Little Sister

by Barbara Gowdy

  She would never find them in time.

  She grasped the newel post. She cried a little. She went into the ladies’ and stroked the door latches and sat on the toilet seat. She hoped to pick up a psychic charge from the things Harriet had touched so recently, but she was far more caught up in the déjà vu, which she took as proof of mind transmission. From now on when she spoke to Harriet, she might really be heard, and to hear an inner voice separate from your own (a disembodied voice if ever there was one) would be like hearing the voice of God.

  She left the washroom in a kind of delirium. Midway along the corridor the silence from below finally reached her.

  Her mother and Lloyd were at the kitchen table. A sherry bottle stood between them, and they each had a glass.

  “Here she is!” Fiona said gaily.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” said Rose, for whom comprehension seemed to be clicking through those blurring, sharpening lenses the optometrist slides in front of your eyes. “You can’t mix Reminyl with alcohol.”

  “It seems I can,” Fiona said.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” Lloyd said. He went to take Fiona’s glass.

  But she held it to her chest and said, “I’m fine,” as if turning down a refill.

  He collected his own drink and the saucer he’d been using as an ashtray and carried them to the counter. A couple of puffs on his cigarette, and he threw it out the open door. Rose picked up the sherry bottle.

  “Help yourself,” Fiona said.

  It was Lloyd’s cigarette Rose wanted. “I’m driving,” she reminded her mother.

  Fiona made a dismissive sound. “Anyway,” she said, “Lloyd’s been telling me about his cousin. He was a famous mascot for a baseball team. Tell her, Lloyd. Tell her what he would do. Mad Dog McNutt.”

  Lloyd was closing and locking the alley door. “Another time.”

  Fiona charged on: “He would throw a Frisbee, chase it down, and catch it himself, in his own mouth.” She sipped her drink. “Now that’s what I call a go-getter.”

  She wasn’t slurring or incoherent. Rose put the sherry back on the shelf. Her mother would drink when and however much she liked, if not from this bottle, then from one she could easily walk up the street and buy.

  “Mad Dog McNutt,” Fiona said, raising her glass.

  “McNeil,” Lloyd said.

  “Mad Dog McNeil,” Fiona said.

  Lloyd glanced at his watch, and it came to Rose that, but for his letting himself be plied with stale sherry on unpaid overtime, her mother would have gone up to the office and found her blacked out. Suddenly abjectly grateful, she offered to drive him to the subway. “You’ve missed your bus,” she said.

  “I’ll walk. It’s high summer out there.”

  The kitchen light lent his tattoos a metallic glaze, and on his bicep Rose saw the words Temet Nosce. Know thyself, she translated, remembering it from somewhere. It seemed like a message to her personally, like a postscript to the episode: get your own head straight before hanging around in someone else’s.

  He saw her looking and smiled.

  “How do you do that?” she said.

  “Know yourself? Meditate, for one.”

  “Meditate,” Rose said doubtfully.

  “Shut your eyes and look into the nothingness.”

  Rose shut her eyes and envisioned Harriet’s face. She opened them and thought that if she knew herself lately it was only by virtue of knowing she wasn’t Harriet.

  Fiona stood. “Where did I put my purse, where did I put my purse?” she said with a slur now, and an accent. Either she had suffered one of her ministrokes or the liquor was hitting her. “We’re driving you to the subway station,” she told Lloyd. “No, no, no.” Holding up a hand. “That’s how it is.”

  Once they were in the car, Fiona decided they would drive him all the way home. “I want to see where you live,” she said over his objections. Rose hoped it wasn’t someplace depressing. She let the two of them do the talking—Fiona laughing and wisecracking—and replayed the episode. The car seemed to steer itself on rails.

  Lloyd lived in the basement apartment of a plain brown low-rise across from a Dairy Queen. So not depressing, more like poignant, especially since a cat waited in the window.

  “My daughter’s,” he said.

  “What’s her name?” Fiona asked.

  “My daughter or the cat?”

  “You’ve told me your daughter’s name. Although, what is it again?”

  “Ariel. The cat’s Napoleon.”

  “Better than the other way around!”

  After Lloyd got out, Fiona moved to the front seat. Rose, looking at Napoleon, thought she should marry Lloyd and save his daughter and cat from basement apartments. She imagined the sex, Lloyd’s weathered face as he labored toward orgasm, and was engulfed by a richly erotic feeling.

  Fiona was singing, “Let’s all go to the Dairy Queen, the Dairy Queen, the Dairy Queen.”

  Rose returned to the episode. Harriet joking about having an abortion frightened her. She rewound to Thursday and Harriet saying, “I need to know the option of suicide exists, I don’t need to act on it.” This Rose understood. She’d had her black moments after Ava’s death, she knew that telling yourself I can always jump off a bridge conferred a sense of vigilance and security, like carrying a gun in a sketchy neighborhood. Except, why was Harriet talking about suicide in the first place? Her circumstances weren’t unspeakably horrible. She had a good job, friends, a devoted sister.

  But the sister was worried, and Harriet took antidepressants. She must be thin-skinned, Rose thought.

  Ava had been thin-skinned. She had never despaired about her own circumstances, however, so there was that difference. Animals suffering and dying, physical deformities, beautiful fragile beloved objects getting wrecked, this was what had pained Ava, sometimes wilting her to the ground in a type of faint she called “the funny feeling.”

  “What’s the number one suicide profession?” Fiona said in her normal voice.

  Rose looked over at her, slumped in her seat. “What are you talking about?” she said. That her mother’s mind should be running in the same morbid current was extremely unsettling.

  Fiona attempted to sit straight. “The people who commit the most suicides. Lloyd was saying, but I forget. Number two is dentists. Number three is mascots.”

  “Lloyd’s cousin killed himself?”

  “Not him. Others.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Mad Dog McNutt. How am I doing? I’m three sheets to the wind. That’s all right.”

  “It’s just with Reminyl, it’s dangerous.”

  “A man is about to be executed,” Fiona said, letting herself slump again. “He’s lashed to a post. Blindfolded. They offer him a cigarette. He says, ‘I’m trying to cut down.’”

  Rose was silenced. Then she said, as she was obliged to say, “You might live a long time yet.”

  Fiona grunted.

  AUGUST 1982

  It was true about Gordon and the yellow hard hat—it never came off. In the unshaded yard where he taught Ava to ride, sweat rained down his face, but the hat stayed on.

  “He would be cooler in a cowboy hat,” Rose said to Ava.

  “He has to sometimes climb up on roofs,” Ava said sternly.

  For all the things Ava knew about Gordon, she didn’t know he had stepdaughters who fought like a pair of weasels. Apparently Gordon had spoken of them only to Rose, since neither of her parents mentioned them, either. Whenever he ambled over to her during a lesson, she prayed it wasn’t to talk about the stepdaughters. Not until the beginning of August did she let herself believe he had forgotten his plan or changed his mind. “The coast is clear!” she wrote in her diary on August 2.

  On August 5 he arrived with the stepdaughters in tow. It was shortly after lunch, a hot day between riding-lesson days. Fiona was washing her paintbrushes in the kitchen sink, and Ava and Rose, in the living room, were working on a Popeye jigsaw puzzl
e. Ava heard the truck and ran to the window. “It’s Gordon, he’s stopping!” she cried. Less rapturously, she said, “He’s got two girls with him.”

  While they were still on the porch stairs, Gordon introduced them: Brianna Grace and Shannon. “We happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said.

  What neighborhood? Rose thought sourly. Her mother said, “Come in, come in! Isn’t this a treat!”

  Brianna Grace, the younger one, cowered. She wouldn’t let go of Gordon’s overalls, so the two of them squashed through the door together. She wore a shiny pink party dress trimmed in gold sequins, some of which hung from their threads. Over her shoulder and secured across her belly was a hard leather purse, a lady’s purse. Her ears stuck out of her mousy hair. To Rose, she looked like a girl in a movie about poor farm people.

  Shannon looked like a tough city girl, lean and boyish, short spiky hair, black sneakers, a black sleeveless T-shirt that showed off her biceps. She ducked past Gordon and went to the window, where she fell into an examination of her many rings.

  “Have you had your lunch?” Fiona asked.

  “We’re all tanked up, yep,” Gordon said.

  “What about some nice cold lemonade?”

  Gordon put it to the stepdaughters. “Lemonade?”

  Shannon responded directly to Fiona, an unsmiling but not unsociable “Sure, thanks.” Brianna Grace nodded with her face against Gordon’s stomach. It was hard for Rose to associate her with the word weasel, let alone imagine her fighting like one.

  “So, Rosie,” Gordon said, “I was telling Shannon how I thought you was thirteen, the same as her.”

  Rose hugged herself to conceal her breasts. They had started growing in June, along with the vegetable garden and at the same terrible speed.

  “Rose is eleven,” said Ava in a bright, instructing voice.

  “And you, Red, if I’m not mistaken, have a tenth birthday coming up.”

  Ava’s face opened. “On August thirty-first.”

  “Brianna Grace is ten this November.” He rubbed his hands as though, with their ages established, they should start playing a game.

  “I didn’t know you had stepdaughters,” Ava said shyly.

  “Sure you did.” He jiggled his hard hat. “Ah, cripes,” he muttered, and Brianna Grace released him and put her thumb in her mouth.

  “Why don’t we all move to the table?” Fiona said, lifting the tray of drinks.

  Gordon unbuckled his chin strap.

  “Here comes the dent,” Shannon quietly singsonged.

  He tore the hard hat off.

  Ava let out a cry. Rose froze. Above his right ear was a purple, scooped-out place, a less drastic but still grisly version of Rose’s story about him missing the top of his skull.

  He ground his palm in it. The dent. “Sorry for the freak show,” he said. “It’s where I had the tumor removed.”

  Fiona put down the tray. “Tumor?”

  “You didn’t hear?” He scratched his bald head all over. “This trial drug makes you feel like a thousand black flies are going at you.” He pulled out a chair, and Brianna Grace climbed into the one next to him. “Yeah,” he said, “so February seven I had a malignant tumor removed. Size of a golf ball. I thought you would’ve heard.”

  “We had no idea. I’m so sorry. Would cortisone cream help?”

  “Nah, creams are useless.”

  Ava weaved unsteadily to the table. “Give her a glass,” Fiona told Rose, but then she came over herself and cupped Ava’s hands around a glass and said, “Drink.”

  “I’m okay,” Ava murmured.

  “I wasn’t going to go public until I got the all-clear,” Gordon said. He put his hard hat back on. “Everyone found out anyways, from the nurses or whatever.” His eyes followed Shannon as she walked past the empty chair beside him and sat next to Ava. “Brain cancer. I’m going to beat it, no question about that.”

  “Of course you are,” Fiona said heartily. She had opened a box of Oreos and was dumping them onto a plate. “A positive attitude is half the battle.”

  “I’m back to my fighting weight. The cut is healing up.” He held out his arm.

  “I can barely see it,” Ava submitted tremulously.

  “Yep, it’s healing up good.”

  To make room for the cookies, Fiona pushed aside the center tray with its paraphernalia of salt and pepper shakers, Bicycle playing cards, hand lotion, sugar packets, and a ceramic cow. Shannon reached for the cards, poured them from the box, and began a loose, overhand shuffle. She had a ring on every finger and on both thumbs, smooth rings like metal nuts but brown and grained like wood.

  “Oreos,” said Gordon and helped himself to one and gobbled it down. They all took one then. Brianna Grace slipped hers into her purse. Shannon pulled hers apart and licked the icing with a private, pleasured expression Rose found shocking. Also shocking was that Brianna Grace put another cookie in her purse, and then another and another. She was emptying the plate.

  Nobody else noticed or cared. Gordon and Fiona were discussing his wife’s job at the Honda plant, her shift change from nights to days. “Which is why I’m dragging the girls around,” he said. He turned back to Brianna Grace. “Isn’t that right, Bree?”

  Brianna Grace snapped the purse shut.

  “We can’t leave ’em on their own,” he said, “or they’re at each other’s throats.”

  He wants to leave them here, Rose realized, alarmed.

  Fiona said, “Well, at least you’re spending time together, the three of you. You see more dads with their kids nowadays.”

  “He’s not our dad,” Shannon said.

  “Anyways,” Gordon said. He pushed himself up. Brianna Grace stood as well, making no effort to conceal her bulging purse.

  “I better be off,” Gordon said.

  “But you only just got here,” Fiona said.

  “I’m getting a blood test.”

  “Sit down,” Shannon told her sister. “We’re staying.”

  “Oh, you are?” said Fiona, catching on at last. “Well, you’re most welcome.”

  “That’d help me out a lot,” Gordon said.

  “I was afraid you were all going to disappear!”

  “I shouldn’t be more’n a couple of hours.” He began edging toward the door, hands high. Brianna Grace clamped onto his leg. He warned her with several clipped Heys but she clung like a drowning person. “She pulls this at the clinic,” he told Fiona, who crouched to Brianna Grace’s level and asked did she want to see the pony?

  “She’s afraid of ponies,” Shannon said.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Gordon said. He roughly yanked the child by her wrists. She screamed, and there was the gap where Shannon had knocked out her tooth with a pool cue.

  “Do you want to see my dolls?” cried Ava. Ava, who hated having her dolls touched.

  Brianna Grace let Gordon go. “Are they Barbies?” she lisped.

  “I have seven Barbies,” Ava said.

  Gordon made his escape. The little girls went upstairs. “Mind the paint tray!” Fiona called after them. To Rose and Shannon she said, “Can I leave you to entertain yourselves?”

  No! Rose thought.

  “Sure,” Shannon said. “There’s lots to do here.” She reached again for the playing cards.

  “If you want to run through the sprinkler, Rose will lend you a bathing suit.”

  When she was gone, Shannon said, “I’m not the running-through-sprinklers type.” She resumed her casual shuffling. “Have you ever heard of ring power?” she asked.

  Rose said she hadn’t.

  “Okay,” Shannon said. “The power of the universe comes to the earth through plant life. So if you wear wood on your fingers, but even if you wear vines or stems, you grow stronger in the five ways each of your fingers stands for.” She put down the cards. “Honesty,” she said, holding up her thumb. She tapped each of her other fingers in turn: “Health, creativity, judgment, memory. Can you remember that?”

>   “I think so,” Rose said.

  “Honesty, health, creativity, judgment, memory,” Shannon said. “You have interesting hands.”

  “I do?” Rose opened them. She turned them over.

  “Very interesting,” Shannon said. She stood and began to walk around, plucking at her hair, spiking it out. “There are seven types of hands. Your hands are a mixture of two types, the thinking type and the practicality type.” She nudged her foot at the curled linoleum under which the ants, long since vanished, had carried crumbs. “Dry rot,” she pronounced. She opened the cutlery drawer, took out the spatula, and slapped it hard on the counter.

  Rose grew uneasy. “Do you want to play cards?”

  “Like what?”

  “Rummy?”

  “I always win for two reasons. One, I have an IQ of a hundred and forty-five. That’s genius level.”

  Rose didn’t doubt it.

  “Two, I have the third eye. I see pictures in my mind. When I play cards, I see what’s in the other person’s hand ninety percent of the time.”

  It seemed impossible to question this. “But that’s not every time,” Rose pointed out.

  Shannon dropped the spatula back in the drawer. “It’s your funeral.”

  She won game after game. She would shut her eyes for a few seconds, and then discard something Rose had no use for. Between these silent moments she talked about magnets and magnetic attraction. Magnetic people didn’t need people, and that was what made them attractive. The opposite of magnetic was repulsive. Repulsive people needed people. “Brianna Grace is a perfect example of repulsive,” she said. “Obviously.” A perfect example of magnetic was Shannon’s boyfriend. The two of them played strip poker. “He’s down to, like, a sock,” she said, “and I’ve still got all my clothes on. It’s a riot.”

  Rose’s face burned.

  “Have you ever played strip poker?”

  “No,” Rose said, tortured. She discarded without thinking: a five of diamonds.

  “I’ll take that,” Shannon said. “Well, if you ever do”—she laid down her hand, winning yet again—“your glasses count as clothes. Rings don’t count, glasses do.” She stood and went to the dining room doorway. “This is a solid house. You can’t hear anybody. In my house the walls are some kind of crappy Sheetrock that leaks toxic gas. It’s giving Brianna Grace brain damage. But try telling that to Gordon. He has no clue about toxic gas. He’s so uneducated.”