The Sisters

by Nancy Jensen

  Gordon and his mother had chosen dim accent lighting, too, to set off various aspects of the kitchen they believed most attractive. One of these was the display of crystal on open shelves. Alma had suggested the pieces would be safer but still visible in a windowed cabinet, but Gordon had shaken his head in annoyance, saying open shelves commanded attention. Certainly they demanded attention—twice already in the three weeks since the renovation was complete, Alma had had to wash and hand-dry that spectacular glass to keep it sparkling.

  Sometimes she caught herself looking at the pretty yellow refrigerator in the brochure, but she could see now, of course, that Gordon and his mother had been right about the aqua. Alma still hadn’t warmed to the tile floor, though, thinking it looked like some absurd, nightmarishly large chessboard.

  Claudine Powell pushed through the kitchen door and said, “Well, here you are.” She took the ice bucket from Alma’s hands. “Now, you just put that down and come enjoy the party.”

  Alma tugged at the rim of the bucket. “Gordon needs the ice.”

  With a wry smile, Claudine shook her head. “Gordon, Gordon.” She pushed the door partly open with one hand and, rather too loudly, Alma thought, called out, “Bruce!” A slim, balding man in a gray suit appeared, and Claudine said, “Bruce, this is Alma. Isn’t she pretty?” Bruce said hello and then was suddenly holding the bucket Claudine had thrust into his hands. “Take this to Gordon,” she said.

  Claudine strolled to the center of the kitchen and turned around slowly, taking it all in. She pointed at the rotisserie. “I suppose Gordon likes leg of lamb.”

  “Two or three times a month,” Alma said.

  “Well, he doesn’t have to clean that contraption, does he?”

  “It’s not so very difficult to clean,” Alma said. That wasn’t true at all, but she wasn’t sure she liked Mrs. Powell’s tone, as though she and Alma were co-conspirators.

  The older woman laid one hand lightly on the refrigerator door. “This is Gordon’s doing, isn’t it? The scheme? No woman I know would want all these dark colors.”

  “Gordon’s mother likes them,” Alma said, but Mrs. Powell went on as though she hadn’t heard her.

  “Hurts your eyes to look at that checkerboard.”

  Alma got the bowl of ice out of the freezer again to load the ice crusher, checking to be sure it was set on Fine. Gordon was particular about his ice. When she looked up from her cranking, she saw Mrs. Powell had the food sketches in her hands.

  “Did you do these?”

  Alma nodded. “It was silly, I know, but I needed to see what everything looked like first to be sure the food would fit my serving pieces.”

  “It’s nice work,” Claudine said. “Looks like something you’d see in a cookbook.” She put the sketches down and patted Alma on the arm. “I’ll leave you alone, dear. I know it’s hard to be hostess. Next time, think about hiring a girl to help you for the evening.”

  Alma dumped the first load of crushed ice into the large bowl she would take out to Gordon and then put another load in the crusher. She looked at the sketches again, seeing, she thought, a little of what Claudine Powell had seen. Surely it was ridiculous for her to feel so pleased with the woman’s compliment, which was probably really nothing more than casual politeness, but Alma felt a rush of warmth in her cheeks.

  Earlier in the evening, when she’d made her first round with the hors d’oeuvres, she had noticed Milton, looking so handsome and grown up in the blue suit his father had chosen for his birthday, holding an Old Fashioned glass half-filled with orange juice, clearly thinking himself the equal of the two men who laughed at his third-grade jokes. She wanted to do a watercolor portrait of him while traces of the adored infant remained in his face, to capture him before he tumbled over the edge into puberty.

  Surely in another year or two he would be able to sit still for a portrait. Last year when Alma had tried it, Milton became impatient, complaining he wanted to work on his science experiment—he was calculating how long it took various insects to die after being sealed in jars with a cotton pad soaked in alcohol. When she tried to assure him that she needed only another fifteen minutes and went to settle a cushion behind his back to make him more comfortable, he had slapped her hard across the face.

  Mixed with the shock of the strike, Alma had felt a sudden, intense longing for Daddy, who in an instant would have snatched Milton by the collar and laid him across his knee for a whipping. Alma had been too stunned to do anything herself, even to speak, and Milton ran off toward his room, singing some song he’d learned on the radio, while she got up to get a cold cloth to hold against her stinging cheek. The boy had hit her so hard he’d left a red mark, but it was easily concealed with an extra layer of foundation.

  Gordon had told her when they married—and she had agreed—that when the time came to have child, he would handle the discipline, and so Alma waited without a word through the afternoon, through Gordon’s two after-work scotch and sodas, and then through dinner, until Gordon had sent Milton to his room to do homework.

  She had sat down on the edge of the ottoman, facing Gordon. Very quietly and very calmly, she had said, “Dear, our Milton has misbehaved.”

  Gordon folded the newspaper in his lap, reached to get a cigarette out of the engraved silver case on the side table. He tapped the end of the cigarette five times against the gleaming walnut surface, picked up the lighter, and, finding it empty, clapped it back down. He looked past Alma and held his hand out, which she understood to mean that he expected her to get up, cross the room, get the lighter they kept on the mantel, and return it to him. She did this, and he flipped the top, spun the wheel with a hard flick of his thumb, lit his cigarette, put down the lighter, and took two long drags. Now he looked her unwaveringly in the eye and said, “Well?”

  When she explained what had happened, Gordon tipped his head back and laughed.

  Laughed and laughed.

  She thought he might never stop.

  When at last, still laughing, he looked at her again, he took no notice of the tears that had spilled from her eyes in spite of her resolve not to cry. “That boy knows his own mind,” he said, tapping a dangling ash from his cigarette. “That’ll teach you to listen to him when he says he’s tired of sitting around.”

  “You’re not going to punish him,” Alma said, so softly she wasn’t sure she’d said it at all.

  “For what?” Gordon seemed almost angry now. At her. “Why should I punish him for being annoyed that you were wasting time he wanted for studying? You ought to be glad he’s so serious about science.” He stubbed out the cigarette, unfolded his paper, and said nothing more.

  At the time, she’d felt wounded by both her son and husband, and she’d spent the rest of the evening crying in the bedroom, wondering if either of them would come in to stroke her shoulders. But after a time, she came to see that Gordon was right. Yes, she was truly blessed to have such a son, who, still so young, already knew he was going to be a doctor—a surgeon, perhaps—and who didn’t have time to sit for portraits while his mother taught herself to paint. No, she wouldn’t ask him again. If she wanted to paint him, she could do it from a photograph. Or she could paint the tree in the backyard.

  Life was the way you looked at it, she reminded herself. Truly, it was. There had been a time, a year—almost two—after Gordon decided against their having another child, when Alma had nursed a heavy sadness, but at last she had come to see Gordon’s view: the expense—of time, money, and attention—could only be drawn against Milton’s account—and that wouldn’t do. “Nearly thirty thousand dollars to bring up one just to age seventeen,” Gordon had told her, quoting a report he had read in one of his magazines, “and that doesn’t include college. Or medical school.”

  How fortunate she was to have such a good provider for a husband, a man who calculated these things. A man thoughtful enough to arrange for her to have a new kitchen with a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, and even a trash compactor. A man
who was sensible and practical when it came to handling their fine, ambitious son.

  Yes, she was lucky. That was clearest to her when she thought of what her life might have been, given what she’d come from.

  Just look at the mess Rainey had made of her life—embarrassing the whole family by having to get married, and then, just when she was beginning to get settled, she’d run off with that little girl of hers—without any explanation to anyone—and filed for divorce. And the worst of it—not more than a year later, there was Rainey, pregnant again, this time by some man she refused to name. Shameful. Those girls of hers, Lynn and Grace, were certain to grow up half wild, no standards at all. Alma felt sorry for them. She felt sorry for Mother and Daddy, too, for the humiliation they must have had to face at church, but when she thought about how they had always indulged Rainey—or at least how Daddy always had—her sympathy waned. Probably Mother had resisted, at first, but then gave in, Alma supposed, when Daddy put his foot down on behalf of his favorite. Yes, she could see that Daddy might have forced Mother into agreeing to have Rainey back, but even so, that was no excuse for the way Mother doted on Rainey’s girls, while she was only polite to Milton.

  Well, Alma was out of all that and glad for it. She could bear visiting her parents in Newman once or twice a year, and the rest of the time she could enjoy the prestige of being a doctor’s wife—and perhaps, in time, the wife of a city councilman.

  Alma checked her reflection in the broad side of a crystal pitcher on Gordon’s open shelves, tucked a few strands of hair back into place, picked up the bowl of crushed ice, and pushed through the door to join her guests.

  ELEVEN

  Letting Go

  June 1965

  Newman, Indiana

  RAINEY

  LYNN’S CRIES PUNCTURED RAINEY’S SLEEP.

  “No! Daddy! Don’t let go! Daddy! Daddy!”

  Rainey stumbled across the room to her daughter’s bed. Still asleep, Lynn thrashed, not screaming now, but seeming desperate to. Her lips were pressed tightly and her face was turning red, as if she were holding her breath.

  Mother appeared in the doorway, her face white, her housecoat only halfway on. Daddy limped in behind her, still dressed from the day, his clothes rumpled from the couch. Neither of them had taken time to put on their glasses. They stood at the foot of the bed while Rainey hugged Lynn to her chest, rocked her, and rubbed her back, murmuring, “Breathe, baby. Lynn, breathe. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

  Last night, when Carl had brought Lynn home—hours later than he was due—he did not say why she was dressed only in a man’s large T-shirt, but, as he laid her in her bed, he explained the square of gauze over the girl’s eye by saying she’d slipped on the dock. She’d been running too fast, he said, and banged her head into a post. He’d taken her to the emergency room—there didn’t seem any point in calling about it, not after the doctor said she would be all right, not since they were already so late. All she needed was a couple of stitches, a tetanus shot. An accident, Carl said. Could have happened to anyone—and though she hated to, Rainey had to admit it was true. Lynn was always running too fast, falling down, and might as easily have cut her head on their own front stoop. What had frightened Rainey most was how groggy Lynn was so many hours after the fall. For several minutes, Rainey had patted her daughter’s cheek and rubbed her hands, and finally Lynn had roused, opening her eyes for a moment before falling again into a deep sleep. They gave her something for the pain, Carl told them, because of the stitches—but after Carl was gone, they had looked at one another, she and Mother and Daddy, as if each was waiting for one of the others to say they didn’t believe him, not quite.

  From her bed in the corner, Grace began to cry, and it was only then that any of them noticed the three-year-old was awake, sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide and streaming with tears.

  “You come on with me,” Mother said, lifting Grace into her arms. “You can sit with your grandpa on the porch.”

  Grace sniffled and rubbed at her eyes, then laid her head on her grandmother’s shoulder. “Can I chase lightning bugs?”

  “They’ve all gone to bed, sugar,” Mother said. “But you can listen for the whip-poor-wills and whistle back to them, like Grandpa taught you.”

  “Will Grandpa sing?” Grace asked.

  Daddy nodded. “You take her on out, Bertie,” he said. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  Lynn’s body had at last relaxed into stillness, and she breathed steadily again, but Rainey continued to rock her. She looked up at her father, and then, feeling her tears coming, turned her head away. “What am I going to do, Daddy? I can’t…” There were too many ways to end that sentence, all rushing at her at once. I can’t let him keep taking her. I can’t stop him. I can’t protect her. I can’t not protect her.

  Daddy reached for Rainey’s hand, gave it two quick squeezes, and hobbled back toward the front of the house. She knew he wanted to help, knew he would give everything he had to help, but he didn’t know any more than she did about what to do, where to start. Even Mother had been trying her best, being kinder to Rainey these last few months, ever since Carl had turned up again, insisting on having his visits with Lynn—a right, the lawyer had told Rainey, that was still legally Carl’s, despite his never having exercised it before. No one, it seemed, could untangle the mess she’d made.

  Rainey eased her daughter back onto the bed and tidied the sheets as best she could. In the dim light that filtered from the hallway, she could see Lynn’s face—a face now twisted and creased with worry, the face of an old woman, not of a child barely eight.

  This, too, was her fault—all the scars of her mistakes, written on her little girl’s forehead.

  No good could come of wishing backwards, she knew, but sometimes her mind would slip off before she could catch it—wishing she’d never taken up Carl’s first offer to drive her home, wishing she’d never met him, wishing even that she had never gotten her job at the Burger Chef. When those thoughts came, she pushed hard at them, driving them down again, for to wish away Carl would be to wish away Lynn, and Rainey didn’t want that. But if one day she rubbed a lamp and a genie appeared before her, she knew exactly what she would ask—to go back to that night in the car with Daddy when she told him she wanted to marry Carl. If she were granted that wish, Rainey would grab her silly nineteen-year-old self and shake some sense into her, stop her from saying “Yes,” stop her from declaring to Daddy—and to herself—that she was in love when she wasn’t.

  Though she had long forgotten how it had felt to love Carl—she supposed she had, for a few weeks that summer—she did remember how it had felt to be nearly four months pregnant, standing beside him in the judge’s office, dreaming of their future, seeing herself slipping her fingers through his hair, long after it had gone silver. What a strange sensation, remembering how at the time she had thought the day a happy one, and yet also remembering how it had really been, just as if she were two different people with two different experiences of the same hour.

  Carl had been late. He’d arrived with his mother, a pruny woman with home-dyed hair the color of withered marigolds, who, when she entered, looked away and refused to return Rainey’s greeting. Mother had talked all the way downtown in the car about the disgrace, but once they’d stepped inside the City-County Building, she’d hushed up, answering any question, when she was forced to, with a gesture or a step forward. Daddy had driven more slowly than usual, not once looking up at Rainey in the rearview mirror to roll his eyes at something her mother had said, and when they walked across the parking lot, Rainey had had to grasp his arm to steady him.

  After the wedding, nothing was like she’d ever imagined it would be. There was no cute little apartment with flowered curtains, no afternoons fixing herself up while the dinner cooked, no romantic evenings curled together in an armchair, talking about what their baby might be like. There was his parents’ ramshackle farm lined with tumbledown fences, nasty chickens and pigs ruttin
g up the yard, big red dogs that Carl’s father bred for fights, snarling and hurling themselves at the pen day and night, and for the newlyweds a tiny damp room in the basement filled with greasy car parts and racing magazines. Never in her life had Rainey believed it was possible to miss Newman, but she did. Siler was less than an hour across the state line, but it might as well have been on the far coast of Hell.

  In Siler, nobody ordered Rainey to do the cooking, the scrubbing up, or the laundry, but she saw right away that if she didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done—and for the most part, when she was in her last month and couldn’t be on her feet long, it didn’t. It was just the same when it came to Carl’s finding a job. From one day to the next, he didn’t turn a hand toward it, and it wore Rainey out to be the only one who seemed to think he ought to be looking, so just as soon as she could after the baby came—several weeks sooner than the doctor would have liked—she hitched a ride into town and found a job clerking at the drugstore. When she got back, she told Carl he had to teach her to drive.

  It knotted her stomach to leave Lynn behind in that house, but working was the only way she could see for getting them out. Every day when Rainey got back, she was sure to find Lynn screaming with hunger and lying in a foul wet diaper, but after she got her cleaned up and soothed, she whispered to her baby, promising that soon, soon, she would take her away.

  For eight months, Rainey saved every penny of her pay, and then, one day on her lunch hour, without a word to Carl, she rented a small house in town and called a woman about sitting for Lynn during working hours. Before leaving the drugstore that evening, she filled the car with empty boxes from the stockroom, and as soon as she got back to the farm and tended to Lynn, she started throwing all their things—hers and Lynn’s—into the cartons. When she was finished, she set three or four empty boxes on the bed and went out to the old barn where Carl was messing with one of the half-dozen cars that would never run again, told him the address of the house and said he could come with them, but if he didn’t have a job within two weeks, he’d have to go.