Authors: Sandra Novack
Once, with the very first man I dated seriously, I tried to speak about her. I said: This truly awful thing happened, and she left, just like that, up and disappeared. I was far less circuitous in those days, much more haphazard with both my love and my intentions. I would tell anyone anything, if only they seemed as though they might listen. If only they asked.
When this happened with my boyfriend, we were at dinner, a fancy place with white linen—he worked for the government and had a lot of money. As I spoke, he cleared his throat and glanced around to see if anyone else might be listening. He leaned forward and said: No one wants to hear
that
kind of story. He said: Tell me one about a man who battles the enemy and wins the foxy lady. You know: action and blood, secrets and death. Maybe a rhetorical flourish or two. Now
that’s
a story.
My sister is so insistent, though, so small in what she offers me. The secret to beautiful hair, she says, is to lather and repeat. You’ve got to coax the shine into it.
She has just come from the shower, and I have heard the doors closing and opening again, heard her secret knock at my door—five quick knocks, a
bumpity-bump-bump
rhythm, a language she and I share through the walls at night. I have smelled aftershave and lotion and sensed my sister’s salty tears. I have searched the corners of my room but come up empty-handed.
She sits on my bed and adjusts the pillows. She sits bundled in a robe, even though it isn’t even dinnertime. No bears, Goldilocks? she inquires. When I say no, she growls and tackles me, tickling my sides until I laugh. She lets me roll her over—she is so easy, my sister, so gentle in her rolling—she lets me go bang-bang-bang into her heart with a pretend gun.
Oh, she says, covering her forehead with her arm. I’m dying. As she leans back, her hair falls, the soft skin of her neck exposed, the faint impression, raspberry marks under her ear.
Don’t die, I say, suddenly regretful. Come back to life, I tell her. I plant a kiss on her cheek. I coax her with another kiss, but her eyes are closed and she does not answer. She lies perfectly still. I push at her shoulder. I nudge her a bit, check her heartbeat and pulse like doctors do on television.
September pushes life on and on. I feel it pulse through me, like wind scattering the dead leaves. September is also the month of Aunt Judy’s pumpkin bread, sticky on the mouth’s concave roof, sweet on the tongue, melting like butter. She stops by to check on my father, to see if there have been callbacks on jobs. Laid off from the textile factory, my father has been home all year, and people are starting to worry, notice small things, changes in demeanor, a certain quietness that has settled over the house. Is he depressed? she wants to know. Are things okay? Does he seem all right to you girls?
My sister and I rally around him. We are his girls—we are such good girls. We stay inside, neglect friendships, help out around the house. My sister does not ask to drive, though I know she wants to. She has a secret love, a kiss-me love, a boy from school named Alex. Sometimes Alex prowls by the house late at night, waiting to catch a glimpse of her. He coaxes her with promises of weed, tiny pills, and beer. He throws small stones at her window. Come out, he whispers. Can you come out?
We prepare for Halloween a full month early. We are secretive in our preparations; my sister holds clandestine meetings in the basement, telling me exactly how the skeletons must look. When we finish our cuttings of cardboard and charcoal, we
hang the skeletons on the front door, a warning to those who enter—Beware! We plant gravestones in the front yard, speak of death and goblins, ask Aunt Judy if she knows what it’s like not to sleep. It’s not Judy but my sister who seems most tired, those half-moons under her eyes, her hair barely combed. She cracks lame jokes anyway, parades around the living room, dancing like a zombie.
Girls, Aunt Judy says. You girls, always living in a fantasy world. Can’t you ever come down from your clouds? She tells my sister she’s surprised at her—almost sixteen now and still talking nonsense. Silly, she says. Your mother needs your help. She’s been working so much, trying to keep up. There are important, adult things going on, you know.
Aunt Judy is silly. She wears entirely too much makeup: blue eye shadow and peach lipstick, and her red hair always shellacked. Her clothes are too tight for her round body. She believes she can be twenty again. What is sillier?
There must be a mother. I open the white shutters of her closet, step into the mothballed air and inhale until my lungs hurt. There are pretty shoes lined up against the floorboard, long dresses hanging on metal wires. I go a-hunting through the house, down the long corridor that leads to the kitchen, where soup has been left on the stove too long. I run my hand across curtains left on the ironing board. I find dictation in the living room, take-home work from the office, her almond-shaped reading glasses lying atop a mass of papers. In my room, I find clothes laid with exacting detail in the places body parts should
be: a yellow Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt lying just under the pillow on my bed, a pair of brown slacks under it, a braided belt in between, socks under the cuffs of the slacks, clogs on the floor. And then I sleep.
It is not my mother but my sister who kisses me goodnight, who tucks blankets all around me. It is my sister who tells bedtime stories. Before she pulls up the covers, she lets me drape the sheets over both of us. This is how we tell stories: under the sheets, hiding in ourselves. If someone were to look in through an open door or window, if ever there were open doors and windows in this house, they’d see us bunched up, flashlight barely seeping through the fabric. We are like ghosts, my sister and I, already disappearing.
My sister ignores the knock at the door. We are busy, go away. She intones: It was a cold night, just like tonight. She pretends to shiver. She has just taken a pill, one that will dull her senses, one that Alex gave to her the night before. I listen more to the sound of her voice than to her actual words. Her voice is light, like a song waiting to be lifted, full of its predictable, often sorrowful, rhythms. I try to braid my sister’s hair—she has left it looking wild—but it tangles so easily. She pulls me from her, in no mood for my wandering fingers.
It was going to snow, my sister continues. It was just about to snow, actually; the sky was black and the air so cold it hurt. The mother pulled her entire family out of bed—two boys and two girls—and she scooted them outside in their housecoats and slippers, their jackets still open. The children thought perhaps
there was a fire, but there was no smoke. The children wondered where the father was, but he stayed inside, sleeping. The mother piled them all into the car. She had packed a suitcase for each child, my sister says. There were icicles hanging from the door. A brother broke one off, just for something to do; he carried the icicle in his bare hands, licked it. The mother started the engine running to warm everyone up, but then she just sat there, crying, not knowing where to go or what to do. The baby slept through all this, my sister says. The baby was only three, going on four, and she had curly blond hair, just like yours. She looked like an angel, sleeping like that. I bet the baby doesn’t even remember.
My friend frequently speaks about lies and how bad they are, though mostly it is with regard to the government and politics and the vitrolic flow of information. My friend’s brother died in Vietnam, and she is still very angry with the government. Truth, she says, is the only thing that can save us, restore our voices, our common humanity.
Sometimes I think she speaks the truth so much in an effort to remember her brother. Maybe, in speaking the truth, she soothes some hurt, calms some grave injustice. I do not know for certain. I rely on speculation, innuendo. In that regard, I believe I am like my sister. We are not easy girls, my sister and I. We leave out the most important things, rely on pauses and hesitations, which we also look for in other people. But, even then, intuiting, what can we say we really know? I will never be like my friend, who searches for truth and seems disappointed
when she can’t find it. Even the smallest pieces of my knowledge are fraught with complicated interpretations, large, gaping holes, lies.
My friend and I sit at the kitchen table. We drink wine and smoke cigarettes. We read tarot cards and palms and laugh hysterically when we say that we’ll never lose our beauty and luster, or that we’ll be rich and famous.
What was your family like? my friend asks later. She is still trying to get to know me, still piecing me together. She is so intent on uncovering anything I hide.
Mostly, I say, we were a normal family. This is not a lie. I love my parents. They are my parents, after all. And my father and mother took care of us. We had warm clothes every year, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We went on picnics in the park. We took vacations to Florida. My parents had friends, people who visited. In the winter months, my father would take us all sledding. He waxed our sleds with candles. He made sure we bundled up. He warmed the car before we got into it—he always did that for us—and he drove us to the highest hill in the neighborhood, where he’d wait as we got out, one after the other, and flew away on our sleds, screaming. Then he drove down to retrieve us and drove us back up again for another go. He did that for hours, which was very nice.
That
is
nice, my friend agrees. But it seems to me that this is not enough for her, that she is still waiting.
Most of us, these days, don’t have much of a relationship, I tell her. We hardly speak, if you want to know the truth.
She looks at me sympathetically. Of course you all have a relationship, she says. Even if you don’t speak at all.
I would like to believe this. I would like to believe that’s how all love is—that love is carried with us, on our shoulders and
inside our bellies. I would like to believe this about my sister, especially, even if it is rather foolish.
Hunk, Hunk, Hunk, my father calls. He wants her to come and clip his toenails. My father is a slack man, with skin that is like leather treated too long. My father is also extremely superstitious. Did I mention this? He believes he once saw a ghost. He speaks of his own mother casting spells that could bring the dead back to life.
Hunkie, he calls my sister. He praises her Gypsy good looks. Hunks can call one another Hunks in affection or recognition, in the way that another friend, years later, would talk about calling her sister Dirty Irish, or in the way that my friend Greg would call his lover Queen, or Queenie, or Louis, you fag.
In January, we pour a new basement. My sister has been living these days in her room with the door locked, and my
bumpity-bump-bump
coaxing doesn’t bring her out. Even Alex doesn’t draw her interest, coming to her window, offering up weed and small tokens of his affection. What is wrong with her? Aunt Judy wants to know. Come down, she calls. Come down now.
My brothers, Aunt Judy, and I help my father mix cement that will turn hard and crumble. My brothers call each other
goofball
and
moron
and
dumb ass
. They throw cement into each
other’s hair, claiming peanut butter gets anything out. They laugh when Aunt Judy chides them.
My sister finally comes down to help. She is dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt that exposes her thin arms, the paleness of her skin, the fine dark hairs that travel over her and stand on end. My brothers tease her, tease her tiredness, her aloneness. They smear wet cement on her back, to try to egg her on.
We mix and pour and level things off until everything about the room seems gray and cool, thick and wet. We move backwards, edging our way to steps that lead upstairs to the kitchen. We leave no footprints. Right before we finish, my sister bends down, and, at the landing, she writes in big, chunky letters:
THE HUNK
. Years later, after my sister has left, my mother will cover this up with ugly fragments of carpets that do not fit anything. And my sister, what is left of her, will disappear all over again.
Who’s the favorite? What does the favorite get?
Time passes and life thaws outside the window. Things push on and on. A full summer later, after the summer of closing and opening doors, the summer of bears and more bears and raspberry kisses and briny tears, I walk into my sister’s bedroom and find her packing a small duffel bag, with only the basics: shirts, jeans, underwear, a bra and panties. She is so willing to leave everything behind. She is so willing to go. She tells me: I’m sorry, baby, but I can’t take it anymore.
I do not understand what my sister’s packing means, just as
I do not understand her laughter or tears. There was a mother, I know, who packed things and only made it to the end of the driveway, so I am not too worried. I watch as my sister packs, as she takes a family photo and cuts our two faces from it—same pale skin and hooked nose, same deeply set eyes. She holds us up and says: I’m going to keep you with me forever.
Years later, in her one and only letter, she will send this photograph back to me, worn and blanched and wrinkled. She will send it to let me know she hasn’t forgotten, to remind me of her promise and to break her promise all at once, to both lie and tell the truth, simultaneously.
For a long time—years, in fact—nothing happens, which makes me sometimes wonder about my sister. Before I leave home for college, she sends a letter to me, along with the photograph of us taken years before. In the letter she says horrible things. She speaks of doors opening in the middle of the night, marks left all over her body. She says so much that I have to skim over large portions of her words, skip entire passages, block out pieces of information.
These days I never read the letter, but I know exactly where it is, in the third drawer of my lingerie chest, buried under fishnets and garter belts, lacy bras and other things I don’t often wear. That is where I keep my sister, and that is where I keep her words.