The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Sometimes I think that now Jenny is gone the tragedy is played out. We are all worn out with this impossible story, with the volumes of words we have never been able to say to each other; we just try to get along. We meet most years for two or three days, go together to museums or restaurants, talk about presidential races, or books, or Richard Serra’s serpentine sculptures, and there’s real pleasure in all this. We laugh, even, we grow giddy. If only we could just be these people talking and caring just enough about each other, just be the people we presently are, freed of those ancient nets. But those nets are always there, tangled in our ribs or throats, visible in our eyes each time we remember.

  In Germany recently, when my father and Helen visited, I complained of a scratch in my eye; it wasn’t much, but the eye grew red and watered, so Helen came over to look. We stood in my apartment, by a large mirror, near a revolving bookcase full of Ovid and Aeschylus, the light green and watery on a rainy German day. She held my chin and tilted my face to see. I both looked at her and tried to look away, tried just to show the hurt eye. Whatever was wrong I don’t remember; it was soon gone. What I remember is Helen touching my chin, her eyes looking carefully at mine. I might have held my breath. Then she leaned back, but didn’t step away, and with my chin in her hand kept looking into my eyes. Differently now: quizzical, absorbed.

  My god, she murmured after a moment, your eyes are just beautiful! She seemed surprised, as if she’d never seen them before. She looked more closely. There’s a deep blue ring around the iris, she said, and near the pupil there’s dark ochre, or gold …

  All I could think was: She’s seeing me, she’s seeing the substance that’s actually me, no one else is in the way.

  I didn’t move, barely breathed. Across the room, gazing at us, my father did not move, either. His face seemed peaceful in the cool German light.

  When I’m with Helen and meet people, they say, “Oh, you look just like your mother.” She and I smile and declare that we’re flattered and don’t bother to make the correction.

  When I’m with my mother and meet people, they say, “Oh, you look just like your mother!” And we both smile and say that we’re flattered.

  My mother and Helen don’t look too much alike, yet it’s true I look like both of them. I sometimes imagine that the blood of both women runs in me, as if they were my true and only parents, and it’s from the two of them, their strengths and secrets and beauties and failings, that I’ve been constructed. And often I think, despite all the darkness, what an odd gift to have had two of everything. A sparkling, black, precious possession.

  When I look down at my feet and calves, in nice thonged sandals and with my toenails polished, I see Helen. I especially see her in my calves and feet when I do what I have often done, living in Europe: walk around ruins or galleries, looking. I feel like a lady then, a new Madame Merle, pausing before a painting, pressing a finger to the guidebook.

  When I look at my arms and hands, I see my mother. Stretch out my fingers: There she is. Strong arms, lean, with gold hairs and sunspots, nails blunt. Hands for doing things, cleaning, tearing up a plant. When I get up at six, make coffee, assemble my papers to teach — then quickly water a dry philodendron before running out to catch the bus — I see my mother.

  When all four parents look at me, what they see sooner or later is the absence of Jenny. I look in the mirror and see it, too.

  A friend asked me the other day, “Do you ever feel like your own self?” We were in a loud dining hall having lunch, and the question seemed so indulgent I laughed. An hour later I stood in a bathroom stall staring at a message about personal hygiene, and didn’t know how to pull myself together, and had to go out soon and teach.

  But of course I pulled myself together and went out. Because Jenny was the one ruined, not me.

  Lucretius is the ancient philosopher I’ve always liked most. He sees atoms streaming in straight lines, elementary particles that, endlessly falling, would never bump, never clump or congeal and begin to form objects, but would stream eternal and lifeless in parallel lines. There must be an initial slip, a stir, something that makes one atom swerve into another and send it spinning and crashing, so that the lines become marvelously tangled and life begins. You need entanglements. All the entanglements in this family: the original split, that southern cross; Jenny and me with our toes clenched in the bath; Jenny and me in our twin beds with her words splitting open the darkness; Paul forgetting whose daughter I am; my father looking at me but seeing my mother. All of this formed the tissues that made us.

  Yet when I say this sort of thing to Maggy, she seems baffled, she shrugs. She escaped all of it and made herself otherwise. And so simply. The other day she said, “I just pretended Daddy was a nice uncle.” That was it. She didn’t fix her soul to him, didn’t need a father to shine light through her, to make her visible and live.

  Whatever made those four do what they did I will never know. I can keep puzzling over the stories, sliding the pieces around until maybe one day they’ll lock into place. What I can also do is walk away. Just get up and leave that puzzle behind, go outside into the brilliant light, because Miami Beach is where I live now, alone, and look into the green water at clear, needle-nosed fish, watch an iguana suddenly run across my path, splash into the water, and swim off.

  Recently I saw my friend William and asked him about those nights at Café Lautrec, when Jenny and he charged off to after-hours clubs. He told me a few details about the coke and the girls kissing in corners, but otherwise was confused.

  “Jenny didn’t work at Lautrec,” he said. “You mean Amy.”

  Amy was someone else we knew in those days, also difficult and wild.

  “Of course she did,” I said. “Remember? You’d go there after work, and at first you didn’t know she was my step sister. And then I found out and thought it was funny, and we’d go there together. Remember? That’s how you went to the after-hours clubs. You couldn’t have known her or gone to them otherwise.”

  Still William was confused; he seemed sorrowful. Finally he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t remember Jenny there.”

  I went to Café Lautrec to find someone who might have known Jenny, maybe a manager or the owner — she’d told me, with that gaze into her private sphere, about the wife of the owner demanding she be fired. Lautrec is on Eighteenth Street in Adams Morgan, and as I walked down the street in the hot June sun I was glad to see from a distance the huge mural on the façade, the big man in a red scarf and black hat. But when I reached the building, the windows were boarded, the place empty.

  So I walked farther down Eighteenth Street, past her father’s old apartment, where she’d stood in his bathroom in a haze of hair spray and smoke, smiling at me and herself in the mirror, wild to go. Her father had moved years earlier to a big house in Upper Northwest, near Deal. I kept walking down to George Washington Hospital to see again where Jenny had once been, up in the psychiatric ward. I just wanted to see it, some vaporous trace of her. But when I got to Washington Circle, there was a huge hole in the ground, the building razed. I looked stupidly up into the hazy air to where the sixth floor might have been, and pictured her up there still, sauntering down the shining hallway, flicking her bandaged wrist and bracelet as she blew kisses to the lunatics. With nothing but sky it was easy to squint and see her forever wandering, up there in a cube of air.

  I kept walking, down to the Museum of Natural History. In the great dim hall where the blue whale hung from the ceiling, Jenny had stretched up her hands, claiming that whale, longing to be something larger than her own longing self.

  But in the museum now hung no blue whale. I looked in the ocean room and the mammal room, among all the milling, chattering children, but found no suspended whale. When I asked a woman at the information desk, she said, “Oh, no, that whale’s been gone a very long time. It wasn’t even accurate.”

  Jenny wandering up on the sixth floor in the air, transformed to light and shad
ow. Like one of Ovid’s girls who’d been raped and humiliated and turned into a bear but then, as a grace, altered once more, now to a constellation. Helen has done something you can do these days: designated a star to be Jenny’s.

  Maybe making a self is like writing. You start with nothing inside skin, or an empty white page. Out of this you conjure one frail figure, one living strand after another. Most strands are feeble and give way at a tug. But slowly some grow stronger, not watery and smudged to nothing between the fingers, but firm. Bit by bit this goes on. With luck what’s in you is content there, and by content I mean contained: The flesh itself and the consciousness infusing it are not alien to each other but mutually owned. No one part, a hand governed by despair, slices open a wrist with a knife; no one part, a denying brain, just flees, leaving a soft, staggering body among strangers at night.

  Making a self can be like writing, and now I think writing can be like home: a space you make that you dwell in and roam through for hours every day, a space that’s absolutely yours.

  And now that Jenny’s gone the story seems over, and I can finally write it out.

  I think of Jenny in her grave in the cliff outside Sydney. Then I see the other narrow spaces she’d been, where she and I had been fixed together: my extra twin bed on Barnaby Street, where the springs sighed on our birthday night when she came home alone. Or her twin bed in the pink room on Fifth Avenue, where she raised a foot in the darkness and split the night with her question. And that bathtub in Canberra at the start of our lives, when we looked at each other over the suds and pressed each other’s wet pink feet, while my mother stood in the doorway and turned to see my father embrace Jenny’s mother, and our story began.

  The other day I saw in a dream the seal of Australia, the emu and kangaroo. It lay on a stone floor, cast as a shadow or as colored light through stained glass. When I saw the image, tremulous on stone, I felt rise from nothing that compounded sense of my father and home — again, that obscure pain for the lost man and lost place those seven, nine years when that ache lodged in my ribs. It’s odd to think of excavating yourself and finding inside the things that were lost. Odder still to be tugged by these things, although they live only inside you.

  I suppose it’s the same, this yearning for love and home, for a place where we dwell at the center. Sometimes I think that memory, pain, and love all arose from the same quiet pool in the body: longing.