The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  The splitting had happened in less than nine months. But posts are limited, and Paul’s in Canberra was about to end, taking him and his family back over the Pacific. Surely the four had needed to move quickly. Their ability to imagine a new world and step into it dazzles me; they were just thirty-one, thirty-two. And how to resist the miraculous neatness? No one would be left out.

  But surely everyone was stunned. The adults, for having done something so astonishing so fast — in those years divorce wasn’t common, and these divorces were entwined with the men’s professional lives and their roles representing countries. And the four girls were stunned, but the way children are: a quiet, numb shock, like a crack in a stone, not enough to split it but inside, silently fissuring.

  2

  This time we crossed the Pacific by plane, at night, as if in stealth, and as if already the world had grown cold and new, the romantic day of ocean liners gone. Paul had flown earlier and shipped some of our things — dishes, wicker, batik spreads — but until we followed him it apparently wasn’t certain that he and my mother would proceed. He talked to her on the phone from Washington and told her she should wait. But she didn’t want to wait. She and my father had already divorced, and what could she do now? She applied for a new passport for the three of us, as we could no longer use what we’d had with my father. In this passport we’re still called Cummins, and in the group photo my mother’s head is tilted, eyes heavily lidded. Maggy stands beside her, alert and troubled, mouth soft. I sit on my mother’s lap with her Bellini hand clasping my stomach and grin like a monkey, clueless.

  We flew back over our ocean path from Sydney to Honolulu and landed in Los Angeles, where Paul’s mother took us to stay in her white bungalow. She and my mother hadn’t met, so this surely was awkward — this brand-new woman, not even a wife, and her unknown daughters — all such sudden replacements. My mother called Paul in Washington and insisted he fly out, which he did, but when the two went to dinner they fought, my mother says, and she walked home alone. (Why did they fight? “Oh, just because I went to the French ball after he’d left Canberra. With friends, mutual friends of ours.”) Not a good start to this new world. But we were there, and how would she support two daughters alone? We flew on to Washington and rented a stone house on Connecticut Avenue, a cold, drafty, leaky house with spiders in the corners, and tried to start new.

  Over the next seven years, each couple would establish itself, and each girl would take form. We would live in Washington for three years, first in the uneasy stone house and then a brick one; we’d move to Los Angeles while Paul got a second degree; we’d go on foreign post in South America. My father and his new family would have postings in Asia and the Middle East, so the two families were always on opposite sides of the globe, once a neat 180° apart.

  Maggy and Patricia were seven when this new era began, young, but maybe formed enough to have their own soft shapes already, a thin bark. Jenny and I were five and four, just starting, and over those eerie, detached years I think we formed ourselves around the primary facts of the split. I picture cells dividing and subdividing and see us each looking out from within a thin membrane, gathering knowledge and hoarding it, acquiring longings and manners and peculiarities that would become our personal traits. Hurrying this stuff inside, then pushing out layer upon layer of gelatinous skin to keep all of it safe, to keep other things out. Like an oyster wrapping nacreous film around grit, like a tree forming rings of tissue.

  When I’d pulled papery strips from the eucalypt by our house in Canberra, it didn’t bother the tree. Beneath the bark lay cool blue-white beluga skin, and if you pressed your cheek against it, its tension told you it was alive. In Washington the oaks didn’t have smooth skin but ridged crocodile bark that could make your knuckles bleed. But jam a rock into the bark or reach up and snap a green twig, and it bled, too.

  In a Miami garden I once saw a slim tropical tree into which someone had stabbed a spade when it was young. The sapling hadn’t been mortally hurt, though, it had kept growing, layering tissues and xylem and phloem around the blade, so that the tree’s smooth flesh had closed around the spade at its knees, until only the wooden handle showed. I was in my twenties when I saw this, and it reminded me of paintings of saints: a woman standing, head bowed and serene, with the sword that had killed her mortal self piercing her ribs; another with the ax that had severed her head from her trunk lodged lovingly in her neck, rimmed with a demure line of blood. Saints and their attributes, a complicated symbiosis, the saints held forever in the moment that cleaved them from mortal life and gave them life eternal. The saints don’t actually caress the sword, ax, or rock, just live with it deeply. That’s what the Coconut Grove tree looked like, with its flesh enveloping the spade. It needed that spade now; you could not draw it out. It’s how I grew up, and how I imagine Jenny did, too, with our parents’ split at our core, our tissues growing around it, around the fact that we’d each been replaced.

  I wonder sometimes how our lives would have been if the conditions had been more enlightened or less international: if instead of oceans and half a globe between us, there’d been only a park and a few streets, so we could see our counterparts on weekends, and they hadn’t become so fantastic. Or if those four parents had been more modern, versed in psychology, and, worrying about the effects of this rearrangement, had made enormous efforts to heal the little rips.

  As I write this, though, I know I prefer how it was done. I like the austerity, the extremity. It gave us, or I know it gave me, a secret, black, precious possession, like when you split open a geode and find the sharp crystals inside. For seven years we may have seemed like ordinary girls kicking balls and learning to write and getting our hair cut and skinning our shins. But inside was crystallizing a mass of fantasy, jealousy, and longing that was crucial and would define us.

  These things happen: A father vanishes overnight and turns into paper. Another man appears, his face rough and smelling of cigarettes and scotch when we kiss him, but he’s not ours, this is understood, he belongs to a pair of girls somewhere else. Our own identity — as fixed by name, father, nationality — is as curiously cloudy as the cigarette smoke that drifts around him when he sits on the sofa or drives fast through Rock Creek Park. And this problem of identity begins to fix on the facts not only that our own father has left us, but that we each have a double, a girl we cannot see but this new nonfather sees each time he looks at us. He sees through our eyes straight to her.

  Paul had a sixties style, dark hair, Beatle boots. He was tall, walked with a swagger, and had eyes so dark they seemed almost without pupils, and a mouth that in pictures looks as soft as Paul McCartney’s, but wasn’t. He parted his thin hair to the side, and even then it receded from his forehead, which was tanned from tennis and lined from raising his brows in disbelief, from not giving a good goddamn about something as insignificant as the sun. He smoked and drank steadily but never seemed to alter; his own father had left when he was a boy; he believed in picking yourself up by the bootstraps. He had a fast, gunshot laugh.

  Brought from his first life and now in that leaky Connecticut Avenue house: a low-slung black leather Mies van der Rohe chair; a tough leather table from Peru; a carved whale’s tooth, cold and heavy in my hands, with a gleaming dark mother-of-pearl where the tooth had been rooted in the whale’s jaw. Also the double bed he had shared with Helen, where he now slept with my mother, and that would later be given to me. Paul drove an old smoke-gray Jaguar and had a large framed photograph of a snarling tiger taken so close you could see each strand of fur, the gleam of saliva on its fangs, the black pupils in its wild green eyes. At dinner I’d stare into those mad, slanting eyes, and this tiger, the Jaguar, the leather chair and table, the whale’s tooth: All these things configured Paul. This jungle would grow when we moved to his mother’s house in L.A. and then on to South America: the saber-toothed tiger trapped in the tar pit, its kin who ranged over the isthmus of Panama and killed off the old, gentle sloths, the
wild German shepherd Paul got to protect us but whose nails left bloody lines in our legs — and the sharks, all the gray sharks I have never in life seen but that glide every month through my dreams.

  I don’t remember thinking about Paul when we first moved into that cold stone house, just being conscious of him as a large living fact, a figure whose dark form took up space. And not just his form but his low voice, his whistle, the smoke gusting from his nose. I sat in that windy living room, staring out at cars and buses and worrying to the point of panic about not being able not to think, about the fact that there was always something in my head, like choking: numbers, pictures, words, even if they were just Don’t think don’t think don’t think. So I had room in there for thinking. Just not about a man like Paul, or about the shock of what had happened.

  He went downtown each day to the State Department, and Maggy and I walked down Connecticut to Murch Elementary, Maggy to second grade and me to kindergarten. We still called ourselves Cummins, we still were Australian, we still had bright little Aussie accents. Cars and buses rushed down the wrong side of the street, and it was autumn when in Canberra it had been spring; the world felt mirrored, unreal. There was a spell that first year when in bed at night I’d watch lights careen through my window, dance up the wall to the ceiling, then race down the other wall whenever a car passed. I’d stare at them without blinking, stare at one dancing cluster of lights after another, and try to be hypnotized. But at a certain moment I’d begin to tremble, then cry, then shake with sobs, pillow jammed in my face until it was slimy. I’d turn it over and go to sleep and every night dream the same dream: of flying back to my father. Through the airplane’s window I’d peer through Canberra’s marbled clouds and see him tiny and far on the tarmac. His figure would grow as the plane descended, until we landed, the hatch swung open, and I jumped into his arms and clung like a monkey, at which point the dream stopped, because what on earth could happen next?

  After this came a time when it seemed I was never awake but suspended, dreaming, in ice or glass. A sense of being off-kilter: Home, the real center, was far away, and the feel of hovering at an edge was sickening. I did what people said to do, pinched my arm hard, but a pinch in a dream felt like a real one, so there didn’t seem to be any point.

  How do you make your self home? Are people your home? Does loving or needing someone make him home for you? A feeling that’s gravitational: Wherever he is, is home. The one toward whom you helplessly gravitate and near whom you feel settled, that painful yearning dissolved. When you’re a child, surely your parents are home. Fathers and fatherlands, the sun. A basic sense of orientation, of knowing where the sun is.

  My father stayed in Canberra for some months after we left, and then he was posted in Asia. By then both divorces were settled, and Helen and my father married, as did my mother and Paul, as if the split had blasted apart stones and fused the pieces, making metamorphic families.

  Over the next years letters flew between Paul and his girls and between Daddy and us; letters even between us and the girls, although I forgot about these until finding them years later in a box in my mother’s basement. First, when I was too young to write, I drew my father pictures: little girls in long bright dresses, small boys falling from trees. My mother wrote for me once, but apparently it was made clear that a letter in her hand was unwelcome; only the men, of the four adults, were to communicate. Maggy and I didn’t talk to our father on the phone those seven years, and I do not know why: because it was expensive and no one made such calls in those days, or no one thought of it, or maybe because a live line between the two households seemed dangerous, fire.

  Our father wrote us together, Dear Maggy and Jane, Maggy first presumably because she was older, and it must have been hard for him to decide what to say. He described exotic places, local customs and shows. Some of the riders looked like the Saracens who fought against the Crusaders (have you read about them?) with turbans and cloaks that streamed behind them when the horses galloped … He made observations about the time of year and what we might be up to: I suppose you’ve had lots of snow and fun with your sled and snow saucer. Is that what it’s called? The other girls are always present: I know how quickly Patricia and Jenny are changing now and I expect you are too … The next birthdays are yours Jane and Jenny’s too on the same day. He signed with variations of I think of you often and love you. Your Father. Below this he’d print a double row of X’s: at first five X’s, until after a few letters he settled on three but matched it with a double row of three O’s. A birthday card to just one of us would have a single row of X’s and O’s.

  He sent presents for birthdays and Christmas, fabulous things from Asia that would appear in the front hall wrapped in battered brown paper and smelling dry and foreign. Inside: a little leather pouch containing tiny ivory tigers and birds; an intricately wrought silver elephant that looked seamless but split neatly apart in your hands; a fine silver pin in the shape of a peacock with tiny whorling filigree feathers; a heavy wooden jewelry box to put the peacock in, one box for Maggy, one for me. The wood was dark and glossy, as dense as gold, and inlaid with brass scrolls and arabesques that on the curved lid surrounded our names, Margaret, Jane. The box opened with a small brass key, and inside sat a shelf trimmed in red velvet, which you could lift to reveal a lower, secret layer. I carried this heavy treasure, the silver peacock, and the plump silver elephant to Show and Tell, then installed them on my dresser. They were proof, proof that was splendid but hurt.

  The letters often came the same day: one for Paul, one for us, nothing for my mother. Paul would take the letter from his girls and read it in private with a scotch; Maggy and I read ours from our father together in one of our bedrooms. We called our father Daddy in our letters but didn’t say the word much. The girls also called our father Daddy, while their own father they called Father. We called their father Paul. The girls were called the girls, or Paul’s girls, his real girls.

  _______

  The parallels between the two families were so neat we seemed as designed as nature, twinned markings on the wings of a moth. My father’s birthday came about a week before Paul’s, so Maggy and I wrote cards for both men together. My mother’s birthday fell two weeks before Helen’s; Jenny’s birthday was the same as my own. In April 1968, two years after the split, my father and Helen had a baby boy, and four days later, so did my mother and Paul. Nicholas and Tommy: two babies that consolidated the new marriages and knotted us tighter. Tommy bound Maggy and me by blood to Paul and the girls, and bound the girls to our mother; Nicholas bound us even more to the girls as well as to Helen, and bound the girls to Daddy. Like paper dolls all holding hands.

  Something else we shared with the girls: grandparents. What the old people thought of the rearrangement I don’t know; they seemed to accept it, stalwart. The girls’ grandmother was Elsie, a petite woman with a face like an elderly movie star, a smoker’s dry voice, long thin fingers, a husky laugh, and a very old cat named Shadow, who could open the kitchen door. Her manner was gentle, and when we told her something she enjoyed she’d open her eyes wide and say, “Oh, my-y-y,” then shake lightly with a papery laugh. If she resented that we’d displaced her real granddaughters, she never let Maggy and me know. Every birthday and Christmas she’d send a card and check for $10, and during the year we lived in her house in L.A., she never let us think we were anything but her own. How did those girls feel, knowing we were in their grandmother’s house, leaning against her knee, getting her birthday checks, earning her laughter?

  Probably how we felt knowing they now had our Maisie and Albert. Our grandparents had begun writing us at once after the split, sweet, passionate letters that began Darling Janie, My dearest Janie, Oh! Janie! They’d each write a part, and Maisie would sign, all my love — lovingly! and beneath that squeeze as many X’s and O’s as could fit in the last sliver of paper, wild squashed X’s that turned corners and jammed into words, like she was kissing you all over your face.

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bsp; Albert and Maisie traveled to Asia and sent us cheery postcards reporting their adventures with rickshaws and spices and giving news of our father, without mentioning those other girls in his house; they must have known children can get sick with jealousy. When we read these postcards, we’d never have imagined them with those girls, not realized our grandparents had made the trip in order to meet and start loving them. But at the same time our father wrote that he and Helen looked forward to having his parents stay with the girls, while he and she got away on their own, and reading this letter even now I’m jealous. My mother tells me that Albert wrote her, too, saying they’d met their new daughter-in-law and liked her very much: how this had stung. I can’t but wonder if they were instructed to do this, if those two old people sat at the kitchen table in their bluestone villa in South Australia pondering the matter, wading anxiously in the ocean of difficult protocol into which they’d suddenly been cast. Marriage, Albert wrote me years later in his watery blue hand, is meant to last a lifetime.

  The absent presence of the other family was never mentioned but always felt, a sense of otherness elsewhere to which we were bound. The sun wasn’t over us just now because it was over them. Or a sense of all of us holding our breath, and maybe the arrangement might work. It had to: Everything was fair and right, because everything was even. It was fair that there was a Jenny somewhere who had my birthday and father and grandparents and half brothers, because, after all, I had hers. The letters she sent me, which I found recently in a plastic pouch labeled Friends, tell of horses, judo lessons, swim meets, new clothes. Her writing is pretty and plump, with little hearts for O’s, and she signs off I love you and miss you very much! I expect I wrote the same things to her and signed off that way, too.