The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  10

  Home economics, domestic arts. Dora had been trained in this, a real subject for a young Australian woman in 1920. How to keep milk and meat without refrigeration; how to arrange time, funds, water, and fuel in the heat and dryness of a small South Australian town, within the schedules of men who delivered produce, and the seasons, the different fruits each might bring or withhold — how to manage with care each substance that came into the house. There’s a pleasure in keeping linens fresh and floors swept and not letting any fruit rot, wasting nothing. You see this in Dora’s accounts of life then. Her house was small but thoroughly kept, every surface imbued with her hands, thrift, and thinking.

  When I visited her on that trip to Australia, she was near eighty and woke early, washed and dressed and then sang in the kitchen, a singing that rose into trills of delight but stopped cold when she saw me. She was never warm like my mother, but not unkind, either: dry and contained. Her pleasure seemed to be in keeping her house as she liked, and having in it a loved visitor, but having that visitor in another room sleeping, not awake and marring the world she’d made. She knew one of the great things to know: how to make your own home and be content in it, alone.

  I’m like Dora this way: I feel a wave of joy when I’m in my kitchen and the place is ordered and I have the food I need, plentiful but not enough to be wasted. It’s a feeling of modest contentment. But if things are missing or broken or dirty, unease agitates through the place into me, as if everything will split apart.

  Homemaking: The term sounds trite and has ruffles. Yet it stands for an enormous act of will, whereby you leash the globe and make it revolve around the incidental spot you’ve put your bed and table and cups. You’ve made that place your center. When all the while the world is out there with uncontrollable rushing currents, reminding you you’re nothing. So what an act of power to make your self home and sturdy.

  Not that there isn’t the opposite surge, which makes me want to walk toward my cats, put them in their carriers, take them to the vet, and say, We must do it now, I can’t care for them anymore, and stand by the metal table watching as each one, watching me, stops breathing. Then to walk home and take each potted fan palm and bougainvillea and drop it out the fifth-floor window onto the sidewalk, or not even bother, not bother to water them once more or run my fingers over their fronds to smudge to death the spider mites, just leave the plants to die, why not. Then walk away from my books and files and bar-of-gold jewelry box with the ancient silver peacock and llama, and walk down the sixty-six stairs, away, leave my husband standing there stricken, and go somewhere else, go break up someone else’s home, too.

  Equal surges: Make things, break them. Make yourself, or break out.

  A few years after the episode in Italy, Jenny apparently was pulling herself together again. She’d gotten rid of the boyfriend who didn’t like chairs and now had a new one, a tall, older man who seemed good to her. In 1995 she flew to the United States to visit her aunts, uncles, cousins, half-brother, and father, and she made the telephone call she’d never made to me in Sydney. But I didn’t hear the phone ring, and she left a message; she was already about to board the plane back to Australia, and again I missed her.

  I was involved with Alex then, living with him in Philadelphia, in an old wrecked house we were trying to fix. Telephone wires hung from the kitchen ceiling, through which you could hear mice scraping. Between the kitchen and patio stood fogged glass doors that wouldn’t slide; outside, a Tree of Heaven, strangled in ivy, wrenched up the patio bricks. Termite tracks rivered the kitchen walls in dry channels you could crack with your thumbnail, and on the living room’s black-and-brown plastic tiles stood tea chests and stacks of Baedekers like badlands. For months I’d been on my knees screwing down sheets of plywood or on ladders scraping off wallpaper, sanding and sponging, slapping on mud after Alex hung sheetrock. Between my skin and the walls and floors was no difference, cracked mud and ochre paint sticking to my legs, sawdust thick in my hair. I was trying to work my way into the house, right into those walls and beneath those floorboards, not write or think but just hammer.

  One day I stopped drilling and saw the light blink on the answering machine, and when I punched the button, there was Jenny. I stood in the wrecked kitchen, in the new empty quiet, her voice floating around me. I knew it but at first couldn’t name whose it was. Then realized it was her, and the world swiveled. The kitchen and house were what I didn’t recognize, some dislocated place, a house and another man I’d washed up with, both of which could dissolve again. Because her voice was the real thing, the constant thing, as if playing from inside.

  On this visit Jenny gave me her last gift, through Paul. It’s a Penguin writers’ quotation book, something you pick up quick at the cash register at Borders. Unlike the books she’d given me earlier and marked with her florid signature and poems, in this one she wrote nothing. I keep opening it and looking for something I missed, a message, a quotation underlined or starred. But it’s just a book she grabbed and bought and passed on, without wrapping. If her father hadn’t told me, I’d never know it even came from Jenny.

  By then I’d been writing for a few years. But Jenny had been writing since those poems she’d bent over in her big shirts in the dark, those scraps of paper she’d shoved into her impossible bag. She’d written ever since, but I’d never thought about it until she gave me this book. So this was another thing she and I shared, along with our fathers, brothers, names, birthdays, countries, pasts, and longings: everything but our blood.

  _______

  After struggling with that house a few years, in 1998 Alex and I sold it and moved to Germany. Before leaving, we went to Rehoboth with Maggy. Those last days in the United States felt like an end, a queasy end at the edge of a continent.

  At the beach, we dumped our towels, and Maggy and I rented a big blue and yellow raft. We pushed ourselves up on it side by side, its cool, wet, taut fabric under our arms, our legs in the water kicking. She’s taller and goes out deeper than I do, and she rolls her eyes when I get nervous so I pretended not to mind, and together we kicked out far. The green waves rolled in slowly, and when we saw a good swell coming, we lurched around, kicked, caught it, and rode it in, screaming and tumbling into the froth, grating our legs on the sand. We got up and turned around and shoved back out.

  But while we were out there in the rising, lowering water, something happened: A current began gently to tug at my legs. Not at hers, though, maybe because she was bigger, more balanced. I clutched the edge of the raft tightly, but the current kept pulling and my hands slipped from the edge, and with nothing to grip in the middle of the raft, I slid back until I’d fallen into the water and was gripping the plump edge on which my hips had just rested. Maggy didn’t notice because we were still pushing out, rising over swells. But then the current pulled me away from the raft, and I held only the white cord. Then that slipped away, too, and so did Maggy; she and the raft floated free over a swell, while I was pulled the other way, toward the jetty of black rocks. She looked back over her shoulder and called, but I kept being pulled farther. When I tried to stand, I went under. I tried not to panic, but if I did what you’re supposed to, swim with the riptide, I’d be thrown into the rocks. As I was about to crash into them and lifeguards splashed into the water, I finally got a foothold. I staggered out of the water and Maggy came, too, laughing, uneasy, and we went up to the dry sand.

  Huddled in a towel, I didn’t want to tell her that it felt like more was slipping away, something was ending.

  That night we drove down the coast, along that road between dunes and bay where Paul and I once flew in his Mercedes, leaving Jenny behind on the grass. At his beach house, with him and his wife and Tommy, we sat around the picnic table, ate grilled fish and bean salad, drank wine, took pictures.

  Paul looked pleased and kept saying, “This must be the first time we’ve all been together in, what, it must be twenty years.” As if it were a real reunion, and Maggy and I
were really his daughters, and we were a family.

  Later Paul and his wife sent me a photo taken that night, set in a green bamboo frame. It’s the picture that comes closest to those glossy photos of my father’s family in a tropical garden. I sit on one side of the table beside Paul, just him and me, and I have the bright tense smile I always have beside him, and look the way I always feel then, glassy, privileged, uneasy, as if this position is both my right and my crime. Even as the photo is snapped, I’m imagining his real girls seeing this picture when they next cross the Pacific to visit him, because he still did not fly to them; I imagine them seeing this framed picture in his office downtown. Paul had displayed my books there, the first books I wrote, when I still used his name, and I can see him take each book out of his briefcase, regard the cover and shiny gloss of our name, place the book on a spot on the shelf, adjust it, then regard it with satisfaction. In his office evidently one saw no trace of his daughters. When Patricia came to visit once and saw my books on his shelves but no sign of herself or her sister, I am told, her shouting could be heard down the hall.

  Maybe Patricia saw this picture of her father and me sitting side by side, but Jenny didn’t. As we sat on Paul’s porch that steamy night and he smiled like a father flush in the wealth of his children, looking satisfied that the damned thing had turned out all right, in Sydney his real daughter was about to buy heroin, although she’d been off it for years.

  A few days after Rehoboth: Germany. The sky was heavy and gray, and after sleeping awhile I went out for groceries. Then climbed the sixty-six stairs to our apartment, dumped the Karstadt bags on the floor, and pushed the button on the blinking answering machine.

  “Hi, Jane, it’s Paul,” her father’s voice said. “Bad news. Jenny’s dead.”

  I sat down. Just sat there, in an empty apartment on the fifth floor of a bare, new building in a small city in Germany.

  My first thought was, I’m free.

  My second was, But now it’s too late.

  Because I’d thought, I’d quietly counted on, Jenny and me seeing each other one day, or Jenny reading something I wrote, and her knowing that she was in me, too, that I knew what I’d done to her, what we’d done to each other, and that I was unutterably sorry.

  _______

  She had gone through rapid detox but then apparently stopped taking the antidepressants she’d need to endure this, and sank, and by then even the little heroin she injected was too much. It was a month before her thirty-eighth, my thirty-seventh, birthday; depending on the time zones, on her boyfriend’s birthday or Paul’s.

  Earlier I’d written a novel based on her, on us, one of the ways I first tried writing out this family. I’d thought of killing her at the end, but didn’t. The novel begins with a scene in which the girl like her and the one like me are swimming, and one is terrified of going deep, and the other taunts her to make her swim out far. Then suddenly she — Debby — begins to struggle way off in the water, and whether she’s drowning or a shark’s got her the other girl — Alice — can’t tell, and stands paralyzed, chest deep. She pictures Debby dead but realizes that if she dies she will have won, she will have become singular and loved at last. So Alice swims out to save her, and the girls struggle, clawing at each other to stay up. In the novel I would not let Debby die; I had her doing her best. She lives in a halfway house near Sydney and comes out one day to the cliff along which Jenny and I once walked. She climbs down the grassy path to the beach and stands ankle-deep in the water, in the wind, gazing across the Pacific, longing herself to America, to Washington, to a cold apartment with a thick white carpet, downtown. That’s where Jenny stayed in my mind, on the beach by the cliffs of Sydney, longing.

  After Paul’s message, there were calls over the oceans with Maggy, my mother, Daddy, Paul. Paul’s voice sounded like metal plunged into cold water and shocked even harder. What we talked about was flights; he was arranging his to Sydney and said he’d have his agent help me with one, too.

  But then, in another call, my father asked me please not to come, said truly it would be better if only Maggy were there.

  “Think of Patricia,” he said, and his voice sounded wretched, and I could tell how awful this must be for him to say. “Just think if it was your own sister who’d died, how you’d feel. Hmm? It would be easier for everyone if you didn’t come. You understand, don’t you? With Paul there.”

  So I helped pay for Maggy’s ticket and sent a lot of white roses. While everyone was in Sydney burying Jenny, I wanted to be where I could picture her, and Alex and I drove to Normandy, to the high grassy cliffs at Etretat. On the day of her funeral we walked on a cliff, on the windy grass. The day was overcast and breezy, the Channel gray, and on the cliff you could see how the jagged edge of the land stood in sloshing Atlantic water, you could picture the continents just splitting apart.

  Maggy and Helen sent me photos later: the church service, men carrying Jenny’s coffin drenched in flowers, the burial. It’s a sunny day, high on a green cliff of Sydney, looking out at the Pacific. The light is brilliant, the sea blue and hazy. Her father, my stepfather, stands in the foreground of one picture, in a dark suit in the antipodean light, near the grave. He’s not looking at the coffin or the hole in the sand, though; someone must have called his name, so he’s turned to look back at the camera. His face is stern and ruined. Before him, a heap of white sand and an incredible number of flowers. Jenny loved flowers; I didn’t know. But there are heaps of flowers, lilies and gerberas, the same flowers I’d had at my wedding on the Atlantic, a wedding her father attended, a wedding at which he strode over to me smiling and said, You look the way Marilyn Monroe wished she did. The same gerberas here on Jenny’s coffin: yellow, white, coral, and red.

  It’s the sort of picture you can look at and look at but still not see what you want. The waves don’t break, the clouds don’t drift across the sky, and Paul does not turn his head again, he does not turn and face that hole in the sand, he just looks back toward me. Although, of course, he does not look at me. I’m not there; I’ve been asked not to come. But that is how it will always feel. And the picture never shifts to the right, the lens never slides over enough to show Jenny. She lies unseen in her coffin, in the shadow that falls by the white heap of sand, beneath all the gerberas, which are all facing up, all facing the sun and us still living, not her.

  After the funeral, after the reception, back at the apartment, Paul called me. He picked up the phone with everyone around, Patricia standing across the room; he must have put on his glasses and taken out his little phone book and then dialed the numbers to reach me in Germany.

  Well, Jane, it’s all over, he said.

  He might have said another word or two, but all I could hear then was Patricia screaming: Even now, even now, I can’t believe you’re calling her!

  Looks like I better go, he said, and hung up.

  I put down the receiver, turned back to the gray silence of Karlsruhe.

  But in Sydney, Maggy told me, even she couldn’t stand it. She walked out, rode the elevator downstairs with her swimsuit, dropped into the pool, and sank to the bottom, the quiet.

  It is an old graveyard, where Jenny is buried. Or as old as such a graveyard can be in Australia, that huge island with no British bones in the soil when Captain Cook first stepped upon it. Even the bones of my grandparents don’t lie there: Dora, Herbert, Maisie, and Albert are ashes in boxes in drawers. Jenny’s bones lie in the soil of a cliff you see rising crimson from the Pacific as you fly in on Qantas, a cliff Cook saw, swarming with birds. Around Jenny’s grave are others, the remains of the first settlers and their children, the ones who didn’t survive this strange new world. Inscribed on the gravestone of a little girl laid to face the ocean: What hopes have perished with you, our daughter.

  After Jenny died, I tried again to put her in a novel and this time made her a ghost, a dead twin. A needle apparently was the last thing she touched before falling to her kitchen floor. At the time I was also
using needles but, of course, for an opposite reason: I was trying to get pregnant, jabbing needles full of hormones into my stomach each morning. But it turned out that again we were both opposite and the same: Jenny had been trying to have a baby, too. She, like me, was failing. And I imagine this was one failure she just could not bear.

  Because then you really are closed, and finite, and won’t slip out of your skin. Like living and being finished at once.

  There is no causal connection between the last thing Jenny and I shared and the story of our family. But I can’t shake the feeling that there is, that a black hole had run through each of us ever since we’d been pulled from that bathwater long ago and gone our separate ways, and that she finally fell into hers.

  After Jenny died, my mother sent a card for my birthday with a check to help pay for Maggy’s ticket to Sydney, because, she wrote, What happened to poor Jenny was my responsibility, too, way back. My father sent a check, too, and wrote, Happy birthday, but I won’t say many happy returns of this particular one because there’ll be too much pain in it for all of us. Helen wrote, We will be remembering you too on the 29th. The night of our birthday I sat in the glass wintergarden in the dark, with a candle and a bottle of red wine and a white rose I’d bought to be Jenny. I wrote to her, words I couldn’t even read between the darkness and wine and crying. Then burned the letter so the smoke words would have some obscure chance of reaching her, and burned the rose as well.

  On our birthday my father published an article he wrote about Jenny’s addiction. He cited everything she had tried for a decade to escape it: detox, psychotherapy, methadone, acupuncture … Later Helen wrote to me about Jenny’s slide into addiction and said how sorry she was I had never known the real Jenny except when we were young. And often those encounters were filled with a certain amount of pain due to the rivalry for the two fathers. Although there is always pain when a child … it is regrettable beyond saying that you four girls experienced so much of it due to decisions we made when you were all so young. I know that the four of us feel this very deeply.