“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The profits go to Krauts and Japs.”
“Don’t call them that. We won that war.”
“Well, we’re losing the economic one, baby,” he said.
Through the kitchen window we watched her park. The boys screamed with delight as the cloth roof of the convertible folded back, as though Beth was unwrapping a gift that contained herself.
“Ta-DA!” she yelled, hopping over the door.
Sam rushed her middle and Jake kept hold of the sleeve of her peasant shirt, looking into her face like she was the first Christmas tree he’d ever seen. Beth slapped open the front door carrying only a small leather overnight bag.
“Hey, jackass,” she said, opening up an arm to Beau.
“Nice mouth on you,” he said, lightly hugging her.
“Fuck you,” Beth whispered, sweetly kissing him on the cheek.
“Been there, done you.”
That was their shtick to lighten the tension of their history as high school sweethearts. It wasn’t a big love, a long love, or a deeply profound love, but they were each other’s first, and that mattered for something.
Beth first met Beau in shop class, and right away she complained that he liked her too much, sent her too many carnations on Valentine’s Day, and hovered too near her in the smoking area, which he’d frequent even though he wasn’t a smoker. They’d wrestle around in the dark of the living room until they heard Lou’s Jeep pull up. Then Beau’d scamper off Beth’s wilted body, deeply molded into Nell’s old La-Z-Boy. Beau’d plop himself onto Lou’s own La-Z-Boy, tossing a pillow over his swollen middle. Without touching Beth, he’d leave, as though an intimate pat would give him away, as though Lou didn’t have a clue what the hell they were up to. He wasn’t ignorant of the fact that Beth had had a reputation in high school. We once watched her get out of the back of some guy’s Thunderbird, half of her dress absently stuffed into the back of her black nylons. We said nothing when she ran into the house and up the stairs, leaving her denim jacket in a pile on the foyer floor, the smell of stale smoke wafting off of it. What’s to ask? Best he could do was cover the bases by making sure she covered her cervix with latex condoms that he boldly stored under the bathroom sink next to our tampons and the dusty hot roller kit.
About me, he worried less. I had experienced adolescence largely through Beth, much the way I like to think she’d later experience adulthood through me.
As a kid, I’d often interrupt Beau and Beth going at it, the first time on the living room carpet, Beth straddling him like a lazy cowgirl, poor Beau doing all the bronco work beneath her.
Beau yelled, “Get the fuck out, Peach. Don’t you knock?”
“I don’t knock on my own front door, asshole. Do this shit in Beth’s room. I just vacuumed.”
I stepped over their bodies and turned on the TV. Though they’d been dating for several months, I believe that constituted the first conversation I had had with my future husband.
I wish I could admit to mooning after Beau during those sweaty months when he was Beth’s. Wish I could say I wistfully spied on them from the top of the staircase as they grinded on the living room shag, Beau peering over Beth’s shoulder, shooting truer love from his pupils into mine. Fact is, I thought of Beau as the sputtering idiot with the perfectly feathered hair, who was always sweaty, who always wore too-tight T-shirts and had car grease under his stubby fingernails. To me their courtship simply represented the first and last time I had had my dad all to myself. During those months, Lou taught me to golf and canoe. We grew an herb garden, buying Mexican seeds from a specialty catalogue and reading up on natural pesticides. We canned a bunch of beets that fall. In fact, I had secretly hoped Beth would run away with Beau, so that I could finish growing up and out from under her dense shadow.
They had sex constantly, once in the dugout, and once in the back of Beau’s mother’s car, Beau’s fingers working Beth quietly while Mrs. Laliberté drove them home from a school dance. After one of those rides I watched through the living room curtains as Beau’s mom tipped the front seat forward to expel the spent cargo. Beth exited looking as though she’d had a good cry. She ran up the porch stairs and silently passed our La-Z-Boy gauntlet, sniffling.
“You okay, sweetheart?” Lou asked, half-distracted by the TV. “D’jall have a fight?”
“Kind of,” she said.
Lou signaled for me to go after her, to see if she wanted to talk. It was his way of trying to raise us to be close, by helping me see the signs of her distress and training me to respond to them. “Beth’s quiet today, Peach, go ask her if she wants to join us.” “Beth seems a little moody today, Peach, go upstairs and see what’s up.” Thus began my career as Beth’s interpreter, a hobby I honed into a science.
I found her in her room rummaging under the bed for a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, threw the match out the window, and nestled in the pane.
“Peachy. Everything’s fucked,” she whispered. Her face was flushed with what I thought might have been fresh sex. I was not completely wrong. She was pregnant. Beau wanted to keep the baby and was thrilled. Beth said she’d rather die than do that, let alone marry Beau. Indeed, after he proposed, Beth told me she threw up in the kitchen sink. She was seventeen and had the rest of her life to live, which didn’t include—had never included—Beau. She was determined to get an abortion, with or without Beau’s support, and I would have to help her.
“You have to drive me home from the clinic. They won’t let me leave without someone accompanying me.”
“I’m fifteen,” I yelled. “I only ever drove the lawn mower!”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re not going to check your driver’s license. I’ll take over the wheel once we get far enough away from the hospital.”
“No fricken way,” I said. “Get one of your friends.”
She raised an eyebrow at that. Beth didn’t have many friends. Other girls had always been afraid of Beth, and because she gave the impression of someone just passing through, people weren’t anxious to connect or commit to her.
“Why can’t you tell Dad? He’ll understand. He’s prochoice.”
That was true, but, as Beth pointed out, Lou wasn’t pro-whore-for-a-daughter. He’d have been so disappointed in himself and his failed parenting skills he would have taken it out on Beth’s considerable privileges, arguably ones that had put her in this position to begin with, but ones she’d grown thoroughly accustomed to nonetheless.
“Besides,” she said, “I’m old enough to make my own decisions and to have my own secrets.”
During the days leading up to the appointment, she stopped doing anything domestic. She stopped cleaning her room, doing chores, feeding the dog, or helping me with dinner. It was like she didn’t want to play house. Sad House. Super Sad House. Smack the Unwanted Kid’s Face House. Fat Ass Having House. Mommy Hates Daddy House. Beth never saw herself wearing cookie-crumb-studded shirts, smacking mouthy kids, hanging her clothes on a line made from a skipping rope as cracked as stale licorice. She wasn’t built to stand in some welfare line in order to get what was coming to her—baby bonuses, retraining, government assistance. So she took out her frustration on the house, as though if she had kept up her chores, got sickeningly good at them, she would end up living on the farm for the rest of her life, becoming a horrible chain-smoking, farmhouse-living, cellulite-having, beer-out-of-the-bottle-drinking, teen-mom cautionary tale.
Newly terrified of his potent sperm, Beth dumped Beau by phone. Afterward, you couldn’t find a boy more bereft in our county, and if I hadn’t looked sideways at Beau before, I started to feel compassion for his shattered attempts to do the right thing. One afternoon he even brought flowers and his bank statement to prove that he had what it took to give the baby a good life. Beth dragged me by the arm into that conversation, afraid to be sucked into his vortex of sadness.
“Fifteen hundred dollars. Wow, Beau, that changes everything. Let’s get married an
d have another one right away,” she said, crumpling up the paper and dropping it on the carport floor. Beau didn’t grasp sarcasm back then, so it was pitiful to see his face light up with her reply, only to dim seconds later when he realized she was joking.
SHE BOOKED THE abortion on a Saturday morning, ignoring Beau’s last-minute phone calls. I only answered the third time to stop Lou from picking up. Beau cried openly and loudly that Beth wasn’t just killing an innocent baby; she was also killing him.
I listened, hung up, and relayed the message.
“So now it’s double homicide. Nice,” she said, blowing smoke out the laundry room window. We had often discussed the dilemma over the running washer and dryer. “Believe me, he and his future wife will thank me someday. You and Lou, too, because you guys would be the ones taking care of this baby. Not me.”
Beth told Lou we were going to the mall for the entire day, and he was so overjoyed at our seeming closeness he insisted on taking Polaroids. He peered through the viewfinder, set the timer, and ran to stand between us. Beth threw her arm around him and smiled big.
“Might want to put something on under that, Beth Ann,” Lou said, clearing his throat at the way her braless boobs spilled out over the top of her scoop-neck T-shirt.
“I’m cool, Lou,” she said, cupping one boob and adjusting it. For the six or so weeks she’d been pregnant, she couldn’t keep her hands off them. She made me check out her boobs in every outfit she had tried on that morning. “I will definitely miss these,” she said, bending over in the mirror and giggling.
The camera flashed and spat out a picture.
“Okay. Keep an eye on Peach,” said Lou, shaking the photo dry.
“I won’t let her out of my sight.”
* * *
THE CLINIC WAS housed in an ancient hospital where crackpots and rummies went to calm down and dry out. In the parking lot Beth put a bit of makeup on me, in case they mistook me for the fifteen-year-old that I was. She tended to my face with concentrated artfulness, standing so close to me I could smell her Juicy Fruit and Final Net. In the gift shop she bought me a bunch of glossy magazines and candy. And then we waited. I seemed to be sitting on every last one of my nerve endings, a little terrified of Beth’s fearlessness. When they called her name, she sprang up like she’d been picked for something excellent.
“Okay, Peachy, just sit tight, okay? Back in a jiffy.”
In those two hours I must have drunk about six cups of coffee from the automatic dispenser. I kept picturing how I’d drive out of the parking lot the way athletes meditate on winning their races. I saw myself backing out of the space with beautiful efficiency, gracefully negotiating the crowded lot before pulling over a few blocks away, sweaty but victorious. Beth would hop out and trade places with me and we’d be home in a half an hour, shrugging off our lack of shopping bags with words I had a hard time believing myself: if asked about the absence of purchases, we’d say we didn’t see anything at the mall that we liked.
But Beth emerged a different person than the one who bounced through the swinging doors. She walked like the elderly, tippy and fragile, damp hair clinging to her face. Her features looked smushed, as though pressed in by a giant thumb. The nurse asked if I was taking her home, and I nodded. Good, she said, handing me an envelope of pills. Give her two tonight and two tomorrow. Make sure she drinks a lot of water and gets a lot of rest in the next couple of days, she said. If the bleeding doesn’t stop in seven to ten days, bring her back. What bleeding? I wondered, half-expecting them to have sewn Beth up entirely.
We both mumbled thanks and I ushered Beth out to the Wagoneer. The sun was harsh and hot. I buckled her into the passenger side and took my seat at the wheel. I began a prayer in my head, but stopped when I realized that God had more urgent needs to attend to than guiding the ride of two teenaged girls leaving an abortion clinic.
“You’re going to have to drive all the way home, Peach. I’ll show you how,” Beth said in a small voice.
“I can’t. You said you would after the parking lot!” I was terror-stricken and angry.
“You can.”
“I can’t. If I kill us or anyone, it’ll be your fault.”
“Fine. Just put it with the rest of the carnage,” she said. “I’m on a roll today.”
I inched out of the parking lot in agonizing fits and starts, jarring Beth’s limp body against the rigid seat belt. Beth leaned her head on the window, one hand covering her mouth.
“I have to get out of here,” she said, her voice cracking with ire. “I have to get the fuck out of here.”
“I’m trying,” I said, speeding up slightly.
“That’s not what I meant.”
We hit all four red lights in the stretch to the blessed highway, Beth trying to muffle the winces my cautious braking caused. At one point she finally let the strap across her belly go slack. It was the last time I remember her ever using a seat belt.
At the farm, Lou was in the side yard with Scoots, watering the hydrangeas. I ran into the house, yelling a big phony hello through the kitchen window. Beth carefully crept up the stairs where I followed her with a glass of water.
“I need those pills now,” she said, her forearm thrown across her eyes. It was like her body was a big empty puppet with old sprightly Beth still desperately operating the limbs.
“They’re for tonight,” I said, bossily. “You have to wait.”
“Now, Peach. All of them.”
I ran down to the kitchen and fished through my purse for the yellow envelope. I noticed Lou had secured the morning Polaroids on the fridge with several fruit magnets, our eyes betraying no hint of our true destination.
LOU NEVER FOUND out about the abortion. But after Beth broke up with Beau, older boys began to call the farm with alarming frequency. Lou often talked about that final year with Beth as one might describe a short trip to a dangerous country like Lebanon, or Liberia, a journey plagued by roadside skirmishes, shady men, rock throwing, late-night phone calls, police, and mysterious rashes. High school counselors called about Beth so often Lou eventually put them on speed dial. After a shoplifting stunt on a field trip to Cedar Point, during which she necked with a brown-toothed carnie on a dare and let the air out of the bus tires while it stopped to gas up, Beth was assigned to see a psychologist twice a week. Now with a captive, paid audience, Beth made up a story about how, after his wife had died, Lou was left with a sick sexual hunger. When he was done with us, she told her psychiatrist, he’d hand the both of us over to the bachelor brothers next door, in exchange for marijuana cigarettes and pornography. After the cops came, Beth had to admit it was an awful joke, that Lou wasn’t even much of a tickler.
Still, the good doctor diagnosed Beth with borderline personality disorder, the root cause of all her emotional eruptions and burgeoning addictions, though the only side effects seemed to be Lou’s chronic ulcers and my budding insomnia.
Lou dismissed her X-rated stunt as the product of leftover grief from our mother’s death, the kind of thing, he said, that can make a person feel like they’re a gas-soaked rag, begging bystanders for matches. But why hadn’t these defects dented my own character? I was there that day too? And wasn’t she my mother as well? Where was my buried grief, dramatically manifested? How come there were no expensive doctors listening to my sadness?
Around that time, Lou went to great expense to restore two minutes of Super 8 footage featuring Nell and Beth on the front lawn of the farm chasing after me. I couldn’t have been more than two in the film, the smallest blur soundlessly running away from a medium-sized blur and a tall blur, presumably Nell.
“That’s it?” Beth asked, rolling off the love seat. “We can’t even see anything.”
“That’s it,” Lou said. “The film’s mostly damaged. Want me to replay it?”
Beth shrugged.
“Yes,” I said. “Again.”
Lou had hoped the film would jangle whatever was left of the grief stored inside her, but
Beth lost interest after the third play. Eventually, Lou said no to the pills and the therapy, figuring plain old love and simple understanding would straighten Beth out long enough to reawaken her ambition to leave us.
IN BETH’S FINAL year of high school, she managed to score not only entry-level marks, but her risky style sense secured her a place at Parsons School of Design in New York. Despite her rancid outbursts, Lou began to miss her long before her goodbye. Once, over breakfast, I watched as he became momentarily lost in Beth’s puffy lips. She was absently stuffing pancakes into her mouth, her other hand negotiating an unruly sketchpad, the stainless-steel fan pivoting back and forth, mutely following what wasn’t being said between them. I remember wondering if he was thinking, like I was, that Beth’s lips were just like our mother’s, before Nell’s began to wrinkle around the edges like the dozens of clay ashtrays we brought home from art class. Every birthday and Mother’s Day we’d bring her some kind of handmade round thingy which eventually took the form and function of an ashtray. Pick her some flowers, Lou would beg. Buy her candy, something she can’t stub a goddamn cigarette out on. Lou was not being lascivious that morning, but something odd had made itself at home across his stubbled face, something I would call now nostalgic ardor. Finally, Beth looked up at him and grinned, her tiny teeth studded with pancake bits.
“Loo-ooou?” She slammed down the sketchbook. “You were, like, totally staring at me all weird there for a second.”
Her syrupy finger hovered six inches away from Lou’s face.
“Sorry, Beth Ann. I was staring and that is rude.”
I tried to change the subject.
“Hey Beth, where’s my book I lent you?”
Beth ignored me, waving the fork in Lou’s face like a court lawyer.
“Why are you looking at me funny? Do you think I’m very beeeeoootiful?”
Lou threw down his napkin.
“Actually, yes, I do, Beth Ann,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning back from the table as though he’d been challenged. “You looked just like your mother there for a second, and I was thinking, I miss Nell very much and I wish she could see how beautiful her daughter has become. And what a great success she’ll be in New York. You do have your ma’s mouth. Is there something wrong with that?”
The Almost Archer Sisters Page 4