Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  My sister finally comes down to help. She is dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt that exposes her thin arms, the paleness of her skin, the fine dark hairs that travel over her and stand on end. My brothers tease her, tease her tiredness, her aloneness. They smear wet cement on her back, to try to egg her on.

  We mix and pour and level things off until everything about the room seems gray and cool, thick and wet. We move backwards, edging our way to steps that lead upstairs to the kitchen. We leave no footprints. Right before we finish, my sister bends down, and, at the landing, she writes in big, chunky letters: THE HUNK. Years later, after my sister has left, my mother will cover this up with ugly fragments of carpets that do not fit anything. And my sister, what is left of her, will disappear all over again.

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

  14.

  Time passes and life thaws outside the window. Things push on and on. A full summer later, after the summer of closing and opening doors, the summer of bears and more bears and raspberry kisses and briny tears, I walk into my sister’s bedroom and find her packing a small duffel bag, with only the basics: shirts, jeans, underwear, a bra and panties. She is so willing to leave everything behind. She is so willing to go. She tells me: I’m sorry, baby, but I can’t take it anymore.

  I do not understand what my sister’s packing means, just as I do not understand her laughter or tears. There was a mother, I know, who packed things and only made it to the end of the driveway, so I am not too worried. I watch as my sister packs, as she takes a family photo and cuts our two faces from it—same pale skin and hooked nose, same deeply set eyes. She holds us up and says: I’m going to keep you with me forever.

  Years later, in her one and only letter, she will send this photograph back to me, worn and blanched and wrinkled. She will send it to let me know she hasn’t forgotten, to remind me of her promise and to break her promise all at once, to both lie and tell the truth, simultaneously.

  15.

  For a long time—years, in fact—nothing happens, which makes me sometimes wonder about my sister. Before I leave home for college, she sends a letter to me, along with the photograph of us taken years before. In the letter she says horrible things. She speaks of doors opening in the middle of the night, marks left all over her body. She says so much that I have to skim over large portions of her words, skip entire passages, block out pieces of information.

  These days I never read the letter, but I know exactly where it is, in the third drawer of my lingerie chest, buried under fishnets and garter belts, lacy bras and other things I don’t often wear. That is where I keep my sister, and that is where I keep her words.

  I have learned so much from my sister about the importance of walling myself off from the world, of keeping things inside. And I have been clever, in my own right. At twelve, I took up voodoo. I turned Goldilocks into a crone, magically. I practiced the evil eye. I could tell my sister: One inconsiderate look and I was at the needle, stitching away, making dolls from old scraps of clothing, spitting on the face. I was never labeled the favorite. No one ever called me Hunk, though my father, to this day, calls me a witch.

  My parents are now very old, and they live alone without many friends. They never speak of my sister. Her name, like the clothes of the seventies, has fallen out of fashion. Each year, their house becomes darker and quieter, their reasons for celebration less.

  If ever I mention my sister, on days when I am feeling brave or those days when I just need to remember or piece things together, my mother is always the one to say: There are two sides to every story. Your sister was smoking so much pot in those days; she was taking pills. She would run off in the middle of the night. You really don’t even know the half of it, my mother says. You were too young to understand anything, so I don’t appreciate your tone.

  I do not tell my friend any of this, just as she rarely speaks about her brother, except in fragments.

  16.

  It is so unlikely that my sister will ever read this. It is so unlikely that if we ever passed on a crowded street she would turn her head in the smallest recognition.

  Still, I hold entire conversations with her in my head. I could tell my friend this, but frankly, why should I? Like my mother, she would only arrive at too-quick answers. I am practically a lunatic with all my chatter. I am like Goldilocks on speed, held up in some abandoned building with a gun, trying to formulate a plan that will let me get to her. Because I sense that my sister needs me, that she is lost somewhere and hurt and in need of resuscitation. Only, to find her, I have to murder many people, and say things no one likes to hear, particularly in stories. What order could possibly come from such chaos, what happy ending? Already I hear the blazing sirens down the road, anticipate the disaster that is us, that wreck of my sister and me.

  Sometimes I like to imagine that I bump into her somewhere, on a street or train, or in a coffee shop. She recognizes me immediately, even with my hair dyed jet black, even with all the angularity my body has taken on in recent years—hard edges around the chin and cheeks, arms that frequently cross when I am speaking. She recognizes that certain pout of my lips, that quality of sameness in us. I know you! she exclaims. I’d know you anywhere, you, oh you.

  We sit down, at a table or in a nearby restaurant. Even though I have aged, my sister, miraculously, has not. She appears tall and her hair is still long and full of shine. I say: What have you been up to all these years? Start slowly, take your time. I’ve got all day. I’ve got forever for you, actually. You, I say, are forever in the present tense.

  But my sister does not answer, as if she herself doesn’t know what happened to all the time. I thought about calling, she says vaguely. I wrote you that letter, but you never responded. Alex said maybe you were frightened, but I told him you were so small—you were really just a baby—you probably blamed me for everything. It’s good to see you don’t.

  No, I say. I never blamed you.

  It seems as though she wants to touch me, perhaps my knee or my shoulder, but she keeps her hands planted firmly on her lap. Only her body leans slightly forward. You held up pretty well, she says. I bet you’re a real fighter; I can see it in your face.

  Maybe, I say. But I’m not as brave as you. I do not know whether my sister has been brave or not, but it seems to me this is something you tell people you love who have been through a great ordeal and continue to live. I had it pretty easy, I say. The bears never got me. I moved far, far away. I also mastered the evil eye; it does wonders in a pinch.

  Funny, she says.

  I confess: Sometimes I try to write about you, but I can never make the words fit. I leave out entire passages and all the big moments. I keep abbreviating everything.

  Then you lie, she says. About the bears.

  I don’t know, I say. It’s true I have had to forget things. I do not tell my sister that part of this means forgetting about her at times, that part of this means having to let her go. It’s amazing what you can live with, I tell her, if you just commit to it.

  Oh, I know, my sister says. Then she says something a little stupid and hokey, something like: I understand you, really. You never have to explain to me. She leans forward and plants a tiny kiss on my cheek, one that is terribly light and breezy.

  Thanks, I say. I needed that.

  My sister leans back, smiles. You girls, she says, imitating Aunt Judy. Always making up stories, always living in a fantasy world.

  Yeah, I say, imitating Aunt Judy back. Can’t you ever come down from your clouds?

  Then, suddenly, we laugh. Can I tell my sister how much I love her laughter, how much I’ve missed it? Or how much I’ve longed for her? In a few seconds, my sister will get up from the table and leave—magically, just like that, she will disappear—because that is also how my sister is: full of comings and goings. But for now we are both alive and well and laughing. We laugh to cover the silences, to cover the tears and all the years between us. If I strain, I can hear under our la
ughter the smallest fractures and sense the greatest losses, those spaces in us where nothing fits anymore.

  ANTS

  She wakes to an infestation. From beneath her bedroom window, ants have crawled in from the garden and formed a haphazard line along the lattice. For a while now, she’s been watching them. She’s been admiring their bodies, their threadbare legs, their groping antennas. Against the glass, the ants seem to form phrases: Adsum. Ecce signum.

  Not so surprising, actually. Nothing surprises her anymore.

  Look, she says when her husband, Paul, comes in from his office, pencil in hand. She says, Darley, the ants have learned Latin.

  Paul frowns, ruining the superb line of his face. He asks if she’s been playing with the morphine drip again. Once, after she’d first begun morphine, she believed she saw cockroaches scurrying down the walls. She screamed until her voice grew hoarse and her cheeks burned with tears. Afterward, she tried to joke to cover the terrible silence, to stop Paul from looking away. She said, No more Kafka, Darley. That’s a promise.

  But the ants—if not the roaches, if not the words—are real. That, she reasons, must be so, because Paul says, I’ll get the spray.

  She waves her free hand. What for, Darley? It’s spring. It happens.

  It’s spring, she thinks, that makes everything worse, the aching inside her, the pain so sharp it feels as if a barracuda is nipping at her insides. And the infestations, the ants, they have happened in previous years, in previous springs. Last year, she pinched the ants between her thumb and index finger, one at a time, and felt like a god. But that was a different time. Things bothered her then: an unmade bed; dust on the table; a fine, graying hair out of place. Ants storming the house? What would the Mulhaneys, the Forbeses, the Walkers have thought when they arrived for Friday cocktails, all of them with their manicured fingers and pressed suits, their leather soles clicking against the floors? And what would Paul have thought? After being married for thirty-five years—good years, in which they raised their daughter, Rebecca, and taught her to enunciate when speaking in foreign countries—she still worried what Paul thought of her.

  Back from the kitchen, Paul tucks the pencil behind his ear and sprays until the ants begin to fall from the window, disappearing below her line of vision. His silver-rimmed glasses gleam in the light like minnows flashing underwater. A fumy cloud drifts toward her.

  It’s dastardly, she says, or thinks she says. Just exactly the last thing this house needs.

  Shhh, Paul says, raising a smooth finger. Don’t breathe.

  SHE DOES NOT FEAR the last breath, that slow draw of air, that raspy rattle. She does not want more sunsets, the dying ball of flame sinking below the horizon, nor has she wanted the pale-blue, too-expansive sky. She does not want Paul to confess his late nights, his extracurricular business meetings. She refuses to ponder the unfathomable world, the even more cruelly unfathomable God. Her mother once questioned too earnestly, and where, in the end, did that get her, lying on the floor, frothing at the mouth?

  Paul goes out to the kitchen again, comes back carrying paper towels and Windex. He sprays a fine, vinegary mist over the glass and rubs until it squeaks. Everything about him—his high forehead, his thin, gray hair and sea-blue eyes—seems to shine in the bright morning light. When he finishes, he kisses her forehead, then leaves, and, within moments, he settles down at his drawing board next door. He is all business, all pencils, all protractors and blueprints. He is gone.

  Left alone, she is willing to consider small details. A globe that rests on her nightstand, for example, the couple suspended in glass, their openmouthed laughter, their circular spin through iridescent snow that swirls when the globe is shaken. It’s a gaudy thing, really, but still a gift from her sweet Rebecca, Rebecca at eight, all dark pigtails and ruddy, fat cheeks. She is willing to consider this room that Paul built for her. This space around her. The domed ceiling like a church, exposed oak rafters, large windows that filter too much light. The walls of the room are yellow. Flowers surround her. Daffodils border the white linen sheets. Orange-yellow trumpet flowers, morning glories twist and turn just outside the window. Wilting dandelions fill a gold-colored vase, a gift from the nurse who tended to her until Paul finally sent the nurse away. What was there to do? Thank God the nurse left the small dispenser. Thank God for her kind pity.

  FOR A WHILE, he has been laughing. She has forgotten the sound, and it startles her. It begins low, in Paul’s stomach. It rises and falls, then ascends again, finally choking out the stillness. Robert Mulhaney, Paul’s partner at the firm, says, What? then he laughs, too. Since Paul has taken to working from home, Robert sometimes stops by during the week. Perhaps today is Tuesday. She often loses track. Time seems to slow, then stop altogether. It bends backward and forward. It speeds up, and she tries to catch it.

  There, on the other side of the wall, Paul and Robert discuss blueprints for the new municipal building in the city. Robert will stop by her room before he leaves and she will pretend—as she always pretends when he stops by her room—that she is sleeping. He will turn, quietly, but for now there is laughter.

  When was the last time she and Paul laughed like that? It had to have been on her fifty-eighth birthday, last year, when Paul surprised her with a cake. That morning he snuck into their room, nudged her awake. He wore a mischievous look. A dusting of flour powdered his forehead and cheeks. She said of the cake, Darley, Pisa leans less.

  Such compliments, he said. Quiet, and make a wish.

  Disastrous, she said. Wishes.

  Money?

  She swatted him with the morning paper.

  World peace?

  She pressed her index finger to the chocolate frosting, and Paul shooed her finger away.

  Rebecca’s success?

  She has a job in D.C., she said. Soon she’ll be president.

  Fine, he told her, sighing. You’re always so difficult. How about happiness, then?

  We are happy, aren’t we? She touched his arm, smiled playfully. Have you neglected to tell me something during all these years, Darley?

  He set the cake on her bedside table. There was that affair with my ego, he said. I got successful and suddenly fell in love with myself.

  Such vanity, she said. You’re terribly vain. I don’t know why I ever married a man better-looking than I am. He laughed, as did she.

  If he knew, though, how unhappy she often was. If he knew those times she felt as though they were strangers, as though she were a stranger in her own life. If only Paul knew how much she’d grown to despise her teaching, to cringe when collgiate mouths massacred the language she loved: mirabile dictu, meum et tuum. And Rebecca. She couldn’t count the times she spent resenting her daughter, resenting that Paul catered to Rebecca’s every desire. If he knew, then perhaps he’d hate her. He’d hate that he’d married a woman who wanted to break the fine bone china, sabotage the parties with too much pepper, stand up from the dining room table and, in front of everyone, scream.

  She screams now.

  Paul rushes into the room. The silvery flash of minnows moves closer. She feels as though she could almost touch that light. The morphine drips slowly. One, two, three crystal drops, like melted snow. Behind Paul, in the doorway, Robert Mulhaney stares down at his shoes. What they must all talk about in private. What things they must say. Paul wears a look of exasperation she’s often seen lately, a look that already eulogizes.

  Stop that, she whispers.

  What?

  That look, Darley, she says. I hate it.

  THE NEXT DAY the ants reach with their delicate legs and attach themselves to her covers. They crawl across the white blankets, climb the hills of her bony knees and stop at her chest. She lets the morphine drip from the dispenser.

  Paul comes in from his office to check on her, just as he claims he comes in every hour to check on her. He surveys the window and says something under his breath, which she must strain to hear. He says, I’ll get the spray.

  Pl
ease, she says. No assault today.

  He stares out the window. It’s a fine day, really. There have been so many in a row. The purple lilacs are in bloom, the day-lilies are open. All right, he says, bitterly. He adjusts his glasses. Rebecca called, he says. She sends her love, of course. She met a man in the city, a lawyer who she likes. I think it’s good she has someone to talk to about everything.

  How terribly useless to talk, she says, or seems to say. She looks for the ants, but they have disappeared from her blanket. They are so much quicker than she once thought, in those springs when she pinched them between her fingers. She wonders, vaguely, if this is how Kafka felt, destitute and alone with only the company of bugs.

  Rebecca asked if you ever read the book she sent awhile back, Paul says.

  Yes, she lies. She did try to read, of course, until the words blurred and seemed to move about on the page. Once, she read many kinds of books, books on Buddhism, Jainism, animism. Many -isms. But Rebecca had sent a book about cerebral functioning, with one page dog-eared that talked about firing synapses, those terrible spaces within the brain that create a final need for God. A parlor trick of the brain! And her daughter’s inscription, that there was no need for a Bible when the science told us all we need to know of God. It occurred to her, then, that Rebecca hated her, that possibly she blamed her for being slightly overweight, for subjecting her to unnatural cruel hurts as a child—an impossible quest for perfection, Latin tutorials, a weaning from the nipple too soon. Who knows how many complaints the heart holds, quietly and forever?

  Paul turns to face her now. Every spring, he says. He grabs a tissue and wipes the ants from the window. He throws the tissue away and sits down beside her. He says, You were talking to yourself again.