The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  It seems strange, though, when we could hardly remember each other, and impossible that we could miss each other when we’d parted ways at four and five and the circumstances were rough. Even more unlikely when I think of how it would be when we’d meet again: how we’d look at each other in Jenny’s pink bedroom and see only the girl who’d taken everything. So I wonder how these letters began, whose idea they were. No one on our side seemed up to that sort of decorum. Maybe the wish was to turn us into friendly pen pals, little paired animals of a zoo or an ark, cheery written proof that the enterprise was working. Surely the hope, anyway, was that the arrangement would be fine, that the four adults could brush hands clean and smile and shake and say, “See, then, no harm done!”

  I went to first grade, then second; we moved to a house on Barnaby Street, where we’d return when I was eleven and where most of my dreams are still staged. A half-timbered brick house, fairy-tale, gothic, giant oaks along the sidewalk, shaggy firs at either side, a concrete path leading through grass limp and silky as hair. Pink azaleas grew beneath the front windows among tangled ivy, ferns, and fat silver slugs; daddy longlegs waited on the front steps and trash cans, waited to run up your legs and arms.

  By the time we reached Barnaby my father was a shadow, a function of light or thought; he was gone. The fabulous gifts he sent were solid, but you could look at them and hold them and nothing would happen, there was no secret message in the velvet lining of the jewelry box or in the belly of the silver elephant, no matter how you poked and shook them. He was not even a voice. And neither were we: invisible and silent. We could send nothing but paper to make him see us, nothing but letters, pictures, gold stars stuck on school-work. We’d hurl this stuff halfway around the world, but it was dead by the time it reached him.

  And his blue-ink words were dead on the page by the time he folded each letter and slid it into an envelope, sealed it, addressed it, licked the stamps and placed them on the corner, slipped the envelope in his breast pocket, took it with him in the car to the Australian Embassy, and mailed it, and it flew over the Pacific and the Rockies and the Mississippi River until it reached Washington, then fell through the brass slot in the heavy oak door and was picked up by my mother and looked at a moment, then propped smartly for us against an Indonesian figurine on the orange chest. By the time Maggy and I had slit open the envelope and read the letter, his words were dead. And no matter how much you looked at them, they only said what they said, sentences about Nicholas and the heat and always Patricia and Jenny, something missing even though he seemed fond. A phantom limb, not there but aching.

  Whereas Paul was actually there. He would stride from the Jaguar, eyes straight ahead as he moved fast up the sidewalk, whistling low. He’d come through the screen door and stand there, regard the state of the house. Sometimes he’d keep whistling in the kitchen as he fixed a drink — he whistled with arabesques like smoke — and if so, that was lucky. He’d tell jokes that night, horror stories. In the living room with a scotch, or at dinner, he’d imitate a shark to terrify us. His pupilless eyes were utterly focused, and even his nose tilted up like a shark’s. He’d stare dead ahead and pull down his mouth until he looked vacant, a monster, and glide and suddenly lunge, twist his head, and rip. But it was funny, a terrifying sort of funny. In a low, conspiratorial voice he told us about a boy attacked by a shark in the San Francisco Bay as he swam with his girlfriend, and how first the shark ripped off the boy’s left leg, then his right, then his left arm, then his right, and his girlfriend clutched him under the chin and kept swimming to shore — until finally when she reached the sand, all she held was the boy’s bleeding head.

  He told stories about the Abominable Snowman, his face shuddering and eyes bulging as he simply said the name, or about a man with a hook instead of a hand, or about the hand itself that had been cut off but could still move, alive. Paul would lay his own hand on the table and drop a napkin over his wrist to isolate it, then jerk his fingers in little spasms, and stare down at them, horrified, and I’d get carried away and scream. Then he’d laugh and return the napkin to his lap and keep eating. He’d go back to the original subject, Humphrey or Nixon or some jackass in the department, but then in a pause, as he chewed, he might notice us still sitting there and get back to the shark.

  “So do you know what to do,” he might say, dead serious, “if you see a shark coming your way? If you’re out in the water, swimming way the hell out there, and you see a big fin gliding your way?” He’d wait for an answer, brows high, expectant.

  I had no idea. I didn’t even like having my legs under the table.

  “No? Well, I’ll tell you.” He’d put down his knife and fork, lean forward, lower his voice. “Here’s what you do. You wait until that big fin is almost there, wait until he’s just about got you. Keep an eye on him, though. You don’t want a mistake. Then at the last minute, at the very last minute — you twist around fast and grab his fin,” and he twisted and grabbed in his chair to demonstrate, his eyes squinting across the sea.

  “Then what?”

  “You ride!”

  “But then what?”

  He shrugged. Who cared? The best part was over.

  This was good humor. Otherwise, when he came in the door, after he’d gone to the kitchen and tossed a few ice cubes into a glass and poured a good inch of scotch, he’d return to the living room, jiggling his glass, and position himself on the sofa. He’d snap open the paper or switch on the news or read one of the letters from his girls, the real girls, and if you happened to come near or make a noise, he’d stop and stare as if he had no idea who the hell you were or what the hell you were doing there. If you said nothing worth hearing, he’d turn away: no patience for losers or fools. But if you said something clever he might lift a brow and take interest. And if you said something downright daring, he’d laugh, and those dark eyes would linger on your face, consider you: as if you might just be worth his while. And that current of interest was the start of everything, the current that lit me to life.

  In that same room, on that striped brown sofa where Paul would sit and regard me — on that sofa when I was sixteen, I sat with a boy in the dark, a boy who wasn’t the one I loved but who had come over one night to try his luck, and he put his arm around me, laughed, and softly sang: Jane, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. So I lay back and let him slide his hands under my shirt, let him hold my breasts, kiss my neck, suck so hard the blood nearly broke through the skin, a pain that soothed, and I pretended not to care that he wasn’t the one, because by then finding such replacements seemed natural.

  At the beginning, Maggy tried to please Paul, but soon she didn’t bother. An incident I’ve been told: Walking with him one day in Washington, through a park or down a street, Maggy, seven, put her hand up to be held. He slipped his own hand in his pocket.

  Was he thinking of his real girls? Trying to stay true?

  Another incident, again his hand, but this moment Maggy and I both remember: We sat in Paul’s old Jag while he went to the post office or liquor store, and, restless, Maggy found a Red Hot in the glove compartment and gave it to me to try. When he came back and saw me sucking, he turned to Maggy, demanded to know, and she said, Someone threw it in the window! He slapped her leg fast, a slap that left a hand burning on her skin for days, forever, it burns there still, and this moment — the car, Paul’s face, that red-hot hand — established relations among us. I was the cute one, the baby: preferred. He would never slap me.

  Maybe she was old enough to stay true to Daddy, or maybe she didn’t need to fix herself on one father or the other. She was slim, tall, with a boyish haircut and one blue eye and one green (You look just as darling as I expected and hoped and you certainly are growing tall, too, wrote Daddy. It’s hard to believe that in two more birthdays you’re going to be a terrible teenager. But not too terrible, I hope). Around Paul, she put her head down, slid away, made herself not care if he liked her or not. She made t
hings. Daddy sent her origami paper, beautiful squares of glossy colors, and she’d sit cross-legged with the tip of her tongue at the corner of her mouth and fold lime and magenta and indigo squares until they became parrots or swans. Later she’d make candles, pouring layers of different colored wax into a milk carton, and when the wax had hardened she’d peel the carton away, and there stood a block of rainbow.

  She didn’t care if Paul liked her, but I did. You can imagine the moon on the other side of the world, but what about the sun above you? Paul would look down now and then, consider me. He seemed pleased with the gold stars stuck on my schoolwork. He seemed to like that I was the little blond princess in the play, memorized the whole damned thing, and shouted the frog’s lines when he forgot them. And that when a boy kissed me I pushed him down the playground steps, and that I had rope-burn welts all over my arms but never said uncle. He said these things were terrific and tousled my hair. He liked a cute smart kid who acted tough.

  I reminded him, my mother said, of Jenny.

  Two things happened within the first years of the split to articulate the realliances. The first involved our names. How it happened I don’t know, and neither my sister nor my mother remembers, but what I picture is this: One day a letter from the girls came for Paul, but it was addressed not from Patricia and Jenny Stuart but from Patricia and Jenny Cummins. They had taken our name, or our father had given it. I picture a moment of seasickness, seeing my name in another girl’s hand, worrying that our father had adopted those girls, that to do this he’d given us up, so whose were we? I might have asked Maggy about it in the attic, slithering around the floor in an old crinkled taffeta dress of my mother’s. But probably not, as I would not ask my mother, because the rearrangement somehow wasn’t our business; it was just the air, breathe it or not.

  I also don’t know how Paul reacted to his girls’ dropping his name and taking our father’s, leaving him just as Helen had. It was probably one of those nights of broken glass, smoke, slamming doors, my mother sleeping curled in the car.

  What I do know is that one morning I went to the principal’s office and said to a woman peering over a typewriter, “I’m not Jane Cummins anymore. Now I’ll be Jane Stuart.” A necessary trade: my Barbie for your skates. Those girls had my name and father. I’d need theirs.

  It didn’t happen legally. I was still Cummins on most envelopes and report cards until 1969, although sometimes also Stuart. Then Cummins disappeared. My sister took Paul’s name, too, although I doubt she wanted to, as I did; more likely my mother urged her, icing to hide the lumps. My father never mentions the changed names in the letters I have, and by 1969 he was addressing his envelopes to Misses M. and J. Stuart, and as I write this now I can’t help but wonder: What if I was the one who switched names first?

  The second thing that happened was this, and it’s less a moment than the speculation of one. I’m the one who kept our father’s letters, the folded sheets with his blue handwriting flowing across the page. You’d think Maggy would have kept them, she was older and closer to him, and even now her basement in Chicago is so full of papers and CDs and records and beads you’d think she’d never thrown anything out. But she didn’t keep those letters; I put them in a plastic pouch labeled Daddy, and, whenever we moved, I packed the pouch in a box, then unpacked it to add the new letters that came. I found this pouch decades later, in a box in my mother’s basement, each letter still folded as my father had folded it and still in its neatly slit envelope.

  In one envelope, though, I found not just a letter but pictures I don’t remember seeing; usually the photos he sent he’d marked to Maggy or me, or we divided them and put them in our scrapbooks. These pictures showed Daddy and his new family, composed color pictures he must have taken with a tripod and timer. Surely it was strange for Maggy and me, at ten and eight, to get a letter from our father and slip from the envelope glossy color images of him posing with his new boy on his knee, as he had posed with us by Lake Burley Griffin. Or pictures of his new family arrayed in a garden, the lovely young mother with bouffant hair holding her lacy new baby, those two other girls in party dresses smiling at their new brother, the handsome man in shirtsleeves and thin tie happily regarding his new family, all together in a garden, somewhere else. There would be many more pictures like this, Jenny or Patricia on the arm of my father’s chair, leaning into him, smiles all around. I don’t know what we felt when we saw the first of these. A flare of panic so cold it must be stifled at once: You have been replaced.

  We didn’t put these pictures in any album, not Maggy’s with the blue and brown batik cover or my big green one with the soft pages falling out. Either she or I tucked them back into the envelope with Daddy’s letter, which was dated December 1969. It ends like this: The little colour photo was on Nicholas’s first birthday; that and the other two showing Nicholas are for you two. Please give the other three (which I have marked to him) to your Daddy. With lots of love, Your Father.

  So names slid around; attachments were understood to have properly shifted. That letter with those pictures either Maggy or I slipped back in the envelope, and then I put that envelope in the plastic pouch, and when we packed to leave Washington for Los Angeles, or Los Angeles for South America, I put the pouch carefully in a box, and then a closet, and then a basement, the casual documents of our realliance.

  And Paul? Maybe one day after he regarded a glossy image of his girls leaning at the knee of that man who now had both them and Helen — or maybe one day after I’d first printed his name beside mine on dotted green lines — maybe he looked down at me and saw a little ally, a small consolation. And what I have wondered since and still wonder now is whether there was a moment between us, a silent agreement: I will be yours if you will be mine. We will replace, and punish, those others.

  When I try to imagine Jenny then, on the other side of the world, I do something a man taught me at college about playing pool. To hit a ball off the side into a pocket, look at the pool table and imagine a mirror version alongside the real one. Aim for the pocket in the mirror version. So I imagine that other family over there, Jenny growing up like me: picking up a letter from her father that my father had brought home from the embassy, sliding her finger under the seal, reading it on her stomach in her bedroom, putting the paper down on the pillow, staring at the palm tree out the window, wondering what to do with the ache, the panic that feels like your insides might slip out, the unvoiced question of whether she’d see her invisible father again, and what would happen when she did; and the haunting sense of that other girl over there, the one like her who now had him.

  Moving a lot as a child means you keep starting over from nothing, proving yourself again and again. It’s like being a thin sandy solution and, by fierce will, making that solution congeal around you. And the more you move to alien places the more often you have to do this, like being dropped into acids that dissolve you each time. Personal traits need to be asserted in each new place, which means contests must be waged and won. If you’ve worked hard to become anything — fastest runner, best skater, funniest girl, anything — these terms have melted into your skin, become your skin, and must be preserved. If you stay in one place, your standing and self are only threatened when a new, outside girl appears. But if you keep being new; and your name is new and must be practiced, embarrassing, on dotted lines; and your father is new, although it’s never clear whether you should write down both fathers or add the word step or just pretend he’s really yours; and your nationality is new, to be checked in the right box, not the wrong one, as if you had no clue what you were: Then the attributes that are truly yours — fastest, best, smartest — are crucial. To take them away is like ripping off skin. So on top of the split and the jealousy it engendered, all the moving and remaking made us bitterly competitive as a matter of course.

  When I’ve done the pool trick to imagine those other girls being like us, it’s partly right: We could not have shared more. But it’s also wrong. On that side t
here seemed to be more consciousness — more consciousness about us. Maybe because the girls were older and nearer each other in age, more allied, not split the way Maggy and I were by my sidling over to Paul. Or maybe because that family seemed to have solidified so firmly, which gave them a fixed place from which to look out and think hard and talk about us, the others.

  One day those girls did something novel: With their letter to Paul they sent a tape. We gathered in the living room to listen. The reels whirred, ice clinked in Paul’s glass, the springs of my mother’s gold chair squeaked as she shifted.

  Then suddenly the girls’ voices broke into the air. “Hello, Father,” they said with bright Aussie accents. There was giggling, then music, and they began to sing:

  “Imagine there’s no heaven …”

  I lay on the brown and gold rug, combing the dirty tassels, sick. My mother watched Paul, whose face grew hard as he listened, one hand gripping his scotch glass and the other dead still on the armrest.

  “We hope someday you’ll join us …”

  Paul looked then at the alien world around him, the woman and girls who had displaced his real ones. My mother’s face stiffened. She probably sat back in the gold chair, crossed her legs, and sipped her martini, but sooner or later something unfortunate was said, and Paul got up, switched off the recorder, and took it with another drink to the bedroom. All that night and for days we heard the girls’ voices and that song through the door while my mother slept on the sofa or out in the car. And why hadn’t we thought of it, why had we let the girls do it first?