I.O.U

by Nancy Pickard

  While I put the dishes in the dishwasher, he answered a call on the portable phone in the kitchen. After saying, “hello,” and listening to the person on the other end for a moment, he walked out of the kitchen with the phone, and I couldn’t hear the rest of his end of the conversation. “Who was it?” I asked him, when he returned, and replaced the receiver in its cradle.

  “It was the department.”

  “What did you tell them today, Geof?”

  “I’m still sick with the flu.”

  “Do they believe it?”

  “They can believe what they want. Did you find that new dish-washing powder I brought home?”

  “Geof—”

  “I forgot something upstairs. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  It seemed that I wasn’t the only one who had certain subjects he didn’t want to discuss.

  We agreed that I could probably stay safely in my sister’s house without a bodyguard, particularly as Geof still felt confident of his theory that the attack on me was one of opportunity, and not of premeditation. So he drove me there, dropped me off, and arranged to pick me up before noon.

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” he said, as I got out of his car.

  I turned to him, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been pissed about something all morning.”

  I nodded. “Maybe I’m looking for a target.”

  “You plan on saying things you may regret?”

  I thought about that and then said, “Yes.”

  He didn’t try to talk me out of it, which seemed to me a fine quality in a husband.

  Sherry was definitely surprised to find me on her doorstep at eight-thirty in the morning. I’d timed it so the kids were already off to school and Lars was gone to work. And I just happened to know that her housekeeper didn’t work on Fridays. I was taking a chance with Dad and Randy, but maybe I didn’t really care if they overheard what I had to say. It turned out, however, that they were gone, too.

  “Jenny?”

  “Thank you, I think I will come in,” I said, although she hadn’t invited me, but only stood, looking dumbly agape, in her doorway. “Why yes, thanks, I’d love some coffee. Okay, we’ll have it in the kitchen, that would be fine.”

  I strode past her into her entryway, and then kept walking, forcing her to follow my footsteps through her living room into her huge, modern, industrial-strength kitchen. I walked to her freezer, pulled out a bag of coffee beans, and then ground them and started them brewing in her fancy German coffee maker. I turned around to find Sherry seated at her own kitchen counter, looking nervous. And defensive. Well, a good defense deserves a good offense, I always say—

  “The flowers were lovely,” I said, talking fast, so she couldn’t interrupt. “Small, but lovely. So nice of you to send them. And to identify yourselves so clearly on the card. I guess you thought I might have confused you with some other Guthries I know, my being in a befuddled mental state and all. Much too confused to entertain visitors while I was in the hospital, you must have thought, or of course you would have tried to visit me. Or phone me, other than to complain about my influence on your children, of course. Sorry about that. They only wanted to help their crazy aunt. So I guess you were only thinking of me, that’s why you haven’t come to see me. Or called to ask about me. Or made some fucking effort to find out how I am!”

  I discovered I was shouting at her.

  “Jenny—”

  I just keep shouting.

  “What’s the matter with you, Sherry, that you could even think I might try to kill myself? How could you think that? I’m your sister! Don’t you know me any better? Or didn’t you care if it was true? Was it all too embarrassing, just simply, oh, my darling, just too, too mortifying for you, Sherry? How dreadful for you to have a sister whom others might accuse of trying to commit suicide. Never mind that I didn’t do it, that I am constitutionally incapable of doing any such thing. Never mind me. Never mind that I was in the hospital puking my guts out, needing the love of my family—”

  My voice broke on all of that self-righteous self-pity, which only infuriated me even more, so that I couldn’t stop, but had to keep right on screaming at her, hoping the neighbors heard, hoping Sherry was “mortified” beyond bearing, hoping this hurt, hurt, hurt her in every way that it was possible for her to hurt—

  “Do we embarrass you, Sherry? Crazy dead Mother? Loony Dad? Your cop brother-in-law? And me. What horrible crosses we are for you to bear. Poor, poor Sherry. Well, let me tell you who’s dead. You are. You’ve got a dead heart, baby sister. And let me tell you who’s crazy. You are, for giving a damn about everything that doesn’t matter and for being too cowardly to place any value on the things that do matter.” I walked over and leaned in her face and shouted at her. “Like your sister.”

  Sherry shoved me out of her face.

  Literally, with both hands, physically shoved me.

  I stumbled backward, caught myself, and then shoved her back. Hard, so her chair tipped and tumbled her sideways to her kitchen floor. She uttered a frightened, pained little scream as her shoulder and head struck the tile, but then she quickly scrambled to her feet and grabbed my arms and began to shake me. I broke loose from her and hauled back my right hand and hit her across the face as hard as I could. She gasped and fell again, crying, clutching her right cheek. And then she was on me, hitting my head and chest, kicking my legs, screaming wordlessly at me, and crying. And I was giving it back to her. We fought like heavy, desperate, furious, heartbroken, overage, out of shape wrestlers, until our clothes were torn and our skin bloodied and bruised, and until we were merely clinging violently to each other and sobbing.

  Sherry whispered furiously, “I hate her.”

  “I do, too.”

  “She left us.”

  “Goddamn her!”

  “And now we hate each other, too.”

  “Do we?” I breathed deeply, but it hurt.

  Sherry drew away from me and stared at my face. We were panting like dogs. She actually managed a little smile. “God, this is really embarrassing.”

  I started to laugh. “Good old Sherry.”

  “Well, really.” She pulled completely away and I could see that the full horror of what we’d just done was beginning to sink in on her. “Look at us, we’re a mess. If anybody ever hears what we’ve—”

  “Oh, well, they already think I’m crazy.”

  She gazed at me a moment. “I never did.”

  “Then why didn’t you come to see me?”

  “Because you are a disgrace and an embarrassment to me, always getting yourself into these disgusting predicaments involving violence and death. Frankly, if you weren’t my sister, I wouldn’t want any part of you.”

  “Sherry,” I said, “we have to talk about Mom.”

  She bit her lower lip, tasted blood, grimaced. “I don’t really hate her —do you?”

  I shook my head, unable to speak. I felt, in fact, unspeakable.

  “Just sometimes,” Sherry added softly, like a little girl.

  I nodded, still unable to get my voice to work. All I could think of was the baby that Sherry once had been, and what sadness had befallen her, had probably even formed her, and she didn’t even know about it. And I, instead of feeling compassion for her, had hurt her, too—as if it were her fault, as if my mother would have gotten well and maybe never have gone away from me, if only Sherry had never been born.

  My sister sighed and then did something that, for her, was remarkably brave. “Let’s go upstairs and clean up,” she said, “and then, let’s talk.”

  We limped upstairs—both of us in pain from the blows we’d inflicted on one another—and we took showers, Sherry in her bath in the master bedroom and I in the children’s bathroom. Then we both wrapped ourselves in matching white terry cloth robes that belonged to Sherry and Lars and we sat cross-legged on their king-sized bed. One of her eyes was turning black and blue and that cheek was red and swollen. Beneath t
he robe I wore, I felt bruises swelling and throbbing, but the bathroom mirror had shown me a face that was free of marks. In that regard, I was luckier than I deserved. Lord, why hadn’t we done this when we were kids and tough enough to bear it? I ached in every tendon and surely she did, too. How would she ever explain that cheek to her bridge club? Fortunately, my sister did have a reputation for clutziness, so she just might get away with claiming that she’d banged into the edge of the dining room table. Again. It actually had happened once before. And what excuse would I devise for limping and groaning? Well, that was easy—everybody knew I was crazy, so maybe they’d just assume I had tried to beat myself to death.

  Sitting there on the bed, with every appearance of sororal coziness, I confided my discoveries that our mother had had a hysterectomy and that she had been institutionalized after our births. I didn’t tell Sherry about Francie’s claim that Mom had, evidently in a postpartum state of psychosis, tried to harm her. Maybe I was wrong, but I felt that was information nobody ever needed to know about her own mother. If Sherry ever wanted to go to a psychiatrist—and I doubted she ever would, she wasn’t the type—or if she ever showed any sign of wanting to delve into her own psyche, then… maybe… if she really, truly, desperately seemed to need to know… everything… then I’d tell her. But for nothing less than that. In the meanwhile, it was plain that I’d given her enough shocks for one day.

  “I didn’t know anything about any of this, Jenny.”

  “Of course you didn’t, how could you know? You were a child, and Mom wouldn’t have wanted to frighten you, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Dad to tell us anything. But Sherry, you must have been frightened anyway—”

  She frowned. “I can’t remember. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think I want to remember.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t blame you.”

  With her right forefinger, she traced the inner seam of her robe, saying, “Now that we know, what good does it do us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked up. “Does it make us happier? It doesn’t make me happier, Jenny. Does it finally satisfy you that you know truth, whatever that is? It doesn’t satisfy me. That’s something you’ll never understand, will you? I don’t care about the truth. It’s bound to hurt. It does hurt. There isn’t any satisfaction to be had for either of us, from any of this, ever. All there is is forgetting. And going on.”

  “You’re good at that,” I said, without bitterness.

  “Better than you,” she agreed, without malice.

  “But you won’t fight me if I keep trying to find, I don’t know, happiness, satisfaction? I don’t know what it is… whatever it is I’m after?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” She smiled slightly. “But I don’t care to fight you again, about anything. Once in a lifetime is enough, thank you.”

  We were silent for a few more moments.

  “Did we get it all fought out?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, decisively. “I don’t suppose we ever will. We don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”

  “What’s it all about—”

  “Alfie?”

  We smiled at each other, at the shared cultural reference to the movie from our childhood. But I was saddened to realize that it still wasn’t the kind of smile that you share with your best, closest, bosom friend. There was still, even now, a distance to it, a coolness, an… unrelatedness, if you will… and that knowledge hurt me more than any of my bruises did. We would always be sisters, but for the first time I had to face up to the fact that we might never be friends. Tomorrow, I still might not like her very well, or she, me. Tomorrow, she’d be embarrassed again, mortified by the visible evidence of family discord. And between two women, at that. Hell, I was mortified, too, but only because of the implication of our lack of love.

  “Where’s Dad?” I inquired.

  “At the club, playing golf.”

  I laughed. “My God, it’s cold and it’s March and it’s the middle of the morning! It’s not even 50 degrees outside!”

  “He has his love to keep him warm.”

  “I wonder if Randy likes to play golf in any weather.”

  “You want to see them?” Sherry asked, surprising me with her perception. When I nodded, she surprised me even more. “I have some clothes you can wear. Come on, I’ll help you get into them.”

  It struck me as a willing, friendly act on her part, although I couldn’t help but protest. “Sherry, don’t bother. I’ll wear my own clothes, I don’t need anything special.”

  She looked with disdain at the pile of my clothes that lay humped on her bedroom carpet—red sweater, blue jeans, socks, and Weejun loafers —and shook her head in mock exasperation. “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny, were you raised to go on a golf course looking like that? I’m ashamed of you. If you go dressed in jeans, Dad will be embarrassed in front of his friends and then he will spend the entire morning fretting about your clothes and telling you how Randy always knows exactly the right things to wear at all times, and how Randy wouldn’t step up to a tee without golf shoes, the proper pants, and a pretty little golf sweater.”

  “There is wisdom in what you say,” I admitted.

  “Bet your ass.” She swung her legs off the bed and limped over to her closet where she began pulling out ensembles for my appraisal and tossing them to me on the bed. “Leave it to me. I’ll fix you up so even Nancy Lopez wouldn’t be ashamed to putt with you.”

  “But Sherry, I’m not going to actually play golf. I’m only going to ride around in the cart with them.”

  “Right.” She pulled a crimson velour jogging suit out on its hangar and threw it to me. “That’s like saying you’re not going to worship in church, you’re only going to sit there. Makes no difference at all. You go to church on Sundays, you wear a dress and heels. You go to a golf course at the club, you wear golf shoes. You know I don’t care what you wear—” (I didn’t know that.) “—you can wear tennis shorts for all I care, but Dad will care, and that will make a difference as to whether or not he pays any attention to you.”

  “I guess I appreciate this,” I said as a white jogging suit followed the crimson one in an arc to the bed. Lordy, I thought as I fingered the velour, could it be possible that I was a shade melodramatic? Might I even have been wrong about my sister, and about the possibilities for us? Surely not, not I.

  “The red one,” Sherry decided for me. “The white makes you look like you’ve been lying in a hospital bed.”

  I glanced up at her.

  She was smiling at me. Slightly. But still.

  “Oh dear,” I said. “I forgot. Sherry, I don’t have a car. Geof drove me here, and he won’t be back for awhile.”

  She sighed, hugely, but I thought I detected a hint of mockery in it. “Okay, okay, I need to pay our club bill for this month anyway, I’ll go to the office, and then maybe I’ll sign the kids up for their spring tennis lessons while you find Dad.”

  19

  AT THE COUNTRY CLUB GOLF SHOP, I WAITED FOR THE ASSISTANT golf pro to call out an electric golf cart for me. There wasn’t a whole lot of competition for them in the middle of March. In the sun, the day felt pretty warm, but I was bundled into a lined trench coat anyway, which took some of the snap out of Sherry’s stylish suit and her regulation cleated shoes. I’d had a few golf lessons as a girl— enough to convince me that life wasn’t long enough to spend it walking eighteen holes—and I remembered feeling like Lyle Alzado in those shoes. I still felt like a football player in them. (An exhibitionist football player, considering the trench coat.) It didn’t increase what little aplomb I felt in regard to talking to my Dad and Randy.

  The assistant pro said, “Mr. and Mrs. Cain ought to be at about the fifteenth green by now.” She was a tanned, big-shouldered, friendly woman about my age. “They have the place to themselves this morning, so they ought to be zipping through. Do you know how to find them?”

  “Do you have a map?”

&n
bsp; “Sure.” She laid a little map on the counter between us and pointed out the path winding around the course, which I hadn’t been on in probably twenty-five years. “Here we are. And here’s the fifteenth hole. They’ll be in that vicinity, I expect. Your dad’s wearing a plaid tarn with a big red puffball on top and Mrs. Cain is wearing a mink sweater.”

  I looked up at her. “To play golf?”

  She remained poker-faced. “Well, it’s chilly out.”

  “More like silly out,” I said under my breath. She didn’t charge me any green fees, but I paid for the use of the cart by signing my dad’s name to the bill. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, Mrs. Bushfield.”

  “It’s still Cain. Better yet, Jenny.”

  She smiled. “Thanks, but I can’t do that. Club rules.”

  “Ah.” It’s the petty rules I most like to test, so I glanced at her name tag and said, “Thanks, Ms. Finney.”

  “Susan,” she said, and grinned.

  What a colossal pain in the ass I am sometimes, I reflected as I climbed into the golf cart and turned the switch to On. Or was I just practicing for what lay ahead? Maybe every astonishing thing that had happened so far this day was only groundwork for the fifteenth tee.

  I shifted into gear and zipped off between two bare birch trees, down the narrow gray asphalt cart path, to Daddy.

  “Yo! Pop!”

  That was my first mistake. Never yell at a man as he tees off. He paused at the peak of his swing, his head jerked, his arms jerked, he swung down and topped the ball, sending it flying, about an inch off the grass, to the west. The hole was north.

  “Damn it!” my father exclaimed, and threw his tarn to the ground.

  Randy alighted from their cart and stood waiting for me, her hands on her hips, her lips pursed in a showy display of pique. Her expression accused me of ruining his shot, which was the same as ruining his day, which wouldn’t improve hers. Shame on me. I aimed my little cart in his direction, and rolled over the putting green on the 14th hole. That was my second mistake.