The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Paul has told me about “the big black guy” who lived in his building near Dupont Circle, and he’s speculated that it was this man who got Jenny hooked. He mentions this big black guy and leans back on his sofa with a scotch and squints, as if replaying those days, trying to pick one, to find the beginning of the ruin of his daughter. Helen said that Jenny’s problem began with amphetamines during exams in college. I remember a night at the beach on Cape Cod, when we four girls went to a bonfire and drank beer for maybe the first time. Maggy and Patricia drank more than Jenny and I, so when we got home and found Daddy and Helen up waiting, those two rushed upstairs while Jenny and I strode forward, blithe and brash and glowing. Of course they smelled it. And the next day gave us a talking-to: We might think we were just sipping beers now, said Helen, but beer led to marijuana, and marijuana led to heroin. I stared at her in terror, but at the same time heard a little voice say, She’s crazy. Yet she would probably say that what she saw in the bonfire came true. Beer by the bonfire and that big black man: things that could carry you off.

  I try to imagine that lustful moment on the edge, that moment when you could dive in, go under, lose consciousness. Or you could not; you could turn from that alluring blackness and step back into the ordinary world with its ticking clocks and the body you’ll be trapped in until you die. And even if it’s a fine body, healthy and lovely and lithe and smart, still it’s you, and for that you hate it, you hate the mind that circles inside like a rat. You can just plunge out and be gone from yourself.

  Jenny had climbed deep into caves, she’d owned a car for a day before crashing it, she’d gone diving so she could swim near sharks. That day in Sydney, thirteen years before she died, as we stood on a cliff and gazed at the Pacific, she told me about diving. She told me that off the coast of New South Wales she’d swum out to the nets that are placed there to keep sharks away. She told me that she saw plenty of sharks caught in the nets down there, dead sharks, eyes empty, long gray bodies swaying cold in the dark.

  “But listen, Jane,” she said. “The thing is —” and this was the point of her story, the part she’d been waiting to tell, like her father, loving the jolt of terror “— the thing is, Jane, the sharks I saw weren’t trapped coming in. They’d been trapped as they tried to swim out.”

  Jenny probably never found an answer to the question she asked that night in New York. I’ve never found it. There isn’t one, just the stories our four parents might tell or the glimpses they’d give, stories that are each true enough. And if we had learned a single true story, would it have made a difference? The answer didn’t matter; the question should never have mattered so much.

  I’ve thought about asking my four parents what happened in 1965. They will not welcome this book, and I could not ask for their stories without saying why, and I think this would only make their stories more stiff, more formal: a filtering gate, held up against me. But there’s no point speculating how they would fashion their stories, as I can’t ask. It would be stealing, asking to have something not mine, whereas what I remember and think is my own.

  The subject almost, but not quite, came up recently with my father. I was driving with him and Maggy’s little girl, Cate, along a hilly road among weird geological formations and outlet stores in an industrial part of Italy, where my father had bought a farmhouse upon retiring. Somewhere among these eruptions of stone was supposed to be a stripe of the fabled mineral released by a comet that had extinguished the dinosaurs, and I was leaning out the window trying to see it in the jagged stones. Cate was carsick in the back seat, as truck fumes swirled in and we swung around curves and rattled over hills, so after a while we put her in the front seat to keep her from throwing up, and I climbed into the back. As she moaned and shut her eyes and pressed her hands to her forehead, I talked to distract her and hit on the topic of childhood injuries. That got her attention.

  What was the worst thing that had ever happened to her? Broken finger? Black eye? Really bad cut?

  She sat up and began bouncing in her seat, telling stories about dog bites and fingers jammed in doors. Then I told her about when Maggy was six and I was three, and one evening we were running around wild in slippery new Mary Janes, and Maggy skidded and hit her head on the corner of a stair. She screamed, there was blood all over the floor, she got a butterfly bandage. Cate knew this story and liked hearing it again, legend, twisting around and gazing back at me with her big opal eyes.

  My father glanced up in the rearview mirror. “I don’t remember that,” he said. “Quite sure?”

  Yes, I was sure. He squinted to remember, shook his head. “But I just don’t recall it. In Washington?”

  Yes, I said. In 1965.

  Surely he’d recall it, he said, if it had happened. Surely I was much too young then to remember anything. I must have gotten it wrong or made it up. But I had the staircase and banister right, and how slippery the floor was beneath our new shoes, and the butterfly bandage Maggy wore on her forehead, and Cate nodded violently to affirm the scar, so finally he admitted he just couldn’t recall; perhaps he’d been out that evening. He glanced at me again, though, looking troubled, and his eyes went back to the hot winding road.

  We were on our way to swim at the house of a friend of his, another Australian who’d landed in Italy. The topic that afternoon got to cigarettes and how much everyone missed the little elegances of smoke, and I described my father’s orange cigarette drawings in the dark when I was four. Again he squinted at me, straining to see what I meant.

  “But I just don’t remember ever coming in with a cigarette!” he cried. And why should he, why would anyone, it would be like remembering brushing your teeth. But as I got up to swim, I suddenly wondered, and maybe he did, too: Had it even been him? Or was it not my father but Paul who’d drawn those glowing pictures in the dark all those years ago?

  As we drove home, he caught my eye again in the rearview mirror, smiled quickly, and said, “So do you remember much else from Australia then?” He seemed good humored, just curious, but there was something in his voice and eyes — something that seemed concerned with collecting whatever he’d left behind inadvertently and would like safely back in his pocket.

  “Hmm?” he said. “Remember much else from those days?”

  I shrugged. “Sure,” I said, but didn’t go on, partly because I liked seeing him troubled, but partly because it would be too much, make me too weak, to reveal all I’d hoarded. The rock where I’d wait for him to come home, or the mark on my foot in the shape of Australia I’ve always believed I got when I tripped on a stone, running home when he called me to dinner.

  His glance darted once or twice between the road and me, but he and I are both mulish enough that after just one more hopeful “Hmm?” he didn’t ask again. And I wondered what images might still be burning in the darkness behind his eyes, what, after forty years, still flashed inside him, let out on his blackout nights, the black itself streaming like light.

  Because my mother is the one I know best, I’ve heard more of her story than the others’, and I’ve worried that this isn’t fair, that I must learn their versions, too. But then I think, No. They’ve had forty years to speak up. In fact my mother hasn’t told much at all, as if it were a dream, and she still can scarcely believe that it happened. She does have a few fixed memories and has told me these in such a way that I’ve absorbed them and know that no matter how I try to see through them, they’ve colored my vision. She says, “Oh, the others did it first.” She crosses her arms and is certain. But she doesn’t seem really to know it, to have proof; she only believes it, just as I wanted to believe the opposite. Because I’m closest to her, I try hardest to look into the gaps of what she says to find a darker version of her, one closer to how she might have been seen by the others.

  She has embedded in her mind the phrases that signaled the end of her marriages: Helen’s overheard, There’s a man at this party, and his name is Edward Cummins, and he’s mine, so hands off. Six years later
in South America, the ambassador telling her, Higamous, hogamous, woman’s monogamous. Hogamous, higamous, man is polygamous. I picture her hearing these words amid music and clamor, leggy and glamorous and a little drunk, and upon hearing them become that much more abandoned, fling out a hand, let an internal door fly open so that she could do whatever the bloody hell she wanted because they were, after all. Each time she’s recounted these moments, though — thirty and forty years since the events — there’s been a pause when she gazes away into the trees, the night sky, and in her face are hurt and bewilderment.

  She’s said many times that she and my father really did love each other, that it wasn’t all bad. The nastiest thing she ever told me was something ugly my father apparently said one of those dark nights in the little Canberra house. This was in the kitchen where she vamped for Paul in her yellow swimsuit. Yet the interesting part of this detail isn’t the ugliness of what she says my father said but what she revealed of herself in telling it: She stressed the littleness of the house in Canberra, its littleness having disappointed her, the Stuarts’ house being far more grand. This was a new angle on the story. It altered the equation I’d worked out, that Helen had gone toward the safer man, and the one more likely to succeed. Another item to file with this: My mother had met Paul, with my father, in Washington, before even returning to Canberra.

  The hardest thing she told me is this: My father said either she must file for divorce or he would, because he wanted that woman. There it all is in that raw verb want: to be wanted, or not to be wanted, the only measure of value. Just being is not enough — and not even an option, because you can’t isolate yourself from the wretched human economics of desire and desirability, the currents of value and valuation that forever stream between bodies and eyes. Lucretius, like Epicurus, said: Eliminate your wants, and you will eliminate the pain of not getting. Epicureanism is not about pleasure but about avoiding pain. Want nothing, and you will not suffer; plug up the leaky jar. But you cannot plug up the jar and still live. You have no choice but to be porous and leak, to want and love, and need to be wanted and loved, and I have to keep learning this again and again, and it is painful every time.

  The last thing she has told me: One night when we were all at the Stuarts’, she’d been giving Jenny and me our bath. She stood from sudsing us in the water, stepped to the door, and saw, in the dimness of the next room, my father and Helen embrace.

  Paul has told me nothing about those days. He’ll make a remark like, Helen’s whole family is crazy. They’re nuts! and break into that gunshot laugh. Perhaps something can be divined from these words, I don’t know. He did tell my mother a few details, and she passed these on to me — so technically, I suppose, they belong to her account and not his.

  He has said: In Peru, Helen walked into the sea one day and swam out. Straight out into the Pacific. I picture him standing on the shore, fists at hips, squinting, and damned if he knows what’s the matter with her, tightening his heart against whatever he felt as her blond head, her young arms, slashed away from him into the sea.

  And he has said to my mother: Of course the other two were at it first. At the beach, near Canberra, where both young families went for a weekend. He told my mother the others started then. For proof he cites that utterly ambiguous phrase they’d whispered: Screw your courage to the sticking point.

  He has said nothing else. He has let nothing slip. Because he’s not like my father, never alters no matter how much scotch he’s drunk, never misses a curve.

  There are some cracks in him, though. On one of his visits to Germany, Alex and I drove him through Alsace. It was a bright day, and Paul sat in the passenger seat, I sat in the back, the car speeding smoothly along the ribboning road, the wind whipping past; it could have been Australia again. I mentioned something about my Aunt Joan, my mother’s sister, whom Alex and I had just run into by chance in a train station.

  I’m trying to remember, Paul said, which one of your mother’s sisters that is. She’s got so many goddamned sisters. I remember Marilyn and some of the others, but I just can’t remember which one is Joan. And they’re all crazy, he said, turning to me with that collusive smile.

  I made some joke to cover his mistake. Because Marilyn is not my mother’s sister, but Helen’s. He’d forgotten which of the two women I belonged to.

  About Helen he has said: Now there’s a woman who’s never lost her looks. And: She was always a terrific cook, just terrific. There’s not much to go on, but from the little there is, I see a man who lost a woman he did not want to lose. His marriage with my mother, I think, passed in a blur.

  He is a man who has fed and petted a neighborhood cat for years, his eyes as he strokes this tattered animal the same tender soft eyes as when he once held my hand. On one of his last visits to Germany, we climbed the spiraling dark steps of an old fortress tower, inside, dark and cold. I had gone first and, as I came to the light at the top, I looked back over my shoulder; in the shadows behind me, Paul climbed the steps on hands and knees. I looked away fast. But a moment later, when he strode into the light, he was tall again, Paul, and regarded the city and the Black Forest, all stretched out before him.

  Helen has said little to me, either. Just: Don’t you see? I had to get my girls away from their father.

  I romanticize Paul, as my mother said, and one of my favorite fabrications is this: He was CIA, not regular Foreign Service, and brought down a South American government or two. Helen hadn’t known this when she married him, but perhaps she found out in Peru. Frightened and angry, maybe she threw her towel on the shore and ran into the water, began to swim out … But finally stopped, gasping, regained her breath, treaded water, thought for a time, and swam in. And soon, in Canberra, she met a more suitable man. Not only suitable but unhappy.

  This is pure fantasy. But it suits me and seems to work.

  Of course she had to get her girls away from their father if she thought he was dangerous.

  But was that man truly dangerous? Were both? Or was neither? Was neither worth any of this at all?

  My mother’s story and my father’s, Helen’s story and Paul’s, have moved ever farther apart over the decades, like specimens of a single plant transported by splitting, drifting continents, slowly evolving different stems and leaves. One thing I know is that however the split happened, it had to. Those four did what they needed to do, as I would do now myself. Who wouldn’t shake off a shadow if he could? Trade in a trapping life for a new one? Especially if it seemed that everything was even, that no one would be hurt.

  Now and then I decide to love my father easily, to push my way through all the asphyxiating clutter. It’s a relief, it’s like that gate in the Residence hallway sliding open, and I can just flow through it and love him. But when he actually stands before me, I can’t do it. The gate slams shut inside me, and I can’t afford to love him or tell him or give him a thing.

  A friend of Nicholas’s once said, when I was visiting my father, “You haven’t any idea what it was like before you arrived. They don’t put out the special silverware and plates for Nick and the others. That’s all just for you.”

  I’d seen only the presentation, impressing and dazzling and making me think blackly of our chipped plates at home. But now, another glimpse through the mirror: Maybe before all those visits, my father had moved through the apartment or Residence making sure the dishes were turned to show the gold Australian seal, fresh lilies stood in vases, silk pillows were plumped. Maybe he had moved about humming. But maybe Helen had been the one to do most plumping and arranging, and maybe the girls had been told to clean their rooms, clean up their acts, for Daddy’s real daughters. And maybe once the place was readied and Maggy and I walked in, so much bitterness burned in the air that my father would have to tamp his pleasure, having shown such favoritism before we’d even arrived.

  I’ve seen this man sometimes. Fussy and jolly as we cook dinner, he waves me from the cutting board, he throws up his hands in despair at how I
chop garlic or spin the greens, he shakes rivers of salt into the pasta water and brushes my worries away with mock impatience — but all he wants, maybe, is to show how well he can make lemon pasta; maybe what he wants amid all the teasing and mocking is to please me.

  My father has praised my books and said that he’s proud of me. I like the praise. But when he says he’s proud, when he says this now, I can’t help it: I grow bitter that he thinks he has a right to be proud. He wants, now, to help me buy a house, as he’s helped the others. But it’s too late: I can’t let him own anything about me. I don’t know what he can now do. I cannot be pleased.

  _______

  When we’re apart it’s easier, and we are apart all but three or four days a year. We send each other a card or message every few months, short, simple things that try. I send him a drawing I think he’ll like; he sends me postcards of paintings or places he knows I like. The Tomb of the Diver, Friedrich’s dark moons, palm trees far north in Scotland.

  In the past few years he’s acquired a tic: Each time we’ve spoken on the phone — perhaps once a year — and are about to sign off, or each time we’ve visited and are about to part, he says, “Love you lots!” I don’t know what to do when he says this. It’s not I love you; it’s not a phrase that demands I say anything back. So I don’t. Or I’ll say, “Give my love to Helen!” or something that seems suitable without going too far, without actually saying I love you, too. It’s like writing Love at the end of a letter, a formality that doesn’t mean much; there isn’t even a pronoun, a subject.

  But the phrase does mean something. Surely he is saying something. And he is doing it just as you do in a letter, that gesture that tries to hold on as you’re about to fall away into the huge world again. With all my love! Lovingly! … Give my kind love to Papa. The moment itself is always awkward: I make my inadequate answer and hang up or get in a car and drive off, or he’s the one to drive off. And it’s then that the ripping starts again, that he’s leaving all over again, disappearing invisible into the world once more, and once again I do not have him.