TRAVELS WITH NICKI
I stood in front of gate C-12 in the Newark airport, waiting for Nicki. I had taken the train from Princeton to Newark. My sister was soon to arrive from Boston, and, after an hour layover, which we’d planned to spend in the frequent-flier lounge, we’d be on our way off for a week in Fort Lauderdale with our grandmother and, eventually, our mother and our brother, Jon.
From my vantage point at the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, I watched my sister’s plane lumber toward the gate. Passengers struggling with luggage or wrangling fussy babies piled out of the walkway. I shifted my backpack from one shoulder to the other and checked my watch. When I looked up, Nicki was stomping into the lounge, dragging her duffel bag, looking mightily displeased.
At nineteen, Nicki could probably still pass for a twelve-year-old, in her ratty canvas sneakers, white overalls, and faded Run-DMC T-shirt, and with an oversize lime-green wind-breaker tied around her waist. Her purse, a little number in black silk and gold sequins, which I recognized as one of our mother’s ancient cast-offs, was slung across her chest, and dangling from a leather cord around her neck was a tiny plastic vase with fake flowers and blue plastic water. Her dark brown curls were piled haphazardly on her head, and her little mouth was pursed in its customary frown.
I bent down to hug her. “Hi, Nicki.”
She sidestepped my embrace, air-kissed my cheek, and pushed her duffel bag into my arms.
“I have a kidney infection,” she announced by way of hello. She pulled her backpack off her shoulders and shoved it on top of the duffel bag. “Take this, oaf,” she said, and headed off down the hall.
The frequent-flier lounge, a study in tasteful beige carpet and gray couches, was filled with businessmen murmuring into the telephones or talking to one another. It had an open bar that I hastily steered my sister away from, and a number of snacks laid out buffet-style on a table in the center of the room. Nicki plopped down on a couch across from two businessmen in blue suits, while I fixed myself a plate.
Nicki looked at it longingly. “Can I have your plum?” she wheedled.
“Get your own,” I said, sitting down beside her and pointing to the fruit bowl. “Kidney infection!” Nicki said loudly enough to cause the businessmen to stop their conversation and stare at her. She gave them a cordial wave and stared meaningfully at my food. I handed it over. She accepted it with a brief inclination of her head, devoured the plum with noisy relish, then grabbed my hand and spit the pit into my open palm.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I said. The suits grabbed their briefcases and departed for a quieter couch. Nicki gave them another wave as I tossed the pit and scrubbed my hand with paper napkins. “Bring me some salted almonds, Josie,” she instructed. “I’m sick.”
• • •
My mother had never provided me with a plausible explanation as to why Nicki and I were born a scant eleven months apart. “I loved being pregnant,” she told me when I was fourteen and we were jogging side by side in the swimming pool.
“Ma, nobody likes being pregnant that much.”
“Well, I did.” She pumped her arms up and down over her head. Her breasts, restrained by her thick-strapped, practical tank suit, heaved in the water, churning up miniature whirlpools. I tried not to look, knowing that mine were doing the exact same thing. “I loved being pregnant, I loved being a mother.” She smiled dreamily. “After you were born I couldn’t wait to have more kids.”
I kept my mouth shut without observing that there were almost four years between Nicki and Jon. Whatever mother lust she’d had, however she’d enjoyed her pregnancies and her newborns, it seemed that Nicki’s childhood had cured her but good.
My sister and I shared a bedroom until I left for college, which should have at least given us a shot at friendship. In fact, we were nothing alike. I was quiet, bookish, and so shy I once rode the school bus all the way to the terminal because I couldn’t work up the courage to tell the driver he’d missed my stop. Most of my friends were imaginary. I’d been that way since I was a baby. “You slept through the night at two weeks,” my mother told me. “Instead of giving you midnight feedings, we’d wake you up every two hours to make sure you were still alive. You weren’t really into interaction,” she concluded. “You just liked your mobile a lot.”
Nicki, in contrast, clawed the mobile off the ceiling before her six-month birthday, and flung herself out of her crib before she turned one. She was into interaction: the more violent, energetic, and potentially painful, the better. Family myth had it that her first word was not “Mommy” or “Daddy” but “gimme.” Our vinyl-covered photo albums show a delicately built girl with long lashes and dimples, usually in motion. The strained, weary expression of whichever parent or relative was in the picture with her told the story better.
• • •
Nicki and I found our seats in the back of the plane. I fastened my seat belt low and tight around my hips and pulled Madame Bovary out of my backpack. Nicki slapped it out of my hands. “Vacation!” she said, handing me a copy of People. “I can’t wait to see Jon.”
“And terrorize him,” I muttered, bending to retrieve my book. The passengers in the row ahead of us took their seats: a mother with a flushed, cranky toddler in her arms. The child had a phenomenally wet, deep cough, and within minutes of takeoff Nicki dubbed him the Exorcist Baby. Every time he coughed, she shuddered, then giggled. The mother looked at us with a tired smile. “I bet you’re waiting for something to come flying out of his mouth,” she said.
“No,” Nicki whispered to me, “I’m actually waiting for his head to spin around.”
I shoved my book into her hands. “Here,” I said. “Improve yourself.”
Nicki tucked the book in the seatback pocket and adjusted her snug shirt, then the straps of her overalls. “I don’t need improving,” she said. I sighed and pulled Heart of Darkness out of my backpack. Five pages later, Nicki was slumped on my shoulder, her mouth open, her eyelids a dark fringe against her cheek. When the flight attendant zipped down the aisle, I asked her for a blanket, and when it came, I pulled it around my sister’s shoulders and clicked off the light over her head.
• • •
Nicki woke up with a start as soon as we’d started our descent, rubbed her eyes briskly, and opened the window shade to peer down at the cars inching along the highway. “Check it out,” she said. “You can see how bad they drive from all the way up here. Also, the stewardess did not offer me the beverage of my choice.”
“I think we’re supposed to call them flight attendants. And you were asleep,” I pointed out. “I got you a Diet Coke.”
“Well, that’s the beverage of your choice. Not mine. I wanted Chardonnay.” She rummaged around in the seat pocket and finally found an evaluation form. Under the section on “flight attendants,” she checked off “poor.” In the comment section, she scribbled, “Was not provided with drink.” A picture of the founder of Northwest Airlines appeared on the form’s front page. Nicki drew horns and a beard on it and a balloon coming out of his mouth with a statement urging the reader to perform an anatomically impossible act. “Nicki,” I said, “I don’t think they’ll take that seriously.” She scowled at me, lips pursed, plucked eyebrows drawn, and jabbed one pink-tipped finger at the call button so she could hand the flight attendant her form.
Nanna, our mother’s mother, greeted us beside the baggage claim. At seventy-six, she was small and trim, with carefully styled frosted hair, wearing one of her array of pantsuits that spanned the spectrum from pale yellow to beige and back again. She tucked her purse carefully under her arm—a precaution against the thieves she believed roamed the world outside of her gated retirement community—and gave us a quick once-over. “How are you?” she asked, kissing us each once on the cheek. “How’s Mother?”
“Fine,” I answered. It wasn’t exactly true. When I’d gone home for Thanksgiving there’d been a “For Sale” sign stuck in front of the house but, Nicki had told me, nobody
had made an offer yet. In the eight months since their divorce had become official, my mom had dragged my father into court twice. Each time he’d promised to pay her the child support and alimony he owed. He’d send checks for a month or two, then he’d stop, and the whole process would start again, with court orders and subpoenas and staggering lawyers’ bills. He hadn’t sent the tuition check to Princeton that fall. My mother and I had gotten a loan as a stop-gap measure until my financial aid application went through. I remembered her detached expression as we sat in a back office of our Connecticut bank, the way her lips had twitched underneath an unfamiliar coat of lipstick as she stared blankly at the stack of documents until the loan officer handed her a pen and pointed out the space for her signature.
Nanna smoothed her short hair. “Mother told me you have a kidney infection,” she said to my sister. Nicki rolled her eyes and grabbed at her back dramatically. “I’m dying,” she groaned. Nanna glared at me. “How could you let her come here with a kidney infection? Take her luggage!” Meekly I complied, heaving both of our backpacks over my shoulder and struggling with the straps of Nicki’s duffel. Nicki smirked at me, but was quickly distracted by an elderly woman driving a golf cart.
“Oh, can we get one of those?” she asked.
“The car’s just across the street,” Nanna said. Nicki weighed her options and elected to continue walking. “I called my doctor,” Nanna continued. “We can see him first thing in the morning. How’s school?” she asked, peering at Nicki through her bifocals.
Nicki scowled. “It’s a dump,” she cried, and began enthusiastically listing her university’s shortcomings: bad food, ugly guys, clueless roommate, library too far from her dorm, unsympathetic RA, girl across the hall plays Janet Jackson incessantly, infirmary sucks. We walked through the glass doors into the inky Florida night, and the humidity hit us like a fist. I shifted Nicki’s bags in my arms as sweat trickled down my back.
Nanna led us toward her enormous cream-colored Cadillac sedan. The car had belonged to my grandfather, who’d died in 1985, and it still smelled faintly of his cigars. It wasn’t the most practical vehicle, getting, as it did, approximately eight miles to the gallon, but Nanna kept it and drove it at least once a week, all the way to the car wash a mile away from her condo, to have it waxed and vacuumed.
She unlocked the car doors and stared at Nicki, frowning. “Just what’s wrong with the infirmary?” she asked.
“Well, for one thing, I had to wait for two hours before I saw anyone,” Nicki said. “Then they said there was nothing wrong with my kidney. They didn’t even give me a blood test! They didn’t even ask me the right questions!”
Nanna pursed her lips. “So you don’t have a kidney infection.”
Nicki didn’t back down. “I might have one,” she said. I wiped my face and heaved Nicki’s backpack into Nanna’s immaculate trunk, right next to the first-aid kit and emergency gallon of bottled water. “They forgot to ask me if I was experiencing pain upon urination.”
“Well, are you?” I asked.
“No, but that’s not the point.”
Nanna threw up her hands in despair. “Nicki, Nicki, Nicki,” she said. “What are we going to do with you?”
But Nicki wasn’t listening. Kidney pain forgotten, she opened the heavy car door and flung herself into the backseat, behind the cramped, skinny, bald, Sansabelt-slacks-clad figure of Nanna’s eighty-three-year-old gentleman caller, Horace. “Let the games begin!” she cried. I stowed the rest of our luggage and slammed the trunk shut.
• • •
My sister’s earliest childhood memories were of torture. She talked frequently, nostalgically, about the happy days of her youth when she’d give Jon his bath and pour alternating pitchers of hot and cold water over his back—never hot enough to burn him, just hot enough to make him extremely uncomfortable. “I liked the noises he made,” she said. She hid my books, stole my diary, listened in on my telephone conversations, and finally found her niche and calmed down a little when she landed a spot as the coxswain for the varsity crew team, where she was actually encouraged to scream insults at people. She’d sit in the tiny seat at the stern of the boat, knobby knees drawn up to her chin, a headband holding a miniature microphone perched on top of her curls, red-faced and cursing inventively, utterly in her element (especially when I was the stroke and she could direct her insults, and her threats to tell our mother about the copy of Delta of Venus she’d discovered under my mattress, specifically at me).
But high school was over, the crew team was gone, and I sensed that my little sister’s college experience wasn’t turning out as well as her time in high school had. We’d run up a shocking phone bill her freshman year, working through her assignments long distance. Every few weeks she’d mail me a paper to proofread (translation: rewrite), but when we’d been home for Thanksgiving, she’d just shrugged when I asked how her classes were going. Since then, she hadn’t sent anything to read, and when she called it was mostly to complain about her geeky roommate, who used up her hair mousse and slept with a retainer and a night-light. “Fine, fine,” she’d say, every time I asked about her classes and her coursework and whether she’d gotten her grade on her Introduction to Sociology class yet. “Everything’s fine.”
• • •
“Horace!” Nicki crowed. She flung her arms around his neck and planted a loud kiss on his sun-spotted pate. “My man!”
“Hello, Nicki!” Horace boomed. He worked his way out of his seat and around the car so that he could hold the door for my grandmother. He gave me a hug on the way back, and I breathed in his smell of mothballs and Hall’s eucalyptus cough drops. Horace had survived two wives, several strokelets, a heart attack, and quadruple bypass surgery and, along the way, experienced what his doctors and our grandmother politely referred to as a substantial hearing loss. In other words, Horace, despite the finest hearing aids Medicare can buy, was as deaf as a post. But he was a sweet man who loved my grandmother and could put up with my sister (perhaps because he couldn’t really hear her).
“How are you?” he asked Nicki when he was back in the car.
“I’m having a sex change!” she shouted.
“Glad to hear it!” he replied.
Nanna shook her finger at Nicki, who stuck out her tongue in reply.
“Your mother worked hard so that you girls can have a nice vacation,” Nanna said, undeterred. “I want you both on your best behavior.” I rolled my eyes. I didn’t need to be told to behave myself, even if Nicki was another story.
My sister adjusted her necklace, fluffed her curls, and pinched my thigh as she groped underneath me for her seat belt. “Cut it out!” I said.
“You know you liked it,” she said.
“What’s that?” asked Horace.
“Nothing,” I yelled. I rolled down my window, yawning. I wasn’t very well rested, thanks to my roommate, who slept with neither a retainer nor a night-light but, rather, a rotating cast of our classmates, whose ranks had most recently swelled to include my crush from philosophy class freshman year. After two and a half years of staring, I’d finally worked up the courage to talk to him. Sadly, our first and last conversation had occurred in the quad in front of my dorm room. Sally, my roommate, had sauntered by, and that was the end of that. The three of us went to dinner together where, over pork chops and green beans, the two of them had discovered a history class in common. They’d skipped dessert and gone to the library to study, leaving me alone in the room. At two in the morning, they came giggling through the door, clambered into the top bunk bed and noisily consummated their relationship, apparently unaware of, or untroubled by, my presence in the bottom bunk, three feet away. I’d given Sally a stern talking-to in the morning. She’d sniffily loaded up her purse with her toothbrush and a fistful of satin underwear and departed, presumably for the philosopher’s single across campus. Every night since then I’d barely slept at all, waking up once or twice every hour at the sound of laughter or a door slamming
, thinking it was the two of them showing up for an encore.
As we drove down the palm-tree-lined streets of Fort Lauderdale, Horace noted the passing attractions in a booming voice. “Heavenly Delights,” he read as we motored past a billboard. “Nude Oil Wrestling Nightly. Now Hiring.”
“I could get a job!” said Nicki.
Horace, who caught only the last word, nodded his approval. “Jobs are wonderful.” Nanna’s lips tightened.
“Why I let your mother talk me into this,” she said. She glared at the two of us in the rearview mirror. “You’ll have to share the pullout couch, and I don’t want any complaints.”
“Forget it,” said Nicki. “She could accidentally kick me in the kidney.”
Nanna zoomed onto the freeway. “Too bad.”
Our grandmother’s guest room hadn’t changed in the fifteen years she’d lived in Florida. It was decorated in shades of sea green and coral, with family pictures in frames on the bookshelves and crocheted samplers hanging on the walls, and there was a pullout couch against one wall and a tiny television set on a dresser against the other. I pulled out the bed and piled the pillows neatly in the corner. Nicki unzipped her duffel, stacked her clothes on Nanna’s card table on the screened-in porch, placed her cosmetics and a Walkman on the bedside table, and scooped up all three towels on her way to the bathroom. After some perfunctory bickering about whether this bed is really the most uncomfortable one we’ve ever slept on (I argued in the affirmative, my sister maintained that the ones at Camp Shalom were worse), I pulled the blinds shut and we fell asleep.
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