They’re more like little twitches. Her eyes twitch to the right and her right thumb moves back and forth, and she moves her lips but can’t talk. But then they’re over, and she’s okay, and they don’t have to go to the hospital.
She still has to have her blood taken and has to get CAT scans, which now they call CT scans. The scans show the hole in Zoe’s brain, which looks like a moonscape after an asteroid strike, as though the doctors used an ice-cream scoop to remove the tumor. Like when the Waluhili counselor got bitten by a black widow and kept space in her leg for secret messages.
Amy writes letters to all of Zoe’s favorite celebrities and saves their responses for these moments, thinking if she can surprise her at exactly the right time, she won’t notice the needles or the noises or anything else that scares her. She gets an autographed picture of Oksana Baiul. She makes their dad take her to the drugstore to buy a clear plastic frame for a dollar fifty so it doesn’t get messed up. She thinks that this time it will work. But Zoe still gets scared and cries. Although then she spends a long time looking in silence at the picture.
Amy gets a typewritten letter from Viktor Petrenko and a handwritten note from Paul Simon. She tries writing to Dr. Seuss, but it turns out he has died already, the girls just didn’t know about it yet.
The better Zoe does, the more their parents leave them at home alone and for longer and longer periods of time. The girls tape songs off the radio and choreograph dances. For a long time their favorite one is Salt-N-Pepa’s Shoop. They puzzle over the words, trying to get to where they can lipsync. Even when they can parse them out they don’t always know what they mean. Zoe likes to say the line that goes, Lick him like a lollipop should be licked, but nearly four years before Monica Lewinsky, neither Amy nor Zoe could possibly fathom the actual thing that is being suggested. They just know it has something to do with sex, and this is enough to obsess them.
Zoe develops other problems, though, like allergies to all different things. One evening she becomes allergic to grape juice, and her mouth swells up. Their parents accuse Amy of hitting Zoe when they first come home. For a little while their mother stands up very straight and says that they can’t leave Zoe alone with Amy anymore. Amy pictures stabbing their mother with the kitchen scissors, imagines the blood. She turns and goes to their bedroom and lies down. The dog goes with her and prowls around, sniffing at the squirrel cage.
Until today, I thought I would have given anything to change the way things went with Sasha.
Three things happen in 1995
Amy is thirteen and turns fourteen in September. Zoe has been ten since November.
The first thing that happens happens on the morning of April 19. The girls are setting up a house with their dad’s old Lincoln Logs. The Lincoln Log is a kind of precursor to the Lego, just logs with a little groove at either end that lets them stay together. The set, which the girls discovered on a recent tornado warning in the hall closet at their grandparents’, is in perfect condition, almost as though it has never been used. The only problem is that the dog keeps nosing around the base they’ve made, and Zoe doesn’t want to put it outside.
Although not due home from work till lunchtime, their mother comes storming in at ten. Saying nothing, face flushed, she turns on the TV.
What remains of the Alfred P. Murrah Building looks like a body after a severed limb. Wires hang loose like snapped arteries in exposed organs, all the walls ripped off. Amy’s hand hovers over the box she was reaching into for more materials when the image appeared. Their father comes in from his study. Their mother turns to him in a flurry of savage, desperate gesticulations. Her eyes are shining.
More than six years before September 11, the Oklahoma City bombing shocks the nation and utterly cripples the girls. Fourteen adults and six children are confirmed dead by afternoon. A photograph of a fireman carrying an infant with a blood-covered head is shown and reshown on every channel, printed and reprinted in every paper. The infant dies. Zoe won’t stop crying. Amy’s stomach churns. No one has even the slightest comprehension of what has happened. They spend the evening at their grandparents’. Someone is always on the phone with the cousins in Oklahoma City or the other ones in Texas and Missouri who also need to know. No one they know has been directly affected. But somehow that doesn’t seem to matter: it might as well have happened in their backyard. For the first time ever, they all four spend the night at their grandparents’ house.
The second thing that happens is the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial. For this the nation is prepared. Domino’s Pizza reports that in the hour before the verdict it receives the most orders ever in its whole history, but not a single pizza is ordered in the entire United States of America in the minutes between 12:00 and 12:05, central time.
Amy and Zoe watch the verdict at the Junior College, on a big TV screen in the middle of the Main Commons, where hundreds of students and some teachers have gathered and are sitting or standing or squatting waiting for the time. Amy and Zoe stand alone at a balcony on the second floor, outside the office where their dad is in a meeting, scanning the crowd in search of Sasha. A woman says we the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant Orenthal James Simpson not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code section 187(a), a felony upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being, and the door behind Amy and Zoe opens up, and their dad comes out and sees he’s missed it and says let’s go, even though they haven’t found Sasha yet, and they wanted to wave to him from the balcony, like in a fairy tale.
Between the Oklahoma City bombing and the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial there is a summer of hummingbirds in the Roses of Sharon at their grandparents’, of watermelons and watermelon fights into which Amy is dragged by Zoe against her better judgment, and of a perfect performance by Yekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov set to Ella Fitzgerald singing a song called The Man I Love. This performance, and this song, will serve Amy for many years as the sole definition of love. The way she awaits him as he skates towards her, the way her face lights up when he gets close. Her immaculate plain beauty. How she can land smoothly on a single blade every time he tosses her into the air no matter how many times she spins around or how fast she is going.
How many times would they have fallen first to get everything so perfect? Or was it always perfect? They started skating together when he was fourteen and she ten. Did they always know they were in love?
Amy is certain that someday she and Sasha will be just like that. That if there is a period of initial falling, that that is the period that they are in now. But soon they’ll get in sync together, and everything will be perfect.
But on November 20, 1995, the third thing happens. Amy finds out from their grandma, who finds out from the news and calls the house. It is so unthinkable that Amy cannot bear to think about it. To Zoe’s absolute outrage, Amy throws away all the tapes they have of figure skating. She bans the topic from all conversation and will not tolerate even the slightest allusion to anything involving sports, ice, love, happiness, or beauty. Let alone direct invocations of Sergei Grinkov, who has died at the age of twenty-eight of a heart attack, leaving Yekaterina Gordeeva inexplicably alone.
Since Oklahoma City Zoe has clung on to Amy in her sleep. Her limbs grow heavier and heavier until by the end of the year Amy flings them off her in the middle of the night and threatens to make her sleep out in the hallway on a cot made of stuffed animals.
She turns away from her sister and holds her purple octopus in her arms. She remembers the boy at the hospital with leukemia who first accused Amy of cheating and who must be dead by now. She sleeps little. She hates nightmares, especially when they’re true.
Sasha and Amy are reaching the end of their first-year textbook
The final chapter is titled What We Need for the Table. It teaches the dative singular and ordinal numerals. The dative plural and cardinal numerals they will get to when they get to the second-year textbook, though first they plan to spend some time on poetry.
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The subchapters in the final chapter of the first-year textbook are Buying Groceries; Age; Expressing Fondness, Need, Uncertainty, and Desire; and Time by the Clock. Amy finds it impossible not to say something incriminating when she tries to use the dative singular in expressions of fondness, need, uncertainty, and desire, so in her homework, she focuses on food.
One day Sasha says he feels more at home at their house than he’s ever felt anywhere in his life. He says it to their mother, but Amy knows it’s really meant for her.
Do you remember when you used to always try to hold my hand when we would go somewhere, and I’d say no because even when we were little I always thought we were too big?
Amy knows when Zoe lets the squirrels loose at last that her sister’s secret hope is they will choose to return someday, but Amy also knows they won’t
So she makes Zoe a peanut butter and potato chip sandwich, with the crusts cut off, and she spends the whole afternoon watching Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast with her and letting her win at Monopoly.
In the evening after dinner in their room they play a game called If Sasha Were. If Sasha were an animal Zoe says she’s pretty sure he’d be a meerkat or a lightning bug or a Rhodesian ridgeback, or a swordfish. But Amy insists he’d be a bluebird. If Sasha were a constellation the girls agree he’d be the Big Dipper. If Sasha were an instrument Amy says he’d be the cello. Zoe says he’d be the drums. Amy says that’s just because they know he plays the drums, which does not have any relation to what he’d be, but then as she watches the dog try to wriggle out of her sister’s clutches, she remembers Zoe’s just set Orange and Banana loose at Whiteside Park and will probably always be asking herself now if they’re okay when it rains or gets cold or gets hot, a kind of concern that is new to them, so finally Amy says fine, he can be the drums, although inwardly she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt from the way he sits and how his face gets when he gets serious that if Sasha were an instrument, he would be the cello.
Amy wears perfume to Sasha’s play
She retrieves a vial named Sunflowers from the shoebox in her fossil drawer and sprays it gingerly on her wrist, in the bathroom, with the door locked even though they’re not allowed to lock the door in case what if they get electrocuted. She half expects everyone to make fun of her, but maybe she doesn’t put enough on because nobody says anything on the car ride there.
Amy doesn’t really watch the play. She waits for Sasha. When Sasha comes onstage the audience claps as though they’ve been waiting, too, and a bolt of jealousy shoots through Amy’s core. It is fine for Sasha to have other friends, she thinks, but some of these people are girls. But now Sasha is talking, and his firm male voice, all-encompassing, eradicates everything else, even the words, which Amy’s brain can’t process. She simply listens to his voice, appreciating his thick eastern accent, but treating it all as music, not talk.
Amy watches Sasha’s face. Sasha’s face is taut, but open. Amy watches Sasha’s hands. Sasha’s hands are big, but delicate. She tries to think what their first kiss might be like. She would shut her eyes. Past this she can’t imagine. She worries she will not be good at kissing. She watches closely when people kiss on TV, and she practices sometimes on her octopus in the bathroom with the door locked, but still. Maybe Sasha can teach her the way he teaches her Russian. She hopes he will not make fun of her. Although maybe she won’t be so bad. She hopes in fact that she will be a natural like she is at other things. That’s what their grandmother says, anyway.
Despite the diagrams that came with the condoms they bought, Amy can’t quite really believe that Sasha would have a penis. The idea of their whole bodies touching from head to toe appeals to her, but she can’t even see herself naked when she attempts to envision it, let alone him. She likes to think that he will hug her when he graduates, to say a temporary goodbye, but then it won’t be their whole bodies. It will probably only be between their shoulders and their chins, and then their hands will rest on each other’s backs for an instant, though probably not more.
She feels guilty she has Sasha when she thinks of Yekaterina Gordeeva, who no longer has Sergei Grinkov. But she can’t help it that she loves him, and she tells herself it’s not her fault. She loves everything that Sasha’s ever said and everything he ever will say, and everything he will ever do, and everything he’s ever done.
After the play there is a party. Amy and Zoe stand in the corner shifting their weight from foot to foot. They are both wearing their church shoes. They don’t speak. They just wait for Sasha to come out from backstage.
But then he does. He sees them first thing, and his face lights up. But Amy flinches: it feels too good to be true. She takes a tiny step so that she’s shielding Zoe with her shoulder, but Zoe misinterprets it and thrusts her away, and Amy doesn’t counter because she wouldn’t know how to explain. And then he is there, holding Amy tight in his arms. She breaths in his cologne and the smell of his sweat and what smells like cigarettes although she knows he does not smoke, and other smells she can’t decipher, and when she gives up she starts to pull away, but he still holds her, and she becomes aware of her chest pressed against him, and she pulls away, and ducks down a little, and he lets go.
Immediately she knows she’s just gotten her period, and that there is blood running all down her legs. It is impossible to check and impossible to ask Zoe because they never successfully established any kind of useful code.
Amy sees their parents heading over and exhales. Sasha hugs Zoe, but it is not the same. Their mother wants to take a picture, but Amy excuses herself and goes to the bathroom.
There isn’t any blood.
Afterwards as they cross the parking lot their mom says Sasha must have been drunk. Scandalized, the girls wait for their father to correct her, but he says nothing. Zoe reaches for Amy’s hand, but Amy’s fingers wriggle loose.
Except for Red Rover. Remember how we used to be the perfect team and nobody could ever even dream of tearing us apart? (This picture comes from near where we live now, in Argentina.)
Everyone in the family is aware that Sasha will be graduating soon
As the date approaches, they begin to consider what to do next.
Their dad has the idea of taking Amy to the community college, which offers Russian classes, too. But when they go to sign her up for one, the secretary says that first she has to take the SAT.
Their parents discuss. Even though the SAT costs twenty-three dollars, and their dad has lost his job again, they decide to let Amy take it. They sign her up for the next test date. She needs to score in the sixtieth percentile to be eligible to take her Russian class. Their dad says not to worry because the test is really for older kids, so if she doesn’t score high enough, it doesn’t matter.
But when her scores come back, they discover they are perfect. Amy is not in the sixtieth percentile, but rather in the ninety-ninth. This gives them a new idea.
Although few people do it, it is possible to go to college early, without even getting a GED
You have to have good grades and really good standardized test scores, and do well in your interview. Amy is a polite child whose taciturn manner—in fact a blend of shyness and mistrust—tends to be confused with maturity. She is admitted to the University of Tulsa and given a free ride, including room and board. She is what is known as a Presidential Scholar.
She is admitted to other schools, too, but nowhere else gives her a full scholarship. Besides, since she is only fifteen, their parents say she needs to stay close to home. And their parents like the University of Tulsa, the mascot of which is the Golden Hurricane, and now they always watch them playing basketball on TV.
Amy enrolls for classes.
She does not consider Zoe now, or the worry she might come to feel, her sister gone. She does not think of the fact that her own life is about to change forever and completely, or if she does, she thinks of that change only in terms of how it may affect her relationship with Sasha. Sasha will move away, but maybe he w
ill visit someday, and by then she will be a college student, and she will know all the things you have to know in order to be a girlfriend. Then they may get married. Amy will wear high heels even though she will be taller than her husband.
She writes all this in unsendable letters to Sasha, which she keeps inside a shoebox, until one day she catches her sister poring over them when she thinks that Amy has gone to the living room to read. Without hesitation Amy rips the box away from Zoe with her left hand and punches her sister in the stomach with her right.
Zoe howls. Their parents come running. They find Zoe doubled over, crying, and Amy standing over her, fist still clenched. Amy braces herself. Yet she feels strangely indifferent, as though none of this concerns her any longer.
Then her sister surprises her by lying. She claims she just has cramps. That night Amy lies awake under their mother’s mother’s quilt, tugging the threads loose, watching the catfish suck at the small stones all along the bottom of the aquarium. Listening to her sister’s steady, heavy breaths. She takes stock of the secrets between them: on her side, the secret stash of photographs that she still keeps; her secrets about Sasha, which now number in the dozens; her secret future; her secret grief.
Add the accidental secrets kept inside the labyrinths of signs and symbols Amy created to protect them from the world, all those notes Zoe refused to learn to read.
Subtract the secret rooms that Amy couldn’t access at the hospital, where things were done to Zoe that Amy cannot ever know. Subtract the lies that Zoe might be telling Amy, too, in the same way that she lied to protect her earlier that night.
Did you know octopuses know how to communicate as well as camouflage by altering the colors and the textures on their surfaces, like magic?
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