by Ursula Hegi
This past year, the river trail has become too uneven for Basil, and he can no longer negotiate the steep path between the trail and our house. When Ev and I were girls, we used to clear that path every May with our father, who was as impatient as we to swim, though the water was still cool; but now we merely whack at the dense weeds and shrubs and sumacs every few years to keep them from absorbing our path altogether into the overgrown hillside that turns amber and dry before the end of summer.
“You think Basil is afraid?” Moss asks.
“Of porcupines. He went in for porcupine quills and — “
“You’ve told me the porcupine story, Libby.”
“He is also afraid of water. You’ve seen him—he’ll go right up to the edge, but never in, and when Ev and I swim, he just runs along the bank, yelping as if he wanted to rescue us.”
“What I meant was…” Moss presses two fingers against her high forehead and circles them. Her face is all forehead, her hair short like a boy’s. She’s the only blonde I know who darkens her hair deliberately, and she snips at it every day the way some men snip at their beards.
“What I meant was,” Moss says, “afraid of dying.”
“Not nearly as afraid as I am of him dying.”
“You’ll know it’s time for him to go when the life in his eyes goes dim.”
Moss said the same thing last Sunday to Ev and me when she served us eggplant kabobs. Life is one of Moss’s passionate subjects: it’s something she “embraces” and “balances.” Ev and I see her at least once a week when we eat at the Street Café. Our regular table is next to the chocolate carousel, the cake display where a dozen variations of chocolate cake revolve behind curved glass. Food at the Street Café never tastes the same twice in a row. That’s what Ev and I like about it. That’s why we endure the long wait that, inevitably, is part of eating here. Moss is an inspired cook, the only one who’s worked at the café for longer than a year and who seems to follow some kind of schedule. At least most days. Employees here change frequently, bringing with them flowing garments and hair, traipsing between the stoves and dining tables in their Teva sandals or combat boots, tinkering with recipes they remember from a grandmother or have unearthed in ethnic vegetarian cookbooks published by communes that dissolved decades ago.
“My boyfriend, he gave me a black rose the other night,” Moss tells me as we walk past the construction site of the new library.’
“The kind of red that’s almost black?”
“No. Totally black.”
“Basil … Basil …” I check the street next to the library. Nothing. I’m so impatient for this library to be completed. Our temporary library has been squeezed into what used to be J. C. Penney, and it has to share the building with a discount store that, I swear, employs more detectives than salespeople. You can never locate what you came in for, but there’s usually a man in a cheap suit stalking you. And that’s damn distracting. And tempting. Tempting because it makes you want to test how good those detectives really are and, even though you’ve never thought of shoplifting, to snatch a pair of ninety-nine-cent socks, say, and a three-dollar tie and stuff them into your pockets. The only decent thing we ever bought there was a purple terry-cloth robe for Ev. We avoid shopping there, because we don’t particularly enjoy feeling like suspects. Besides, the store has a lousy return policy—store credit only—which means you have to endure another one of those lovely shopping experiences. No, thank you.
“My boyfriend says they’re supposed to last longer.”
“What?”
“Black roses.”
“Make sure to drop a penny into the vase.”
We take the Lincoln Street Bridge back across the river. In the fenced playground of the YMCA, the day-care toddlers are playing, diapers pressing their squat legs into O-shapes. One pale, stocky girl is reaching through the metal links with a plastic shovel to get the dirt on the outside of the fence. I can imagine what my sister would make of that. “That girl will always be like that” she’d say, “wanting what’s outside her own boundaries. Like you, Libby.”
Please. I used to think boundaries were the lines between countries, but Ev has been talking a lot about what she calls personal boundaries. Her own boundaries. Her professor’s boundaries. Our neighbor Gloria’s boundaries. Our paperboy’s boundaries. Moss’s boundaries. Lately even the river’s boundaries as it pulls lives into its current, growing fat on souls.
These days, Ev is into textbook interpretations. After twentyfour years of working with me in the plant shop that our parents started, Ev is now taking psychology classes and telling me that my boundaries are inconsistent. She never mentioned returning to college—not until she started on speed. Legal speed: methylphenidate. Her doctor wrote a prescription for her when she complained about getting drowsy while doing our accounts. Within a week of swallowing speed, Ev built a wooden bicycle-rack, hosed down the walls of our potting shed, designed a stained-glass window in six shades of green for the plant shop, brought home college catalogues, registered for classes, and started dating a student half her age, a chaste and brainy encounter, I suspect, like most of Ev’s encounters. She thrives on passion of the mind, prefers it to the messiness of bodily passions.
I know all the reasons why it’s foolish to live with my sister when, together, we’re a century old. Ev’s fifty-one, I’m forty-nine, and we’ve never been apart. Including the year when I was nineteen and married to Billy Wood, who moved in with me and my parents and Ev. Maybe that’s why Billy and I didn’t make it to our first anniversary. One Sunday we broke up in Knight’s Diner after ordering breakfast. We were arguing, loudly, as we often did the instant we were out of the house, and just as our favorite waitress, Marie, was bringing our plates, Billy shoved his chair aside and stomped out. Since I didn’t want to be rude to Marie, I ate my eggs over easy, certain that everyone in Knight’s Diner was staring at me while I sat across from Billy’s waffles.
Marie touched my hair. “Libby … You want me to take those away, Libby?”
“No … I’m really hungry today.”
Whenever I go over things I would do differently in my life, I’m sure I would not sit by myself at that table in Knight’s Diner, swallowing eggs over easy I no longer want while pretending nothing is wrong, and then swallowing Billy’s cold, spongy waffles that—on bad days, I swear—I can still feel sitting on the bottom of my stomach. Greasy. Queasy. Instead, I picture myself raising one hand and signaling Marie for the check, paying it calmly. Or, better yet, without bothering to ask her for the check, dropping a twenty on the table, more than plenty for two breakfasts and a large tip.
Seeing myself like that is enough to make me want to go through that breakup again, to get it right this time. Except I wouldn’t want to sit across from Billy Wood again. Not even to give myself that satisfaction. Besides, a breakup would presume a relationship. And there hasn’t been anyone else since. Not really. Unless you count the times I cruise the home-improvement stores to pick out a two-day-fellow for myself. One day for the get-acquainted-fuck, one day for the goodbye-fuck. It’s that basic.
Moss raises her face, sniffs the air. “Yeast,” she says.
I inhale deeply, draw in the warm, thick smell of the Wonder Bread factory, a smell that hugs the north bank of the river. While I love that smell, Ev claims it puts weight on her. She frets about her size even though she’s barely an eight.
“Basil.” I glance over my shoulder, and Moss’s entire body follows that motion. “Stop hopping around. Please?”
“Sure, Libby.” But she can’t keep still.
“Sorry for snapping at you.”
“Have you ever sold one?”
“Sold what?”
“A totally black rose.”
“Not totally black.”
“I thought maybe my boyfriend got it from your shop.” She frowns. “Anyhow, that Christmas cactus you gave me last year … it’s getting spots.”
“What size are they? What color?�
��
“Tiny. And white. It’s getting crusty too.”
“What do you mean by crusty?”
“An inch or two where it comes out of the earth … it’s sort of hard and dry there.”
“Why don’t you drop it by the shop? I’ll see what I can do for it.”
From behind a stack of bald tires, a brown dog snarls at us, lips puckered from its teeth.
“Don’t,” I warn Moss as she hunkers down.
But she’s already extending one hand toward the dog.
“Wrong dog,” I tell her. “Ours is yellow.”
Just then, the dog darts forward, tail clamped between its legs.
“Moss-”
“Don’t be so frightened.” Her eyes are enormous.
I have no idea if she’s talking to herself or to me or to the dog who, amazingly now, is nuzzling the wristband of her watch. “Let’s go, Moss.”
She starts massaging the dog’s throat. Proceeding to his pink belly as if settling in for a while with him. “I learned that at a retreat in Ritzville last weekend,” she tells me without looking up. “Actually, it was a retreat for horses and for people. We slept nude under the stars. And in the morning we massaged the horses.”
I’m right back in junior high, trying not to giggle as Frankie Marinelli whispers to me that Catherine the Great used to do it with horses. “She had herself strapped underneath the horse. Right underneath, in a leather sling. Get it, Libby? Because men’s boners weren’t big enough to fill her up inside.”
Moss sighs. “It was magical….”
I fight the image of Moss strapped beneath some horse Catherine-style. “Basil,” I shout, and start walking away from her. “Basil?” I whistle. “Come here, good boy….”
But she’s following me, hopping in front of me. “Those horses transformed under our hands, Libby…. All their tension and aches floated out of them and into our hands, vanished … and then we rode them. They were so … balanced, the horses, Libby, extensions of us, of our own harmony. Normally I’m sore after riding.”
“So was Catherine.”
“Who?”
“Catherine the Great.”
“Except she copulated with the horses,” Moss says calmly.
I stare at her. Feel my face go hot.
“But everyone knows that, Libby.”
As I check the alley between the Street Café and the barber shop for Basil, I can already see myself telling Ev about Moss and those horses. She likes to insist Moss was hatched on some other planet. “A different way of being in the world, Libby. Like from far, far away and without a clue.”
Last month we somehow ended up taking Moss to the Civic Theater with us, though we had no plans to do so. We were eating dinner at the Street Café, talking about the new Harnetiaux play we were about to see, when Moss pulled a chair to our table and asked if she could come to the theater with us. That’s how she is—she says what she wants the instant she thinks of it—and I have to admire that. Even though it sometimes bugs me.
Ev stalled. She took off her bottle-thick glasses, cleaned them on her scarf, and pretended to glance around the café though—without glasses —she’s practically blind.
“It’s rather crowded here tonight,” I said. Aside from Moss, only the blond boy cook with the Whoopie Goldberg braids and the pierced eyebrows was serving food.
“It may not be fair to the other customers to take you away,” Ev suggested.
“They don’t mind waiting.”
“You may not be able to get a ticket.”
“Then I’ll come back here,” Moss said, and got her woven cape from the kitchen.
In the basement theater, she wedged herself between Ev and me, lean elbows hogging both armrests. Where most people will make room for your arm if you touch them accidentally, Moss presses closer. “You two” she said, “have the absolutely best sister-relationship I’ve ever come across.”
“You have a tendency,” Ev said, “to romanticize what we have.”
“I don’t have anyone who looks like me. With you two, it’s obvious that you are sisters. You’re lucky.”
I glanced at my sister. We both have small chins and wavy hair. But Ev definitely looks a lot older than I. Of course I would never tell her that. While my hair is more brown than gray, hers is almost entirely gray, and that’s more obvious now that she’s a student and letting it grow.
“We have lots of differences too,” I said. “Ev always has cold feet, while I go sockless into winter.”
“Yes, and Libby leaves shoes all over the floor, while I pick mine up.”
“But you two talk to each other.” You two. Moss said it with awe.
“Well… yes,” I said. “We do that. A whole lot of that.”
“Occasionally too much,” my sister added.
When Moss and I can’t find Basil, we go inside the Street Café and call Spokanimal. But just as I’m reporting my dog missing, Moss points to the door. Behind its milky glass, the silhouette of a broad-bellied man slides past, tilted back as if tied to something he’s dragging along. Instantly, I’m by the door, and there’s the barber from next door, attached to my dog and my dog’s leash.
“You found Basil,” I yell.
“I took him for a nice walk.”
“You did what?”
“He was whimpering. So I untied him from the table and — “
“I wish you hadn’t done that.” I say it softly, very softly, to keep from screaming. But then I remember Knight’s Diner and Billy Wood’s spongy waffles. And I do it right. “Don’t you ever do that again,” I scream at the barber.
He flinches. Drops the leash. Raises both hands as if I were pointing a gun at him. “No reason to make a fuss.”
I feel his powerlessness at being accosted by me. Feel it as strongly as my fear of losing Basil altogether. Soon. But not yet. “Bang.” I aim my right forefinger at the barber’s heart. Cock my thumb. “Bang. Bang.”
His eyes skim across me, then Moss, as if we were one of a kind, not quite fit for a neighborhood in Spokane —not his neighborhood, anyhow—and walks off in his pointed cowboy boots.
“All right?” I crouch, stroke my dog’s long, yellow jaw. “All right now?”
“Basilboy,” Moss croons. “Such a handsome dog you are.”
As I lean my face against the top of Basil’s head, I feel the bony ridge that runs up the length of his nose and between his eyes and ears. His fur smells of dust and sun the way a hayloft will in the afternoon, making you sneeze. It’s the same smell he had the day Ev and I first brought him home, a smell that, however, didn’t last for more than an hour, because he scrambled through our yard and down the steep hillside to the river trail, where he managed to get himself skunked. After we bathed him in eight gallons of cheap tomato juice, he smelled like spaghetti sauce about to spoil, and the children in Lower Crossing stopped petting him, because the residue kept coming off his fur for days.
Lower Crossing is the name of our neighborhood, because—according to Gloria Müller next door—the Spokane Indians used to cross here late every summer. Gloria does it too. Although she’s not from the Spokane tribe but half Scottish and half German. Every August—even now, at eighty-four—Gloria waits for that day when the river recedes far enough so that she can walk across the huge stones in the riverbed as if they were evenly spaced railroad ties. She balances her tall body by extending her arms, and when she reaches the other side, she sits beneath the enormous cottonwood tree, her back against its trunk, her face turned to its leaves. I know because these last few years I’ve crossed with Gloria, though she insists she doesn’t need help.
“You’re the one helping me,” I tell her. “I want to be with someone who’s done this before.”
“Stop bullshitting me, Libby. You are a swimmer—not a convincing liar.”
“It’s not that. It’s because I have this fear of the entire Spokane River coming at me all at once in one giant red — “
“Red Sea? Your fathe
r read too many Bible stories to you when you were a child.”
“Probably. I think he read them to himself. I just listened.”
“Stories…” Gloria snorts. “And not even good ones.”
Gloria is a fierce atheist who has lived in Lower Crossing since she was a child. For me, she has always been old —a woman older than my parents when I was born; in her eighties now that I’m approaching half a century. When her grandson, Jesse, visits her on weekends, he races up the steps of our front porch, eager to play with Basil. He would like to teach Basil to swim in the river with him, but our dog is skittish near water. He’ll get his paws wet, but that’s about all, and he gets agitated when any of us swim. My sister doesn’t much like to have Jesse around —she says he lies —but I love listening to him tell me about the two bears that live inside the hedge at his preschool; about the apples on his grandmother’s trees; about stars talking to him through his glass roof; about how he saw Basil in the dentist’s chair when his father had a swollen tooth….
Jesse is still too young to separate his inner and outer truths, and whenever I’m near him, I feel as though I, too, live in that gap of light where everything is equally real. It’s one of the few times when I regret not having a child of my own. Usually I don’t let myself go there in my imagination. It’s too risky. Because I’m capable of imagining almost anything. With Billy I made the imagining of our marriage stronger than the marriage. I can do that with almost anything.
My sister says that I’m drawn to people like me who are on the fringe. Like Moss and Gloria and Jesse. I’m flattered. Because I wish I could live even closer to that fringe, wish I could always see the world the way Jesse does.
Whenever Ev corrects him —clarifying what she considers real, and what she considers a lie—Jesse frowns at her as though she were telling him lies. And already he’ll be turning to me, describing his latest discovery, the most recent a frog with three tongues.
“And then what happened?” I ask him.
And then… It’s what moves Jesse forward. Always.
Into yet another fabulous truth. “And then the frog—a red frog, Libby—”