The Almost Archer Sisters

by Lisa Gabriele

I had no one in mind. No face. No body type. But the fantasy had the effect of an aspirin swallowed at exactly the right time, just before the headache took hold. Beau could sense something rancid brewing in the dark corners of my mind. It made him open and close drawers, check and recheck phone messages, wash and brush extra hard.

  The only person I had told about my adulterous fantasies was Beth. In fact, though I stopped sleeping with my husband and started treating my father like a sitter, and herding the boys like sheep, Beth I began to need more than ever. Our biweekly phone conversations provided a kind of tonic of distraction and drama. It was satisfying to talk to someone who seemed to have chosen her own life out of some mysterious catalogue stored on a high shelf that had always been out of my reach: I’ll take that career, this city, those shoes, these dates, that past and this future.

  “Got anyone in mind?” she asked. “Has anything happened? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No. Haven’t gotten that far.”

  This was a tricky prospect in a place like Belle River. Beau and I knew everyone. Plus, I had married the only person in town I had ever really wanted to have sex with. So far. I told her I was waiting until summer to find a hot little tourist. Or maybe some hipster-type punk they hired at the marina. Someone kind of just passing through.

  “And you think this will help?”

  “No, Beth. I am really hoping it will hurt.”

  “I think I’m a little bombed right now,” Beth said, acting surprised, like, Hey, how did this happen? But I knew it was a preemptive move in case she couldn’t recall bits of our conversation the next time we spoke. I had mentioned her drinking to Lou, told him that I was worried about its frequency, but he always shrugged it off, saying, “If she has a problem, it’s not like she doesn’t know where to go.”

  “Oh yeah? What’d you do tonight? Did you go out? Tell me, tell me,” I asked, yawning. It was 9 P.M.

  “Nothing yet,” she said. “I’m going to Jeb and Nadia’s for dinner. Kate came over for a while.”

  Jeb was one of Beth’s oldest friends. She met him when she worked at MTV, before she started her own production company and stole Jeb as her director. The way Beth had described Jeb always made him seem a little gay to me, the way they’d shop, and trade scintillating gossip about singers and stars they’d known and dressed. But then a few years ago, Beth spoke at Jeb’s wedding to a woman named Nadia.

  “Hey, Beth. Tell me something. How many guys have you slept with?”

  “Is that why you called? To lecture me?”

  “No. Seriously. I’m just wondering.”

  I had always gathered distracting information from Beth the way little birds tugged shiny string out of bushes, her confessions padding my anxious nest.

  “What do you mean, ‘slept with’? ‘Slept’ as in sleep with, or ‘slept with’ as in fucked? There is a difference,” Beth said, drawing on a cigarette. I could hear her wine bottle clacking against a glass. “Why do you suddenly want to know the exact number?”

  “I don’t know. I lost track.”

  “Maybe so did I.”

  I slid open the back door and quietly shut it behind me. I was careful to bunch my nightgown between my legs before crouching on the cool stairs, because God forbid should anyone see my underwear. Who did I think was watching me? Waiting to get a peek? Raccoons?

  “I’ve only slept with two guys, Dougie and Beau. I don’t think that’s right, Beth. I wish I could do something about it, but who’d want me? Two kids and I got tits that point down now like a Snoopy’s nose.”

  “Plenty. Beau still does. And why are you talking this shit? How’re things?”

  “They’re okay, you know. Nothing big. Just … being married … and now with Sam …”

  I admitted to Beth that it had been almost two months since we had had sex.

  “Jee-zuzz,” she said. “I’m getting you a hooker next time I’m home.”

  Suddenly, probably to make her bored married sister jealous, and for reasons that had more to do with accuracy than Beth would really admit, she let the number “fifty” fall out of her mouth.

  “D’you just say fifty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bloody hell, Beth! You slept with fifty?”

  “No. I’m kidding. I was kidding.”

  “Ahh, I heard you.”

  “Ahh, it was a joke. Anyway, why are you whispering?”

  “Because, Beth Ann Archer, my youngest son is just learning how to count past forty and maybe I don’t want him to use Auntie Bethy’s sex life as practice.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “—and how many fingers does Jakey have? Ten! And how many toes does Jakey have? Ten! And how many men has Auntie Beth slept with? FIFTY! Eww, Beth, is that not kind of skanky?”

  Lawyerly, slowly, Beth explained that actually it was not skanky. It was normal for New York. Then, sounding too defensive, she added, “And don’t forget, Georgia Peach, I am thirty. And I have been having sex for almost fifteen years, so if I had slept with about fifty men, that would really only be about three a year.”

  “Guess when you put it that way.”

  “Not that I’d ever tell Marcus.”

  “No. Not a good idea. Hey, Beth. Are we going to meet this one?”

  “Maybe. Maybe,” she said, sounding more doubtful than she had a month earlier. “But listen, I gotta go. Marcus is supposed to call when he lands in Phoenix.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. So I’ll call you later this week, okay?” she said.

  “Okay! Good night, you cheap, filthy whore.”

  She laughed a hollow little laugh and hung up. I instantly regretted the jokey taunt. Something was changing in Beth. Where she should be happy now that she had met someone special-sounding and clearly smitten, she acted doomed and moody, like her spirit had begun down-gearing in anticipation of a rapid descent.

  BETH HAD BEEN dating a new man, Marcus Edward Street, for close to seven months. Right away he sounded like a completely different species than any of Beth’s other significant boyfriends, a category that included any man who had ever made her cry. There was the don’t-ask-don’t-tell deal she had with this married guy, Terry, a boat maker from Jersey City, and father of four by three wives. I told her he’d never leave the third wife, and when Beth pressed the point, he naturally fled. Then there was the one-year fight-fest with John-O the comedy writer, a man who seemed addicted to the adrenaline of a good argument. But in the last few years, her time off the market grew increasingly shorter. A mere six months with Kevin the junkie journalist, a textbook codependent relationship, diagnosed straight from one of my old textbooks, in fact. That was followed by four months with a video-game designer called the Other Kevin, his nickname later changed to ADD Kevin, because he couldn’t commit to a TV channel, let alone a woman. But ever since she’d begun dating Marcus, her calls home had dropped off dramatically. I was the one who initiated contact, an issue Beau brought up when it came time for him to pay the bill. Not that he minded playing the role of breadwinner, but it was just a role. The mortgage on the farm had long been paid for, and the land-lease arrangement with the bachelor brothers not only covered the taxes, but also generated a tidy income in my name. Surely no broken home or recent refugee needed me more than my own son, I’d say, to anyone wondering why I still wandered the farm while the boys were at school. And because I believed I was needed at home, Beau and Lou believed it too. But no matter how I couched my excuse, Beth wasn’t buying any of it.

  “You stay at home because you’re afraid of a lot more than Sam splitting open his skull, and you know it” … and I was talking to Marcus about this and he said he’d break up with me if I wasn’t passionate about my career. He said one of the things he likes most about me is that I’m a successful entrepreneur … I’m not trying to brag, Peach … but I think you’re too smart to sit on the porch all day wearing sundresses and hosing off your kids and blah blah blah … and you can’t run around holding a net
under Sam all your life … and it’s not like I’m planning the wedding or anything like that … but Marcus is so funny, so smart, so sexy … and Marcus says the situation in Afghanistan is a fricken joke and that we should be bombing the Saudis instead … and Marcus was saying, just the other day, that the real estate bubble isn’t a bubble, but something that’s here to stay, and did I ever tell you Marcus only has one nipple because the other one got torn off in a bass fishing incident when he was around seven …? Did I? Oh, I did. Oh well, he still has the scar …

  At first it didn’t bother me that Beth insinuated Marcus into every discussion, because I figured it wouldn’t last past three months. And I’ll admit I was jealous when she sent me his picture (sun-gingered hair!), more so when she told me how much money he made, how good he was in bed, and that he was an avid ass man— though for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how he’d managed to locate one on Beth. Still, she always seemed one temper tantrum shy of losing him.

  But then this Marcus fellow did the oddest thing. He kept sticking around, even after Beth had to have an ovary removed, further hobbling her chances of having the babies she had never really longed for anyway. He stayed, even after she confessed she’d put unnecessary Botox injections on her already extended credit card, and that she had never, would never, cook a chicken, pork loin, or pot roast, in her life. He kept her fish when she went away on extended trips, and then just held onto them under the assumption that when they lived together it would just continue to be his job to tend to the tank. When he sent her flowers on her thirtieth birthday, ensuring there were no carnations, and later told her he actually thought she was too skinny, which, indeed, she was, I began to worry. I began to imagine Beth as the happy wife of a wealthy lawyer, managing a busy social calendar, a woman who’d begin to screen my calls, because why would she want to talk to me, her uneducated, put-upon sister, living in Nowheresville, heading toward Sadland, accompanied by an aging hippy of a dad, two sweaty boys, one getting sicker, an old smelly dog, all trailed by the nicest guy in town? I began to imagine all of her past boyfriends knotted at the bottom of a faraway lake, like a pile of rusty bikes, me eventually joining them.

  chapter three

  IT’S WEIRD WE’RE in the park so early. Can we go home now?” Sam was fully awake by 6 A.M., still three hours before Beth and I were due at the Detroit Metro airport. I noticed that he had Beau’s feminine features, his upturned nose, dark freckles, and long eyelashes.

  “Can we go home?” he asked again.

  “Soon, bud.”

  I wish I could say this wasn’t supposed to happen, but it was always supposed to happen. And though Beth had not planned for it to happen this weekend, its inevitability was written on both of their bodies. She and Beau had a past, one full of regret and sorrow, so there was no other postscript to their story than one also full of regret and sorrow. I thought of Beth’s naked, bendy body, her foothill of a butt, her manicured hands grasping the sides of our utility shelf, her legs so thin she could register them as a font. Even Beau’s staccato banging didn’t jiggle her ass flesh, or the canned goods, which made me feel more like my name than ever before; something that bruised too easily, something fuzzy and round, fleshy and bursting. I often wondered what my mother, who had never shaved her legs or armpits, would have thought had I grown up to follow the Southern debutante feel of my name. (In fact, both our parents were hippies of the first order; Lou remained so, with his long white ponytail, drawling all political about the hell of war, the miracle of universal health care, and the gift of gay marriage, while snipping split ends and darkening roots.)

  They had named me Georgia Peach Archer after the state in which I was conceived. They’d been driving north so my father could dodge the draft with the help of his new Canadian bride and her “imperious little one-year-old,” Beth, as Lou described his first impression of the baby who sat up front, back when infant car seats gathered dust in garages, if you owned one at all. But the “Georgia” part never took, the state giving way to the fruit of my middle name. I had always hated Peach. To me it better suited a girl who was raised to chase county pageants, with sequin dresses and dubious talents trailing behind her. Admittedly, Peach would have been easier had I been blessed with Beth’s ass. But I dented the cheap seats at the Detroit Children’s Hospital. Bag boys likely rubbed one off in my wake. I wasn’t fat by any stretch mark of the imagination, but the body wasn’t a friend anymore. The body cracked in half giving birth the hard way. Twice. No detours through the tummy for these boys. They took the bloody scenic route and half my innards along with them. And now my body felt like a roommate, one I used to let my husband fuck now and again.

  I was focused on the investigation in the park, trying to unearth where this visit had gone wrong. Beth had arrived the day before, ostensibly for Lou’s birthday barbecue, an event she never missed. But I had caught an email Beth had sent to the family account coordinating dates and flights with Beau about my surprise trip to New York, which was to be my first. He had deleted the email but he hadn’t emptied the trash, which I regularly checked after reading in a magazine how to retrace your kids’ steps to make sure perverts weren’t trying to seduce them online. In the email Beau had explained to Beth that I’d never go to New York on my own, that I wouldn’t leave Sam, let alone Jake. He wrote that she’d have to come to town to “physically escort Peachy over the border, physically carry her on that plane.” I was touched when I read that, felt a bit smug too, imagining how the martyrdom of delaying my return to school must have been terribly apparent to all. Now I was trying to remember if there’d been seduction in their exchange, some menace to their messages.

  For days I tried to pretend I didn’t know about the trip, meanwhile taking the boys aside to prepare them, telling them that it was our secret and that they should act more surprised than me when their aunt announced she was taking me to New York. Beth didn’t have children, so she didn’t know that mothers rarely took surprise trips unless they were addicts or adulteresses, or seriously depressed.

  “When Auntie Beth says she’s taking you to New York, I’m gonna go, Wow! Oh my gosh! You are going to New York and I can’t believe it!” Sam screamed, slapping his face with his palms.

  “And then I’m gonna go like this,” Jake said, spazzing all over the kitchen, yelping and clapping.

  “That’s perfect, guys, no one will know,” I said. Not that it registered for them that I would, in fact, be leaving, but I would deal with that later.

  Though he never crossed the border himself, Lou was still sad that no one met Beth at the airport anymore. Jimmy Carter had long pardoned draft dodgers, but Lou refused to step foot in his home country. Not a day went by without Lou openly railing against war and the price of gas, which he thought should be prohibitively higher, along with the price of cigarettes, alcohol, fast food, bad movies, video games, highway tolls, and city living for the rich. But I knew he missed America more than he’d ever admit, the imperial system, the miles, inches, gallons, and Fahrenheit of it all. When I used to greet Beth off the plane, Lou would sometimes come as far as the McDonald’s in Windsor by the border crossing. He’d bring a thermos of coffee, practically daring the pimpled teenagers to tell him to vacate his seat for a paying customer. There I’d fetch him after fetching Beth. Lou would give her a big hug, make a comment about how thin she was, and then he’d use the drive home as an opportunity to discuss American peculiarities with Beth, such as urban blight, extreme poverty, litter, and modern segregation, a subtle, therefore more insidious, foe. His caravan of criticism was an important part of the cheerful trip to and from Detroit.

  “Sometimes, Beth Ann, I just don’t know how you can live in that country,” he’d invariably cluck at the end of a diatribe.

  “Lou, darling, I am an American. I make a lot of money in the television industry. I have friends who are unboring, an adorable Mexican boy who delivers my vodka and cigarettes to my door, a view of the Hudson River, more than eleven hundred sq
uare feet of high-end parquet that another Mexican, a lady, polishes once a week. And I have a second home, on a river, in a cheaper country, that costs me a few hundred dollars to get to every six to eight weeks, where I get my hair perfectly streaked, for free, where no one wakes me up before noon, and where I am surrounded by the people I love. And on the way home, to America, where I live, there’s the duty-free, the cherry on the top of the whole dang deal. Now my sex life could improve, but it’s doubtful Belle River could help me remedy that.”

  “Not that you haven’t tried,” I said.

  “Right. Otherwise, I’ve nothing to complain about.”

  “Buckle up,” I’d say to Beth in the rearview mirror, watching her light another cigarette.

  “Can’t,” she’d say, blowing smoke through the window crack, appearing more famous than the minor cable celebrity that she was. “Jacket’s linen.” Or she’d say, “These pants are crushed velvet,” or, “I’m not feeling right in the middle. Must have been something I ate.” Her explanation was that if she never wore a seat belt in a New York taxi and lived this long, surely she was safe with me behind the wheel.

  Sometimes, if she knew she’d be arriving in a particularly foul mood, some drama trailing behind her, she’d ask me not to bring Beau or the boys, because they made it impossible for her to smoke in the car. But I missed the part when Beth would head, head-first, into the Beth-sized space we would open between us. She’d duck into our huddle like a shy quarterback, or maybe like someone hiding, not wanting anyone to see that these were her folk. But the boys didn’t care about appearances. When she pulled into the gravel drive in the fancy convertible, they unselfconsciously bolted from the house, desperate to make contact with her and her car.

  Beau noticed right away that the rental was a foreign make.

  “Hope no one eggs it,” he said, winking at me. It was a protective county. Too many auto jobs in Windsor were reliant on the domestic market, even though a lot of the foreign ones were assembled in North America, I reminded him.