There was no word anyway for what May was. I am from far away. I am from Sule Skerrie.
May knew she was as smart as Carrie but something kept Mrs. Pitt from knowing it. It might have been her failure to learn to read all year. She knew the letters but they were so many seeds scattered on the page, and would not grow words. What did it matter? She cared only for Flying Dutchman at recess and for sharing a desk with the smiling wordless Isabel, whose dark curls brushed the paper along with her St. Christopher medal as they were printing the letters of the alphabet—or as Isabel was. Isabel’s rough, glossy hair gave off powerful waves of something that entered May’s nostrils the way the twisting ribbon of scent from the pieman’s basket entered Simple Simon’s, in the book. The picture book. May couldn’t see why anyone would give up a picture book, ever, for reading-books with no pictures, as Mrs. Pitt said they all would.
“Nonsense,” her mother said. “Is that any way to inspire you? Just say you’ll decide for yourself.”
“But politely,” her father spoke up, “in case Mrs. Pitt hasn’t read her Kropotkin.”
“You’ll decide for yourself, thank you,” said her mother.
Isabel was a shy girl with a faraway smile, who took shape maddeningly in May’s mind at all times of the day and night, silently winding black hair onto her white finger. The hair, with its flowery smell, was washed more than May’s and Carrie’s was. Isabel’s mother said so. In their own bathroom with its shared towels and mangled soap, May did not think to ask to have her hair washed more often or to wash it herself, but she basked in the mild yet important scent emanating from Isabel’s. It lent Isabel holiness, in the form of a sweet, indefinably pitiful aura.
With her pale pink timid lips turned up at the corners and her perfect letters rounded like beads of sago, Isabel would have been a namby-pamby but for the black-haired, extenuating beauty. “Isabel Barr was my introduction,” May would tell her own daughters, “despite having a mother and a sister, to femininity.”
“Whatever that is,” her daughter Vera would say.
In May’s house three of them were females, but by accident, it seemed. Nothing graceful or instinctive entered into their getting dressed in the morning or putting things away in their drawers, or governed their bodies and faces and voices. Everything just came out any old way. May knew that, after she had been to Isabel’s house and seen the order of the bedrooms, the dressers, the linen closet, and then had questions put to her by Isabel’s mother, who had on a cream-colored middy blouse and a skirt that ended above her knees, and had buffed her fingernails until they glowed like the opal in May’s favorite ring. In one afternoon Isabel’s mother taught them how to dance the Charleston and how to squeeze furled borders of icing from a pastry bag.
When May’s mother danced she didn’t do the neat-footed Charleston but ripped off her glasses and whirled into a rampage through the downstairs, if Carrie began on “The Skaters” or “The High School Cadets” at the piano, and she would grab May in her arms and whirl her too, until they flopped together over the back of the couch.
If her mother had good clothes they were given away or forgotten in the closet; she had worn her black watch plaid coat for so long May could remember no other. Only later did it come to May that she might have had a style, with her wound scarves, her big felt hat or her old, shiny little pre-war hat of black circled feathers, her georgette dresses under faded sweaters sagging with cable. She sewed; she could make each daughter a dress in a weekend, but she didn’t go picking over trays for buttons of painted enamel the way Isabel’s mother did, and she didn’t smock their dresses or drop the waists or do anything but gathers for a skirt. By Sunday night she would be back at her desk typing out articles, her own and other people’s, for the Union-Record.
She was writing about thugs who beat men rightfully on strike and left them half dead on their own doorsteps, and about women no different from herself except that they were the sole support of children, and they fainted from hunger at their sewing machines. “Why don’t we take them food!” Carrie offered in her prissy school voice.
“No, no,” their mother said, “charity is not the answer. Don’t you see, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.”
May prided herself on understanding this as Carrie did not. She knew it by heart: mutual aid was a law of nature, charity a trick. It was Kropotkin.
When their father came in late from the clinic he liked to be read aloud to in front of the fire while he ate his dinner with a big wooden tray across his lap. Carrie lay wrapped in a blanket on the rug, blocking the fire’s heat, and didn’t listen; she was noisily turning her own pages, calling attention to the special assignments she got every day because she was ahead.
Propped against the marble clock was a photograph of their mother with a group of women posed outdoors in winter coats, in two rows of chairs, arm in arm with their hat brims touching. Around their necks hung beautifully lettered signs saying NO WAR. Her mother had marched against conscription at the side of a woman named Anna Louise Strong.
“But your mother,” their father said, “was slightly in the lead.”
No War. It seemed to May in the first grade that she could read those words, if no others.
“May smells! Does she have to go down there with the chickens and then come in my room?” Every day Carrie complained, even though the bedroom belonged to both of them for the time being, while May was little and needed company.
After school May was in the habit of ducking into the chicken house she and Carrie had used as a hideout before summer ended and the days took the cramped shape of first grade. Now that it was almost summer again May went by herself, tired as she often was after school, and irritated, with skinned knees and all the voices of the day in her head. She didn’t even mind the spiders Carrie hated, hanging in corner webs and living, their father said, on a diet of bird lice.
The chickens belonged to him. They had arrived in two squawking crates for his birthday. Chickens were no longer kept in their neighborhood, though an old fenced chicken house stood in a corner of the yard, half covered with blackberry vines. Their father worried but their mother said, “No one will mind. They’re no different from the MacLeods’ beehive.” Now in the morning when May was lugging the bucket of laying mash, Mr. MacLeod waved his big glove cheerfully at her. He let her come over and watch from a safe distance as the bees shot in and out of the hive.
Once quite by chance she and her father had seen the whole hive emerge. They had been burning a leaf with a magnifying glass, when suddenly next door the bees poured upward in a giant brown question mark and hung on a branch in their own yard, like a big sweater thrown into the tree. “It’s just the old queen gone up in yer spruis tree,” Mr. MacLeod called. “She’s wanting to leave us, but I shan’t let her.”
The chickens came to her father at their foolish armless trot and bumped his ankles like cats, and he petted them as if they were cats. Her mother had been right to give him chickens. At one time, he told May, long ago in the colonies, people had thought nothing of dropping a hen down a chimney to clean it. “Clean a chicken?”—but it was the chimney. He told her stories of the turkeys his own father had raised in the Skagit Valley, so big they could knock a man over. Then, sent to medical school by his prosperous grandmother, the one in the long black dress on the study wall, he met a college girl.
Oh, all he was doing was going down a hill in Boston, and she coming up, a redhead. An Irish girl, a beauty. Their mother! You could almost see in those eyes, he said, the political wrangling in the hot whiskey-smelling kitchen where he would soon be pulling up his chair with all the suspicious Irish brothers.
The girl who was to be May’s mother handed him a leaflet that said KEEP OUT. Out of the war, it meant, the Great War. May liked to hear the story, the pieces fitting one by one: the turkeys, the black dress, the hill, KEEP OUT.
May got in the habit of sitting in the chicken house. When she liked a thing she liked it painfully and had to do
it or have it or see it over and over. Her mother understood and somehow approved, but it was one of the things Carrie hated about her. Carrie hated all the old pleasures now, and liked only rows of multiplication and division, and clapping the chalk out of blackboard erasers after school for the teacher, and whispering under the horse chestnut trees with the girls in fourth grade all through recess, instead of playing Flying Dutchman or joining the relays in preparation for Field Day or even pitching chestnuts at the boys for them to stamp on and squash.
The only time Carrie was her old self was when she got out of bed in the middle of the night. To her shame she was a sleepwalker. May could follow and take hold of her if she did it gently, but Carrie would drag back with a foolish face, at first shy and then cross, as you might show a waterlogged resentment if you blundered into Green Lake with your clothes on the way a very old woman had done before their eyes, so that their father had to wade in after her and bring her back, and calm her family running down the hill from their picnic.
When she was sleepwalking Carrie was herself, she was back to being May’s sister, as stubborn and alone as May felt herself to be. From the front hall where she could usually be found on the bench of the hat rack, or steering along the inlaid stripe of walnut on the floor, Carrie let herself be led upstairs. She never really woke up at all, while May would lie for an hour afterward, cold and listening. As the light came in May could hear a high continuing tone in the room, like a hissing chime. She liked to be the only one awake. She liked to hear the first notes, single as passwords, of the starlings her father said were invading the city.
Their mother went to bed very late, or she went to bed and then got up again to read and proofread and clean the house—though they could not really see what had been cleaned, or why she would not have someone come in to do it. Carrie dusted, by choice, after her discovery of a mold growing between the piano keys. Sometimes in the study May found an old cup of her mother’s strong sugared tea with a different mold, a disc of waving softness, asleep in it. She liked to look into this tea, and slosh the tentative blue-green thing. If Carrie found it she would splash it into the sink and scour the cup, and call for May to get the mold with her fingers and throw it into the garbage pail.
At any rate their mother would have just gone to sleep in the dark of early morning, which was when Carrie’s sleepwalking took place. Their father too slept heavily, though he could be wakened by the telephone. Often he was gone half the night delivering a baby and no one even knew it. “Thank heavens we can rely on May to get you back in bed,” he told Carrie.
Carrie said, “She does not.”
At school May got into trouble for tripping the boys and for luring Isabel into the mudhole at the bottom of the playground, where everything Isabel had on, down to her tiny silver watch—not even Isabel could tell time!—was stained and clogged and spoiled when she fell, just let herself fall.
May had to stand in the corner for disturbing others and shouting and lagging, and for talking back. For a “spirit of dispute.” Things she would have paid for if she had been a boy. The boys were spanked, and occasionally paddled with a bread paddle sent up from the basement kitchen for the purpose.
At school Carrie pretended they were not sisters, and liked her no more. Her mother said that was not so, though it might seem so. Sometimes May could hold her breath and make a pressure of hate in her own head, but she couldn’t keep it there. Her eardrums gave once, twice, like bike brakes, and the air burst out of her.
In the watery light slanting into the chicken house she heard her mother’s voice say through the vents, “A sad girl came this way. You chicks, give her some eggs.”
“‘A mischief that is past and gone,’” was what her mother would say when one of them complained of something the other had done, unless there was a lie involved. When that happened she would take off her glasses and lay her cigarette in its groove in the pewter ashtray. “I don’t understand. If both of you are telling the truth . . .” Without her glasses, they knew, she couldn’t see much more than their shapes. It was her heavy sad eyebrows drawn together that stopped them. Though Carrie never gave in to shame, and would always stand by a lie. Nothing in their mother’s face, pale under its freckles, was felt as a reproach by Carrie later, or made her brood on what she had done, or even remember it. She was not troubled, as May was, by anything hotly sorrowful, anything locked away and private in her feelings for their mother, anything uneasy.
Their mother had no religion, even though she had been raised a Catholic as their father said an Irish girl must be. But she had superstitions. She believed for instance that some spirit had hovered at the naming of her daughters. May was May Olivereau, named for an anarchist; Carrie was Caroline Verona, named for the ship that had carried the union martyrs shot in Everett the year before her birth. “Both of you have v-e-r in your names, through no intention of ours,” their mother said. “You see? V-e-r is the root of truth.”
Coming out of the schoolhouse May went still with dread every day before she identified her mother, so slight among the women waiting in a group that she could have been a seventh grader let out before the bell. When May caught sight of her in her plaid coat her ribs hurt, she shut her eyes, she bolted forward until she came to a stop against her mother.
This shock at the end of each hated day of the first grade—the scalding relief of seeing her mother’s glasses flash, and locking her fingers onto the big tortoiseshell buckle of her mother’s coat—May outgrew, to her surprise. When she crossed the hall from Mrs. Pitt to Mrs. Olafsson for second grade she waited for it and it wasn’t there; it lost itself until many years later, when as a married woman she came upon the same dread, relief, and joy with a man not her husband.
In the second grade—the year of the soothing and boring Mrs. Olafsson, whose big slow-moving hips and pinned-up braids and soft monotonous voice daily lulled May into a semisleep at her desk—she swore off Carrie. She did it the way her mother was always swearing off cigarettes. She swore off the past of playing with Carrie and talking to her in bed at night, though Carrie might relent when the light was off, and toss in her bed sighing things to herself so May would have to say, “What? What?” as if no look of stone had passed between them on the playground.
If Carrie wanted to talk and May didn’t answer, Carrie flounced up onto her elbow on the pillow and hummed one of their mother’s bedtime songs in a high, challenging tone:
Si bébé pas fait dodo
Gros chat est là que manger li
which had a sweet repeating tune, but meant a huge cat would eat May if she didn’t go to sleep. Yet in Haiti, it was a lullaby. Their mother was full of these lullabies from other countries, and sad songs no one else knew.
“The happiest moment of your mother’s life,” their father said, “was when she heard Paul Robeson sing ‘My Curly Headed Baby.’” He would say this fluffing the ends of Carrie’s thick braids.
“And then he sang ‘My Straight-Haired Baby with the Straight Eyebrows,’” their mother would be sure to say.
“He did not!” Carrie would yell, but May felt a shiver of advantage, seeing in the mirror the forceful eyebrows placed on her like her mother’s own initial.
Neither of them had hair the scorched dark red of their mother’s; they were both fair like their father. Their mother liked to braid their hair but she had shingled her own. “Who is this?” their father had cried out, stricken, when she did it. “Is this the new paperboy?” But in a day or two he was admiring the hair, cupping its straight edges in his hands and kissing their mother in the white-skinned parting.
He put a feed bin in the chicken house for May to sit on. Two of the chickens, he had agreed, were hers to pull in her wagon if she could get them to sit in it. She no longer did that; she could not say just what it was she liked now about the chickens, and required of them.
They were Plymouth Rocks, with the white bars woven into the dark feathers like hem tape, no two exactly alike. At first she d
id not speak to them in their boxes, but sat watching their sequin eyes blink up from below in the way they had if you looked at them for any length of time, as if your rudeness were no more than they expected, as they drifted into the tucked sleep of birds, who would never deign to squirm or wheeze or sprawl helplessly in their beds with drool on the pillow and a leg hanging, the way May often found herself when she woke up. When she did speak they cocked their heads the merest bit, acknowledging the events she related, and belittling them. They had no sympathy. Her voice—“I can’t read! I’m the only one!”—seemed to soothe them. Alphabet! The bright eye winked. Sister! What of it? The chickens would blink and settle, blink and ruffle and settle, as if she were putting them to bed with a story, the implausible story of what happened in human life, and hearing it they would only occasionally snap awake, whip their heads to one side as if she had shown them one of themselves skinned for the dinner table, and gape for a long time, their thin tongues poised in the air.
May never wanted to hear about narrow escapes, or miracles of recovery. Even before her mother got pneumonia she didn’t like the healings in the Bible stories their father read them. Why one blind man and not all the others?
What religion there was in the house was their father’s responsibility. Their mother’s view was that religion was usually to be found locked in the arms of drink. “I should know the comfort it is, from a-many Irish funerals,” she liked to say, rolling her eyes.
Because he was a doctor their father said, “You don’t see them when they require the comfort of religion,” but then he had to take it back, of course. They all knew the story of the influenza epidemic. It was before their father moved his new family out of Boston. With a baby of her own to take care of, their mother had nursed both her parents until, three days apart, they died. May and Carrie would never see Boston; their mother would never go back, never.
Seven Loves Page 17