“Me too.”
She smiled and said, “That so?” in a tone I didn’t like. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I said, “Well, he missed the food.”
Becka shrugged. “Aw, he never eats my breakfasts anyway. Kind of nice to have somebody to cook for.” She fastened the ponytail with a purple barrette and shook her head to test it. Then she wheeled around to face me. The rapid switch was disconcerting. “Jack said you didn’t bring hardly any clothes with you. You want to go shopping this afternoon?”
“I don’t have any money,” I said, watching her carefully.
Becka waved that away with one hand. “Jack gave me some to spend on you, and I’ve got more if that’s not enough. Besides, this way we girls can get to know each other. You can tell me all your brother’s dirty little secrets.” She winked.
“You sure you want to know?”
“You mean, watch out what you wish for and all that?” She laughed. There was a sudden bitter edge to her voice. “Smart girl.”
“I was just kidding.”
“I wasn’t,” she said, a little shortly. Then, with another whirlwind mood change, she smiled a big, toothy smile and told me to run and get myself cleaned up, now, so that we could head on out.
Definitely a put-on, I thought.
The store where Becka took me shopping was a huge concrete building with a row of plate-glass windows facing a vast asphalt parking lot. Becka took the lot at about fifty. I just had time to read a sign taped to one of the windows, wishing the best of luck to the Erie High School Laker Band; then Becka whipped the Ford into a parking space, barely missing an abandoned shopping cart.
As soon as the key was out of the ignition I was out of the car, grateful for the solid feel of asphalt below my shoes. It took Becka another five minutes to sort out her sunglasses and check her lipstick and make sure she had her wallet. I stared at the bright sun glinting mercilessly on the other cars in the lot and began to feel awkward.
“You’re just like your brother,” she said as she got out of the car. “Everything is fast, fast, fast. At least you wait for me.” She shook her head. “I swear, if that man weren’t so damn sexy, I’d never put up with half his bullshit. ”
On the sidewalk in front of the store, there was a miniature coin-operated carousel. The battered fiberglass animals were something like ducks and something like dogs; the bright colors had been faded by the weather and the red paint on the base was beginning to rust and flake off. The carousel was revolving slowly, the noise from the engine inside it all but drowning out the tinny music. There was a crying baby with food on its face clinging desperately to the back of one of the animals, while two women talked calmly over its head.
“Something wrong?” Becka asked.
I shrugged and gave her a fake, sunny smile as we passed through the automatic doors into the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit store. “If you were a kid, would you want anything to do with that?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “You mean the merry-go-round?”
“I guess so. That thing outside, with the baby on it.”
“That’s a weird thing to think,” she said.
The last new piece of clothing I’d had was my Christmas dress. My wardrobe back on the Hill had been a mixture of Jack’s castoffs and my mother’s left-behinds; that day in the store, I was wearing a cotton blouse that used to be Crazy Mary’s and a cut-off pair of Jack’s jeans. I didn’t much care about clothes, especially
girly
clothes; so when I saw the part of the store where Becka wanted to shop, filled with row upon row of shining chrome racks hung with bright primary colors and cheerful prints, I wanted to laugh out loud. I couldn’t wear this stuff. She had to be kidding.
But I soon discovered that Becka was nothing if not serious when it came to clothes, particularly trendy clothes. She gave me a bright orange dress to try on that made me feel like a traffic cone. When I looked at myself in the narrow mirror outside the dressing room, I said, without thinking, “Well, if nothing else works out, I can always find some road construction to stand next to.”
Becka sniffed. “I think it’s adorable.”
“You don’t think it’s a little bright?” I stroked the stiff fabric and tried to sound as if I really valued her opinion.
“Wouldn’t have picked it out if I didn’t like it.” She turned away, her face expressionless. “But maybe I don’t have your educated taste.”
“No, I didn’t mean—” But then I shut my mouth. I could tell by the set of her shoulders that it wouldn’t matter whether I apologized or not.
Becka moved among the racks of clothes and I shuffled after her silently. I heard exchanges all around me, flowing as fluidly as water from a rainspout. Becka said to the clerk, “How you doing today?” and the clerk said, “Not so bad, still hotter than blazes out there?” and Becka said, “Sure is,” and it all seemed so easy for them. Meanwhile, there I was, about as fluid as a slab of granite. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so terrifying. In the outside world, people cared about the weather; they cared about their weekends; they cared about their baseball teams. Nobody cared about the theoretical ramifications of black hole entropy. I didn’t really care, either, but my world was made up of the things that Raeburn thought were necessary and true; in Becka’s world, I was like a gear uncaught, and there was nothing in the whole of string theory that could make me a part of what I had been thrust into.
Becka spun a chrome rack around and pulled out another sundress, this one bright green. “How about this one?”
“Nice,” I said.
Jack came home later that day. I was wearing one of the dresses that Becka had bought for me. I felt stupid in it and he laughed when he saw me, which didn’t help my mood or hers. Finally he suggested that he and I take a drive around Erie, so that I could get my bearings, and Becka said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, “Oh, what a nice idea.”
“The Becka Capriola mood swing is a force of nature,” Jack said when we were alone in the car. “Watch for it. It bites.” Becka’s house was on the east side of town. Jack drove west down tree-lined streets through a neighborhood full of Victorian houses and wide grassy lawns, and I thought, this must be how the other half lives; but a few blocks later, we were back in the land of small box houses, scrubby ill-watered lawns, and old cars with paint fading under a thick coat of dust. Closer to the water, the boxes had been painted, and sleek, expensive cars sat in front of tidy gardens. To the right of us, the bay between Presque Isle and the mainland stretched and glittered in the sun, and I thought, of course. Now that the water’s cleaner, this is hot property.
“There’s not much money here,” I said.
“It’s hidden. The summer people live up near the state park, on the peninsula. Gated themselves off from the highway and everything.” Jack’s lip curled contemptuously. “They’re the ones who are going to buy all that stuff we took from Raeburn.”
“What are we going to do? Go door to door?”
“Becka’s got a friend who can fence things for us.”
“Great. Let’s meet him.”
“You really want to get out of here.”
“She doesn’t like me, Jack. She doesn’t want me here.”
“She wants me here,” Jack answered. “And if she wants me, she’d damn well better be nice to you.”
That was true and we both knew it. All the same, it didn’t take Becka long to get sick of me. I understood. She was in love with my brother, or at least enthralled by him; I could tell because when she talked about him, her voice held the same awe as when she talked about the characters on the soap operas she watched in the afternoons. She and Jack had met in a tattoo parlor on Peach Street, she said.
“Jack doesn’t have any tattoos,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Becka said. “But one of the ink guys down there is a friend of mine. I go down to see him sometimes, on my day off.”
“What was Jack doing in a tattoo parlor?”
“Meeting me. What the hell does it matter? I went in there to talk to Mike, and there he was. He was staying with this awful girl, over on Sixteenth Street. Wasn’t a week later I said to him, ‘Sweetheart, you just go ahead and move your stuff in with old Becka until you decide you need to be moving on.’ And the rest is history.”
“And then I came along and ruined everything.” I meant it as a joke.
“Oh,
no,
honey!” Her smile was forced. “Nothing like that! You’re a cutie pie. I’m happy to have you here, just as long as you want to stay. It’s exactly like having a little sister again.”
But later that night, when Jack returned from driving her to work, he was grinning. “What did you say to our little Becka? She’s been stricken with a guilty conscience. Thinks you think she hates you.”
“She’s right. I do think she hates me.”
“So do I. But why is she all wrapped up about it now?”
I told him what I’d said to her that afternoon, and he said, “My small scheming sister, you’re brilliant,” and kissed me. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t been scheming at all.
Later he said, “There is a downside, however. Our guilt-stricken Becka now feels the need to prove her goodwill, so on her next day off we’re all piling into the car and going to the beach. Together.”
I groaned.
“Oh, it gets better. Becka’s going to bring along a friend for you.”
“No, Jack,” I said, but he put a hand on my knee and said, “It’s okay. It’s the same friend I was telling you about. You’ll like him. His name is Michael.”
“That’s why you were in the tattoo parlor.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Somebody’s been telling stories.”
“So who’s this girl you were living with, over on—what was it—Fifteenth Street?”
“Sixteenth.”
“Sixteenth. What was her story?”
“Her name was Teri. She was a waitress. I was only there for a week or two.”
“Before that?”
“Somewhere else.”
“You won’t tell me.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Because I’ll be jealous?”
“Because it’s over,” Jack said. “They’re history.”
The next morning, Jack and I picked Becka up from work. We’d gone down to Pittsburgh to see the planetarium, which had just reopened after a renovation. The show had started at midnight, and then we had gone to a bar, so we were awake anyway. As we waited outside the club, which was a plain cinder-block building outside of town, he said, “If I had my way, I’d buy us a private island in uncharted waters and we’d never have to leave it.”
“Are there still any uncharted waters?”
“There have to be some somewhere.”
“Becka’s coming,” I said.
She was walking slowly across the gravel parking lot, wearing a light pink sundress. During the night a heavy cloud cover had moved in over the lake, and the predawn light was thick and hazy. The pink sundress was virtually all that I could see of her, floating ghostlike in midair. She was walking so slowly, I saw as she came closer, because her red shoes had stiletto heels, and they were sinking into the gravel.
“Better let her sit in front,” Jack said, so I got out of the car and slid into the back seat.
When she was still about fifteen feet away from the car, she stopped to kick off her shoes and picked them up in one hand. She was singing softly to herself as she walked, and the hand holding the sandals swung cheerfully in time with her steps, but when she reached the car I thought that the heavy makeup she was wearing made her look plucked and artificial. The skin under her eyes was gray with exhaustion.
I realized that I had no idea how old she was.
“Morning.” She smiled the same tight, tired smile she usually gave me. “How was Pittsburgh?”
“Postindustrial,” Jack said as she climbed into the car. He leaned over to kiss her, sliding one hand into her hair and twining his fingers there. The kiss lingered. I made myself look out the window until I heard him say, “Hey, gorgeous.”
“Hey, yourself,” Becka said. I looked back at them. There was a foolish grin on her face. “You two been having fun. This car smells like an ashtray.”
“You look tired,” Jack said.
“Quite a night,” she said. “Feel like some food? I’ll buy.”
“Sure.”
“What about you, Jo?” she called back to me, not bothering to turn around. “Hungry?”
“Whatever.”
Jack used his right hand to work the gearshift and then rested it on Becka’s knee. “Quite a night? Is that good or bad?”
“The money was good.” She laid her hand over his. He picked it up and kissed it, then dropped it so he could shift again. “God, I’m tired.”
We went to an all-night diner and sat in a booth. It wasn’t quite seven o’clock. There were only a few other people there, and none of them seemed entirely present—they all looked either half awake, as if they’d just crawled out of bed, or drained and half asleep, like Becka. She ordered hot chocolate and a Belgian waffle with strawberry topping and extra whipped cream. I ordered coffee.
“You don’t want anything to eat?” Jack said to me.
“It’s too early for food.”
“Two coffees,” he said to the waitress. She nodded drowsily and shuffled off.
Becka yawned and leaned her head on Jack’s shoulder. “All I want to do is sleep for a hundred years.”
“Sleeping beauty,” Jack said. “I’ll try to find you a hedge of thorns.”
Becka smiled sleepily and kissed his shoulder.
Our coffee came with a dish full of individual plastic cups of half-and-half. I poured two of them into my coffee and watched the white liquid swirling in the cup. When I looked up, Becka was sitting up straight. She was holding a compact mirror in front of her face and staring at me. Our eyes met and she looked quickly back into the mirror and began wiping the heavy blush from her cheeks.
“So, y’all had a good night?” she said.
“Great,” Jack said. “You should see the planetarium. It’s cool.”
“Went there on a school field trip once,” Becka said vacantly. “Planetarium, zoo, whole nine yards.”
“I’ve never been on a school field trip,” I said.
“We used to go all over the damn place. Even went out to Fallingwater once. God, that was a long day. Real pretty, though.”
“It is,” I said. “I’ve never seen it in the springtime, though.”