Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  Perhaps Rilke was wrong. I cannot ask you this. You teach history and speak frequently of soldiers, countries, and war.

  Do soldiers, away from their homeland, carry flags? I ask instead.

  You scoff at this and shift under the covers. Only if they’re insane, you say. Only if they want to get shot.

  It’s frustrating, to be without a home and country.

  Not really, you say, as you strip off the covers and get up to make a snack. There are always borders and opposition. Sometimes, you tell me, it’s easier to remain quiet and say nothing.

  HUNK

  1.

  Hunk, he calls as he pulls my sister close and loops his thick arm around her—flesh and bone, his mottled elbow, her pale neck and shoulders. She’s a pretty girl—too pretty, I think—tall and lean; dark eyes; a Gypsy forehead that, when it furrows, makes her seem older than almost-sixteen.

  Hunk, Hunk, Hunk. Hunkie, the people of Eastern Europe. Or Hunk, a slab of meat. He musses her hair, then pretends to bite into her until she screeches and laughs, leaning into him, leaning in and not away. Raspberry gloss coats her lips; her smile tightens. I love my sister’s laughter. It’s as deep as a secret she hides inside, and, as it runs through her, her entire body shakes. Her head bobs forward, a mass of long chocolate curls. Her head bobs back, gently, like a buoy.

  Here in the kitchen, the light shines brightly through the worn curtains, exposing fine particles of dust in the air; here the day is beaming and beaming more, the hot, sticky August sun promising never to go down. The air pushes so insistently through the screen doors. My sister laughs when he whispers something in her ear. Beyond her, the house remains almost quiet; a fan hums, pulsing on and on and on. There are fans all around the house, in hallways, in bedrooms, set up in strategic places to circulate and cool the air.

  Who’s my favorite? What does the favorite get?

  2.

  I am the baby of my family. Eleven years younger than my sister, I am an accident, the grand failure of a breaking condom. Life pushes forward, I joke to people, years later. I am happy to be alive, I say, and I mean it.

  Here in the corner of the kitchen, I sit at a rickety table with legs that always wobble, my own legs never touching the ground. I lop up too-sweet cereal with a spoon, lick what runs down my chin. At five I am all yellow curls, all sweet chunky cheeks. Jealous little thing, I want to be the favorite. She is mine, I want to say. I watch the intricate weave of bodies, the play of skin on skin, like wrestlers, or like dancers twisting in both graceful and violent maneuvers.

  She is mine and mine and all mine. I have woven my hands into that mass of hair, nuzzled against each curl, threaded my fingers through her fingers, pressed my lips to her lips, a goodnight kiss, a good-morning kiss, a glad-to-see-you, to-be-alive kiss. She is my sister. I have breathed her and felt her and been her, and she is all mine, right down to the bones and blood.

  My sister, still in a stranglehold, looks over at me, winks in assurance, and says, Hey, Goldilocks, what does Goldilocks do? And I know then I am to hunt for bears—my sister has made me fierce, telling me exactly how I must be: I am to be the hunter and not the hunted, which is what she tells me when she doesn’t want me to be afraid. It also means I am to go to my room and stay there and be quiet and wait for the sound of closing and opening doors again. It means I am to look under the bed, search through the closets, poke around the dusty corners for things that might devour me.

  Okay, my sister says, to something my father whispers. She looks down to the floor, at the forget-me-nots springing from woven baskets, and she laughs. She looks out the back door, to the yard and trees, to my brothers, who are outside in the sun, enjoying the day, and she laughs.

  I do not know what her laughter means.

  3.

  Yes, there are boys. They are tough-and-tumbling brothers who wrestle at night, who give each other bloody noses over yard work. Outside, on this particular day, they rake crunchy leaves that have fallen down early—a drought in August—and then throw the leaves up in the air, out of their arms. The boys spend all day outside. The boys are the outside, wild, unkempt down to the last hair. They smell of warm breezes and sunshine. They wear the wind on their backs, have tree limbs for arms.

  Later, after they finish their work, they will dangle themselves from branches, falling backwards without concern for the smallest injury. They will burn insects—ants and katydids and cicadas in this summer when the cicadas awaken. They will burn them all with magnifying glasses, just to see.

  The brothers aren’t exactly hunks, though they are lean and muscular—almost, but not quite, fleshy. They do often hunker around, though, practicing Travolta moves in the driveway—a little hip, a little lip—a routine from Grease. Their smiles widen when girls in the neighborhood ride by the backyard on bikes, all curvy, shiny knees and floppy sandals.

  4.

  Years have passed since I’ve seen my sister. I am thirty-two now, and, mostly, I am alone. There are several reasons for this. I like to be alone; I am used to it. And I am difficult to know. Impervious, deliberately so, I push most people away.

  There is a woman I know who wants to be my friend. She is a beautiful woman; she has thick hair like my sister’s. She keeps her hair cut squarely, bluntly, just as everything about her is blunt—her forehead, her smile, her manner of speaking. My friend loves the truth. She’s as relentless with it as a sewing needle, threading and threading bits of truth into something substantial. She tells me not to hunt for bears, but to chase down the words instead.

  We exchange stories, hers always truth, mine always lies. Because I prefer the idealism inherent in lies. I tell her I don’t see the point in truth, and I mean it. It’s never served me well. I bring her stories about unending road trips and warring roommates and people who want rather absurd, funny things—things they have no hope of getting—like pet cows and love that will never leave them. I write all this so I don’t have to write about my sister. My friend reads my stories, finds in them the one or two slivers of something that sounds like me. She finds something else, and suddenly there is a pattern. She is stitching me together, putting me on the mend, which I suppose is an act of friendship.

  5.

  Many times I’ve thought of writing about my sister, because I often miss her. But I don’t know what I would write about, or how I could keep her from becoming just another fiction, just another character I invent to pass lonely days, to have someone to talk to who understands without all that saying. It’s been twenty-six years since I’ve seen her. The amount of time that I’ve known her has been eclipsed by the amount of time I have not.

  Once, with the very first man I dated seriously, I tried to speak about her. I said: This truly awful thing happened, and she left, just like that, up and disappeared. I was far less circuitous in those days, much more haphazard with both my love and my intentions. I would tell anyone anything, if only they seemed as though they might listen. If only they asked.

  When this happened with my boyfriend, we were at dinner, a fancy place with white linen—he worked for the government and had a lot of money. As I spoke, he cleared his throat and glanced around to see if anyone else might be listening. He leaned forward and said: No one wants to hear that kind of story. He said: Tell me one about a man who battles the enemy and wins the foxy lady. You know: action and blood, secrets and death. Maybe a rhetorical flourish or two. Now that’s a story.

  6.

  My sister is so insistent, though, so small in what she offers me. The secret to beautiful hair, she says, is to lather and repeat. You’ve got to coax the shine into it.

  She has just come from the shower, and I have heard the doors closing and opening again, heard her secret knock at my door—five quick knocks, a bumpity-bump-bump rhythm, a language she and I share through the walls at night. I have smelled aftershave and lotion and sensed my sister’s salty tears. I have searched the corners of my room but come up empty-handed.

  She sits on my
bed and adjusts the pillows. She sits bundled in a robe, even though it isn’t even dinnertime. No bears, Goldilocks? she inquires. When I say no, she growls and tackles me, tickling my sides until I laugh. She lets me roll her over—she is so easy, my sister, so gentle in her rolling—she lets me go bang-bang-bang into her heart with a pretend gun.

  Oh, she says, covering her forehead with her arm. I’m dying. As she leans back, her hair falls, the soft skin of her neck exposed, the faint impression, raspberry marks under her ear.

  Don’t die, I say, suddenly regretful. Come back to life, I tell her. I plant a kiss on her cheek. I coax her with another kiss, but her eyes are closed and she does not answer. She lies perfectly still. I push at her shoulder. I nudge her a bit, check her heartbeat and pulse like doctors do on television.

  7.

  September pushes life on and on. I feel it pulse through me, like wind scattering the dead leaves. September is also the month of Aunt Judy’s pumpkin bread, sticky on the mouth’s concave roof, sweet on the tongue, melting like butter. She stops by to check on my father, to see if there have been callbacks on jobs. Laid off from the textile factory, my father has been home all year, and people are starting to worry, notice small things, changes in demeanor, a certain quietness that has settled over the house. Is he depressed? she wants to know. Are things okay? Does he seem all right to you girls?

  My sister and I rally around him. We are his girls—we are such good girls. We stay inside, neglect friendships, help out around the house. My sister does not ask to drive, though I know she wants to. She has a secret love, a kiss-me love, a boy from school named Alex. Sometimes Alex prowls by the house late at night, waiting to catch a glimpse of her. He coaxes her with promises of weed, tiny pills, and beer. He throws small stones at her window. Come out, he whispers. Can you come out?

  8.

  We prepare for Halloween a full month early. We are secretive in our preparations; my sister holds clandestine meetings in the basement, telling me exactly how the skeletons must look. When we finish our cuttings of cardboard and charcoal, we hang the skeletons on the front door, a warning to those who enter—Beware! We plant gravestones in the front yard, speak of death and goblins, ask Aunt Judy if she knows what it’s like not to sleep. It’s not Judy but my sister who seems most tired, those half-moons under her eyes, her hair barely combed. She cracks lame jokes anyway, parades around the living room, dancing like a zombie.

  Girls, Aunt Judy says. You girls, always living in a fantasy world. Can’t you ever come down from your clouds? She tells my sister she’s surprised at her—almost sixteen now and still talking nonsense. Silly, she says. Your mother needs your help. She’s been working so much, trying to keep up. There are important, adult things going on, you know.

  Aunt Judy is silly. She wears entirely too much makeup: blue eye shadow and peach lipstick, and her red hair always shellacked. Her clothes are too tight for her round body. She believes she can be twenty again. What is sillier?

  9.

  There must be a mother. I open the white shutters of her closet, step into the mothballed air and inhale until my lungs hurt. There are pretty shoes lined up against the floorboard, long dresses hanging on metal wires. I go a-hunting through the house, down the long corridor that leads to the kitchen, where soup has been left on the stove too long. I run my hand across curtains left on the ironing board. I find dictation in the living room, take-home work from the office, her almond-shaped reading glasses lying atop a mass of papers. In my room, I find clothes laid with exacting detail in the places body parts should be: a yellow Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt lying just under the pillow on my bed, a pair of brown slacks under it, a braided belt in between, socks under the cuffs of the slacks, clogs on the floor. And then I sleep.

  It is not my mother but my sister who kisses me goodnight, who tucks blankets all around me. It is my sister who tells bedtime stories. Before she pulls up the covers, she lets me drape the sheets over both of us. This is how we tell stories: under the sheets, hiding in ourselves. If someone were to look in through an open door or window, if ever there were open doors and windows in this house, they’d see us bunched up, flashlight barely seeping through the fabric. We are like ghosts, my sister and I, already disappearing.

  10.

  My sister ignores the knock at the door. We are busy, go away. She intones: It was a cold night, just like tonight. She pretends to shiver. She has just taken a pill, one that will dull her senses, one that Alex gave to her the night before. I listen more to the sound of her voice than to her actual words. Her voice is light, like a song waiting to be lifted, full of its predictable, often sorrowful, rhythms. I try to braid my sister’s hair—she has left it looking wild—but it tangles so easily. She pulls me from her, in no mood for my wandering fingers.

  It was going to snow, my sister continues. It was just about to snow, actually; the sky was black and the air so cold it hurt. The mother pulled her entire family out of bed—two boys and two girls—and she scooted them outside in their housecoats and slippers, their jackets still open. The children thought perhaps there was a fire, but there was no smoke. The children wondered where the father was, but he stayed inside, sleeping. The mother piled them all into the car. She had packed a suitcase for each child, my sister says. There were icicles hanging from the door. A brother broke one off, just for something to do; he carried the icicle in his bare hands, licked it. The mother started the engine running to warm everyone up, but then she just sat there, crying, not knowing where to go or what to do. The baby slept through all this, my sister says. The baby was only three, going on four, and she had curly blond hair, just like yours. She looked like an angel, sleeping like that. I bet the baby doesn’t even remember.

  11.

  My friend frequently speaks about lies and how bad they are, though mostly it is with regard to the government and politics and the vitrolic flow of information. My friend’s brother died in Vietnam, and she is still very angry with the government. Truth, she says, is the only thing that can save us, restore our voices, our common humanity.

  Sometimes I think she speaks the truth so much in an effort to remember her brother. Maybe, in speaking the truth, she soothes some hurt, calms some grave injustice. I do not know for certain. I rely on speculation, innuendo. In that regard, I believe I am like my sister. We are not easy girls, my sister and I. We leave out the most important things, rely on pauses and hesitations, which we also look for in other people. But, even then, intuiting, what can we say we really know? I will never be like my friend, who searches for truth and seems disappointed when she can’t find it. Even the smallest pieces of my knowledge are fraught with complicated interpretations, large, gaping holes, lies.

  My friend and I sit at the kitchen table. We drink wine and smoke cigarettes. We read tarot cards and palms and laugh hysterically when we say that we’ll never lose our beauty and luster, or that we’ll be rich and famous.

  What was your family like? my friend asks later. She is still trying to get to know me, still piecing me together. She is so intent on uncovering anything I hide.

  Mostly, I say, we were a normal family. This is not a lie. I love my parents. They are my parents, after all. And my father and mother took care of us. We had warm clothes every year, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We went on picnics in the park. We took vacations to Florida. My parents had friends, people who visited. In the winter months, my father would take us all sledding. He waxed our sleds with candles. He made sure we bundled up. He warmed the car before we got into it—he always did that for us—and he drove us to the highest hill in the neighborhood, where he’d wait as we got out, one after the other, and flew away on our sleds, screaming. Then he drove down to retrieve us and drove us back up again for another go. He did that for hours, which was very nice.

  That is nice, my friend agrees. But it seems to me that this is not enough for her, that she is still waiting.

  Most of us, these days, don’t have much of a relationship, I tell her. W
e hardly speak, if you want to know the truth.

  She looks at me sympathetically. Of course you all have a relationship, she says. Even if you don’t speak at all.

  I would like to believe this. I would like to believe that’s how all love is—that love is carried with us, on our shoulders and inside our bellies. I would like to believe this about my sister, especially, even if it is rather foolish.

  12.

  Hunk, Hunk, Hunk, my father calls. He wants her to come and clip his toenails. My father is a slack man, with skin that is like leather treated too long. My father is also extremely superstitious. Did I mention this? He believes he once saw a ghost. He speaks of his own mother casting spells that could bring the dead back to life.

  Hunkie, he calls my sister. He praises her Gypsy good looks. Hunks can call one another Hunks in affection or recognition, in the way that another friend, years later, would talk about calling her sister Dirty Irish, or in the way that my friend Greg would call his lover Queen, or Queenie, or Louis, you fag.

  13.

  In January, we pour a new basement. My sister has been living these days in her room with the door locked, and my bumpity-bump-bump coaxing doesn’t bring her out. Even Alex doesn’t draw her interest, coming to her window, offering up weed and small tokens of his affection. What is wrong with her? Aunt Judy wants to know. Come down, she calls. Come down now.

  My brothers, Aunt Judy, and I help my father mix cement that will turn hard and crumble. My brothers call each other goofball and moron and dumb ass. They throw cement into each other’s hair, claiming peanut butter gets anything out. They laugh when Aunt Judy chides them.