The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “I’ve never been to an aquarium,” she said, with assiduous awe. If only I could act the parent, and she the child—well there was safety in that, for both of us. The bus ride might take us exactly where we wanted to go, and when we stood before the enormous tanks in the dim undersea light, watching the fish flash by, we’d become the children we were supposed to be, amazed and joyful as the world opened out before us.

  “You’re going to love it,” I said, thinking how damned inept our parents were, how I’d show Dolly the world.

  I’d seen the aquarium from the bus before, at the intersection of Park and Vine, but there was a new subdivision going up along Vine Street, and where I remembered a little corner gas station set in a tangled woodland there was a landscape of sandy canyons now, with backhoes grinding over them on heavy treads. The light was green, and the other direction seemed to lead straight into the woods, so I pulled Dolly along westward.

  “It’s just the next block,” I told her. Vine Street had no sidewalks, just a wide drainage ditch with lengths of plastic pipe laid beside it. One or two houses had already been built—a little boy was trying to pedal a tricycle in a muddy driveway while his mother smoked a cigarette in her open door. I nodded to her and a shadow crossed her face—I felt as if she’d laugh at me if I asked her for directions, and if she laughed at me I’d probably disintegrate, leaving Dolly all alone. We walked on along the street, which had widened to four lanes and curved assuredly through the empty land—it must lead somewhere, and the aquarium seemed the likeliest place.

  “It’s kind of barren here,” Dolly said, “I mean, in a very nice way—because they’re improving it.” We could hear the heavy equipment downshifting to climb the hills, which were several stories tall.

  “Is it like Wyoming?” I asked.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “You know, Wyoming’s got the richest mineral stores in the whole country. There’s no sand there at all—it’s all rock and clay and if you dig down just a foot the earth is all red and gold and green.”

  “I meant, is this a little like where you live—a development?”

  “I guess,” she said, not wanting to contradict. “Maybe it will be, when it’s done.” We rounded the corner with no sign of the aquarium. We seemed to be in the midst of a choppy sea of sand with no compass, and on the horizon a lowering sun. I picked up the pace, determined on the next curve. It was the middle of March and the pastel sky promised spring but the wind was from the north and right in our faces.

  “Do you think maybe it’s moved?” Dolly asked. (In our family it was considered very impolite to suggest someone had taken a wrong turn.)

  “God, how would you move an aquarium?” I asked, though if they had moved it, this wouldn’t be my mistake. “No, it’s right around here, I’ve seen it,” I said. “Not much farther now.” The suspicion that I might be walking in the wrong direction only spurred me on: I could not, I would not, be the latest person to lead Dolly into the wilderness; she trusted me and it would be too awful to disappoint her. “Just another minute,” I said.

  “It’s nice to have a little walk,” Dolly said. “Stretch my legs.”

  “I wish the wind would stop,” was the next thing she said to me. Besides its being cold, the wind was full of sand now, which meant that either it had switched direction or that we had. We’d come to the bend I’d pinned my hopes on, and could see down a long stretch to the light at a distant intersection. There were no longer any trucks or cranes working, and the land was churned up with the trees still rooted in it. We’d walked more than a mile.

  “It’s just up at the light,” I said. It was right near a stoplight, I remembered.

  “Do you think they’ll have a water fountain?” Dolly asked. I looked over at her—her cheeks were flushed and she was beginning to limp a little—her shoe had worn through the heel of her sock.

  “Oh, they have a whole cafeteria,” I said. “We’ll sit down and have toast and tea!”

  She smiled in the deepest way—toast and tea was a phrase from our childhood, or really from my mother’s childhood, during which there had been, she told us, department store lunchrooms where tea was served with cream cakes and fresh strawberries. She spoke of it with such longing that we’d longed for it too.

  “I don’t know why Pop wants to live way out West,” she confessed suddenly. “It’s not like there’s anything for him to do, really, just sit by the phone and watch the news. I don’t really understand.” She worked at understanding, for a second, but in the end, the idea didn’t appeal. “We’re together, that’s the important thing,” she reminded herself.

  We’d reached the intersection, and it was just that—eight stoplights strung up across two four-lane thoroughfares, surrounded by more raw land, with nothing else in sight except one of those impregnable telephone company structures that confound the romantic by being at once so mysterious and so dull.

  “I don’t know, Dolly, I can’t find it,” I said. I could hear the disappointed, querulous note in my voice and I stopped talking instantly because I was afraid I was going to cry and I knew there was nothing worse than having the person you rely on fall apart that way.

  “It’s okay, Beachy,” she said. “I don’t have to see the aquarium.”

  She was so sweet—I wanted to smack her. How wrong, how perverse of her to keep renouncing and renouncing, first for my father’s sake, now for mine. I had promised her something I couldn’t give her, pulling her along the side of a sewage gully to bring her nowhere, and still she refused to be angry, or even disappointed. I sat down on the bank of the ditch and rested my head on my knees. The great flood of cars that had been dammed up at the light gave way suddenly and roared past us.

  “I’ve screwed up,” I said then, trying to sound lighthearted. “It must have been the other way. We’ll have to turn around,” I said. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  She nodded. “It really doesn’t matter, Beachy,” she said. “It’s just nice to get to spend some time with you.”

  She meant to mean it, I knew. I stood up and dusted myself and we started back. We’d come much farther than I’d guessed—miles. I’d dragged her along, walking and walking as if no map were available and no one else would know the way, searching for an aquarium as if it was a single flower in a twenty-acre field. How long had it been since we got off the bus? It seemed to be rush hour already.

  “Let’s hitch!” I said, and we stuck out our thumbs the way they do in the movies, but no one even slowed. They didn’t see us, or maybe we looked so pathetic no one dared to stop, lest they find themselves saddled with a pair of foundlings. I began to run, backward, with my thumb out, and to edge into the road as if I might throw myself in front of somebody’s car. Now they swerved in wide arcs around us, eyes still averted.

  As we came back to the bus stop, I saw the sign for the aquarium over the trees, about half a block away—it hadn’t been visible from the other angle. Neither of us cared about it anymore, but we did want a drink. As we went up the steps, parched and covered with dust from the excavation, a young woman came out with a ring of keys.

  “We close at five,” she said, looking at us sadly. She could see something about us that we could have kept hidden if we hadn’t been running through a dust bowl for hours. She pointed to the clock inside, which showed the time as 5:02. Beneath it was a tank the size of a small room, filled with fish in shades of azure and silver-green. I thought of smashing down the door.

  “It’s okay, Beachy,” Dolly said. “We’ll come another day.” She sat down on the step and wiped her face with her sleeve.

  “It’s not okay,” I said angrily.

  She blinked, and looked at me in wounded surprise—how could it be, when she had done everything just as I’d asked her, and really, she was as good as gold, polite to Lee even while our being Lithuanian was so strange and unnerving to her—rushing to wash the dishes after dinner—she had even insisted on paying my bus fare. How could I answer her so sharply?
r />   “The important thing is that we’re together,” she said.

  “That is not the important thing,” I said, through my teeth. “The important thing is…” but I couldn’t think. Maybe nothing was very important. I felt the impulse that had just arisen—to tear all the veils and set my hand on something true—recede. What did it matter, after all, any of it? Nothing would change. We would all go on spinning outward, away from each other, each foolish hope failing, each desperate move leading to a worse consequence, whether or not Dolly and I saw the jellyfish in the Hartford Aquarium.

  “You’re right, of course,” I said. “It’s just, I’m so sorry.” My voice, infuriatingly, was breaking. I tried to cover it with a laugh. “Oh, dear, why do these things always happen to us?” I said. The afternoon would shrink away; we would turn it into a neat anecdote that confirmed our sisterhood; we’d laugh to think what we must have looked like to those drivers who’d passed us. It would be funny one day, it would, and we both laughed dully in anticipation.

  “If we could just get something to drink,” she said then, wearily—no one could accuse her of complaining. But the museum was closed, the woman had disappeared back into the building, there was nothing in any direction but the lees and swells of bulldozed earth. Thousands of cars sped out of the barren landscape now, heading, it seemed, nowhere, the bus among them. It picked up its passengers and took off again before we could brook the traffic to reach it. the driver staring stonily ahead while I tried to signal him, the passengers looking on mildly, full of their own thoughts. They had seen many more curious sights than this bedraggled woman, waving her arms on a street corner as if she thought she was drowning. We got the six o’clock bus and rode back to Frog Hollow in a silence broken only by Dolly’s earnest expressions of gratitude for the wonderful afternoon she knew I’d meant her to have.

  Five

  LEE HAD made baked stuffed flounder for dinner. “Finally, a fish,” I said, but no one noticed the joke.

  “If you’d called I’d have started it later,” Lee said as she spooned the gelatinous stuff onto our plates. “I’ve been working on it ever since I got home.” No doubt true, I thought—she was convinced that all foods needed to be chopped, marinated, and sauced until they were completely purified of any trace of their vulgar roots. She could make a vegetable terrine that tasted exactly like fish and a salmon pâté that tasted just like broccoli, and then there were the tomato roses or the pureed turnips or the veal birds. Usually I liked this, since it meant we spent hours in the kitchen together with only the simplest conversation, grinding garlic against sea salt, sifting cornmeal over a boiling pot—it was all abundant, fragrant, warm. Sex was nearly behind us—we didn’t seem to need it anymore and were only moved that way when we’d been out in the straight world and remembered that for us making love was an act of rebellion. But the food, the food proved how lucky we were in each other’s love.

  “What’s in the sauce?” I asked, thinking it looked like disintegrating cardboard.

  “Shallots, in a cream reduction with a little vermouth,” she said, and I had a guilty flash of memory: Ma, getting Thanksgiving dinner with only that one stove burner working. “And paprika, and celery salt, and I put in a pinch of curry, I don’t know if you can taste it.

  “And it’s the tamari-sesame dressing,” Lee continued, pushing the salad toward me. “Look at the cucumbers—I used that julienne blade.”

  Dolly’s good humor was running low and though she praised each bite, she only got through three or four before she excused herself, asking if we’d mind if she took a shower. This time tomorrow, I thought, she’d be on the way back to Wyoming. I was counting the hours.

  “She’s sort of sullen,” Lee said, as soon as we heard the shower.

  My blood leapt—“What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Look, she hardly ate a bite. She doesn’t smile, she just sits there making little judgments. She has no spark,” she said, and went silent.

  “She’s depressed,” I said, standing up to clear, moving gently so as to keep my speech light. “Would you smile, if you were fourteen and your mother wouldn’t recognize you and you had to move two thousand miles away from your family and all your friends so you could live in a godawful tract house with your lost, dazed father, and the mountains went up like a cliff to the west so you never saw the sun after one o’clock in the afternoon?”

  And if your older sister, your one hope, was so inept she couldn’t manage to take you an afternoon’s outing, never mind saving you? I thought.

  “And what’s your wattage, anyway?” I asked suddenly, and Lee gasped as if I’d struck her and started to cry.

  “She’s a guest in our home,” she said. “She ought to make some effort.” And then, as if she’d only just truly heard what I’d said, she sat down and wept in earnest. In my anger I’d jabbed her right in the big secret we were keeping from each other.

  “Three bites, and I worked on it all afternoon.”

  “It’s not about dinner!” I roared, but I realized she’d been offering me an olive branch, a chance to pretend it was about dinner, and not about whatever it was I was desperate to get from her, that she didn’t have to give. I heard my mother’s ghost in my voice … and that I refused to accede to.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just been such a bad day … and you made a wonderful dinner, and if only I’d called, everything would have been fine.”

  “Accepted,” she said, turning both faucets on to fill the dishpan. She took care of me all day, every day—whether or not I needed it. I owed her gratitude at least. Slender though she was, she seemed like a pudgy boy, her shoulder blades moving like a pair of tiny, useless wings as she soaped the dishes and set them in the drainer. Then she went into the back room, where she was refinishing a chair. I ran my hand along the surface of the dining table, her last project; it was like satin, you could almost feel the grain. Wind, water, and Lee Schuyler, I thought—they all know how to wear the things they touch smooth.

  Dolly came out in Lee’s bathrobe and made for the refrigerator. “My stomach feels funny,” she said. “Do you have some ice cream or something?”

  We never had ice cream.

  “How about some cheese?” I asked. It was moldy but we could cut that part off.

  “I know,” she said, “I’ll eat that yogurt. I think that would help.”

  “That’s Lee’s,” I said, wanting to bare my teeth and ask how the yogurt had changed since breakfast, when she’d found it so revolting. Spinning into a rage, I caught a dizzied glimpse of something—she meant to eat the yogurt now to make amends for her earlier refusal. She looked up at me in hurt surprise.

  “For her lunch,” I said, “That’s what she has for lunch—she’s worried for her heart.”

  “Well, can’t she get some more?”

  “Not before work,” I said piously. “Have some cheese.”

  “It’s all moldy,” Dolly said. “Don’t you have cottage cheese, or cream cheese or something?”

  “What is it, do you think food just grows in the refrigerator? Well, it doesn’t. Someone has to go out and buy it, someone who works.” Someone who had spent hours making a special dinner that tasted awful to me, who wanted only one thing—my love, which I could not seem really to give her …

  Dolly shot me a despising glance and quickly looked away. Her lip was quivering, and I saw the moment of her indecision give way to anger—“You’re my sister and you won’t give me a cup of yogurt out of your refrigerator!” she said. “All that time living out there and not once, not one time, did you call me, to ask how I was doing, to say you’d do anything to help, nothing, NOTHING!” A sob shook her, and she bent into herself, holding her own arms as if that were the best embrace she could hope for. “Abandon us all? When just a few thousand dollars would mean so much—for Sylvie and the baby at least—he’s just a baby, he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  She immersed herself in weeping, repeating “my sister, my sister
” in sarcastic misery. If her mother was an implacable, avenging whirlwind, her father a wisp in the breeze, then, I stood in loco parentis. On this we had both, without thinking, agreed. Sylvie and I were the only ones who had so much as a job, and everyone knew Sylvie needed every dollar, while I lived in comfort and ease.

  “One goddamned cup of yogurt,” she said again, and I grabbed it out of the refrigerator, ripped off the lid, and pushed it at her.

  “Here,” I said, “have it, if you think a cup of yogurt is so important, eat it then!”

  “I don’t want it now,” she said, pushing it away and burying her head in her arms to cry so quietly, I could hear the faithful, exact strokes of Lee’s sandpaper in the back room.

  “No, I insist, you eat the yogurt.”

  “I don’t want it!” she roared, striking out at it as if it were a cup of hemlock, and it went flying across the room, spilling its pale pink contents in the most vibrant, painterly way. She waited for me to respond, and I thought that we were at the brink of the familiar, that I could almost feel my mother’s presence. Ma would have raged at Dolly, or splashed a dishpan full of water down on the mess, or whatever would most completely electrify us. And afterward, we’d feel we’d witnessed an act of nature, been washed clean by a furious storm.

  “I want to go home,” Dolly said. “I want so much to go home.”

  “You’ll be there tomorrow.” This was the cruelest thing I could have said. She didn’t mean Wyoming of course, but our home, or the place we had tried to believe it had been, the beautiful farm on the hillside where the girls with their long hair cradled the little lambs in their arms, while in the valley below us, the evening lamps blinked on and the stars grew brighter in the sky. Why couldn’t that place have existed, when we’d wanted it so badly, had worked so hard to make it real? She cried at the table as I sopped the yogurt off the floor, listening to Lee’s sandpaper, thinking of that poor lost place, our home.

  “I’ll never be there again,” she said.