Three Sisters

by Norma Fox Mazer

  “Well, I never see Dad do this.”

  “That’s because he has office hours,” her mother said, sitting back on her heels and lighting another cigarette. She puffed away, frowning. “I think that’s the excuse, anyway.”

  When they were finally done, Karen took a couple of creamsicles from the freezer. She licked the frozen orange coat. “Reward food, Mom, don’t make faces like that.”

  “Sweet stuff. Ruins your appetite.”

  “You’d like it, too, if you didn’t smoke.”

  Once, Karen had gone across town to visit her mother at work. Ebbert Mingus Junior High. “Where’s the library?” A kid pointed indifferently. Karen went up worn stairs, down a wide, green-walled corridor. A display case with book jackets, a sign on the door. COME IN AND DON’T BE QUIET. The library was buzzing, kids all over the place. Her mother stood with her arms crossed, listening to a small, dark boy in a striped T-shirt. She wore a full skirt, a red silk blouse, earrings, stockings. She seemed to be somebody Karen didn’t know. Her mother put her hand on the boy’s shoulder; they walked over to a bookshelf. Three girls hurried up to her. “Mrs. Freed! Mrs. Freed, you gotta help us. We’re desperate.” They like her, Karen thought. For some reason it was shocking.

  She wandered into her mother’s study, a small, narrow room off the kitchen. The desk was snowed under with books and papers. This was where her mother did science book reviews for some magazine that only other librarians read. Karen could read the reviews only after they were published. Her mother’s other writing was off limits because it was unpublished. She had written a story for little kids, “Don’t Stop That Music,” that she kept sending around to publishers and getting back in the mail.

  Karen peeled the paper off the second creamsicle. Once her mother had said to her, “You know what my life wishes are for you, darling? That you find somebody good to share your life with and that you have work that you love. Then you’ll be one of the lucky ones.”

  “Like you?” Karen had said.

  Her mother had hesitated, then nodded. “Like me.”

  Karen remembered that hesitation. Sometimes she heard her parents fighting behind their closed bedroom door. Then she wondered about the things she and her sisters said about their parents. That they loved each other so exclusively, that they were neurotically dependent on each other. It was exciting to talk that way, but was it true?

  “I wonder where Tobi is,” her mother said, sitting down at the desk. “She couldn’t be jogging all this time?”

  At once, Karen imagined Tobi with the man in the photo, jogging by the reservoir, side by side, his bow legs churning, Tobi’s heels kicking up. She saw this so vividly. She said, “Yes. She is!”

  The hall door slammed. “Tobi?” her mother called.

  “Me,” Liz answered. “Want some help?” she said, looking in. Scott hovered behind Liz. Over her shoulder, he waved to Karen.

  Karen dropped the creamsicle sticks into the wastebasket, swiped at her mouth. Was she smeared orange? She hunched over to hide her stained sweat shirt.

  “Your timing is great,” her mother said to Liz. “Karen and I did it all. But if you want to sign up for next week—”

  Liz was rosy; all her freckles stood out, the way they did when she’d just come out of the shower. “We took a ride,” she said. “It’s beautiful out.”

  “We went to see the house I’m working on,” Scott said.

  “The one Scott designed,” Liz said.

  “No, no, no. Don’t give your mother the wrong idea. I did the drawings, but it’s nothing complicated. I’m no architect.”

  “You could be,” Liz said.

  Scott looked from Liz to Karen to her mother, the same tender glance all around. “Listen to her,” he said, putting his chin on Liz’s head. They went out again, their arms around each other, and Karen and her mother heard Scott saying, “Come on, give me a little kiss!”

  “There,” Karen’s mother murmured, “is a man who likes women.”

  Eight

  “Mom?” Tobi said, coming into the kitchen, and bumped into Karen, as if she didn’t see her standing right there with a handful of silverware. Was Tobi nervous? “I want you to meet someone, Mom,” she said, and there he was, the man from the photograph, towering over Tobi, big and burly in a flannel shirt.

  “This is Jason.” Black eyes, a brushy, flowing mustache, and thick, black hair, long hair, down to his shoulders. And—aha, Karen had been right, bow legs.

  “Pleased to meet you, Tobi’s mom.” He should have had a deep, resonating voice to go with the rest of him; instead it was light, smooth, almost a boy’s voice. “I’d like to call you something else—and, really, not Mrs. Freed.”

  “Well … the name is Sylvia.”

  “I’m Karen.” Not that anybody asked. Jason looked at her, looked down at her. Then his hand, a real bear paw, outstretched; a brief touch, and he returned the full force of his eyes to her mother. Ah, so. For him, she didn’t count.

  “Jason teaches at the college,” Tobi said. “But we met jogging.”

  “At the reservoir,” Karen said, remembering her “vision.”

  “What?” Tobi looked at her, frowning.

  “You were jogging at the reservoir.”

  “You just met today?” her mother said.

  They were all talking at once. From above them, Jason laughed. “No,” Tobi said, “we didn’t just meet today. Where’d you get that idea?” They’d known each other quite a while, she said. “I’m in one of Jason’s classes.” But they only got to talking as people, not teacher-student, one day when they were both jogging. “Around the rose gardens,” she said. There went Karen’s vision.

  “So I guess it’s, oh, two months now we’ve been seeing each other.”

  “Really,” her mother said. “Two months?” She didn’t like that. “That’s a long time, Tobi …” Her voice trailed off. Fill in the end of the sentence.… a long time for you to be seeing someone without your family knowing about it.

  “Mmm,” Tobi said, sitting down and peeling an orange.

  “How long have you been teaching, Jason?” her mother asked.

  “Ten years, Sylvia.”

  “Ah. And is that all you’ve ever done?”

  She was fishing, wanting to know how old he was. Karen wondered the same thing. He looked nearly as old as her father; his neck was brown and crinkled.

  Jason put a cigarette between his lips—the original Marlboro man. “Mind if I smoke?” Surprise! That light boy voice again.

  Tobi got up, threw the orange peel into the garbage. “Mom’s a smokestack, herself.”

  “Before I taught, Sylvia, I bummed around a bit, worked as a gandy dancer on the railroads, picked up work here and there, enough to keep going as an artist, enough to keep my family together.”

  “Family?” her mother said.

  “Jason’s staying for dinner,” Tobi said. “Okay?” She leaned against him, a taut stick leaning against a tree, and in her eyes, in her glance upward, there was something that turned their mother’s nose faintly blue at the wings.

  Karen’s father came into the kitchen then, and he and Jason shook hands. “Jason Wade Wilson, sculptor,” Jason said and, without missing a beat, he added, “Remember that name. It’s going to be famous.”

  “Arnie Freed,” her father said, and passed his hand over the bald spot on the back of his head. His mode was modesty.

  Then there was a lull in the conversation, one of those dead spots when nobody knows what to say. In fact, Karen thought, Jason was the only one who looked at ease. He stamped out his cigarette butt in the sink, brought out a rumpled pack, and lit another cigarette.

  “Would you like to see the backyard?” her father said finally.

  “Sounds good to me.” The two of them went out.

  Karen’s mother turned to Tobi. “How old is he?”

  “Thirty-five.” Tobi stuck her chin out.

  Karen did a bit of elementary math. Seventeen yea
rs older than Tobi. Ten years younger than her father, only eight years younger than her mother. And if you got right down to it, old enough to be her, Karen’s, father.

  Her mother must have been doing the same math. “He’s too old for you. He could almost be your father! What is he doing with a green, eighteen-year-old girl?”

  “Green!” Tobi’s voice rose. “Thanks, oh thanks. For your information, we’re in love.”

  Her mother’s nose turned blue again, then white. “Tobi—”

  “Age doesn’t matter.” Tobi cut her off. “I don’t care. He doesn’t care. Why do you care?”

  “He’s had other relationships,” her mother said.

  “So?”

  They were talking over each other.

  “What was that about a family?”

  Tobi hesitated, then said defiantly, “He was married before.”

  Her mother stood in the middle of the kitchen, holding a stirring spoon, looking as if she wanted to clobber Tobi with it.

  “And you might as well know, he has two kids.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “A boy and a girl. They live with their mother in Spain. She—Lara—went there a few years ago. It’s awful for him, he never gets to see his kids and he misses them a lot.”

  “Then why doesn’t he go live there?”

  Their voices notched up another decible.

  “Tobi, you’re getting in over your head.”

  “It’s my life.”

  “You’re not even nineteen—”

  “I told you! My age has nothing to do with it.”

  Stop it, Karen said. Stop. It. She thought she said it. Maybe she just imagined saying it. Her mother at the table, her hand over her mouth. Tobi leaning against the refrigerator, face glowing with anger and tears.

  And just then they heard her grandmother calling, “Sylvia? Arnold? I’m here.”

  “So there you are,” her grandmother said, as Karen came into the front hall. She was waiting by the staircase to be received. A real lady.

  “How are you, Grandma?” Karen kissed her soft, bristly cheek.

  “Are you working hard in school?”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “You have to work, Karen. You can’t be lazy.”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  Her grandmother straightened her hat, a classy-looking felt fedora with a wide brim and a dark band.

  Mrs. Freed, or Hattie, as she prefers to be called, is never seen anywhere, anyplace, anytime, without a hat. Quote unquote a newspaper article, written about twenty years ago and now hanging, framed, in her grandmother’s living room.

  One way or another, she had been making hats since she was a girl. “I used to make hats out of nothing, a bit of ribbon and a little scrap of material. I went to work as a milliner when I was fifteen; I had to help out my family.” Later, she had become a hat designer for a big manufacturer. And much later still, she had opened her own shop, Creations by Hattie. “A dream come true,” she had told the reporter.

  Now, with the fedora, she wore a draped midnight blue dress, a string of blue glass beads, and matching blue stone earrings. She had a big, deep voice and big, fat, strong arms. An impressive woman. Even her earlobes were impressive, large and thick, fleshy as thumbs.

  “Too bad none of you take after your father,” she said. Grandma’s lament. “Arnold was an exceptional student. Do you know that he went to medical school when he was only nineteen?”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “Brilliant. A brilliant boy. He could have been a surgeon. Of course you three girls are bright enough,” she said, sounding regretful at having to concede so much. Tobi had once said that if their father had been able to conceive and give birth to the three of them on his own, a holy male birth, without their mother’s taint, their grandmother would think they were brilliant, too.

  Karen followed her grandmother into the living room, brought her the fruit tray, showed her the new issue of the school paper. She had a photo in it of a blue jay sitting on a roof of a house next to a tv antenna. “Very nice,” her grandmother said. Karen winced. Why had she trotted the paper out? When she developed the photo she had thought it inspired, a satiric comment on modern life. Now it seemed banal, even pointless.

  Her grandmother sat upright in the chair, her eyes bright, looking around to see if anything had changed since the previous Sunday. “I’m seventy-six,” she liked to tell people. “I look much younger. People are amazed when they hear my age.”

  Karen’s mother came in. “Mother Freed, hello.” She kissed the older woman. “Dinner’s almost ready.” Then everyone else appeared. Tobi kissed her grandmother. Liz was there and stepped up. “How are you, Grandma?” She hugged her and Grandma patted Liz’s face. Everyone got in line, even Scott. Jason smiled under his mustache. Hang around a while, Karen thought, you’ll be kissing her, too.

  Grandma beckoned to Jason. “A teacher? At the college?”

  “Teaching’s a sideline,” Jason said. “Cruel necessity. I’m an artist.”

  Grandma pursed her lips fastidiously. “I don’t suppose you make a living at that, either.” Why did everything she say sound like God’s word to Moses on the mountain?

  “I do all right. I don’t think about it any more than I have to.”

  Karen watched the two of them dueling. Worthy opponents. She enjoyed the contest—this was different than Tobi and Mom going at each other.

  “Food, folks.” Karen’s father set a bowl down in the middle of the table.

  “Arnold,” her grandmother said, “sit down, dear, you look tired. Are you overdoing things?”

  “I’m fine, Ma.”

  “Then you must be getting old.”

  “It happens to us all,” her father said mildly.

  “Does it?” Grandma sat up even straighter.

  Liz tapped her spoon on her glass. “Hello, everybody, I have something to tell you all.” She held out her hand. Among her silver rings was a new one on her thumb. “Scott and I are now engaged to be engaged.”

  A hum of talk arose. “Engaged to be engaged,” her grandmother said. “What kind of nonsense is that?”

  Karen’s father tipped back in his chair. “That’s a new one on me, too, Mother.”

  “Congratulations,” Karen’s mother said, and added, “I think.”

  “Come on, guys.” Tobi raised her eyebrows at Liz. “You people act like you’re in the Stone Age. You’ve heard of that. Everyone does it.”

  Karen toyed with her melon. So Liz and Scott were making their relationship really tight. Scott was going the distance, all right. She might even have a brother-in-law sometime soon. So why didn’t she feel terrific and happy?

  “You have two children?” her grandmother was saying to Jason.

  “Right. My daughter’s name is Georgia. Named after Georgia O’Keefe.”

  “The artist,” her grandmother said.

  “My son’s named after Picasso.”

  “How very interesting.”

  “When he lived here, Pablo was a funny name, but in Spain, it’s ordinary as dirt. So I’m told by my wife. The bitch.”

  The word dropped into the conversation like a stone in water. A short, vibrant pause. Tapping the edge of her glasses on her mouth, Karen’s mother looked at Jason. And Tobi, her face flashing warning signals, looked at her mother. You could always tell when Tobi was on the verge of exploding. She got red right under the roots of her hair.

  Karen’s stomach clenched. She pushed back her chair and left the table. “Where are you going?” her mother said.

  “My camera,” she improvised hurriedly.

  She stood in the doorway, snapping pictures, focusing on hands. Grandma’s hands, liver-spotted, strong. Her father’s hands, the blunt, clean nails. Scott’s, bitten-down, raggedy nails, a blood blister on one of his fingers.

  “Take me and Scott,” Liz said.

  Karen took deep breaths, unclenching her stomach. The dangerous moment seemed to have passed. Jason
was devoting himself to the food. Her mother had put her glasses back on. Karen stood up on a chair, focused. Liz and Scott. Tobi and Jason. Mom and Dad. Click … click … click.… All those pairs. This was a regular Valentine. To rumple things up a little, she took Mom and Grandma, Scott and her father, Jason and Liz. Uncouples. A series. The happy family at the table. Sweet Harmony in Suburbia. Ms. Freed is know for her satiric yet sympathetic exposition of suburban life.…

  “Too bad you didn’t invite David over today,” Liz said when Karen sat down again.

  “How is the boy?” Tobi, though, was still perched on the edge of her chair, as usual picking at her food. “Is he still going to be the brilliant young scientist?”

  “I guess.”

  “And who,” said Grandma “is David?”

  “My friend.”

  “Friend? Do you mean you have a boyfriend, Karen? You’re too young for a boyfriend, darling.”

  Karen’s father zeroed in for a wink. Liz smiled, tapped her lips. Another poem coming? At once, Karen remembered a funny, slightly humiliating moment some weeks ago. Rashly, she had said to Liz, “Why don’t you write a poem about me?”

  And Liz, smiling, had obliged on the instant. “My sister Karen, she is so sweet. My sister Karen, she has cold feet. There’s a poem, there’s a poem about you. Is one enough? I can’t do two.” Karen’s head flamed; she felt the injustice of being the youngest in this family. When would they stop treating her like a joke?

  “Are those all your own teeth?” Karen’s father was saying. He leaned interestedly toward Jason. Had he really said that? Were all families as bizarre as hers?

  She looked across the table, met Scott’s eyes. He didn’t smile, wink, blink, or look away, but watched her gravely. Something passed between them, some link, some unspoken message, and then he nodded, a tiny salute—only she saw it—as if he were telling her he understood. Understood what? Everything, she thought, everything.

  Nine

  “The more I think about it, Tobi,” Karen’s mother said, the next morning in the kitchen, “the more I know I just am not terribly thrilled with what’sisface.”

  “Jason. His name is Jason.” Tobi’s voice was like wire.