The Almost Archer Sisters

by Lisa Gabriele

  Since you drowned the laptop, I write this from the copy shop in town. Beth wrote your email address, and this young woman here showed me how to work this thing. You should know last night I made my home on the couch to clear space for Beau to ruminate and sulk in the trailer.

  I am no arbiter of marital accord, or how to achieve it. Your mother and I had a difficult go of things. Not just because her depression was so deep, but the fact is I was a lousy farmer and I had a lot of guilt over skipping out on a country at war, and from marrying a woman who never loved me. She sure tried. She was just never mine for the having. Tooey was her love long before I was graced by her ride. But I am daily grateful for her generosity in marrying this almost soldier, who would have died from cowardice over there before a bullet could have grazed me. She gave me two girls I can’t love any more than I do, who’ve blessed me with more than I know I deserve. Fact is, she never wanted to come back to the farm, let alone stay. But because of my predicament, and the fact that I saddled her with a new baby right off, she felt forced to. I long have urged both of you to let go of any responsibility you two may have felt toward your mother’s death. But a part of me lives that believes she left like she did because of me. It’s the part I try to whittle down daily, but it pops up in times like this. I suspect it grows in Beth too. We forget, she may have been only eight then, but she was no dupe. When I look at how aware Sam is of any kind of discord, compared to the way Jake just kinda rolls with things, I can’t help but remind myself you two were roughly the same age as the boys during those treacherous days.

  I know you want an update on how Beth’s faring in the role of temporary caregiver. She’s no you, Peachy, but she has an endearing knack for the boys, probably, as she jokes, because she’s about their mental age. Somewhere in the middle. She puts it at seven and I don’t argue.

  Yesterday was busy for Beth, and a little confusing for the boys. They asked why she was here still and not with you in New York, and she said, “Because I love your mother and I want you guys to still be my friends.” Sam asked her why you were mad at Beth, and she said, “Because I did something very wrong and your mother is very right to be mad at me.” And when he asked her what she did, she said, “The worst possible thing to the people I love the very most.” Then Jake asked if she felt sorry, and Beth said she did and would for the rest of her life.

  That seemed satisfactory to them. The boys seemed to regard Beth with a kind of wary affection because they know you left in anger and that Beth had something to do with it. Sam had a small and uneventful episode; it came and went in under seventeen minutes. I was here, so there was nothing to worry about. Beth was out with Jake and Scoots at the pond. Beau’s been doing a lot of weekend work at the shop. He doesn’t want to be around, and that’s understandable. But he was home to tuck them in. Will be tonight too.

  I know you don’t want to hear this, but as a man who’s done some awful things too, I worry for Beau. He’s done big damage, but mostly what he’s guilty of is seeking selfish comfort in a place that had no business giving it to him, not the least reason being there was none to give. People like Beth can be powerful vortexes when they’re holding on to the bottom rung, as I believe Beth’s been doing for some time. I’ve often trotted out that old hippy saying of “living in the moment.” Smarter people than me say it’s the definition of happiness. But sometimes I think Beth lives too much in the moment, especially when she drinks. She’s become completely unaware of the consequences. I also believe that she’s letting go of that ladder.

  You know she drinks. You know my policy on preaching. What I’m saying is that if this be her bottom, we have to ensure a hard landing pad. This time I can’t catch her. I told her that and she cried like a child. I cried too. Later, in private. These have been hard days for me, because to know there is hatred and betrayal between your children is an awful kind of parental cancer.

  Peachy, you once wanted to be a social worker. You wanted to help sick and damaged people. And because you are a natural saint I know you will proceed with your graces intact, which you probably feel have abandoned you. They haven’t. They’re just dormant.

  From your loving father …

  No doubt Lou hoped to have a palliative effect on me. He wanted to use his words to build a buffer between me and Beth, between me and any actions I had planned on taking against her. But instead of a pause, instead of a reconsideration, his note left me feeling inflamed and, frankly, bereft. I kept my reply brief, knowing Beau or Beth would probably read it before handing it off to Lou.

  Thanks for your note. I hope when I screw up you’ll be equally eloquent in making my case to my loved ones. I will see you at the airport tomorrow. Kiss and hug the kids for me. Tell them I’ll be home after lunch. Tell them they only have to go to sleep and wake up one more time. I hope Beau is comfortable down at the trailer. And I hope Beth kisses the farm goodbye. I’ll be taking my better graces out for dinner and drinks tonight. Perhaps that’ll revive them.

  AS USUAL, I got ready too early, but even with the air-conditioning, I felt too hot to pace the apartment. I was a hurry-up-and-wait-type person, for the boys at school, for Beth at the airport, for Beau after work. I was the really early bird who waited for the worm to surface. I heated up food I had cooked too soon. I drove around the block to avoid being the first to a party or a shower. I ordered another while I waited, and waited, the serial killer of time. But after catching a glimpse of my face in the mirror, I realized applying makeup passed time rather dangerously. A solid layer needed to be troweled off, which carved a necessary fifteen minutes from my potential “wandering the block” time.

  I did look nice in that dress, the skirt cutting across the part of my legs that were thinnest, the firm fabric draping over my ass like a heavy flap. The slit provided the perfect amount of sexiness. I grabbed the folding map and checked my route to the restaurant. In these shoes anything was walking distance, I decided, and stepped out of the elevator into the lobby.

  Jonathan looked up and then covered his eyes and then uncovered them.

  “My, my, my,” he said. “You look wonderful.”

  “Why, thank you,” I said, spinning around like a goof.

  “And what occasion could warrant such a dress?”

  An occasion informed by fraud and vengeance, I wanted to say. With a dollop of sexual danger thrown in.

  “I’m meeting a friend for dinner. In Greenwich Village,” I said, feeling entitled to those words.

  “Where are you meeting your lucky friend?”

  I told him, and he gave me directions that matched the lines and arrows I had drawn on my own map. Despite the motives behind meeting my so-called “lucky” friend, I felt terribly proud of myself.

  “Thank you,” I said, smiling, winking, flirting. I was flirting. I was good at it.

  WHEN SHE WAS in love, I could see how this city could feel like Beth’s costar, her cohort, her coconspirator. I could see why flowers in buckets that she might normally pass with little appreciation could suddenly turn into tiny Ziegfeld girls in this city, marking a path with a theatrical tilt of their heavy heads. That’s the way I saw things walking to Greenwich Village in my dress. Even the garbage men seemed romantic here, hinging themselves out from the side of their churning white trucks, looking more like regal jousters than portable janitors. I was feeling floaty and foolish, remembering that Beth once told me that the best thing about New York is that the city itself cared about who you were and what you wore.

  “And that’s a good thing?” I asked.

  “No, Peach. That’s a great thing,” she said. “Why do you think talented Canadians leave Canada for New York?”

  “For American money?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s because talented people tend to be weird and weird people tend to be iconoclasts and Canada has no idea what to do with people like that.”

  “But you’re not a weird iconoclast, Beth.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But I’m work
ing on it.”

  I passed an old cookbook shop, marveling that a shop specializing in old cookbooks could be a viable business anywhere. Who shopped there? Who urgently needed to buy a used cookbook? I walked up Bleecker Street and past all the gay shops and people, trying not to gawk at flamboyance. I turned onto Hudson, nauseous with worry, even though Marcus was meeting Georgia, not married Peachy whose husband had recently been caught cheating. He was meeting a horse-riding, private-school-going girl named Georgia, not a university dropout and current housewife with a brain-stormy son who peed his bed and fainted in malls. He was meeting Italian-speaking Georgia, a chick with a bright future and a yellow racing bike, not Peachy, who still lives with her father in the same house and town in which she was born. Georgia was single, arty, and original, the type of woman who would never even give Beau Laliberté the time of day, let alone sleep with him, marry him, and give him a couple of sons.

  My stomach was getting busier as I got closer to the restaurant. God, I thought, Beth put herself through these painful procedures all the time. All those first dates she’d told me about, the assessments, the acceptances, the dismissals. It couldn’t be good for the health or digestion, let alone the human spirit. The mere potential for mortification that evening felt so corrosive, I could only imagine that serial rejection could ruin a person forever.

  Where Hudson met Eighth Avenue, I strolled to a stop at a small park and lit a cigarette. I watched women blow by me, leaving a lot of different sounds and smells in their wake. Some were yakking into the space in front of them, like zombie models, their phones hooked around their ears. Like Beth, they seemed to wear a wall of purposefulness around them, like an invisible, expensive force field. I watched a specter of a woman poke through the middle of a slow-moving crowd. She was a wisp really, clacking her staccato stilettos toward me, bouncy hair bracketing her shoulders, a mouth like a punch, eyes angry, breasts rising and falling a beat behind the rest of her body. Without breaking stride or looking at me, she careened around my body like she was an avatar from one of the boys’ computer games, controlled by a celestial joystick. I was not this, I thought. I could never be this. I was too fleshy, too earthbound.

  Just ahead I could see the restaurant’s sign dangling above the street. I threw my cigarette in the gutter and smelled my breath. I couldn’t remember if we had said that Georgia was a smoker. I looked at the time on the cell phone, feeling a little disappointed that I was still ten minutes early. Beth always said she arrived late for everything, so people had a chance to feel anxious to see her. “Huh,” I had said, my stock answer to all her odd rituals. I had noticed earlier that the cell’s battery was nearly depleted, so I shut it off for the day to save up enough juice to squeeze in one more call to the boys.

  Beth answered on the first ring.

  “Put one of the boys on, please,” I said.

  “Sam’s not here. He went with Lou to town. Jake is though. I was just going to call you. Where are you?”

  “Jake then, please. My cell doesn’t have a lot of battery power left. I forgot to grab my charger. So if I can’t be reached for the next couple of hours, that’s why. But call me at your place if there’s an emergency, and only if there’s an emergency. I’ll phone from the airport in the morning. Also, please tell Dad that he’s going to have to get over his no-coming-to-America thing, because he has to pick me up. I don’t want to see Beau’s face either.”

  “Jesus, Peachy,” she whispered.

  “I mean it.”

  “Peachy, please talk to me. I am worried about you there.”

  “Not now, I’m running late and I just want to talk to my son.”

  In the silence between us I tried to picture her face. It was likely makeupless and looking drawn. Saturdays are long when you have children. Some mornings the empty hours seemed impossible to fill, but by the end of the day everything you’d planned invariably took longer than you thought. That’s what Sundays were for, to complete the stuff you had started the day before under the misconception that you had nothing to do and too much time on your hands.

  I could hear her yell for Jake and then his little feet on the wood floor running to the phone. “Mom! Where are you?”

  “Hi, buddy!” His voice was food to me. I wanted to eat it, chew on it, savor it. “I’m still in New York. Just one more day. I’ll be home this time tomorrow! But guess what? I went shopping!”

  “What did you get me?”

  “You’ll see,” I said, stunned I had forgotten to buy them anything, a first among firsts for me that weekend.

  “It is a truck or maybe candy?”

  “I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise. How’s Sam? Where’s your brother?”

  “Grandpa and Dad took him to get movies for tonight. He had a spell this morning and peed on the kitchen floor. He hit his head, but Auntie Beth said no stitches!”

  My whole body buckled. His seizures were commonplace irregularities to all of us, but I could count on one hand how often he had seized while I was more than ten miles, or ten minutes, away. Four times, exactly, and each seizure felt more portentous than the one before.

  “Honey, I miss you so much and I will see you tomorrow. Could you put Auntie Beth on please and stay good. I know you’re being so good. I love you.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What the hell happened with Sam this morning?”

  “I wanted to tell you, Peachy, it was crazy. I can’t believe you do that every day!”

  “Just—is he okay?” I started to feel that awful strangulation of the parental heart.

  “Totally, Peachy. No. He’s fine. It was me I was more worried about.”

  “How surprising,” I said. My hands were shaking with worry and regret. What the hell was I thinking staying away for three days? Surely there was a special corner of hell reserved for selfish mothers like me.

  “Don’t, Peachy. That’s not what I meant. I’m just saying it scared the shit out of me.”

  “Tell me what the hell happened. Everything.”

  She told me she was alone, she had woken early and was making coffee, when Sam entered the kitchen muttering raggedy dream details, something about a moat, something about elephants coming toward the house at great speeds, then their huge legs churning and stopping in the mud, clothing and money in the mix.

  “He seemed a little weirded out that I was there. That you and Beau weren’t. But not upset.

  “On the other hand,” Beth said, “Jake would have made a champion orphan.” Apparently he bounded down to the kitchen and took in Beth’s news of his parents’ absence with his patented blitheness, a trait I hoped would accompany him throughout his life.

  “Jake goes, ‘If they’re gone, then we can have Lucky Charms.’”

  “She said Lou got up off the couch where he had fallen asleep the night before, splashed his face in the kitchen tap, and took Jake into town to buy a box of that forbidden tooth rot.

  Though my feelings about Beth were still steeped in awful ire, I was sorry to hear she was alone when Sam’s eyes rolled up and back and away. She told me he dropped to his knees by the dog bowl, spilling Scoots’s food all over the Mexican tiles we were meaning to replace with carpet for that reason. She didn’t know he was falling into a fit, so picking up the damn kibble had temporarily distracted her, therefore preventing her from catching his head. Beth tried not to panic, she said, as she sat next to my almost-gone boy, inching closer to him, but afraid. She watched his body fight the current running through him before he finally succumbed. She pulled his head onto her lap and started wiping the blood off his forehead.

  “Honestly, it’s a little tiny cut. He doesn’t need stitches. And Lou agreed. I’m so sorry, Peachy. I didn’t catch his head. I fucking hate myself,” she said.

  “It happens,” I said coldly, not mentioning all of the times I’d settle him down into a spell and go back to finishing the dishes. I pictured their little kitchen pietà, worried ove
r what could have happened, but ashamed of the ownership I suddenly felt over his seizures. They happened to Sam, but they had always been my moments to manage and contain. I clutched the side of the bench.

  “I kept saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’” she said, describing how she rubbed Sam’s twitching arms, trying to move some stillness into them, while reciting to herself the rules governing the next several minutes of his life.

  Sam’s pee had reached up under Beth’s legs. She had tried to make a dam with her hands but couldn’t stop it from soaking her pajama bottoms. For a second she said she thought it was her own pee, her own blood, and I almost laughed to myself thinking that she must have been totally petrified of adding Sam’s death to the map of carnage she had already charted through our home. When Scoots started to lazily lick at the pee, Beth pushed his head away with a purposeful shove. After several minutes passed, each one less difficult than the one before, Sam’s slippers finally slowed to their blessed twelve o’clock stop.

  “Then I said, ‘Come back, Sam. You can come home now, guy,’ like you always say. And then his eyes opened and he opened and shut his fists and rubbed his jaw and the first thing he said was, ‘Mom,’ and I said, ‘No honey, it’s me. Auntie Beth.’”

  By then I was sniffling audibly. Beth was oblivious, describing how it seemed like Sam was embarrassed while lifting his bum from the wetness.

  “I told him there was a little blood because he smacked the tiles. And I told him I was sorry I didn’t catch his head. And you know what? He apologized, Peachy, for peeing his pants. Poor kid. So I told him the pee was probably mine,” she said, nervously laughing, adding she wasn’t altogether sure it was untrue, she’d been that scared. She said her legs were so numb they felt welded to the tiles. She described how she had folded my son forward, keeping her hand on his wet back for a second while he took in his surroundings. Even after Beth added several minutes to the clock on the microwave, only remembering to time it out as Sam was coming to, it still sounded like one of his shorter spells.