The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Late one of those nights Sutter and I staggered drunk over the grass of Candy Cane City, and when we’d gone so far that the cars and lights of the parking lot had shrunk and all around were only dark grass, dark trees, he pulled me to the ground. His jeans smelled of soil and smoke, and the skin inside his shirt was soft. As we lay there wrangling he pushed my hand down. For the first time I let him, down over his warm belly, along the hollow of his hip, and into his jeans, into a smooth warm cave where I knew that thing was waiting, and it was, it grazed my knuckles, silky and firm like a limb.

  He whispered, “Do something you’ve never done. Grab it.”

  I did. My head was far away, up in the night air among the ringing cicadas, and probably my eyes were shut, but when I remember this now it’s as though my head and eyes were down in that cave, looking around wildly for what to do next. I held that thing in my fist, panicked, until headlights flashed on in the parking lot and shone bars of light over the grass into our eyes. I pulled my hand out fast and got up and yanked him behind me, and we went back to the others, and I could put it off again.

  Why do some girls not fuck earlier? They’re afraid of pain, or their virginity’s precious, or they believe in some sort of love? I didn’t have reasons like these. When I was six I’d been jumping on a pogo stick in the playground when the spring snapped and I fell hard and broke whatever hymen had been there. I remember lying on a table in the nurse’s room, her peering between my bloodied legs and saying, “Oh, what a shame.” But I like to imagine that, as an inversion of my mother’s webbed platypus toes, I never had that intimate webbing: A clean, fine hole had always run through me. I wasn’t afraid of being hurt; I didn’t want to fuck because I had no idea how. It was too dark and confusing, so much potential to fail. Jenny had wanted me to practice with her one of those hot nights in New York; she’d rustled in the dark in her bed, moved rhythmically and sighed and moaned and finally whispered, “Come over here, Jane, and I’ll show you what to do.”

  And I had no physical desire. Some girls at sixteen do. I’m sure Jenny did: slippery desire. I had something, an awful need in my head and chest, but this need was bony, glassy, like the numbness lodged in my ribs for so long. Or maybe that sort of desire could not be afforded, to give in would mean all those loose tubes would tumble out: got to keep everything tight. But I understood that this thing must be done sometime soon to keep Sutter, because there were so many other girls out there who roamed the land of desire.

  ____

  Sometime after that Candy Cane night, it was decided that Jenny would come live with her father. I’m using the passive on purpose: My diary knows that Jenny decided, but there was a story, too, that my father was about to be posted again, and Jenny was too wild to go along. Once it was decided, Paul called me to discuss the new situation. He sounded sharp, alert: a situation like a mission, to rectify the previous regime’s failure. I sat at the Scan desk in my mother’s room, making little notes and drawings.

  He couldn’t understand what was the matter with Jenny. “What do you think she really wants?” he asked, and seemed really to need an answer.

  “Obviously,” I said, “attention.”

  He was silent, but I could picture his jaw tightening in his cold apartment, could see him shaking his head: If that’s what she wanted, then the first thing to snap her out of this neurotic shit and get her together would be not to give it to her. She’d have to pick herself up by the bootstraps, like he had. The only way to learn.

  He outlined a plan. She’d dropped out of school and would need her GED, and she’d sure as hell have to work. He wanted me to help her, help him straighten her out.

  “Have her over, Jane. Take her out with your friends. Show her she can have it both ways, like you: You get the grades but still know how to have fun. I want you,” he said, “to be her model.”

  I felt cold when he said this, and dazzled, and sick, and stared over my mother’s bed into the oak trees, knowing that he knew what he said.

  ____

  But now, anyway, there was no more time: Jenny would ask and I had to be able to shrug and say, Sure. It happened on the screened porch that hung beneath my mother’s bedroom and on whose roof she sometimes sunned. The porch pushed out into the trees, a screened cube surrounded by screeching cicadas and oak leaves so dense they made the air like green flesh. That’s where I did it, on a yellow lounge chair — the chair that wasn’t stolen from the terra-cotta balcony in South America, the surviving one. But because the chair that was stolen was what betrayed Paul and, in a way, spirited us manless to Washington, I see the lounge chair on which I lay that night, June 17, six years after the plumbers broke into Watergate, with my pants pulled off and the weave of the plastic cushion pressing into my skin, as the same chair that was stolen, a magic chaise longue that had flown off the porch and taken me with it and settled me on the porch on Barnaby, at 2:00 in the morning, with Sutter pushing naked on top of me, and my mother, through the porch roof, sleeping or longing above us.

  “Stop thinking about your mother,” he whispered, after he let my breast loose from his mouth and sank his face in my hair. “You think too damn much about your mother.”

  7

  When Jenny reached Washington, she was seventeen and Barnaby Street rang with cicadas: the ones that crawl from the ground every seventeen or thirteen years, or the ones that emerge each summer. Magicicada, order Lepidoptera. They clung to the crocodile hides of oak trees, buzzed through the filmy air, whirred and ratcheted their tiny tymbales. They left on the sidewalks their crumpled glassy shells, iridescent and golden, dry legs curled up. For seventeen or thirteen or a single year they’d been larval, underground, eating and forming bodies: thoraxes thickening, wings growing glossy on a fine network of veins, membranes turning to sheaths they shed one after the other. But you don’t see this. It’s their ringing and shells you know. After all that time underground, the cicada itself — grown nymph encased in ephemeral shell — finally cracks out and flies into the air, becomes sound.

  Birds and sea turtles leave their shells when they’re born; molluscs and snails leave theirs when they die. What we have for shells: first our mothers, maybe, and then our own skins.

  The house on Barnaby Street became porous that summer after the night on the lounge chair, only gritty screens between us and the world. Sutter whistled low and threw bottle caps or climbed in the basement window, landed on the tiled floor, crept in stinking sneakers upstairs. We broke a pane in the basement door to get in down there, where no one would hear. My mother climbed out her bedroom window onto the porch roof to sun, her bikinied body as it was in those slides my father had shot a mile away, thirteen years earlier. I leaned out my window at night and smoked, flicked the cigarette against Miss Blaine’s brick wall so that it scattered orange sparks in the darkness. A bat flew through that window: a rustle, then a dark form flitted between my face and the book at my knees, The Other.

  Inside, the house was porous, too. The phone upstairs lived in my mother’s room, so when I came home late without Sutter, I crept in as she slept or tried to sleep on that ancient, spoiled mattress, and dragged the phone as far as its cord could reach up my attic stairs. But when I came home with him, we fucked in my room and then lay there, and smoke drifted from the crack beneath my door and through the crack beneath her door as she lay alone, just as it had crept under my door in Canberra when she and the rest were on the other side. Sutter sat on my bed in the dark, and I watched the burning glow move toward his mouth, flare briefly and drop, leaving a bright trail of orange that lingered.

  Once he’d left, I turned on the lamp and drew on the calendar a tiny circle with a dot at its center: sex. Then I registered the day’s humor on the long, gridded chart, and because he’d just been there, Happy. The next morning, when it was safe to pluck the diaphragm out, I’d bring to the bathroom a glass slide and drip on it a dangle of his slippery stuff, press another slide on top, and hurry with this tucked in a sleeve to my room a
nd sit at the desk, look at the slide under the microscope, and study the blur for tiny homunculi, miniature relics of Sutter.

  So by the time Jenny arrived, I could just say, Of course. She came in June or July or August, my diary doesn’t note when; her name just starts appearing as often as Sutter’s, although it’s true he is often just he or you. I love you, I hate you, I cannot stand this, where are you! Before Jenny came my mother and Tommy and I must have sat at the yellow kitchen table and talked about her, because Jenny was Tommy’s sister, after all, coming to live near him for the first time in his life. What did she want, what would she get. Her coming to Washington was surely an act of will, a plan, like that first time the girls sent Paul their live voices, like that first time they called us and asked their strange questions, like her pulling me through a door in New York, a door I’d never even seen but that she opened like parting the wall itself, and pulled me into a hot, painted stairwell that was nowhere, where we crouched and whispered and smoked. Her head glided forward, eyes open, looking. Thirteen years, seventeen years: Surely she was coming for something.

  I picture her flying over the Pacific, watching the plane’s tiny shadow flit upon the crinkled sea. Maybe she thought about time zones, like I would, and drew charts on the Qantas napkin to figure out where each zone changed, what time it truly was just then in her pocket of air. But maybe she didn’t look out the window, was not transported to see the undersides of clouds. I’m just telling you one thing. Don’t ever leave yourself behind.

  Whenever she arrived, there was a day when Paul invited me down for lunch and a swim. Jenny had moved into his study and scattered her things all over his desk. Her hair was dark and coiffed, and she was heavier, eyes bright, breasts enormous.

  “It’s the pill,” she said, as we put on our swimsuits. She looked down at her breasts, took them in her hands and shook them, then gazed over at mine and grinned. “Yeah, Mum told me I’d be the only one like this around you all.”

  On the hot, bright roof we swam, I smoked, my hair caught in the flame, and Jenny brushed the sizzled strand away. “Hang on,” she said, “I’ll have one, too,” and she groped in the immense bag she carried everywhere, lipsticks, gum, brushes, postcards, lighters, tampons, tarot cards, pens.

  “So?” I said, after she’d exhaled in a rush and gazed out at Washington stretching hazy around us.

  “So,” she said. “Here I bloody am.”

  She told me about her boyfriend in Canberra, and school, and the end of it, and the speed and the cars and the dope and the flats and the dole of Australia. “Pissants,” she said. “Waste of time. But oh! What will I do without him?” She wriggled and kissed a picture of her boy.

  “So you didn’t want to leave?”

  She looked away. “Of course I did.”

  “Why?”

  But she just gazed privately out at the city, white light glowing around her dark hair.

  I worked evenings serving dinner to a house of Jesuits but had the days free, so for the next few weeks I’d take the bus downtown and get Jenny, and we’d swim, wander, go to museums. She wore long loose men’s shirts, tight leggings, and pointed shoes with stiletto heels that dug into the floor or struck the sidewalk with metal; she carried that purse of junk everywhere. She was never ready, so in her bathroom, Paul’s bathroom, I’d sit on the rim of the tub and watch her put on eyeliner and spray her hair and stroke red lipstick on her baby-sweet mouth, smiling at herself and at me in the mirror amid cans of spray, bottles of gel, tubes and boxes of lipstick, cream, and powder, their gold and silver labels all around her reflected self. Hair spray hung in the air with the smoke curling up from the cigarette she’d set burning on the edge of the sink. If Paul was home his mouth would tighten; he’d move through the apartment shaking his head at the new stains on the rug, ashes on the table, piles of dishes and trash in the kitchen, preposterous mess in the spare bathroom, general aimlessness of Jenny, because from the start it was not clear what she wanted.

  We wandered down Eighteenth Street. Jenny kicked her feet out, her black shoes with nasty heels landing on the concrete hard, her face high and eyes challenging. We sat for a cigarette on the edge of a monument, at a horse’s bronze hooves, and I said what was expected: Why hadn’t she just finished high school, she should have at least gotten a diploma, she was stupid, that was a mistake. She half listened, grew fey, blew smoke rings, laughed, crossed her legs and tossed her foot up and down in annoyance, jumped up to keep walking, slipped into her own private zone away from me, and her father, and the whole bloody world.

  We walked on through the muggy air. The glaring Mall, the Museum of Natural History. Only in that echoing, cool space, that underwater light, did she seem to move in her medium. She gazed up at the huge blue whale suspended from the ceiling and reached to stroke its sleek skin, as if the whale and its underwater ilk were the only ones who knew her, and I turned away and saw again her blood on the sand, on the marble floor. Then her soft private sighs could go on for blocks as we walked back to Paul’s, and even though I’d resolved not to, I couldn’t help it and finally said, “What?”

  She gave a little laugh and pulled herself up from the depths. “Oh,” she said, shrugging. But once more let her eyes wander toward the private world she seemed to try to make valuable by making private, smoke drifting as if forgotten from her lips.

  Back at Paul’s, I’d fall upon the sofa while she slid a cassette in his player, something I had to hear, she couldn’t believe I didn’t know it already. You had a temper, like my jealousy … I sat across from her as she sang, eyes shut, mouth a small O, and even if I wanted to listen I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, everything about her made me clamp shut.

  My glass neatly centered on the coaster was not like Jenny’s sweating on the table; my ashes tapped cleanly into the ashtray were not like hers melting in watery rings; my boyjeaned legs were not like Jenny’s carefully torn stockings. My body went stiff, every movement watched by Jenny, whose every movement was watched by me. And on played her songs through those stupefying afternoons, air heavy and green and full of whales’ cries, perpetually underwater.

  I’m coming back love, cruel Heathcliff …

  But then a key would turn in the lock and there was Paul, the air clarifying around him. He stood in the doorway with his polished shoes, hand fisted at hip. He looked at the appalling state of the apartment, breakfast dishes still on the counter, milk sitting out, wrappers and records and cigarettes and shoes and things from that goddamned bag all over. He looked at Jenny, who did not even open her eyes but sang more sweetly, raising her chin, showing her white neck, pouting her stained lips to the far crying of whales.

  Four fast steps to the stereo and it was switched off. In the new silence Jenny smiled, as if with fresh pleasure in being denied. When he jingled his keys and nodded at me to say he’d drive me home, Jenny rose, too. A curt shake of the head: no. So she smiled again, as if more deeply satisfied because more deeply denied, dropped her bag on the sofa, dropped herself, too. His hand at my back, Paul maneuvered me courtly through the door, and Jenny, her mouth in its private curling smile, pulled from her bag a pen and cards and began to write, smoke drifting from her nostrils.

  “So what do you think,” he’d ask in the Mercedes as we rushed beneath the leaves.

  When you’re sixteen or seventeen meaning can be anywhere. A drop of rain running down the window is a symbol, a song comes on the radio just when you longed for it, you have the same initials as the boy for whom you’re sick, secret messages await you in poems. It’s like living in a net of logic, of systems of words and significance. The number of words was finite, I thought, and all knowledge was contained in words, so it must be possible to have complete knowledge, if only you had the capacity. Time was always ticking by, I thought, which meant numbers floated in the air like molecules, so if they could enter your pores you’d be precisely conscious of time, if you only had the capacity. It was a matter of letting logical matter seep into your skin. S
tories, myths, lyrics of songs had codified human patterns, and you just had to find the one that applied to you. The master plan, said spooky boys: traces of the overriding logic found everywhere from license plate numbers to a sequence of songs. And dreams, of course; dreams told you everything. In that subliminal land you got clues to what would happen next. It was all plotted out: You just had to step along the path made for you, like Cassandra toward the blood in the bath.

  A month of hot days downtown as Jenny brooded and smoked and haunted her diary, as heat lightning flashed between her and Paul; a month of solitaire on the floating back porch and making dinner for the Jesuits. Somewhere up the coast at a Jersey beach was Sutter, so there was no tapping at my window at night, no rustling in the hydrangeas. A letter came: scrawled block print, words spelled wrong, fragments of songs that then played in my head. Me and Crazy Janie were making love in the dirt, singing our birthday songs …

  Then a few hundred Atlantic miles south of Sutter, we went to the beach, too: Paul invited me along. It was my beach, so why shouldn’t I go. Besides, I was needed as aide-de-camp. Paul and Jenny have never really been together in a father-daughter atmosphere … And I know how hard it will be for the two of them to discuss things … God, I’m glad I’m not really in all this.

  I had my learner’s permit, and Paul said he’d teach me to drive a stick shift. So one afternoon at the beach, in the hot slanting light, the air humming with gnats, he came out the screen door in his flip-flops and tossed me the keys to his convertible. “Here,” he said, his face the same tender face with sky behind it as when he once held my hand. “Here you go, Jane. Get on in.”