The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Jenny came out, too, trussed up to strut the boardwalk. The three of us stood a moment outside the house by the dark red Mercedes, the grass tough, asphalt hot, cicadas whirring in the pines. She shook her bracelets and stepped forward in her wicked shoes, reached for the door, she wanted to drive, too, but Paul shook his head. He stepped forward to block her and opened the door for me to get in. So I did get in, and put the key in the ignition and shifted as Paul showed me. The car jolted to life, and Paul and I drove toward the shore, in the lowering sun, leaving Jenny laughing and humiliated on the grass. Just as she once drove off with my father, with her conquering slit foot, while I stood behind mute and ruined.

  That was when she wrote that diary entry or note, at the same beach where years before I’d nearly drowned.

  I’m just telling you one thing. Don’t ever leave yourself behind … you’ve got to know where the hell you’re going and why. Otherwise — once you get there — you won’t really know why the hell you’re there …

  You’ll find that you’ve left yourself behind …

  Actually — the truth is that I’m bullshitting. What you’ve really got to do is find yourself again — because you lose yourself in the process — somewhere in the middle of the Pacific or something.

  Back in Washington she came to stay at Barnaby Street, where my mother suddenly got to be hostess and show her real self after all those years. She clasped Jenny’s hands, looked searchingly into her eyes, sat her down at the table, maybe baked Melting Moments or Afghans, made evident in an instant, I thought, that she could never have been the one to do it first. Up in my room Jenny bounced on both twin beds. She sat at my desk and touched the chrome S’s jabbed in the cork, the “Believe It or Not” about Sutter’s gold, the calendar with its secret codes, then smiled and turned away.

  Sutter was still gone, but other boys would pull up at night. She’d quicken, ready to go, who cared where.

  “This is my stepsister,” I’d say as we climbed into a Dart. “My stepsister Jenny.”

  “Stepsister!” she cried, her Aussie voice exotic. “Must you say that? I feel like something disgusting — with warts!” She laughed and leaned toward the front seat. “But the fact of the matter is,” she whispered, “next to Jane, of course, I am wicked.”

  Her big, loose shirt was open low so breasts swelled forward trimmed in lace, necklaces lost in between, eyes of Alan and Jimmy lost there, too. At parties she sat alone and drank red wine and wrote poetry in the dark. She’d pull scraps of paper from her bag and write, smiling to herself and smoking — letters to her boy in Australia, poems, poems that were letters, diary entries. She’d get up and come over in her leggings and pointed heels and kneel at my feet, give me a poem in her curlicue writing, poems of velvet and blood. I could not read these poems, could not stand to hear them.

  “We’re fairytale sisters,” she’d whisper. “Snow White and Rose Red. We’re bound together.”

  She’d take my face in her hands, gaze into my eyes, and kiss me, while across the room the boys elbowed each other and laughed. Then she’d stand up, cock her hip, and go kiss one of them, too.

  “Your sister’s wild,” the boys said.

  “Stepsister.”

  “She seemed,” one of those men told me recently, “mostly she seemed very angry. At you.”

  “She seemed,” another friend told me, “she seemed like a darker version of you.”

  “That’s silly,” said my mother. “You’re not even related.”

  Systems of thought when we were younger, lying hot in her pink room: nomenclatures and charts, static. The periodic table, families and orders of insects, names of who begat whom after Chaos or Nothingness. Collections of bare knowledge, not anything we yet lived. But now, at sixteen and seventeen, we replaced these static systems with others that followed logical narrative paths, paths we must follow ourselves.

  I like that a larval cicada is called a nymph, because the ethereal word is so wrong for a moist, maggoty thing. The naming itself is sublimation: transforming the base to the lofty. A nymph will shed five glassy skins before emerging as an adult, then has six weeks to sing, mate, and die. Nymph, imago, metamorphosis: The language of entomology nears that of myth, where human patterns and transformations are codified, especially the interesting ones where something has gone wrong. A girl who cannot bear to be touched turns into a tree, virginal, evergreen. A girl who is worth nothing and has nothing to say becomes a cave and an echo. A girl who refuses to love or be loved is turned into stone. The stories of families are more complex and need phases, often spring from an original curse or crime. It can take a generation for the crime to be avenged or the curse like poison to work its way through the bloodline. A girl is sacrificed by her father, so her mother must kill him, and then the mother’s son must kill her, so he, too, must be killed … Logical compulsion, psychological compulsion. A girl is abandoned by her father, so she must steal someone else’s. These compulsions are like secret rivers running through your brain. You must play out again and again the prime event, to make it turn out right, or make sure you are perpetually ruined so the narrative itself is intact. These channels run through you but encase you, too, as if you are an oyster, nymph, or tree and keep putting out the same shell, a shell patterned by your growing: the glassy shell that is your natural form, out of which you want to smash free.

  Jenny flew over the Pacific with a bag full of meaningful music, fairy tales, tarot cards, poems, and, deep inside, her secret, black, precious possession: the split sparkling like a geode. Smoking at her father’s desk, she turned her tarot cards over and over, and maybe she found predetermination each time. We’re Snow White and Rose Red, she’d say again and again, and look at me emblazoned with meaning. But I didn’t know the story and didn’t want to. God, I’m glad I’m not really in all this. She’d look at me bemused then, as if marveling that I would not understand the simple systems that impelled her.

  The two children loved each other so dearly that they always walked hand in hand when they went out together, and when Snow White said, “We will never separate from each other,” Rose Red replied, “Not so long as we live!” And their mother said, “What each girl has, she must share with the other.”

  Sure enough, the main thing the two girls would share was a wild bear that was no bear at all but a hidden prince dressed in gold.

  And sure enough, for the first time in our lives we’d be together on our birthday. Two years after the famous party when Sutter had whispered, Come here.

  ____

  By then, Jenny had a job at a purse store downtown. For my seventeenth, her eighteenth, birthday, she gave me a bag from that store, a dark red leather, crescent-shaped bag with a brass zipper, which I hated. Pictures show the presenting of gifts, in her father’s apartment. Paul’s mother, Elsie, was visiting from Los Angeles, and Tommy was there, too, so there were lots of people for Jenny and me to share. In one photo, we kneel side by side on Paul’s deep white carpet, Jenny dark haired in a man’s pearly shirt and black vest; me in a mauve blouse, flushing and blond. Snow White, Rose Red. In another picture I pull the wine-dark purse from its wrapping as Jenny smokes and smiles and watches me, as we’d decided to exchange presents at Paul’s and not at my party the night before.

  At that party we’d drunk a lot making dinner, drunk a lot more after that, drunk until everything had bounced and melted. Sutter kept not being there, not at 8:00 and not 9:00 and not even at 10:00, Sutter, my prize, my gold. I kept glancing toward the door, pretending I wasn’t, glancing out the window, looking away, drinking more. When a car pulled up and he finally came, he staggered, bleary, and fell into the gold chair: my punishment for having dared claim him. A single instant is frozen then: As I step toward him in his gold chair one of the boys, laughing, steers me away, because Jenny steps toward him as well. Then there was a jumble, we piled into cars and went to another party, but I lost her then, it was too hard to keep track. And I lost Sutter, too, just plunged into the m
usic and smoke and beery mud. Hours later the springs in my other twin bed squeaked when Jenny finally came home.

  What I would learn the next day, two hours after pulling that purse from Jenny’s wrapping as she smiled and watched me, an hour after Paul had driven me home through Rock Creek Park, was that when I lost Jenny she’d been where you’d expect: fucking Sutter in the hydrangeas.

  What her father said to her then I don’t know. Did he call her a whore, ask how the hell she could have done something so disgusting to Jane, of all people?

  I myself was cold and shrugged. Nothing had hurt me. Nothing like that could possibly hurt me. I had her stay over a week later to prove it, and while there she hunted through my room and read my diary, to see what I really thought.

  But I doubt she found in that book what she wanted, because Jenny never seemed to get what she wanted, and that diary doesn’t even give me what I want now.

  It doesn’t, for instance, report what I did when I learned about Sutter and Jenny, after her father had driven me home and the love-the-one-you’re-with boy called to tell me what had happened. I went up to my room, stood before the mirror in the dark, stared at myself gasping in the glass, and said, But you’re pretty. And you’re smart. And you can draw. And you smoke! And you drink! And you fuck! Then I hit myself in the face, one cheek and then the other, and did it again, and again, my head jerking back.

  Downtown, Jenny — not that night but soon after — took a bottle of scotch from her father’s liquor cabinet and a knife or a blade and went into the bathroom and cut her wrists. Or maybe just one wrist, but enough to spill blood all over his tiles, enough to make her black out on the floor. I think Tommy found her.

  Paul drove her to George Washington Hospital, then called us. (I feel guilty because I feel I should. But I don’t really. I don’t know. Numbness.) I remember phone calls all day, nets across the ocean: health insurance, legalities, the prospect of plane tickets proposed, then abandoned, whose fault this bloody well was. At some point my father and Helen called me.

  It was of tremendous importance that I go to see Jenny, my father said on the phone. Of tremendous importance to her and her mother. I may not know it, they said, but I mattered a great deal to Jenny. She loved me very, very much. So they hoped I would visit her often, please, while she was mending in the hospital.

  So I did. I took the bus down to Washington Circle after school on Fridays and went up to the psychiatric ward on the sixth or seventh floor. Jenny seemed happy to see me. She seemed almost proud of the place, her new, shining territory in the sky. She strutted before me down the bright hall, swinging her bandaged wrist and silver slave bracelet as she pointed out the television room and blew kisses at the lunatics. In her room, she sat on the bed, I sat on a chair, and we looked at each other, her with a bag full of poems and garbage and me with a bag full of Latin and math. She smiled and suddenly grabbed my hand, kissed it, and swore that fucking Sutter had not meant a thing.

  “Just call me a whore,” she said. “Come on. Call me a whore and then we’ll be even. I don’t think he even came. I know I didn’t.”

  I could say I was drunk, Sutter told me later. Or that I didn’t know what I was doing, I lost my head, I’m sorry, but they’re all just excuses. I could also say I was seduced.

  “Oh come on, Jane!” She looked at me with those eyes hot and live and dug her nails into my wrist. “Don’t be such a condemning bitch. Just say it!”

  But I wouldn’t, so after a while she turned away. Then smiled her dreamy smile and hummed and blew her dreamy smoke rings.

  Of course she smiled, because she’d won. Telephones ringing across the oceans, both fathers, both mothers, intent upon her, Sutter stolen with ease. She’d won everything.

  And no one noticed, because they were laughably minor, that I had little scars on my wrists, too. After I’d learned what she and Sutter had done, after slapping myself in the face, I’d gone down to the bathroom and tried cutting my own wrists, but not with a knife because I was not as strong as Jenny. Instead, with the small, sharp prongs of the metal clasp that binds an Ace bandage. I found the bandage in the bathroom cabinet, unwound it, took the metal clasp, washed it with hot water and soap, and pressed the prongs into my wrist to make two little vampire holes. I pulled the prongs across the thin, green veins, enough to fray the skin, but I just could not push harder; it hurt. So after trying a few times I washed the claw and hooked it back in the bandage, put it in the cabinet, turned off the light, and went upstairs.

  In my green bedroom, at the balsa desk, I took out my microscope and placed Jenny under the lens. I laid her down gently and pressed pins through her hands and feet. Then I took the scalpel from my blue plastic dissecting kit and cut a careful slice from her haughty neck, between her breasts, and over her soft, blue stomach to that part of her I don’t recall ever seeing although I must have, first a bare little peach in the bathtub in Canberra and then more like a mouse in her bathroom in New York, a part that Sutter, anyway, must have seen and wanted. I drew a knife down to that spot and peeled her skin carefully apart and pinned it to either side of the board and examined what I found inside.

  She’s sure she isn’t really bad … She wants to prove me not as good as Paul Stuart has always built me up to be as her model. I don’t know how much the whole family history has to do with it. Helen’s made it as if I won out as far as fathers go, leaving Jenny with none. But I really don’t think that’s affected her much — it hasn’t me …

  When Jenny was released from the hospital she returned to her father’s study for a time and got a job at the Smithsonian museum shop. That Christmas, she gave me two books: a catalog of fantasy illustration and a Smithsonian diary (For Jane Alison Stuart. Christmas, 1978. With love, Jenny Cummins). She took the first five pages with a poem she’d written called “Realizations.” After it she added a note:

  Jane — do you remember the excerpt I read you from my diary. I had written it the night I slit my wrist — it talked of my outside. I thought, at the time, that I could find it through death. But, I had forgotten this poem, which really is true. I cannot find my outside through death. I cannot even look for it. It cannot be found. So I will never again repeat my act of Nov. 24. Anyway — how could I have been so selfish as to deprive the world of me — or to deprive myself of those I love — like you Jane. With much love, Jenny C. T. G.

  Insides and outsides. A girl standing before a mirror with lipstick in her hand, making herself up for someone; a girl standing before a mirror with a knife in her hand, breaking herself for someone. The image you see in the glass does not accord with the vaporous thing inside you that sees. The vaporous one is made of words that keep flowing along paths, the same stream of thoughts and impulses. When I was nine I’d once looked at my hand on a tree trunk in South America and marveled that inside the skin flowed consciousness and me; it was a miracle to be conscious. Now the idea of consciousness in skin was suffocating, the same blood moving around and around in this membrane: I wanted to cut it open to let the poison out. Bloodletting, humors. But I couldn’t do it then and can’t now; it hurts.

  Jenny could. Cutting her wrist in the bathroom: She wanted to find her outside. Which means she wanted to find the hard, pretty girl in the mirror, finally be that thing that looked so valuable but kept being worthless? Or to get outside, out of her skin? That unhappy, pressing a sharp blade into your wrist, feeling the skin split, watching the blood trickle, pressing deeper — that unhappy, you surely want to escape. Your self is not at home inside you but at large, longing for an ancient center that’s lost: a ghost in exile inside its own flesh.

  ____

  When Jenny came down from the sixth or seventh floor, it might have seemed that a crisis had passed, she’d done what she needed and this battle could finally end. In one of the Anne of Green Gables books, a child ponders the word crisis. But she confuses it with chrysalis, which means golden sheath and denotes a state through which a larva passes before metamorphosing int
o an imago, the final perfect form of the insect. But imago also means, psychologically, an idealized image of a parent that a child forms and cannot be free of, an image that persists as the child grows old. Had Jenny done as she needed her mother to have done, taken the man at the party? I’d done as I feared my mother had, lost the man at the party, just could not hold on to him.

  But, of course, I’d already taken Jenny’s. Which even now I’d probably do once more if I were four or eleven and the split happened again.

  Jenny said she’d never again do what she did, but she was wrong. Again and again she’d stand before a mirror with a knife. But there are other ways to get out. What I did was drink. She’d cut; I’d black out. The first time, sixteen, I drank a bottle of kirsch and disappeared easily, became someone else who did not talk or walk like me and did things I would never do, and I remembered none of it. One of the boys sang a song to me outside Wilson later to narrate what I’d done. When he did, a black hole opened up, panic at having no memory, as if for a time I’d been extinct. But, I decided, as I hurried hot down Fessenden Street to the bus stop, clamping Apuleius to my chest, since I had no memory of what I’d done, I hadn’t really been there. So I hadn’t actually done it; it wasn’t me; it was someone else. Which meant I could do it, and therefore not do it, again.

  I’m glad I’m not really in this … The family history hasn’t affected me much … Amnesia and suppression, a black hole in the brain. Whereas Jenny, as always, was ahead, slicing herself open and peering inside.

  That fall she wrote a poem for me, and maybe she read it aloud one of those nights, but if so, I didn’t listen. I didn’t see the poem for years. In it she examines me, as I’d dissected her, as she’d peered into herself. She sees something I’ve buried deep and keep in darkness, she writes, something I’ve locked inside and can’t reason with or make go away.