Three Sisters (2 page)

That summer Liz was working, their mother taking courses at the college, and Karen and Tobi were home alone together. “Do everything I say,” Tobi said, “and you can be my best friend.” That seemed a small price to pay for best friendship with Tobi. It was almost as good as the Katoli. They baked butterscotch cookies, slept in the same room, made up plays, jumped rope, and played Monopoly, one continuous game, day after day, flat on their stomachs on the living room rug, the Venetian blinds drawn against the sun. Staggering away, surfeited with money and deals, they would make a pot of fudge and eat it all at once, shushing each other’s giggles. “Don’t say a word to Dad…. Put the sugar away! … There, behind the ketchup! … Should we brush our teeth?”

One wet, hot night, three boys in a car crashed headlong into the enormous old oak in front of the Gitanos’ house down the street from the Freeds. One boy died instantly, the other two, hours later. The morning paper ran front-page pictures of the crash, the boys, their weeping families.

In the middle of the night, Tobi got in bed with Karen. “You want to go someplace with me?” Karen was awake at once. “Where?” “Don’t ask questions, it’s special.”

They dressed, crept down the stairs. Tobi had taken a wreath of flowers from her room. Karen had forgotten to put on shoes; outside the sidewalk was cool and gritty underfoot. They held hands, walked swiftly down the street, past the dark, sleeping houses. Where the car had smashed into the oak tree, there was a deep gash, a bloodless wound. Metal and glass were strewn all over the street and lawns.

Tobi bent over, put the flowers at the base of the tree, wiped her eyes. “Never tell.” They ran back home in the swaying shadows of the trees, gulping air frantically.

Two days later, there was another story in the morning paper. Their mother read it out loud at breakfast. “… and no one on Morningale Avenue could tell this reporter who left the wreath of wild flowers at the tree where the lives of three young boys were so tragically cut off. Whoever it is also left a note tucked into the wreath. ‘To Sandy, Amos, and Rick, rest in peace. Sandy, I’ll never forget you as long as I live.’ “

Tobi, pale and proud, fixed Karen with her eyes. Karen poured milk recklessly over the cornflakes;

the bowl overflowed. Her mother sighed at her carelessness. Later, Karen said, “Did you love him? Do you?”

“Never speak of it,” Tobi said. “Never.”

It was the end of the summer. One morning Tobi looked at Karen through the hair falling into her eyes. “Why am I wasting my time on you, child?” She rampaged through Karen’s closet and bureau, grabbing armfuls of her stuff. On her way out, she banged into the shelf where Karen had her seashells arranged, and for good measure kicked the door. Later, she came back, shrugging, flipping books on the floor. She fell down on Karen’s bed and looked meanly at her for a long time. Tobi had violet eyes and the worst sneer in the world, “Why do you write in that stupid diary, Karen? You have nothing to write about. Your life is silly and boring.”

“Tobi—”

“Diaries are not for silly little people like you.”

“Tobi! Anyway, it’s a journal, not a diary.”

“Journal? Journal? Talk English.”

“That is English.”

“My dear. That is pretentious English. Journal is a pretentious word for diary, my dear. Do you know whereof I speak? Do you understand the word pretentious, or should I put the message into simple language? Journal, little sister, is a stuck-up word for diary.”

Tobi, Karen knew, could keep this up for hours. Bit by bit Karen felt herself falling into a pit, a black hole where she was disappearing. The scream started in her stomach.

When Liz came home, she pried them apart. “Really, Tobi. Why can’t you two be friends?” Karen

saw how Liz’s lumping Tobi with her enraged Tobi. Oh, well, good! She didn’t care. She hated her fickle sister. She went off with Liz to her room to look through Liz’s clothes and try on her earrings. But after a while, she was bored and went looking for Tobi.

That summer, too, Liz got her driver’s license and Karen saw Paradise Lake for the first time. Both things on the same day. Or at least that’s the way Karen remembers it—the two events connected forever in her mind.

The memory is this: Liz jubilantly waving the license, herself curled up on the window seat in the living room, watching Liz, her stomach aching with the thought that comes to her like a warning: Now Liz is a grown-up. At the instant of the thought, Liz seems to become at once larger and then, in a moment, dizzyingly smaller. Not smaller in the sense of little, but only as someone is smaller who is seen from a vast distance.

Immediately after, as if the two events happened in sequence, Karen’s memory puts her in the back of the car, Liz and Tobi up front. Liz is driving, sitting up very straight, and Tobi is singing, off-key, of course. Karen is happy because she’s with both of them and today they’re all friends. She leans toward the front seat, leans between them, putting a hand on each of them, until Tobi complains that her hand is hot and sticky and pushes it away.

But Liz, never taking her eyes off the road, pats and squeezes Karen’s hand, and suddenly Karen loves Liz so much she gets dizzy again and falls back into the seat where she rolls around and kisses

the upholstery, announcing in a loud, silly voice, “I’m kissssing the caaaaar, guys.”

And all the time they are driving through tunnels of green, and past wide fields, the sky is enormous and blue, and Karen is weak with pride in Liz, who jams on the brakes and sedately makes a turn. Dust billows up behind the car. Cows look over a wire fence. A man comes out of a little trailer and scratches his stomach.

Ahead of them, Karen sees a castle, a gleaming white castle with flags and turrets. Even though they are on a dusty road, it doesn’t surprise her at all; it seems, in fact, completely right, and Karen knows that this is where her sisters are taking her, this is the destination, this castle with the sun blazing off the shining turrets.

The castle turns out to be a flag-draped arch with a big red-and-white sign, WELCOME TO PARADISE LAKE. Karen is a little disappointed that it’s not a real castle, but all the same, it’s wonderful. They pass through the arched entrance; there’s a little booth with a woman inside. “Quarter each,” she says.

“My sister drove us here,” Karen says, her nose dripping with pride and excitement. Tobi pokes her, Liz puts down three quarters, and they clatter across the wooden decking and stand together, looking out at the lake.

Three.

Karen was dancing. The cool morning air made her drunk. She was Liz, round and golden and beautiful with freckles. She was Tobi, small and slender as a needle, violet eyes and a mouth that could sneer or smile to kill you. She danced until the sun broke through the window. She was Karen, large and lumpish, big feet and knuckles on her fingers she could crack like castanets.

She rode her bike to school, splashing through every puddle. Later, she went home through Walnut Park, looking for Tobi. The last few months Tobi had taken up sketching. Where had that come from? Did that have anything to do with speech therapy? Tobi drew lumpish men on park benches, misshapen trees, old women wearing strange hats. Karen found her near the Civil War statue. Tobi was sitting cross-legged on the grass, charcoal pencil in her hand, sketch pad in her lap. She raised her eyebrows in greeting and went on sketching.

Karen threw her bike down on the walkway and

took her camera out of her knapsack. She crouched on the grass, back against a tree, focusing on the feet passing through the lens. Boots … shoes … slippers … sneakers … and no two pairs of feet exactly the same. She shot rapidly, it was the only way, every photographer she’d ever read about said the same thing. Take the pictures, take ten, twenty, a hundred, maybe you’ll get one good one out of the lot.

And as always she felt a fake. Did she really love photography? Did she burn with ambition? Was she talented? Or was it only her need to be one of the clever Freed sisters, to have her own niche? In her lens, a pair of red high-heeled shoes with straps clicked past. She could do an entire series of photos on shoes. Was that unique? Or had someone already done it? Hadn’t someone, somewhere, already done everything?

Every month or so, at the Light Gallery, there was a new photo show. For Karen, always an occasion for despair, although afterward she would imagine herself the famous photographer, hers the framed pictures lining the white walls of the gallery. About her work, Karen Freed is remarkably reticent. “My work speaks for itself.” Ms. Freed did comment, however, that the inspiration for Shoes, A Statement arose from an afternoon in a park when she was struck by the notion of footwear expressing the whole of one’s character and personality. Ms. Freed’s brilliant work has been shown in galleries all over the country, and the well-known art collectors, Daniel and Bernice Delay Horace, have just acquired her -

“What are you doing?” Tobi said. Karen turned

her camera on her sister for a moment; Tobi’s face hung in the lens. She swatted Karen’s arm away. “Is there film in that thing?”

“No.”

“God, Karen.”

Brakes screeched. Karen’s stomach jumped. Karen Worrywart, they called her in the family. She worried about money, school, the future, car crashes. If any of them were late coming home, she went into the automatic worry mode. What would I do if anything happened to Mom, Liz? … But except for the time Tobi fell off the couch and broke her arm, they were all intact. Healthy as horses, their mother said.

Karen swung her camera. A boy came running along the path. She watched his feet through the camera. Brand new sneakers with purple lightning marks along the sides. She watched the sneakers run past, watched his hands dip down, watched them grasp the handlebars of her bike. She swung the camera up as he swung up her bike and continued running with it.

“That boy just stole your bike,” Tobi said.

Karen dropped her camera, astonished that what she’d just seen in the lens was actually so. It had been like seeing a news event on TV, a fire, a storm, a riot. Even though you knew it was real somewhere for someone, it wasn’t real for you. Except this time, it was. She ran after the boy. He looked over his shoulder, ran awkwardly with the bike. Karen thought, What a dummy! Why doesn’t he get on it and ride away? At the park entrance, she caught up with him. “That’s my bike!”

He was skinny; acne covered his cheeks like a tattoo. “What are you talking about?”

Karen grabbed the handlebars. She could hardly speak. “Bike! My bike!”

“You’re crazy.” He kicked the wheel. “This old beat-up thing—I’ll sell it to you for three dollars.” He kicked the wheel again.

“Hey, you!” Tobi yelled from behind them and Karen heard her drumming feet.

The boy raised his arm; Karen thought he was going to hit her in the face. She flinched; at that moment he could have had her bike, but he dropped it and walked away.

“This dumb bike,” Tobi said on the way home and she kicked it the way the boy had. “Do you realize how long we’ve had this? It was Liz’s first. You should have let him steal it.”

But it was precisely because it had been Liz’s and then Tobi’s that Karen cared about it.

“We’re ho-oo-ome,” Karen yelled when they walked into the house and Liz came downstairs from her room, her hands in her pockets, a princess in overalls descending from the tower. In the kitchen, Liz took a bowl of cold macaroni from the refrigerator. Karen and Liz dug in. Tobi picked at the food, one macaroni at a time.

“Have some,” Liz said. “Here. Eat, you skinny rabbit.” She pushed the bowl toward Tobi.

“No, no, I’m not hungry.”

Tobi told Liz about the bike thief. “Karen ran after him. You should have seen the monkey, Liz, scooting down the length of the park after that crudo.” Tobi took another macaroni from Liz’s plate.

“She was yelling. I mean screaming; no wonder he took off.”

“Screaming? I don’t remember that. You were screaming. I was screaming, too?” Karen stuffed in more macaroni to keep from smiling her pleasure.

four

Does your father kick up a fuss that your mother works?” Marisa asked.

“What we say in our house,” Karen said, “is that my father’s money pays the mortgage and my mother’s money puts the food on the table.”

Marisa nodded. She had a face like a polished penny—round and gleaming. “I like that. My father won’t hear of my mother working.”

When Karen first met Marisa she was impressed by her hint of a foreign accent. Anything Marisa said—it could be as ordinary as “pass the salt”—sounded better because of that tiny exotic twang to her words.

Marisa’s father was an executive with an international computer company and Marisa had lived a good part of her life in France, England, Germany, and Switzerland. She’d gone to at least eight different schools and along the way, Karen thought, besides her delicious accent, she had picked up a lot of poise, a lot of polish.

“Karen!” someone called. It was Liz, leaning out of Scott’s pickup truck.

Marisa and Karen walked over. Scott’s truck was bright red with his company’s logo, a hammer and saw inside a circle, painted on the door. Underneath was the name, Hammar and Sawyer. Scott was the Sawyer part of the company. Guy Hammar was his partner. “It’s just one of those funny coincidences,” he’d explained when Liz first brought him home. “That our names are so perfect for the work we do.”

“We’re off to investigate a dog for Scott,” Liz said. “Down Derider way. Want to come?”

“Want to?” Karen asked Marisa. They’d been planning on shopping.

“Oh, yes.” Marisa looked so happy it made Karen feel a little guilty. Marisa was an only child. Every once in a while she would say, “Karen, come and eat supper with me tonight.” It usually turned out that she’d been alone for the past three or four or five nights in their huge, formal house.

Marisa and Karen crowded into the truck. Karen sat next to the window, Marisa between her and Liz. They slung their knapsacks on the floor and put their feet on them. Karen liked the way Scott drove—a lot of concentration, but loose at the same time. The last time her mother gave her a driving lesson, she said Karen was so tense she was afraid she’d spasm her neck. No wonder. Karen had been worrying the whole time that she’d do something stupid and wreck them.