by Alix Ohlin
But Bob did not like me. I think my very existence troubled him, since it reminded him that my mother had had a life, sexual and otherwise, before they met. He treated me with a tight-lipped politeness that was more uncomfortable than outright hatred would have been. I did my best not to upset him. I tiptoed around the house, I put away my toys, I dressed tidily and combed my hair; but I didn’t succeed in winning his love.
A child who knows she is disliked can acquire the skill of invisibility. I learned to spend as much time as I could at school, and I walked slowly there and back, making each block last as long as possible. On weekends I stole change from Bob’s jacket pockets, my one delinquency, to buy tickets at the movie theatre down the street from our apartment, always sneaking from one show to the next. Many of these were films for grown-ups, and I could barely follow their plotlines, but I responded in some intuitive fashion to their rhythms, helped along by the brightly flickering images, the swell and fade of the music. I sat cross-legged in my seat, mesmerized, and nobody—it was a different era then—asked what I was doing there alone. I came to prize my invisibility, and to grasp the freedom it offered. I watched couples kissing in the dark, mothers hushing their children, an elderly woman laying her head on her companion’s shoulder and falling asleep. There was more to watch than what was on the screen.
* * *
—
Marianne quit her job after Robin was born. Perhaps strangely, for a woman once so fixed on rebellion and independence, she didn’t seem to mind not working. She and Bob both doted on my sister, who was an easy baby, fat-legged and dimpled, a happy eater who snuggled against my mother’s chest and fell asleep without complaint. Marianne doted on Bob too, greeting him at the door each afternoon with a freshly made drink. I see now that she threw herself into the performance of domesticity with the same intensity she brought to every other role.
I don’t know how long she would’ve lasted in this one. It seems unlikely that she could have endured a whole life like that, or a whole marriage. But she didn’t have to try. She and Bob had been married for five years when he sat up in bed one night, white-faced, clutching his stomach. He’d apparently been suffering pain for months, but chalked it up to indigestion and stress. By the time it was diagnosed, the cancer had already spread to his lymph system, and he died two months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. He ordered Marianne not to bury him in Montreal. “I want to go home to my family,” he said, by which he meant Minnesota and his parents.
* * *
—
Marianne’s grief was as impenetrable to me as her marriage had been. She seemed more nervous than sad; she smoked constantly, and her hands shook. Most nights she fell asleep in an armchair in the living room, with the television on. Bob’s colleagues at the bank sent their wives over with casseroles, and they’d put the food on the kitchen counter and get drunk with Marianne, stumbling out the door hours later, trailing vapors of cigarettes and Baby Duck wine; but after a while, they stopped coming. Marianne had been told she could go back to work at the bank, but when she applied the manager said nothing was available. Perhaps you should be at home with the children, he suggested, and Marianne spat on his desk and walked away. At least that’s what she told me she did; even then I understood that her version of events was not always credible.
She found another job, at a company that imported digestive biscuits from the UK. Every week she came home with “mistakes”—boxes that had been dropped, crumbling the biscuits, or whose labels were crooked—which we ate for breakfast, lunch, and snack until the taste made me sick to my stomach. To this day I can’t eat a digestive biscuit. She hired babysitters to look after me and Robin during the workday, and increasingly left us by ourselves. While Bob was in the hospital, and Marianne often there with him, I’d grown accustomed to taking care of my sister. Giving up the movies and my long walks home from school, I fed her biscuits and milk and dressed her and played with her. I taught her to sing “Au Clair de la Lune” and to somersault across the couch cushions. I decided that she belonged to me.
3.
My sister grew into a delicate, dreamy girl with Bob’s high cheekbones, whether they were Sioux or not, and our mother’s shiny dark hair. She had an air of looking a bit lost, even when she knew exactly where she was. People liked to give her things: she’d come home with a box of pastries from the bakery, or a wheel of cheese in a bag that someone had thrust into her hands. Since we were usually hungry, I was always glad to see these gifts. Marianne started dating again, and often didn’t come home until after we were asleep. In the mornings, getting ready for work, she’d tell us where she’d been: a restaurant, a party, a night at the theatre. Her stories were tinged with glamour and malice: when she talked about people she’d met, she cut them down to size. She wanted us to know that she saw through everything.
Every so often she brought a man home for dinner, and Robin and I would comb our hair and wear dresses and set the table. Some of the men were jocular, stealing our noses and waving their thumbs in our faces; others were red-faced and tipsy, squeezing Marianne as she brushed past them to serve the lamb or beef. After eating we got ourselves ready for bed, reappearing in our pajamas with our teeth brushed for a final goodnight.
In our shared room, we whispered. Quiet and invisible elsewhere, with my sister I was full of opinions.
“That one was the worst yet,” I’d tell her.
“He wasn’t so bad.”
“His breath smelled like Limburger.”
“What’s Limburger?”
“The worst-smelling cheese in the world.”
“He’s nicer-looking than the last one.”
“That’s not saying much. The last one looked like a walrus.”
Robin would laugh. “He did!”
The dinners always seemed to go fine but the men never came back, and I assumed this was because of us, the burden we represented. Marianne moved from one man to the next. All her friends were getting divorced and she declared, “Finally, everyone else is catching up with me.” We didn’t point out that she had never, in fact, been divorced. She liked to think of herself as a pioneer.
* * *
—
Marianne fed and clothed us, but anything beyond that was our responsibility. If we asked for more of her attention, she might give it, or she might fly into a rage and scold us, even knocking over furniture in her anger. Once in a tantrum she gathered up all our toys in a garbage bag and threw them away. Once she stormed away from the dinner table while we were eating and we didn’t see her for two days. Other times she took us in her arms and spun us around to “Superstition” or “C’est pour toi.” We never knew which Marianne to expect, so we learned to expect nothing, demand nothing.
Robin’s teachers praised her, cast her in plays, and sent notes home suggesting singing lessons, because her voice was so lovely. I was the better student, often placing at the top of my class, but struck silent by shyness, and throughout elementary school I don’t think I ever once raised my hand. Sometimes my teacher would turn around and seem surprised I was even in the room, and when this happened I wasn’t upset but gratified. I practiced the art of subtracting myself from any given situation. To do what Robin did—to sing “Greensleeves” by herself at a school assembly, for example, when she was in grade one—would have been impossible for me. I would rather have died. I was proud of Robin and not at all jealous. Years later someone asked me about our unhappy childhood, using that word, and I was startled; I’d never thought of it like that. It was strange, yes, in the sense that we mostly raised ourselves, but I wouldn’t call it unhappy. My sister and I had each other, a union of separate but conjoined strengths. We were the bird sisters, Lark and Robin, one who could study, and one who could sing.
4.
When I consider the shape Robin’s life took later on, the things she chose or refused, I think abou
t the year she was seven and I was eleven. At school her teacher had mentioned Marie-Angélique Le Blanc, the eighteenth-century Wild Child of Songy, who lived in the forests of France for a decade before getting captured by villagers. Historians believe she was from the Meskwaki people of what today is Wisconsin, and that she was brought to France under mysterious circumstances by an older Canadian woman. Some believed that during her time in the forest she lived with wolves; others that she fended the wolves off with weapons she’d fashioned. After her capture, she was assimilated back into society, successfully learning to read and write, and died in Paris at the age of sixty-three.
Some combination of the elements of this story—Midwestern roots, mysterious parent, youthful years of freedom and isolation—must have spoken to my sister of herself. Fascinated with this girl, Robin took to befriending whatever wild animals she could find in our neighborhood—mostly squirrels, feral cats, the occasional dog that had breached its yard—wondering if she could live among them if the opportunity arose. She scavenged berries off bushes, nibbling them as she sat outside in a cutting wind. At home she insisted that I put her food on the floor, where she’d crouch down and eat without using her hands.
I wasn’t bothered by her behavior. I was absorbed in reading a biography of Mackenzie King, the prime minister who used séances to consult with his dead mother on issues of the day. Interested in trying this myself, I lay on the floor next to my sister with the book open before me, scribbling notes about how séances could break through the slim barrier between the living and the dead. Unfortunately, the only dead person I knew was Bob, and I doubted he wanted to hear from me. Marianne would step over both of us, shaking her head, and go straight out the door.
* * *
—
When Robin wandered through the neighborhood befriending the animals, I sometimes went with her, less out of a desire to protect her than because I had no other friends. A few streets away was a small house that looked semi-abandoned, its paint faded and its siding streaked with grime. Sometimes we crept up to the windows and stared at the cobwebby innards. We could make out an arrangement of furniture whose use seemed ambiguous—a few scattered chairs and stools, an armchair, a high table in the center of the room. Sometimes these pieces had been moved around, but we never saw anyone inside, until one afternoon, as we were peering in the window, a witch’s face appeared before us.
Her nose was round and bulbous at the tip; her eyes were pale and watery and weird; her grey hair lay in a braid that coiled around her neck and trailed down her shoulder like a pet snake. She wore dangly earrings with dusty-looking rhinestones and a long skirt with ruffles that were tearing loose in spots. She looked like she’d gotten dressed for a fancy party decades before and never changed.
She smiled at us and curled a finger, beckoning us inside.
She was, it turned out, not a witch, but a piano teacher named Mrs. Gasparian. She led us into a side room that featured a piano, a rug, and a wilted plant. We’d been told at school to be wary of strangers, but Mrs. Gasparian was as threatless as a person could be. She sat with her legs crossed beneath her long skirt, listening and nodding as we gave her our names. Then she offered us some digestive biscuits, which we refused.
Mrs. Gasparian asked a lot of questions, none of them personal. She wanted to know what we’d learned at school that day, what books we liked, what we thought of the painting on the far wall, and whether we’d rather visit Paris or London. In other words she spoke to us as if we were adults, not children, and this was thrilling. Her low, husky voice was very pleasant to listen to, and one of her eyelids drooped, which made her look a bit ill but also a bit mischievous, as if she were permanently winking.
In a rare moment of extroversion I was telling Mrs. Gasparian about one of my favorite films, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, elaborating its plot intricacies in detail, when Robin slipped off her chair and went to investigate the piano. She plinked around on the high notes and began to sing along, matching the notes with her voice. While still talking, I saw Mrs. Gasparian’s face change, the attention leaving her expression even as she nodded and kept her eyes fixed on me. At last I fell silent, and we both watched Robin pressing the keys with her index finger and mirroring the melody with her voice, completely absorbed in what she was doing. It felt like eavesdropping on a private conversation, something very intimate, almost grossly so, and it made me uncomfortable, though I couldn’t have said why. I shifted in my chair.
Robin turned around. “What?” she said.
“Nothing, dear,” Mrs. Gasparian said. “Keep going.”
But Robin could tell that I wasn’t happy, and she cocked her head to the side. We had between us a language of signs and gestures, and this one meant Let’s go.
* * *
—
Soon Robin and I were haunting Mrs. Gasparian’s house. She never asked to speak to our mother and didn’t seem to care about payment for the lessons she began giving my sister. She told Robin to come over as often as she wanted, to practice, and I often went along. She had a grey cat named Marcel who was grotesquely fat and rarely moved, although he must have gotten around somehow because cat hair feathered the chairs and clustered beneath the furniture in dense, silky drifts. There didn’t seem to be a Mr. Gasparian, and she never spoke of her past, at least not that part of it. We heard about a concert she’d been to as a girl, when a Liszt sonata had moved her to tears; we heard that Kafka was the great poet of loneliness, and that cold weather made her crave a particular kind of soup whose name I can no longer remember. She was full of reminiscences that meant nothing to us, and yet we were riveted by them. I think this had to do with her air of conviction, her assumption that we understood the importance of culture, and the exoticism of her clothes and hair. Like Marianne, she didn’t care what anybody else thought of her, but unlike Marianne, she had time for us and was always home. Though focused on my sister, she’d also lay out books for me in the living room, or old wall calendars she’d kept because she liked the pictures, and I’d sit on the floor there and occupy myself. Sometimes I returned to my old habit of going to the movies, but just as often I preferred to be in the living room while Robin and Mrs. Gasparian played and murmured. This was my ideal situation, to be present and listening in one room while the action happened in the next, and during those long dusty hours I was happier than I’d ever been.
5.
Mrs. Gasparian told us that every pianist must learn to perform. Robin had been taking lessons for over a year, and it was time for her first recital.
“Perhaps you will invite your parents to come,” Mrs. Gasparian said gently, writing the date and time down on a notecard in curly, old-fashioned penmanship. Robin and I glanced at each other nervously. We were both thinking, I was sure, about something that had happened earlier that year, when I won an award at school; it was part of a provincial math contest in which all students were required to participate. The results were announced at assembly, and those with the highest marks were asked to walk onstage to receive certificates. Not only did I have the top score in our school, I’d placed fairly high in the entire province. When I heard the math teacher say “Lark Brossard,” I shut my eyes in terror and kept them closed until Vivian Hum, who was sitting next to me, pushed me hard and hissed, “Go.” My legs shook as I climbed the stairs and stood in front of everyone.
“Well done, Lark,” the math teacher said, and gave me the certificate; my hand trembled so badly that I dropped it, and it fluttered down below, making everyone laugh. I ran offstage, not realizing I was supposed to shake the teacher’s hand, so that she was left there with her arm outstretched, making everyone laugh again. I ran out of the gymnasium and into the girls’ washroom, where I locked myself in a stall. Vivian Hum, who would’ve been my friend if I hadn’t been too shy to allow it, found me there after assembly and handed me the crumpled certificate, which she’d picked up off the floor.
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I would never have mentioned the award to our mother, but Robin was so proud of me that she told Marianne the next morning, when we were drinking our milk and Marianne her tea. “Look,” she said, holding the certificate out. “Lark is the smartest girl in school.”
Marianne blew on her tea. We hadn’t seen her the night before, and this morning she was wearing her bathrobe, which was usually a good sign; it meant she’d enjoyed herself, and wanted to luxuriate in the feeling. She glanced at the paper, then at Robin, as if noticing her for the first time in ages. “Your hair is a disaster,” she said. “Where’s your brush?”
Robin said, “They made a presentation onstage and everything.”
“I can’t even look at this bird’s nest. Go get your brush. Now!”
It never did any good to argue with Marianne. Some nights, we woke from dream-deep sleep to find her next to one of us in bed, stroking our hair, nuzzling our temples. But she wouldn’t be forced into anything, even praise. She gave affection when she wanted to, not on command.
So Robin and I decided that inviting her to the piano recital—especially since we’d never mentioned Mrs. Gasparian in the first place—wouldn’t go well.
On a cold Saturday afternoon in April we slipped out of the apartment, wearing ski jackets over our dresses and our Kodiak boots. We spent some time at the pharmacy, where I shoplifted a lip gloss for Robin, and then lingered in the little weedy park next to the dépanneur. Robin was unusually quiet. At night I could hear her fingers rustling across the bedspread as she rehearsed a piece in her mind, and she was doing the same thing now, her hands twitching lightly on her jacket as if flicking away one bug after another.