The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Stay as you are Jane —

  But I will come

  Soon I will come

  And dig it out of you …

  What she’ll dig out, she says, what she’ll pry from my depths, will be ugly and frightening. And when she digs it out, it will envelop me as I stand unaware, vulnerable for the first time. This thing she’ll pry out, that I’m afraid of, is Love.

  Amnesia evidently can coexist with a craving to know everything, to catch all the words and numbers afloat in the air. Maybe the two are necessary correlatives, or maybe all those logical particles can collapse into atoms and break down to oblivion. I wrote an essay about the concept of omniscience on the emu-and-kangaroo letterhead my father had given me, and got into Princeton the spring after Jenny came. But Princeton had a policy concerning financial aid, which I needed badly: Both parents, if divorced, had to file a statement. Former stepfathers didn’t, though. In his memoir, Geoffrey Wolff describes how furiously his father reacted to this policy. Mine did the same in a letter, with one from Helen, which I did not keep but that my diary tells me flatly refused tuition money and was intended to make me (us) feel guilty … For never attempting to visit him? For allegedly throwing Helen into a terrible financial situation? — letters that made that diary of mine finally explode at the situation with the fathers.

  Just before leaving for Princeton, I dreamt I was in my mother’s bed with a friend’s father. There were two of me, one physical … the other, seeing and thinking everything, was a little below and a little beyond … So he started making love to me, but he was talking very concernedly and businesslike the whole time. It was no fun. Then suddenly she came home, so we had to rush. It was awful. Putting on clothes, etc. I felt so guilty, but then it was sort of my father, and I thought everyone goes to bed with their fathers! Some, in fact most, of this is traceable. I’m not going to bother writing it.

  I just realized that I’m alone and myself — the same as in the mirror.

  And right now I wish I weren’t.

  8

  There’s so often a hole at the heart of first-person narratives: a black hole like the windy center of consciousness, or like Odysseus calling himself No One in the Cyclops’s cave. The self seems so nebulous: What’s it made of ? Paths of words that follow obsessive patterns, images that rise and sink again, repetitive ways of doing things. There must be a fixed number of all these, so the self should be finite and recognizable. Then why does it seem so vaporous, no more certain than weather? The grammatical construct itself implies clarity: I am this, I am that. Yet the verb to be denotes a falsity, because what precisely equals anything else or stays in a fixed condition? And the subject — I: how could such a slight figure denote the rushing, shifting, remembering, forgetting, multiplying nonsubstance in the skin?

  Ovid gave these ideas such beautiful flesh: Bodies change and are permeable; the self is unfixed. All breath and words, it slips through our openings; it enters, exits, can be lost.

  Just as there can be a hole in these narratives, a memoir can be as much about what’s forgotten as what’s remembered. When I was nineteen, twenty, I seemed to have an alternate self that lived away from my consciousness, wanting and doing things I couldn’t believe I’d do and refused to remember. Like an Ovidian figure of Hunger or Greed, climbing out night after night and leaving me wrecked.

  Ways out. Jenny did work at the Smithsonian for a time, and at a local college she studied poetry, chemistry, oceanography, but before long I was told that she cut her wrists again; sometime later, her neck. A Renaissance painting shows a martyred saint being buried. Because the saint had been beheaded, her kind buriers placed her head back where it belonged, a fine red line ringing her neck. Jenny didn’t die when she cut her neck; I think she just looked again and again at the idea of dying and left traces of that looking on her skin. She became attached to a skull she named Clarence or Herbert and kept on her father’s desk, with candles like Mary Magdalene: memento mori. Remember, remember, even while you push into the black to forget. For a time she lived in a studio Paul owned in Foggy Bottom, until Maggy, returning from Vassar, moved in. Where Jenny went after that I’m not sure — here and there with her bag, on the floors of friends.

  Whereas I went to Princeton: the princess and the witch. Although in each of us was a portion of the other. Her Romantic poets, my Horace and Ovid; her poems, my drawings; we both studied oceanography, we both loved the sea. I went to Princeton because of This Side of Paradise. Reading Fitzgerald one night when I was fifteen I’d suddenly realized that reading would always pull me out and away. Fitzgerald’s world still lingered in the slate paths and magnolias of Princeton, in the air of the young people muddy fresh from the playing fields and lakes. When I got there I didn’t know what eating clubs or prep schools were and had never seen so many white people in one place, never so many white men. I wore a paper apron and served them ziti and baked chicken at Commons, part of my scholarship deal, together with loans, working summers, and all my mother put in. I stayed away from the clubs that had tormented Fitzgerald, joined a benign one, and later ran the parties there. And did well enough, publishing drawings in the Nassau Lit, winning a prize to study in Italy. This was the bright, formal information that appeared in letters to my father and Paul.

  Paul seemed impressed by his demistepdaughter at Prince ton on scholarship and sent me $100 a month for a time (not, he said, to buy fancy cars, or form expensive drug habits, or indulge in blackjack in Atlantic City, or play the stock market: This money is for pizza and beer! Love Paul). He visited once on his way somewhere, and I was supposed to see him again before he headed home, but didn’t; I couldn’t get out of bed. He waited downstairs in the dark, woody lounge and after an hour or so left a note on a scrap he found on the coffee table. I don’t know if he turned the paper over and saw what had been written on the other side, or if he’d even chosen that scrap because of it. In red marker, by a man in the band that had played at the party:

  Jane:

  sparkles on her eyes

  no spontaneity

  likes dancing

  20 years old from W DC

  mixed-up childhood

  nice perfume

  forgets what she’s talking about

  then denies it.

  fish net horizontal rib stockings nice

  legs

  I remember sitting in the library of the club with the band, legs up on the table, mirrors, cocaine, but I don’t remember this man making his list. Or another man or maybe three who had left me in that same room at dawn a week earlier, left me slumped on a red leather chair with no pants on, no underpants, no memory; or any of the other men like them over those years. I’d found another boy to adore, another hard, cold boy who’d have nothing to do with me, and I’d follow him helplessly from party to party. Then give up, black out, two or three times a week, fuck whoever I’d been talking to when I blacked out, remember nothing, just wake up on a wet lacrosse field, naked, with cuts on my back, or suddenly come to myself crying on Prospect Street at 4:00 in the morning, running home barefoot on ice. Everything I didn’t remember would be so ruining that I’d lock the door, go straight to my desk and Oxford editions of Ovid or Plato, and translate, look up hundred of words, try to memorize them, mark with an angry dot each word in the dictionary I’d failed to memorize as a record of my stupidity, do nothing but translate black lines of Horace or Homer on hot white pages until finally I couldn’t stand the burning lamp or damned verb endings or myself anymore and went out and blacked out again.

  I wouldn’t stop drinking until I’d transformed. Hesiod warns men not to bathe in the water a woman has touched because it’s filthy; and nasty stuff slides out when Pandora opens her box or jar or own personal self; and Plato tells a story about a hungry female named Lack who rapes a self-contained male named Wealth; and I became fixated on the repulsive female part of the sexual equation, on orifices, on need. The whole sexual arrangement seemed economic, pure intake on one side and output o
n the other, and the female portion felt like nothing but need. Economics from oikos, house. I would see Barnaby Street and my mother holding a glass of wine and a chicken leg and saying she just needed a man, and I’d feel my skin, my organs, actually harden. I’d refuse to need a thing, was disgusted by even having a mouth, wouldn’t eat, refused to feel. But after a while the petrifaction began to force that jagged hollow inside to explode. When it was unbearable I would rush out the door to anywhere else, anywhere but my own room and skin. As fast as I could I was gone, and the other thing that was nothing but mouth and need took over again.

  Fucking on tables or bathroom floors, in cars on the New Jersey Turnpike; spewing a language, I’d be told, that wasn’t English or Spanish, Latin or Greek; waking up naked and choking, mouth full of water, in a pool. And when I woke up in my bed, clothes and ruin all around, I’d get out of that place of dissolution fast and hurry to shake the sheets, fold them, smooth them, pretend some unknown thing hadn’t slid between me earlier and me then. Sick as I served chicken steaks to football players in Commons, I’d keep my head down and look for clues to what I’d done, with which of them. Beyond what I’d already found in the morning, the bruises and scratches on my breasts, the mess between my legs. And because someone who erupts each night but refuses to know she wants anyone to touch her isn’t likely to shove in a diaphragm, there was that to worry about, too.

  I’ve been drunk every night for almost three weeks. Everything’s changed, everything and every word I used to be able to use to describe myself. I don’t know when I lost myself … I can’t talk to anyone about this because I’m so ashamed. If how I act when I’m drunk is how I really am then I hate myself.

  This other person, this craving thing that climbed from the black hole, was like that plantar’s wart I painted acid on each morning to dissolve it, to dig it out of my foot; the one that, if poked exactly, made me drop to my knees: a weakness that ran like a nerve right through body to brain.

  Jane and neoJane, my friend William called the phenomenon. He was still in my bed when I woke one morning, and he didn’t seem to mind the little condition, and lingered. He looked like a Caravaggio or Flandrin’s nude youth sitting curved and pensive against a deep evening-blue sky, a postcard of which Maggy had just sent me from Paris. William was quiet and marble and took a philosophical interest in this mind-body problem. We went to see The Three Faces of Eve. He left notes on strips of paper I’d cut from the emuand-kangaroo letterhead and placed in an envelope on my door, one of them a linguistic equation that concluded: therefore Jane is not Jane lose.

  To myself I wrote, What’s wrong with ignoring and forgetting things. Like Jenny with her fairytales and songs, I made myth and literature serve. Persephone, shuttling between underworld and upper; between darkness, men, and sex, and her mother. Narcissus, frozen in his self. Echo, eaten up by need for a man who would give her nothing, until she becomes a cave. The logic of classical myth and tragedy seemed algebraic: The marble boy who refuses to love will be shattered by ruinous love. The man who refuses to know himself will be blinded by horror when at last he looks. A single crime — like feeding a man the flesh of his child, or stealing the wife of your host — can start a curse that will not be exhausted until the family, the house, is destroyed.

  I didn’t have a diary but on a calendar kept track, as always, of letters: wrote to Daddy ha ha ha; and weeks later, letter from Daddy ha ha ha. He wrote: I understand why you were depressed, but one of the arts of life is to get psychologically back on top again very promptly — and to roll with the punches.

  “The problem,” a psychiatrist told me at the end of a single hour when I finally made myself go to the infirmary, “is not who you are or what you do when you’re blacked out. The problem is who you are when you’re sober. There seems to be another person you don’t allow out.”

  That other person never did anything too dangerous, though. Never anything like what Jenny could do. Jenny could slice her wrists and her throat. Jenny could get herself beaten up; Jenny apparently could get herself raped. Really raped, not my little blackout affairs with Princeton men bound for Wall Street. Jenny seemed master of her abandonments. I just left myself behind.

  I hope you’ll understand I can’t possibly respond to your “affairs” — love or non-love, my father wrote. I can’t even keep up with them. So just remain conscious of the drinking problem (ahem!) … Jenny is a mess and is making herself a worse one.

  So much of our growing up was defined by the negative — not being that other girl, not having that father, not having that name or country or accent. At twenty-three and twenty-two, maybe we’d both reached the hollow core, the knowledge that value was always elsewhere.

  When what’s inside feels like a black hole, you’ve got to break out and make your self home, somehow. Maybe it’s a settler instinct: Push away from what’s old and rotten, colonize a new place, make it yours. The dream: to be content, centered, not hollow. But even as I write this I know I don’t mean it; such contentment may be healthy, but it’s dull. One thing that split gave us, I think, was a terrible questing energy, as if the vapor inside the geode were aflame. At Princeton sometimes when I thought I’d explode and for once wouldn’t let myself drink, I would escape in the old, sweet manner, by walking. Finishing a shift at Commons, I’d tear off my paper apron, stuff it in the trash, and walk hot and fast beneath the stone arch of Blair and along the slate paths that led past magnolias down through campus, then up toward the golf course. Away from all the men I’d fucked, into the woods, the Narnia fir trees, the slender green lampposts glowing to life. Then out to the open slopes and huge evening sky. Venus burned cool and quiet in the deep blue, and here were peace and excitement at once: my eyes drinking in all that fresh twilight, my mouth open to breathe it and be it, words in my head suddenly wanting to do more, images arising to be transformed to paper and shining graphite.

  To find yourself is a phrase that’s ruined but true: You go wandering, and maybe somewhere outside you do find it. But outside like this, not Jenny’s way. Except for when she sat in the dark, if in Washington she still sat in the dark, with her bag and pens, and wrote poems.

  After Princeton, where I finished with honors despite all the mess (What are you going to do with your degree Jane? wrote my father. It is a commendable achievement, wrote Helen. You’ll always have an admirer in me, wrote Paul), I moved back to my mother’s — a different house now, one she’d bought with her new husband, an older man, a contractor named Lou. It was the first house she’d owned, in the leafy neighborhood near Deal, and it had a screened-in porch where she’d drink coffee in her nightie among African violets, then pack up her bag with notebooks and a yogurt and walk to the Metro to go downtown to teach.

  After she’d left, I’d sit on that porch in the steamy air, in the cicadas’ ringing, and jab at the crossword puzzle my mother had started, stare at my horoscope that also was hers, gaze through the screen at the green haze all around, try to figure out what to do with myself. Live where? Be what? I made charts of possibilities that all pointed nowhere, I drew pictures of myself closed in a box. What are you doing to do with yourself, Jane? Teach, like my mother? Be some sort of artist?

  I worked as an office temp for a month, typing lists for one company, making calls for another, riding around in tour buses with a tape recorder secretly reeling inside my bag for quality control of the tour guides. Finally I agreed with a friend to put everything off and spend what I’d made on a few weeks in Europe. My father, now posted there, called it a grand plan and helped pay my way.

  Camping, hiking, sleeping on trains and in tiny rooms, hoarding packets of jelly and biscuits from breakfast for lunch, wandering in Geneva, Interlaken, Nice. Then my friend traveled on, leaving me in my father’s new Residence, a creamy villa with a lush garden and servants and a small porcelain bell on the dining-room table when it was time to ring for coffee, a Residence where Jenny had been flown a few months before me and where I was told to act j
ust like family. Helen sent me to galleries and pale yellow palaces or said she’d just put aside her own work again and take me herself. Then, clicking ahead of me down hallways and paths, she talked of philosophers and painters and musicians and writers, a cascade of names always splashing around her, Jugendstil, Schiele, the Secession, one name spawning three before each sentence was through, and it was astonishing that after Princeton I still knew so little, sputtering out a few lines about ruins or myth as I floated behind like a fish, gaping. It was the ionic wind, of course, she said. The Föhne. It exhausted everyone.

  Then back to Washington to try living again, to figure out what to do with myself. I’m sorry to hear that you had such a difficult month arguing with yourself over D.C. or N.Y., Helen wrote. We missed you when you left, and still.

  Helen has written ever since New York, pages covered in cursive, with photos or gallery postcards tucked in the folds, images she knows I’d like to see or would like to remember. Aren’t these photos marvelous? The series of you by candlelight is broken because we put the third one in a frame. Rolling blue words about my troubles or plans (We understand that you want to get on with your life … and become self-sufficient as soon as possible too); and about books, painters, films, ideas (I named one large painting “Echo,” remembering the paper you sent us last year). And always — until a point — a few lines about Jenny. I will be trying to see what, if anything, we can work out for Jenny’s future. I don’t know when I’ll be in the States again; so it’s crucial.

  When I read Helen’s letters, I don’t find the doubled surface I’ve seen when we’re together — the twinned surface born of our twinned families — as when you move a piece of moiré silk in the light and the hues change, sweet pink suddenly shot through with blood-black. Maybe in letters, written alone before a fire, more tender feelings can come out; or maybe letters form a record and must be written with care. But when Helen and I have been together, in one moment she could be the woman who wrote those letters, could be with someone she truly liked, a gentle blue light spilling over me as we forgot who we were, spoke loosely, laughed, and I could almost feel the fierce mother she surely was for her girls — but in the next moment I would say something wrong and seem to remind her who I was: not Jenny, a girl Jenny was not, a girl who’d gotten everything.