The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  When the two weeks were over, we said good-bye to Nicholas and the girls (I’m not heartbroken about leaving J + P) and stepped with our bags through the sliding brass gate, rode the elevator, got into the black car. Helen might have sat in the front seat this time and talked to the driver, while we sat in the back with Daddy between us, the kind of fair thing he would have planned, giving our arms a squeeze now and then and glancing at each of us brightly, looking hopeful; otherwise the three of us gazed at the large windows of mannequins in gold dresses and furs rolling by.

  “Did you remember,” he whispered, “to thank Helen?”

  We reached the station and took the escalator down, down again to where the trains waited in the darkness and heat.

  “It was wonderful to see you both,” Helen said on the platform, and kissed us. “Please give my regards to your mother.”

  “Thank you,” we said. “For everything.”

  We found a pair of empty seats, and our father swung up the luggage and gave Maggy the tickets. He stood with his hands in pockets, jingled coins, and glanced up the aisles, back at us, smiled, glanced away again. The train jolted.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “Time! It was wonderful. Call, hmm? Write? Don’t look so glum! Soon you’ll be up again.” He kissed us both, made sure our bags were in order again, and hurried off. We saw him out on the dark platform then, peering through the train’s tinted windows, and pounded on the glass until he saw us and threw up his hands as though it were all new.

  The train wasn’t moving yet, so we pressed against the window, and he looked up and down the tracks, made Idon’t-know expressions, shrugged. He wrote with his finger on the window, backward: c–u soon! xxxooo.

  Finally the train jolted again and inched forward, and he mimed surprise, alarm. He walked alongside us, and as the train gathered speed he jogged athletically, lifting his knees and elbows high. But then we were really moving. He gave up, smiled, made a boo-hoo face, wiped his eyes, and waved.

  Riding silently through the tunnel and out among the belching machinery of New Jersey, I felt a weakness, a loosening near my ribs, as though a plug had been pulled and something were spiraling out, something essential, like blood.

  I didn’t know what I’d wanted on that trip to New York. Maybe that a long sleep would be over, I’d wake to see my father smiling through the airplane hatch. He would finally see me, and I’d be restored. I was a hero who had been mistakenly exchanged and had tramped the earth and proved himself and now at last would be recognized.

  Maybe all four girls had boarded their Amtraks with the same occult craving, too much to commit to words, to air. Maybe, alone in our beds the night before we took our trains north or south, a private image of an ancient lost union with our fathers had risen in each of our minds. Then, later, maybe each got back on the train stunned — and when we first saw the girls, as always, they were a step ahead, they’d already seen their father and learned what they learned while we were still beginning. Maybe we sat on an Amtrak rattling through Delaware, staring out the window, not sure what had happened but realizing already that our fathers could be lost again, we’d fail again to make them love us.

  _______

  But still. Still, I can picture other things that might have happened on that first visit, little events to balance the last day we’d seen our father, seven eerie years earlier. We might have gone for a walk around Central Park, just Daddy and Maggy and me, arm in arm, and he might have said, Listen, let me tell you about those years, let me hear how you were.

  This didn’t happen, and I’m glad. To have such tender regard and concern for health would ruin this story and turn it to sponge. I prefer the silence and pounding on glass.

  5

  Layers of consciousness seem like zones of ocean water, dropping from a surface that’s glittering, warm, salty, and blue, to cool green volumes shafted with light, down to cold currents that roll black over the ocean floor. Zones of self-knowledge like this, sinking and subtly transforming, seem to form the body of memory; how small daily actions are stirred by other, deeper motions that become clear only later. The glinting blue surface and the black rolling currents are the same body of water.

  What is known and felt at the surface when you’re eleven or twelve: One moment dissolves into the next as you breathe and move forward, printing the meanings of words upon smudged purple mimeographs in a fluorescent room, memorizing the periodic table and the chained pictures of chemical compounds, writing names inside the outlines of countries. You shake free of little hairs and lint the dark-green cotton sheet each morning, fold it back, smooth it with the side of a hand, plump the pillow, place it straight, then straighter. Or you sit dreamy on the toilet, peeing as you wind a strand of hair around your finger. Or smell your hair, dry and yellowish, dirty, baby shampoo, and wonder if that body down there beneath your chin will ever change, and rub two fingers along the skimpy skin over blue-bone ribs, close your hand slowly into a fist, admire the forearm’s slight swelling muscle, then bend over to study the little bare cleft before dropping toilet paper into the bowl. You rake wet leaves in the backyard, smell stale coffee air when you come inside chilled and hurry to make your mother’s bed before she’s home from work, and slam the door at the bottom of the attic stairs, so that dust whorls float behind your dirty feet as you run up to the green cork room, the moss rug.

  Beneath these streaming moments other things move silently, splashing up sometimes in dreams. I was running down the hill again with that little man holding my hand. Who is he? Surely no one at eleven thinks consciously of creating herself, of pulling in from all she sees and touches the most valuable strands. To make my father see me, love me, this is what I have to do … No. That he hadn’t seen was too obliterating to articulate: that one father hadn’t seen, and the other had left as well. But something in the body knows what it’s doing, understands it’s crucial to collect or discard strands among all you see, to build and weave and tighten. This is a critical venture because what you’re making is you: devising ways to be valuable.

  But if you’re lucky, or just healthy enough, it’s not only wanting to be valuable to a pair of fathers as remote as gods. It’s working in a way that’s unwittingly sane against being hollow or leaky, making your self home despite everything. Because there are options, and one is not to do this, not to carve a safe cell for yourself and fill it with things that are useful, but to give in and go under.

  I stopped keeping a diary soon after New York and didn’t write in another for three years. Maggy and I would speak to our father occasionally — on birthdays, for instance (Although Daddy called I’m going to write a letter to him, anyway, to ask formally for some pamphlets on the U.N.) — but we didn’t go to New York again until Christmas, then Easter, then the following summer, and I think the girls visited their father as often. We saw the girls in New York and at Paul’s; except maybe once, they did not stay with us, so we saw them only on their territory, and it felt as if there was a problem with our house or mother, a danger or an uncleanness from which the girls must be kept. New York felt all splendor and treat: chocolates on Madison Avenue, the U.N. building with its glass and bright flags, artist studios in cobblestone Soho, the Lincoln Center, dinners out. The girls would go to a private school while we’d go to a public junior high. They’d have a driver; we’d ride the bus. Their mother painted and arranged flowers on the Upper East Side, while ours was alone and took the bus to work. The girls seemed to have two fathers, we seemed to have none.

  In August, when Maggy and I first returned from New York, our mother was still looking for a job. She’d sit in her bedroom in pink cutoffs and a bikini top, typing job applications to send out to the world. She was starting fresh, and who knew? Life might be waiting outside each morning when she swung open the heavy front door. The oaks stood huge and green on Barnaby, the humid air veiling the street into September, and when she stepped outside she turned herself out, opened her bright sea eyes, looked to see what was out there
. She was thirty-eight and had danced the cancan and might do it that instant if you dared her, right on the front walk in her flowered nightie as she paused to breathe the morning air, then picked up the paper to see what the day held.

  Barnaby Woods was a lucky neighborhood to start over in, full of Washington Post writers, photographers, artists. My mother waved and helloed gaily over the hood of her new old beige Volkswagen, and soon she sat beautiful and wry amid the gatherings in the D’Angelos’ garden up the street, drinking wine and talking about Archibald Cox or Rose Mary Woods’s foot on the pedal, and we’d be there, too, we’d run barefoot up the sidewalk still warm from the day’s heat, slide into that deep green garden, and lie on the grass, reaching for fireflies at dusk. When Nixon resigned the following summer, fireworks exploded on Barnaby Street. And the feel of those late summer nights, that smooth asphalt warm beneath my bare feet as I glided in the dusk and looked through the oak branches to the sky full of cool light, was like a wild current of life that tugged me outward and could pull me free from the nets of that family, make me something on my own, something else.

  Paul came Fridays to take Tommy and Sundays to drop him off, but he existed otherwise at the end of the phone line, or the way Daddy had for so long: a black hole in my chest that was both numb and painful. When this second divorce was being worked out, or when Paul and my mother were still fighting whatever they hadn’t finished, he’d call, and Maggy or I would hand the phone straight to our mother, who, stopping in the kitchen doorway amid bags of groceries, would clamp the receiver between ear and shoulder, motion with her chin for us to dump the frozen peas and carrots in boiling water, then pour gin over glass after glass of ice, her voice rising, body sinking, until finally she sat wedged in the doorway, weeping, cord kinking from her hand up the wall, while we sat silently putting forkfuls of vegetables and chicken pot pie into our mouths.

  Paul had a legal commitment to Maggy and me in exchange, I gather, for my father’s commitment to Patricia and Jenny. We still had Paul’s nationality and name, sort of, although in the divorce documents of 1974 Maggy and I are called Cummins again. Also in these documents: She and I seem to be worth three-eighths as much as Tommy. In the house was a murky air of gratitude that anything came for us at all, given that we weren’t Paul’s daughters.

  When he drove up to fetch or drop Tommy and deliver a check, he might also take down an air conditioner, examine a broken bike. My mother often was not there when he came, and Maggy would stay in her room with the door shut, so I’d be the one to let him in while Tommy looked for Red Dog. Paul would stand in the hall and glance around at the house he’d once lived in, at the old gold chair, the repaired dining-room set he’d bought with my mother, a painting he’d bought with her, too, then let her have or not wanted. His eyes might move toward the kitchen, upstairs toward the bedroom where he’d once slept, perhaps think better of that journey, return. And while he was there, the wood floor he’d walked in on, and the stained cream carpet beneath his foot, and the musty brown striped sofa he sat on, and those wool curtains behind his dark head, and how clean they were or how worn or dusty, were not just themselves; they were my mother, Maggy, me, all left.

  Sitting with my ankles crossed and cold hands under my legs, I’d feel myself defend that sofa or rug. It wasn’t clear how to look at his eyes, it wasn’t clear at all what to do.

  “So how’s your mother getting on, Jane?” he’d ask.

  “Okay.”

  “Good, good. Your sister?”

  “Fine.”

  “The car still acting up?”

  “It’s all right.”

  He’d nod, seeming satisfied, interview over. Then pull a check from his pocket, look at me so I’d take note as he placed it on the chest beneath an Indonesian figurine, and walk with his son out the door.

  He sure is generous in the way of birthday presents! I got a stamper which makes my name, a set of stationery which has my name and address on it, 12 colored pencils which have my name …

  A gravitational puzzle, repelling and pulling at once. Or like the black disk that glows in your eyelids when you’ve looked at the sun: still there and burning, but not there at all.

  _______

  My mother got a job with the government, teaching grammar, writing, and communications for $12,000 a year, and we fell into order around her. We cooked macaroni, vacuumed and dusted the living room each weekend, cleaned the bathroom, swept the stairs, folded laundry, babysat neighborhood kids for $1 an hour; I ran a day-camp in the basement, tacking signs about it on all the Barnaby oaks. We bought our clothes at Penney’s and Encore. The energy crisis began, so we kept the thermostat low, and when icicles formed inside my attic windows, we taped sheets of plastic over them, sealing me in. The huge oaks in the backyard dropped thousands of leaves onto the mud, where they rotted and formed sodden mats, and acorns pelted the roof, then sank into the swampy leaves and put out tough slippery roots so that rot layered the backyard in prehistoric growth that was heavy and pungent and slippery with slugs, and this must be raked up, could not take over, like the bills on the orange chest, like the dining room ceiling suddenly crashing in, the kind of thing that threatened the house with collapse, as if only a force of will could keep it standing. So after school I’d rake. For weeks I’d drop my books on the yellow kitchen table and go back and face it, the sea. I’d stuff leaves in black plastic bags with my boot, but the acorns and twigs poked through the plastic and ripped it, so that by the time I dragged one sodden bag from the end of the yard by the alley all the way up to the house, through the side zone wet with ivy and nervous with daddy longlegs, and up to the sidewalk, the hole would have caught on roots and rocks and ripped wider, and half the leaves would have fallen out and left a trail of failure, and sometimes this new world was just too exhausting.

  Those years feel larval. Not just because of the wet leaves and maggots squirming beneath them and the little white worms that wiggled out of the bread-dough figures I’d hung on my cork walls, but because the split in South America and then the trip to New York had been shocking, had left me a weak underground thing. Now at school being white was a problem. My body did not grow but stayed a pale tube I hid in ugly magenta corduroy pants, old hiking boots, a thick Andean sweater. But larval times are times of waiting: storing up and waiting.

  Maggy and I took the M4 each morning to Alice Deal Junior High. The school stood in a leafy white neighborhood of Georgian and Tudor houses and groomed gardens, the houses bigger and gardens more lavish than in Barnaby Woods. But only a handful of kids from that plush neighborhood went to Deal, which was big and brick and smelled of urine on hot heaters, sweet hair pomades, warm gas from the stoves in Home Economics, cigarettes, pot, and incense to hide it. The black kings and queens who ruled Deal came from parts of D.C. like Anacostia and Northeast, far from that leafy place, arriving on school or city buses.

  On the first day, they felt like a monsoon, a warm, dark storm coming in the front and back doors of the M4, with purple picks in their hair, snapping gum, smoking, eyeing us hard, wearing platform shoes that could tromp you. They kept coming up the steps and pushing down the aisle, and I could not understand it, wondered if all these people could be from the same family, because the brain has compartments and mine were stupidly small. The M4 doors wheezed shut, and we sagged up Nebraska to Deal, the nine white kids with their big baby teeth staring at their scared fish reflections in the windows, trying to melt into the glass.

  I was the only white girl in Home Ec., one of four or five in Gym. Between classes in the crowded halls it was good to be small like me because newspapers would be rolled up with sand, slung tight, and used to whack blond heads that showed. Packed halls, though, were better than empty ones, much better than when some teacher sent you on an errand to the other end of school and the halls were empty, but not really empty, not in the stairwells, behind doors. Hey white girl. White girl! What you got in that bag. Give me that. Those words white girl were sometimes s
aid so slowly, each morsel held long in the mouth and hated, but sometimes spat out fast as a smack. In Gym, I flattened myself against the lockers when I pulled off my shirt and slipped on the horrible soft blue-nylon gym suit, while around me dark breasts and pregnant bellies sprang from brassieres and old panties: bodies fully made and shockingly potent already. I tell you ladies: you got half as much hair in those pits as you got on your heads you had better shave that mess! I had nothing in my pits, nothing anywhere, twenty-four, twenty-four, twenty-four, and was knocked down easily with a medicine ball by a beautiful girl named Corinthia, and was even knocked down with a Webster’s thrown from a window: Something flapped at my head like a prehistoric bird and I fell to the sidewalk.

  No cafeteria for the white kids at Deal. We huddled on the blacktop in the cold, near the numbing iron rail, with our clammy sandwiches. We skidded down the steps and tramped over the muddy field, ever farther from the brick building, until we reached the edge of school grounds, the bushes and garbage and rats, and sat shivering there or around a sewer top. But it felt safer, because just the other side of a fence lay the curb and smooth street and trimmed hedges and paving stones of that fine neighborhood, like waking after a nightmare.

  After school, the white kids who took the M4 bolted to the bus stop once the bell had rung, and we hoped to god it would come before the school buses finished loading and began to swing around the corner. Because when they did, lit cigarettes or rocks or bottles were pelted from the windows at us huddling like pale stupid sheep. A cigarette stuck burning in my arm once as I stood clutching my daisy-covered notebook, and I couldn’t understand what it was, thought it was a bee. A friend was hit by a rock in the head, and she didn’t get it, either, just stared at her bloody fingers through her glasses, confused. A skinny white boy had an arm and leg broken, another was given a concussion, a gym teacher was beaten up by girls. I never went to the bathroom at Deal, or at least not after the first times. I made myself not need to pee, and since my body stayed a narrow tube there was no other reason to go. Hey girl. You a girl? What you got between those legs? Why you got no titties?