The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  The posting was Paul’s first since Australia, our first since the United States, with our father. The girls wrote to tell us that new countries were exciting; our father wrote, I certainly hope no-one tries to kidnap you! The ransom for two pretty girls like you would be high, so don’t talk to strangers or go wandering off anywhere without asking!

  Eight days before we flew to our new post, the president there proclaimed himself dictator in an autogolpe and shut down Congress and the courts, and we landed during military rule. The land was as unstable as the nation: volcanoes, earthquakes, mudslides.

  High in the Andes, it was a place of inky blue sky, baroque churches, new villas, limping dogs, the smell of shit and burning corn. We would live in a big yellow villa that stood in a garden of palms and hydrangeas and was fortressed by a stone wall studded with glass; to enter you pushed a button and waited for the electric gate to swing open. We weren’t to be on the streets after dark; we weren’t to go barefoot or swallow the water. Servants named Teresa, Miguel, and Cecilia lived in quarters out back, and Paul got a German shepherd we named Sultan, to protect us, a dog that was never trained and left bloody scratches down our legs, a dog that meant well but raged in the backyard and was finally shot by a soldier. The school we went to, Academia Cotopaxi, was also fortressed by walls, as white as the mountain the school was named for, and soldiers would ultimately march in there, too.

  So many walls and compounds — the embassy as well, with its Marines and flag. Suddenly we were defined by contrast to where we were: Stuarts, Americans, gringos. Like a settler stepping into the antipodean sun, our name, culture, citizenship, and language were compacted within us, noticed only now that we’d arrived somewhere else. On the streets, we’d walk fair and green-eyed in our pale skins, belonging to another world, looking out at the new world around us. Women with black braids squatted beneath black hats, draped in heavy cloths the colors of parrots or flowers; little boys with brown rumps sprayed yellow pee in corners; old men with gnarled fingers and no feet, knees black and knotted, reached up from wagons. You walked past in the equatorial sun with whatever it was that lived inside your skin, all those American words.

  Neighbors on Barnaby Street said to me later, when I was eleven, “You’re very lucky to have done all that traveling. Most people never have the chance.” Which was true. If you’re the right age, you’re not just placed somewhere foreign in a pot; you’re film, and the light burns into you. Identify is a word that seems ruined, meaning to feel that you and what you regard are the same, and in South America I had instances of pure physical ecstasy, a transparency between myself and the natural world, as if the membrane lying between me and that splendor dissolved and we breathed each other.

  The place was so brilliant, it could burn into anyone. Its steaming green ground, huge black moths like powdery bats, sky such indigo it seemed you could clutch it. Paul lifted me into the cool branches of a tree once to pluck an avocado, then showed me how to snap off the stem, poke it into the skin, and squeeze out pale green paste: paradise. You could drive to a monument at the equator and stand with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern, squint in that blinding yellow, blue light, and feel yourself on the globe, spinning. Paul took us to stay at a hacienda where Maggy and I rode horses, without rules and no idea how, just climbed on their warm, broad backs, pressed our heels into their flanks, and took off clinging into the wild, lush landscape, our mouths open as the wind whipped through us and we pounded through meadows along the sides of hills no one had ever stepped on. Maggy remembers this. It’s one of about five things we remember the same, and when either of us mentions it, we both look away: away from each other but closer than ever, seeing and feeling that green rushing again.

  I climbed Pichincha like Alexander von Humboldt and ran down a dune of sand and volcanic pebbles at the mountain’s peak, seventeen thousand feet up in the air. Imagine being so high you see nothing but a mineral world, Andes peaks jagged and rising all around, peaks that at dawn are pink, pure sun upon pure snow and rock, while at night the stars take up more sky than the darkness and cast sharp shadows around your feet. Imagine being at the top of this, then screaming with so much pleasure it hurts and just running, rolling, down a sand dune in the sky.

  So much consciousness suddenly. Do you wake up when you’re nine? Before, maybe you had a mute understanding of your self as a glimmer of awareness in a body that moves and feels, but you’re so embedded in this condition you can’t express it. Then suddenly consciousness opens up with a shock. You are a physical, sensing thing in enormous place and time, all in motion. There’s past, there’s future, there’s this unreeling now, the world is huge and heaving, there’s so much light. At the same instant, you begin to understand the smallness of your self and the vastness of everything you aren’t.

  That consciousness should be contained in a body, in the hand resting on the branch of the Angel’s Trumpet tree I’d climbed fast in the backyard to escape crazy Sultan, but that consciousness should not be in the branch itself: so strange, when dirty hand and branch looked alike, both mottled and dun, both cool, both bony. If I lifted that hand and drew it through the air, where it flew also flew consciousness — a swath of it pulled through the air — but then consciousness no longer was where it had been, resting on the bark. Why was it only inside a human or animal? Sultan barking down there, scratching the trunk, trying to reach my dangling foot — wherever he ran also ran consciousness; the air sparked with it behind him.

  This strange conjunction of your self and all that’s outside: The two meet at your eyes, your fingertips, your mouth as you swallow blue air. It was so stunning that physical senses, which were stuck in your skin, were exactly what let you fly out of your skin. But it seemed true. By looking hard you disappeared and became what you saw. Whatever you touched or looked at became part of you for as long as you touched or looked; for that moment you and it melted together. Lying on a hot lounge chair on the porch above that Angel’s Trumpet tree, the porch off my mother and Paul’s room, I would stare into the dizzying deep sky and feel myself dissolving into it.

  _______

  But at that age, just as the world tears open around you, you also become aware of your own personal scope. I stood on the dining-room table as my mother took measurements for a uniform, and the numbers — twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two; fifty-four pounds; four-foot-ten — became a new part of identification: That was the shape and room I took up, and beyond it was the rest of the world.

  Visible: dirty-blond hair, gapped teeth, green eyes. How to high jump, long jump, run the fifty-yard dash, cartwheel, round off, limber, back limber, play volleyball and soccer; how to hit the bull’s-eye and win a gold medal. Because if you did these things right, medals showered like gold and adorned you. Accumulating little boyfriends — Gavin, Derek — was the same. They adhered to the skin, helped make you, their desire clinging and burnishing. I helped strip other girls at slumber parties and pretended to sleep while they stripped me, lying still under their appraising eyes. There was a curious shift in potency about this: The girl being stripped and stared at in the dark seemed more potent than the ones crouched around her, but whether it was our looking that made her potent or she possessed this potency on her own wasn’t clear. She had something we needed to see. But if we didn’t look at her? If we just shut our eyes? I kissed a girl in her closet, nibbled her baby breasts, touched her peach pudenda, and let her ponder mine. I kissed a boy under a blanket at a party, too, the crew-cut son of a huge Marine, and it was the clasp itself, being wanted, that meant everything: those hands and eyes, like medals, like gold stars.

  In the blazing sun on a black square of asphalt I first saw how a girl could have value, be a jar filled with gold coins. On a volleyball court in the Cotopaxi compound, the blue sky blazing and snowy mountains rearing all around, fourth-grade girls stood in gym shorts waiting to be picked for the team. One girl was picked, then another, and I suddenly saw with seasickness that
for no visible reason, some girls had value and others didn’t. Not value as players; that had nothing to do with it. Pure value, desirability. You could see it: Some girls were jewels, and others were nothing, they were trash, no one even looked at them. But the idea of value existed somewhere between the girl choosing and the one being chosen — who might have no quality beyond being chosen. So arbitrary, so magic. And perilous, too, because what could it mean if you didn’t own that value but it was invested in you from outside? You only had it if someone else dropped her gold coin in you. Desire and desirability were a mingled current — the way when you looked at the sky, it was the current of looking that meant everything. Close your eyes, and girl or sky disappeared.

  “I pick Desiree!” A girl who looked like Snow White, and Desiree was really her name.

  “Then I get Susan!”

  “I want Peggy!”

  The captains’ voices rang clear upon the hot black volleyball court with its invisible rules of rotation like the circlings of the planets, and those chosen girls, Desiree, Susan, smiled and walked in the sun to one side of the net or the other. The remaining girls waited, one drawn at a time, until only the worthless were left.

  A strange economics, fluid and shifting. Maybe because this was the foreign service and a fresh influx of girls came every few months, we were replaceable, the currencies were liquid. Or maybe because we grew up in the air of politics and diplomacy, measuring worth was like breathing.

  Or maybe if I were to find Desiree or Susan now they would say, We don’t remember it that way at all. We didn’t care about those things. But you: You had to win all the prizes, have all the boys love you, or you looked like you would actually die.

  Another discovery at nine or ten: the peculiarity of our family. I told Peggy the story in a closet, the story of my doubled family, which I’d never told before. It had never seemed anything to tell, just the air around me.

  There was silence. She looked at me in the dimness with eyes I’ve seen since, the troubled, defensive eyes of someone who does not recognize your language or species. I looked back at her in that closet, and suddenly felt I was looking out through the eyes of a hybrid, a griffin.

  A last awareness, of position within the house, in Paul’s eyes. Tommy was the baby, the boy, owned and adored. Maggy was discounted. But somehow I was like Tommy: favored, a blond pet with promise. Paul would glance upon me, eyes warming as he speculated what I’d become, as if I were actually his.

  I’ve studied girls with real fathers since, and seen in those girls’ eyes a look of absolute safety, as if they know they can tilt their heads back, close their eyes, and fall, and they’ll be caught and nested, unconditionally.

  Paul was not like that. He did not hand out love for free. And I’m glad for having had to earn it, because at least that meant not ending up with nothing. He was a star at the embassy, I’ve been told, and he preferred stars himself. He would look hard and keen at the world — local political tensions, the best convertible to buy, the new girls arrayed on the brown and gold carpet; he would look out measuring, judging. In each situation was a winner and a loser, and the winner he’d reward with the glow of the sun. My report cards, the bull’s-eye I hit in a citywide meet, the boy under the blanket: These amused him. He’d look at me and smile, turn his warm attention on me — the best way to make clear who deserves favor is by cutting out the rest.

  I was too smart, he would say to my mother, to become a teacher like her. And it certainly was good, he would say, that I wasn’t developing as fast as Maggy, because then all that blood would drop from my brain. And I sure was one crackerjack student, he said, and look at those terrific drawings I did. I lay on the tasseled carpet and felt his rare gold sift upon me, felt it melting on my skin, until it became my skin, burnishing, stunning. And the faint, fine sense of being favored was an element of the high air in that house, nine thousand feet up in the Andes, air that was too thin, made you giddy. Maggy and my mother would nod to this now without saying a word.

  But then the diplomatic pouch would arrive bearing those letters from the other side of the globe. I don’t know about these funny new schools you are all going to, whether you are really learning anything, and if so what. With the pictures tucked inside, these letters fell in the stomach, disorienting, because it was so easy to forget that other family, those other girls who had displaced you. After reading the distant blue lines, you might put out your hand to touch the sheepskin rug or the little birds painted on the wooden chest and find that they were no longer real, where you were was not real, what was real lay on the other side of the globe.

  But after a moment, with effort, those things could grow solid. There was your bony ankle and the gold medal hanging from a red ribbon on the mirror, and if you sat still you could hear Paul in his study whistling arabesques. And you could fold that letter back up, run the side of your hand along the edge, slip it back in its envelope, and tuck that envelope in the bag labeled Daddy, because he was the one not really there, he was the one who had been replaced.

  But. The way it had been in those other houses was how it would be here. Such a beautiful house, gleaming wood floors and the blue sky and mountains burning through the window’s iron bars. But then the air changed; you could feel it. The rooms were far apart, so it was possible to drift away and shut out the fighting. Maggy glided to her room and closed the door to concentrate on her candles and American teen magazines; I went to my room, where I’d crouch on the porch and mouth a cigarette, or draw greeting cards, or study Maggy’s booklets about tampons. I wore hiking boots and orange hot pants, made wings out of plywood to fly off the back porch. In our rooms we could be busy and not talk about the fighting, or the girls, or where home was, or Paul, or our invisible father.

  But when things reached a pitch, even in that big colonial villa you’d feel the heavy front door slam, the gate screech open, Paul’s car jet off. A relief and a sense of disaster at once. In the silence Maggy and I knew that we had to do something. We probably sat on the floor or bed, wishing we could just be asleep, not know. But after a moment we’d get up, open our doors, look at each other across the dark hallway, move quietly together downstairs. We’d find our mother in the living room in the big gold chair, crying, a glass of wine in her hand. She’d look up and shut her wet eyes, fling out her arms, and we’d go to her, Maggy then kneeling on the floor by her legs, me hunched sideways in her lap, as she clutched her little miserable mothers, and we whispered whatever soothing words girls of nine and twelve can whisper about ruined marriage, until she fell asleep. Then we’d disentangle ourselves, arrange a blanket upon her, turn off the light, and run back up to our rooms.

  And at some point Maggy would whisper in the dark, so hotly I could almost see her burning green and blue eyes: She hated Paul, and I should, too.

  But once, when we walked down a hill, he held my hand.

  An amazing sensation, almost holy, like a shark gliding toward you and not ripping off your leg but letting you pet his harsh hide. He looked down at me with his face utterly tender, the sky huge behind him, and offered me his hand.

  _______

  The first June in South America we went to the beach for vacation. When you drive down mountain roads to the coast, you pass through the temperate zone to the torrid, a salty, glaring landscape of marshes and sugarcane. We reached the beach late at night, the flames from oil derricks dancing orange in the black. The Hotel Ensenada faced the ocean and was bleak, the days heavy and dull; June was not the season at the equator. We walked on the dingy beach, we went shopping at Libertad. I wrote in my diary, Saw 2 sharks! although they were just dogfish washed up on the dirty sand, but I saw fins everywhere and couldn’t go in the water without picturing something gliding toward me, then panicking and bolting out. The sky and the water were swollen, gray. Except for the weekends, when Paul came down. Then the sky would clear to blue, and the beach became a real beach, golden. Paul brought the sun with him, my mother said; she’d shrug and l
augh and say, “Here comes the Sun King,” and although she doesn’t remember this, I do, because with him there the sun shone on me, too. Swimming lessons: being held by him in that perilous water, rising with him in a wave.

  At night we drove down the coast to Punta Carnero, a high promontory with a fancy hotel overlooking the Pacific. Marlins and swordfish hung on the walls, slot machines flashed in the game room, and from a pool on the cliff’s high terrace you could swim gazing out at the wild, unswimmable ocean. Once we knew that June wasn’t the season, the next time we went to the coast was January, and we flew down and took a cab to Punta Carnero, the driver swerving on the coastal road to avoid iguanas. The sun burned directly overhead, and Maggy, Tommy, and I spent our time in that pool or playing the slot machines, either out in the brilliance or manic in the dark. We got so burnt that at night Maggy and I peeled clinging strips of skin from each other’s shoulders, and I’d take a strip and hold it up to the lamplight to see the networks of lines, then wad it like cellophane and ping it over at Maggy. The new skin underneath burned, too, and I still have a constellation of freckles on my shoulder from that equatorial sky.

  One day, out by the pool, a cube of clear blue in a cliff, I put Tommy on a raft in the shallow end and climbed on beside him. The sun was so blinding, so hot on our faces and shoulders and backs, the water so cool. Tommy’s hair was bleached by the sun, his laughing eyes tilting and hapless as he clutched the wet edge of the raft. He was three. I kicked us out, wobbling and splashing, toward the deep end, toward the edge of the cliff. An arc of blue sky, an arc of blue sea, the pool blue and rippling around us. We floated.

  But something happened, and all at once I was underwater, spinning in the bubbles and quiet. Then the bubbles cleared and I saw Tommy. He had settled on the pool floor and sat there, plump legs before him, blond hair floating, head tilted as he smiled up at me. He didn’t know water was different from air, that he’d drown. Yet I couldn’t reach him, couldn’t move through that water. He sat on the bottom and I floated, helpless, as light rippled upon him. Then suddenly there was a rupture in this serene world, a torrent of bubbles streamed down, and a long dark figure dove toward Tommy. He smiled and put out his arms to his father, who gripped him, turned, kicked off from the floor. And what I can’t remember for sure is whether, in the moment Paul held Tommy safe, he turned and looked at me through the water, those dark eyes stared hard and judging at me, as I floated there, useless, letting his son drown.