Little Sister

by Barbara Gowdy

  “I got your messages,” she said. “My cell was turned off, and I didn’t realize until I was home, and then it was late.” A dog barked at his end. “Are you outside?”

  “I’m near your house.”

  That woke her. “Where?”

  “Davisville and Cleveland.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” he said aggressively. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  He sounded drunk. Except he never got drunk. “Victor, I should have phoned last night,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I need to see you. I’m not up to faking pleasantries with Fiona. I’ll wait here.”

  “Okay. Give me five minutes.”

  He was standing at the bus stop and writing in his notebook, getting down some important thought. He wore very blue blue jeans and his loud Hawaiian shirt, tucked in. Normally, her heart opened to see his diligent, unfashionable person in the distance, but the writing had her envisioning all the drafts of his books mounted on his office floor, like foundation pillars for a house you doubted would ever get built, and it came to her that in his perfectionism and terror of being judged, he was like Marlin Lau.

  He didn’t glance up until she was right next to him. He capped the pen, clipped it to his shirt pocket, and tucked the notebook inside. “Thank you for coming,” he said. No kiss, no smile. He looked north and south, then north again, his attention snagged by a basketball net in a driveway. He would never live near such a place, basketball nets equaling children, equaling noise.

  “Where should we go?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said and started walking up Cleveland.

  She fell in beside him. After so much rain, the lawns were brilliant green, but the roses drooped in the humid warmth. “Let’s cross the street,” she said.

  Even over there, out of the sun, she was hot. Her legs were tired, and she asked him to slow down.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  They walked on. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?” she said.

  “In bed Friday, you were different.”

  “So were you.”

  “Because you were.”

  So much for renewing their sex life. “You seemed to enjoy yourself.”

  A young girl on a bike wobbled toward them, and they stepped off the sidewalk and let her pass. “Bikes are illegal on sidewalks,” he said.

  “Yeah, kids should ride on the road and get run over.”

  Another long silence. Then, “Rose, when I say I love you, you don’t say it back.”

  “I do,” she said uncertainly.

  “You don’t. Not since Fiona’s diagnosis.”

  Anger rustled through her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s taken a lot out of you, understandably. And it’s only going to get worse.”

  “So I should pack her off to a nursing home?”

  “You should be researching them, yes.”

  “Don’t tell me what I should do with my mother.” Now she was the one walking fast. “I know what you think of mothers.”

  “What are you talking about? I worshiped my mother.”

  “I’m giving you all the time I can.”

  He halted. “Rose.”

  She turned.

  “Are you seeing someone?”

  “No.”

  He came over to her and stared into her eyes with his one good eye. He was checking, she knew, for the dilated pupils of a liar.

  “I’m not seeing anyone,” she said. She wasn’t, not in the way he meant, but she didn’t trust her pupils to make such fine distinctions, so she dropped her gaze. An earthworm writhed at her feet. In honor of Ava, she picked it up and carried it to the lawn.

  “It’s my fault, too,” Victor said. “We’ve both grown complacent.”

  She surprised herself by saying, “We’ve grown apart.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  She looked at him. “Yes.”

  “All of a sudden we’ve grown apart.”

  “Not all of a sudden.” Having no idea what she was going to come out with until she came out with it was like being in Harriet.

  “So you’re saying we’ve been growing apart for some time.”

  His hair was shorter. He must have had it cut yesterday. “For a while,” she said gently. “A year.”

  “A year.”

  “Or so.”

  “We’ve been growing apart for a year. Or so. That’s what you think.”

  “Victor, you know what I think? To be honest? I think we need a break.” It wasn’t, after all, like being in Harriet, it was like having somebody in her, a strong, pragmatic mind that had ordered her to stand back and make way. “A trial separation,” she said, emphasizing, as apparently David had not, the word trial.

  There were more stranded worms. Worms everywhere. She began picking them up and tossing them to safe ground.

  “For how long?” Victor said. The fight had left his voice.

  “A month?”

  “That would take us to . . .” He got out his notebook and flipped the pages. “August third.”

  “Okay.” She studied the fat worm in her hand. It might have been a beaded necklace, its pale, swollen middle segment an opal. “How do you tell a male from a female?” she asked.

  “Worms are hermaphrodites.” He flipped another page. “How should we do this? I call you, or . . .”

  “You call.”

  “What time?”

  “Noon?”

  “Twelve PM, phone Rose,” he said, writing.

  She went over to someone’s garden and dug a hole and put the worm inside. “Okay,” she said. Victor wouldn’t want to touch her with all the slime and dirt on her hands. “Until then.”

  He pocketed the notebook and gave her a tight smile. She hoped her smile wasn’t too pitying. Or too buoyant.

  She entered the house by the back door, returned to the den, and lay on the sofa. When she woke, the TV was blaring in the living room, and dark clouds were rising above the houses behind theirs. She quickly showered and dressed.

  “I’m taking the car,” she told her mother. There was a growl of thunder, but she judged it to be some distance away.

  Fiona turned the TV down. “That was a long nap.”

  “I must have got your hangover.”

  “Try not to get my brain damage.”

  “What time will you be leaving?”

  “The usual time.”

  “Will you let me pick you up if it’s raining?” The episode would be over by then.

  “It’ll be over by then,” Fiona said.

  Rose blinked. “What will?”

  “The rain. I’ll walk.”

  The storm was moving quickly. Rose rolled through stop signs to beat it, but as she turned onto Mount Pleasant a lightning strike focused her vision. The thunder was a single loud report followed by a horde of flecks already starting to assemble.

  She pulled over. You don’t have to be in the office was her final thought before exiting her body.

  She stood on a grassy bank above Lake Ontario. The water was slate gray and choppy, giant waves crashing on the industrial rubble that held the bank in place. Near Scarborough Bluffs, windsurfers were still out. To the west, the CN Tower shone against thunderheads branched with flares of light, and glittering inside. Slanted lines below the clouds indicated rain.

  She was smoking. She wore blue-striped shorts and red plastic sandals. On the middle finger of her right hand was a ruby ring too big for her. Every time she exhaled, she slid the ruby back into place.

  Rose knew where she was: Ashbridge’s Bay Park. One Sunday last summer she and Victor had walked along this ridge and argued about the city’s decision to fortify the bank with concrete slabs from wrecked sidewalks and building foundations. She’d said they should have used rocks and boulders. Victor had been all for the recycled waste. “It’s a money saver,” he’d said.

  “It’s ugly,” s
he said.

  “It’s efficient,” he said.

  Inside Harriet now, Rose was staring at the black horizon line. You could get struck by lightning up here, she warned. She felt heard but disregarded. She pitched the cigarette, and the ring flew off and slid to the shore.

  She looked at it nestled between two stones, the only scrap of color. Harriet seemed not to care.

  But she went after it.

  Crevices jammed with fine gravel zigzagged down the bank. She followed these paths, clutching the rough edges of slabs. At the bottom, she retrieved the ring, numbly considered it, and put it on her finger. She stepped out of her sandals. She walked into the frigid water and kept walking. Waves smacked the length of her body.

  By now Rose understood what was happening, and she was screaming into Harriet’s enthrallment. Not until she went under did it come to her that she, too, would die. There was a sound like an electrical short, and then deafness, and then, without Harriet, on her own, she was a million miles above Earth, orbiting sooty smudges and silver shafts that found shape and became demons and angels, hideously elastic demons pissing into rusty tin cans, slender stone angels extending glass goblets.

  She accepted a goblet. She brought it to her lips. Immediately, she was back in Harriet and bursting from the water, gulping air, floundering. It’s okay! Rose said to her. Calm down!

  She sagged.

  Walk!

  She let the waves throw her. She stubbed her toe. The pain was sharp, but she didn’t react.

  She reached the shore, and Rose said, Put on your sandals. She put them on. Rose said where to climb, where to step.

  At the top she sank to her knees. A warm, steady rain had begun to fall. She lay down. Her heart boomed. Her mouth opened and closed out of sync with her short, labored breaths. She felt for the ruby ring, but it had come off in the water. She felt for her jacket—no, it was a shoulder bag, the mauve one—and tucked it under her stomach.

  The drive was a feverish twenty minutes of lights turning green at her approach and downpours lasting the space of an intersection. Stay where you are, Rose prayed. Wait for me.

  The shoulder bag absorbed her. If you wanted to drown yourself, why bring a purse that size? For the cigarettes? Why not just bring the cigarettes and lighter, and leave the purse behind? Harriet might have driven to the lake contemplating suicide, but Rose was convinced that she attempted it on impulse. And then shielding the purse from the rain, caring about it, surely this demonstrated a will to live.

  She made a right onto the Ashbridge’s Bay entry road and slowed down to peer at oncoming drivers. She cruised through the lot, looking for Harriet in parked vehicles before pulling in as close to the water as she could. The sun had come out, and people were strolling on the paths. Rose made a beeline across the spongy lawn. She scanned left and right, dismissing everybody except for a little brunette woman who (Rose detoured for a closer inspection) turned out to be a boy.

  The bank lay hidden behind dogwood bushes. Rose was there before she saw that Harriet wasn’t. She went to the exact spot, the flattened grass, and looked over the cliff edge. Nothing, no red sandals, no body floating on the jagged water.

  She returned to her car, breathing hard now. If she had been found slumped over her steering wheel at the side of the road, the cause of death would have been ruled what? Heart failure? Stroke? In the obituaries on the same day there would be an entry for another woman, this one drowned while swimming alone. Or they might omit the circumstances and just say “suddenly.”

  At the theater the first thing she did was check that the Weather Network was still calling for clear skies overnight. She then lit a cigarette and read e-mails, dozens and dozens. She hoped Victor had managed to bury himself in work. The truth was, having him out of her life was like having a piano lifted off her chest.

  She craved sleep, but she avoided the sofa, and started writing up last night’s episode. Lloyd arrived. Lloyd, she thought, jolted, and crept over to the door and shut it.

  For tonight’s first feature, The Seven Year Itch, her father used to get his friend Mr. Donnelly to man the projection booth so that he could sit in the auditorium. This was because on September 15, 1954, her father happened to be visiting New York City, and when he heard that they were filming Marilyn Monroe on Lexington, he ran from West Eighth, a distance of three miles. Near the back of the crowd, nobody taller to block his view, he watched take after take of Marilyn’s skirt flying up. “It’s not a thing you forget,” he would say the rest of his life, as people say of the pyramids.

  This evening, at dinner, Fiona asked Rose if she planned to carry on the tradition.

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. It would be the first screening of The Seven Year Itch since her father died.

  “You can just as easily nap in there as you can in the office,” Fiona said. To Lloyd she said, “Rose had a three-hour nap this afternoon. She’s tired from being up all night gallivanting.”

  “From being up all night playing online poker,” Rose said, afraid that Fiona would go on to tell Lloyd she was having an affair.

  “What?” Fiona said. “Poker?”

  “The high-stakes games.”

  Lloyd passed her a swift, measuring look. “How high?”

  “Hundreds of thousands,” Rose said, and he smiled into his coffee.

  “Oh, you’re pulling our leg,” Fiona said. “Well, as long as you’re not having online sex.”

  “Mom,” Rose groaned. She stood and rinsed her plate.

  “I wouldn’t even know how to find online sex,” Fiona said.

  Rose felt her face heating up. Her mother was sensing her heightened sexual arousal but, thank God, had yet to zero in on its target. The arousal itself Rose could explain only by thinking she must have brought it back from Harriet, although why it should land on Lloyd and not on one of the younger patrons—or on Victor—left her at a loss.

  She put on a suit jacket (Fiona liked her to dress more formally when she worked in the lobby) and helped at the concession. Also to please her mother, she slipped into the auditorium. She’d seen The Seven Year Itch twice and expected to fall asleep.

  The opposite happened: she got caught up. Tom Ewell was like her, swinging between one reality and another, entranced by his fluorescent imagination, letting things get out of hand. It was difficult to sit through, but so as not to deal with her clairvoyant mother she stayed until the credits.

  She helped at the snack bar again, and then she went to her office for a cigarette. She leaned out the window. Her smoke ribboned up to a royal-blue sky. People at the café crossed their legs and drank from their glasses, and welded cell phones to their ears. Eventually the unassailable integrity of the scene reassured Rose.

  But her apprehension didn’t go away, it transferred to Harriet. Had Harriet told Marsh about her suicide attempt? Rose’s feeling was no, she hadn’t. The Harriet who had tucked her purse under her stomach had tucked her emotions into such a tight pellet that Rose couldn’t see her telling anybody anything. She turned on her computer and found the yoga center’s number. “Harriet almost killed herself this afternoon,” she would say to Marsh, nothing more. She would use her cell with its blocked number. She would disguise her voice.

  The machine answered. She hung up and searched on the website for a list of instructors. Marsh might have gone home, but she needed his last name to find the number.

  There was no such list.

  Her alibi was that she was meeting some university friends for a drink. “Impromptu girls’ night out,” she said, avoiding her mother’s level look.

  She made an effort as she drove to picture Harriet among friends. But it was Ava’s drawn, freckled face that accompanied her. She didn’t talk to it. Talking to Ava was a comfort she’d never felt entitled to, other than to say, “I’m sorry,” and “It should have been me.” Flares of guilt and agony in that vein. No matter what Rose said, she had her life.

  Although sometimes she had the impression that i
t wasn’t the life she’d started out on. Not lately, not since the onset of the episodes, but every so often since Ava’s death she felt as if she’d changed tracks and was ten or a hundred or a thousand parallel lives over from the life she had started out on. She went to bed on one track and woke up on another very much like the last, identical as far as she was concerned, all the inconsistencies having been addressed in sleep. Imperfectly addressed, of course, or there wouldn’t be these moments.

  AUGUST 1982

  Rose dreamed that Gordon’s truck jostled up the dirt road between their backyard and the neighbor’s mustard field. It was a way of approaching the barn without being seen from the house. He swung onto their property and stopped. Dread sifted through her even before he pushed open the passenger door and Ava appeared from behind the barn and climbed in. Off they drove, continuing northward.

  She woke with a lurch. She walked next door to Ava’s room, shivering and still frightened, and stood near the bed to establish the rise and fall of her sister’s chest. Shame at how she’d been treating Ava, combined with the fastidious demands of resentment, kept her from getting in under the covers. Back in her own bed she surrendered to what she’d known for days: Shannon wasn’t coming. Asking her to phone had been a mistake. Repulsive people asked, magnetic people waited.

  She and Ava returned to how they’d been, except Rose was listless and sad. She felt demoted, having to play with her little sister after learning how to identify native plants and build a lean-to with an older girl who was a genius and had the third eye. She often thought about the lean-to. It wasn’t an exercise in anguish, because she removed Shannon from the picture. She saw herself collecting the branches on her own, arranging them, stuffing ferns into the cracks. She imagined equipping the interior with a plate and cup and spoon, a bottle of water, peanut butter and bread, a knife, a flashlight, her sketchbook and her colored pencils. Everything a person needed she would have in that tiny shelter of her own making.

  There were no ferns anywhere near their property and no branches that their father hadn’t broken up and thrown onto the woodpile. One cool, gray morning in late August, with Ava trailing along and asking what they were doing, Rose searched the roadsides between their farm and the next concession over. They found nothing, only a rotten red-and-white pole, like a barber pole.