They walked while making sleeping arrangements and then sat outside their cottage on the granite and watched the moon, which didn’t do anything. In the moonlight, Una suddenly said her strongest word, “Mother, you’re pretty.” And their father said, “My God, yes.” She looked so young, her skin like the flesh of a flower, she could have been her own child waiting for the mother to come. Mother and father backed up, sitting, put their spines together, and rocked each other almost into a dream. The sisters got nervous, they didn’t want their parents to dream and they got itchy when they saw that side of them.
Later, inside, the birds wiped their beaks and fell asleep standing. Late, late night, the sisters kept at their vacation, trying not to sleep in it but stay up for it, reading everything—cards, heads, contents of pockets, and then they got to hands. “Una has fingernail marks in her palms, Mother.”
“She makes secret fists,” their mother said. “It shows up in all the family pictures.”
Since her feet were too strong and wouldn’t stay still, they wouldn’t sleep with her. They put her on a pillow pallet on the floor at the feet of their father and mother so she’d be safe.
Then the sisters said, high and almost together, “I’m lonely.”
“I’m not,” said Una.
The sisters sat with her then and scratched her back and played with her loose hair. They had curlers in theirs. Back in their bed, they clicked into sleep like insects in their shells.
For a while Una played with her own broad, flat ribbons of hair. Then she woke her mother by tapping lightly, one finger on her forehead as if it were a door to something.
“Can we leave a light on?” Una asked.
“We don’t need to, dear.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re all here inside, together.”
“Daddy would turn on a light for me. He lets me have everything.”
But everybody was still and quiet and riding in sleep, their father in his long-sleeved pajamas, his deep male breath in the room, rocking them.
Una left them to get to her pockets. She’d brought two small sea-shells, small as seeds; she planted them now in front of the mirror, which the moon made into a long, cool light on the wall.
The next morning she said to their father before both of his eyes would open at the same time, “Daddy, my seashells walked last night. Just a little.”
“What . . . they couldn’t have, Una. There’s nothing in them anymore. They’re empty.”
“Ugh.” That excited the sisters. “Dead spirits of snails, snail ghosts,” they screamed. Their imaginations, unforgivably, were just alike.
Una made a dimple of spit on the mirror to mark their place. “It’s just an experiment,” she said. They giggled, which sounded like something running around in circles.
“Mother, Una’s starting to pout,” said one of the sisters.
“I am not. My face is just different from yours.” To her mother, softly, she said, “Did you argue with Daddy last night? I heard you.”
“No, you didn’t,” her mother said. “You heard a light rain. It came to wash things quickly for tomorrow, which is right now, you better be ready.”
Their father said he was first awake before everybody, but stayed with his eyes closed, letting the sun get to his face in bed. “Fire me up from inside, cure me like a pot of clay.”
Una put on fresh underpants even before her bath because she wanted to set out now. Dinner had embarrassed her, so she’d give herself breakfast alone—an apple from the trip in one pocket, old bread in the other, where the seashells had been. Her parents let her separate from them like this. She wanted to finish breakfast early so if she fell into the quarry pool she’d have long since eaten and cramps wouldn’t drown her.
But her doing something different, and being allowed to, set the sisters in a mood. Also, their bangs had come up in their sleep and wouldn’t come down again. So they made fun of Una. “She can’t ever get married, Mother. Cause she won’t take off her underpants. She sleeps in them.”
“She wears three pairs in twenty-four hours,” said their mother. “And I remembered to pack extras for her.”
Angry, the sisters wore their bangs like fins to breakfast.
The bright light, going the other way, hit Una’s eyelids and made her feel like she’d suddenly run ahead of herself and the earth had slipped out from under her feet.
The quarry pool wasn’t yet blue. In the new light it was colorless. So the family went to the dining room while she tried to find what new birds, butterflies, and worms were in Vermont. When their parade got back from breakfast, their father visited the cage. The birds ducked because he came back with coffee breath. Then a bird jumped on his left shoulder; he turned and it winged. Una thought he liked birds because they didn’t have two hands either.
Una’s shells were checked by everyone; they had not moved and the dimple had dried to a glass defect.
The sisters felt three flat bathing suits. “Dry, dry, dry.” One was their father’s; he hadn’t worn it, but it was out waiting. It was he who’d wanted to come and swim—the one thing he was so good at younger that he’d almost had to give up. “A place where I was perfect and won medals.”
Their mother had disappeared and now she gave the order from behind the bathroom door, “Everyone close your eyes.” They heard her step out past the brush of the door. They opened to see her with her breath held and her stomach tight.
“As beautiful a shape as before anyone was born,” said their father. He kissed her for her joy in accomplishing this feat.
Then, when their mother’s breath was out, there were soft rolls at her waist. “Oh, well,” she laughed, “one too many babies.”
Their father changed and looked funny to Una, a long-sleeved shirt, a black bathing suit, and his two legs showing.
Their mother said, “When I bend over, this tight bathing suit bottom hurts like I was having a baby again.”
Una changed. In the bathroom, quickly. She’d seen enough of herself one time—with a hand mirror. Her pubis. She was cloven there, but closed, like two tiny hooves pressed together.
The minute she walked toward the pool, her lean cheeks began chewing away at her bathing suit bottom. By the end of the day, she knew, it would feel like a man-eater—several times she would have to snap it from its jaws. It won her attention by the ache it caused, constant, tiny, which seemed to be already on the way to her heart.
The sisters’ lips were white with Noxema. They had already screamed and run, then carefully dunked themselves in the water, wet, their bangs pressed flat against them. They dipped, came out to bake; they were using water as a magnifying glass to get sun on them.
It was apparent their father would go in wearing the shirt and the black glove that matched his bathing suit.
Their mother now was wrapped in a white sheet taken from the cottage bedroom.
He only paused, and rethought. Then his body curved, gave a slow fall with a slight twist toward his incomplete side, one arm forward, one dangling at his side. The water bent under his masculine weight and took him beneath it without even a gulp. He left a crown of breaking bubbles on top to mark his place.
When he did not pop right back up in them, Una was afraid that he had gone to touch bottom and she knew the bottom wasn’t there. Then he was on top, seeming to float standing straight up, not touching anything but his chin to the water line, and his fingers of one hand swimming. He began moving. Would he swim like a bird with a broken wing? Then Una saw he wanted to swim in circles.
She watched a little, and listened. Her sisters had accused her of having ears like antennas. “They pick up overseas stations.”
“We’re waiting,” their mother called to their father, her voice like the drone of bees half put to sleep by the sun.
When the white shirt was wet, you could see through it and through the sleeve, and it was alarming. Through her split-lid look that she couldn’t control, Una saw the appliance and what
remained of her father’s real arm.
Actually, she was watching the sky when it happened. The moon was out where it didn’t belong. She found it in one far corner of the sky with the sun. In daylight, the moon wasn’t rock at all; it looked like the cloth in the water, like one layer of thin skin. She was waiting for courage. She had time because the water was too much for her. It took her balance in it, and with that water penned in the quarry, the whole rock felt like it was moving. She wanted time to see what she would have done on her vacation that was special. The stars and sun and moon together—that was what she wanted. She closed her eyes to wish all of a sudden and felt like she was falling. It was too high up here in Vermont. She made a small wad of herself, crouched on warm quarry rock. Extra nerve, she was waiting for it—and for the apple and bread she’d eaten to settle down before she looked up to the spinning sky again.
Then she heard with her tuned ears the sounds her father was making and trying to keep to himself. He was panting and exasperated, sucking at the sides of his mouth.
One of the sisters cried out like a cat.
Una was on her feet, running right off the edge of stone and into the water. She was in and over and under and up. The water was flying around her and around them. Her father was so hard to catch, she wanted to hold onto him and save him. He kept giving her the wrong hand, the false gloved hand, and she kept knocking it down and away from her.
The quarry’s water was not cold. It was hot, coiled inside her, real air now felt like tight rings in her nose.
She had never seen her father’s face in anguish this close up before.
“What’s going on? Make her leave Daddy alone,” the sisters screamed. She heard them outside; she was trapped in the water with her father.
Where in the world to hold onto her father? She got him around the hips, her arms tight, hard little lifesavers, and her feet kicked, kicked them up.
They bumped against the side. But her father wouldn’t get out. Then his good elbow hooked, and his bad one followed. She was like a step beneath him, a moving step. And then there was a sheet flapping, popping at the quarry side—the sail took him up and in. It was her mother’s sheet and her mother’s hair rose and filled and flew with her joy and her moan.
The sisters waded tiptoe into the clear splatters around him. Their backs to her, they screamed, “Oh God, God, Una!”
“I’m up and out,” she said. “My feet are strong.”
“How? Did you get out from slick water and up straight rock and not go to the ladder?” Rita asked.
“I got myself by the hair and pulled, lifted myself out by my own hair,” said Una.
“Impossible,” said their mother.
“And here I am,” said Una.
“Saint Una,” the sisters said and giggled, but then they cried and were so scared they couldn’t even look at their father.
“Ladder?” said their father. “Ladder?”
“Two! Didn’t you even know? Didn’t you even look for one? What were you hoping to do about getting yourself out?” He closed his eyes when their mother kissed him. He took his good arm and put it around her. “I couldn’t pull myself out with just one arm. My shirt tired me and the appliance hurt in the water.” She put his other arm around her and started shivering. At the same time, she was squeezing Una’s hair dry.
The way her mother stepped in to get her kisses from her father made Una fierce. “I’m the one who saved you, not her,” she told him. This time, quick, she drew blood under her fingernails down her mother’s arm.
And this time he raised his hand to her. “Did you hurt your mother again? Did you scratch her?”
“He’s never spanked her; only us,” one sister sniffed, “but now he will.”
“He’ll spank her in the face. Good.”
He retrieved her mother’s protective white sheet and carefully wrapped it around her, put it on her as if she were coronated. Then he told her to go inside. He wanted to talk to Una. He told the sisters to stay beside their mother.
The sisters, for once, didn’t bolt ahead. They wore their sun shirts now and held knots in the sheet and waited to follow.
“No. You leave Una alone,” her mother said. Her voice had holes in it from nervous breath.
“Don’t take up for me.”
“Sit down, Una,” her father said.
“No,” her mother said.
“Is ‘no’ all she can say?” Una said. “Make Mother go away. I mean disappear. I hate her.” When she looked, her mother had gone, the sisters pulled along behind her. Only wet sun pieces were there, stuck in their footsteps.
“You’re going to stop talking like that,” her father said. “I’m going to stop you now.”
Una made knuckles out of her toes. “I won’t sit down. I got water in my bathing suit. It’ll make funny squishing sounds and you’ll laugh at me.”
In the cottage, the sisters did.
He looked at them behind the screen, serious, as if he were going to guess their weights and ages. “Your sisters were born too close,” he said. “That’s what’s the matter with them.” He seemed mad at everybody after just having been saved. “We hit fallow between them and you.”
“Fallow! Daddy’s talking dirty again, Mother.” The sisters were laughing, scared.
“I’m drunk on pool water and fear,” he said.
Her mother’s voice sieved through the screen, aimed higher than Una’s head, as if he alone could hear. “You didn’t do wrong alone; we’re married.” There it was—the old argument come back on vacation. Worry was the sound of rain, it had whispered last night to Una. “We decided together no more children. I was the one who broke it and then refused.”
“Who? Who?” the sisters screamed.
Una’s nostrils closed like doors to dark closets. She pinched her nose and tightened her eyes, her wet lashes tied together. “I don’t like this old argument today,” she said.
“We do, Daddy, tell us.” The sisters, looking hopeful, crossed their fingers and slid their hands into their shirt pockets.
Their mother said, “I made the appointments and cancelled. I changed my mind after I had promised.”
“Now I don’t want to know. This is a big deal,” said Marie, who always chickened out first.
“It’s the Scarlet A,” said Rita, who really did listen in school. “Abortion. He didn’t want to have any more of us.” They laughed, terrified.
“The last one was me,” said Una. “And there was nothing I could have done about it.”
“Una was the mistake!” the sisters said, shocked. The words were magic. Their mother and the white sheet were gone, disappeared from the screen.
“It was then she told me she had two hearts inside.” It was their father talking. “She told me to leave. She said I was missing, not an arm, but a heart. See, Una?” their father said. “You have to stop making me your only one. You must let your mother love you.”
Their mother appeared, her sheet folded in her arms.
As if there were two answers to everything and they had them, the sisters pulled their fingers from their sun shirts and held up one hand apiece. Each hand held an empty shell.
“Stolen!” cried Una. “Mine! Don’t touch them. Mother, make them stop taking my things.”
“They walked to us, Una,” said the sisters. “And we caught them and saved them for you.” They had lied many times against her; this time they lied for her.
Their mother, face pressed against the screen, was flat as a photo of herself.
“Don’t you cry, Mother,” said Una. “You know you’ll upset the birds. These birds talk. We have to be careful what we say.”
Behind them, the birds found sun on their perch and stood in it. They mumbled between their beaks, understood only each other; they had private matters, too.
“Now can you see? I love you, Una,” said their father.
“Ow,” she said.
“Look, Mother, Una’s tears are falling. And they’re huge.”
When they all looked down, the quarry rock was speckled as a mackerel, drops of silver and black depending on which side of the eye and sun you saw. It looked like her eyes falling around her.
the boogieman
They were halfway through when they saw behind the window in the air-conditioned house Great-Aunt Birdsey’s sweating face. She was sweating because she wanted out.
Evelyn was twenty-eight and just back home, and her grandmother, Jackie, who was Birdsey’s youngest sister, was trying to teach her how to tie a bush back with twine and nail it against a wall. The bush was a pyracantha, as old as Birdsey, heavier, its limbs loaded, sometimes with berries, always with thorns.
“Get away from that window,” said Jackie, not making much sound because Birdsey couldn’t hear through the double window. “She’s as old as fossil teeth,” said Jackie. “And twice as hard. She’s turning into stone. I can hardly lift her, and watch out, the pyracantha is falling. Don’t grab it, Evelyn, it has thorns.” The thorns could leave scars.
“Get back, get back, Birdsey,” Jackie told the insulated window. “You’ll only get out here and get sick. You know I can’t push and pull at you anymore, I’m the baby sister and I’m old, too. And Evelyn can’t help, she’s supposed to be on a holiday.”
That made Evelyn skip her jaw to the side. Her face felt wobbly. She was afraid she had come to stay. She didn’t argue, but she did say as if she’d never thought of it before, “Why did you name me . . .” Her tongue and lips wandered. “. . . Elevyn?” she heard herself say, and she shut her eyes on the self that couldn’t even pronounce her own name.
“Evelyn. Because it’s such a pretty name,” Jackie said. “I gave it to you. Here, hold the nail. You were three weeks old. I told your mother, ‘If you don’t hurry up and name her, she’ll be Evelyn, named by me.’”
“Why did she leave me when I was so little?” Evelyn was stuck with the twine in her hand.
“Pull tight.” They went over it one more time. Jackie said, “She kept leaving and coming back. Finally I told her, ‘You’re making the baby cry. Run out that door one more time and you’ll not get back in again with me.’ She loved doing things behind my back. Just like her father. Damn her. We hurt ourselves with spite. We’re all walking around with our noses off.” They both let go to test the bush. “So,” said Jackie, “it’s a blank. Empty. Not a word for too long. Not a clue. She won’t remember me or you. I don’t forgive her.”
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