Three Sisters (12 page)

On the bus home, Tobi sat by the window, staring out. “He could have said hello,” she said at one point. “At least hello.”

Karen wanted to touch Tobi, but the angle of her shoulders was sharp and forbidding. And she couldn’t think of anything comforting to say. Jason was a rat. That was what she wanted to tell Tobi. He’s a rat, a dirty rat! She didn’t understand how someone who was an artist, maybe even a genius, someone who could do things with a piece of stone that made

you want to cry and laugh with happiness—she didn’t understand how such a person could also be your basic crud.

That night she took Scott’s T-shirt out of the closet, laid it across her pillow and slept on it. In the morning she put it back in the closet. She didn’t know why she’d done it, why she’d done any of it—taken the T-shirt, kept it, slept on it. She brushed her hair, heard Tobi clumping down the hall. Her hand froze in midair. Poor Tobi! Then she thought there was one thing she did know. As far as men went, Liz was a thousand times luckier than Tobi.

A few afternoons later, Karen was home alone when the doorbell rang. It was Jason. “Tobi’s not here,” she said, standing in the doorway, remembering the gallery, not liking him, not liking him one bit.

His eyes in that browned, leathery face looked red and smaller than she remembered. He leaned against the door frame. “So you’re—” He snapped his fingers. “Ah—the kid sister.”

“Karen,” she said shortly, and repeated, “Tobi’s out right now.”

“Well, I’ll just wait for her.” And without Karen’s knowing how it happened, he was past her and inside, in the hall and ambling toward the kitchen. “Where’s the rest of the gang? You home all alone?”

She didn’t like that question. “They’ll be home any minute. Look, I don’t think my mother would like you to—”

“Relax, kid sister, I’m not going to throw you down on the floor and ravish you. Get me a beer, will you?” But in the kitchen the awful man opened

the refrigerator himself. “What the hell kind of a house is this,” he said amiably. “Only two bottles of beer. A house without a goodly supply of beer, kid sister, is a house without character, is a house without imagination, is a house without hospital-ity.”

He took the beer into the hall and sat down on the floor—no, really, what he did was a kind of enormously graceful, deliberate slide down the wall to the floor where he hunkered, tipping the beer to his mouth.

And what was she supposed to do—leave him there for whoever came home to stumble over? Carry on a polite conversation? Go about her business? She stood indecisively, leaning against the little triangular phone table. He had left her speechless, outraged and, to be truthful, both fascinated and frightened. Those last two in about equal parts. He was so large and so unpredictable. He didn’t act like ordinary people. She eyed the phone. In an emergency, call your operator. Operator! Operator! There’s a beer-drinking bear loose in my house.

It was her house. Her hall. Her terrain! How had he managed to make it seem that she was the intruder and he the laird of the castle, relaxing in his own way. He set the bottle down and hummed, low, deep in his throat, his eyes unfocused, staring off as if he were an aborigine sitting in front of a campfire, humming and mulling over the day’s business.

Karen’s scalp prickled. The man was strange. She had the sensation of something unseen, indefinable but real, of an aura surrounding him and reaching

out to touch her, to touch everything in its path. An energy that was strong, powerful, radiant, arrogant.

After a while she went upstairs. Tiresome standing over him like a prison guard—not that he seemed bothered. He didn’t pay any attention to her. The laird ignoring the boorish peasant. She sat down at the top of the stairs with her books. From there she could watch him. He was still hunkered down in the same place when Tobi came in.

“Hello, bird,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.” He put his hand up to her.

“Most people call before they come to a person’s house.”

“Since when am I most people?”

“You know since when.” Tobi was pale, taut. She stood straight, her hands at her sides.

Sitting on the steps, Karen felt as if she were an audience of one at a play. But this was her sister, her sister who would eat her alive if she caught her eavesdropping. Karen coughed. “Tobi—”

Tobi looked up. “What?”

“I’m sorry, Tobi, he just came in.”

“Tobi, Tobifer,” he said. “Let’s go out. We have to talk. We have a lot to talk about.”

“We have nothing to talk about. Say anything you want right here. Then you can leave.”

“So hard on me,” he said. “Why do you care about those women? They’re intellectual groupies.” He laughed. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

“I don’t care about them. It’s not that!”

“Oh, now.” He sounded weary for a moment.

“Because I didn’t say hello. But you know why, I warned you about all that, I told you about that foolishness.”

“What foolishness? You have words for everything. You do what you want and then you—”

“No,” he said, “you’re a student. I’m a teacher, or so they say. That’s why they pay me. Student. Teacher. You and me, we’re a no-no-no-no-no.” He stood up, almost slid up the wall as he’d slid down it. Maybe a bear, but a dancing bear. “I miss you,” he said. “I’ve been missing you a whole lot.”

“No,” Tobi said.

“Yes. Yes, Tobi.”

“I don’t like it!” she cried. “I won’t have that!”

“Tobi—it won’t always be like this.”

“I don’t like it!” she said again.

“All right,” he said quietly. “All right.”

And at that moment, something changed. Karen, sitting on the stairs, wondered what she had missed. She had been waiting for Tobi to make him leave. Instead, Tobi left with him.

She hadn’t come back by supper time and Liz was out, too, with Scott, so it was only Karen and her parents at the table. Heavy weather. This gave her parents a chance to concentrate on her, to ask her about school and job-hunting. They meant well, but it was all kind of depressing. Her father said he knew without a doubt—shades of her grandmother—that with a little extra effort Karen could do much better in school.

And her mother, also seeking to be positive, told her that she was sure to find a job if she kept at it. “It may be a cliché, but it’s true. If at first, you don’t succeed—”

“Okay, Mom,” Karen said hastily. “Fine. I got it.” It was true that she had slacked off in her job search.

“Where’d you say Tobi was?” her father asked.

“She went out with Jason.”

He tipped back in his chair. “Ah, yes. You said so. So. She’s still seeing him?”

“You knew that, Arnie,” her mother said.

“I suppose I did… . Why did the girls have to go out on the same night? Couldn’t they at least take turns? This isn’t my idea of a family meal.”

“Arnie,” her mother said, “it just happened. They didn’t plan it this way to make you unhappy. Anyway, we’re lucky we still have all three of them living home. A lot of girls Liz’s age, and Tobi’s, too, would be gone by now.”

“That’s right, you guys,” Karen said, “then you’d be stuck with me.” But what she thought was that she’d be stuck with them. She couldn’t imagine life in the house without Liz and Tobi. Yet, it was true what her mother said. One of these days, Liz would leave—to marry Scott?—and then it would be Tobi’s turn to leave, and after that, hers. But if life without Tobi and Liz was unimaginable, her own life in the future was even more unimaginable.

Halfway through the meal, the phone rang. Her mother got right up. “That must be Tobi,” she said expectantly, but it was an emergency call for Karen’s father. He left his meal and went out. He’d only been gone five minutes when the phone rang again. “Tobi,” her mother said again. But it was someone asking for a contribution to a fund to save the blue whales. “You said yes, didn’t you?” Karen asked.

Her mother sighed and dug into the fruit salad. “I don’t know how to say no to that stuff.”

When the phone rang a third time, her mother started to get up, then sat down. “You get it, Karen.”

This time it was Tobi. “Karen? Tell Mom I won’t be home until later.”

“Mom,” Karen called into the dining room. “Tobi’ll be home later.”

“What time?” her mother called.

“Mom wants to know what time.”

“God! How do I know? Later, later.”

“Mom, she doesn’t know exactly when.”

“Ask her where she is, Karen.”

“Tobes? Where are you?”

“In a telephone booth, reporting in as requested and promised.”

“Mom. She’s calling from a telephone booth.”

“What telephone booth?”

“Tobi? Ahhh, where is this telephone booth?”

“Tell our mother it is located next to the women’s room in the back of an Italian restaurant which, itself, is located on Michigan Street next to a fairly sleazo ginmill.”

“She’s in an Italian restaurant on Michigan Street, Mom.”

Her mother came into the kitchen, still holding her napkin. “Ask her if she has money with her, Karen.”

“Do you have money, Tobi?”

“God. Does she want to know what I’m eating, Karen? An antipasto. Jason gets all the ham, but I refuse to share the olives. Is Mom right there, Karen? Why are you two playing ventriloquist?”

Karen looked at the phone, then held it out to

her mother. “Mom. Do you want to talk to Tobi?”

Her mother took the phone. “Tobes? Sweetie—you could have come home for supper…. No! No, I mean both of you…. What?… I mean it, Tobi. Okay, listen, we’ll talk about it.”

Later that night Karen woke up from a dream. In die dream she’d been in the country. She passed farms and little houses and trailers. She saw everything with great clarity. On top of a hill of ice was the house Scott was building. It had dozens of rooms. And she thought, Oh, good, right here is where I’m going. A man was hammering shingles on the roof. “I can do that,” Karen called up to the man. “I’m not afraid of heights.”

And at once she was on the roof next to him, kneeling down. “Here,” he said, “show me.” He handed her a hammer. She saw that it was Scott, after all.

That was when she woke up. And only a moment later she heard Tobi’s steps passing down the hall, heard her parents’ door open, heard her mother say, “Tobi?” Then Karen fell asleep again.

Twenty

Through Liz, Scott passed on to Karen a tip for a possible job. A man he had done some work for had a fruit and vegetable market, The Green Market, and might need summer help. “Scott says Derek always seems to have kids working in his market.” Was that what Scott had said? Kids? Or were those Liz’s words?

“It’s not far from where I work,” Liz said. “If you get the job, we can go to work together. Ask for Mr. Anderson.”

It was a half day in school, teachers conference. Marisa and Karen met in the hall near the chem lab. “Doing anything after school?” Karen asked. “I have this job interview.” Well. That sounded impressive.

“I was just going to ask you if you wanted to go shopping with me. I need a bathing suit.”

“Not seeing Davey?” Karen said his name deliberately. Testing, one two three.

“Maybe later, if he doesn’t have to work.”

“He has a job?”

Marisa linked arms with Karen as they went down the stairs. “At the Veterans’ Hospital, where his father is. Part time in the lab, washing bottles. Not exactly what he had in mind, but David says you have to begin somewhere.”

“He has a job,” Karen repeated. How irritating! And how odd to hear Marisa talking so familiarly about Davey. Odd, too, that Marisa knew more about Davey, now, than Karen did. Odder, still, that hearing his name, seeing him in school, seeing the two of them together, Karen still felt some kind of weird pang, a mixture of jealousy, anger, loss. How long was that going to go on?

The Green Market was in a renovated church, a big old white clapboard building on a narrow side street. A high-ceilinged room, long oval windows, dark wooden floors. Karen asked the woman at the counter for Mr. Anderson. A black man wearing a vee-necked sweater and cords came out of a little office. “Anderson. What can I do for you?”

She was a little taken aback by his crispness, stammered for a moment, then pulled herself together and got out that she knew Scott. “He said you might need somebody?”

“Oh, yes, I met your sister. What kind of job are you looking for, Karen? Have any experience? Cash register? Clerk?”

She looked around at the bins of fruits, a shelf with bread and thick bars of Swiss chocolate. “I’d really like to work here.”

“Anybody who enjoys eating usually does.”

That made her feel like a fool. A fat fool. A fat, greedy fool. And, of course, it was—Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

“That was quick,” Marisa said, when she came out.

“It doesn’t take long to say no.”

Marisa pressed her arm. “You’ll get a job, don’t look so worried.”

It was unbearable how everyone said the same inane, reassuring things. You II get a job. Something’ll turn up. If at first you don’t succeed… . “Marisa, you don’t know anything about work,” Karen exclaimed. Oh, that was mean! Marisa blinked, looking hurt. Karen flung her arm across Marisa’s shoulders. “Don’t mind me! Come on, let’s stop in and see Liz, buy some jelly rolls.”

Liz was waiting on a customer. Standing behind the counter, wearing a white headscarf and a white apron, she looked like a baker, herself, but the baking, the real work of The Bread Box, went on in back, out of sight. You could smell it, though, even before you opened the door to the store.

“This place smells heavenly,” Marisa said when the customer left. “There aren’t that many real bakeries in America, hi France, they’re everywhere.”

“Do they really wrap the bread in newspaper?” Liz asked.

“Sometimes. And people just take it, too, without any wrapping and carry it in their string bags. Liz, do you know how to bake bread?”

“I wish I did.” Liz nodded over her shoulder. “Lori, my boss, said she might teach me… . Any luck, Karen?”

“The usual. I left an application.”

“Well, can I sell you ladies something? Bread? Rolls? Cake? A T-shirt?”