They ground me for the rest of the summer, but of course I go the funeral and no one remembers to punish me when we get back so I ride my bike to the lake. I take a root beer for me and a Purple Berry Blitz for Marty. It fizzes when I pour it out onto the marshy ground and if the tears come I don’t know it cuz now I’m looking up. Watching.
SWEET THE STING
“YOU CAME.”
My sister says this through cracked lips, and it isn’t a question. It never is. The oxygen hums and the IV drips from pouch to vein. Her sallow hand clutches for mine.
“You gonna save me again?”
There’s a trace of the lopsided smile, the one that cuts through the anger with its little girl need. I stay silent because I won’t make it easy this time. I know her too well. “You remember that summer,” she says, “the wasp nest?” So she knows me even better.
It was one of those hot August days that sticks to the skin and prickles the temper, that forces the cattle under the shade of the paper birches. I’d been sent to muck out the barn.
Amy was meant to be helping but she was five years younger and wearing her ballet costume. The white gauze floated while she tripped from hay bale to bale. “Ring around the rosies,” she sang, “pocket full of ponies.”
“Posies,” I muttered.
Amy ignored me. She tiptoed her way along a shaft of light, her bony arms held out pretty and precarious, her bare feet delicately arched. The wasps droned from the eaves, and my big hands heaved while my toes sweated and slid inside rubber. “Husha,” Amy looked at me with wide blue eyes and a little smile as she slipped out the door.
I shovelled another load of manure into the wheelbarrow and cursed her.
Amy had allergies and asthma and rashes; she was born six weeks too soon after a series of alarms. A near loss, said Mom, and all the more precious for it. And me? I wanted to ask, but never did. I knew I was the lucky one. I was built like the broad side of a barn and never a worry.
“Husha,” came Amy’s voice from outside the door.
I swatted away a wasp. It had been a bad year for yellowjackets.
We found their papery nests in every shelter: under the eaves, clinging to fence posts and tree branches, and even once in the front seat of the old Ford. Dad sprayed the nests at dusk when the wasps had gone drowsy. Amy and I stood on the porch in our nightgowns to watch, balancing on our tiptoes and holding our breath. She giggled as the first bodies circled and fell like drunks in a stupor and I told her to shush, but Dad stopped anyway. “You let her come this close?” he said. “You’re supposed to be the older one. Use your goddamn head.” So I grabbed Amy by a hand sticky with thumb-sucking and hauled her upstairs to bed. “Deb,” she said, her arms reaching for me. “Deb, I wasn’t scared. You were there.” “Husha husha,” sang Amy now, and I could hear her feet crackling over dry grass.
My toes sweated and the wasps buzzed and bumped against the beams above. Husha. There was a thud as Amy jumped onto the old log just outside the barn door, the one Dad kept saying he’d cut up for firewood, but never did because Amy cried. She needed the log, needed it for a princess path and a ballerina stage and fashion model runway; she needed it because she was going be a star. Husha husha. I let my shovel clatter against the floor and rubbed my neck. My hands hurt and my head ached and my sister hummed and bounced.
“We all fall down,” I hollered. Mean. Some part of me seeing her tumble onto her frilly ass. Willing it even.
Silence. My head buzzed high and tight, and the wasps circled.
“We all fall down,” sang Amy. High and pure, making it sound goddamn great, like something we’d all want given the choice. Another thud, softer this time.
Then she screamed. Sharp enough to break skin, high and hurt and spiralling down to just one sound repeated.
Deb deb deb.
I came running.
The heat slammed into me, and the sunlight stung my eyes after the dark of the barn. I blinked. Amy flailed and flapped, one foot stuck up to the ankle in the log and the other hopping, screaming so loud my ears fizzed. Her gauze skirt floated up, and out swirled a cloud of shadow. I blinked again and the shadow disintegrated. It landed on me like hissing rain, feather-light but sticking to skin, and the pain came a split second and a thousand needles later and I yelped and danced, I stumbled towards Amy and lifted her up and away while the air roared around us. The wasps fell like a rain of hot needles and Amy screamed and screamed while I brushed and slapped and bolted, all the way to the front door where Mom stood with a dishtowel in her hands and her mouth open.
“What?” she said, “Deb? What, how could you . . . ?”
Then she was on the move, hauling us inside and slamming the door, her towel slapping and her foot stomping while the furious little bodies pulsed against the linoleum. I stood shivering with Amy boneless and wheezing against me. Deb deb deb.
“Deb,” Mom pushed at me, “get her to the truck.” She scrambled for the keys.
We ran outside with the wasps still buzzing, and then I was in the passenger seat with Amy propped over my lap and Mom lurching the pickup onto the road.
“Push her head back,” yelled Mom, “keep her airway open.”
I shifted Amy over my knees until her head tilted backwards and her mouth gaped. Her skin was hot and it burned where her body touched mine, but I held her tight, even while my hands slipped with sweat and my gut pitched and my head buzzed black and yellow.
“Deb deb deb,” Amy bubbled, her eyelids swelling and her breath rasping. She turned her head and puked up milky white against my rubber boots. Stripes wavered in front of my eyes.
“Ring around the rosies,” I whispered, “pocket full of ponies.” She sucked in air and a triangle hollowed between her collarbones. “Husha husha,” I pleaded. A little smile before she puked again and her breath came out a shrill whistle.
Amy was barely breathing by the time we got to the hospital. The nurses gathered her up in a flurry of white, and Mom clung to the stretcher and left me. I stood for a time with my hands hanging. My rubber boots hummed with sour stink and the receptionist told me to sit down.
I counted my stings as the minutes passed. Twelve, thirteen. Perfect red circles and hardly any swelling. I pulled off my boots and slid them under my chair, and a few smashed corpses fell from my feet. Nineteen, twenty. The receptionist looked at me then went back to her magazine.
Amy could die. I tasted this thought. No more wide blue eyes, no more good night kisses and gummy-sweet hand. My throat burned and my eyes blurred and I counted my stings until I got to twenty-three and had to start again. Amy could die and we would bury her in the ground. I would wear something black and gauzy, I’d lift my veil so they could all see my tears and know that I was suffering too. Amy could die and I would be the one watched for the near loss and more precious for it.
But Amy didn’t die. My parents took turns sitting with her and I was left home with a list of chores. If my thoughts came back to me in a gut-twist of shame, I would shovel harder and hose down the troughs a little longer, I would work until my palms blistered and the sweat ran into my eyes. The wasps circled and buzzed, and I swatted at them with my bare hands, willing them to sting me. They did not. Their high thin hum filled my head when I sat at the dinner table with whatever parent was home that night, silent and white with exhaustion. Please please please, I’d catch myself thinking, with no idea of what I was hoping for.
Amy was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. When she came home, Dad doused the ballerina stage with gasoline and Amy and I roasted marshmallows over its remains. Amy wanted to hold her own stick and cried when she got melted goo in her ponytail, and Mom asked how could I, with Amy’s hair baby-fine and her hands still bandaged.
Amy danced on a real stage after that. The years passed in ballet white and princess pink and homecoming blue, and I scrubbed my big hands with pumice so I could clap through her curtsies. The attention Amy got didn’t bother me. I had it figured out by then. I was big-
boned and practical around the farm and I knew Dad was grateful I’d turned down college and the neighbour’s son and the backpacking trip around Europe with my friends. I was needed. But sometimes the autumn wind would come through paper birches and set their heart-shaped leaves to trembling, and I would feel something stab at me, something as stark as the stripes of peeling bark and as sorrowful as those yellow leaves falling.
I stayed and Amy left. Amy was beyond us, beyond a barn and some cows, beyond dance lessons in the school gym and recitals on a church hall stage. My parents sold the far field to the neighbour’s son and pooled the milk money, and it was enough to send Amy to the School of Performing Arts. The local newspaper did an article. It was official; Amy was going to be a star.
The seasons came and went, the years marked in variations of heat and rain, in volumes of hay and milk and shit to be shovelled. I took pride from the silver canisters filled and waiting, I took peace from the summer dusk falling. Amy sent us long letters at first, then the occasional photo or clipping from a magazine. She was thin and glossy and unrecognisable. When she phoned, she bubbled and chirped at the other end — this party, these people, we wouldn’t believe who’d been there and what they’d done. Dad would pass it around the feed store later and get all the names wrong.
Amy did visit. She arrived in denim and cowboy boots, but her jeans were cut close to her body and her toecaps free of dirt. With her face scrubbed clean, she looked something like the sister I remembered. But the edginess at the dinner table was new; she picked up her fork and put it down again, she spoke in exclamations and ate in little bursts. She followed me out to the barn after I did the dishes, and sparked up a joint.
“Oh Jesus,” she said when I gave her a look, “you would not believe, Deb, you just would not believe.”
She was eighteen. I was five years older and didn’t know what I could tell her.
I drove her home from the city the year she played the nurse in a hospital drama. She needed every gas station restroom, and told me it was a bladder infection while she swiped at her nose.
The snow cancelled her return flight the next Christmas, and she curled up in bed for three days of retching and moaning. She told my parents it was stomach flu.
Dad thought it was that, the same stomach flu, which kept him in bed for the rest of the winter. By the time he was diagnosed, Amy had landed the lead in a romantic comedy. The theatre sold out of tickets when the movie came to our town, but Dad watched the trailer on the hospital television. “That guy she’s with?” he said. “What’s his name? How come she never brought him home? Why is she so skinny now?” Another time he refused to look at the magazines I brought. “That’s not her. Where is she? Did you girls have words, did you do something, Deb?” I could understand his confusion. Amy on film looked like somebody else, from somewhere else. She didn’t belong to people like us now.
Amy came to Dad’s funeral in dark glasses and a heavy coat she kept on after the sun came out. I told Mom it was the grief, guessing at the marks under the long sleeves.
Amy made the cover of Vogue that year. The local newspaper ran the story and a reporter called for a comment. I flipped through the farm equipment catalogue and said we were proud, so very proud, and could they send us a copy because Mom framed all of Amy’s clippings on her memory wall.
I told Mom it was man trouble when Amy didn’t call for a year. Man trouble was believable for someone who looked like Amy. And Mom believed me when I said I’d been talking to the neighbour’s son on the subject of goats, and he’d highly recommended the livestock exhibition held in the city.
“You go,” she said. “Maybe you could look up Amy while you’re there. Just to make sure she’s okay.”
Amy’s condo smelled worse than any goat shed. I washed the dishes and paid the bills and got Amy into a clinic. I rubbed her back when she sobbed, and I nodded when she told me she would never let it happen again, not again, not ever ever. I stayed until she stopped picking at her scabs and could nibble toast without retching.
I told Mom that Amy was fine and goats were too much trouble; they got into everything and were helpless against predators.
There was no one to tell after Mom died. No one to tell after the service, with the old aunties fogged with punch and their men bound in suits, and the neighbour’s son asking what I’d do now with no one to care for. There was no one to tell when Amy appeared in the supermarket tabloids and the auditions dried up and she called to whisper for money.
Once I answered the phone to a line gone dead and thought I heard my name in the hum. Deb deb deb.
Amy sat in the hospital garden after that one. She told me to let her go, that I’d always hated her anyway.
I should have said something but the bees buzzed in the roses and I think their hum soothed me to silence.
Husha husha.
“Why do you always come?” Amy mumbled.
I had no answer to that.
Six weeks later she overdosed again.
The oxygen hums and the IV drips and I hold my big hands together.
“You remember that summer?” Amy asks. “You remember the wasp nest?”
“Of course,” I say, reaching for her hand. “I nearly lost you.”
“Those stings hurt,” Her cracked lips try a smile. “But you know something, Deb? I was high with it too, the falling down and you there to catch me.”
The oxygen hums and I stay quiet.
“God, how do you stand it,” she says. Her eyes drift shut.
It’s been a bad year for yellowjackets. I look for the drift and cloud of them, listen for the low roar that betrays the nest. I wait for evening to aim the nozzle at the dark opening and pull the trigger. The wasps swarm and drop, and I see Amy tripping from hay bale to bale with her white gauze floating and her arms held out delicately, and I know she’ll always need me. That I’m always there, that I’ll hold onto an empty line just to hear my name.
I look for the wasp nests in every shelter, and I spray them when the dusk comes.
MARRAKECH
“MARRAKECH,” MY MOTHER WOULD SAY, “Marrakech was somewhere else.”
She’d peel off my snow-damp socks and drape them over the back of a chair in front of the woodstove. They’d steam silently, and everything I hated about my childhood was there in that musty odour of wool.
“In Marrakech, the sun beat down hot and the air smelled medieval,” my mother would say as I stretched out my legs, watching my waxy toes redden. “Oh Aisha, the perfumes of the medina! Cumin and coriander, and attar of rose. Cinnamon sticks and seed pods of cardamom, and the turmeric a dry shocking gold. The souk vendors would pile them up in pyramids of colour, and their little burners blazed day and night with benzoin. And the old plague doctors, they’d fasten little pouches of aromatics around their necks and fashion beaks of posies for their noses, to drive away the smell of sickness. Those spices, they’re strong enough to cover the stench of the dead. Can you imagine that, Aisha? Every bad thing, every rotten memory, carried off on a drift of petal.”
Then her eyes would stray, darting from the scarves flung over our second-hand sofa to the intricately patterned rugs that hid the worst of the peeling lino. The colours jangled my eyes but not so my mother; it was the mention of Marrakech that made her restless. She’d spring up to open a window despite the cold outside, and her hands would flutter and float until they found her basket of yarns.
“The rugs were so well woven,” she’d say, her hands calming over the clacking needles, “Perfectly patterned, balanced and geometric. Nothing real, Aisha, no people allowed in those rugs.”
Our home was filled with her knitting. She had her own sense of colour, my mother, with shades grouped according to what she would call spiritual semantics rather than conventional aesthetics. It was a question of balance, she told me, Yin and Yang. Saffron needed its fiery nature calmed with imperial purple, wild lime was tamed by sludge brown, while rusty earth could only be coupled with deep turquoise. Al
l these hues worked out their issues on our living room cushions. My mother drifted into my bedroom to paint my walls sky blue and knit my bedspread shades of orange. She would have me sleep with the setting sun. Every night, she’d wrench open a window and instruct the whistling wind to blow the bad dreams away and keep me safe.
We lived in the kind of apartment block favoured by retirees and welfare cases, and it was obvious which ones we were. I was a quiet child, and this earned me some illicit sugary treats at a few dinette suites around the building. The furniture there was always coffee-coloured and the wallpaper a floral beige and, more often than not, I had to sit on a step stool for the lack of chairs. I was sometimes invited to a classmate’s birthday party or Saturday sleepover and from this I learned that other children lived in whole houses. You took off your shoes at the door so you did not mark the pale squishy carpet that ran up the steps and into all the rooms. You did not bounce on the squeaky leather sofa, or run your hands over the shiny surfaces or touch the sharp-edged ornaments on the shelves. But it was the mothers of other children that most astounded me. These mothers came home from work with their hair pinned up over big shouldered suits and their lips glossed crimson. They’d smile tiredly and kick off pointy pumps to rub their toes, telling us to eat our potato chips at the kitchen bar. All that shine was awful for showing the grease.
Our apartment was not shiny. It was frequently hazy with smoke from the cigarettes my mom smoked, or from the incense she lit to hide the ashtray smell. My mother wore squat sandals with woolly socks and kept her shoes on in the house. I would ask her why she did not wear black suits like the other mothers, or go to work in high-heeled pumps. I kept my eyes wide and my voice sweet, but I knew what I was doing. My mother’s would flutter and reach for another cigarette, and my gut would twist.
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