Sister of Mine

by Laurie Petrou

  * * *

  A Sunday in July, a year since our father had disappeared. A year of gossip and teasing, a year of making our world smaller.

  Outside, the sun shone while we, in our itchy wool dresses, were condemned to the inner sanctum of the church basement. From the limbo of the tiny chairs in the Sunday school room, I could smell burnt coffee and cigarette smoke, with an undertone of paste and manila envelopes. Anima Christi.

  Hattie was called to endure the punishment of doing chores for God and Mrs. Walker, as we often were on Sundays. A kind of agreed-upon penance that the Grayson girls deserved. She’d been hauled off almost as soon as we’d shuffled into the room. Mrs. Walker, that strict Madam of Ministry, that Call Girl of Catholicism, saw in our small family a host of sins. She prayed for, and preyed on, Hattie in particular. There was something in Hattie’s soft innocence, her hair color, that infuriated the Sunday school matron, and Hattie often spent Sundays cleaning baseboards with a toothbrush or scrubbing the diaper bucket from the nursery, gagging into her black velvet Polly Flinders shoulders. I waited, numbly, with the other children, for Mrs. Walker to return. I knew I should bail her out, but too often I thrilled in seeing her punished. But still; I could hardly concentrate when she was gone. She was a magnet to me and I to her; I hated that I couldn’t help but love her, hated that this love made me feel obligated to protect her. Sometimes wishing I was an only child.

  Time stretched out on this morning, and the other kids began to goof off, joking and whispering, but ignoring me. I kept an eye on the door, wondering where my sister was now. There was a scrape of feet and the creak of pews from above us in the sanctuary, the muted chorus of parents and grandparents coming through the floorboards. I looked out the half-window, which afforded a glimpse of the parking-lot asphalt. Time ticked by. Hattie wasn’t usually gone this long. I was uneasy.

  I looked out the doorway again, and pushed out my chair.

  “Where are you going?” snapped one of the older girls who was left in charge. “You aren’t allowed to leave without asking me.”

  I ignored her, and left the room.

  I kept walking, down the hallway towards the storage room that doubled as Mrs. Walker’s office. Ran my finger along the cold concrete brick wall that was painted a glossy white. In the groove, my finger going up and across, through a maze. I heard a whap whap as I approached the room. Mrs. Walker sometimes had Hattie bang out the blackboard erasers, which was something I actually loved doing. Whap whap whap. That sound, and now a whimper coming to my ears as well. What a baby. My patent leather Mary Janes were digging into my heels. Whap whap whap. Harder and louder. I rounded the corner to the storage room, the smells of dust and craft paint and old costumes rolling over me.

  I saw Mrs. Walker hunched over, her coarse black hair, streaked with wiry white, hanging in her eyes. And Hattie, palms up, her face red and wet.

  “Penny!” she squeaked.

  Mrs. Walker turned, a wooden yardstick in her hands. There was a strand of hair stuck to her lip.

  “What are you doing here, Penelope?”

  “I … I …” Hattie’s hands were swollen and bright pink. Mrs. Walker was out of breath.

  “Your sister, if that is what you’re here for, defiled the belongings of this church. And of God.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She wiped her hair from her face and threw down her yardstick. Grabbed a children’s Bible from the table beside her, its bronze cover starting to tear, the name Harriet Grayson printed in crooked child’s writing on a piece of masking tape curling from the front cover. Mrs. Walker opened it to the first page, where there were two circles drawn in pencil, little dots in their centers, and a triangle below.

  “This.” She shoved it under my nose, and I looked at the drawing.

  Hattie, sniffling, said in a whisper, “It’s a face.”

  I could see how she meant it to be a face, but to the trained eye of a curious kid like me, and apparently a grown-up like Mrs. Walker with an eye for judgment, it was a naked lady.

  Mrs. Walker scoffed. “It’s a sick depiction of a woman’s nude body, and it will not be tolerated.” She took back the Bible and muttered, smoothing her skirt, “Least of all by a little minx who has clearly learned a host of habits from her father.” Hattie hung her head, knowing that this must be some kind of insult.

  I lifted my chin up and said, “I did it.”

  Hattie looked at me, confused, her red hands at her side, palms still facing out.

  Mrs. Walker regarded me carefully. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s true. I did it. And it is a face, that part is true,” I added that as an extra touch. Every lie needs an ounce of truth. “And leave our dad out of it.”

  “Harriet, get back to the Sunday school room so I can have a word with your sister.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Walker.” Hattie’s lip trembled, her teary eyes finding mine. I nodded, and her little shoes clip-clopped out of the room.

  Once back in the Sunday school room, I refused to look at Hattie, who scooted her chair right next to mine. I smiled when another child picked on her. I could only go so far in love.

  But later we compared hands. I liked how mine felt, and liked even more the feeling I’d had marching back to face all the other kids, my head high as the brave sister. I had stood in my sister’s stead. Protected her, but also stole the spotlight, painful though it was. Hattie and our Sunday school classmates had stared at me with wonder, and it felt good. At home, we held icy cold cans of Coke in our hands and did not tell Mum, who made us cinnamon buns after church like she always did.

  “Anything interesting happen in Sunday school today?” Mum wiped down the counter and ran the dishcloth under the tap. Hattie looked to me, her eyes wide. I shook my head sharply.

  “We learned about Abraham and Isaac,” I said, taking a bite.

  “Hmm. I always found that story disturbing. Strange choice for children.”

  “Mrs. Walker says it’s about sacrifice,” Hattie piped up. I rolled my eyes.

  Mum smiled at Hattie. “Well, sure. Isaac was the sacrifice.”

  “But he didn’t do it,” I said, meaning Abraham. “He just almost did it. Maybe he was never going to do it at all.”

  “Maybe,” said Mum, filling the kettle. “But sometimes it’s the thought that counts.” She took a deep breath that signified a subject change, and sat at the table with us, pulling her cigarettes out of her apron and lighting one. “So! What are your plans for today? It’s a gorgeous day out there.”

  “I want to go swimming!”

  “That might be fun, Hattie. Penny, do you think you could take Hattie to the pool?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you have other ideas?” Eyebrows raised, Mum smoothed my hair down with a smile.

  “I dunno. I wanted to ride my bike.”

  “Well, you two can ride your bikes there.”

  Hattie grinned at me, and I dampened it with a blank face until she looked away.

  “Can’t I just stay home with you, Mum?”

  “No, honey. I’ve got lots of tidying up to do. Laundry and other exciting things far too fun for kids. I’ll take a walk over later and watch how your dives are coming along, though, okay?” She squeezed my reddened hand, shooting pain up my arm, and I loved her.

  Later, at the pool. Hattie puffed out her cheeks and sank her head beneath the water, her hair like red seaweed waving around in slow motion. She gestured and bugged out her eyes and mimed a tea party, begging me to join. I pretended not to understand her, pretended I didn’t want to play, even if part of me did. Took to the ladder and walked proudly to the low diving board. My skin goose-bumped, my hair matted in a black clump, I climbed the silver steps, looking for Mum. She was there, in a lounger, a long flowered dress hitched up to her knees, talking to another mom, smiling gamely and nodding her head. I caught her eye and she waved enthusiastically, dropping her cigarette in a puddle beside her chair. She threw up h
er hands and laughed at herself. The other mother stared, unmoved. I walked across the pebbly diving board; the whole pool seemed to freeze. Mum clasped her hands together and nodded. You can do it, she mouthed. I almost lost my nerve. I waited. The kid behind me muttered under her breath. I put my toes on the edge of the board and felt a shiver. Hattie was climbing out of the pool in front of Mum. Her eyes moved to Hattie. I took one bounce, and jumped, making as big a splash as possible.

  * * *

  That night, Hattie climbed into my bed and we carefully pressed our hands against each other, fingers to the sky, and I remembered why I loved her. How I couldn’t help it, just like no one else could. She smelled like fresh soap with an undercurrent of chlorine, her post-bath wet hair soaking my pillow. She looked at our matching hands.

  “Like we are praying,” Hattie whispered, and her innocence chafed against my newly hardened heart, and still softened it.

  That year and those after, we prayed. For our father to return. For everything to go back to the way it was before. And later, for friends, for boys, and boobs. But then everything changed again, and prayers didn’t work where fists and flames did. Prayers got lost when we whispered them up into the air, they got caught in the branches of the maple tree in front of our house. I’ve spent the past few years trying to shake them free, hoping that one of them will flutter upwards and be read by the wind.

  2

  I encouraged Hattie to take extra shifts at the salon, and urged her to read lots, after the fire. She needed to be kept busy, distracted. We were together again, stuck in time like bees in amber. One day she looked up from her book while I was straightening up the sitting room.

  “Leo Tolstoy said there are only two kinds of stories: man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.”

  “Oh yeah?” I looked at our mother’s wingback chairs and shifted the position of one.

  “Yeah,” she murmured, turning a page. “If only that were true. No one ever comes here.”

  * * *

  Tolstoy was right.

  A stranger did come to town, and it was like the moon dropped out of the sky and broke open like an orange. By then we had become St. Margaret’s Dangerous Darlings. We were young and pretty and had been touched by death and tragedy, and the people of St. Margaret’s, some with long memories, and others without knowing why, avoided us like we were cursed. They watched and whispered, but we had very few friends other than one another. Being a widow, people largely left me alone. Hattie had initially let Officer Moore in, buckling under his kindness, his soft persistence. I noticed how his tender blue eyes, like so many others, lingered after her when she left a room, trying to will the red mist of hair back as it swung out of sight. Her beauty like smoke that I hoped had clouded his judgment, but she got rid of him. Keep your enemies close and your sister closer. We might have been adult orphans now, but we’d learned enough growing up to know that secrets can’t be split in more than half or they start to crumble, and you find pieces of them all over town in everybody’s pockets, drifting up against the curb when the snow melts.

  He changed everything, that stranger. Jameson Leung. And if I could turn back time now, I would still open the gate, leave the door open, I would usher him in despite it all. All over again.

  “He’s different,” Hattie would say later. “Different from everyone else in this place.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. He was. He was funny and strange and charming but also plain and good and true. Like he’d swallowed the sun. And, well, the sun had always favored Hattie. She was the light in the corner, the warm side of the bed. I had been the darkness. We had a balance. But then it listed sideways.

  The daycare where I worked as a director was attached to the public school: Arrow Park PS. PS: you’re still here. PS: you’re never leaving. It had been a small schoolhouse where our mum had gone as a kid, and Hattie and I after that, but had since grown with an addition and added portables in the back. We had waged the war of childhood there, and now I was an old general back from the front, with a torn uniform and scars the recruits couldn’t see. I kept watch over the faded wooden playground with its bouncy bridge; mock stained glass pictures made with colored tissue paper taped to the windows. When the weather was warm, and the windows were open, I watched toddlers in the yard as the chipper young women who worked there dusted sand off chubby bums. I listened as the children in the school sang the national anthem and said the Lord’s Prayer, chairs squeaking against the plank floor when they returned to their seats.

  Jameson was the young new teacher. He was taking over for a teacher going on maternity leave, and so joined just as the year was coming to a close. He was, as our mother would have described with a sparkly wink, extraordinarily handsome, with just the right lack of symmetry—in his case, his left arm ended at his elbow—to make him curiously exotic to the townspeople. Jameson Leung. He was as beautifully strange as anyone who had come to St. Margaret’s in a good number of years. Mrs. Carr called him the Oriental Teacher with One Arm; one of my workmates called him the Knockout. As with most newcomers in a small town, people mainly watched him and talked about him incessantly to each other. He kept to himself, and was left largely alone. I, too, had been carefully keeping an eye on him for a couple of weeks before I took the plunge.

  I introduced myself as Penelope Grayson, realizing at that moment that I had returned to my maiden name. I blushed as I said it, and Jameson shook my hand, saying, “Well, that’s a nice name.”

  “Everyone calls me Penny.”

  “Okay, Penny. Everyone calls me Jameson.”

  Jameson projecting loudly to the children in his classroom, running around, kicking a soccer ball, flying kites, cheering on the slower kids in the field behind the school. Getting on his bike at the end of the day and riding one-handed to wherever it was he lived, calling goodbye to me, and the daycare kids, on his way. At the end of June, while he was cleaning out his classroom, I invited him over for dinner.

  I was overly cheery and nervous, conscious of the echo of my shoes on the floors. He turned when I knocked, a corrugated border in his hand, stepping down from a ladder. The left sleeve of his light blue dress shirt was knotted under his elbow. The sun was high in the sky, and a breeze moved everything in the room around, made it alive. Something about the room or the weather or Jameson made me feel giddy, and like taking risks. And so, I asked him to our house. The house I share with my sister, Hattie. He’d love to come, what could he bring, where did I live? An errant eyelash that stuck to his cheek caught my eye when I turned to leave. The breeze swirled around me. Blow it away. Make a wish.

  I told Hattie what I was planning, and she’d raised an eyebrow.

  “You never invite anyone over here.”

  “Yeah, I know. I dunno. I guess I felt sorry for him. He’s nice, and, he doesn’t seem to have any friends.” She was right, I knew. And immediately after asking him, I had felt a surge of anxiety. But it was too late for that now.

  “You’ll like him,” I said.

  “If you say so,” she said, smiling.

  * * *

  “Hello!” Hattie nearly shouted, answering the door and taking Jameson’s summer jacket, hanging it on the large gothic coat stand at the front door. “I’m Hattie … Welcome!”

  She was so jolly, I noticed, alive and vibrant, so happy that the outside was coming in. I felt the panic return: a rush of regret for welcoming someone, even briefly, into the fold. But there was Hattie, filling up the house with her voice, her hair, her big laugh. She was so intoxicating. Sometimes shy and coy, other times boisterous and fun: she seemed to know which way to turn, like magic. Something slipped inside, and I knew I was already behind.

  Jameson was laughing straightaway. I watched from the doorway of the kitchen as he took Hattie in, surprised and charmed by her brazen dissimilarity to me. I can pivot, too; I can adapt and change, but not like her. Never like she could. Jameson followed Hattie through the large front foyer into the kitchen, where I wa
s making a salad. Seeds and dried fruit scattered on the cutting board, hands red from slicing beets, hair damp against my forehead. Hattie caught my eye and gave me a face of girlish approval.

  “Jameson,” I said. “So glad you could come. Beer?” And I wiped my hands on my apron, cracking open the bottle and handing it over, fingers touching.

  Hattie, one step ahead already, clinked bottles with us both. “Want to eat outside?”

  * * *

  It was the perfect evening. Bottles filling the center of the table while we nibbled on the remains of the meal, and fireflies sparkled in the hedges around us.

  Jameson lifted a bottle. “You two are so polite. I know you’re wondering about my arm, so let’s just have it out.”

  Hattie and I exchanged nervous glances and she giggled.

  “No, not at all. I mean. You don’t have to share it with us.”

  “Right.” He smiled. “I’m sure you’re right. It’s not interesting.” He sipped his beer. Hattie clasped her hands together like a child.

  “No! Please tell us!”

  “Hattie!”

  “What? He started it!”

  “I think you guys should just guess. Go ahead. I’ll let you know if you’re right.”

  I closed my eyes in embarrassment while Hattie’s widened with excitement.

  “Construction!”

  “Car accident?” I ventured.

  “Logging! Carpentry! You fell down a well!”

  “Biking?”

  Bold, cutting over one another; Jameson grinning and shaking his head.

  “You know this is really disrespectful to disabled people. Down a well? And you call yourself a student of literature, Hattie. I ask you, where is your imagination?”

  “Virgin sacrifice gone wrong!” She shrieked.

  His smile a twitchy switch for us both, lighting the night, his aftershave and the summer scents mixing like a spell. I leaned back in my chair, watched a raccoon that was tight-wire tiptoeing over the fence at the far end of the property. Slowly moving along the edge with purpose.