The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  My mother never saw Sutter in daylight but knew him by the crashing in the hydrangeas at night and the bruises on my neck, and she wished I’d find someone who might treat me more nicely. His great-great-great-grandfather was the Sutter who’d found gold in California but died a ruin, which gave my Sutter a romantic doomed past, and he let himself be doomed, too, by dropping out, stealing cuts of steak or albums, getting fired, letting himself be beat up by a black girl, being accused of stealing things he hadn’t even stolen. Sutter was the one who brought the Funkadelic and Brothers Johnson records to parties; it was understood he had kinship to blackness. It was also understood that he was king, the delinquent king, and he didn’t drive, he rode shotgun.

  He was elusive and famous, known to school principals, police, even to some drunk woman who careened over one night wanting a cigarette as we sat by the reservoir. She squinted in the moonlight and cried, “I know you — you’re Paul Sutter!” Elusive and legendary and a perverse choice and crucial.

  Gold. I pinned a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” item about the gold-mine Sutter to my cork wall. I made a list of all the songs about gold, “Heart of Gold,” “Sister Goldenhair.” It was significant that Sutter and I had the same last initial, so I snapped the chrome S’s off cars I passed walking home late at night, and poked these into my cork wall, too. I came out the heavy green doors of Wilson every day at 3:00, or cut class and came out early, or walked in the rain at night to Starvin’ Steve’s on Wisconsin Avenue, or roamed over the hill of Fort Reno, with one goal: to find him. Sometimes he was around and sometimes he wasn’t, and even when I found him I ignored him; I had to. It was like gravity and its opposite at once: need and refusing to need. I’d spot him and turn my back, not be caught hunting. Sometimes as I sat on the wall of the horseshoe behind school, I’d see his olive-green jacket appear over the hill and I’d freeze in a panic, my lips still pulling on a Kool but frozen, my foot still kicking in a boot but frozen, as he slanted into view. If he saw me he ignored me, too. I could barely hear myself speak, could dig up nothing worth saying, nothing that would make his laughing eyes stay on me in public, although just the night before he might have thrown sticks at my window and bitten my stomach. I’d stand with my back to him, matching his cool, but my fingertip as it knocked away ash, the edge of my burning ear, knew exactly how far he was behind me, which way his crowing voice was thrown, whether the smoke from his mouth was blown in taunting rings my way. If I happened to pass into his cold, blue, laughing glance, it was enough, a silent communiqué. But then Rick’s Dart would pull up, and Sutter would be the first to dive through the window, crowing at everyone ditched as the car screeched off. And even if he left silently I’d sense a lack and turn just enough to see him walking away. An old feeling, something pulled from my ribs, that pull that says the center is elsewhere, and I’d have to stand there, pretending I wasn’t watching him go.

  But at night I’d wait and hope and will. After I’d walked home dejected from wherever I’d been hunting, or burning with a truly frightening jealousy if I’d seen him glance at another girl, after I’d walked home alone in the dark, calculating the number of blocks, figuring out the hypotenuse as if there were a street at an angle instead of the numerical and alphabetical grid, reciting the names of the streets, which, this far uptown, had graduated from single letters, as streets were named downtown, to one-syllable names to two-syllable to three-, McKinley Northampton Oliver Patterson Quesada Rittenhouse Stephenson Tennyson and then, for no reason, Barnaby, once I got home and had crept past my mother’s dark bedroom and gone upstairs, I’d stand at my attic window in the dark, and wait, and hope, and will. I’d light a cigarette and stare up at Orion, which Sutter had pointed out to me one brilliant cold night, wanting whatever else I wanted so badly but refused to want, and I’d wait, and hope, and will. Then I’d smash the cigarette out on the brick sill and flick it down into the ivy, get into bed, and wait. And if it was a lucky Friday, at 2:00 or so a car would move slowly down sleeping Barnaby Street. I’d open my eyes in the dark. A car door would creak open and a bottle would fall to the asphalt and roll to the gutter. The door would slam, the Dart would drive off, and I’d wait, not breathing, hands clenched at my stomach, until the hydrangea rustled and a bottle top pinged at my screen. Then I’d run down past my mother’s bedroom in a nightie and let him in fast, and we’d creep back upstairs, past my sleeping mother, betraying and hurting and defying her at once, up to my attic, where I had a $50 stereo and would play, very low, the Stones’ Black and Blue, which Paul Stuart had just given me for my birthday or Christmas, and Paul Sutter and I would struggle until 5:00, my underpants inched down by his fingers, my underpants yanked back up, my underpants wheedled down by his thumbs, my under-pants wrenched back up, and although in my house there were no rules, my mother couldn’t say much about it and there was no father to say anything, still I wouldn’t let him get in those underpants and wouldn’t go anywhere near his, fisted my hands and stayed away, because no matter how much I’d seen I still didn’t know what to do, so we wrangled for a year and a half.

  Sutter was somewhere between Peter Pan and Mick Jagger, or Pan himself — grinning, leering, feral, a creature that flies in windows at night and creeps out by daylight, can’t take much daylight. He was not like Amor in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, but that’s what I was reading in Latin, so I made him Amor, too. He might have coils and scales if you turned on the light, but what you heard was the rustle at the window, a rustle of distance and night air and thrill, and what you felt was the heat of his hands and mouth wanting you. But these monster-god boys must stay exotic. They can’t be homey, make polite conversation. They need to be half fantasy, unknowable, just leaving a smudge of dirt or gold on your skin as proof once they’ve disappeared.

  ____

  When he’d gone I’d lie in bed and replay everything; only then, without his obliterating presence, could it become real. Jesus, he’d whispered, his lips at my breast. Jesus, Jane. You. The way he said You. I could still smell him — dirt and leaves and musty hair, smoky jeans and wildness; it clung to my arm, so I pressed my nose into the skin and breathed it. And the marks he left, so valuable; his eyes blurred and hungry, he’d fix his mouth to my neck and pull the blood to the surface, painful and satisfying.

  He did just enough to keep me sick and craving. He called at 1:00 in the morning and whispered he was sorry to be such a bastard, wished he could be better. He scrawled that he loved me on a scrap of pink paper and left it on my desk in the dark. He gave me a snaky gold bracelet he’d probably stolen from Woodies. Once, in my room, after we’d struggled, as he sat on the edge of my bed smoking, elbows on knees and cigarette dangling from fingers, he saw where his shirt had been ripped in a fight, and pulled at the cloth slowly, let the scrap drop to the floor. It was a cotton shirt, olive with fine salmon and white stripes. I waited until he’d gone — until he suddenly jumped up and lunged down the stairs, me running behind; until, at the screen door, he kissed me hard and pulled away, out in the air now, free, already sensing the big night around him, while I stood at the door of a narrow, dark house; until he spun military on his heels and skidded down the steps, stopped to light a cigarette, flung the match into the grass, and walked with long, loping strides up the block, his shadow lengthening and shortening under the street lamp; until he turned the corner and the sound of his steps was gone and so even was the faint smell of sulfur — then I ran up to my room and snatched the piece of cloth from the carpet. I breathed it and smoothed it and put it in my diary between the pages for that day, kept it safe, like the scrawled note and snaky gold bracelet, which I put in the bar-of-gold jewelry box with the silver llama and peacock, and still have there now.

  That strip of Sutter’s shirt was like the pink shirt Anthony gave me the day of the thunderstorm, a shirt I would let Jenny borrow not long after putting Sutter’s scrap in my book: the only other trace of a man’s shirt in our house. A man’s shirt was all I had that would fit Jenny when
I next saw her, she was so big when she returned — because of the pill, she said, because of course she was ahead of me, always ahead of me, she’d been fucking for years. She needed a big shirt and looked in my closet until she found Anthony’s, and took it off the hanger and put it on and never gave it back, and anytime I might have dreamt I was free, not thrashing against Jenny or infused with my mother or hunting my father, I was wrong.

  Another thing pinned to the cork wall: a mood chart I made. It had gradations of thirty humors from suicidal to ecstatic in the left column, and a grid to the right with a square for each day. Every day I filled in a box with the dominant humor, and a red line moved from one box to the next, plunging up and down. The line rose to ecstatic three times in those years: because of Sutter and only Sutter. Not having been valedictorian at Deal, not winning the Vergil prize two years later, not getting into Princeton after that. Funny that ecstatic means to step out of yourself and not the reverse, to feel as complete as the little inked box.

  Although I kept each scrap of Sutter in those days, I have no letters from my father, but they came. I did keep photos, or at least one of Jenny. In it she’s a woman, full, her shirt tied at the waist, her hair winging back, her smile baby-sweet, although studying it I knew better. Like a stabbing needle, she could smile through that lens into my father, across the ocean, into her father, into me.

  On Fridays or Sundays now her father sat and listened to my stories about Sutter, police, bricks thrown through windows — just as terrific as my prizes and jobs: the right mix. But talk always drifted like gravity to the other side of the world, to that family of such intense interest. Paul got his letters from Canberra, I got mine, and his brows rose skeptical at life glimpsed through the stationery, and he’d wonder what was really going on, what his girls were really up to — screwing up at school, dropping out? I talked to him on the phone, too, because I was the one who bolted when it rang. More and more, we talked about Jenny.

  Jenny drinking and dropping out of school, Jenny in more and more trouble: men. Jenny on the horizon, laughing and knowing things, moving faster than me. But I was so smart now and hung out with those wild boys, Paul wanted to know what I thought. Maybe I could shed light on his difficult daughter.

  As in his study in South America: the honor. I’d lie on the antique green-velvet sofa in my mother’s room, lifting and lowering my legs as I dissected Jenny with him on the phone: her possible motives, troubles, desires. And I found myself often taking the bus down to his apartment with its white carpet, cool air, and ficus. Paul would lean back on the sofa with a scotch in his hand, and I would sit on that black leather Mies van der Rohe chair, but now I wasn’t flushing and taunted, now I smoked Kools and sipped beers and wore a bomber jacket and jeans ripped at the knees to take the edge off my Vergil prize, and was very knowledgeable about self-destructive girls, and was Jenny’s father’s special confidante, his ally.

  One of those nights, after I’d been down at Paul’s and had drunk too much, as he drove me home through Rock Creek Park, something suddenly went wrong and burst, something born of the talk of that other family, caught in the choking tangles. The dark parkway, how he took the turns smoothly with one hand on the wheel, how we glided through the wet leaves, and the smell of the creek, and the moist air rushing past — out of the blue I was crying.

  “He doesn’t give a damn about me.”

  Paul looked at me fast in the darkness. “Of course he does.” He might even have awkwardly patted my hand. “Of course your father loves you. He loves you very much.” He said it so earnestly, he looked actually stricken, his face the tender face as when he once held my hand.

  And later in my room, lying in bed as the green walls spun and burning with shame that this weakness had splattered out, I wondered if downtown Paul was in his own bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering whether his own girls imagined he didn’t love them: if in answering me he’d been speaking to them, looking through me again to Jenny, if, in fact, he’d always just looked through me to Jenny.

  But surely he did see me. One of those summer afternoons he’d driven over not for Tommy, but for me. He came with his brother, just flown in from California. The dark red Mercedes parked out front, two tall men moving up the walk and then waiting, smiling, breathing scotch through the screen door as I opened it barefoot and wondered why they were there. They stepped inside and stood by the stairs, where my mother would let her purse drop after work.

  He smiled and said he had just wanted his brother to see me, he hadn’t seen me since I was eight. Paul gestured with his chin the way he’d tell me to go pose for a picture: Go stand over there.

  I did.

  He twirled his finger. “Go on, Jane,” he said. “Turn around for us.”

  So I turned. Slowly, around me, the room’s dark oak panels and old gold chair, then the ashy fireplace, the scrolled dining-room chairs, the brown tasseled rug, the green glowing in from the back porch, the dim kitchen. The darkness and glow revolved glassy around me, as Paul and his brother watched and appreciated. Which is what they surely did, appreciated, a word so full of praise and prize, they stood there and admired how well I’d turned out, how well I’d been made, as if I were Paul’s and he had made me himself.

  Helen’s made it as if I won out as far as fathers go, leaving Jenny with none, my diary will say soon after Jenny returns. It won’t react to this. It will say nothing uncertain, or sick, or despairing about one father or the other. But then, it rarely mentions them.

  On Sutter, though:

  I feel as though I’m beginning to split up.

  Jenny did not see her father one weekend each year the way Maggy and I saw ours, because Paul did not fly to Australia. But I was sixteen and in such a hothouse I didn’t care about that other side, the other story over there. I was in a hothouse that had no man, in which my mother was alone, she was the only one of them alone, and if those girls did not see their father one weekend each year, they lived with mine all the time. But mostly it was a hothouse in which I whispered at the mirror until my knuckles turned white that one father or another did not matter, whether my father loved me or knew me did not matter, the situation with the fathers did not matter, the damned fathers had left no mark on me: All that mattered was getting out.

  Walking at dusk you get out of the house and almost out of your maddening self. Past brick houses and stirring oaks; past a single swing dropping from a tree; past a little girl on the sidewalk, dreamy, fat pink chalk gripped in each hand, drawing like swimming, turning her head and glancing up, laughing to be caught in her dream. Walking, you can disappear. You can forget your body, your head glides easy and fast, all you are is eyes, small pools lapping up what they see, pools that are permeable, you ought to be able to slip through them and into the air, into that little pink-fingered girl’s laugh, up through the leaves to the constant, changing sky.

  In twilit summertime Washington it was hard to see far down Barnaby Street, each oak tree more veiled by the heavy hanging air, and the asphalt gave off the day’s heat as I walked barefoot, breathing hard. I’d walk three or four or ten blocks until I was empty, then sit on a curb and smoke. Or if I couldn’t leave the house I’d just lean out my window, once I’d torn off the plastic and was free. The rough branches of the oaks filled the air with rustling volumes, and the cicadas’ whirring and ratcheting rose and fell like waves, enough to lift you as you longed yourself out, the air a lulling temperature to let you flow like blood from your skin, out into the world and summer.

  A night in our house could be like this: Tommy at Paul’s, Maggy at Vassar, just my mother and me at home. Sixteen years old and forty-three, both restless. But no one was calling, the phone cord hung limp. So we sat, her on the sofa, me on the floor, near a burning lamp, playing Scrabble. We might have been eating Melting Moments she’d baked; we might have been drinking hot tea. We might have been playing our second or eighth game of the night, and in the Scrabble box lay sheets with the scores of the forty or fifty
we’d played that hot month, and in my tense fingers, the pencil for scoring. The phone still had not rung, the phone would not ring, Sutter was somewhere without me. My mother didn’t yet have the antique clock on the orange chest, but all the same I hear its loud ticking.

  “Oh,” she’d say, flicking a hand at her letters, “I have nothing worth anything. I have absolute junk. You probably have the Z. And the X. All I have is vowels, all U’s and I’s.”

  My ears would be like a cat’s, my dirty foot on the floor bouncing fast, waiting, hoping to god that something would happen and I could get out. She’d scowl at her letters in their little wooden pew, and the old dishwasher would rumble and choke in the kitchen, and the telephone still hung silent and dead, and no Dart drove slowly down Barnaby Street, no van or Cadillac, either, because she’d decided she’d had enough of men, so it was the two of us in that hot house, and sweat would start sliding down the backs of my knees — but then out of nowhere her face would light, and she’d look up from her letters, look at me, beaming.

  “U’s and I’s,” she’d say, and break into a glorious smile. “But that’s all I need, isn’t it, Janie. You and I!”

  And then at last a car might pull up, we’d hear it drive down Barnaby and idle. Our fingers paused above our wooden letters and words. If a bottle broke on the asphalt or a boy’s voice crowed, that was it, I sprang. I had $10 in my pocket and cigarettes and was gone. Then out in the car, speeding down Utah, buying beer, until everyone was picked up.

  We drove to Candy Cane City, a park with a branch of Rock Creek running through it, swingsets and slides, a field. These outside, liminal places when you’re a teenager. Ways out! At sixteen, seventeen, you shouldn’t live in houses; you should hide in woods or dart in fields, move in dusk or darkness. We would roam every Friday and Saturday night outside, in winter, too, sitting in alleys to smoke and drink, climbing up the reservoir hill, staring at faraway Maryland. Candy Cane City, Dumbarton Oaks, any park anywhere, as long as it was dark, with space to run and scream. Windows broken and climbed through, girls flying from houses, boys trying to push themselves in.