A Gift for My Sister: A Novel

by Ann Pearlman

  I find Allie and Tara in Allie’s room. Allie has bought a bottle of wine that she offers to open though we’re still full from dinner.

  “Fat chicken. Look at my fat chicken!” Levy had squealed with delight at a particularly stubby piece he picked up. He licked off the sauce and nibbled the thigh, and he and Tara split one of the sweet potatoes. Rachel, who usually doesn’t like chicken, ate half of my breast. Smoke and I brought a salad bag from Walmart, and Allie got some ice cream and chocolate sauce from Circle K. A complete family meal, I thought. Aaron’s chicken was perfectly tender.

  “You could open a restaurant,” I told him.

  But he didn’t smile at me. Evidently he’s still angry about what I said to Tara.

  Levy held out his empty plate after he finished the entire piece. “I ate the whole chickie.” He laughed. His curls bounced with glee, the balls of his cheeks almost hiding his black eyes. “It’s my flavorite.”

  “Favorite,” Tara corrects him.

  “No, Mommy, my favorite flavor. F-l-avorite.”

  “What a funny word,” Aaron nods. “Let’s make it one from now on.”

  Rachel wore her “prestnicks,” even at dinner.

  “What she say?” Smoke asked me when we gave her the water wings.

  “Presents,” I tell him.

  “Yep. Tanks for the prestnicks.” Rachel slides them up her arms. I forget that her enunciation isn’t as terrific as her vocabulary. She wore them to dinner and the “prestnicks” are still on her arms as she sleeps curled around Levy.

  Now, in the quiet night after a tumultuous and terrifying day, Allie opens the wine and pours it into the plastic glasses next to the ice bucket.

  She hands us each one and says, “I always wished I had a sister. But no such luck. I figured a sister would be another woman who shared your life, knew all about you, shared your childhood.” She sips her wine. “A best friend with witnessed history and deep knowledge of each other.”

  “We’re too far apart in age,” I say.

  “And we’re, like, so different,” Tara adds.

  “We have different fathers,” I say as though Allie doesn’t know and as if it explains everything, though I know it doesn’t.

  Allie lies back on her bed, cushions around her. The spread on the bed is printed with contrasting colors so it doesn’t show stains. Tara and I sit on two upholstered chairs on either side of a table. There’s nothing spectacular or even interesting in this room. It is exactly like Rachel’s and mine next door. Simply functional and clean. I sip my wine, and savor the taste.

  “You think you guys are different?” Allie laughs. “My grandmother and her sister looked a lot a like but were vastly unalike.” She emphasizes the un. “It’s one of the things from my childhood that I still ponder, and I’m amazed how one family could have such disparity.” Allie shakes her head and clears her throat. She rests her glass on her abdomen and crosses her ankles. “My grandmother was German, her parents emigrated from Germany. This was back in the 1880s.”

  “I thought you were Jewish,” Tara says.

  “I am, but my mother’s grandmother, Mum, was German and she grew up proud of that German heritage. In fact my nana spoke German with Mum when they didn’t want us knowing what they were saying.” Allie chuckles, and sips on her wine. She wears a pair of knit black pants, a wildly multicolored shirt, and equally vivid dangly earrings. “Here.” She interrupts her story and turns to the bedside table and lights a candle. “This’ll make the room smell good. I always pack one so that I carry a little piece of home with me.” Then the flare from the match ends.

  “So. There were two sisters. When my grandmother was fourteen, she was sent to a hospital to be a nurse . . . that’s how they did it then. It was a Jewish hospital and she fell in love and married a Jewish doctor and converted. Alma, her sister, married a man she met at a German community youth meeting. They went through World War I. And then the Depression hit.”

  Allie stops and narrows her eyes as she looks at each of us, and asks, “You know all this from your mom . . . right? . . . because your grandparents were German and there’s a large German immigrant population in Michigan.”

  “I’ve never thought about it like that,” Tara says. Her hair is up in a bun with a clip. Shorts, a T-shirt, and no makeup wipe away ten years, and she looks like a kid barely past puberty.

  “Well, yeah, we all arrived as immigrants. Even the so-called Native Americans. They just got here earlier,” Allie says.

  “Unless you’re black, and then you didn’t come. You were stolen and brought,” Tara says, and I know she’s thinking about Aaron and Levy.

  Allie shakes her head and her earrings jingle. “Think of this. The middle of the Depression. One sister married a Jewish doctor, converted to Judaism, and lived in the Jewish community. One sister pro-German.”

  Allie leans back against the pillows. I glance at Tara, whose eyes are wide, her legs crossed, her fingers entwined.

  “Then it got more complicated. Pup was fired from his job one week before he would be entitled to his pension.” Allie shrugs and shakes her head. “He moved in, along with Mum, to Nana’s. Then, Nana’s youngest sister died in childbirth, and Nana and Poppy, my grandfather, adopted her toddler and the baby.”

  Allie interrupts herself here for a footnote and lowers her voice. “They were adopted with the condition that the girls retain their Christian last name and attend church.” She shakes her head slowly.

  “Then what happened?” Tara asks.

  Allie crosses her legs and puts her elbows on her knees and leans toward us. Her toenails are polished with iridescent red. “My Jewish grandfather was supporting all these people—his wife’s German family. Then Aunt Alma became enmeshed with the Nazis, advocating the necessity for Germany to rise again under the leadership of the Fuehrer. She started trading currency for the Germans. Going back and forth across the Atlantic from the U.S. to Germany with suitcases of cash.”

  The candle flickers illuminate our faces. The blinds are tightly shut against the night. I remember drawing family trees in school and concentrating on my father’s family because it seemed more mysterious. He was Irish Catholic, and that’s about all I knew. I didn’t pay attention to my mom’s side of the family. The German side. She was with me. I had her.

  “So,” Allie narrows her eyes and stares at each of us, “before the war, right before my birth, there were these two sisters. With the same father and mother. One a Nazi.” Allie turns a palm up. “The other a Jew.” She turns her other palm up.

  “Then. One day Alma came to Nana and took her aside. The Nazis were going to win the war and conquer the U.S. ‘Already we’re making lists of Jews,’ Alma said. ‘You can save your children. Annul your marriage and deny their Jewish blood. Before it’s too late.’” Allie swallows and shakes her head.

  Allie stops. Her head is down. Tara and I look at each other. I can’t imagine Tara and me being on opposite sides in a war. Our family squabble, which seemed so important, feels less so.

  “What happened?” Tara prods.

  Allie lifts her head and clears her throat. “‘I’m not going to turn myself into a whore,’ Nana told Alma. ‘My children into bastards.’

  “But Alma insisted. ‘You’re risking their lives for your pride.’”

  “Did they keep communicating with each other?” I ask.

  “Sometime during that period World War II started. My mom married my dad, who was a Conservative Jew. Alma was still a Nazi sympathizer. She still visited her mom. I remember a holiday when we were all there—my parents and grandparents and me. The war was still going on or just ended. When Alma arrived, she and Mum went into Mum’s bedroom. Alma came out alone.” Allie’s earrings catch glimmers from the candle.

  Outside, I hear a car pull into the parking lot. Its lights slide through the slits of the blinds and momentarily stripe the walls.

  “Anyway,” Allie resumes, “Alma sat on the upholstered wing chair. When I entered f
rom the bathroom, I saw fury darkening my father’s face and heard his paper crackle when he turned the page. Poppy left the room with steps that slammed and thumped as he climbed the stairs and slammed the door to his room.” Allie sipped her wine and inhaled.

  “Alma cried about how old and frail her mom was getting. Her mom was being supported and cared for by Jews when she, herself, supported a regime to kill us all. Her own relatives, because they were hers, too, weren’t they? Like it or not.”

  Now we’re all quiet. Tendrils of bright streaks slide out of the clip holding Tara’s hair. She looks so unremarkable. Not like a celebrity, just my kid sister.

  I remember what Tara said in the fight. She reminded me that Aaron, and Smoke and the crew, were helping Rachel and me. I’m just not sure it’s a rescue that I want.

  “Life led them down such different paths partly because of who they had married.” Allie sips her wine. “Nana figured out a way to accept,” Allie’s eyes slowly circle as she hunts for the word, “well, tolerate her sister’s disgusting beliefs with the love they both had for Mum and the love Mum had for both of them. The love, that mother-daughter bond, was respected over horrendous political beliefs.”

  No one says anything, and then Allie adds, “I wonder what they talked about, that mother and daughter, when they spoke about it. Because they had to, didn’t they? I wonder about the hidden motivations and thoughts that are never spoken.”

  “What do you think?” I ask.

  “I asked Nana, and she simply said that they were all very proud of being German but then the wars came, and the Holocaust.”

  Then Tara asks, “No, like, how do you reconcile it?”

  I realize then that her questions stem from more than curiosity about Allie. And I understand what she’s learning from Allie’s story. She has moved from the security and safety of being in the white majority to the potential threat and hardship of being a minority, even though that is less now than it was before the civil rights movement. And because of her choice, Mom and I have a new affiliation with black people.

  “As a child, I wondered how some of my kin could have killed their own kin. I imagined a German relation herding and gassing a Russian-Jewish relation and neither one—the murderer or the murdered—recognizing they were relatives through me. A terrifying possibility: blindly killing your own family.”

  Allie stops and bites her upper lip. “But, isn’t that what war really is? Aren’t we really all related?”

  Tara is quiet, maybe considering all the possible futures for her and Levy. “Levy and Rachel are both amazing mixtures as a result of our and our grandparents’ lives. I think about that a lot. The accident of me—I mean, here I am lasting so much longer than my parents’ relationship. And then the accident of me meeting Aaron.”

  “Yes,” Allie says. “And Rachel and Levy already love each other and share such a bond. They enjoy each other and share their worlds.”

  How the future might tear them apart. “We don’t have political beliefs pulling us, though. Not a war,” I say.

  “No. But you disapprove and have stereotyped beliefs about what’s going on with us. All that drug shit you accused us of.” Tara meets my eyes and says this without blinking, her flat tone absent of confrontation.

  “Smoke said something about that, but I smelled pot in your room.”

  “Sure, pot, but we don’t touch hard drugs. And I seem to remember you and Marissa smoking some during one of your sleepovers. None of those dudes use hard drugs . . . well, I don’t know about T-Bone. He’s the party boy, he’s liable to do anything for a thrill. But they couldn’t afford it when they were growing up and now they have too much to lose. It’s the dudes in the ’burbs who have that luxury.”

  “You forget I’m a lawyer. Pot is still illegal.” I sit back and cross my arms. “I know the statistics. Seventy percent of drug users are white. Seventy percent of people serving time for drugs are black.” Desperate to change the subject, I ask Allie, “Were they ever loving sisters?”

  “I don’t know. But we learn from them by using history to help us understand the present. They were more alike than they could see, and so are you two,” Allie continues.

  Tara and I glare at each other, then look away.

  “Have you ever realized you went through the same things: the loss of a father, and a long-lasting first love?

  “You don’t realize it but you both bonded so strongly, so young. And being a mother is important to both of you. And you’re both hard-working and dedicated.” Allie counts these five similarities on her fingers. “Oh, and you’re both beautiful,” she laughs.

  “Sky always found me annoying. She didn’t want us to bond over anything.” Tara has a peculiar expression on her face, as though she’s thinking something else. And then she turns to me and asks, “Are you coming to my concert in Albuquerque?”

  I look away. “I don’t know if I could stand so many happy people.”

  Tara nods. “Do you remember that night we went to Magic Mountain? When we were kids?”

  I struggle to remember and must squinch up my face in confusion, because she adds, “Remember, Dad didn’t pick me up like he was supposed to and you had to babysit?”

  “That always happened.”

  “We walked to Magic Mountain and sat on the top and told secrets.” Tara nudges.

  She twists toward me, a pleading expression on her face. And then I remember, and tears start as my father’s death and Troy’s death combine in a wave of anguish. I nod, my fingers covering my eyes and cheeks.

  “And that orphaned orange light, the sunrise in the middle of the night, do you remember?” Tara is not deterred by my tears.

  I nod.

  “I thought about that the day Troy was dying and, for the L.A. concert, I painted my face half orange to commemorate us.”

  “Oh, so that’s why you did it. It looked so cool,” Allie says. “It gave you an unearthly appearance.”

  Allie’s words break the silence between Tara and me.

  “You know, you’ll always have each other. If you want each other,” Allie says. I know that she told us the story intentionally.

  “But look at Alma and Nana, did they have each other?” Tara pushes.

  Allie shakes her head. “At Mum’s funeral, Alma wailed out her guilt and sorrow, wailed to bring the heavens down. Nana tsked and said, ‘People who mourn the loudest have done the least.’ But through the years the war was forgotten. The Nazis were viewed as an aberration. Alma became a Republican and campaigned for Eisenhower. So did Nana. But I don’t know if there was forgiveness. And of course no one ever forgot. Even I, two generations later, haven’t forgotten. But they were sisters regardless.”

  Tara turns to me. “I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

  I don’t say I love you to Tara. I’m not sure I’ve ever said it to her. I have to peel away layers of sadness and anger and resentment. But then I creep toward something I know is the truth: “I envy you. I’ve always envied you.”

  “Really?”

  “The secret that I told you. That your father is still alive.”

  Tara huffs, making a snorting sound. “For whatever good that is.”

  “Alive means there is a possibility for reconciliation. When you’re dead, it’s over.”

  Allie sits crossed-legged on her bed, watching us. Now, I smell the sweet vanilla from the candle.

  “But you know your father loved you,” Tara says.

  Yes. “And I know Troy loves me.” I inhale, turn to Tara, and say, “Your life is so easy. You played against the odds and won, and I played it safe and lost.”

  “You haven’t lost,” Allie and Tara say together.

  “Troy’s gone. But you haven’t lost. You still get to decide what you do next. How you live out the rest of your life.”

  “I’ve had no determination in what’s happened.”

  “But what you do next, you do,” Tara says.

  Why does Tara think she knows so much
when she’s so young? I guess because she’s been alone so long, since she was a baby. And I feel sad for her, for the first time. I look at her sitting there, her eyelashes shadowing her cheek, her lips slightly opened but downturned in a naked and vulnerable expression.

  “You decide how you look at it,” Allie agrees.

  He died. That’s how I look at it. I’m alone, living my mother’s nightmare.

  I think that, but don’t say it. And then I remember, I’m not alone.

  Rachel. Thank God for Rachel. I am a mother. She has me. And for the first time, I realize that with all the weight and importance of it. Rachel has me. She still has me. And I still have her.

  “And you have us to help you. Me. Mom. Aaron. Levy. The whole crew.”

  “Me, too,” Allie says.

  “But most importantly, you have you,” Tara adds.

  And Rachel has me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Apple Doesn’t Fall Far

  Tara

  ONCE YOU LOVE someone from a different ethnic group, you see the world with different eyes. The lesson from Allie’s story reiterates my own truth. It’s funny, but I sometimes view the world with black eyes now. Black people who don’t know me might get annoyed at such a statement. How could a white girl know what it’s like to be black, when all I have to do is walk away and I’m in my white world again? But I can’t do that. I walk around with a white-looking face and a black sense of America. What happens to black people affects me through the people I love. I’m assumed to be part of the mass of white people when I’m alone, or with Mom or Sky. But when I wander around the world, I imagine how I’d be treated if they knew about Aaron and Levy, or if I were black. I see racism more, because I know what it’s like on both sides. I know the freedom and safety of being white.

  I understand things I didn’t before I met Aaron. Before, I didn’t care. Like: there are very few white people in low-level service positions. I took that for granted. Most of us do. Most white people just assume that’s just the way the system works. They don’t even think about how they benefit. Now I see how that assumption affects Aaron and how it’ll impact my Levy, who I love even more than I love myself.