The Almost Archer Sisters

by Lisa Gabriele

  “I must go cook,” Nadia said, turning and leaving me with these people. Noooo. Don’t leave me, I yelled in my head.

  “That’s my broad,” said Jeb. “Broad” seemed silly but very apt. Not just because Nadia looked to be older than Jeb by a few years, but, like Beth, she carried herself differently than everyone else. But where Beth’s rails ran low to the ground, Nadia’s were higher than all of ours. I could see why Nadia rankled Beth. “She thinks she is sooo great,” Beth would say. But it was precisely that aspect, that pride of place, that made her seem great.

  The group in the living room resumed their conversation under a dusting of cigarette smoke. I looked past them at what I thought, for a split second, was a poster of the Manhattan skyline. But it wasn’t a poster. It was the skyline in all its gaudy brilliance. It was dusk by then, and the buildings were washed in the kind of color you could never find in a can. As I moved closer to the window, the moon suddenly joined the buildings and I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it looked, hovering over the skyline. I felt choked up, like even the moon knew it looked better over here.

  Jeb came up behind me, slapped a vodka and soda in my hands, and lit a cigarette.

  “So. Tell me. What happened?”

  “This is amazing. Look at that moon,” I said, smiling and sipping. I never thought the moon could put a person in a better mood, but it had. I pointed to his cigarette pack. He pumped one out for me and lit it. “What do you mean, ‘what happened’?” For a second I really had no honest idea what he was talking about.

  “You know what I mean. Beth. Kate mentioned something about her and Beau. What the fuck?”

  I tried not to look around the room at all the faces suddenly trying hard not to face me. Kate seemed to be eyeing the bottom of what must have been her second martini, pretending to pay attention to something Anthony wasn’t saying. Out of the corner of my eye, Nadia was moving slowly in the kitchen area in case the pots and pans she was messing with drowned out what Jeb and I might say to each other. They reminded me of bored hyenas, dying to gnaw on the entrails of my wounded family. Beth would have launched a witty barb into the tense crowd, something sharp enough to counter their curiosity: OK so yeah, my husband fucked my thinner sister and all I got was this lousy, extra-large T-shirt, she would have said, to guffaws all around. The thought made me wish for my husband, a man whose job it had always been to shield me from this kind of menace. Whenever I’d been bored, out of my element, over my head or off my game, at the party, a barbecue, the tavern, or a banquet, I needed only glance sideways at Beau, and he’d appear by my side with my coat. If Beau were here, I thought, he’d have long since called us a cab. Before leaving he’d have smashed their faces together, Frieda and Stacey in particular, nose job to nose job—whack. Then he would have hoisted me into his arms like a rescuing prince, or an avenging angel (the kind who have sex with their wives’ sisters and then feel really bad about it), and carried me across the darkening room. But there was no one coming to get me, no one to save me from these people whose only real sin was to give me a supportive audience for my indignation, to allow me the necessary luxury of ripping into Beth. But I couldn’t do it. Even though I had never hated her more, I probably would have still thrown an arm across her chest if I slammed on the brakes at a stop sign.

  “I don’t want to be rude, Jeb,” I whispered. “But I’d rather not discuss my personal problems in a room full of people who don’t know me.”

  “Oh come on, Peachy,” Anthony yelled from across the room. “We know Beth!”

  Kate snorted. A bit of pimento landed on Anthony’s arm. He carefully lifted it and returned it to the rim of her martini glass. “I believe this is yours, madam.”

  “Ank oo,” Kate said, mouth full of olive.

  There was more laughter from the faux comedy club audience, now off the subject of Cuba, and onto the subject of me.

  “Well, I think it’s totally fucked what she did,” said Frieda, who was sitting in the middle of the sectional couch. “Totally wrong.”

  Stacey, wired and tight, added, “Well, if Peachy doesn’t want me to be her friend anymore, I won’t be Beth’s friend.”

  She was kidding, but there was a smattering of nods and yeahs to that childish comment.

  “You all know?” I asked, looking directly at Kate.

  “We’re all best friends with her,” Louis said, shrugging. “She would have told us herself. Eventually.”

  “Peachy,” Nadia yelled. “Come into da kitchen wit me.”

  I practically ran across the massive living space, past the chainsmoking gauntlet. Fury moved my legs, but embarrassment and anger were the fuel. Nadia glowered at Jeb from across the room.

  “What are you looking at me for?” Jeb yelled. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Jeb, you should be fucking gay for all da stupid gossipy girl shit you get yourself involved in. No offense, Anthony. Louis. And be careful of trowing stones,” Nadia said. “And Kate! You should shut your mout sometime.”

  She was being meanly playful, but her Polish accent made the scolding come out in a religious hiss.

  “Peachy, stay away from doze people, dare awful,” Nadia cooed, motioning for me to come to her in the kitchen. I felt coddled and protected, and since the vodka was kicking in too, I felt a bit bolder. Beth’s betrayal seemed to lend me a necessary edge in the room, made me kind of feel a bit interesting. Plus, I didn’t relish the thought of wandering the neighborhood below looking for a cab.

  “And scat, you two! Go,” she said to Kate and Anthony. “Go sit in da corner wit da udder bad people. We don’t like you.”

  They skulked off, leaving us alone in the kitchen, which was bigger than any restaurant kitchen I’d ever been in. I gulped the rest of my drink, slammed it on the cutting board, and asked Nadia what I could do to help.

  “Hand me dat rifle,” she ordered, pointing to the top of the fridge.

  I turned and scanned the wall above for a gun rack, for a second thinking she might just finish them off in a hail of bullets. I could only see a big bowl of cream and fruit perched next to a standing photo of chubby girls in a line wearing bathing suits.

  “What rifle?”

  “No, try-full,” she said, laughing. “Put it in da fridge, please. Sometimes, I wish I did have a gun, dough. I hate Americans.”

  I moved the bowl and then pulled down the picture of the bathing beauties. Their excellent posture, red lips, pin-curled hair, cocktail-weenie thighs jutting out of bathing suits, reminded me of a still from a 1940s water musical.

  Nadia grinned fondly, pointing at the girl in the middle. “Look at me how beautiful. Tirty years ago, can you believe it? Only tirteen and look at my legs. Very strong. I believe I should have won because I feel I was standout, no?”

  I laughed, thinking that around the age that Nadia was expertly posing, one meaty thigh in front of the other, Beth would have been tugging on satin shorts, obsessing about imaginary cellulite, hating her nonexistent breasts and her very real set of braces. No wonder Jeb, or any man, would rather marry her than Beth. I would have married her because she really was standout. In a place that seemed full of self-abusive, self-flagellating self-loathers like Beth, Nadia indeed stood out.

  “You must terrify Beth,” I said.

  Nadia stopped braising what looked to be a dozen tiny heads of thin lettuce splayed on a strip of foil.

  “Not on purpose,” she said. “I need a sharp knife, Peachy, hand me.”

  I unveiled a long knife from the block, feeling like her assistant surgeon. “Smells good, what are we having?”

  “Boudin and spaetzle with braised endive. Trifle for dessert. Jeb bought da sausages. I can’t cook a pig’s head.”

  The menu sounded like the starting lineup for a Finnish hockey team, but I didn’t care, I’d try it all.

  “Do you love him?” she whispered, glancing over my shoulder at the guests behind me, seemingly entertained by a story
Anthony was telling them. She moved the little lettuces into the bottom of the stove.

  “Beau?”

  “Your husband. Do you love him?” She stood up, put both her fists on her hips, and fully faced me.

  “I think so. I don’t know. I’m angry. As you can imagine,” I said, feeling suddenly so tired.

  “More dan imagine, Peachy. I know. But if you love him, you can get trew dis.”

  “I guess I do. Yes. I mean, we have two kids. And one’s sick. And I don’t want to go it alone. But that’s not why I’d stay. I just—I don’t want to hurt the boys. My dad loves him. But what he did. And with Beth. My sister. And she—”

  My voice caught in my throat again, but I was not going to cry at Jeb and Nadia’s. I didn’t want to give them the performance they seemed to be keening for.

  “Let me tell you someting, Peachy. I don’t know if Beth told you dis, but before I was married, Jeb had a one last fling wit your sister.”

  “No. She didn’t,” I said, stunned. “And you’re still friends with her?”

  “Yes. It may seem strange, but day had been broken up for years. Can you hear me in the udder room dare? And Jeb, I don’t know. Beth was a reliable person for him to fuck because she didn’t want anyting from him. Didn’t want to destroy our relationship. Didn’t want him back. She just wanted to have some fun. A nutting ting, day said. Jeb too, and dat was supposed to be all. And day tought dat I would understand, even if I did find out, which I was not supposed to find out—right, Jeb? Dare not listening now, you see, because dis is an embarrassing ting for Jeb listen to. He feels shame. Even still.”

  I glanced behind me, and it was true, the party suddenly seemed deeply ensconced in a discussion about Sardinia, pros, cons, celebrity spottings, the yucky pebble beaches, anything to desperately not overhear what Nadia was unconcerned about saying in their company. I suddenly wanted to be Nadia’s best friend, to make Nadia like—no—love me. I wanted to tell her that I would never hurt her, never betray her, that I was nothing like Beth. I would be a soldier-friend, loyal, honest, and kind. And probably, to these people, as boring as hell. It suddenly dawned on me that they loved Beth precisely because she was so spectacularly fucked up. She entertained them, which had made them as complicit in her crimes and dramas as I had been.

  But they knew nothing about me, nothing about how my insides work or the depths to which I knew things. My love for the boys, for instance, was so limitless and impenetrable that there could be no real harm done to me there. I could see these people for who they were, sad, careworn, and a little lost. I had never believed, like some parents, that you can’t really know what love is unless you have children. But after I had the boys, I found it impossible to hate the same way again. And while I could hold some softness in my heart for Beth’s people, they likely found me as dull as a spoon. I was okay with that. I knew otherwise. So did Beth. Once on the radio I had heard a piece of classical music, just a snippet. It was slow and then it built, like a small dancer quickly tiptoeing up some stairs. It built up and up and up like that, hung for a second, then released into a cascade of instruments before abruptly ending. The silence just started me bawling. It wasn’t the music so much as the end of it that cut me right in half in the kitchen. Twenty minutes I cried standing there. I have no idea what that music was, who composed it, whether it was a symphony, an opera, a concerto, whatever. But years later I told Beth about it, how that bit of music seemed to be inside of me at first. How it curled right around my spine and then pulled something awful and hidden out from behind my heart.

  “It felt like a miracle or something,” I said.

  Instead of teasing me or snorting at the sentiment, Beth, eyes welling up, said, “Peachy, I was just going to say nothing has ever moved me like that in my life. But you just did.”

  I suspected that it was the kind of thing that I could tell Nadia, too, one day. If we ever really became friends.

  “So anyway, I find out. Doesn’t matter how, but I do. And I cry. I call da whole ting off. I cry for weeks and weeks and weeks. She never told you dis?”

  I shook my head, marveling at Beth’s appetite for ruination as Nadia sliced diagonally across the boudin sausages, sprinkling a little dark oil in their centers. Placing them back in the oven, she plunged both hands in a bowl of dough, lightly massaging it.

  “I need you to turn on da water on da stove dare, Peachy, to boil. And I hated your sister with all my might. A person. Who I asked. To speak. At my wedding,” she said, punctuating her sentences with her kneading. “Dat she would have sex with my fiancé. But den one day she comes here to my door. Face all swollen and fat like a crybaby’s. She had deeze flowers and she begs me to come in, pleeze, she says, I will never ask anyting of you again. Hand me dat strainer.”

  Nadia described how Beth paced and smoked, and I saw my sister working the room, using the exposed-brick wall as the backdrop to her dramatic monologue. I could hear her voice, bruised with just the right amount of patented regret, saying all the right and soothing words, words that go beyond sorry and into the realm of celestial expiation. Her story would describe a heinous deed not committed by her, but someone not her, as though she’d been momentarily abducted by a bald-headed, shriveled demon who, once finished committing the crime, giggled over its shoulder as it gleefully exited her body. I had heard that regret in her voice before, sometimes in minor dollops, like when she’d canceled a trip home for Jake’s graduation from preschool. It came in a bigger dose when she couldn’t be there after we were told of the full scope of Sam’s dilemma. Beth’s potent apology was followed by three dozen roses with a note attached that read: “I am there for you, whatever you need. I will do it. If you need it, say so.” And she meant it, she always meant it, which is why I had always forgiven her. Though she was only kidding when she said she’d be on the first flight home for Nana Beecher’s memorial, held at the church in Belle River after Lou picked up her ashes at the Windsor airport. (“The last place you’ll ever find me,” Beth said, “is crying over that bitch’s coffin.”)

  “So I forgive her. Not completely. Not right away. And you know why? At first because you should keep your friends close, Peachy, your enemies closer. But den, I knew Beth. I knew Jeb. I knew dey could make trouble like children do. But once day were caught, I never was loved better by eeder one of dem. And I love Jeb. I know he loves me. And I would miss Beth and her stories, and she’s so funny and generous too. You know dis. Mostly it’s because I feel sorry for her. Someting about Beth makes me want to take care of her, even dough she hurts people she loves. And you know, wit her childhood and everyting, and how awful it must have been to—anyway. It’s best to forgive.”

  We all began to gravitate around the dining room table. The boudin was delicious, though I had to chase the image of the face of the pig from my own head in order to eat it. Frieda and Stacey asked me affectionate questions about my boys, which I happily answered. Lou was an object of real interest, a mythical draft dodger Americans really only hear about but rarely meet. But when I brought up the time Nell tried to convince Lou to cross the border before draft dodgers were pardoned, just to see what would happen, the table went nearly silent.

  “Yeah, before she died, she was always on him about moving back to the States,” I said, filling in the sudden blanks at the table. “You know, ‘Let’s go to the States, I want to move back to the States, I miss the States,’ but he really didn’t want to leave Canada. He’s totally in love with the country, I swear. It’s like a person to him. A woman even,” I said, laughing into the silence, taking an uncomfortable sip from my wine.

  “Sorry, Peachy,” Nadia said, taking up some of the empty plates. “We didn’t mean to bring up your mudder.”

  “Um. It’s okay,” I said, looking around, confused. “I mean, I brought it up. But I don’t mind.”

  The table seemed to exhale.

  “What is it?”

  Then Louis piped up and said, “Oh well, Beth made us totally sig
n our death warrants not to bring up the subject of your mother’s suicide in front of you.”

  Kate kicked someone under the table.

  “Must have been awful for you two to lose her so young,” Stacey said, lighting a cigarette, handing it to Frieda, then lighting her own. “The real tragedy is that Beth was so little when she found her. I mean, do you ever wonder if part of why Beth’s the way she is is because she discovered the body?”