The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Maggy picked up the phone in a bedroom, and I picked up in the kitchen. I stood barefoot on the linoleum floor and stared out at the green haze, the receiver in both hands, Maggy’s voice loud and breathy, too near. My diary says that my father’s voice wasn’t what I’d expected after seven years, although it doesn’t say what I had expected, or that I’d expected anything at all.

  He said something like “How are you, chaps?” and when we answered, “Fine,” he said, “My god, listen to those dreadful American accents!”

  To which we said, “Talk about accents — what about yours!”

  I don’t know what we talked about then, whether he made reference to the latest failed marriage; we got to business fast. How and when we wanted to come to New York, how long we wanted to stay. We were to write him on July tenth with our answers.

  But Maggy became weaker and paler, soon had a temperature of 102, and was diagnosed with mono that would become hepatitis. So we packed up at the O’Donnells’ and took her to Sibley Memorial, then checked into the Chevy Chase Holiday Inn, which seemed a step up to Tommy and me because there was a pool. We shared a single room that was dark, dark blue, the curtains pulled close against the glare; we kept milk, cheese, and orange juice chilled on the air conditioner to save money on restaurants. But we couldn’t afford this and after a few days went to other friends, splitting up to make things easier, Tommy to one house while my mother and I went someplace else, then I joined Tommy while my mother went elsewhere. Meanwhile our furniture arrived and was being held somewhere, but many pieces were smashed. Maggy would stay in the hospital for ten days, after which she’d need to rest, and the trip to New York must be put off (Or I go alone. Oh no). All of this — the drifting, broken dining-room set, Maggy collapsing, us wandering apart, the failing cars, the mother with no husband or job but with a wrist she’d broken in South America that needed resetting, the awful absent presence of Daddy and Paul — infused these months with a weakness that seeped into the bones.

  Housekeeping seemed to work against this, like a settler driving a fence around the place: warding off dissolution and chaos. It’s not so easy to make yourself home. You know what it’s like to wake up startled, not knowing where you are, until bit by bit the window and light shining in, the smudged wall, the scrap of paper on the floor become familiar again. Maybe you know, too, what it’s like to wake up and, for a shocking moment, not remember who you are or what your name is, scramble in terror for a center; it’s like being suddenly pulled out in the water and trying to touch down but finding no bottom, plunging under. Night blasts away identity and form. When I wake up, I feel dissolved, chaos spilling into the day, and I’ve got to get out of bed, get the sheets shaken and smoothed, reestablish order fast. Once the bed’s made and clothes are put away, I feel better: nothing fallen apart yet. Maybe this struggle against dissolution is the soul of making your self home: a cell of order in streaming chaos.

  At each of those places we stayed that summer I did housework — to earn my keep, make up for all that had gone wrong, I don’t know; to pay for my alliance with the wrong father. At the O’Donnells’ I cooked soup, baked brownies, mopped the linoleum; I designed hundreds of houses, pages of them in different colors, trying to get one right. At the next house I made muffins and polished the kitchen floor (made everything bright and shiney). I still vacuum and dust when I feel worthless or things are falling apart, because it’s both productive and punishment.

  Maggy finally emerged from Sibley in July, weak and spotted, and we moved to Barnaby Street. Around the house the shaggy fir trees drooped, their branches scraping the windows and telephone wires. The backyard stretched long and disheveled to an alley, with a clanking swingset, pocked raspberry shrubs, a stand of swaying oaks. But my mother kept making a new start, rising up each morning in her little flowered nightie, plunging like a divorced Mrs. Dalloway into each muggy day. She cut the lawn, pushing over and over it a rusted old mower that left limp, green strands for us to sweep from the sidewalk and stuff into bags. She clipped hedges, discovered ferns, shook out dead leaves from azaleas.

  “Maggy! Jane! I need you, please!” Her voice lifted at the end, lifting up spirit; her face wet, bright, and tired; back straight.

  We fell in. We swept stairs, cleaned windows sticky with pollen and cobwebs and June bugs, wiped sills whose paint flaked and chipped into the crumbling sponge. We mopped the linoleum kitchen floor opaque with layers of wax; we mopped the basement floor, too, cold black-and-brown tiles that stayed dull no matter how much Mop & Glo I squirted or how fiercely I rubbed, in a room that was large and dark, with a fireplace and a door that opened to the backyard, a basement full of potential but always hopeless and musty, until my mother finally rented it out to boarders, at least one of whom stole. We scoured brittle black-and-white shower tiles held together with rotting grout. I raked leaves, found nails and plugs to fix my broken desk, made an unsteady night table from a splintering tea chest, hemmed cutoffs, sewed felt animals to send to our grandmother Dora because it was important always to make things, to be productive as well as industrious, and kept distressed accounts of what anything cost (SOUR MILK FOR 59 CENTS!). We vacuumed the cream living-room rug with its trails of flying wine drops from all those glasses thrown in South America, Los Angeles, and this same house a stepfather ago. My mother went at the rug with a toothbrush one day. She had crouched to scrub a spot but moved on from there, finding one stain after another, crawling across it on reddened hands and knees as if retracing her life, spooling it back in, following the crumbs back to hope and potential, her days with bare legs and a blowing dress on a South Australian shore.

  “Come on, girls!” she cried, looking up as we tried to creep past, drops of sweat running down her long nose. “Help me.”

  We wanted to read, watch television, eat ice cream, sleep, but we dropped to our knees, dipped toothbrushes in suds, and began scrubbing, heads down, resentful, eyes burning with tears. Only later, when she had stood stiffly and leaned in the front doorway through which Paul used to pass with his polished shoes and hard eyes, as she stood there gazing out at the August haze and the prospects of life with two marriages behind her, no job, far from home, only then did we glance at each other and whisper, “Why are we scrubbing a rug with a toothbrush? Is she crazy?”

  But seeing her straight back as she stared out at the oaks, I knew I would fly at anyone else who said so, as if the attack were personal.

  We only rented at Barnaby Street, didn’t own it, but we would stay there for years, and it grew around us like a shell. Home economics: Maybe the most ancient form of economics is to hold a house around you, managing what goes in and out — the stern spirit of Dora, who had saved the white–wash water for the colors and stitched from scraps that peacock robe. Little things my mother did that I learned to do, too, like saving each bit of string or pink rubber band that comes around the newspaper, keeping them in a drawer and not needing to buy such items, making everything count. Never throwing away an old, bruised banana but mashing it for muffins; folding the towels in halves, and halves again, and piling them warm with the rounded edges aligned, blue, yellow. Making sure there’s enough milk and that it never goes sour; cooking our own paste from flour and water; using the leftover peas and carrots in meatloaf. Days and weeks like this, handling food and running a sponge over each surface of the kitchen, make you feel as if you’re stroking the house itself. We had an old dishwasher that must be rolled to the sink, its tubes screwed into the faucet, before you turned the dial and the machine stirred to life. In the dark, the washer rumbling, I’d lay my head on it, press my cheek against its warmth, shut my eyes. My mother’s old black Singer that ran with a foot pedal — the warm smell of machinery, thread, and cloth were so soothing as you bent over to guide a hem past the plunging needle. I got to know with my fingers the beveled edge of each wooden stair I swept with the soft, black hand broom, the grained oaken roundness of each bulb of the bannister, the worn hem of each tea towel an
d sheet. We grew into each other.

  But the composite was tighter than that, synecdochal again. This house was a woman’s, no man this time. The house would be a form of my mother, and not just her, but her little mothers: us. How she set the table was how we now did. If, weeping, she placed a glass of water between herself and the onion she chopped, we learned to do that, too. She’d suddenly start sponging the floor in the morning while still in her nightie, and although I hated this then, I do it today, and feel I’m actually her each time I crouch on the tiles and see my strong hands, my bony knees, like hers. Barnaby Street was where self, mother, and house merged, fathers and fatherlands gone. An organic compound and very female. Tommy, at five, stood before a mirror one evening, plucked the shirt from his chest, and asked when he would get bosoms, too. But his father came to fetch him on weekends, so even this slight chameleon boy left the house, left it entirely female. A humid female compound whose counterparts now were Paul’s glassy apartment downtown and that real family’s official residence in New York.

  In the middle of all the sweeping and swishing of toilets, my mother went to the hospital to have the wrist she’d splintered in South America reset. While she was gone, Maggy and I made macaroni and cheese and kept mending, cleaning, arranging our rooms: the gold-bar jewelry chest, silver elephant, colored bread-dough figurines from South America; the medal for throwing set on the white dresser that once had been Paul and my mother’s and now was mine; certificates pinned to the pale-green cork wall.

  One night while she was in the hospital, the girls called — a new point on the nonexistent continuum, midway between that tape they’d sent four years earlier and their real breathing selves in New York. Daddy and Helen had gone out for the evening, so the girls were alone, like us. Unlike us, they’d discussed and imagined their stepsisters; we already existed in their minds. They’d surely planned, watched to see where Daddy kept his address book, waited until he and Helen had left, looked at each other, and nodded. One of those critical differences between us: To excavate a plan like this from the murk of the present was beyond us. I don’t think we once pictured those girls, because we couldn’t see farther than the window screen or stained porcelain sink. We were just trying to make the house run and hoping our mother got a job and maybe a boyfriend and that life would work out. We would never have dreamt, anyway, of calling long distance. There’ll be a large bill! my diary frets. They asked some pretty strange questions.

  What these were I don’t know. The girls knew their father lived on the other side of Rock Creek Park, so maybe they asked about him. Maybe they asked about his girlfriend, who lived with him downtown. As I write this, though, I know it’s wrong. They would never have admitted to something about their father we knew but they didn’t. Instead they probably asked if we wore bras and when we’d started our periods, and I just sat there with the receiver burning my ear.

  In August, Maggy and I finally went to New York. I’d laid out my clothes for the train trip like a flat mannequin on the other twin bed, to be as ready as possible. Our father had stressed the need to reach Union Station early, as if in all likelihood we would be late, because girls belonged to a species that always was late. Sure enough, either the car wouldn’t start or my mother didn’t know the way, so we rode the bus to Union Station, and as it kept stopping to let slow old people off or on, or turning and chugging in what seemed the wrong direction, and the time for our train got closer and the station was nowhere in sight and we didn’t even know where it was, the idea of arriving too late made me nearly physically sick. But we got there, ran through the marble cavern beneath the stone Indians standing high on the cornice, found the right platform, and boarded. My mother waved her bandaged wrist as our train pulled out.

  The air-conditioning had broken, my diary says, and the cars were 90°, but I remember only a vaporous sense of heading toward something that both took up no space and enveloped. Maggy and I gazed out the window at Baltimore’s hot brick turrets and marble steps, played Alphabet, and lurched to the café car for M&M’s. We found the paper cups in the dispenser and stared out the window again. Sumac, kudzu, old cracked tires, shimmering heat as we skimmed the shining rails toward our father.

  It was the first time we’d been on a train since leaving Washington in 1965. Maggy had spent half her life with her father, half without; she sat quiet beside me. The subject of our family had sunk inside us to a private, dark zone so deep and compacted that the cold water there took different molecular form; no words would bubble up from this place. I looked out the window and thought elsewhere. A quarry, hills of gray pebbles, pink graffiti, the hot gleam of the track. I wondered whether a pen tossed up would keep moving at the same speed as the train or, touching nothing, would be freed from the motion and hover still like the landscape we rushed through, so I kept tossing my pen to find out. Vistas of water, Johnson & Johnson, blue plastic swimming pools, children looking up and waving gravely as we sped by like they knew where we went. The expectations you might have if you were conscious of your mind: anticipation of union, a true state restored.

  Trenton. Through the thick scratched window, green suburbs started to give way to rusted cars and swamps filmed with scum. New York appeared on the horizon like a toy city, as if the towers would only reach to your hips and you could kick through them if you wanted. But as the swamps spread out the city grew large, the train shot into a tunnel, and this is when panic began, the secret about to be real. We slid into a slot of cool granite light, back into hot darkness, then stopped. Beside me Maggy snapped open a mirror.

  We were to go straight up to the announcement board. We were not to talk to anyone or wander off, or we would never be found. He’d asked, to be safe, what we’d be wearing.

  We pulled our bags from the rack and dragged them off the train to the sooty platform, up stairs crowded with hot pants and tall heels caked in glitter. In a dim middle layer we stopped, but it didn’t seem right, so we went up another flight to a glare of hot dog stands, electronics, noise.

  An announcement board hung above a crowd, and we lugged our bags over to stand beneath it. We waited. Hundreds of faces in the noise, and one might be his, and we searched each man about the right age. But no one looked enough like his picture, and everyone moved, and there is no continuum between image and moving life. We stood there, wondering if we’d gone to the wrong place or had come the wrong day, and how it could be we didn’t know our own father, when suddenly a figure stepped from the crowd, and I wish to god I could remember the instant, but there was too much noise and motion, and what I remember most was that as he came toward us beside him walked a woman — and somehow, despite everything, I had forgotten about her.

  I’m sure he embraced us, I’m sure he beamed, I’m sure the rusty word Daddy gurgled out of our throats. I’m sure Helen embraced us, too, and that we both looked down giddily at Nicholas, this other half brother for whom we’d carefully brought a present, a little moving dog, whatever that is. But I don’t remember Nicholas being there or even quite grasping that he actually existed; I don’t remember seeing my father then at all, as if the fantastic moment had finally come but exploded at once into a black hole. We probably chattered stupidly about the hot train as we rode up the escalator and climbed into, I think, a black Checker; if it wasn’t a Checker that first time, it was the next, a cab converted to be my father’s official car. Either that time or later he had a driver, and we sat all five in the back. I sat on the little fold-down seat, which I might have liked then because it was novel but it also made me ridiculous, knees jabbing my chest, a fossilized bird. My mouth and head had filled with air. Maggy and I looked out the windows, made the mistake of twisting and craning to see the tops of tall buildings, and Helen touched my father’s hand and said, “Look, darling. Of course they’ve never seen skyscrapers.”

  We drove up to an apartment across from Central Park with a gray awning and top-hatted doorman, a deep gleaming lobby, and an elevator man who matched the doorman, sl
id shut the brass gate behind us, and cranked us upward. The gate slid open to a vestibule with a little table, a vase jetting flowers, a door affixed with the Australian seal. My emu and kangaroo, which suddenly belonged to a foreign world on which I had no claim and which, like my father, had now been sliced out of me, set free.

  The apartment was elegant and long. That summer it was being redecorated, so walls were torn down and floors were torn up, but what I see is its serene, finished state. Large paintings of colors and shapes hung on the walls, doors opened upon other rooms with more paintings, flowers, boomerangs, spears, plush sofas, a glass table with small silver boxes. Overlooking the park was the master bedroom, where the royal bed seemed always made, smoothed with satin, silk pillows plumped. Into this my father and Helen would disappear, the door closing silent behind them. That very long, narrow hall, papered in photos, not as bamboo, as I insist on remembering, but as a garden trellis, led to the deep end of the apartment. A door on the left opened to one bedroom, and a door on the right opened to another just like it, except one was yellow and the other was pink; both smelled of shampoo, watermelon soap, fresh plastic. The pink room was Jenny’s, and I would sleep there; Maggy would stay in the yellow room. Our first two days in New York the girls were in Washington with their father: that’s how it had been arranged. The carpet was thick and absorbed sound.