The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  For two years, in her pink bedroom, Jenny and I fought on. I don’t think we could have told you why; it just drove us like blood in veins. We performed ever more elaborate neurotic routines. We took pictures of each other in the dark with flash bulbs; one of us would shoot blind while the other posed in the flare. When I developed mine, I found that in the first pictures Jenny had done the same gags as me — lain back with her head and arms flung over the mattress, dead, or stood on her head, or crossed her eyes — but the last pictures are different. In one she stands before me with her face cold and gives me the finger; in another she rears above me with scissors.

  In the dark we whispered at each other, fierce. She lay spread-eagled on her pink bed and listed names of gastropods while I lay spread-eagled on my pink bed and listed names of arthropods. Kingdom phylum class order family genus species! Hymenoptera Lepidoptera Coleoptera Orthoptera! The-ptera part means wing! So lepidoptera means scale wing because lepido means scale! And hymenoptera means membrane wing because the wing’s like a membrane!

  I had to outdo her. But she was older and went to a real school and it was impossible that I could know more. One day — as if a switch flipped, and she with her extra year could decide this, or maybe she simply gave up the battle — she flounced over in bed and announced that it was boring and childish to keep raving like this, she simply couldn’t give a piss! And she gazed into the more mature, dusky air around her and shrugged a bored shoulder and said that the fact of the matter was, none of the sort of thing I was chattering about mattered. But speaking of Hymenoptera, probably I didn’t even know what a hymen was. Did I? And what about orgasm? Did I happen to know what an orgasm was?

  It sounded like organism, I didn’t know, and I flailed around trying to answer until she snorted with satisfaction, fell back on her bed, and stretched her arms toward the ceiling, languorous, while on my bed I lay in flames.

  The next day she informed me, kindly, that the fact of the matter was that I was oversensitive, everyone could see it, they’d discussed it in fact quite recently, she and Patricia and Daddy and Mum, and she knew Father thought so, too.

  They’d discussed it in fact quite recently: a glimpse through the mirror at how the others saw us or wanted to see us. A corollary of the formal photos they’d sent, a curious reflection of ourselves. Glimpses of their stories over the years: Jane is utterly emotionless and cold … Mum’s the first to have been able to please Daddy … Jane will never be as close to Daddy as we are, and never as close to Father, either.

  Paul still came up Fridays to get Tommy, Sundays to drop him off, and while Tommy looked in the closet for his rocks or comics, I was still the one to greet Paul. He’d rap on the screen door and stand shadowed behind it, and I’d let him in, go fetch him a beer. He’d sit, rest an ankle on a knee, stretch an arm along the back of the brown sofa, look around at the house he’d once lived in.

  I’d hand him the beer. I’d sit down and wait.

  “So, how is everything, Jane.”

  “Okay.”

  He’d nod, take a sip, ask the other usual questions.

  “School as terrific as always?” At which I’d roll my eyes and say something smart, and he’d laugh and hold me lit in his sight.

  Then he might lean back and slide into the real topic of interest. “So, Jane: There’s nothing you don’t pick up, you’re so goddamned observant. Tell me. What do you really think about all of them —” a gesture northward with his chin “— all of them up there on Fifth Avenue?” And he’d lift his brows, give a conspiratorial smile, welcome whatever intelligence I’d spill. And of course I’d spill, reckless and hungry, I’d spill anything to hold that attention.

  When Jenny and I reached fourteen and thirteen, the terms of battle shifted. She herself changed, everything sprouted, breasts, blood, hair, all that potent female stuff, while my body stayed underground, my head floating full of nomenclatures above it. We were like different kinds of fish, one throwing out flamboyant color and preposterous membranes, the other forming a spiny skin like rock.

  She was now tall and curvy in a yellow bikini, and even her face had become more sly, her mouth a sweet, pink della Francesca curl like her mother’s. She looked around everywhere with bright, hot eyes; she turned upon herself and learned arts of her body. In New York she led me into her bathroom and shut the door. “You’ve got to shave your legs,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Because that’s bloody revolting. Here,” she said. “Put your foot here.”

  I put my foot on the sink, and Jenny soaped her hand, lathered my calf, pulled the razor in a clean stroke over the skin, and knocked it against the sink, the soft blond hairs running into clots.

  “Watch it,” I said as she slid the razor fast along my stony ankle, stinging. She laughed and made a sweet face in the mirror: as if she’d meant to hurt me, her darling sister.

  Jenny stood at the mirror with her hips thrust forward and applied lipstick, shadow, powder. She put them on me, too, holding my jaw between her fingers. “God, no one’s shown you how to do anything,” she said, pinching my mouth open like a snapdragon and stroking on red.

  No, no one had. My mother’s beauty was natural, and otherwise, who could bother? She’d walk around her room naked as I lay listless on her double bed, the one she’d slept on with Paul, and he’d slept on with Helen, and I’d take to college and sleep on with I don’t know how many men until I finally left it somewhere and moved. I’d lie on her bed and study her belly, her bottom. She’d give her hair a quick brush, slather the same lotion on her face as her legs. Helen I saw only fully composed. Nature versus art supreme: the emu and the peacock.

  In her bathroom Jenny poofed me with powder and turned me to the mirror. “There.” She took a handful of my hair, bunched it up, let it fall. She put more lipstick on her own mouth and pursed into the mirror. Then she grabbed me by the waist and held me, smiled, and kissed me hard on the cheek, her teeth pressing through lips and skin to bone.

  “Now you’re finished,” she said, smiling at the lipstick bruise on my cheek.

  She blossomed on the sidewalk, tossing her hair and exchanging looks with boys who only emerged from trees or shop windows when I saw them staring at Jenny. Once she’d caught their eye, she lifted her chin and dropped them cold. They sneered or cursed but turned for another look, and that’s when she smiled most. One boy riding by on a bike grabbed her breast, right on Fifth Avenue. She looked enraged, delighted, her face lit with excitement as she shook her fist and shouted, “My god! Piss on you, you bloody fucking P.R.!”

  She was her own object now, her own show. At Gimbels she fingered scarves and sprayed perfumes and tried on hats, and then at Papaya King, sipping Coconut Champagne, she opened her jacket, pulled out a gold-cased lipstick, and set it on the counter. Then a pair of costume earrings, the price tag still dangling. She placed them between the mustard and napkins as people walked up or down Lexington the other side of the grimy glass. She turned to me, grinning.

  “You’re an idiot.”

  She shrugged and twisted open the lipstick. “What shit!” And dropped it magenta-head first into the trash can.

  “So why did you take it?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “You didn’t even want it.”

  She laughed. “That’s hardly the point.” And looked away, grew dreamy, abstracted, lowering her lids privately, but even then surely feeling my eyes cold on her cheek. And which was the greater potency, to feel eyes clinging to your skin, or make marks on someone else’s?

  Beside me on a city sidewalk, Jenny was always ahead now, gazing off into a more exotic air moving with subtle currents. On a glaring road at the beach, her body oiled in the yellow bikini, she turned herself out, her eyes aware of her lean flesh shining as she strutted in her blue Dr. Scholl’s. She held her chin high, narrowed her eyes like Corinthia at Deal, and sauntered, kicking out each bare gleaming leg in a way that drove me wild and was exactly how P
aul walked, and Patricia, and Tommy, because those American genes were so strong. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it and imitated, throwing up my chin and flinging each leg out, letting the heel of my red Dr. Scholl’s clop like a camel to annoy her. She smiled; she ignored me. She looked like she knew her skin was magnetic and all eyes would fly to her, and sometimes they did. But if they didn’t she’d make them. One day on that road at the beach she grabbed a little boy by the neck and kissed him hard, as she’d kissed me, and left him on the hot asphalt, crying.

  My mother had joined groups with names like Parents Without Partners, and she went to therapy and worried about possible ramifications from the situation with the fathers, as she called it. She wanted me to open up and tell her what I felt. I told her I did not feel a thing.

  “Oh, of course you do! Janie.”

  Nope, not a thing.

  “You have to let yourself feel!” she would cry. “You can’t bottle everything up!”

  We would be playing Scrabble some hot summer night, and I’d be sitting on the old sofa, itching, and as I assembled some six-letter word, she would probe at me.

  “Darling. Jane. Listen to me.”

  I’d turn to stone.

  She’d finally make me put down my wooden letters or stop adding the score, and she’d take my cold wrists and gaze at me with her big gray eyes and beg me to say what I felt about things, about, oh, all of it, the whole situation! She’d swing her head around like a horse in the rain, and exactly that subject, the whole situation, the situation with the fathers, the weakness implicit in it and feeling anything about it, was what I did not want to let show or have anything to do with. And as she gazed at me, kneading my thin wrists with her thumbs, her own eyes filled with tears and there was nothing I could do to stop this, her eyes filled and filled until they spilled over, and I shut my eyes hard and put my arms around her damp shoulders as she wept and shook and said, “You know, none of this has been very easy for me, either.”

  Feeling, hunger, need: all weak. The object was to be hard, to be marble. Not to blush like a white girl, not to cry, not to be a girl at all. Because for one thing weakness was repulsive. And what was repulsive naturally repelled people, and if you repelled people they wouldn’t want you, and this unfortunately took you back to the beginning, to admitting there was something you needed. Unless you could transform your object: Get everyone to want you but then not need them at all.

  What I truly loved, so easily, because there were no allegiances to be broken, was summertime dusk and the feeling that came with it. The transparent feel of gliding over warm asphalt with bare feet, with Tommy, walking down twilit Barnaby to the Beautiful Alley, which cut a swath of coral azalea through the block. I loved looking in windows as we walked past, slipping through the glass and into lit rooms and even for a moment into a little girl, watching a lean gray cat stretch and roll on the sidewalk, losing my self, coming home exhausted and fresh, stepping back into my body.

  I loved dusk and its inner equivalent, that suspended feeling when I wrote or drew. My father had given me a ream of stationery with the little emu and kangaroo at the top, and I covered sheet after sheet with green or blue marker. I’d invent stories about slipping through mirrors to somewhere else, places like Narnia, reached by pushing through fur coats that became fir trees, or by gazing at the shadow of a boat gliding alongside you, willing yourself through water. I’d draw or paint, the distance between me and what I drew dissolving as my eyes traveled over each curve and my hand tried to remake it.

  And then there was the painful, pulling beauty of the world itself: the rolling marbled sky, the glassy green under-side of a wave. This beauty exists nowhere but the current of air between the object and your eyes, and you dissolve in that current, you become the seeing itself so long as you stand there and give yourself up. Beauty enters through the eyes and undoes you; it sets you loose from your self, lets you flow out and be other, and this I wanted most.

  On weekends I took the bus downtown to a Washington torn up, the streets planked over while the subway was tunneled. It was like bouncing on the boardwalk, feet making that same warm, hollow sound, but here was no sand or sea, just Pennsylvania Avenue or F Street, abandoned. I went to the Smithsonian and looked at rocks, dinosaur bones, ancient clocks; I went to the National Gallery and ran up the cool marble steps to the greenery and fountain and poised, pointing Mercury; I took painting classes at the Corcoran. Years later, in my twenties, I studied there again, took a class in animation, and made a short film of Daedalus taking flight. A simple method, just drawing sheet upon sheet clipped to a register, each showing a sixteenth of a second of motion, a tiny move in knee and wing. Making these drawings on the Murphy table in my studio in Adams Morgan, a table with benches that unfolded like a wooden insect from the wall, I wouldn’t notice time itself passing, real time measured by the sun. I wouldn’t move or look up as I sat and drew each sixteenth of a second, just got lost in the motions I drew, so that three or four hours would pass and the sunlight would have slid over the parquet floor, out the window and down to the sidewalk, to the hoods of the Ethiopians’ cabs, and while that had happened I’d gotten Daedalus to take one step. But I’d thought about him and envisioned Icarus in the air: the feel of his arms straining, his knees loose in the wind, the sun blinding his eyes and melting the wax in hot drops on his shoulders, and the shocking sight of his shadow on the water rushing up as he falls in.

  Always it felt polar, antipodal. When we were far enough away from those others the gravitational tug weakened, and I might almost be free, my own self. But seeing them was to be pulled under, Jenny and me forever in twin beds, wanting to cut ourselves out of that room, shake off that stifling other.

  The summers my father lived in New York he rented beach houses on Shelter Island and Cape Cod, and Paul rented beach houses, too. All four girls went, with one brother or the other. There are pictures: Four swimsuited girls do handstands on a lawn, three shapely young females and me. Four girls array themselves on a boulder around Daddy, and he looks too young to possess these brimming creatures; it’s alarming to look at this picture. Four girls on a dock perch on four wood posts, Daddy in the middle, our gymnastic legs stretching to reach him. Watch me, Daddy! Daddy, look! Each of us strains to be noticed, and except for me we are big girls now, women. We made up dances, put our arms around each other’s shoulders and kicked and hopped like cancan girls. Ask any mermaid you happen to see —

  The dock was gray, the shingled house was gray, the sky was gray, too — although in a print Helen made of us girls on the dock, the sky around us blazes orange. I remember my father preparing bait on the sand, lifting a worm and dangling it before us so we’d shriek.

  I’ve dissected worms, I wanted to say. Don’t you know? You stick one pin in the head and one at the end and take a scalpel and cut down the long squelching middle. Then you peel the gray-pink membrane away and pin that like wings to the board, leaving quivering strands: the alimentary tract, the nervous system. And I’ve collected insects, I wanted to say, and pinned them and labeled them; I know the classifications. And I know Spanish. And I can draw. I get all the prizes! Why don’t you know this? Why don’t you want to?

  Instead I said, “Can I fish, too?”

  Jenny stepped forward and plucked a worm from the bucket. “Me, too,” she said. “Here! Here, Daddy.”

  But he shook his head and stepped away. Three was too many. He’d just fish alone.

  So we danced. Let Noxzema cream your face — da da da da — We sang and kicked, each of us trying to kick highest, Rockettes. A bevy of beauties, an old man remarked when we went out together, my father and Helen walking ahead with Nicholas, the king and queen and sweet little prince, while the four girls jostled and squawked behind. What a bloody racket comes from you lot!

  “People probably look at us and think, My god, they sure must have wanted a boy,” Helen said once, and we laughed. But looking back now at us squawking and worthless, I think it was true. A
boy, a boy. If the children who’d been left at that split had been boys, how different. A boy might still be owned by a father, even at a distance. A father might still really want him.

  With all that hopping and kicking we were careful, on the dry splintering dock, to wear sandals. But on the sand we kicked barefoot and free.

  “Watch us! Watch us, Daddy!”

  We thumped on the sand, all four in sync, kicking.

  Let Noxzema cream your face — da da da da —

  Suddenly there was a scream and a crumple, and if it didn’t happen right then, as I recall, it did happen that summer and was a sign of change that’s documented in the last of these photos: the bandaged foot.

  A scream, and Jenny had gone down; she’d landed on a broken bottle or shell, and a piece of her foot flapped, blood spilling.

  “Mum!” Patricia screamed up the beach. “Daddy!”

  Jenny held her leg bent close to peer into the gash while we stood around her, clutching our hands. “Look at all the blood!” she said. “Can you believe it?” And she stared at that fascinating thing, her insides, the potency of her split skin.

  Daddy put her in the car and drove her away, and she gazed back at us, triumphant, back at me standing there, a mute, raging statue.

  I can keep everything inside of me until I explode.

  She’d fainted, too, I realized later; she’d collapsed on the floor of the Natural History Museum, her blood slippery on the marble, and everyone crowded around to look. She had chanced upon something new. For a time we’d looked at each other in the mirror, too similar, no way to win. But now something darkened on her side of the glass, and on one side stood a princess, on the other a grinning witch.

  Corresponding scenes a few hundred miles down the coast, in Delaware, this time at the beach house Paul rented. It was my beach, where I’d nearly drowned, but it was Paul’s house and car and money and plan, and he was the girls’ father, so the beach was theirs now. Again four oiled girls in bikinis gathered around a man, a tall, tanned man with an arrogant walk; we came squawking after him down the boardwalk like geese.