grade, when we were new to the school together. Grey was tall and was redheaded, like me, and he saw snow for the first time at age eleven. We’d been talking about electricity and were taking turns at a board assembled by the window, trying to complete circuits in pairs to light a bulb. Odette was my partner, and she was working so quickly I just stared out the window. Silently she told me,
I’ve got it; don’t bother.

“It’s snowing,” I said quietly, wondering at the way the world was suddenly muted.

“Snow?” asked Grey, knocking over his chair as he ran to the window. Any other teacher would’ve told him to sit down, to wait his turn, but Mrs. Carrigan, whom we all adored, told Grey he could go outside. By himself. Smack in the middle of the electricity lesson. We all watched him out the window as he held his hands up toward the sky, coatless, wearing brown corduroys and a striped T-shirt that made him look like a kid from
ZOOM
. His face was glorious with recognition, with joy and a tiny bit of fear as the snow kissed his face.

“He’s weird,” said Odette.

“That’s okay,” I said. She looked at me, recognizing something, but being honorable, not teasing.

Grey’s eyes were very, very blue. I loved him from that moment.

Unfortunately, there were two Sarahs and two Skys in our production of
Guys and Dolls
, and we’d each get two nights, one with each partner. And unfortunately, the other Sky was Gary Waters, who was shorter than me and always tried at lunch recess to snap my bra strap or steal my lunch or trip and catch me. I
didn’t realize until later that he had a crush on me as potent as my crush on Grey. Meanwhile, Grey had kissed one of the Clumps, a girl named Nicole, at a boy-girl party I hadn’t attended—though my sisters were there and offered thorough reports that made me wince and ask for more. Nicole was claiming she and Grey were boyfriend and girlfriend, though Grey didn’t seem particularly involved in this endeavor.

My mother came to rehearsals and sat with her knitting, embarrassing me just by being there, by knitting, by wearing a dress she’d made herself with the Marimekko fabric left over from our couch slipcovers. Often, she missed mortifying me as she drove Odette and Olivia to matching Suzuki violin lessons, to figure skating and twirling, all of which I’d forgone after a lesson or two. After the show, I’d ask for voice lessons and study for three years with a divorced Princeton grande dame who’d been on Broadway for sixteen years before retiring to the suburbs. She wore scarves on her head and had scars from melanomas that had been removed—she’d been a serious tanner—and she smoked between lessons on her screened-in porch. I had already taken two years of school clarinet lessons—I knew outside lessons were expensive, and despite the house, despite the money, Mom still checked the Accounts every day; she still made slipcovers and her own dresses, so I couldn’t help worrying about money in concert with her silent obsession.

I would be a fine singer, but I wasn’t good at clarinet. If I practiced, I got a perpetually chapped lower lip and a little improvement. If I didn’t practice, the sessions in the basement of the lunch hall were somewhat more bearable, as my teacher, the spindly and sweaty Mr. Peterson, would demonstrate for more of the half hour
rather than sitting through my squeaks and cracked notes, wincing and encouraging, which consisted of patting my shoulder with his gigantic, blunt hand.

Sixth grade was a year of longing: for my mother to give me more attention than my sisters, but also not to embarrass me, the way all sixth-grade mothers embarrass their girls; for Grey to kiss me—which he would, onstage—for real; for my father to come to the play, even though he was away all the time now on business trips. Oftentimes he brought Lee, the nurse-practitioner who worked in his practice. She’d been working with him since we moved to Princeton—an oddly chic woman, wearing the fringe and flowers of the seventies, and no makeup except for thick kohl eyeliner, which made her exotic. She was always in his office when I came to visit. She was young and she brought us gifts—when I said I was interested in learning French, she came to dinner with six storybooks in French. When Olivia said she loved horse figurines, Lee brought a little white shelf to hang in Olivia’s room, and three tiny Hagen-Renaker ceramic horses—one prancing, one with ears erect and tail asway, and one speckled pony. She brought flowers for my mother and kissed my father on the lips. To be fair, she kissed my mother on both cheeks, like a Frenchwoman.

We adored Lee; she was exotic and amazed us with what she could accomplish without the benefit of a husband. I never knew what my mother really thought of her; she flushed when Lee kissed her hello. Mom always included Lee at Thanksgiving and Christmas parties. She chose Lee’s holiday gifts and consulted with us; I helped her the year Lee received a music box that had tiny brass animals spinning while “Für Elise” rang out of the speakers like a discussion.

Later, Lee left the practice and had a baby out of wedlock. We still said that, then,
out of wedlock
. She adopted another child from Guatemala and moved to Boston and, like that, left our lives. It was the special disempowerment of childhood that kindled a small fury in me. If Lee could leave, anyone could leave, and I had no choice but to administer my affections elsewhere.

All through dress rehearsals for the play I was worried my father wouldn’t see me, hear me sing and fake hiccup, playing drunk after drinking
Dulce de Leche
in Havana, sets painted by my friends Sophie and Mary, who had stopped wearing black lipstick in favor of clumpy mascara and peachy lip gloss pocketed from Sophie’s mother’s vast collection of cosmetics. I was afraid my father would watch me when I kissed Grey, or Gary, and that he would mind. Or that he’d miss it, so he wouldn’t.

Closing night was my night with Grey. On our second night, which was my first performance, I’d kissed Gary, and he’d tried to push his tongue past my teeth, a fat slug of tongue, tasting of Bazooka gum and pizza. I pulled away and delivered my line, about feeling dizzy, and stepped back on the stage. Then I’d sung “If I Were a Bell I’d Be Ringing,” and thought about Grey, about how just last week he’d crouched down on all fours, offering me his back as a step stool in gym class, so I could reach the first knot on the climbing rope. How I’d been embarrassed that I could do more push-ups than all the other girls and some of the boys. How Grey’s back had felt warm under my sock-clad feet. How his eyes were dark blue in the stage lights, how I couldn’t even remember
what it felt like to kiss him in dress rehearsal; I’d been so nervous, it was as if it had never happened.

My father wasn’t in the audience, or at least he hadn’t come in with my mother, who was wearing the same embarrassing Marimekko dress and holding little gifts for my sisters and me in her lap, little wrapped things from the town’s gift shop that were probably beaded bracelets my sisters had coveted for weeks.

Then I was singing, and kissing Grey—this time I remembered, because I pulled away as quickly as I had with Gary, feeling the eyes of the audience on us, feeling how dry his lips were, and my own, how hot it was under the lights. He smelled of wool and limes, delicious. He grinned at me, but he was acting. I wore a blue wrap skirt that had been my mother’s, and a high, white blouse. My hair was back in a bun, and I had chosen Chinese slippers so I wouldn’t be taller than Grey, who wore loafers with a little heel. Mrs. Carrigan had wanted me to wear character shoes, but I didn’t have any. I cast my focus into the audience, wishing I’d let the kiss last, wishing he had, wishing it had felt like more than the lightest moth-brush of mouths, like the momentous opportunity it really was, instead of brief, too brief to make an impression on this boy I adored, just a stage kiss, nothing real. Despite the lights, I could see my father in the back, having come in too late to get a decent seat, and he held an enormous bouquet of flowers in his lap.