Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  The others looked at him. “Whadaya mean?” Jed asked.

  Raymond described the animated cartoon called “The Mystery of New Life” that he had just seen in Physical Education class.

  “Naw, you’re lying,” Jed insisted. “The man puts a seed in the woman and it grows into a baby. That’s what Dad said that time.”

  “Yeah, but where does it come from? How does he put it there?”

  “It’s true. I seen it myself,” Donny muttered. “My neighbor done that to his girl. I sneaked up and watched them in his car.”

  There was a silence.

  “Six inches?” Sally gasped, pressing her knees together. “And how big around?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Raymond yawned. “Two maybe? Like a cardboard toilet paper roll sort of.”

  “Barf!” Sally and Emily said, pretending to vomit over the side.

  “Don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it,” Raymond suggested.

  “And I suppose you have?” Emily sneered.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Raymond Tatro: When we get married, I’m not doing that with you.”

  “Me neither,” Sally agreed, fingering the end of one braid.

  “According to this movie, we have to if we want children.”

  “Not me. I’m adopting,” Emily insisted. “It’s disgusting.”

  “Then our children can’t be real double-first cousins,” Sally wailed.

  “They wouldn’t be anyway, since you and I aren’t real sisters,” Emily pointed out. “Now I’m sure we’re adopted. Mom and Dad would never do that.”

  “Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Jed requested, looking green.

  As the leaves on the Castle Tree that year faded to pale yellow and fell to the ground, The Five met in its branches less often. When they did, they sometimes avoided each other’s eyes. Silences seemed awkward. Sally would chatter mindlessly to fill them.

  The Five ambled into the newsstand one afternoon the following spring to watch the high school boys play pinball. As the machines bonged and lit up in carnival colors and shuddered to blows from cursing players’ hands, Raymond sneaked off. The others saw him by the magazine rack, and with a smirk he gestured to Donny and Jed. Soon all three were pointing and giggling. Emily and Sally wandered over. Raymond flipped the magazine shut in their faces. But not before Emily and Sally caught a glimpse of some naked ladies.

  They walked out of the newsstand and across the green in front of the red-brick courthouse. On the wall of the courthouse were bronze plaques bearing the names of all the men from Cherokee County who had died in the two world wars. And outside the doorway was a statue of a Confederate soldier holding a bayoneted rifle, which had been sold to the county right after Reconstruction by a salesman from a Vermont granite company. Traditionally, The Five saluted as they passed. This day Donny kept his hands in his shorts pockets.

  “You forgot to salute,” Jed told him.

  “Don’t feel like it.”

  “How come?”

  “Just don’t.”

  The five had worked all morning collecting soft drink bottles in the mill village and hauling them to the store in a wagon. They gave a penny of the refund per bottle to the person who donated it and kept a penny for themselves, trying to amass entrance fees to the Majestic Theatre matinee Thing from Another Planet. At one house, a peeling wooden box on cinder blocks, a woman in a torn housedress came to the door with a squalling baby on her hip. She asked Raymond, “Is these here the Prince gals?” He nodded. She yelled at them, “No, I ain’t got no bottles for you! You go tell that daddy of yours to give his gals some of the money he stole from Mrs. Harmon’s husband! You tell him that!”

  The Five ran down her sidewalk, dragging their red wagon.

  “What’s she talking about?” Emily demanded. “Our father would never steal.”

  “Ah, old lady Harmon, she just crazy,” Jed assured her.

  As they hauled the wagon to the store, Jed picked up a Coke bottle and said, amazed, “Look, this here bottle’s from over at Egypt.” He pointed to the “Cairo” embossed on the bottom.

  Raymond snatched it, looked at it, and tossed it into the wagon. “Cairo, Illinois, dummy.”

  “It is not,” Jed insisted. “How do you know? You think you’re so smart just because you’re in the seventh grade.”

  “I sure know more than a dumb fifth-grader. Egypt! Boy, are you dumb!”

  Leaving behind the Confederate soldier, Donny began balancing along the curb, Yo-Yoing. The others balanced and Yo-Yoed along behind him.

  “I ain’t never been to no downtown theater,” Donny remarked over his shoulder.

  “You ain’t?” Jed asked. “How come?”

  “Grandmaw, she say stay where the white folks wants you at. Anyhow, most ever movie here comes out to Pine Woods.”

  They ducked into Woolworth’s, packed themselves into the photo booth, closed the curtain, and inserted a quarter. The pictures that emerged showed five faces in snarls and grimaces, some with tongues sticking out, or thumbs in ears and fingers waggling. In one, Raymond was holding up his middle finger. They cut the strip apart, each taking one picture.

  The posters outside the Majestic announced that the Thing in person would be sneaking through the downstairs handing out rewards to anyone brave enough to sit through the movie. They studied the titillating pictures in the glass cases—of terrified men throwing themselves against slowly opening doors, while buxom blonde women shrieked in the background.

  When The Five bought tickets and started for the doors, the bouffanted, gum-chewing woman in the booth yelled, “Hey, colored boy! Yes, you. You know you can’t go in that there door. Get up them steps to the balcony, hear? Don’t you go getting smart on me.”

  “He’s with us,” Raymond assured her.

  “Honey, I wouldn’t care if he was with Jesus Christ, he ain’t setting downstairs.”

  Donny was looking down and poking the toe of one high-topped black tennis shoe into a crack in the fake marble flooring. The other four exchanged glances. They’d never noticed the side staircase.

  Finally Donny mumbled, “Yawl gwan. I meet you down here after.”

  “We’ll all sit in the balcony,” announced Emily.

  “You’ll miss the reward,” Donny said in a whisper.

  “That’s right,” said Jed. “Listen, Donny, we’ll get you one too, hear?”

  Donny nodded and headed for the back stairs. After the newsreel, a film of the Stars and Stripes rippling in a breeze came on the screen. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Everyone stood, hands over hearts.

  Back in the Castle Tree as they chewed Turkish Taffy and discussed what they would have done to the hideous green thing from Mars, no one could look at Donny.

  “Well, shoot,” Jed said finally. “I love the balcony. It’s neat sitting up high like that.”

  Donny shrugged.

  “When I reach the top plateau,” announced Emily, “I’m gonna buy that theater and give you and your grandmaw a lifetime free pass for up front.”

  They heard leaves crunching below as someone approached the base of the tree. Looking down, they saw Mr. Fulton, grey and stooped. He called up through cupped hands, “Yall come on down out of my tree now, hear? Yall too old to be climbing around in trees. These branches can’t hold you. I’m sick of worrying about you. Gwan home now and do your lessons.”

  The boys began spending time crawling around vacant fields on knees and elbows, cradling imaginary rifles. When Emily and Sally would try to join them, they’d lob pretend hand grenades at them, pulling the pins with their teeth. The only day they let the girls play, they tied them down and dripped water on their foreheads until they confessed irritably to sabotage. The boys got army patches out of cereal boxes and nagged their mothers into sewing them on their windbreakers.

  That summer at the carnival Raymond and Donny and Jed spent a lot of time looking at the poster
s of nearly naked women outside the show tent. Emily and Sally tried to persuade them to come look at the hot dog machine: A live dog was fed into one end; after much barking and howling, strings of wieners came out the other end. But the boys chased them off. Emily and Sally ended up at a nearby booth pretending to be interested in tossing pennies into milk bottles. Occasionally laughter would drift over. “Look,” Jed said, “it says she shoots Ping-Pong balls into the audience.” The three boys collapsed in giggles.

  “What’s so funny about that?” Emily demanded of Sally. “What’s so funny about Ping-Pong balls? I don’t get it.”

  Sally shook her head. “I think they’ve gone plumb crazy.”

  The following winter no one shot down mistletoe. Each got only a shower of dead leaves and twigs. The hut in the woods fell in on its treasures, and no one came to prop it up. Raspberry canes grew up around the mouth of the powder magazine. Younger children perched in the Castle Tree and chattered like monkeys. Emily and Raymond, as they strolled home along the sidewalk from the white junior high school, separately, with new friends, pretended not to hear the eager voices from the top of the tree.

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  A Team That’s on the Beam

  At the pep rally for the game against the Bledsoe Station Bulldogs, Sally and another cheerleader dragged the Newland Pioneers’ Terrorizing Machine into center court, while the band played “Hot Time in the Old Town.” It was a large, elaborately painted cardboard crate. Into one end they put a bulldog wearing a cloth saddle in Bledsoe High’s colors, navy blue and white.

  The band’s song ended abruptly. Emily lowered her flute and watched the box. From it came barks and growls. It pitched, heaved, and shuddered. A cheerleader opened the door at the far end and out walked a Chihuahua in a minute blue-and-white vest. The audience howled and cheered.

  As the Terrorizing Machine exited, the captain of the football team lumbered up to a microphone. “Uh, the members of the ball team and me, we really wanna thank all yall for coming out here this afternoon. Uh, it really means a whole lot to us out there on that ball field to know that we got the whole school behind us one hundred percent of the way. Uh, this here game tomorrow night, I reckon yall know it’s real important that we win it if we going to have us a chance at the State Championship …”

  He was shifting from foot to foot and chewing frantically on his gum. While the teacher on duty was strolling to the other side of the gym, Raymond slipped from his seat and ducked down the steps to the exit.

  “… uh, but we can’t win it all by ourselves. Uh, we need all yall out there tomorrow night yelling just as loud as yall can yell. So, uh, on behalf of all us on the team, and the coaches and all, we just wanna thank all yall for your alls support this season, and ask yall to keep it coming tomorrow evening in this game against the Bulldogs.”

  The cheerleaders bounded onto the court, pumping their arms and screaming, “We got a T-E-A-M, that’s on the B-E-A-M…”

  Sally caught Jed’s eye where he sat on the bench with the team, and they smiled.

  Sally lay on the couch watching “American Bandstand.” Kenny and Arlene were back together again, and doing the Mashed Potato. She was glad for them. Yesterday they’d been fighting and had seemed unhappy dancing with other people. She didn’t look up as Emily came in and stood over her exuding disapproval.

  “I mean, if this is how you want to spend your life—fine.”

  Sally nodded her head to the music.

  “You’d sit in front of this thing all afternoon if only there were a conveyor belt to bring you food. Why don’t you do something constructive for a change—come play basketball with me, or read a book, or something?”

  Sally sighed heavily. Emily was always picking on her, had ever since she was first born, she supposed. Jealousy. She wished Emily would learn how to relax. She already had frown lines, and she was only sixteen years old. If she didn’t frown so much, maybe she’d make cheerleader or Ingenue or something and wouldn’t have so much to frown about. She wasn’t that bad looking, it was mostly her personality. And the way she dressed—her sweaters didn’t quite match her skirts, her skirts were baggy because she had no hips. She looked like she belonged with the crowd that came into school every day from the farms. Ina Sue Bascombe, say, who wore her hair in long braids, and who still didn’t shave her legs because her daddy was a Holiness preacher and wouldn’t let her. And the way Em slouched, like she was ashamed of her chest and trying to hide it. Sally just couldn’t understand it. She was proud of her body, loved the ways she could make it move as she led cheers, loved having the boys watch her. Frankly, it wasn’t easy having someone so out-of-it for a sister. People were always saying, “I just can’t believe you and Emily are sisters! Why, you aren’t a bit alike!”

  “I practice cheerleading twice a week,” Sally replied. “I go to Devout and Ingenue meetings. To movies and dances and ball games. I’d worry about myself if I was you. And why no one ever asked me out except that creepy Raymond Tatro. And why no girls asked me to join their clubs—so that I had no choice but to stay home playing basketball and reading dumb books.”

  Emily winced. “Do you think I care about your idiot clubs? I would no more join Ingenue than I would … watch ‘American Bandstand.’”

  “Good, since no one’s asking you to.”

  Ruby, her head wrapped in a kerchief, was sitting on a stool watching television and ironing at the rate of one article per program. She wore a pair of Donny’s cast-off high-topped black tennis shoes, and her stockings were rolled down to her scrawny ankles. She shifted her tobacco to one cheek and opened her mouth, lips curling in over toothless gums. “Law, you two girls is at each other all the time. How your mama stands it I don’t know. But I ain’t gonna put up with it. Hush now, hear? Miss Emily, you go upstairs and get me some more coat hangers. And Miss Sally, you fix me a ham salad samich.” She couldn’t understand how two girls who’d always had ever advantage in the world could be so everlastingly mean to each other. She could of understood it if her Donny was like this with his mama running off, and with hard times all around. But Donny was nothing but sweet. She just didn’t understand what this world was coming to. Emily and Sally’s parents weren’t the people their parents were, and she didn’t know what to make of these two girls.

  Emily reflected, as she rummaged through closets for empty coat hangers, that everyone in her family always did exactly as Ruby instructed. Wasn’t Ruby supposed to be the maid? Even though they fought over who had to have his or her clothes ironed by Ruby on ironing day, since the items came out creased in the wrong places and splashed with tobacco juice; even though her meals were outstanding throughout the country for their indigestibility, each morsel having been marinated in bacon grease; even though it appeared she brought cobwebs from home to strew around on the days she cleaned; in spite of all this, their mother had spent years trying without success to fire her.

  “Shoot, missus,” she’d say. “You wouldn’t hardly know what to do without old Ruby.”

  Apparently Ruby was their familial cross to bear. The only time they had been emancipated from her was when Sally

  was an infant just back from the hospital. Ruby had announced she hated babies and small children, especially several at once, and had gone to work elsewhere until they were in school.

  Emily thrust the hangers at the skinny old woman, scooped up the basketball, and dribbled toward the back door. In passing, she studied the marks all over it. Each summer The Five used to stand against the door and mark their new heights. There were five rows of marks, each stretching from three feet off the floor to around five and a half feet.

  “We really made a mess of this door,” she announced to Sally. “We should clean it off sometime.”

  Sally, absorbed in the Stroll, made no reply.

  Outside Emily did hook shots and layups against the backboard on the garage. She rarely missed. Then she stood at the free-throw line and grimly swished i
n shot after shot. She didn’t understand her compulsion to nag Sally. Why couldn’t she be aloof and dignified? What was it to her if Sally spent most of her life in front of either a mirror or the TV?

  She saw her mother out back weeding in her flower garden, wearing a straw hat and work gloves. Her mother spent most of her time out there. When Emily went to her friend June’s house, June’s mother always offered snacks and cracked jokes. But Emily’s mother never had. Emily wondered if this might be why the Ingenues had never given her a bid. Her mother’s lack of interest made them uncomfortable? But of course Sally was an Ingenue, and she had the same mother …

  A turquoise and white Chevy, with blocks so low that the dual exhausts nearly scraped the concrete, pulled into the driveway. Emily tried to ignore it. A young man in chinos and a plaid Gant sports shirt got out. “Hey, Em,” he called. He ran his hand up the front of his flat-top, to be sure it was standing up as straight as a fakir’s bed of nails.

  “Hi, Jed.”

  He held out his hands. Reluctantly she tossed the ball. He did a one-handed jump that fell short. “Shit!” he drawled, pantomiming the shot so that he could flex his biceps. Emily frowned. It was revolting the way he worshipped his wretched body. Working out all the time and standing around preening. When she thought about what a puny little runt he used to be … she used to mash him into the dirt when they were kids. She could still outshoot him at basketball, but there was no girls’ team. Instead she was expected to stand here and swoon over these obscene bulges, sit in the stands at the Friday night football games and follow Sally’s instructions for cheering him on. He made her sick. His lazy good humor made her want to strangle him. What Sally saw in him was beyond her. But what could you expect from someone like Sally?

  Jed watched her frown, then shrugged and smiled. What else could you do with a girl who acted all the time like she had the rag on? She’d been bossy as a kid, but not grouchy the way she was now. Well, it couldn’t be easy having someone as great-looking and as popular as Sally for a sister, if you yourself was nothing but a brain. Most of the kids over at school resented her because she always raised the grading curve of any class she was in.