by Ursula Hegi
“Yes?”
“—it jumped out of my cereal bowl and then my Grandma Gloria caught a lion and made a drum from his head and then — “
“Not lions,” Ev interrupts.
“Yes so. Lions and alligators and rhinoceroses,” he insists.
Many of Jesse’s stories have to do with the drums his grandmother builds from pottery and animal hides. He is fascinated by those drums. When Gloria plays them, she sits with her sturdy legs crossed and leans toward the drum as if driving a motorcycle. She has shown Jesse and me how to start the beat from our palms and let it spread into our arms till we can feel it in our chest, our legs, and down into the earth. Gloria has been drumming long before drumming became fashionable for the men’s groups that flock to the forests north of Colville, where the locals are suspicious of fellows who have encounters in the woods with fellows for purposes other than logging, getting shit-faced, or shooting Bambi.
Though Gloria feels mildly embarrassed for those white fellows with their drums and their vision quests and their sweat lodges and fire pits, she provides them with drumming lessons and made-to-order drums, using the booty—as she says—to revamp her house: a Jacuzzi; three skylights for Jesse’s room; a screened porch.
All through July, the Spokane continues to run mud-colored and high. A teacher from Cheney drowns when his borrowed canoe is overturned by a drifting log. But gradually, as the river dwindles, it loses its force. From our kitchen window I can make out the shapes of some boulders beneath its surface. They’re not big enough to redirect the water; yet, they sculpt its flow. Come August, they will emerge fully, as they do late every summer, scaly and gray-white, waiting for an occasional swell to wash across them and let them glisten for a brief while. Waiting.
Waiting. As Gloria is waiting to cross over. As Ev and I are waiting. We want these last months with Basil to move slowly. Like clumsy magicians, we pull bliss from our pockets of sadness. He tolerates our bungled efforts to distract him from his pain, praises us with a listless wagging of his tail.
One night a bat gets into the shower with Ev, who has no idea what it is because she’s not wearing her glasses, only feels that something is there. When she starts cursing and crying, I rush into the bathroom, yank Ev’s purple bathrobe from the hook next to my sweats, and trap the bat inside the robe. I shake it out under the stars, and there’s Basil, right next to me, then Ev, who has pulled on her blue-rimmed glasses and my old sweats.
“Why did you have to use my bathrobe?” she wants to know.
“Forgive me. If it happens again, I’ll leave you screaming.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Thank you, Libby. Will that do?”
“If you make my bed for a week.”
She laughs. “Dreamer.”
On the grass ledge high above the river, she spreads her purple robe, and we sit on thick terry cloth, our arms around Basil. We tell him stories of when he was a young dog. Basil stories: stories about how he wasn’t interested in learning to fetch but made up much smarter games instead—a crazy dance, and his own version of hide and seek; how polite he was by nature, not all over you like most puppies, but waiting for you to touch him first….
The air smells like Wonder Bread, and the stars are so sharp and so white that it feels as though we were in a lunar landscape. A lunar landscape that smells like Wonder Bread. I laugh, and when I feel Ev looking at me, it’s one of those moments when I know that this here—with my sister and my dog by my river—is where I am content to be. Now. And I think how right Moss is whenever she talks about our sister-relationship, because all I feel just now is what’s good about our habit of comfort and love, a habit that can only too quickly flip into something too familiar, exasperating even.
Like at Gloria’s eighty-fourth birthday party, when Moss told us, “I love how youtwo rely on each other.”
But Ev couldn’t just say thank you and go on to something else. No, she had to analyze it, mess it up. “Now, if Libby learned to value me as I am,” she said, “our sister-relationship would be even more wonderful. Some days Libby shuts me out with that weird humor of hers that cuts other people. You know how she gets with that. And other days she focuses too much on me.”
I rolled my eyes at Gloria. The way Ev was talking about me made me think of those long-suffering couples you notice in restaurants who talk about each other only through others: waiters or friends or children.
“Libby was like that when she was three years old,” Ev continued.
“Moss?” I said. “Would you please ask my sister if she figured all of that out when I was three and she was five?”
“Yes,” Ev said, “I did. I just didn’t have the proper terminology yet.”
“Please.” Times like this, I felt the two of us were rehashing all the games of growing up—the I-dare-you and the I’ll-tell and the you’re-chicken — games that drew us together and apart.
“Please what?” Ev probed.
“Please save me from your games. And from the proper terminology.”
Gloria stretched herself. “I am a great masturbator,” she pronounced.
Ev blinked.
I grinned at Gloria. “Good for you.”
“It’s a shame people don’t talk about it openly.”
Ev turned to Moss. “Would you please tell Libby that I did not invent what she calls the proper terminology.”
“And tell Ev that she sure enjoys parading that terminology.”
“Tell Libby that she enjoys being down on everyone, including me.”
“Do not.”
Moss sighed. She sounded content to be orchestrating our argument without having to say anything. Maybe to her this was just one other facet of our sister-relationship.
I leaned toward Moss. “Would you please ask my sister if she has ever considered that shutting her out, as she calls it, may have something to do with my schedule, now that she’s only part-time at the shop? That I don’t have much energy left?”
But Ev only shrugged. Her legal speed gave her unlimited energy, and she didn’t understand that it wasn’t like that for everyone. I could always tell when she was on speed: one, she talked more; and, two, whatever she began she finished quickly and thoroughly. Her homework. A quarrel. Cleaning. Repairs. All I had to do was steer her in the direction of what needed to be done most, hand her tools or a sponge, and watch her install coat hooks, say, or scrub the bathroom. Occasionally, speed made her charming, which was hard to watch, because charm was not really one of Ev’s natural traits. She was too truthful for charm. Too solid-minded. But I didn’t mention that speed changed her personality, because if I did she’d only get huffy with me, and then, if I’d get pissed, she’d try to win me back with charm. You tell me.
Gloria cut herself another piece of coconut cake. “Because it’s a perfectly normal thing to do,” she said.
I nodded. “I agree.”
“Everyone does it.”
“But no one talks about it,” Gloria said. “About the different levels of skill involved. You have to practice before you become a great masturbator.”
Tonight Ev’s charm is just right for Basil as we sit on her robe above the river. She’s admiring his fur, telling him what a beautiful shade of yellow it is. “The same color as the Cheney wheat fields, where we used to take you for long runs. Remember? Those roads that dipped into the sky? You always found the road again. Remember? Even when it seemed there was nothing but sky beyond the next hill.”
I remind Basil how he chewed his way through a wall of Sheetrock when he was six months old. “When we came home, you and the floor were covered with white dust.”
Stories.
Stories to keep death away from him.
Stories that are more for us than for him.
His ear twitches. He falls asleep. And I know how I will think back on this moment, replay it for myself—his ear twitching like this; his breath calm—and how incredibly a
live he will have seemed to me. In this moment. Which already is passing. Has passed.
Once and again our hands touch as Ev and I continue to stroke him, as we whisper across him and ask one another if we’re selfish, if we’re tormenting him by keeping him alive. But who, then, are we, to choose death for anyone? With a human, we wouldn’t consider that choice; yet, with an old, sick dog, that choice is pushed at us by our friends, by Dr. Sylvia, even by customers at the plant shop. Are we stalling for Basil’s sake? For ours? Already, he feels lost to us. We tell each other that we’re preparing to accept his loss, that we need time for that, and then we feel awful because, once again, we are talking about ourselves. Our suffering. Our grieving. It always comes back to that. And it’s goddamn ugly.
“Let’s swim.” Ev stands up.
We let Basil sleep, climb down the steep path to the willows. As girls, Ev and I used to sit in the cradles of these willows, where the wide branches curve outward and up. I was six when my father taught me how to be safe in the river. Very few people swam in the Spokane back then, because it hadn’t been cleaned up yet. Most houses were oriented away from the water, and their windows opened to the street. All that summer, every evening after closing the plant shop, my father would swim across the river with Ev and me. He prided himself on swimming in just about anything, but he was meticulous about showering afterward.
While my mother read seed catalogues and mystery novels—the only hour in the day that was hers alone—my father double-tied the straps of our orange life vests and taught us where to enter the current by estimating its speed. If it was fast, we’d plunge in upstream so that we’d end up directly across the river from our house, by the old cottonwood tree. We’d leap from the water like flying fish, hang on to the long branches, let the current tug at our legs. I’d strip off fistfuls of glossy cotton-wood leaves—their tops a dark lime-green, their bottoms chalky green—and stuff them inside my swimsuit for my mother.
At home, I’d spread them on our picnic table for her, and she’d bend across them, marveling how each leaf—not brittle and shriveled yet; not for another day—was held together by a net of raised veins. My mother understood about plants and had a reputation as a plant doctor. People wouldn’t just come to our shop for new plants, but also to bring my mother their dwindling plants, their blotchy and spindly and infested plants, and she’d keep them until she’d nurtured them to health. It’s what I do now that my parents live in Oregon. Some mornings when I arrive to unlock the shop, I discover a dying plant on the front steps—foundlings, my mother used to call those plants—and I take it in, check it over, administer to it the way my mother used to. Ev is good at taking care of the business side of the shop, but I have inherited my mother’s gift, her intuition for plants. She told me so.
She also told me it wore down her spirit to live in this desert landscape that was parched by midsummer, to plant a garden each spring and struggle to keep it alive past July. That’s why she and my father retired in Oregon, where the land has more rain than it needs. My mother loves the gray skies, the promise of rain. In her garden in Portland, rhododendrons grow like dandelions, their leaves always damp and shiny. The growing season starts at least a month earlier and lasts a month longer than in Spokane. Whenever we visit, I work with my mother in her lavish garden, while my father and Ev take hikes as they did when we were children. He believed in having quality walking shoes, just as he believed children should wear life vests till age twelve. It was a law he had grown up with, and he was not about to change it for his daughters. Even after Ev and I became confident swimmers, he still made us wear those bulky orange vests. I longed to be twelve, and I’ve never been as jealous as during those two years when Ev was allowed to swim without her vest and I still had to wear mine.
“Careful, now.” My sister is pointing to the base of the willow, where the floods have cast off trash and rocks and fallen branches.
We have to scuttle around several heaps of the debris to get to the sandy recess where we skinny-dip some nights despite our awareness of the people who’ve drowned. With each day, it has become easier to overcome our reluctance to enter its current. “You must never let the dead spoil the river for you,” my father taught us. And essentially we do feel safe. Because we’ve both studied the river since we were children. Learned not to misuse it. Not to ride it in borrowed boats or dive from bridges or tie ourselves to rafts. Acts like that invite the wrath of the river.
As we strip, light slips across my sister’s gray hair, her narrow shoulders, her buttocks. It always astounds me how much brighter it is here on the water at night than just a short distance away in our garden. Gloria believes the river holds us within its own time zone, hours behind the rest of our neighborhood.
My sister glides into the water. “Libby?” she calls out, face raised to keep her heavy glasses dry.
Above us, on the hill, I feel Basil sleeping, and from the direction of Gloria’s house comes the pulse of a drum—not a lesson, but Gloria drumming for herself. I always can tell the difference, because when she drums for herself, like this, her voice lives inside her drum, and I feel the tremor of her drumming—water and fire and earth—throughout my body, stretching my skin. But tonight Gloria is stretching me too wide. Stretching me wide open to sorrow—a season of sorrow—that fans out ahead of me like my sister’s hair on the water. And suddenly I can’t bear to follow Ev.
“Libby?” She is floating on her back, feet flickering. “Libby?”
I hug my bare breasts. Shiver.
My sister kicks shining ribbons of water toward me. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“I’m freezing,” I tell her. It’s easier than to explain how water has forever been a place of bliss for me—for swimming and diving and floating—and that tonight I don’t know how to reclaim that bliss.
By mid-August, the river is no longer deep enough to ensnare anyone, at least not in our neighborhood, where the water is getting lazy. Low. Rocks that only a month earlier lay submerged, are now crusted with gray and white like immense prehistoric eggs.
Gloria and I wait for the day for our crossing. Late one afternoon, she calls me to the edge of my garden and motions to the last wet boulders on the bottom of the riverbed. No white currents here—merely a flow so slight that it’s impossible to determine in which direction it flows. Unless you know.
“Tomorrow morning,” Gloria decides.
“Tomorrow morning.”
But we don’t have our crossing. Because right after I talk to Gloria I can’t find Basil. Ev and I walk around, knock on doors, drive along both sides of the river, peer through the glass panel of the barber’s locked door. Nothing. We hunt for Basil along the cliff where the old Shriners Hospital stands, long empty, its cupola and stone wings a reminder of the children who stayed within these walls.
By five in the morning, I have trouble staying awake. We’re driving through Manito Park, searching through the Perennial Garden, the Rose Garden, and outside the fence of the Japanese Garden. When we circle the duck pond in the fading night, I open the window and turn on the silver flashlight I got at Eagle’s last month.
“Another home improvement?” Ev teases me.
I yawn.
“We have more home improvements than we need, more than a convent—”
“Very good, Ev. Very catty.”
“ — more than a professional carpenter.”
“Then I’ll just buy something for Gloria next time. Some batteries for her vibrator.”
“I can always tell when you’re about to go for home improvements.”
I swear my sister has a detector that tells her when I’m getting ready for sex. Except we call it home improvements. And in a way, it does improve our home life. Even afterward. Because our half-empty tube of caulking evokes Steve from Eagle’s on Division, the glue gun Matthew from the South Hill Ernst’s, the bicycle pump Hal from the General Store. Home improvements.
I shine my flashlight toward a huge ponderosa. “At lea
st they’re my age.”
“Is that your only prerequisite?”
“You …”
“Yes?”
“Go on, have your intense study sessions with your young man.”
“Between the two of us, we’ve really split up the entire man-department. Has that ever occurred to you, Libby?”
“I don’t want to be analyzed. I’m so tired, I can barely hold this flashlight.”
Ev stops the car.
“It’s unlikely Basil made it this far anyhow. Uphill at that.”
We get out. Lean against the side of the car.
Ev opens a prescription bottle, swallows two pills. “Let me give you some speed,” she offers, and holds the bottle out to me.
I hesitate, such a good citizen when it comes to obeying the rule about not taking someone else’s medication. “Sure,” I say.
But when she hands me the bottle, it drops and the pills scatter on the ground. At least a dozen geese get to them before we can, jabbing, raising their heads as they swallow, the insides of their beaks voracious as they shriek for more.
“Jesus Christ,” Ev says.
I rub my arms, wishing I’d worn my hooded sweatshirt instead of this cotton blouse. “What will they be like once the speed starts working?”
“Straight out of Hitchcock. The birds. Only worse. Dive-bomber geese.”
“I don’t want to be around for that.”
“Well, they stole my speed. So they deserve it.”
“That’s vindictive.” In the voice that Ev has used to analyze me, I add, “It is unprofessional to apply standards of human conscience and responsibility to animals.”
She looks at me, sharply.
“It’s not nice.”
“Nice?”
“Not fucking nice. Okay? It’s not fucking nice. Is that better?”
“I can’t stand being near you when you get vulgar.”
“Let’s just find Basil.” My voice skids. “Please?”
“Sure.” She nods, eyes worried. Worried for me. “Sure, Libby.”
Silently, we drive to our house, and after Ev parks her station wagon, we walk once again downstream along the river trail. A dank smell rises from the stagnant water. Dawn strips the parched embankment, reveals the barren earth. A dangerous landscape to get lost in. For any living being. Tumbleweeds careen across the cracked ground, yielding instant blooms of dust. What has survived of the vegetation here is amber and brown, as invariably this time of year.