The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  At about the same time, they sent one of those pictures of themselves in a tropical garden, sitting side by side among palm trees, banana plants, bright flowering shrubs. Their hands lie in their laps, and their faces are soft — but their eyes stare into the camera, intent. Jenny’s are deeply shadowed. Each girl holds her head at a tilt, Patricia to the left, Jenny to the right, each with her hair falling along her face in a wave. Patricia wears a flowered green shift; Jenny wears pale pink. With the grass beneath them and banana leaves and shrubs behind, they look like blossoms springing up from the grass, blossoms whose roots would, if they could, plunge incredibly deep and reach clear to the other side of the globe, clear to their father, our house.

  I wonder who they’re looking at. My father, kneeling before them on the grass with his camera, as he’d knelt before us? Or straight through him, through the lens, at their own father? Or are they looking hard at all of us on our side of the world, as if they have the power to see?

  Usually those photos have a notation on the back in my father’s hand, as he’d annotated the ancient slides. When I found this picture recently, I turned it over, like I used to push my fingers into the velvet corners of the jewelry box, searching for a message I’d missed. On the back of this photo the girls had written: M + J HERE WE ARE FIERCE P + J.

  _______

  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like not to have jealousy running in my veins. It’s like fuel, gaseous, and if you strike the right match, I flame. I can be jealous of anything. Jealousy, jalousie, a shuttered blind, Venetian blind, both words from Latin for zeal, and I picture the zealot’s ravening eyes. So much of jealousy seems held in the image of the Venetian blind and those eyes: peering through the slats, not seeing enough, seeing too much, shadows falling in obscuring stripes, not being there but outside, looking in. Jealousy is as rich as weather and takes on different forms. One is to observe the person you love with the other; another is to be unable to see this but know it’s happening, far away, know that you’re being displaced. The heart of jealousy: knowing you’re dispensable.

  So it’s not true that these shadowing years, when the two families didn’t see each other or speak, traced no drama. I think a silent struggle raged between the distant girls, to make up for what had been lost or taken, not to be displaced.

  When a solid body enters or floats upon water, a corresponding volume of liquid is removed: displacement. The summers we lived in Washington we went to the Delaware shore. We’d gone there with Daddy when we’d been in Washington with him, and now, in 1969, when I was seven and Maggy was ten, we went with Paul. It’s a beach where Paul still has a house, the beach where I got married; it feels more like home than any place.

  Each morning the lifeguards dragged their white wooden stands from the boardwalk toward the water, each to his own stretch of beach bordered by rock jetties. His chair in place, he’d dive into the waves to test the currents, then post a red or yellow flag and plant orange buoys in the sand.

  Paul would lean back on his towel with a beer and the paper and watch the waves until they looked right for riding. Then he’d saunter down to the water and through the froth, dive into a rising curl, emerge where the water was smooth. There he’d tread, his head dark, looking out to sea. When a good wave swelled forward, he’d turn and stroke hard until he entered its pull, stiffen like a board, and ride it in. I’d stand ankle deep and watch him, watch his dark face and arms glide forward in the glossy underside of the wave, come toward me in the rushing froth.

  When he’d had enough he would stand and nod at me, and I’d splash forward, follow him back in; he wanted to teach me to swim. When it got too deep for me to walk or the waves kept knocking me over, he’d tow me to the other side of the waves, out to where it was glossy and deep. I’d clutch him tight. He’d hold me for a time and we’d rise with the swells, float up with a wave until we seemed as high as the blue water tower, it seemed we gazed far down at the beach and bright umbrellas and lifeguards and people on towels: alone with him, lofty. In lulls between waves, he’d teach me to swim. He’d have me lie on his hands and practice kicking. There’d be a pause while he held me and we floated, waited. Then suddenly, with no warning I can remember, he’d hurl me into the deep water. As I thrashed to try to reach him, he’d fix his eyes on mine but swim backward, deeper, his face gliding away.

  When I’d finally fought hard enough to earn the right not to drown, he’d look pleased at how quickly I got it, and he’d reach out, draw me in. “That’s the way, Pookala. The only way to learn.”

  The cottage we’d rented was red and white and tiny, crammed with magazines, dolls, china animals, junk. It was hot. In our cots it was like being at the beach still, baking, there was so much sand in our sheets and hair. One morning Maggy and I escaped before anyone was up. The tough grass glistened with dew, and sunlight slanted through the beach mist. No one was out; the road was sandy and quiet. Maybe we’d planned this. Maybe we’d arranged it with the girl next door, because she appeared on the grass, and together we crossed the bleached road and walked to the beach.

  It was too early for the lifeguards, but we weren’t going to swim. We’d just wade, let our feet sink into dissolving holes and feel the hermit crabs tickling. We stood in our bathing suits, sudsy water fanning toward us in sheets. Sunlight shone through the green water as a wave rose, then it crashed, and surf scudded toward us, pulled at our feet as it slid back out. We stood still, sinking deeper into the sand with each rush, until we were planted, and teetered.

  After a while I tugged my feet from the sucking sand and waded in to rinse my legs. But something happened: There’s a black break in the sequence and what I know next is that I’m far out in the ocean, so far that the blue water tower is tiny. I try to stand, but my feet jab into nothing, and I go under. Then there’s shocking silence, darkness, a drumming pain in my head, no knowledge of where the sun is. I spin, arms and legs loose in the depth. At last I come up, gasping, but with nothing to hold go under again, swallowing water, breathing water, and I do this again and again until slashing now I clutch something solid. The girl next door, come to save me. Though she’s Maggy’s age, she’s as small as I am, and when I clutch her head to pull myself up, I push her under. So she claws at my neck until she comes up and it’s me who’s pushed back into that silence of bursting lungs, until then I fight my way up again. I clutch her face, poke her eyes, pull at her ears and hair. I push her matted head down so I can come up. Then her nails dig into my shoulders, her knees jab my stomach, until she comes up and I go under, until I break into the air again, gasping, and with her hair tangled in my hands push her down. And on it goes, a nightmare I still have, until Maggy reaches us, and with her the lifeguards, who grab us and pull us in and lay us out on the sand and want to know our names, and where are our parents.

  It wasn’t Jenny in the water that day, but a girl whose name I no longer know. But this is what it would be like with Jenny and me when we meet at twelve and eleven. As if our family were a watery element in which only one of us could stay afloat, and to live you must displace the other.

  Nine years later, Jenny and I came to this beach. She was seventeen, I was sixteen, and she had just crossed the Pacific to live with her father. He invited me along to his beach house — to keep Jenny company, to protect him, who knows. While we were there, on an afternoon when I had done the sort of thing it seemed I had to do to her and she had been left alone, she wrote a note to herself, a diary entry, which I either found and took or she gave me.

  I’m just telling you one thing. Don’t ever leave yourself behind. Because you lose yourself in the process — somewhere in the middle of the Pacific or something …

  Sadness has nothing to do with it. You have to be indifferent — well — you have no choice anyway because you’re lost.

  3

  Jean Rhys, who was born in Dominica of white Welsh stock but later lived in London, once said, “Am I an expatriate? Expatriate from where?” She belonged no mor
e in England than she had at “home” in the Caribbean: white cockroach. Another writer, Caryl Phillips — born in Saint Kitts of African blood but raised in Britain — said he’s from a point of water in the Atlantic. Where we’re from, where home is supposed to be, seems so nebulous, at the intersection of blood and place.

  Jenny was born in South America, Maggy in Southeast Asia, places that I think have meant little to them. By ten and eight, Maggy and I had changed names and nationalities and had lost our accents as well, and these things have so much to do with who you are. We couldn’t say convincingly where we were from. I don’t know what the other girls did, but Maggy and I laughed and shrugged when anyone asked, and still do.

  Don’t ever leave yourself behind. A plain sentence, like Make yourself home. Syntax that’s simple but suggests so much more: This self, this thing you start making when you’re small, is both a physical body and vaporous, unfixed, because it can be left behind, and might never be home.

  By the time we left Washington for Los Angeles in 1969, and then left L.A. for South America in 1970, “home” was a vanishing point behind us, a place figured by our father, the Australian emu-and-kangaroo seal that appeared sometimes on his letters, and our grandparents. The old stuffed kangaroo and koala they’d given us sat molting on our dressers, relics; and a whiff of that lost world rose from Albert and Maisie’s letters — a sense of a young country still being settled. “Prevent bush fires!” cried the envelopes, and the stamps showed possum or cockatoo, paintings called On the Wallaby Track or The First Fleet. When I was eight I would look at those stamps, gaze at the emu-and-kangaroo seal, and feel a weird mix of aching homesickness and fakery in claiming a place I did not even know.

  Letters from Britain to the first of our line in Australia, a hundred and fifty years ago, close, I remain with kindest love to all … Give my kind love to Papa. Such quiet potency, almost a prayer, so hopeful that the words will be read with eyes and a heart still living, when so much ocean and time stretch between writer and reader. With all my love! Lovingly! Maisie signed her letters to us. But we were the ones who’d flown to an unknown world, not even a land but a condition of floating, the strange new world our parents had made.

  During the seven years after the split, we lived in five houses — two in Washington, Elsie’s bungalow in Los Angeles, a yellow villa in South America, and one other — but they were just houses, not homes. We didn’t own them but shed them when we moved on. Home or house: Home seems roomier, more feel than structure. Yet even house can mean more than a building, the House of Windsor, House of Atreus. House can be a synecdoche, can describe both the structure and those who live in it, the breath, blood, and flesh pacing its hallways, held under the father’s name like a roof. Fatherland, father, and house: ways of knowing who you are, where you’re from.

  It’s also in the idea of the house that those seven years were as tense, I think, as in the unspoken struggle between the girls: the fear that it would become plain that one of the couples had made a mistake, one of the new houses would fall.

  The couples had surely watched each other since Canberra, a watching that I imagine turned intense and oblique with half a globe between them and communications made of paper. Just how happy were those other two? Each couple had photos to work from, clues we girls gave in our letters, the communiqués of the men. Both couples dwelled in the world of diplomacy, after all, where cool surfaces are scrutinized for signs of inner weakness. So many points of comparison and competition: the career paths of the men; how accomplished and smart each girl was turning out, crucial proof of each new couple’s success; the progress of the baby boys, emblems of the new marriages that invited a return to the most intimate moments of the dead ones.

  Diplomacy is nothing without presentation. And tucked into the letters from the other side of the world, those poised photos presented a family as blossoming as the gardens. Whether the happy images were true, I don’t know, but they seeped into our brains. That was the real family. With us something was wrong.

  We sent no family portraits like those: I can’t even find one. The closest we came were pictures of Tommy, a little boy with drooping hazel eyes, a sweet nose I loved to run my finger along, and a mouth full of cavities: a boy who bound us together. In pictures, Tommy is sun-drenched and giddy in blue trunks in a pool, clasped in happy Maggy’s arms. He leans into me, sleepy, clutching Red Dog, or he sits in the garden beside his father, cross-legged in striped bell-bottoms. There’s a single picture of Paul, Tommy, and me, a dreamy soft picture, we three close and open, but not one of us all together.

  “Well, Paul just didn’t take pictures,” my mother has said. Yet each October when he’s come to Germany for business, he always does two things: He solemnly hands me a card and check, because he visits just before my birthday and Jenny’s, although he never visited her in Australia; and he always takes a picture of me. Near a wall, near a pumpkin, a single photo with whatever new little camera he’s got.

  “Go stand over there, Jane,” he says, gesturing with his chin. I do. “This is the neatest damned camera,” he says, “but I still haven’t figured it out.” He laughs, takes aim. And as I pose and smile near that pumpkin or wall, I always feel so flattered, so chosen and wrong in my alliance with those other girls’ father, too much light spilling all over me.

  _______

  My mother is right; Paul didn’t take pictures of his new family, nothing like my father’s portraits. Our half of the paper cutout was too crumpled to compete. From the beginning, from the phone call between Washington and Canberra when Paul suggested my mother wait, failure had lurked. It could seep into the air at any moment, rising from something as small as the cat’s pee puddle on the tasseled carpet. This tension had lived in each house, from the cold stone one on Connecticut onward. It walked hard up the concrete path and up the three brick steps, or through the sun-bleached white walls of Elsie’s bungalow. If you looked at those houses you would say, But how delightful! Hard to imagine anything better than that courtyard house in Los Angeles: Lemon trees with sweet flowers grew by the windows, and a magnolia stood in the jungle out back, smelling of pencil, its unripe heavy blossoms furred, leaves brittle and glossy. I would love to have this house now. But only if it were mineral and vegetal, just those trees, that sunlight and stucco, no trace of anyone’s thoughts or nights.

  In that house: Paul and my mother had fought. Bitterly, about whatever they wanted. They fought about his mother and car trouble and the bloody Los Angeles freeways. They fought about Tommy’s teeth and us. They fought about shoes and babysitters and beer. They fought about Karen Carpenter. And of course they fought about what felt like the main thing: that for Paul the whole damn thing had been a mistake, or my mother insisting he thought so.

  The fights made the air unbreathable. Sometimes they were just words darting down halls and under doors. Often, too, doors and drawers slammed, my mother screamed, drops of blood were found on the floor the next morning. A ritual that began: Lying in bed with the light still on, I’d run my eyes without blinking along the lines between ceiling and walls, down each corner to the floor, along the baseboard — clear around the room without blinking, to make sure the room was sealed and safe. If not, it wasn’t clear what would happen. The marriage would end, the house would break, Paul and whatever he meant would vanish.

  Maggy and I shared a bedroom, and we’d lie in the dark, listening to it all crash at our door and hoping Tommy wouldn’t wake up howling. If it was daytime, Maggy would march toward me with her lips tight and eyes fixed and whisper, “Let’s just go.” We’d put Tommy in his stroller, or each take a hand, and hurry over the freeway to a park. We’d push him in the swingset, we’d swing ourselves, our feet scooping out hollows in the sand; we’d take him by both hands and spin him until we collapsed dizzy on the grass; we’d lie on that tough grass and wait until the light had cooled and the fight might be over.

  Then we’d walk home slowly, stopping to look at the cars rushing bel
ow on the freeway. The Mach IV was what the boys talked about at school, so I had a thing for the Mach IV, and I’d told Paul that’s what I’d drive, as I’d told him I’d be a skydiver, as I’d do the Bruins cheer to make him laugh, and this was such a problem, this misalliance of mine, the way I did not avoid Paul like Maggy did, the way I’d silently decided to join him, win him, make him love me: Displace the real girl he’d lost.

  Maggy and Tommy and I would stand on the overpass and look through the chain-link fence at the cars whizzing by and far away at the yellow, vaporous horizon. Finally we’d have to go home. When we came into the courtyard, looked into the darkness through the doorway, stepped inside, the house would seem exhausted. Then our mother appeared in the dimness, a hand over her eyes, or sunglasses on in the dark, and there’d be a long loose drive on the pale Los Angeles roads as the sky turned orange, driving somewhere for fried chicken so we didn’t have to be in that house.

  Maggy and I would comfort Mom as she clutched and banged the steering wheel, until she’d toss her head free of tears and turn to us and say she was fine, everything would be just fine. After we’d bought our chicken and stood in the parking lot eating it from greasy wrappers or a bucket, we’d go near her and slip our arms around her waist, let her clasp us hot and close.

  “My little mothers,” she’d whisper. “What would I do without you.” And the correct allegiance was clear.

  But in 1970 Paul got a foreign posting in South America, and we were starting new. We all had the same name, or anyway wrote it on forms and it stuck. On the diplomatic passport I got before flying I signed Jane Stuart Cummins, “dependent of Paul Stuart.” Maggy and I now sounded almost as American as he did, although our mother still had her South Australian lilt. She’d been obliged to give up her citizenship and be naturalized, and we were naturalized through her and gave up Australia, too. All American. And there was Tommy, little blond boy with dreamy eyes, binding us together.