You Are One of Them (2 page)

T
HE FIRST DEFECTOR
was my sister.

I don’t remember her, but I have watched the surviving Super 8 footage so many times that the scenes have seared themselves on my brain like memories. In the film, Isabel (Izzy, for short), four years old, dances on a beach. She is twirling, around and around and around again, until she falls in the sand. There is grace in her fall; she does not tumble in a heap but composes herself like a ballerina. She wears a bathing suit with the stars-and-stripes design that the U.S. swim team wore in the 1972 Summer Games in Munich. It is the same suit that Mark Spitz wore when he swam to gold seven times. On Izzy the Speedo bunches near her armpits but is taut across her stomach. Her body has already lost most of its toddler pudge. Her legs are long and lean and are beginning to show muscle definition. My parents were both athletes; Izzy’s coordination and flexibility suggest that she, too, will win many races. But her belly still protrudes slightly like a baby’s, and there are small pockets of fat on her upper thighs. Her hair is startlingly blond and tousled by the wind. Her eyes are green and transparent as sea glass. Behind her the ocean is calm. Her expression betrays—already!—a hint of skepticism. She is the sort of child who is universally declared beautiful. She looks directly at the camera, unafraid of meeting its gaze. My mother hovers at the right side of the frame in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. She wears a pink paisley bikini, and she holds me, a juicy nine-month-old with a half-gnawed banana in my right hand, on her lap. The camera rests for a moment on my face, but I am blurry, and before the focus can be adjusted, the lens turns abruptly back to Izzy, who is kneeling in the sand, strangely reverent and, judging from her moving lips and rhythmically tilting head, singing something. The camera pans to my mother once more. She is laughing, head thrown back.

Three minutes of footage, shot in August of 1973, exactly one year before Nixon resigned. There are several notable things about this short film: (1) My mother looks relaxed and happy. Half of her face is obscured by the hat, yes, but the smile she wears is an irrepressible one. She is laughing at her older daughter, squeezing her younger one. She is all lightness and joy. (2) The camera lingers on her lovely legs for at least four seconds, which suggests that my father the auteur was, at this point, still very much in love with (or at least attracted to) my mother. (3) My sister is alive.

Just three months after this scene on the beach, Izzy died of meningitis. It was the sort of freak occurrence about which every parent has nightmares: a sudden fever that won’t go down, a frantic call to the pediatrician—supposedly one of the city’s best—and six hours later, despite said pediatrician’s reassurances that “it was nothing to worry about,” a visit to the emergency room at Georgetown University Hospital, where my sister’s meningitis was diagnosed too late to save her. It had already infected her spine and her brain.

This happened on November 7, 1973: my first birthday. Forever after that it was tainted. My parents could never bring themselves to celebrate it convincingly. During every subsequent birthday, they would excuse themselves at various points and disappear into their own private corners to grieve. At my fifth birthday party—the first one I remember—I could hear my mother’s wails from the laundry room in the basement. The sound was so alarming that the clown who had been hired to make balloon animals kept popping her creations. She seemed skittish. “Why is your mom crying?” the kids from my kindergarten class wanted to know. “I had a sister, and then she died,” I said. I used to deliver this information matter-of-factly. It was no more weighty than the fact that our house was stucco or that my father was British. I was three when my parents told me I’d had a sister, and it was a relief to know that there was an explanation for the absence I’d felt for so long in my limbic memory. I’d reach for a baby doll—a doll I later learned had belonged to her—and picture it cradled in another set of arms. Sitting beneath our dining-room table once when I was four—I liked to crawl into private spaces to play—I was overcome with déjà vu. I was sure I had sat in the same spot with Izzy. It must have been just before she died. I must have been eleven months old. I could almost hear a breathy, high-pitched voice urging me to “smile, little Sarah, smile!”

And soaking in the tub, even now as an adult, I sometimes sense the memory of bath time with my sister. My foot touching hers under the water as the tub filled, the sight of her leaning back to tip her blond head under the faucet. Letters of the alphabet in primary colors stuck on the porcelain sides of the tub, arranged in almost-words, and my mother crouched on the floor beside us, her sleeves rolled up so that her blouse didn’t get wet as she washed our hair. And after we were pulled from the water, did we wriggle free of our towel cocoons and chase each other around the house naked? Did I make her laugh? I have no proof that it didn’t happen. I feel certain it did.

Intuitively I knew that something was missing long before I knew how to articulate it. Long before I knew that most people’s parents slept in the same bedroom, that most people’s mothers weren’t afraid to leave the house, that some children had never seen their parents cry, I knew that something was off in my family. “Your poor parents,” people would say to me when I was older and I told them the story. But no one seemed to understand that I felt the loss, too. My sister was in heaven, my mother said, with my mother’s parents, who also died too young for me to meet them. I mourned the sister I didn’t get to know. I longed to share secrets and clothes. I wanted a co-conspirator. I was jealous of the kids with siblings, who rolled their eyes at each other behind their parents’ backs, who counted on the unconditional loyalty only a sister or a brother can provide.

I loved watching that film of my sister. My parents had bought the camera right before that beach trip, so there is no earlier footage of her. There are some photographs, of course, but it was a thrill for me to see her move. Her right hand ebbed and flowed through the air, replicating the motion of the waves behind her. Her body language was like a tide pulling me in; I recognized it somewhere deep inside myself. If she had lived, I know that we would be the kind of adult siblings about whom people say, “Their mannerisms are the same.”

My mother liked to watch our home movies every Saturday night, but screening them was a labor-intensive process. You had to set up the projector on the end table we used as a base, thread the reel through the machine—“Careful, careful!” my mother would say to my father—and sometimes, when the projector overheated, the film would burn and darkness would spread across the image on the living-room wall. It was terrifying to watch the dark blot fill the screen, as if our past were being annihilated right in front of us. It happened so quickly: one moment bright with life and then, suddenly, nothing but darkness. We lost many precious moments in this way—“Stop it, stop it, turn it off!” my mother would cry as my father fumbled with the projector, trying to save the rest of the reel from being fried—including the establishing shots of Izzy on the beach. A zoom into her cherubic face and then we watched that face melt. “My baby girl!” my mother whimpered while the loose strand of film flapped hysterically and my father struggled to turn off the machine. The manic whirring stopped, and then we were all quiet as my father put the reel away in its gray steel case.

“Sometimes I think we should just let it burn,” he said one evening.

“It’s the only one we have of her,” said my mother.

“But we’ve got to let go, Alice. We’ve got to look forward.”

She launched her iciest stare at him. “Is there something better on the horizon?”

I could tell he wanted to erupt. I don’t know if he locked up his rage because I was in the room or because he had already given up on my mom.

We didn’t watch the Izzy footage again after that—my mother was afraid the rest of the reel would be destroyed, so she hid it inside a hatbox in her closet. But when I was old enough to operate the projector, I sneaked late-night viewings of my sister. I would wait until I was sure my mother was asleep and then creep into her dressing room. She kept the hatbox on the top shelf, and as I reached for it, my hand would graze the silks of the dresses my mother had long ago stopped wearing. She retired her glamour when my sister died. (“You may not believe this,” my father said, “but at Radcliffe your mother was always the life of the party.”)

In the dark of the living room, where I set up the projector in the same place we always watched home movies, Izzy’s sequence of movements—turn, turn, fall, kneel—became a sort of meditation. I realize that I see all my memories this way. Everything I remember unspools in the flickering silence of Super 8 film. Each scene begins with the trembling red stripe of the Kodak logo and ends with the sound of the reel spinning, spinning, spinning until someone shuts it down.

I
MET JENNIFER JONES
in 1980.

It was the summer of the Moscow Olympics, and I was devastated that the American athletes were denied the chance to compete because of the boycott. I was a gymnast then, and although I was not good enough to be an Olympic hopeful—I was too tall and too scared of turning somersaults on the balance beam—there was an older girl named Amanda at my gymnastics club who had made the U.S. team. She was sixteen; by the time the L.A. games rolled around, she’d be twenty and past her prime.

Why,
I remember asking my mother, did the Soviet athletes have “CCCP” on the backs of their uniforms instead of USSR? She explained that the Russians had a different alphabet, that in Cyrillic what looked to us like a
C
sounded like an
S
and what looked like a
P
sounded like
R,
and the Russian name for the Soviet Union—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—was abbreviated as CCCP. This was a mind-blowing concept for an eight-year-old. It had never before occurred to me that there could be other alphabets, that somewhere out in the world people were arranging entirely different shapes into words. Like most American children of my generation, I had learned the alphabet watching
Sesame Street.
When episodes were brought to us by the letter
S,
I always smiled, because
S
was my letter, and now my mother was telling me that in the Russian alphabet the
S
looked like a
C.
She might as well have told me that I didn’t exist. It was like money, she said. Different countries have different currencies, and you have to exchange them. Different coins and different letters sometimes. I knew about foreign currency. My father had given me a few English pounds.

The Olympic boycott was one of many signs that 1980 was a turning point in the Cold War: tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were escalating. Whenever my mother said this, I thought of escalators. For years escalators had scared me, a phobia caused by the steep ones of the D.C. Metro, which plummet straight into darkness. Riding down into the stations induced such panic in me that for several years we didn’t ride the Metro at all.
What are you so afraid of?
my father asked me when I was six, as if I could rationally analyze my fear. He wasn’t afraid of anything, my father, or didn’t seem to be, and until my phobia of escalators developed, he thought I was like him.
You’re turning into your mother’s child,
he said to me.

We were on the steamy July sidewalk outside the Dupont Circle station. He had promised to take me to the Air and Space Museum if, and only if, I agreed to ride the Metro to the Mall. Now we were at an impasse. We stood at the top of the station entrance, looking down the short flight of stairs that led to the main escalator. I wasn’t afraid of these steps, but I knew that if I descended into the station, I would be trapped. My father would drag me onto the escalator, he would tug me like a stubborn dog on a leash. I didn’t want to turn into my mother’s child. I knew that she was not normal, that her anxiety was crippling.

What are you so afraid of?
my father asked again. This time his tone was frustrated, patronizing.
You are my flesh and blood,
he seemed to be saying.
Isn’t it time you acted like it?
To my father, fear was weakness. To my mother it was preparation. I looked at him. He was so tall. Six foot four in bare feet. He was wearing a sport coat and a button-down shirt. Even on weekends, even in the heat, he dressed up. He never wore jeans. They were, he thought, too American. This dapper, impatient Englishman seemed, suddenly, like a stranger. He crossed his arms.
Sarah,
he said.
You used to ride the bloody things all the time.

I know,
I said.
I could remember stepping gingerly onto the top step, careful to make sure my shoelaces didn’t catch in the spinning belt. Then clutching the handrail and looking forward, not down, as my stomach sank. The D.C. Metro has an earthy, mineral smell that reminds you you’re plunging straight into bedrock. The cavernous stations are so deep and cold that you half expect to see stalactites dangling from the stone ceilings. The New York and Moscow subways hum with civilization; they smell of human exertion and alcohol-saturated despair. But in Washington, where the trains are not as crowded, where the walls are not tainted with advertisements, the Metro feels almost organic. It’s as if the stations were hollowed out by some primal force. Even the platforms used to scare me. The lights at the edge flashed to warn that a train was coming, then turned a threatening red as the train pulled in to the station. I was always afraid I’d fall onto the track.

I can’t,
I said to my father.
I just can’t.

Fine. I give up,
he said
. Let’s go home.

We trudged along Q Street toward our car. He walked ahead of me, let his back show his disappointment. I had failed. A month later he left.

•   •   •

S
O THE SECOND
defector was my father.

There was another woman involved—there usually is in these situations—but my mother was so unstable that he probably would have left even if he hadn’t met someone else. My mother had an anxiety disorder, and her panic attacks were triggered by a wide variety of daily activities: driving over bridges, flying (or any kind of travel, really), heights (she wouldn’t go above the fourth floor of any building), crowds (tourist-riddled museums had to be avoided), and confined spaces of all sorts (Metro cars, movie theaters, and elevators were all off-limits). The panic developed after my sister died—a not-atypical response to such trauma, her psychotherapist said—and my mother no longer felt safe anywhere. She could be her usual charming self—she had a coquettish streak, and in those days she and my father still entertained people—but she was also capable of wild mood swings. It was not uncommon for her to disappear in the middle of a dinner party. My father would find her hiding in the bathtub, fully dressed, while her guests pretended not to notice her absence. Most people tolerated my mother’s behavior as mere eccentricity; she was beautiful, so she got away with a lot. She insisted on keeping all the lights on at night; she couldn’t bear the dark. She couldn’t sleep without pharmaceutical aid. She became obsessed with preparing for disaster, as if vigilance alone could save us. She slathered my face with sunscreen even on cloudy days. She stockpiled batteries and medications and took my temperature every morning as a precaution.

My father was a pragmatist. My sister’s death confirmed his worldview: that terrible things happen despite your best efforts and when you least expect them, so there was no point living paralyzed by fear. For my mother, Izzy’s sudden death was a reminder that she could never let down her guard, that to relax even for a moment was to open the door to danger. My father took me to the places she wouldn’t go: to the dentist, whose office was on the seventh floor of a Bethesda high-rise; to my gymnastics classes that were located in Virginia and required a trip across Key Bridge. He did his best to compensate for my mother’s agoraphobia. But the more neurotic she became, the less time he spent at home.

And then one day he’d had enough. He was exhausted, he said. He couldn’t do it anymore. This was 1979. In the wake of Watergate, every institution—including marriage—seemed to be falling apart. (“Of course your parents split up,” college friends said to me later. “Statistically speaking, it’s incredibly likely for a marriage to end after a child dies.”) My father had moved to Washington to work for the IMF as an economist, and when he left my mother, he went back to London to join an investment bank. He said he was leaving my mother, not me, but after that I was lucky to see him once a year. The first year he flew in for a long weekend, took a suite at the Mayflower Hotel, and escorted me around like a tourist. He watched me scramble over the giant bronze dinosaur outside the Museum of Natural History. We went paddleboating in the Tidal Basin. We climbed to the top of the Washington Monument and took in the broad expanse of Constitution Avenue from above. When people asked my mother about her husband, she said, “He repatriated.” But he defected. Once he left, he was gone for good.

•   •   •

H
E’D BEEN GONE
for about a year when Jennifer Jones moved into the house across the street from us. It was Labor Day weekend. On that Saturday I watched the movers unload a couch, covered in plastic, from the truck. As the men unloaded other furniture, our dog, Pip, was on his hind legs, pressed against the narrow window above the mail slot, frantically barking. “What’s he looking at?” said my mother from the dining room. The table was covered with paper—she had turned the room into a makeshift office.

“Someone’s moving into the Goldmans’ house,” I said.

“I’m glad it finally sold.”

The house was a stately Queen Anne in white clapboard with black shutters and a wraparound front porch that was typical of Cleveland Park. I always thought of our neighborhood as a community of giant dollhouses.

“Maybe they’ll let us use their pool,” I said. Several houses on our street had pools, but we were not well enough acquainted with the owners to have access to them.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said.

But my hopes were never up. Our house had no room for hope.

A brown Chevrolet station wagon with suitcases strapped to its roof pulled up in front of the house. Before the motor was off, a back door opened and a girl tumbled out. She had two neat braids that reached her shoulders. She was wearing blue shorts and a blue-and-yellow-striped polo shirt and carried a cage of some kind (later I’d learn that it contained her cat, Hexa). Pip couldn’t hold himself up anymore and dropped to all fours, but he continued to bark as he paced back and forth behind me.

“Pip, quiet,” I said. Silencing him was useless; he continued to yap. Like most herding dogs, he had a brittle nervous system. He was like my mother that way. The irony is that my parents got Pip because my mother thought she would feel safer and calmer with a dog. Instead his anxiety fed off hers and then his barking made her more anxious.

A man and a woman—presumably the girl’s parents—emerged from the front seats of the car. The woman had short, feathered hair and wore a white blouse with tiny red flowers embroidered around the collar. The man had glasses with thick tortoiseshell frames. The houses on that side of the street were on a hill, so they looked down on us. I watched the girl scamper up the long flight of steps to the front door. Later I’d count those steps; there were twenty-one. The sloping lawn on either side of them was impenetrable with ivy. The girl tried the door, then spun around impatiently to check her parents’ progress. “Come on!” I heard her shout. When her father reached the porch, she stepped aside to let him open the door. And then they were inside, out of sight. The movers were lugging stuff up the steps.

“There’s a girl,” I said. “She looks like she’s about my age.”

“You should go say hello.”

“Now?”

“Not now. Tomorrow maybe. Let them get settled.”

It wasn’t until Monday—Labor Day—that we actually met. I was walking Pip down the street when I heard a promising voice say, “Can I pet your dog?”

I turned around, and there she was. My new neighbor. “Sure.”

She came closer and crouched to extend a hand for Pip to sniff. “Like Lassie,” she said.

“Lassie was a collie,” I said. “My dog’s a Shetland sheepdog.”

“Mini-Lassie,” she said. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy. His name’s Pip.”

Pip allowed her to scratch him behind his ears. “I want a dog,” she said. “But my dad won’t let me get one.”

“I live across the street from you,” I said, and pointed at my house. It was pebbled stucco, charcoal gray with white shutters and a mansard roof. From the outside it looked normal.

“I’m Jenny,” she said. “I’m from Ohio. The Buckeye State.”

“Sarah,” I said. “I’ve never lived in a state.”

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t a state,” I said.

“My dad says Washington, D.C., is the most important city in the world.” She had the zeal of a convert.

I shrugged. Washington was always more impressive to newcomers: the aspiring politicians at Georgetown University, the freshman representatives who traded state legislatures for the U.S. Capitol, the idealistic reporters determined to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, the tourists who sweated outside the White House hoping to spot the president. For those of us who lived there, Washington was not glamorous. It is a swampy city of wonks, a factory town where everyone—the lawyers, consultants, think-tank strategists, journalists, and diplomats—works in the same business. And the languid pace of life in the leafy enclaves of northwest Washington is so far from urban bustle that it’s hard to believe you’re in a city at all. Even then I knew I wanted to live in New York. I’d been there just once, but before my father had even hailed a taxi outside Penn Station, I remember thinking,
Now,
this
is a real city.

Jenny had turned eight in June; I would be eight in November. We were both entering third grade at John Eaton. And when school started the next day, Jenny and I were in the same class. Our teacher, Mrs. Haynes, was a woman in her fifties who wore a pearl choker and blew her nose into monogrammed handkerchiefs. When she discovered that I had already met “the new girl,” she let us colonize adjoining desks. Jenny and I spent that first recess on the swings, where we exchanged information about our lives as we flew higher and higher.

Your sister died?
she said as she moved through the air, her white kneesocks extending straight out over the blacktop.

Why did you move?
I asked as I pumped my legs as hard as I could.

We covered the basics: Her father had been transferred from his consulting firm’s Dayton office; her mother was a nurse who hadn’t found a job in D.C. yet. Jenny had always wanted a sister; I had been cheated of mine. And so that’s it: we were friends. Jenny invited me to her house after school.