by Sara Levine
I worried about my sister if I made time to think about her at all. She didn’t have many friends; her devotion to her job seemed unhealthy; and then there was her weight. “Pleasantly plump,” my mother said, if pressed, but my mother was pleasant herself, and my father, who resembled a string bean, claimed judiciously that all of us were “lookers.” In high school whenever I had mentioned Adrianna’s weight, my parents circled their wagons. “No, we don’t think teasing strengthens character,” they’d say. Adrianna read storybooks to sick children, played F5 and G5 in the handbell ensemble, volunteered at the county board of mental retardation, and won the Latin Club essay contest three years in a row. There was no doubt she was their favorite daughter. Whereas I, the eldest, baffled them because I did not scan the horizon for volunteer opportunities; because I ran from anyone stinking of need; because I hung out at the mall and chased after boys. What was I interested in? Why did I insist on watching TV? How come I didn’t apply myself? Was I really interested in celebrity beauty secrets or pretending just to rile them?
You can imagine how great it was to jump out of that house at age twenty-one, and now, four years later I was back. As I pulled my banana boxes through the front entrance, past mailbox, mezuzah, and my mother’s idea of a whimsical doorknocker (contented pig, antique bronze), past my father’s study (“Per aspera ad astra,” he said, looking up from his stapler), I could hardly believe what was happening to me. My attention snagged on the pencil-marked ladders on the kitchen doorframe, one rung for each daughter’s surge of height. Five feet four and a dark lead bar. They thought they had me pegged.
The house hadn’t changed since I’d lived there. In the living room there were a few new throw pillows, my father had added to his wardrobe a knit shirt, identical to the one he’d worn the past twenty years, and when I banged around in the kitchen drawers, I invariably turned up some new gizmo. (“What’s this?” “Asparagus peeler.” “What’s this?” “Pineapple slicer.” “What’s this?” “Microplane grater,” my mother said, blushing.) But in my bedroom, time had stood still. A child-sized desk contained a sheaf of water-stained notebook paper, three butterscotch candies, a perfectly preserved Chapstick, and two broken hairclips. I trod on the shag rug in which I’d burnt a hole when I was fifteen, flicked on the bedside lamp shaped like a ballerina, and lay on the chenille bedspread, yellow with pink fringe. On the pillows my mother had propped up the old, soft, heart-sickening gang of stuffed animals: Skipper, Frisky, Buttons, My-Mys, Silky Boy, Toodles-Free, Plush . . . Fuck you all, I wanted to say, and hurl them against the wall.
The only new feature of my room was Richard. I had tried to establish his cage in the kitchen, or the living room, or the dining room, but my father sneezed and streamed like there was no tomorrow. So feather dust decided it: Richard lodged with me. “Do I even know for sure he sleeps at night?” I thought our first evening together, the blankets pulled up to my chin. Down the hall, the dishwasher had long ceased rumbling; no cars tore along the road; not even a dog walker tramped by to adorn the silence with a cheery jingle. I listened: no sound. No squawks, no creepy snores, no rustling in the cage. Wildly grateful, I took two Xanax and fell asleep.
As the dawn crept in, Richard began to scream. Scraaaaw! Scraaaww! Scraaaaawww! This became routine. Even on the rare morning when he was quiet, I lay awake, sweating bullets, waiting for the screams.
“Darling, just uncover his cage,” my mother said. “I think it’s his way of saying, Heigh-ho, let’s start my morning!”
And it wasn’t as if the rest of the house offered peace. Often, under the guise of cooking, my mother monopolized the kitchen for hours, clattering pots and pans, singing along to the music of the swinging forties, and running the garbage disposal. What was she grinding in there, I wondered. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a human carcass. My father, by no stretch of the imagination a talker, nevertheless whistled, stomped, coughed, and called out domestic requests to my mother, which he amplified, against his nature, in order to be heard over her swinging forties. Adrianna was the worst, though. She waylaid me in any room for casual conversation; played computer games that beeped and buzzed; and in the shower, vigorously blew her nose (into a washcloth? Into the water stream itself? Did I want to know?). “Well,” Adrianna said, “have you heard from Lars?” “I just left him.” “I know,” she said eagerly, “but I thought maybe he’d call.” A few days later: “So,” Adrianna said. “Any word from Lars?” “I told you, I left him.” “Sometimes things drag on.”
By the third week, the best thing about living at home, I’d decided, was the square footage. I don’t cherish the ranch house as an architectural form, but my parents’ house ran to so many rooms that, in daylight, I could fall into a stride and imagine myself aboard the Hispaniola. I came to think of the kitchen as the galley; and the living room as the main hold; and the long dark coffin of a dining room in which I endured countless suffocating family dinners, I renamed the round-house, not knowing what that meant but liking the idea of its not having any corners. In this way the stale homestead became a vessel of fresh adventure, though once I made the mistake of picking up the phone when Aunt Boothie called and listened to her talk, quite brazenly, about what it meant that both my sister and I were living rent-free in our parents’ house.
“Quite frankly I don’t think of this as a house,” I said.
I have to hand it to my mother. My first week home, she cooked my favorite foods, or what she remembered were my favorite foods; her memory had stalled, like a wet engine, at my senior year in high school. She lit candles, broke out the cloth napkins, and tried to pretend that we were celebrating some kind of holiday. What kind of holiday would that be? Take Your Daughter In When Her Boyfriend Kicks Her Out Day? Anyway she tried. She served wine at dinner in hand-blown amethyst-swirled Mexican glasses and smiled wet-eyed as she raised her glass: “How wonderful that we’re all together again!” But she didn’t have the family behind her. Adrianna sighed heavily, my father looked blank, I scowled, and after a week or so, she gave up the effort. And then, strangest of all, Adrianna started disappearing at night.
“Where does she go?” I asked one evening when my parents and I were scraping leftovers out of the fridge.
“Who?” my father said.
“Adrianna. This is the third dinner she’s missed this week. Where is she?”
“I have no idea.”
“We don’t ask her,” my mother said mildly.
I would ask her. I had too much time on my hands not to ask her. It wasn’t that I thought she was up to anything interesting. She had probably signed up for a night class on how to make a drum out of a gourd. But the fact that she’d do it without telling us was bizarre. Her life was always out in the open. Every scrap, blowing loose like a tissue in the breeze. When I asked her what she had been getting up to in her off-hours, she replied woodenly that she hadn’t been up to anything.
“These awkward absences from dinner,” I clarified.
“Awkward?”
“You’re leaving me a bit exposed. If you’re not there to babble on about your day, they’re likely to ask me questions. I’m not eager for an interrogation, and now I have to manage them without you.”
She looked at me blankly. “You don’t have to manage them. Just talk to them. They’re people.”
“Mom and Dad? Like hell they are! Anyway don’t try to change the subject. Where’ve you been?”
“Working late,” she said, but I didn’t believe her. How much prep does a third grade teacher have? One, two, sometimes three times a week, she would leave the house while I was dreaming bad dreams under the yellow chenille spread and not return till after dark.
My mother seemed to know her schedule, but each night, sucker that I was, I counted on her return until the deadly moment when my mother set the table. Three plates? My heart sank. Where was she? The deserter! One night, after deflecting a series of barely-veiled remarks from my mother (“So, Sweetie, I went by the gift
wrap department today at Flounkers, and you know who I saw? Your old boss Edie. She says the Christmas rush is already starting. I wonder if they could use people.”), after eating two extra helpings of lasagna in an effort to maintain a mouth too full to answer my father’s questions (“What are the other people in your class doing? The other English majors?”), after voluntarily leaping up to clear the table and wash the dishes just to erect a physical barrier between them and me, I took a strategic position in the kitchen. At 10 P.M. my mother planted a kiss on my cheek as if she were scattering salt onto the drive. “Sleep well,” she said blandly. My father had scudded down the hallway without any ceremony.
Listening to the uneven hum of the refrigerator, I tried to read but soon gave up, cut the lights, and waited for the sound of Adrianna’s car in the drive. I became one hundred and eighteen pounds of human ear, vibrating with every impulsion of air, every click and creak of the house until, just as the digital clock on the stove said eleven-twenty-eight, her figure loomed in the doorway. She flicked on the light, said, “Oh!” and peeled off her parka to reveal a long brown velour dress—soft, hideous, and intricately embroidered with flowers at the yoke.
“Where’ve you been?” I said.
“Working.”
She threw her coat on a kitchen chair and failed to register my meaningful silence.
“Nobody stays up till midnight doing lesson plans for third graders.”
“I do. What’s got into you?”
“What’s got into you?” I parried. “Do you know what you smell like?”
“Jean Naté?”
“No, sister. You smell like sex.”
“Gross,” she said, ducking as I leaned in to sniff. We engaged in a brief scuffle during which I tried to smell her hair and her hands, but she eluded me, laughing nervously and emitting small unattractive grunts. I was only trying to get a rise out of her, but her reaction suggested I had happened on the correct line of pursuit. Adrianna has a prude’s decorum, which she would do anything to preserve, so I stopped chasing her and began to say things she didn’t want to hear. She interrupted, she evaded, she tried to shut me up, and then just when I threatened to embarrass her completely—by telling her the details of my own sex life—she caved.
“All right, all right. I wasn’t at work, it’s true. I’ve been seeing somebody.”
“Who?” I said coolly.
She opened up the refrigerator and pretended to stare at its contents. “Nobody you know,” she told the Brita water filter.
“How do you know? I might. I know people. I know more people than you know. Maybe I’ve already dated him.”
“You are so competitive, it’s sick.”
I laughed dryly. “Adrianna, I’m not trying to compete with you.”
“You can quit fishing. I’m not going to talk about it.” She pushed the refrigerator door shut and stared dully at the photo magnets cluttering its face.
“Well,” I said in my most magnanimous manner, “I think it’s wonderful news, even if you do carry on like a frantic dog, burying the bone in the yard. I’m sure he’s worthy of the mystery. And he signals the end of a long dry spell, am I right? It’s not Eddie Wisbey, is it?”
Eddie Wisbey was a short, thick-set guy, red-bearded, who had repeatedly tried to start a contra dance club in high school.
“You think you’re so funny,” Adrianna said.
“I’m just trying to get my mind around who it could be. Seriously.”
“I’m going to bed now.”
“Okay. But listen.” I touched her elbow lightly. “Lovers can’t hide out forever. I understand,” I added gravely, “that you might not want Mom in your business. She can be so . . . well . . . embarrassing . . . and incredibly tactless, but I’m your sister. I’m more like a peer.”
“I feel distinctly peerless,” Adrianna said.
“ . . . So if you should need someone to vet him—you know, an ambassador from the family—I’d be happy to do it, and could do it nicely, without him even knowing I’m there to judge him. I know how to put guys at ease.”
Adrianna stared at me, aghast. “Why would I want someone to ‘vet’ my relationship? Aren’t I a grown-up? And aren’t romantic relationships about trust and intimacy?”
Trust and intimacy? Dear god! Of course, I’d caught the fumes of her psychobabble before. But this would be the moment when a person who actually believed that claptrap would drop the subject or simply leave the room. Instead Adrianna sighed, opened up the refrigerator again, and mechanically began eating mashed potatoes out of a container with her bare fingers. I pressed my advantage.
“My offer wasn’t meant to be insulting, Adrianna. Really it’s not my fault if you have bad self-esteem. I wish I’d had more perspective on Lars’s personality early on. If someone I trusted had met him, say, last December, and given me a frank opinion, maybe I never would have moved in with him.”
“We all met him. We thought he was nice. Nicer, at times, than you. You’re not really saying that if I’d told you to ditch him, you’d have done that? That’s crazy! As if you could run your heart by committee . . . ”
“I don’t want to talk about Lars, that dumb asshole. I want to talk about your boyfriend. Come on. I’m your sister. When do I get to meet him?”
“Never.”
“At least tell me his name.”
“No.”
“Why? Give me one good reason.”
“Because you have boundary issues. Because you’re mean-spirited and unsentimental about other people’s affections. Because if young love was a flower growing on your lawn, you would crush it under your heel.”
“Jesus. Are you saying you’re in love?”
“This conversation is over.” She licked a dollop of mashed potato off her wrist and lumbered off to bed.
I guess I should have waited. She might have softened in time, and I certainly would have preferred to leave her to pursue her romance in privacy. But her words alarmed me. Two weeks, by my calculations, she had been seeing this guy and now she thought she was in love? And worse, that love was a flower? Given how little experience she had in the domain of personal relationships, I thought it my responsibility to keep an eye on her.
I found my opportunity one Thursday afternoon when Adrianna came home around five o’clock—just to change her clothes, my mother told me; she was going out again.
“Where?”
“I don’t ask where,” my mother said.
She was in the laundry room (folding, always folding).
“I’m going out too,” I said. “Don’t be alarmed if I’m not back for dinner.”
“In this cold weather?” my mother answered. “You don’t have a car. Where are you going to go?”
I masked my resentment of her tone and muttered something, admittedly improbable, about fresh air and exercise.
Adrianna was still in her room, scuffing around in her closet, so I had ample time to struggle into my coat and secret myself in the backseat of her surprisingly filthy car. There I lay, perfectly still, resisting the urge to read her crumpled mail or put the caps back on her ballpoints. When the driver’s door opened, she slid herself in with a hummmph, and started up the motor, having, thank goodness, taken no notice of me.
I don’t know that I’ve had occasion to mention this, but I don’t drive much. I have a license, but I don’t like unfamiliar roads, or narrow lanes, or driving at night, or on highways, or in bad weather. Under the best conditions, my heart thumps and my palms drip and don’t even get me started on my perineum. Because I prefer anyone but me to do the driving, I pay scant attention to navigation and tend, when it comes to street directions, to be a little vague. Although I know Adrianna drove down Curtis Boulevard, once she took a few quick turns, I was disoriented. I could only see the treetops and couldn’t follow the curves the roads were taking. I was completely clueless as to our whereabouts, when a sudden crackle of static made me jump.
A drive-in! Did her boyfriend work here? S
he gave her hamburger order, and the voice on the intercom answered her without love or undue recognition. We drove to a second drive-in; did her boyfriend work here? No, she ordered a Caramel Frappucino and drove on. I had just begun to doubt this adventure when the car came to a halt and she cut the motor. I could tell we were parked in somebody’s driveway. She ate the last bite of her burger and tossed the paper bag into the back seat, where it landed on my neck. A long silence—during which she checked her teeth in the rearview mirror—and then she opened her door and plonked herself out. I counted to twenty-five and then followed.
She had led me to a house—a modest two story with sagging windows and yellow aluminum siding. A narrow cement path, adequately shoveled, led to the front door, but I trod on the lawn for fear of alerting Adrianna to my presence. As soon as the snow crunched underfoot I realized, with regret, that I was leaving footprints. But even with this mistake, the cold night air, and the silvery moon in the sky, and the sudden realization that Adrianna could be in danger inside this squat little house, exhilarated me. I ran for an opening in the shrubs and crouched under a curtained window, hoping to hear something. I heard wind. A squirrel fussing in a tree. A neighbor’s stereo (Bonnie Raitt, I think). And then, from within that unknown house, I distinctly heard a scream.
There was no time to think. I sprung from my crouch and fell upon the front door, which swung open and immediately plunged me into darkness. I took a few tentative steps and heard sounds—short, weird, panting sounds—as if Adrianna were on the floor getting her throat slit.
“Who’s there?” I cried, stumbling forward, palming the wall until I found a switch. The lights blazed on and there was my sister sitting on a man’s face.