Little Sister

by Barbara Gowdy

“Go ahead and pet him, honey.”

  Ava stroked a furrow between his ribs. He was cement gray and had a potbelly and a flowing silver mane like a glamour wig.

  “How old is he?” Fiona called.

  “Twelve.”

  “He’s older than that!”

  “He’s had a rough life.”

  “He isn’t fixed.”

  “Sure he is. He’s a carnival pony.”

  They were talking about his penis, the first one, human or animal, Rose had ever seen. It reached his knees. It looked artificial, not a part of his body but something useful, like a lever or crank.

  “Here’s Gordon with the saddle,” their father said.

  “Gordon?” Ava said. His truck pulled into the driveway, and she dashed toward it, her arm-flailing run. Then, as if embarrassed by her enthusiasm, she ran back to her mother.

  “Mornin’, ladies,” said Gordon, climbing out.

  “How’s your cut, Gordon?” Ava asked shyly, her fists pushed under her chin.

  “Healed up good, Red.” He extended his chubby arm. “Thanks to your mother.”

  Fiona shrugged. “Thanks to antiseptic cream.” But she smiled and wiped her hands on her apron.

  Their father was poking in the rear of the truck. “Which is Major Tom’s?”

  “I got it, Mr. Bowan,” said Gordon. He strode around and hoisted out a worn saddle, a dirty Hudson’s Bay blanket, and a cardboard box. “Okay, girls, if you care to watch.”

  Ava skipped to his side.

  “We start with the blanket,” said Gordon, and threw it over Major Tom’s back. “Like so.” He tugged at it, smoothing it out. “Next comes the saddle.” He set the saddle on the blanket. “Like so.” He slapped Major Tom’s rump, cruelly hard, it seemed to Rose. “Now for the girth. The girth goes under.”

  Rose looked at the cornfield. All you had to do not to get lost in a cornfield was stick to your row. To find your way out of a maze, you ran your hand against one wall and never lifted it. If a current dragged you out to sea, you swam parallel to the shore. These and other survival techniques Rose had read in a book called Stayin’ Alive.

  “Rose,” said her father, his loud voice penetrating her fog. “Would you like the first ride?”

  “That’s okay,” said Rose. She worried that her weight would be too much for the pony. “Ava can go.”

  Gordon guessed what she was balking at. “He’s stronger’n he looks.”

  “I don’t believe in riding on animals’ backs,” Rose said, humiliated. She went into the house and sat at the kitchen table. A few minutes later her father summoned her back out for instructions on cleaning the stall and feeding and currying Major Tom.

  This she took to. Major Tom was the most docile animal. You could comb his mane, and he might graze you with his red-rimmed eyes, but his mind seemed placidly elsewhere. When you brushed his rump, urine dripped from his penis, but that was just Major Tom. Good old Major Tom. Rose declared herself the official groom, and her father stopped bothering her to ride and had her and Ava outfitted at Saddle-Up Equestrian. Rose got green rubber boots, green rubber gloves, and blue coveralls. Ava got black boots, white jodhpurs, a red helmet, and a navy jacket.

  When Ava appeared all decked out for her lessons, proud and self-conscious, Rose felt protective, although Gordon touched her only to help her mount and dismount, holding her by the waist, and this seemed harmless enough. What passed between Rose and Gordon was “How’s it going, Rosie?” and “Fine,” until one morning he strolled over to where she sat on the split-rail fence and said, “You look out for your little sister, eh, Rosie?”

  “There’s nothing else to do,” she murmured.

  “No, it’s good. My stepdaughters, they fight like a pair of weasels.” His eyes followed Ava, who was trotting Major Tom around an orange construction cone. “Last month the older one knocked out the younger one’s front tooth with a pool cue.”

  Rose looked at him. “On purpose?”

  “Hard to tell with them two.” He squinted at the sky. “They’re about your age. What are you?” He gave her a glance. “Thirteen?”

  “Eleven,” Rose said and jumped off the fence.

  He started back to Ava. “I’ll bring ’em around one day,” he called over his shoulder.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2005

  Rose tried to get back to writing her ad copy, but the exchange between Harriet and her sister kept running through her mind. What kind of man fools around on his pregnant wife? What kind of woman fools around with a man who has a pregnant wife? In her hand and arm she seemed to feel the sensation of Harriet waving the cigarette around, just as her father used to wave around his cigar when he talked on the phone.

  And then she was thinking about her father and his lung cancer. Stage four by the time it was diagnosed, and so rampant or so discouraging to him that in a matter of days he went from singing arias at the top of his lungs to wheezing tunelessly, from hugging the breath out of people to patting their shoulders. The morphine gave him delusions. She’d forgotten this, but she remembered it now, him hallucinating about squatters in the lobby (“There’s plenty of space,” he reasoned) and catastrophe in his general affairs. One morning he shuffled by her desk and said, “We’re broke, honey, I’m sorry,” and she panicked before escaping the office and phoning their bank.

  She’d been only a year out of university, still learning the ropes, and there she was doing ninety percent of the work while he lay on the sofa and touched his head with the faltering swipes of a man who can’t figure out where his hair has gone. Sometimes he leafed through photo albums and broke into little bullfrog moans, at pictures of Ava, she imagined, after which he holed up in the projection booth and listened to his Édith Piaf records. Before dinner he opened an office window and smoked. Why had Rose never joined him? She needn’t have started with cigars, she could have smoked cigarettes. She wondered why she’d never at least given it a try.

  She tapped her mouth. Was it possible to develop a craving so quickly? Apparently so. She grabbed her purse and went down to the lobby.

  Fiona was filing her nails under the white light of the menu board. “Where are you off to?” she asked when Rose opened the register.

  “I thought I’d get dinner,” Rose said. She helped herself to a ten-dollar bill (what did cigarettes cost?) and then to another ten.

  “Get enough for Lloyd,” Fiona said. “He’s joining us. He’ll be joining us from now on, if you have no objections.”

  He was coming around the corner as Rose left the theater. She motioned him away from the windows and asked for a cigarette. “I’m buying my own,” she said. “I just need one to tide me over.”

  “I’m not sure I should be encouraging this,” he said, but he put down her father’s wooden toolbox, near the wall where the pavement was dry, and took a rolled cigarette out of one of the compartments. “Did Fiona tell you about the dinner thing?” he asked, digging in the front pocket of his pants for the lighter.

  “Yeah, it makes sense,” Rose said. “If you’re okay with it.”

  “Me? Sure, I’m okay. Free meal, good company.” He lit the cigarette and handed it to her.

  “Don’t tell my mother about this,” she said.

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Don’t tell her that, either.”

  She set off, puffing and hacking. She deliberately smoked the way Harriet did—quick inhalations, a sideways tug of her head on the exhale.

  She resolved to lose ten pounds. She’d been dieting half her life, but over the past few years she’d given up because Victor liked large women. Now it felt slovenly, all the food she ate, all the space she occupied compared to Harriet, who would get bigger as the months passed if she kept the baby. Keep it, Rose thought, a sudden, instinctive appeal. In effect, and the absurdity was not lost on her, she lobbied her own unconscious.

  When she got back to the theater, Fiona was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. “There’s iced tea,” she said.


  Rose poured herself a glass. Her throat felt parched.

  “Nobody dies anymore,” Fiona said. “They leave. They pass away. They pass. ‘After a courageous battle with cancer, Donald passed.’ Passed what? Wind? Do you know what I want mine to say?”

  “What?” Rose asked reluctantly.

  “Bowan, Fiona. Dead.” She reached between the salt and pepper shakers for her playing cards. “How about some honeymoon bridge?”

  Rose glanced at the clock.

  “There’s time,” Fiona said.

  She was an expert shuffler. She had learned from her aunt Aileen, who as a young woman in Limerick dealt the poker games played above a milliner’s shop. Despite years of practice Rose had never progressed beyond a common dovetail shuffle. Fiona could do the Hindu, which is when you slide packets of cards from the top of the deck and let them fall into your other hand. “Cut,” she said and smacked the deck down.

  The score soon mounted in her favor. “You’re letting me win,” she said.

  “I’m not,” Rose said. But neither was she paying much attention. She was barely keeping her eyes open.

  “One day you’ll be letting me win,” Fiona said. “And then the day will come when I won’t know a pack of cards from a pack of wolves. On that day”—she trumped Rose’s ace with a three—“you can do with your old mother what you want.”

  A silence opened between them. Rose wasn’t sure if she’d just been given permission to move her mother into a nursing home when the time came. “We’ll do what you want,” she said emotionally, thinking of Victor’s mother.

  Fiona laughed. “Don’t leave it up to me.”

  Dinner was burritos, chips, and salsa. Afterward Rose went out to the alley and smoked a cigarette with the homeless men—the brothers, everybody called them, two unrelated guys of indeterminate age, not young. Around noon they started collecting cans and bottles in a lopsided, three-wheeled wagon until they had enough to buy a jug of red wine. They did their drinking in any of four or five back doorways, and because they were quiet and picked up their garbage, even their cigarette butts, the local businesses let them be. Sometimes Fiona brought them popcorn, which they accepted politely. They were more enthusiastic about the cigarettes Rose offered this evening. The tall one exhaled his first drag skyward and said to Rose, without looking at her, “Your heartbeat is fast.”

  “It is?” she said. “How can you tell?”

  He pointed under her ear.

  She touched the place and felt the throbbing.

  “He knows what he’s talking about,” the short one said. “He’s Iroquois Indian.”

  The tall one squinted with something like professional skepticism. “Have you been on a plane recently?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Jet lag speeds up the heart.”

  It might have been the power of suggestion, but when she was back inside, her tiredness had a jet-lag buzz. She helped at the snack bar, and then she climbed to her office, so exhausted from the stairs that she couldn’t muster the energy to clear a space for herself on the sofa, and curled up on the carpet instead.

  “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,” she heard through the floor. “If you want any tickets, you’ll have to go around to, eh, to, eh, the front of the, eh, oooh, well.”

  That was probably the longest line of dialogue in the entire movie. The screenplay for Once Upon a Time in the West was 265 pages, but as her father had calculated, the dialogue alone amounted to a mere 15 pages. Rose decided she should post this tidbit on the Regal’s website.

  Her cell rang. She let it go into messaging. After five minutes she reached for it and pressed play.

  “Hi, it’s me,” said Victor’s voice. “There’s a pop-up on the radar.”

  Rose stood and went to the window. Blue sky in all directions.

  “ETA half an hour. And, oh, yeah. I was able to get a background check on Lloyd.”

  What was this?

  “He served his sentence at Joyceville. In 1988 he participated in a recreation-yard brawl. One inmate stabbed, life-threatening injuries. Attacker, or attackers, unidentified—”

  She hung up. Who appointed him to be Lloyd’s parole officer? A guy gets stabbed in a brawl almost twenty years ago, big deal. How did Victor even know that Lloyd hadn’t tried to pull the fighters apart? Well, he’d better not say anything to her mother. Or to Lloyd.

  She lit a cigarette and tried to maintain her indignation, but it soon got muscled aside by the memory of Harriet’s bedroom. She tapped ash out the window. Dark clouds were boiling above the Pepsi billboard. The wind picked up, the marquee cables made their low, zooming whistle. She shut the window, locked the door, sat at her desk, and stared at the plate beneath the photograph of her father and Groucho Marx.

  With the first stirring of thunder the words became legible. The flecks arrived, the fortresses assembled, prompting the nausea, prompting a sensation of Harriet’s skeleton crystallizing out of the ghost of Rose’s own.

  She was lying on a mat and looking with Harriet’s perfect vision at an acoustic-tile ceiling.

  “That’s it, that’s right,” said a man in a deep, sympathetic voice. “Give yourself over to the feeling.” He had an English accent. The thunder was a faint rumble, and he said, “There it goes. Sink into it. The calm after the storm.”

  Harriet was far from calm. All around her people breathed audibly.

  The man said, “Roll onto your stomachs,” but it hurt her breasts to lie on her stomach, and ahead of his directions she crouched and began to straighten. Her eyes traveled up her boyish body: gray track pants, a pink tank top. In the wall behind her, water gurgled down a drain.

  It was then, during her fourth episode, hearing the water, that Rose grew aware of herself, not as a glint at the edge of Harriet’s consciousness but as a separate consciousness, a fully integrated component. She wasn’t surprised. She felt as if she had been waiting for this from the start.

  What surprised her was the instructor. Rather than the slim and elegant person she had imagined from his accent, he was a bull-shouldered, florid-faced guy with a bushy moustache and crooked, red-framed glasses duct-taped at the hinges. A former football player gone slightly to seed was her impression. And yet his smile imparted alertness and alacrity. He bowed his head and offered a yogic blessing, and the students returned it in ragged union. When his eyes rested on her, Harriet melted a little. She loved him, but not sexually. There was no excitement in the feeling.

  People began rolling up their mats. “My basement’s a lake,” said her neighbor to someone else.

  “You came,” murmured a voice behind her.

  Silent, in bare feet, the instructor had appeared. “Oh, Marsh.” She squeezed his arm. “I had no idea you could stand on your head.”

  “Optical illusion.”

  She smiled.

  “Old ashram trick.” He adjusted his glasses in a precise and delicate way at odds with the glasses themselves and with the entire look of him. “One second,” he said and laid a fleshy hand on her shoulder while he exchanged a few words with another student. “Sorry I didn’t introduce you,” he said when the student was out of earshot. “I can never remember his bloody name.”

  They started across the room. From overhead came a burst of loud music, quickly turned down. “Is that the party starting?” she asked.

  “You’re staying, I hope.” He flipped off a bank of lights. “Sandra’s bringing a karaoke machine.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “We could perform a duet together, you and I.”

  “No, we couldn’t.”

  A few students were waiting for him in the corridor. She hung back and put on her shoes. When he rejoined her, she said, “Why aren’t you even a tiny bit angry with me, a tiny bit sulky?”

  He slipped into a pair of worn rubber sandals. “Do you think you’re the first person ever to have stood me up?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re one amongst a teeming multitude.”


  They smiled at each other. He’s in love with her, Rose thought. It was plain enough that she couldn’t understand how Harriet held his gaze.

  “Stay,” he said.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Harriet, Harriet, Harriet.” He wrapped his thick arms around her and rocked her from side to side. With the mat and her elbows between their bodies, it was awkward but nice. “We have a buffet. You remember buffets? Hard-boiled eggs and jellied salads.”

  “I’ve got a four-hundred-page manuscript to plow through.”

  “Don’t plow. Skim. Glide.”

  She had to laugh. “I need to go home first, but maybe I can come back later.”

  His arms opened. “See how easy that was.”

  “I’m not promising anything.”

  “And yet my hopes are up.”

  She started walking off. “Bye, Marsh.”

  “If you play your cards right, I might even ask you to dance.”

  She entered the women’s changing room. At the lockers she unfastened a key pinned to the inside of her waistband and opened locker number eight. She pulled off her tights and T-shirt and removed a flimsy red dress from a pink padded hanger. Harriet’s mood took a sexual swerve. Rose strained to hear her thoughts, to break down the wall. Her own thought, her exhilarated certainty, was that Harriet was meeting David.

  One second Rose was inside Harriet, putting on the red dress, the next she was back in her own body. She clutched the solid flesh of her legs and arms. Her eyes streamed tears. Why this sadness? she wondered. Harriet hadn’t been sad.

  She turned on the lamp. The Toronto directory was still under her phone, and she flipped through the pages to the Ys. Yoga, Yoga Studios.

  Mostly she reached voice mail. On something like her tenth try, yet another recorded message came on, and she was about to hang up when a live woman said, “Fruit of Life.”

  Rose asked for Marsh. By now she was convinced there was no such person.

  “Marsh!” called the woman.

  “Wait—”

  “Good evening.”

  That deep, English-accented voice. At the sound of it Rose didn’t faint or die. On the contrary, she crashed to life. Short, tough gasps pumped from her belly.