Summer Sisters (2 page)

Vix was wearing worn bell-bottoms and a juice-stained purple T-shirt, her dark hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. She had a pencil smudge on her left cheek. As Caitlin spoke Vix could swear she heard Abba playing in the background. “Dancing Queen” … She missed most of what Caitlin said except it had to do with some island in the middle of the ocean. The ocean, for God’s sake, which she had never seen. She was unable to answer, sure this was a trick, a joke. She expected the rest of the class to start laughing, even though the last bell had just rung and the other kids were rushing past them toward the door.

“Vix …” Caitlin tilted her head to one side and the corners of her mouth turned up. “My dad gets me for the whole summer. July first until Labor Day.”

The whole summer. The whole goddamned summer! The music swelled. You’re a teaser, you turn ’em on, Leave them burning and then you’re gone … “I’ve never even seen the ocean.” She could not believe how stupid she sounded, as if she had no control over the words that were coming out of her mouth.

“But how is it possible in this day and age that you’ve never seen the ocean?” Caitlin asked. She was genuinely interested, genuinely surprised that a person could have lived almost twelve years without ever having seen it.

All Vix could do was shrug and then smile. She wondered if Caitlin heard the music, too, if music followed her wherever she went. From then on whenever Vix heard “Dancing Queen” she was back in sixth grade on a sunny afternoon in June. The afternoon some fairy godmother waved her magic wand over Vix’s head and changed her life forever.

At home, Vix asked her mother, “How is it possible, in this day and age, that I’ve never seen the ocean?”

Her mother, who was bathing her youngest brother, Nathan, looked at her as if she were nuts. Nathan had muscular dystrophy. His body was small and misshapen. They had a contraption that allowed him to sit in the bathtub but he couldn’t be left alone. He was seven, sassy and smart, a lot brighter than her other brother Lewis, who was nine, or her sister, Lanie, who was ten.

“What kind of question is that?” her mother said. “We live in New Mexico. Hundreds of miles from one ocean and thousands from the other.”

“I know, but so do plenty of other people and they’ve been to the ocean.” She knew damn well why they’d never been to either coast. Still, she sat on the closed toilet seat, arms folded defiantly across her chest, as she watched Nathan sailing his boats around in the tub, stirring up waves with his arms.

“This is
my
ocean,” he said. His speech was garbled, making it difficult for some people to understand him, but not Vix.

“Besides, you’ve been to Tulsa,” her mother said, as if that had anything to do with what they were talking about.

Yes, she’d been to Tulsa, but only once, when her grandmother, a grandmother she’d never known she had until then, lay dying. “Open your eyes, Darlene,” her mother had said to the stranger in the hospital bed. “Open your eyes and have a look at your grandchildren.” The three of them were lined up in front of their
mother, while Nathan slept in his stroller. This grandmother person looked Vix, Lewis, and Lanie up and down without moving her head. Then she said, “Well, Tawny, I can see you’ve been busy.” And that was it.

Tawny didn’t cry when Darlene died the next day. Vix got to help her clean out Darlene’s trailer, the trailer where Tawny had grown up. Tawny took some old photos, an unopened bottle of Scotch, and a couple of Indian baskets she thought could be worth something. It turned out they weren’t.

She couldn’t sit still. She’d never wanted anything so badly in her life. And she was determined. One way or another she was going away with Caitlin Somers.

“Stop squirming,” Tawny said, tossing Vix a towel. “Get Nathan dried and ready for supper. I’ve got to help Lewis with his homework.”

“So, can I go?” Vix called as Tawny left the bathroom and headed down the hall.

“Your father and I will discuss it, Victoria,” Tawny called back, letting her know it wasn’t a done deal.

Tawny never called her Vix like everyone else.
If I’d wanted to name my daughter after a cold remedy, I would have
. You’d have thought a person named Tawny would have been more flexible.

She’d been to Caitlin’s house, an old walled-in place on the Camino, just once, in March, when Caitlin had invited the whole class to her twelfth birthday party. They’d had live music and a pizza wagon with a dozen
different toppings. Caitlin’s mother, Phoebe, dressed in faux Indian clothes—long skirt, western boots, ropes of turquoise around her neck. Her hair hung down her back in one glossy braid. Some of Phoebe’s friends were there, too, including her boyfriend of the moment, a guy with long, silvery hair, a concha belt, and hand-tooled leather boots. Vix had never been to a party like that, in a house like that, with grownups like that.

She’d brought Caitlin a blank book for her birthday, covered in blue denim, with a silver chain as a page marker. She only hoped it was worthy of Caitlin’s thoughts and feelings. She dreamed about touching her hair, her sun-kissed skin.

She wrote her parents a letter, making a case for letting her go, not the least being Caitlin’s promise that it wouldn’t cost them a penny.

But Tawny didn’t buy it. She claimed Caitlin came from an unstable family. “Just one look at that mother …”

“But we won’t be with her mother,” Vix countered, “we’ll be with her father and he’s very stable.”

“How do you know?”

“Everybody knows. He’s going to call you. You can ask him yourself.”

In the end, it was
her
father who convinced Tawny to let her go. Her father, a man who looked surprised when he opened their front door to find he had four noisy children inside. A man of so few words he could spend a whole weekend without speaking, but if he did, his voice dropped way low on the last part of every sentence and
someone was always asking, What?
What’d you say, Dad?
But he was never unkind.

She imagined jumping into his arms, hugging him as hard as she could to show how thankful she was, but that would have embarrassed both of them so she said, “Thanks, Dad.” And he mumbled something, something she didn’t get, while he rested his hand on top of her head.

Until then the highlight of her childhood had been the weekend her father installed a molded laminate shower in the half-bath in her parents’ room. When it was hooked up and working Vix, Lewis, and Lanie all begged to be first to try it out. Her father looked right at her and said, “We’ll do it in age order. Vix gets to go first.”

How proud she was that day! How grateful to her father for recognizing her as having a special place in the family. First daughter. Eldest child. A yellow shower with its own glass door. She’d wanted to stand under the warm water forever. Only later did she realize how crowded their house was, with small, high, north-facing windows, making it dark and cold year-round, even in relentlessly sunny Santa Fe.

She knew next to nothing about her parents’ early lives. Whenever Vix asked her mother a personal question Tawny answered, “We don’t wash our linen in public.”

“I’m not public,” Vix argued. “I’m family. I’m your daughter.”

“You know enough,” Tawny told her. “You know what’s important. Besides, curiosity killed the cat.” But satisfaction brought her back again, Vix thought,
not that she’d dare say it out loud. If she did, Tawny would shout,
That’s enough
, Victoria! So she quit asking questions. What was the point?

Sometimes she tried to imagine Tawny on the day she graduated from high school, boarding the first bus out of Tulsa and traveling as far as her money would take her, all the way to Albuquerque, where, thanks to her typing and shorthand skills, which Tawny reminded them of regularly, she found a job working for a young lawyer. Seven years later she was still working for him. By then she was engaged to Ed Leonard, a Sioux City boy, polite and nice-enough looking, whom she’d met at a dance at Kirtland Air Force Base.

They were married by a justice of the peace when Ed got out of the service. The young lawyer, who wasn’t that young anymore, threw a party for them in his backyard. Tawny didn’t invite Darlene. Didn’t even tell Ed her mother was living.

Then came the dead babies, three in five years, born before they were old enough to breathe on their own. Vix and Lanie used to play The Dead Baby Game the way other kids played A, My Name is Alice, reciting the names Tawny and Ed had chosen for their babies.
William Edward, Bonnie Karen, James Howard
. They’d just about given up hope when Vix was born, strong and healthy, a survivor. Lanie and Lewis followed. They moved to Santa Fe where Ed landed a job selling insurance. And then they had Nathan.

Her father used to joke about making the Millionaire’s Club, selling a million dollars’ worth of insurance in one year. Then he might win a vacation to some exotic resort, maybe even to Hawaii. If he did, he prom
ised he’d take all of them. Vix dreamed about that vacation until the insurance company went under and her father was out of work for close to a year. Tawny was lucky to find a job working for the Countess. Even after Ed found a new job as the night manager at La Fonda, the old hotel on the Plaza, Tawny kept hers. “It’s hard enough to make do on both our salaries,” she’d say.

The Countess wore suede jodhpurs, blue nail polish, and exotic jewelry. She had five dogs. Nobody knew her exact age. Tawny had to take her to AA meetings. Sometimes, when the Countess fell off the wagon, Tawny would get really mean at home.

Vix lay in bed in the room she shared with Lanie, dreaming of the summer to come. She envisioned palm trees swaying in the breeze. She could almost feel the long, sultry nights, hear the beat of reggae music. Fantasy Island or, at the very least, Gilligan’s. She had to pinch herself to make sure it was real, that she was really going away with Caitlin Somers, that she hadn’t invented the whole thing.

Lanie didn’t like the idea. “It’s so unfair!” she cried. “You get to do everything.”

Lanie was probably wondering why Caitlin Somers, the biggest deal in the whole school, had invited her to spend the summer. She was wondering the same thing herself. She tried to console Lanie. “Look at it this way … you can have our room all to yourself for the whole summer. You can have friends stay overnight and everything.”

“Can I have your Barbies?”

“Have? No way.”

“Use?”

“Use … okay … if you promise you’ll keep them exactly the way they belong. And Barbie’s Dream House is off limits.”

“No fair … that’s the best.”

“Then no deal.”

Lanie pouted. She and Vix shared Tawny’s dark eyes and high cheekbones, a gift from some Cherokee ancestor. But Lanie was the best looking of all of them, with Ed’s auburn hair and fair skin. “Okay … I won’t touch Barbie’s Dream House.”

Vix was almost asleep when Lanie whispered, “If you go away you’ll miss your birthday.”

“No, I won’t. I’ll just be in a different place.”

Phoebe never drove to Albuquerque, even when she was flying somewhere herself, so Caitlin rode down with Vix and her family in the RV, fitted for Nathan’s chair. At the airport, when Vix bent down to hug Nathan goodbye, he said, “Don’t worry … I won’t forget you,” and he gave her his lopsided smile.

“I won’t forget you either,” she promised. As she stood up she noticed a woman staring at Nathan. She was used to the way people looked at him, with a mixture of curiosity, pity, and revulsion. They’d look away if she happened to catch their eye.

Once they were on the plane, seated and buckled in, Vix pulled a lunch bag out of her backpack. Tawny had packed two bologna sandwiches, several juice cartons, and bags of pretzels and potato chips, as if Vix were
going on a camping trip. She unfolded a note scribbled on lined paper.

In case you don’t like the airline food. Mother

She wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or cry.

“What’s that?” Caitlin asked.

“A note from my mother.”

“She wrote to you already?”

Vix nodded.

“Phoebe loves having summers off from being a mother,” Caitlin said proudly. “She’s going to the south of France. She’ll send a postcard and bring me back something great to wear.”

Vix was thinking her mother would give anything to go to France. But the Countess never missed opera season in Santa Fe. She’d throw huge parties and Tawny would be responsible for everything.

The plane was taxiing down the runway now, picking up speed, faster and faster until they lifted into the air. As they did Vix closed her eyes, said a prayer, and clutched the arms of her seat.

“Wait …” Caitlin said. “Let me guess … this is your first flight.”

“Right. And don’t ask,
How is it possible in this day and age
.”

Caitlin laughed. “You’re totally different,” she said, squeezing Vix’s arm. “I like that about you.”

Tawny

W
HAT WAS SHE THINKING
, packing a lunch for Victoria? It’s not like her to fuss over her children. They have to be prepared for life and life is hard, full of disappointments. She shouldn’t have listened to Ed, shouldn’t have agreed to let Victoria go to an island, of all places, when she can’t even swim. And telling
her
not to worry. Worry? She’s too tired to worry. She can’t remember what it’s like not to be tired. She closes her eyes and prays to God to protect her daughter. To keep her safe. But it will never be the same. Once Victoria gets a taste of another way of life, once she spends a summer with a girl like Caitlin Somers, she’ll be lost to them, sure as a dog chews a bone. She knows it even if Ed doesn’t.