The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  And really to tell the truth, I can’t be sure if it was even me, or Maggy. If she was the one who put our brother on a raft and kicked out, lost her balance, let him tumble in; if she was the one to whom Paul turned with those condemning eyes before he kicked and shot upward. But it may as well have been me as her. It may as well have been both of us, two girls floating useless in the water, two girls who had never been Paul’s real daughters, and certainly not his son.

  The following summer we went on leave back to the United States, but Paul didn’t come. When we flew, Hurricane Agnes had just begun gathering in the Gulf, revolving north. We stayed with Foreign Service friends, first in the suburbs of Virginia, which Agnes turned into thrashing green trees, falling branches, floating cars, gray shopping centers with boarded windows. When Agnes weakened we moved on, staying now with friends in an apartment downtown, a compound of curving white buildings. An elegant place with glass doors sliding open to curving white balconies like rows of teeth, and because the building curved, too, you could lean out over a toothed edge and see the building curve away around, or look out across to another white building with the same rows of teeth, or down to the blue, curving pool. The building across from us housed not apartments but offices. And the night we landed in Washington, five “plumbers” had broken into one of them.

  While we stayed in the Watergate, swimming and racing the elevators and looking at fancy boutiques in the arcade, there was another break-in, a minor one, at home. I don’t think I was told the details at the time, but later the story was this: Burglars climbed over our glass-spiked wall and up to the balcony off my mother and Paul’s room, the terra-cotta balcony where I’d imagined dissolving into the sky, and from which I wanted to fly with plywood wings. The burglars dragged one of the chaise longues with its sharp metal legs to the edge and maneuvered it down to the garden. But to do this they made so much noise they woke Miguel. He ran out, and they fled with the chair.

  The problem wasn’t that a lounge chair was gone or that it had left scratches on the terra-cotta tiles; the problem was that those scratches formed a silent record of how searingly loud the theft had been. Yet in the middle of the night, only Miguel had heard. Paul hadn’t, though the bed stood by the porch door. He hadn’t because he was across town with his other woman.

  My mother learned this when we returned, and by October Paul was gone. Apparently he left with only a suitcase. When we began packing the rest of his things — his leather table, cold, heavy whale’s tooth, the tiger taken down from the wall — I asked Maggy what was happening. She was thirteen. She said, “Don’t you know?”

  I think Paul came into my bedroom to say good-bye, but now I don’t know, I might have invented this, I might have decided he had to. I see the crack of light around my shut door widen, then his tall form hesitating, dark with light streaming around him. I think he comes in, sits uncomfortable at the edge of my bed, kisses my forehead, and whispers, “Well, so long, Pookala.” But I know he left a present because I still have it, a fine silver pin in the shape of a llama, as it was nearly my birthday.

  Just before the explosions, there’d been an evening when he called me into his study. It faced the garden of deep, soft grass where I’d turn so many cartwheels I could almost see the circles my fingers and toes had drawn like light in the air, and I’d stand still, dizzy, and look through the bars to his den. He had a teak desk and a shortwave radio he’d listen to with his head held close, eyes fixed hard on whatever he heard, the Bruins or a conversation about oil. The radio was heavy and smelled of steel and its worn leather case, and he’d shown me how to work it, twirling a pair of knobs until raw sound crackled to voice. A canary had flown in through the barred windows of that study, and this was the kind of thing that seemed to happen to Paul, as the sun came out for him at the beach, as he was a star at the embassy, the Sun King.

  That evening before the explosions, he asked me to come in and shut the door. I did. He pulled a bag from a bookcase — he likes buying good things; a satisfied look turns his face tender when he ponders a fine carving or solid device. He turns it around in his hands, admires it, his eyes lost in appreciation. That evening he pulled a bag down from his shelf, drew from it an object wrapped in tissue. I don’t remember what it was, an embroidered dress or a bread-dough figure, maybe. He unwrapped it, held it up, asked what I thought. I considered it, said it was really nice. He looked pleased and wrapped it back in its tissue, put it in the bag, returned it to the shelf. He just wanted to see if a girl like me liked it, he said, before sending it to Jenny for her birthday.

  I don’t even remember what the thing was, so I didn’t covet it, wasn’t envious. When I left his study I had a feel of honor, because I’d advised him on the matter of his daughter. Which was surely a position better than being a daughter, because it had not been born into, worth nothing, but won.

  The silver llama Paul left me in a small leather pouch is the same size and delicacy as the silver peacock my father once sent from Asia, one of those fabulous gifts, so these two animals could be paired on the dresser or on a red velvet shelf of my bar-of-gold jewelry box. They won’t face each other, though; their tiny silver feet and heads face the same direction, two animals heading west. Still, they could be paired like the tiny emu and kangaroo in the Australian seal on my father’s letters, or like the emu and ostrich that parallel each other on their own continents, or like Paul and Daddy, or like Jenny and me, like the two shadow families had always been, except now with Paul gone the symmetry was broken.

  Along with the silver llama pin, Paul left a note tucked in a very small envelope. It’s written on one of his and my mother’s engraved cards, on which he’s crossed Mr. and Mrs. out. Happy Birthday Jane. He would be our agent for anything we needed from the United States, he said. Love Paul. I picture him in his study, at the teak desk, sipping scotch and fiddling with a pen and trying to figure out what the hell to write. He’s left-handed, and his writing does not slant forward in steady waves like my father’s, but is backward, squashed, in jagged points and loops, extreme.

  There was a day when Maggy and I packed our toothbrushes and nightgowns in plastic bags and took them with us on the Number Seven bus to school, but rode the Number Six home to a different house, as the one we’d lived in was too expensive without Paul, our only reason for being in the country. The new house was smaller, modern, white, and angular. It stood high in the hills overlooking the city, beside an empty paddock, fitting the slant of the hill. Square white porches stuck out all over, and you could climb from one to another to the roof. There you could sit and look out at the city and Pichincha with its single white peak I’d once run down, a mountain that had shaken one night since but not enough to do damage, and up at the inky blue sky into which smoke from the cornfields drifted, into which it still should be possible with enough will to dissolve, and you could throw one stone after another into the paddock, one stone fast and hard after another, trying to hit what you wanted.

  That last year the diplomatic pouch had a new purpose: Now we could write letters to Daddy and Paul. Maggy might not have, but I did and recorded each in my diary. On February 25th I wrote to Daddy; on the 26th I wrote to Paul. On March 24th I wrote to Daddy; on the 25th, to Paul. In March there’s also an entry that says, I have a problem. I seem to be two people … and one is a plastic doll.

  Something else began to happen: I started to disappear. Or not disappear, just drift away. Like the glassy dream feeling when we’d first landed in Washington. I’d be walking with my mother down some brilliant, filthy street with its rich, warm stink of shit and smoke, and suddenly I’d be floating above us.

  “I’m not here,” I’d say.

  She’d smile, squeeze my hand. “Of course you are, Janie. What do you mean?”

  But I seemed to drift off, could not feel myself there, and even waving my hand before my face didn’t make either me or the world real. It was disconcerting but numbing, oddly peaceful, slipping out of self.

&n
bsp; We stayed that last year because Paul’s post was supposed to have lasted until then, Maggy and I were still in school, and our mother was still teaching. Also because it wasn’t clear where we could go, now that we’d given up Australian citizenship (cousins wrote, You must be very disappointed that you shall never come back to Australia). The ambassador liked my mother, couldn’t have her abandoned on post, and arranged to fly us back to Washington at the end of the school year. He’s the one who had first hinted what was up, she’s told me: At a cocktail party he said, “Higamous, hogamous, woman’s monogamous. Hogamous, higamous, man is polygamous.”

  A few months before Paul left the country, the president, out of favor with the U.S. government, was removed from office in a military coup. While we had been at Punta Carnero on New Year’s 1972, the local commanding chief of the armed forces had made an official toast to the president and sworn the military’s allegiance. But six weeks later, on Carnival Tuesday, that general deposed the president, and a military junta seized power. It was a school day, although during Carnival life was suspended and colored water balloons spun through the air. Soldiers marched through Cotopaxi’s gates, and we were told to board our buses and return to our houses, because again there was military rule.

  I wrote a novel based on this year, with a character who had a position like Paul’s, and when the book appeared he didn’t speak to me for months. Then suddenly he was back in touch. When I saw him on his next trip to Germany, he gave me a declassified State Department aerogram he had written at the time. “So you can see,” he said, smiling and cocking his head, “what was really going on then.”

  No single group or likely combination of groups is currently able to pose a major challenge to the government so long as the armed forces give the regime their support …

  In a black way I like to think that Paul was involved in the coup ousting the president, and that once he’d done his job he could leave — and had better. Just as I like to think that he had done this earlier, in Peru, where he once told me he was persona non grata. I even like to think that he was CIA. Recently I Googled him and got several hits that seemed to link him to the CIA, but when I ran the same search the next day to make notes, I got nothing. My mother says, “Oh, you romanticize him.”

  I don’t have a letter from my father mentioning the fresh split, but just before we left South America for Washington he wrote a letter full of exclamation marks to say he’d been posted to New York and that we could come and stay very often in an apartment by Central Park. I’m also writing to Paul tonight to tell him about Patricia and Jenny coming. I wonder what Nicholas will make of it all? … Helen and I are both very excited at the thought of seeing you. With love, Daddy.

  I’d like to think that I spent long nights in bed wondering about Jenny, Patricia, Nicholas, and Helen, but I didn’t; they had occupied an aerial place for so long they couldn’t come into focus. And the prospect of seeing my father: It fell into that congested black hole in my ribs where he’d lived for seven years, a place even more congested now because Paul had slid in there, too. But, anyway, the new political reality was clear: Now we’d been left twice.

  In Washington the water had swirled down the drain the opposite direction from the water in Canberra. In Los Angeles water had sprung unannounced from sprockets hidden in the grass, sprockets that were fascinating to Maggy and me when we found them, like keyholes to an underworld; more fascinating when Maggy ran barefoot and a sprocket tore open her toe. On this posting the water was not to be drunk. It was full of life, unwelcome life you did not want clinging to the tissues of your mouth or swimming in your soft pink tubes.

  The other thing you were not to do was walk barefoot. But to do cartwheels and handstands in the garden you had to, and maybe that’s how I got a plantar’s wart. It began as a small, flat disk on the ball of my foot, with a tiny hole at its center. I didn’t feel it unless I stepped on a pebble that poked it; then the pain was exquisite and I’d lurch to the ground. The wart had dug deep into the skin. It took several years to learn what it was, and several more to kill it, by painting acid on the disk each morning, letting the acid burn through the top layer, then digging the flabby dead skin out, until finally the wart had been excavated.

  I’d first discovered this hole in the Watergate. Sitting in one of the elegant bedrooms, I twisted my dirty foot around and finally found this tiny spot of intense sensitivity that made me buckle, as if my arms and legs hung on a string. This tiny hole that had so much power, but that I could ignore unless the right point pierced it. This was what the whole thing, the split, was like: a fine hole of weakness that ran through me, forgettable, buried, until touched precisely, then undoing.

  4

  Whenever I take the train from Washington to New York I try to feel again how it was in 1973, when Maggy and I first went to meet our father. But it’s like trying to reconstruct your brain before reading trained your eyes to move left to right, before language honeycombed liquid life into cells of meaning: an ignorance that’s unreclaimable. Sumac flies by, rail ties, corrugated sheds, shining water, numbers stenciled on posts. When we first rode that train, Maggy was fourteen, I was eleven, and speeding with us like our ghosts in the window was the sense that what had existed only in the mind for so long in fact lived two hundred minutes and miles away: Time and motion could work an appalling transfiguration. Our father would suddenly be real and seen, and so would we. To be exposed as well was whatever idea about love had lodged in my ribs, a fetal vision of what he’d think of me. If I’d been older it might have felt like a Presentation of the Virgin, climbing stairs and offering up self, virtues hoarded in a thin, amphibious body.

  None of this was thought in words on the Amtrak that August; still it colored the blood in the veins. Seconds raced along the gleaming tracks, and soon just a hundred minutes remained, and how could only time and space exist between the imagined and the real? The two don’t dwell on a continuum; between is only a leap.

  When I was older, of sex age, a similar problem came up with men. To know a man by sight and conversation kept him abstract, a compound of image and language. He didn’t yet exist in a way that could be felt or hurt. But if he wanted to touch or kiss or fuck me, the slide from abstraction to body was too much. I’d know it was coming and would panic, would picture his face growing closer, eyes and nostrils swelling like a cyclops, until it all blurred and his wet mouth swallowed mine. To get over this and manage sex, I’d drink and black out, wake up when it was over, and after doing that a few times I could face him. But this was later. In 1973 the problem was waiting for my father, who was only written words and pictures, to become a living thing.

  Maggy says, “The problem is that you were too young when Daddy left to believe he still existed, even if you couldn’t see him. To me he was always still there, and loved me.”

  We wouldn’t see him as soon as we flew back to Washington in June, though, not until August. Between were months of drifting, trying to settle in a new place, new time zone, new hemisphere, new air, making your self all over again, starting over from watery nothing. It was Washington, not a new world, but this was the first time we were alone, as my mother said: just us, without a man. The goal was to make ourselves home in a place to which we were attached only by way of departed men who’d once given us names and citizenships — although the first name was gone and the second was not official, and my mother had burned her naturalization certificate in South America one night. Still, there was nowhere else to go. We landed at Dulles and began to start over, in a hot summer screaming with cicadas that’s documented in my gold diary like a settler’s experience in a strange new land.

  My mother arranged to rent the old house on Barnaby Street, unbelievably available and cheap but not empty until the middle of July. Until then we’d stay with different Foreign Service friends. The O’Donnells had us first at their house in a new Fairfax neighborhood of pale cul-de-sacs, freshly poured curbs, and unfenced backyards that were a single green
haze. It was broiling, the sky a dim gray blue. We rode bikes through the glaring streets to the drugstore for stationery and candy bars, staggered after the Good Humor truck when it rolled by in the shimmer, wondered how things would turn out, and worried.

  My mother began starting over at once, driving the O’Donnells’ car around the Beltway to look at used cars and interview for jobs. She applied to be a doctor’s assistant (but the agency says she’s too good), and to be a teacher again (Sidwell Friends School liked her a lot, but right now they’re all full. Mom hopes some teacher gets pregnant or quits). She bought a car, very big news in my diary, but it failed inspection in D.C., so she had to drive it back out to be fixed and then drive it in to town again, and that time it passed (got a license plate and everything. It’s all okay! Now all we need is for Mom to get a job!!). Meanwhile we fought with and babysat the O’Donnell kids, wrote letters, rode bikes listlessly around in the heat, and did a lot of baking and mopping. The Watergate hearings droned and flickered in dark rooms. Maggy wasn’t getting over jet lag, she was as limp as the blanched leaves outside, and when Paul called my mother because he wanted Tommy I’d hand the phone straight over and feel like a ghost, and June fell into July, and it wasn’t clear if she’d get a job or where we’d go to school, and everything — the curving pale streets, the thin saplings stranded in the yellow front lawns — seemed bleached and exhausting. In the middle of this, our father called. I suppose now that this formed a helpful point on the imaginary continuum from written word to body, but then it just seemed blinding.