The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  When Roots aired, the hallways were plastered with posters showing fat white men whipping slaves, and for weeks tall afroed boys between thirteen and twenty strode the halls in tight purple pants and shiny gold shirts, shaking their fists and shouting “Kunta Kinte!” We knew we were guilty. We were guilty, weak, pale, and privileged, and they were righteous, stylish, strong. It was their school; we gave it up gladly. We sat in pale clumps at assemblies, as bits of ceiling plaster crumbled onto our heads, and watched them — beautiful cheerleaders with gleaming strong legs, spotlit afroed singers in sequins, spectacled class officers; we watched. One day the doors at both ends of the main hall were propped open as a line of girls with glittering platform shoes and fist-shaped pink picks in the pockets of their hot pants did the Bump from one end of school to the other, a sinuous line of girls slowly rolling their hips and shoulders and kicking out their fabulous shoes, smiling low-lidded with their fabulous names, Corinthia, Shantelle, VeLores, and this is the most beautiful thing I ever saw there. Green is the land! Red is the blood! Black are the people!

  I threaded my way like a silverfish, hunting A’s and stars, learning how to bake cornbread and do the Bump in secret, slowly growing a more opaque skin as I held my eyes straight, never needed to pee, stopped flinching when I heard white girl.

  Larval, underground, waiting: That’s how those first years in Washington seem. But they were also lit by making things. Turning inward, compiling. I spooned flour into a measuring cup to bake brownies, cut with long, slicing scissors orange cloth for a pattern, smelled my mother’s warm Singer as the wheel spun, the pedal humming underfoot. Stitching a hem by hand, or typing: useful things to do, and soothing, because you know that each minute you spend in these measured motions is good, productive, nothing wrong. Making things helps make you. And there were the things I made in my attic room with its green cork walls and mossy rug, a rug I’d saved $35 babysitting to buy from a classified. The most intimate relations, just me and the lamp and a pile of paper or pastels or glass slides, my face close and breathing by the hot bulb, absorbed. I did Gothic calligraphy when a boyfriend of my mother’s gave me a book and fountain pen; I wrote and illustrated greeting cards that my mother took to show and sell to everyone at work. I invented things — the word invention made me thrill: project! An orange peeler constructed from a pair of wooden salad servers affixed with razors, a candy dispenser like a pinball game; neither worked. But I won a science-fair ribbon for a plasticine mouth — red lips, pink tongue thrust between gapped teeth — that illustrated zones of taste buds. Sweet, sour, bitter, salty. I was obsessed with valences, nomenclature, charts. Opposites must neutralize each other, so for weeks after school in the kitchen I mixed portions of sugar and lemon juice, trying to find the balance that turned the two to water. I covered index cards with the periodic table and names of the phyla of Animalia to memorize even when brushing my teeth.

  I drew a chart of our family, too. It made the situation easier to explain when anyone asked if I had sisters or brothers, and I kept this card in my wallet. See, my father and mother and this other couple switched. I’ve got a double in New York. See? The chart had lines and arrows. Girls with hair as straggly as mine looked at the chart and then at me as we stood on the windy field at Deal, eating liverwurst sandwiches, and I don’t know what they saw. Someone gave me an acrylic cube for displaying photos, and what else to display but the family? But with only six sides the cube posed a paradox: Who could be included, who not? Paul was the first to cut; that was clear. Paul, and of course with him, myself. That left eight. Did I have to display pictures of the family I lived with? How could I have Helen on my desk and not my mother? The betrayal made me queasy. And on top of this numerical puzzle was another: Which way to set the cube? Who would be smiling up, who face down? Finally I decided that if Paul was cut, Daddy should be, too, to be fair, to be even. I settled on having only girls and halfling boys — and Helen: as a pious act or amulet against danger, I don’t know.

  When the girls came to Washington to see Paul, he often invited us down for an evening — to make it more of a party, be a nice guy, watch us in action, who knows. Maggy and I would take the bus down Connecticut, or Paul would come and drive us through Rock Creek Park, or Maggy would decide she wouldn’t go, why should she. Often I’d go alone. Tommy would already be there, little amphibian, caught between the half sisters who belonged to his father and the half sisters who belonged to his mother, caught between his father’s new marriage and us.

  Paul lived for a time in one apartment and then moved to another near Dupont Circle, and that’s the one I remember. In a neat, modern building, it was clean and cool, with a wall of windows, white carpeting, a big potted ficus, glass and steel and leather furniture, high-quality sound. His new wife was like him: tennis, work, scotch, the news; the apartment was cold and orderly. The girls would stay in the study, that apartment not made for such creatures with their bright plumage and mess, but they’d have been there, with Tommy, unwrapping presents because it was always a holiday and watching gory films and eating chips and getting more inflamed and loud. Then I would appear, with stringy hair and old brown bell-bottoms, there only thanks to my relation to Tommy and to Paul’s sense of duty, there by charity. I was scrawny and sulky and defensive, an orphan. Tommy never seemed sure how to greet me.

  “So how’s school going, Jane,” Paul might say after I’d handed over the wrapped tie or whatever sorry Christmas or birthday present I’d bought him at Woodies, he’d opened it and thanked me solemnly, and I’d slid down in the black leather chair and been given a Coke. Even a question about school led nowhere good. I was an easy mark, and so often when I was there the girls seemed to want to put on a show for the emperor, to talk about “the blacks” at Deal and “the blacks” who overran Washington, the way he did. I’d be spooked by those cries of Kunta Kinte! and walk right into their trap.

  “You’re not supposed to call them that.”

  “What’s wrong with the blacks?” one of the girls might say. “What then, coloreds? Negroes? Why don’t you just call them what they are, Jane? Niggers!”

  I’d flush, cross my arms, stare at my Coke.

  “Oh, come on, Jane. Do it. Just say the word!”

  I’d cross my arms tighter and look hard out the window.

  “Jane’s afraid if she says nigger some enormous black man will come looming up.”

  “Like a shark! She’s terribly afraid of sharks, you know, Father.”

  He’d raise his eyebrows and sit back, grinning.

  “She’s petrified that if she says nigger some enormous black man carrying a club will come looming up and beat her!”

  Of course I was, who wouldn’t be? People got beat up all the time! So I’d shake my head hard and press my lips tight, and Paul and his daughters and son — sweet traitor — would laugh, their cheeks blotchy and thrilled, and Jenny suddenly hoisted herself up from the sofa and made a face that was half shark, half big black man, staring dead ahead and doing something awful with her lips, and came hulking over the thick white carpet to me, and I stared hard through the wall, until she threw herself on the carpet and shrieked.

  After a while, to quiet things down: a change of subject.

  “So, Jane,” Paul might say. “How’s your mother getting on?”

  Fast answer. “Fine.”

  “Good, good.” A sip, a pause, a glance around the room, as if summoning the audience, the lynchers. “How’s her job? What’s she doing now —” and he’d squint and strain, as if trying to extract the information out of the muck of her life “— what is it she’s doing again? Teaching government blacks how not to talk black? Teaching them how to write?”

  And up would go his brows in disbelief, and out would belt howls of laughter from the girls, and heat would rise through my brown bell-bottoms, and I’d slide down furious in the Mies van der Rohe chair.

  The only good class I had at Deal that year was science with Mrs. Rountree, where we did chemica
l equations, hydrogen helium lithium beryllium boron carbon nitrogen oxygen, memorizing positive and negative valences, seeing what chemical would neutralize another, what chemical made another explode.

  Another pause and jingle of ice, another shift of subject.

  “Your mother still seeing — what’s his name — Phil? Bill?”

  She probably was, Phil or Bill or Bob or Ken or some John or another. Men pulled up in white Cadillacs on Friday or Saturday and took her to dinner at Picadilly, she would dance out all Givenchy, leggy blue dress, bright gap-toothed smile, and what was so hard to work out, as I sat on Paul’s slick black chair and dug my feet into that hateful white carpet and looked at all those bright brown eyes and laughing straight American teeth, was the right way to answer, how to know whether my mother would have a positive valence for attracting these men or a negative valence for needing to. Everyone seemed interested. Paul, because he’d been married to her, and the girls because they were thirteen and fourteen and the subject was not only sex but sex involving that famous woman who might or might not have taken their father but in any case had failed to keep him. And given how much intimate knowledge of my mother and Paul existed in the girls’ principal household, who knows how much speculation there had been as to why my mother and Paul’s marriage had failed, who knows how many stories had been told altogether. After a visit to Washington, the girls surely reported to Daddy and Helen. No one wrote letters anymore. The diplomatic pouch was moot; now we had the Northeast Corridor. Now we ourselves were diplomats, spies, shuttling between New York and D.C. My mother wanted to know about my father and Helen and about Paul and his new wife, their apartments and clothes and what they made for dinner. And although my father and Helen asked few questions about her, they seemed to listen closely to our answers and watch us for clues; we were documents of her, after all, and of the failed marriage between her and Paul, just as Patricia and Jenny must prove their own success: The girls had to, like racehorses on which everything was staked. And Paul might ask how my mother was getting on, but he seemed really to want to know about Helen and Edward, especially the intelligence I might offer but his own girls wouldn’t, because our allegiances were different.

  I sat there in the black leather chair and tried to figure out the only right answer, the best portrait of my mother for the different agendas, and Tommy looked pulled to pieces as he sat in his chair clutching his fifth Coke, shaking the ice in it, grinning, inflamed, looking from one of us to the other, his knee jerking hectically, helpless.

  But when I left, the entertainment surely changed, and another cat was thrown into the pen. Evidence burned later in the girls’ eyes.

  The fact of the matter is, I picture Paul saying to his girls, slow and authoritative when it was time to get to the point; the fact of the matter is that Jane goes to a much tougher school than you two. She doesn’t get driven down to a private school by a chauffeur and spend all day with a bunch of prissy rich kids. What she’s doing is much, much harder. And just look at how well she’s doing. First prize in that poster contest, and that science fair, too. A smart kid, he might say, and pause, and regard them. Then shake his head in admiration. Just terrifically smart.

  And I can see him lean back and give his girls that challenging look, his girls so steeped in Edward and Helen. And I can see his eyes fixed hard on theirs as he says these things and slowly swims backward, ever deeper, farther out of their reach, and would they rise to the challenge, earn the right not to drown?

  Maybe Jenny had traveled to Washington arrayed like a bride with all her fresh honors, hoping, without saying so, to be seen, restored. Maybe she’d gazed out the Amtrak window as the Philadelphia boathouses floated by, and listed the private items she’d stored: the medals for riding, the papers, the prizes. Maybe she even thought up things to say, or practiced jokes, moving phrases around in her mouth. And then maybe, a week later, she found that she still couldn’t win what she needed, it kept gliding away, and she traveled back to New York growing fiercely reckless, her breath hot and fast on the glass.

  And often I was in New York when she returned, in her pink room, waiting. Each time I’d have arrived with my own pile to heap at my father’s feet: straight A’s again, my name on the honor roll, that science-fair ribbon, that poster-contest prize. I would throw down my clanking medals, stand in the dust, and wait. I don’t know what I thought winning my father would look like — would he suddenly see me, take my hand, say, You are my own girl?

  In their silken bedroom with its big, bright paintings and view of the park, would my father and Helen have discussed the situation, once several months had gone by and enough information had been gathered to suggest how to proceed? Did they say, Well, does Paul single out and prefer his own girls? Hardly: Just look at the state they were in whenever they came home, the state they were getting in altogether. Then my father could not single out his girls, either: the only appropriate policy.

  So as I stood there waiting, my medals heaped at his feet, it was as if each little medal of mine undid one of Jenny’s or did damage to the house, and he would nod, look embarrassed, and a glance would dart between him and Helen: I was boasting, which was to be discouraged. To single out a girl was not fair. And it was a little sad, wasn’t it, how obsessed Jane was with achievement and knowing things and competing, and why on earth did she think it mattered?

  Again Jenny and I lay side by side in twin beds, breathing hotly the nighttime air. We whispered about analogous evolution, insects, molluscs, the lineages in mythology, elements, every name and system we knew. Maybe we loved these Linnean worlds. But I think mostly we whispered what we knew because each item I knew but she didn’t could erase her, and each item she knew, me.

  It would have been better if we hadn’t both wanted what we did, or if we hadn’t been so much the same, if one of us had been stupid or sweet; if we hadn’t both apparently grown up craving, in secret, the attention of a man very far away and evolving the exact same means to get him; if our tissues hadn’t been made of pure jealousy. Because it didn’t take long for us to know that neither might ever win her own father, that we both might starve, and that made our struggles all the more bitter.

  In my science class at Deal we looked through microscopes at euglenas and paramecia — their nuclei, cilia, fine long flagella — and we learned about seeds, corn kernels, genetics. I had a microscope at home, a small one in a wooden box with a brass clasp that one of my mother’s boyfriends had given me — anyone who lasted until our birthdays or Christmas brought us gifts — and I’d study a drop of stream water, or strand of hair, or fly’s wing. Our dicotyledonous family should be just as explicable. I’d sit in my attic room, at my desk made of such soft balsalike wood that a ballpoint pen pushed hard in the right place could pop through the grain, and I’d trace out the family traits. As with kernels of corn, there were genetic systems that made my stepsisters mean, me so maddeningly weak. I drew charts.

  Edward and Rosemary had produced Margaret and Jane; Paul and Helen had produced Patricia and Jenny. All four girls were pretty enough, and this made sense because so were all the parents. All four girls were smart, and this made sense, too. But our side of the family, I felt, was nicer. For Mrs. Rountree’s class I had to collect a hundred different leaves, pin them to pages, and classify them, so every warm Sunday my mother drove me to the National Arboretum, spread out a blanket on the grass in the sun, and read the paper, looking up at me, smiling and shielding her eyes, as I trooped by plucking leaves. Mostly she was good and nice — in a drought, she would look at shriveled shrubs and wince; after dinner she’d take us for walks to the Beautiful Alley, just to love the azaleas and the evening sky; in a field once, at a picnic, she suddenly cried out to a cow, “Hello! Hello! Moo!” and we imitated her for days, for years. And my father seemed only proper and distant, hopeful eyes blinking as he jingled his change — but then again, how would I know. It didn’t seem that the Australian side was downright mean the way the girls could be, s
o this trait surely belonged to the Americans. Another American trait was strong, even, white teeth, which both Paul and Helen had, not crooked and dun teeth like my parents’, so it made irritating sense that the girls’ teeth were better. The test case would be the little boys, the hybrids, each partaking of a different combination of the same parents. Through them you’d be able to see whether meanness or strong teeth were sex-linked traits. If Tommy got good teeth but Nicholas didn’t, then that had been one of Paul’s traits, not Helen’s, or the condition of strong teeth was itself not stronger than the condition of weak teeth; the parent with weak teeth could counteract the parent with strong teeth, and the child they produced would have cavities, and this was the case with Tommy, so maybe …

  One thing I worried about especially was whether the American parents had stronger genes altogether, whether they were just plain stronger, because this would mean the girls would be, too. And then there was the problem of what strong meant, whether power was something you could make in yourself or simply had, whether you really had it anyway or if it was draped upon you from outside and could be stripped away again. And in love, which was most powerful: attracting or keeping? Or refusing to need?

  What exactly made the woman in one envelope of skin so valuable, so golden, that she could pull a man from his family, she could become all he saw? And what made another worth nothing?