The Almost Archer Sisters

by Lisa Gabriele

  Her surprisingly large bathroom smelled like her, like lemon grass and cigarettes and Final Net, the only beauty product besides Great Lash mascara that Beth had been loyal to since high school. The rest of her products, the ones I’d fingered on her visits, and now found in mother lodes lining the bathroom shelves, were capable of curing things I never thought I was afflicted with until I’d read the instructions. Some cream eliminated “fine lines” I’d never noticed. Another contained “light diffusers” for that younger-looking glow. There was a lime-salt rub that cut down on “orange-peel skin” and increased “subcutaneous circulation.” Its companion cream sat on a tiny pedestal slung over the claw-foot tub’s lip. It promised to “visibly lift” saggy areas, and I imagined filling the tub with every ounce of all of this stuff and dunking my whole ass in the mess. There, get rid of that, would you? Another tubside unction, which smelled like clean laundry and baby’s feet, promised to “lock in moisture,” but where? And still another toner contained “noncomedogenic” properties, a word that reminded me of the kind of humorlessness you’d have to possess to believe these products could work. The boys often dug through Beth’s cosmetic bag with the enthusiasm of two tiny drag queens. She’d let them, winking over at me with that look on her face that said, Goodie, maybe one of them will be gay! Two summers ago, as I was doing my pickles over the sink, I watched out the back yard as Beth lovingly fashioned dark mud masks on Jake and Sam’s upturned faces. She stretched out next to them on the lounge chair, and while her toenails dried in the sun, and the hot-oil treatment baked her hair under a towel, I timed the boys as they sat, side-by-side on the picnic table, waiting for their masks to dry.

  “Imagine if aliens came down right now and landed in the back yard, Auntie Beth,” Sam said, trying not to move his lips. He looked like a mini Al Jolson.

  “They’d probably think they were home,” she said, encasing her hands in paraffin wax.

  Sam laughed and Beth put up her finger.

  “Shh. No laughing,” she said firmly, which made it harder for Sam.

  “Feels like a volcano,” Jake murmured, lightly tapping on his face, his feet swinging off the picnic table. He couldn’t have been more than four at the time.

  “Don’t touch it, buddy!” Beth scolded. “You have to let the Dead Sea emollients seep into your pores. That’s where the magic happens!”

  A miraculous twenty minutes had crept by as the brown caked to beige. Every once in a while, one or the other of the boys would gingerly lift Beth’s hand mirror up to take a look at the “magic” happening on their faces. They had never been so still in their lives.

  I had not seen Beth take more than an aspirin in my presence, so I was shocked at the contents of her crowded medicine chest. Some of the prescriptions I recognized as sleep aids and nerve calmers. Others carried so many of the alphabet’s least-used consonants— Z, X, a Q even—they seemed to be for someone older and sadder than Beth.

  Her bedroom was wallpapered with a retro-old-ladyish pattern of light green scribbles and dark leaves. The bed made the room seem suffocatingly regal compared to the rest of the place. The hip-high queen-sized bed was layered with white sheets, over which was placed a doughy white duvet, the whole confection punctuated with still more pillows, white, red, and a couple of little pale gold ones. There was a high bookshelf featuring only hardcovers, austere biographies of writers I’d never heard of, a couple of popular feminist tomes, guy writers galore, some Indian too, and the bottom three held expensive-looking books on fashion, photography, textiles, and makeup, some on design and furniture, quite a few yoga books, and the biggest was a collection of photographs of famous American summer houses, in which I’d no doubt find a tasteful layout of her imaginary weekend place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, directly across the lake from our farm.

  In the cupboard of the bedside table, under a drawer that housed condoms, pens, tea candles, and a pink plastic rabbit thingy which I knew had a sexual purpose, she stored a paperback collection of self-help books, most of their spines shamefully facing the back. Seemed that Beth needed to help herself with a lot of things; how to find, get, and keep love; how to save, spend, and invest money; how to know if you drink, smoke, eat, or fuck too much, too little, or not enough; and what to do about it. I felt oddly criminal fishing through her things, looking for evidence, flaws, and clues, but it was impossible not to. This is the kind of snooping that wouldn’t have been available to me if I had accompanied Beth back to New York. She would have had furious plans to fill our time. She would have ushered me quickly in, and out, of the building, avoiding any conversation with Jonathan in the lobby, lest he bring up the weekend place, or God knows whatever else she’d invented about her life. I could picture her rolling her eyes in the elevator by way of explaining any obvious tension between them. (“You don’t even want to know, Peachy.”) All weekend we wouldn’t have eaten a meal, or turned on the TV in the apartment, and in fact the fridge was empty except for a bottle of champagne, a half bottle of Perrier, three bottles of white wine, a half-empty carton of American Spirits, a drawer of cheese, a stack of congealing takeout containers, and film.

  The guest bedroom, a bit bigger than the bathroom, was painted a cozy pale yellow, with a quilt-covered double bed shoved up against the wall. I didn’t notice the bowl of four ripe peaches, bums-up, in a bowl on the cedar dresser, until I finally sat on the bed. The entire apartment seemed to belong to a person Beth hoped to be when she grew up. Maybe it was the absence of toys and games, the lack of a meat product thawing on the counter, or dishes piled up in the sink, but her place felt like a hotel to me. And the strategically placed and elegantly covered boxes of Kleenex gave the impression that a lot of crying had been done here. I couldn’t imagine containing my life in such small rooms, however nice everything was. And though Beth bragged that she was still paying less than three thousand dollars a month in mortgage payments and only nine hundred in condo fees (which combined was still more than Beau’s total monthly income), it was to me an inconceivable amount to pay. Lou was always on Beth’s back to move home or at least to Detroit, claiming for the amount of money she was paying to buy an 1,100-square-foot condo, she could have actually bought a house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, if she’d only taken the job with Channel 7 Action News back when it was offered to her.

  “Just think,” he said, “you could have drinks with Bill Bonds.” He was Lou’s favorite local anchorman. “You could have invited him home for a barbecue. Just sayin’.”

  Still, it wasn’t envy I was feeling, keeping my bare feet on the posh area rugs as I floated through the rooms. I never envied Beth’s life, but I envied the craving she had for it. It was a very different life than what she was born into, where I had remained. Yet I couldn’t imagine living in a city where olive oil could cost as much as a tank of gas, where a person couldn’t afford a car, yet could spend thirty thousand dollars on clothes and shoes.

  I turned on Beth’s laptop, and while it warmed up, I stripped off my clothes, leaving them piled at my feet like a sculptor’s shavings. After all, I too was going to be someone else here, someone different for a day or two. I threw on a bathrobe and walked around talking to myself in Beth’s perfect news-anchor-American accent: Hi, yes, welcome, make yourself at home. Do sit on the all-white couch if you want. Can I offer you anything to drink? Why, I don’t think I have any Budweiser, but I do have some Grey Goose vodka in the freezer and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the fridge. Oh, and what’s this? A wine rack? How novel. My sister Peachy told me she and her ex-husband couldn’t imagine using a wine rack, as they always drank the wine too fast to fill one. Can you imagine? How white-trash is that? No, of course you can smoke in here, but all I can offer you is American Spirits. Do you like baba … ga … noush? Well, I don’t know what it is either, but I’m going to smear a bit of it on a table water cracker, because fuck it, I’m hungry, and I’m on vacation. Hmm. Meanwhile, I’m going to pour a lot of this expensive French bubble-bath shit in the runn
ing water. I’m not much of a decorator, but I wonder what the white couch would look like with a single cigarette burn hole in the middle of the middle cushion—

  My fantasy of sullying Beth’s perfect couch came to a halt in the kitchen. The black and white picture of our mother on the beach in Santa Cruz, the one where she’s holding up three fingers, sat framed atop Beth’s fridge. I missed Nell immensely in that moment, thinking about how things would have been different if she had been a happier person. I kissed my finger and pressed it to Nell’s head, then over her heart, meanly skipping the belly part where Beth had been growing. Tooey must have taken that picture. Beth never talked about him, and hadn’t displayed any of his pictures her Oklahoma relatives had sent after Nell died. In fact, the only other picture in the apartment was a framed one of me and Lou on the bumper cars at Bob-Lo Island. I wore the same goofy, apologetic smile that seemed to haunt all my photos. There were several pictures of the boys on the fridge, but they were so clumped together and randomly picked, it looked like Beth had just hung them there for the benefit of my visit.

  I looked for some CDs or a stereo but could only find a white pedestal holding a small white square thing that was probably an iPod. It was docked on what looked to be a single white speaker, but I had no godly idea how to turn the thing on. Instead, I turned on her countertop radio, automatically tuned to a jazz station. The running bathwater drowned out the traffic sound. It had been ages since I had taken a bath.

  But before I could slide in the water, an unfamiliar phone rang in the living room. Call display showed our number in Belle River. If I hadn’t had two young sons, one sick, I would never have picked up.

  “Peachy? Peachy? Don’t hang up.” It was Beth sounding tired. Welcome to my world, I wanted to say, when noon on Saturday feels a lot like a Monday’s midnight. “Kate told me you got in okay. Are you okay?”

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Sam and I just got back from the doctor’s. Jake stayed here with Lou. And I think Beau went to work, but I didn’t see him this morning.”

  “Too bad. That’s his favorite time for it.”

  “Peachy, don’t. I hate myself as it is.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’m going to do whatever’s necessary to repair this, Peachy.”

  “What happened at Dr. Best’s?”

  “Not much. He adjusted his meds, I think. I got a new prescription filled, and the doctor wrote down some things for you to do about his diet. I have it all here. He has to go back in six weeks. But he hasn’t had one today. Lou’s only got two appointments this afternoon, so we’ll both be around in case.”

  “Can you put him on?”

  She muffled the receiver, and I could hear her call out twice for Sam. My mind was picturing him flailing in the bathroom, or going down in the back yard, his head nicking the picnic table en route to the booby-trapped grass.

  “Mom! Where are you?” He sounded breathless and happy, which knocked my heart across the room.

  “I’m in New York, buddy,” I said. Being an asshole. A vengeful, angry asshole. A nonmom. “How are you? What are you doing?”

  “Do you like it there?”

  “Yes. It’s very nice. Very big and loud,” I said. “I miss you so much though. I didn’t expect to miss you so much. Where’s Jake?”

  “When are you coming home?”

  Why do I bother trying to have a conversation with my children when I know they’re only interested in knowing a few things? What are we eating? When are we eating? Where are we going? When are we getting there? And why can’t we have more of whatever it is we want more of?

  “Sunday, honey.” I felt my voice cracking, and I desperately tried to caulk it with a bit of calm, in case Sam became afraid of my fear.

  “’Kay, bye, I gotta go,” he said, darting off before he answered my question about Jake, before I could remind him of how much I loved him, pushing the love through the little holes in the receiver, like sweet-smelling Play-Doh.

  Beth came back on the phone.

  “Is the laundry done yet?” I said, not expecting it to be, not wanting it to be.

  “That’s next on my list. Sam helped me load it in the trunk just now. That’s where we were going. I wrote everything down,” she said with a kind of pride in her voice I hadn’t detected before. “Peachy, are you going to meet up with Marcus tomorrow night?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “Don’t, Peachy,” she said, her voice haunted from this morning’s crying. “Please don’t let this make you mean like me. And I don’t care if you tell Marcus everything. At this point I really don’t care who knows what a screw-up I turned out to be. I’m sure Marcus won’t be surprised anyway. I just hope he doesn’t tell everyone. Actually, I don’t care if he does. You know what? I don’t care about anything except for making things right with you. With us.”

  “Go do the laundry, Beth. Try to find parking on the street. They charge at the lot.”

  “Will do. And Peach?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love you more than—”

  “Just don’t.”

  She was quiet.

  “Did you see Nell’s picture in the kitchen?”

  “I did.”

  “She wouldn’t be too proud of me right now, would she?”

  “Doubtful.”

  “There’s a good walking map in the drawer by the sink. There’s a subway one in the wicker basket by the door. But take cabs and I will reimburse you. God, it’s so weird you’re there without me.”

  Her voice sounded reedy, beaten.

  “Okay. So. I’m gonna get off the phone now. Tell the boys I love them and I’ll see them Sunday afternoon, by which time I hope you will be gone from there.”

  I hung up on her, threw off the robe in the living room, and caught a glimpse of myself, my whole body, in the full-length mirror hanging outside of Beth’s bathroom door. What a template the mother’s body is, I thought. A fleshy notebook upon which her children’s stories are told. My stretch marks weren’t too pronounced, my sides merely lined with the light claw marks of maybe a playful cougar that might have tried to mangle me from behind. Twice. My legs were thin at the base, but they bloomed up and out at the thighs like a vase with generous handles. I didn’t mind my arms, my collarbones, my shoulder blades, and I liked most of the skin over me except for the parts that hadn’t sprung back, that now remained the roomy evidence of my body’s former inhabitants. But even after they had left it, the boys kept returning to my body, which was still theirs. They’d sit on my flabby lap and play with my greying hair. They’d rest their hot heads against my chest and ask questions about my freckles and my bruises and my scars, for the same primal reason, I supposed, that people would sometimes drive by the homes in which they used to live, to remember what it was like, and to note all the new changes.

  Once, while Beth was visiting, I was sitting in my underwear and a loosely wrapped bathrobe, breast-feeding Jake. Sam would have been about four when he asked why I didn’t have a penis.

  “Because we don’t need any more of them. We have four penises in this house already—five, if you count what Auntie Beth has stashed in the inside pocket of her suitc—”

  “Peachy!” Beth screamed, looking up from peeling potatoes. Sam looked at her utterly confused.

  “You have a penis, Auntie Beth?”

  “No. I don’t have a penis. But it’s been said that I have a fine set of balls.”

  “Beth!” I yelled back.

  “You started it,” she said, pelting me with peel.

  God, my boobs shrunk so unevenly after breastfeeding, my torso wore the expression of someone dinged in the head too often and rendered stupid. My nipples were wall-eyed and sad-looking, and the flap under my belly button (which was the nose of the face) looked like the mouth of someone strange and dopey, someone you’d run away from in a schoolyard.

  “Hello, Peachy,” I said, taking my f
ingers and making my tummy flab talk in a Muppety voice. The boys loved when I did this, though it caused Beau to cringe and leave the room. “You’re in New York City by yourself because your husband fucked your skinny, skinny sister. What are you going to do about that? And by the way, what are you going to do about me? I keep getting bigger and bigger.”

  I cupped my breasts and made the nipples look me straight in the eye.

  “We’re going to get in shape. That’s what we’re going to do. But first we’re going to take a bath and then we’re going shopping to buy expensive clothes to cover us up. Make us look super nice and pretty and we’re going to meet Marcus and maybe let him touch us. Would you like that? No? Just a little? Maybe? Well, we’ll see.”

  After my body’s puppet show, I shut off the water and sank under the suds, realizing that the last time I’d had a bubble bath—alone—was the night I tried to induce labor with Jake. Almost six years ago? Jesus. I felt around down there with a kind of numb purposelessness, suddenly wanting Beau so badly I felt angry, as though I had rained more betrayal upon my body just thinking about him. If I was exhilarated during the plane ride, my freedom suddenly felt terrifying, like a balloon freed from a bouquet. At first it was a wild and unfamiliar ride, being away from them, but the farther I got the smaller, the more untethered, I felt. I saw myself floating up and above all the action, unable to will any weight into my legs, now two noodly strings, drunk on wind and fury. I had no real plan and I had always had a plan. I learned in school that before diving into the toxic soup of a situation, social workers had to have plans. You had to be able to anticipate dilemmas with textbook assessments and well-placed questions, open-ended and benevolent. But my training left little room for understanding Beth. Beyond the vagaries of our childhood, the things we shared and those we kept secret from each other, she remained a mystery to me. Her drunken mishap and Beau’s lack of vigilance led to an event as rare as a centennial comet to us. But I lingered in the water, sad for myself, the cuckolded baby sister, sad for the boys and their rotten parents, sad for their aunt, born with a vile bent, and sad that Lou had tried his best and failed us both.