The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Helen’s made it as if I’ve won out as far as fathers go, leaving Jenny with none.

  A gate would shut, and eyes that had just sparkled with humor would turn glassy against me. We’d stand apart, words silent between us — or there might be a cool, pink smile and a glimpse through the mirror: We have often wondered where you came from. You look nothing at all like Edward.

  So many mirrors in this family, so hard to know where to set your foot or tentatively place your hand.

  Back in Washington, I did at last get a job and an apartment, and William moved down from Philly. I don’t know whether someone said Jenny was missing and asked me to look for her, or whether I just wanted to or thought I should, but I did. Thanks for trying to find Jenny, my father wrote. It would mean a lot, especially to Helen, if you could try again.

  I found her tending bar on Eighteenth Street, at Café Lautrec. On the façade was an enormous Lautrec mural of a man in a black hat and crimson scarf, and inside was a faux French café: pressed-tin ceiling, tiled floor, a long bar on which people tap danced, a mirror behind it reflecting rows of glasses and colored bottles and faces, and standing before them, Jenny.

  “My god,” she cried when I came in from the sun, “it’s my sister!” She strutted around the bar with her cocky Jenny walk and flung her silver-bangled arms around me. She was slim again, pretty and haughty Fifth Avenue Jenny, all that mirror behind her as she strode back and forth among the glasses and bottles and knew the names of the men who came in, and knew just what they wanted. She was bright and wired, and talked rapid-fire about a job or two or maybe three she’d had before this one but lost because of some scandal or absurd accusation, something to do with her and the owner and the owner’s wife, but it was all just piss, she said, and laughed, and then got her proud Corinthia look and gazed into the air at the other self no one acknowledged and with whom she privately communed. Then she snapped back to life and turned electric again, her eyes dangerously bright and her fingers digging into my skin, looking like nothing could hold her inside her own.

  I went to Café Lautrec a lot. William, too; he worked as a paralegal downtown and had stopped in there once and seen Jenny without knowing she was my famous stepsister. It was fun to sit on barstools and watch her; she’d give us drinks or just toss the bill. I’d be beat at closing, but not William and Jenny, and they’d go to after-hours clubs. Nothing special, he’d report when he came home: girls in dark corners making out, lots of coke.

  At first, Jenny was slim in a white T-shirt and black pants. Then she started to swell, the pants straining until she’d leave the shirt untucked or wear one of her big men’s shirts, and then again she’d shrink, turn to wire. She drank prodigiously, did lots of coke, became fascinated with caves and depths and learned spelunking and diving, and still evidently went at herself with knives.

  After a year I lost her again, and my father and Helen wrote of salvage operations. Paul shook his head and said that he wished to hell they’d leave Jenny alone and quit feeding her plane tickets to Europe; the only way she’d ever be able to pull herself together was on her own. But in 1985 she was flown back to Canberra, where my father was posted again. Her plans weren’t clear. She’d need a visa to stay in Australia, so apparently she was still American. If she figured herself out she might move to Sydney.

  My plans weren’t any clearer than hers. What are you going to do with yourself, Jane? Some people look around clearly from the start: heads in the air, eyes open, all the world airy, a chance. They have an idea, an urgency that governs the days, while others lurch in rain forests and mud looking for some lost thing they need back in place before they can even begin.

  Idling. A few months after Jenny left, I decided to go to Australia, too. No plans, just that antipodal pull; it suddenly was the place to go.

  Sometimes it was the continent itself that pulled: that coral-colored island swimming in a blue sea, the whiff of an ancient, innocent, lost land, the screams of birds over crashing waves. That fabulist place of bottlebrushes, banksias, gum leaves, koalas, the paired emu and kangaroo: I pictured that continent somehow taking me in. But then the fantasy altered, and instead it was a man on a motorcycle or in a car who roared out of the red earth and just took me.

  Making men your home. Such a faulty quest, a hopeless roundabout route. Like Odysseus and all his women in their seaside lairs, ten years wandering toward home.

  My father approved of the trip and helped pay my way: It will always be in your blood and consciousness, is a very special place, and so you must at least get a mature impression of it … Do you have dates? Cost? A booking? Get your act together.

  Paul thought it interesting, too, although those brows rose skeptical at the idea that there could be anything to see in an ass-backward place like Australia. He gave me a bag of Nixon pens and black State Department penknives and a blue notebook commemorating Reagan’s trip to Korea.

  “It’s good to travel with things like this, you know, Jane,” he said, and grinned, and paused for the punch line. “So you’ve got something shiny to fob off on the natives.”

  The Qantas flew over the Pacific in darkness for a day and a half, the stars shifting, Venus moving in her transit, Venus who had first lured Banks and Captain Cook. The night went on and on and would not open up into day, as if, were you fast enough, you could fly in perpetual darkness. But just as the sun slipped free of the rim, that last continent appeared like a miracle in the wrinkled ocean, and sunlight struck its edge, making it glow crimson against the blue water and white breaks of waves.

  Flight attendants walked down the aisles spraying disinfectant so we wouldn’t dirty the ancient new island, and I was almost sick with excitement. I went through immigration, hoping my birthplace would be noted, it wasn’t, I waited for luggage, passed into the arrivals hall. Then a door slid open to Australia. It seems now that it was a huge door, a hangar door, a whole wall that simply slid open, and there in the blinding morning sun stood a dark form, there in the light stood Jenny.

  Surely I’d been told he couldn’t meet me, yet I’d expected him, somehow. But of course I hadn’t expected him, I didn’t need to think this but knew it hard as I walked toward her in the sun; why would I ever expect him? This journey had nothing to do with him. It was nothing like Jenny’s disastrous journey the other way across the Pacific. I was just coming to see my home, or find a man with a motorcycle or car, any man anywhere who would take me.

  Helen and Jenny and I stayed in a hotel in King’s Cross, and Jenny seemed electric, wanting to fly into Sydney after months trapped in Canberra. We sped in a hydrofoil over the blue bays Cook had first seen two centuries earlier, over the water into which the Oronsay had steamed. We went to Port Manly and Bondi, a seaside town with a famous beach that was quiet that day, empty in Australia’s spring. The day was windy and bright, our hair snapping at our cheeks, faces fresh with salt air.

  “I love this bit here, come on,” Jenny said, and pulled me from the road up the grassy hillside. We walked up a sandy trail lined with blowing grass, along the high, windy rim of the cliff, the jagged edge of the continent standing in blue water. Up there we stopped and forgot who we were, just looked out at the enormous shining Pacific, spread our arms, shut our eyes, took mouthfuls of wind, and both loved, as always, the same things.

  Later, bars. Helen urged me not to give Jenny money, not to buy her drinks, but I wouldn’t listen, liked having money that came from a good job despite What are you going to do with yourself, Jane? We broke out into dark, granite Sydney, Jenny yanking me in her terrible sharp shoes, and climbed up ballroom stairs and through a black velvet curtain into a hall of thunder and spinning disco balls. I bought her drinks and we shouted over the music, and her eyes flashed in all directions as she looked for someone or something until suddenly she found it. She whispered hot and fast in my ear before going, but I couldn’t hear what. So I found my way back to the hotel, to Helen, and didn’t need to tell her what had happened.

 
To South Australia, then, to the traces of the more ancient family, the lines that had sailed from Britain and Ireland to plant themselves and make this new world. Dora, Maisie, and Albert; aunts, uncles, new cousins. They took me to the spot where Colonel Light landed; to Victor Harbour, where my father was born; to the brick Anglican church where my parents married. They showed me the first pictures I ever saw of the two, my mother in her white angled satin, my father looking nervous with his thin neck. They showed me live kangaroos and emus and put a heavy koala in my arms, just as they’d pressed a stuffed one into Maggy’s and my arms twenty years earlier, so we’d never forget where we came from. After two weeks I let the lost accent settle on my tongue, began talking with a faux-Aussie lilt.

  Then at last to Canberra, and my father. I believe he thought it important that the city and country be properly shown, but whether he represented them, or they him, I don’t know. He drove me to ancient sites, a silent tour of secret history: Lake Burley Griffin, where he’d knelt like a suitor between Maggy and me; Rocky Knob, where the magpies screamed; the little house we’d lived in — irksome places, saturated with the internalized past, with the private acts of those parents. I don’t remember talking about the meaning of these places, or talking much about anything. A cloud had seeped into my head, sunk from the marble sky.

  Memory seems such a funny substance, built of the physical world around you but then transformed into private ephemera. To see still living, dimensional, and real the places that formed that private tissue is disorienting. Here was actually the house where my mother vamped in her yellow swimsuit for Paul; here was the driveway where she sobbed as she hurried Maggy and me in our nighties into the old blue car; here was the rock at the bottom of the street where I’d sit and wait for my father to come home. And here, above all, was that man himself, who in one body contained the mythic lost figment into whose arms I’d dreamt of flying all those nights, and the real man near whom I was so rigid and angry I could not say a word. We walked through dry grass among gum trees, and I was waxen because the long, thin leaves and peeling bark, the silky red bottlebrush, the barnacled banksias, the personal arboretum that had lived in my ribs, was now outside and figured by him, and I could no longer love it.

  He walked with me up Rocky Knob, always a little ahead or behind. He jingled the keys in his pocket and smiled here and there, not quite catching my eye. He took pictures of me before that house, that gum tree, those dinosaur stones, documenting the moment of return, like glossy proofs that there were no hard feelings, everything had turned out just fine.

  In these photos I look grim and embarrassed. I’m wondering what to do, what to say, feeling that miserable matted past all around and unable to utter a word. Perhaps he’s feeling the same. Perhaps he’s wishing to god he didn’t have this problem, this bitter rigid daughter, when there are nuclear tests, relations with China, so many real issues to deal with.

  My father and I had one easy thing in common, smoking, and because Helen believed he’d quit he had to smoke secretly, so this formed a rebellious camaraderie. When the sickening silence became overwhelming, one of us would pull out a cigarette and there’d be a burst of relief: wrappers, matches, something to do with the hands, a few stock phrases about this bad habit to utter, the peaceful exhaling.

  We drove out of Canberra along roads he’d probably driven in 1965, racing that other car to one of those eucalypt picnics. In the countryside we watched a mob of kangaroos leap up a green hillside, and my father seemed pleased that Australia performed as it ought. He took me to a preserve of tall, thin gums and said, “Now you’ve got to find a koala. To prove you’re really Australian. Can’t be Australian without spotting a koala! Off you go. Give it a try.”

  It was protocol, a silly thing he’d surely invented to absorb that wretched energy, but I spent the afternoon with my head cocked back, staring as if my life depended on it, sick and angry, staring up into those tall, skinny gum trees, trying to find a miserable clump of gray fur huddled in a fork in the branches, and finally, after two hours, I did. So that was a subject, it warranted a photo, documentation that I was truly Australian, and as he readied the camera I raged in silence about needing to prove this and decided maybe I didn’t want to prove this, maybe I wanted to throw ass- backward Australia away, and how was it I’d lost my claim to it, anyway, and why was it that no proof, none, had ever been worth a thing; and after the business of taking this photo was through we hurried back to the cigarettes.

  So it went, the weird barometric pressure of Canberra compounding the weird barometric pressure inside: so much inside that would never be said; so much outside pushing in, reminding.

  Maybe it was the same for both of us, because one night, after we’d visited a painter friend and had been drinking wine all afternoon, back at home, in the kitchen, my father kept drinking and suddenly transformed. As if a light had been switched off, or on. All at once blackness streamed out.

  His face changed as he looked at me across the table, and there was a weird gap in the air, a coiling. Then out of nowhere, in a different voice, he began to speak of “drunkenness and cruelty.” Had I ever heard that? Did I know those were the terms of divorce, the trumped-up terms put on paper by my mother? And did I know it was a bloody lie?

  I stared at those pale eyes that didn’t seem to see me but things he’d nursed for twenty years.

  Did I know how much that charge had cost him? And how my grandmother Dora had watched my mother have an affair on the ship but never said a word? Did I know about this? Had my mother ever told me?

  What she did on the ship, he said. What she did on that bloody ship. His eyes fixed me like pins, but seemed to see her. At twenty-three in a Canberra kitchen I was her, full of the things she’d done that had cost him and of the stories he seemed to think she’d told against him ever since.

  I ran to my room, which of course wasn’t mine but Jenny’s, and stood there as if something would actually crack in my ribs, but couldn’t move, couldn’t leave, I didn’t have enough money and this was the place I’d wanted to come, the place that had pulled for twenty years, so all I could do was smoke, hard, and stare up at the Southern Cross.

  The following morning: no trace in his eyes. Or maybe they were the eyes I’d had so often at Princeton, shocked by that other dark self, afraid of what might have slipped out: I don’t know. He peered at me over coffee and asked what I’d planned for the day. Perhaps I ought to have a look at Canberra’s new Parliament House. Hmm? Very worth seeing, a most interesting structure, much of it underground, just a bus ride away.

  _______

  Why should I care and feel any sort of personal involvement? I wrote small and neat in Paul’s blue Reagan notebook as I lay with the door locked, on Jenny’s bed.

  It strikes deep, deeper than it should. I wasn’t the one left. I was just one of the ones left … They have all finished with it and we are only beginning … The lack of shame disturbs me. The lack of questions does, too. Don’t they want to know what wreckage there may have been? I like Jenny because she shows it most … Once again, how much does it matter.

  Jenny was staying somewhere else while I visited; she’d had to leave, of course, to make room for me. I was told this lightly as I sat on her bed. I had displaced her again, I was always displacing her, leaving her fatherless, homeless. She now raged around Canberra, which once had been mine but now was hers, because surely she had displaced me, too, and after the night of drunkenness and cruelty the only thing to do was bolt out and rage with her. We walked fast across stretches of grass between empty suburban roads, Jenny in her ridiculous shoes, her hair too glamorous, coiffed for elsewhere. We smoked as we’d smoked when she’d come to my Washington to claim my stepfather, exhaling hard into the sky. We sat on curbs or at the feet of statues in this antipo-dean Anglo capital city. We got up and walked fast anywhere else, and talked as we walked, but whatever we said fell into the air and I don’t know if it ever came close to the subject; how could we even
find the right pronouns.

  We went to bars, smoked more, drank cocktails, screamed over music, and staggered home late enough to be noticed: twenty years after we sat in our bathtub, two aging, maddened girls pressed foot to foot. I’d developed a roll of film, some shot in D.C., with the Olympus Paul had given me for graduation, and at a screeching bar one night I showed Jenny pictures: black-and-white William at the beach on the sand like a pensive Flandrin, William I’d written to four times already and who had written back only once; Tommy, Jenny’s boy and mine, jumping delirious in my mother’s backyard. Jenny looked at both pictures sweetly, head tilted, with her private smile.

  And then glancing at one photo she said, “There’s your apartment,” before clapping her hand to her mouth. A picture of the wooden Murphy table and benches that folded out of the wall like an insect, the table where I’d been drawing Daedalus’s tiny moves toward the air. I looked at her in the dark, blaring bar; she looked back laughing through her fingers, through that old mirror, that moat between beds. Because she’d never been to my apartment with me. When I was away once, it seemed she’d gone there with William.

  “Oh come on, Jane,” she said, grabbing my arm. “I made a point of remembering he was with you! So of course I didn’t let him —” and she broke off, laughing, so all I could do was shrug, light a cigarette, order a drink, and look around for anyone who would do, any damned man at the party to take. I found him fast. And fucked him that night in his car, after we dropped Jenny off at the house of my father’s superior, where she climbed in the window of my father’s superior’s young son.