The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  It was terribly kind of Father, the girls told me, to invite Maggy and me as well. Because he wasn’t obliged to, after all. Now that he wasn’t even our stepfather.

  And it was really rather generous of them, they added, not to mind if we came along.

  We spread out the matching towels Daddy and Helen had given us — the gifts they gave us always matched — the towels printed with huge butterflies, each a different color, pink, yellow, blue, except, this time, for mine; there hadn’t been four butterfly towels, I guess, so they gave me one with leopard spots and red and green racing stripes, a distinction that made me wildly proud. We spread out our towels on the soft, burning sand and placed ourselves on them, in bikinis, skin gleaming. We lay flat, toes east, the sounds of waves crashing and songs in the air, Coppertone and coconut, blazing sky.

  I’m not in love …

  We lay melting in the heat, singing silently, dreaming. Ooh, you’d wait a long time for me … And when a low, praising whistle came from the boardwalk, we tilted our heads back, bared our necks, to see: Paul stood up there, laughing, his face dark against the sky, and which of us was he looking at the most?

  Late one day, Jenny and I walked along the beach as a storm approached, after the lifeguards had whistled and shut the beach because of lightning. We went out anyway, as the sky darkened and the wind rose. We were fourteen and thirteen and excited as we stood on the sand in the whipping wind and looked into the wild sky, the rough sea. We climbed out one of the long rock jetties, slippery with seaweed and sharp with barnacles, as the waves sprayed our faces, and I’m sure Jenny went farther because she always went farther, gripping a rock with her toes, lurching forward and catching herself on another sharp rock with her hands, skinning her shin and cursing and shaking her leg until the sting went, looking through her blowing hair at the ocean. For a time we stood there, unsteady, each on a wet rock, and felt full of that wild sea wind, ecstatic.

  “The sea!” she cried. “The power of the sea!” She turned back to me, the sky flashing and dark behind her. “Doesn’t it just —” and she couldn’t even finish, just threw out her arms and stared at the thrashing water and looked like she wanted to fly into it, be undone, set loose by it, like me.

  That was August 1975. She and my father and the rest of his family had lived on the same continent as we did for two years. But a few months later my father was posted back home. When he told us they were leaving, I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t realized that could happen; I’d thought there would be more time.

  When Maggy and I left New York the last time, I think my father came down the escalator at Penn Station to put us on the train, as usual, then went out to the platform. He probably walked along peering through the tinted windows to find us and, when he did, smiled and stood with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his feet. Maybe he wrote one of his messages on the glass with his finger, or made a sad face and wiped his eyes, and maybe, as usual, when the conductors whistled and the doors slid shut, he mimed alarm, and when the train began moving he jogged alongside us, lifting his knees and elbows comically high. He probably did all of this again, and again it seemed that he was nearer than he’d been during the visit, nearer than he’d been in our lives.

  We had taken pictures that last time. It was New Year’s Eve. These pictures are new versions of those from ten years earlier, by Lake Burley Griffin, where my father kneels between Maggy and me like a groom. Now the three of us sit side by side near a window overlooking the park, in wintry afternoon light. Maggy and I are old enough to look like him, the light giving our three faces the same curving nose, serious mouth, troubled eyes. We look alike as we sit side by side here, but not as though we know each other well or are comfortable close together. Maggy has placed an old Canberra picture next to one of the new photos on a page in her batik album; they have the look of happy bookends, showing that all’s well, no harm done. But to me the pictures are not like that. They’re documents of eternal departure.

  It irks me that each of the main marks in my life, like the strata of rock that can reveal mass extinctions, is made by a man leaving. The original split, then the South America split, and now losing my father again — fresh, hurting hollows to refuse to admit. More shadow lines will appear later, traces left not by a father but by other men once I begin to look for him elsewhere. Again and again when I look down and back, what I see are these lines of extinction.

  6

  After my father returned to his side of the world, letters would fly across the Pacific again, now from Helen, too. That other family would become ephemeral once more; my father would sink deep. I was valedictorian at Deal that Bicentennial June and sweated through a speech in the muggy auditorium where we’d watched black girls in sequins while plaster fell on our fawn heads. And I’d keep going my old way, declining Latin nouns, drawing, turning marble: not letting the situation with the fathers leave a mark. But I’d stand before the mirror in the green cork attic, stare at my reflection, and whisper hard, But you’re pretty. And smart. And talented, as if these words could be breathed through the glass, sink into my reflected skin.

  Over the next few years my father would fly from Australia to New York or Washington once each year for diplomatic business, and Maggy and I would meet him for a weekend. His letters outlined the upcoming visit, which seemed most often spent outlining the following visit, leaving me vague and aching on the Amtrak south, staring out at the shining waters of Delaware. But Paul still came weekends for Tommy. He brought trinkets — a pen with which Nixon had signed a bill, a black penknife with the State Department seal — and he’d sit on the sofa and listen to whatever stories I told. Tales of Deal and Wilson Senior High, the wilds of black Upper Northwest. It seemed to please him that I was turning out so damned well and didn’t need fancy schools like some girls. He’d shake his head, then sigh and shrug, and regard me again with eyes that lit. And it felt so thrilling and unsatisfying and dangerous and wrong to please those other girls’ father. But then Tommy would skid downstairs with his backpack, Paul would get up, and they’d both say, Well, have a good weekend, and walk out the door.

  When I was thirty, a woman who read my first fiction leaned across a seminar table, her eyes moist with sympathy, and said, “Girls who grow up without fathers are so full of longing.”

  I thought: Fuck that.

  But she was right. Longing, a soft, black cavity deep at your core. And the things buried deep are the deadliest.

  At fourteen, fifteen, everything felt liminal: half girl and half woman, beginning to push out the windows and doors of the house. This must be when sublimation begins, when the strange algebraic process starts whereby you start looking for your father in men, and you find or resist finding your mother in your body. This sublimation must begin when the transformation itself does. The chest, once a boy’s smooth skin stretched over ribs, with two pale disks both sensitive and numb, now swells into a pair of warm, heavy, live things filling your hands. Hair sprouts between your legs, a bottom pushes at your jeans, blood’s a surprise on the toilet paper; no wonder it’s mostly girls in Ovid who are transfigured, becoming laurel trees, drops of myrrh, bears. This must be when the shift begins, when yearning for those pantheonic fathers who had dwelled in the ribs turns instead to men on the street, and when you might or might not become your mother.

  Our house had no father but plenty of men — a big difference, because men who come to the house for your mother are like the boys who soon come for you, so you watch and learn, like it or not. A Cadillac, cab, or van would pull up to Barnaby Street every few days for a month or two or even a year, a door would crank open and slam shut, and a man would bound up the sidewalk. My mother was looking for a mate, she said, which as an Australian word can sound chummy and breezy but to me then was sickening and reeked of sex. The cars summed up these men. Ken arrived in a big white Lincoln with a pale leather interior, and getting in that car and being driven by him, all of us, Mom and her kids, down to the
waterfront for a fish dinner at Hogate’s, was a treat but felt faintly whorish. Rupert was stocky and bearded and owned a sailboat but drove a cab and was introduced as working on a book, and when we went out with him on his boat, the wind gusted, saltwater lashed our faces, and we barely made it to shore, even my mother struggling to keep her eyes bright. Bob lasted a long time and drove an old van that smelled of wet camping gear and something salty; he was another one who either owned or borrowed a sailboat, and we all went out for another day on gray water in a boat that seemed doomed. Bob is one whose tongue I saw tangle in the air with my mother’s, and I had to turn away fast.

  Between the more serious ones were men whose names I don’t remember. One of these I met in the living room, and it was clear he wouldn’t last long. While my mother was giving him a drink and talking gaily she suddenly had one of her famous coughing fits, and after gesturing with her hands for a time and trying to continue speaking, she finally flung out of the room to cough more wildly in the kitchen.

  After she’d swung away through the swinging door, he turned to me and whispered, “But is she all right? Does she need help?”

  I eyed him from the sofa and said, “Didn’t she tell you about her problem?”

  Sometimes, though, these men were full of promise. No, not sometimes: almost always. Whenever my mother came back from a meeting or party and said, “Oh, I’ve met such a nice man,” and looked off, I’d have a wild flare of hope but then at once a sickening sense that again it would all sputter and burn. If it got to the point that Maggy and Tommy and I went along on a date, that we, too, climbed into the white Cadillac and drove down to Hogate’s, then there was so much hope as we walked into the restaurant with its wide windows overlooking the river, as we took our seats in a leather crescent booth. So much hope in the warm round rolls in the silver basket, the icy pats of butter, the shining blue swordfish on the wall. There might be more money. A better school. A big house in Maryland. Our mother might be happy at last. And if he didn’t last forever he might at least last a while, and for a few months the sight of his car parked out front was a holiday.

  Two men came close. The first was Phil, a Post writer we adored but who died just before my father returned to Australia, and I’ve decided not to put him in this book. The one who came closest after Phil was Anthony. He was tall and stately and had the look of a European from the nineteentens, someone you’d meet at the baths in The Good Soldier. His eyes seemed uncertain above his long, arched nose, his body barreled at the chest but elegant, his hair wavy and silvered. He had a splendid house and a pool in which he let us swim whenever we wanted; he let most of the neighborhood swim there, as if his house, his pool, were the local duchy and he the kind, dutiful duke. He had a sense of propriety, of graciousness; his face sometimes looked pained if the neighboring kids swam with their long, thick black hair undone and he’d need to say something about it. Once we were caught in a thunderstorm at his house and raced inside, and my clothes, left out on a lounge chair, got drenched, so he sent me up to his room, an elegant, quiet, European man’s room, to find something to wear in his closet. I chose a long pink shirt with fine white ribs.

  “Oh, that one I rarely wear,” he said. “Please keep it.”

  It was soft and delicate, and buttoning it up as I stood before his big mirror, then carefully rolling the long pink sleeves above my wrists, this shirt that belonged to this fine man who seemed to love my mother in a good way and whom we wished she’d just love back, I felt covered, even more covered than you might feel after being caught in the rain and your skin’s cold and damp and you slip on something warm and soft. I wore it home to Barnaby Street, took it off and hung it up, and just looked at it, this long pink shirt, the only man’s shirt in the house.

  What happened to Anthony I don’t remember. There was always a wretched morning with my mother sitting at the kitchen table, flinging out her hand and saying, “Oh, good riddance.” Then they just disappeared.

  Aside from Anthony and Phil, the taste many of these men left in my mouth is foul. One I saw from the laundry-room window late one night when I folded towels. I watched from the basement, half underground, as he and my mother wandered up the front steps above me, the front door banged, and the stairs creaked. An hour later, he hurried out the front walk, jumped into his little sports car with his bald head and glasses, and drove off.

  A house that seemed to want men, yet could or would not keep them. Girls in such a house feel men come and go like currents, feel their mother’s emotion storm and subside, can’t help but feel the flood on their own skin. Hope, excitement, despair, disgust. A sense of sex that is exhausting, an air of dissatisfaction.

  I wonder what those girls saw of sex in their house. Maybe they seemed so interested in hearing about my mother and tormenting me about orgasms because they hadn’t seen much sex in the flesh. Maybe for them it was chambered, behind the door of a bedroom down the hall: marital intimacy, a secret, a treasure. I picture it spoken of in hushed tones, drenched in mystery, requiring art.

  I have a photo of Helen my father took in a castle in Austria. It’s grainy and shows a dusky room, the wallpaper patterned with harlequins, the furniture scrolled, the ancient tiles dim, a Persian carpet. Helen — who’s usually been the one to send pictures, tucking them in the folds of her letters — marked this sequence of photos with the names of painters they’re like, and this one she called a Chardin. In it she sits at a dressing table putting up her hair, and there’s a candlestick on the table, a glimpse of a baroque frame, a crucifix. My father took the photo from behind, so it shows her back, her soft, raised arms emerging from a white sleeveless blouse, her slim waist, her face reflected in the mirror. Everything about the image bespeaks treasure and value, and the image is intimate, yet composed and voluptuous; it hints at great privacy and reveals just enough.

  Whereas with us, everything seemed too natural, exposed, when my mother had a new man or suddenly began cleaning in her nightie and bent over to sponge the floor, showing everything. Still, in my forties, when I look down at my naked body, it takes an effort to see myself, and not her. And a real effort to see something I like, not something artless, an emu.

  Mum’s the first to have been able to please Daddy, you know.

  At fifteen you’re sure you can get out. Out of your family, your house, out on the street, imagine you’ve flung off these fathers and now look at men to see how they look back.

  And on the street now I was like Jenny. When I walked down Connecticut or up Western Avenue, suddenly boys’ and men’s eyes flashed around me, mouths murmured or shouted, horns blared. From car windows, construction sites. As if I’d suddenly stepped into view: fifteen years old, tight jeans, long blond hair. I’d walk through the light of all these eyes terrified, giddy, dazzled.

  When my father returned to Australia, I hadn’t been keeping a diary and didn’t note it. In the diaries I’d kept as a girl, he and Paul are scarcely mentioned beyond notations that one or the other has written and I have written back; you would never know their presence or absence infused me. The diary that starts soon after my father left rarely mentions them, either. It dwells on one subject, and so does the next. They cite each kiss, each howl, each honking car, each time any man or boy looks at me, as if these books are not journals but ledgers. Proof of value, that strange thing hovering in the current between the one looked at and the one looking.

  It was important to document this. In our house men were exotic, not everyday items you’d have at the table or with whom you’d fold laundry. And in my most private house when I turned fifteen, the secret house where these words were felt but not spoken, the most valuable man was the one most remote: To win him was everything. Aside from citing every glance or howl, these diaries chart, day by day for three years, the ruinous fixation I had on a boy who would not even look at me in daylight, a wild boy who was rare and cruel and came only at night. All I’d ever felt, or refused to feel, or refused to admit I felt about the fathers b
ecomes focused, sun through a magnifying glass, on him.

  Deal fed into Woodrow Wilson Senior High a few blocks up Nebraska, beyond a park called Fort Reno that had a water tower and reservoir. During the Civil War, the area had been a shantytown refuge for blacks fleeing the South, and my after-school job was to document this. The shantytown’s lost now beneath the plush gardens and houses of Upper Northwest, but a hundred years later, Deal and Wilson made the place black again. To be cool then meant being black, so the white boys I hung out with gave a black lope and limp to their walk, flinging the air behind them. We smoked Kools, danced the Bump to the Brothers Johnson and Commodores and Parliament Funkadelic, and cried in falsetto voices, “Shoo, baby!” Some of the boys who came from black parts of D.C. or had other credentials almost passed. One had a walk and talk that made him black at a distance, until you saw his pallor and haunted blue eyes; a heroin baby, the story was, and he rarely spoke, although he sang a few words to me once as a clue. Another boy who nearly passed was three years older than the rest of us, eighteen, and he was the one I became fixed on: Sutter.

  I don’t remember the first time I saw him, just that one day when he looked at me I could not keep my legs moving. I’d been valedictorian at Deal, he’d soon drop out; he wore army jackets and dirty jeans and loped around the edges of Wilson. He was taller than me but slight and had a round behind like a black boy, drooping blue eyes with bruise shadows beneath them, a sweet pink mouth with a filthy Jagger tongue, a child’s blond hair, rude moves. I first kissed him at my fifteenth birthday party in the basement. He had drunk seventeen beers and told someone to send me to him in the bathroom, where he stood in the dark and muttered, “Come here.”