Sister

by A. Manette Ansay

  “When I get married,” Monica whispered to me, “I’m sure not going to work.”

  “I am.”

  “Then you’re weird.”

  To punish her, I let my knee nudge one of the dominoes, and they all went down. “Hey!” she said, forgetting to whisper. “That was my turn!”

  “Girls?” my grandmother said. “Why don’t you take those into the living room?”

  Thursday was the advertising deadline at the Sell It Now! and on Wednesday nights my mother seldom made it home before midnight. After school, I’d hurry from the bus up the drive and into the house, where I’d find her careful dinner instructions taped to the refrigerator door. I preheated the oven and prepared casserole or pot roast or lamb, remembering to stab the potatoes so they wouldn’t explode. When my father came home, I called Sam to supper, enjoying the grown-up feeling of serving the meal as if my father were my husband, Sam my little boy. My father grumbled about my mother’s absence, but by then Sam and I were so used to it that it was easy to ignore. Afterward, I’d clean up while Sam did his homework in front of the TV and my father reread the Milwaukee Sentinel. Then I’d spread my homework on the kitchen table: English, French, Science, Math. Usually, I finished the first three in an hour so I could linger dreamily over basic geometry, resketching the various shapes until my father sent me upstairs to bed.

  One night, as I was fitting the stubby pencil back into my compass, he came into the kitchen with his newspaper and sat down across from me in one of the orange vinyl chairs that matched my own. Air wheezed from the seat cushion, a ragged sigh. His regular place was at the head of the table, in the wooden chair with arms that his own father had made long ago. He glanced at the rows of figures I had written in my notebook. He reached out and touched the neat labels with his fingertip: parallelogram, rhombus, triangle.

  “Para-what?” he said.

  “Parallelogram. It’s a figure with opposite sides that are parallel.”

  He tapped his finger on rhombus. “What’s that?”

  “An equilateral parallelogram.”

  I was proud to know something he didn’t. But my father shook his head. “You’ll never need that fancy stuff, you know,” he said. “You should be learning about things that matter. Your mother should be teaching you the things you need to know.”

  He often said that his time in the service was where he’d gotten his real education. But I liked school; I especially liked geometry. I wanted to go to college someday. I went back to my compass and drew a circle with a one-inch radius. He opened the paper and slipped it between us, a textured wall of print.

  “Here,” he said, “just listen to this,” and he read an article about a young woman in Milwaukee who’d been followed to her apartment by three men. When she unlocked her door, they forced their way inside, where they took turns raping her at knifepoint. She was unable to recall their faces. She was treated at a local hospital and released.

  I pressed the sharp point of the compass into my thumb; when I took it away, there was a tiny red hole. I knew about rape from catechism; there it was called violation. But the women always died protecting their virginity, and then they were rewarded by God, glorified as saints, which made the possibility of rape seem as abstract, as unlikely, as a virgin birth. A window opened up in myself, and I saw what I could not know: the hallway that led to the woman’s door, poorly lit and carpeted in orange, the apartment number screwed into the smooth, painted wood, the way she jingled the keys, thinking, Hurry, hurry. Then my mind winked shut. I smelled the sharp, after-dinner smell of the kitchen, and there was the circle I’d just drawn. I sketched a smile on its face. I wrote: The diameter of a circle with a one-inch radius is two.

  “Has your mother told you about sex yet?” my father asked.

  I nodded. Sex happened after marriage. At first it would hurt, but afterward it got better.

  “When you live alone like that, you’re at risk, you see,” my father said in the utterly rational voice my math teacher used to explain right angles. “You have to learn to be careful,” he told me. “You’re not a little girl anymore.” Sam came into the kitchen then and leaned against me, his body warm and faintly sour-smelling, twitchy from lying too long in front of the TV. “What’s that?” he said, and he pointed to circumference in my notebook.

  “The distance around a circle.”

  My father put his tongue to his teeth. “Nothing you’ll ever need to know,” he repeated. “It’s the school of hard knocks that counts,” he said.

  “What’s the school of hard knocks?” Sam said.

  “Life,” my father said. “What you’ve seen and where you’ve been.”

  “Oh,” Sam said, and I was not surprised when he moved away from me. He no longer crept up the stairs at night and into my room, where we held flashlights under our chins, or played Scissors-Paper-Rock, or dipped our feet over the edge of the bed into piranha-infested air. He kept his sketchbooks hidden under his mattress, and he’d given me his watercolor paints and his calligraphy set, though sometimes he borrowed them back. My father said Sam was too old for all that, that it was time for Sam to grow up. He said it was time for me to grow up too, and yet it was clear that growing up meant one thing for Sam and, for me, something else. Boys were expected to live in the world; girls needed special protection. They had to be careful, and some girls, it seemed, never learned to be careful enough.

  From then on, Wednesday nights as I worked my way through geometry, my father read to me about women who walked alone after dark, or talked to strange men, or went to bars with professional athletes, women who let themselves fall into the wrong place at the wrong time, women who suffered the consequences. Women who didn’t have my father’s respect for the world and the way it worked. Women who had learned the hard way, who hadn’t been told, the way he was telling me now. “‘Entering through an open second-story window,’” my father read, “‘a juvenile, armed with a gun, sodomized a sixteen-year-old girl while her horrified sister watched.’” He shook his head. “What a world!”

  I wrote out my math problems in clean, dark script. A rectangle with four sides of equal length is a square. The next day, I consulted the big red dictionary on display in the school library. Sodomy: abnormal sexual acts: bestiality. It made me think of the screams I heard from the horse farm down the road when the mares were bred by the stallions. I began to have trouble sleeping. During the day, I drifted through the halls at school, bumped by the flood of bodies that seemed drawn in one frenzied direction like magnetized bits of iron, and by association I became magnetic too. Each day, I got where I needed to go. I sat, I took notes, I swallowed my lunch in small, careful mouthfuls. Perhaps it was then that mathematics began to frighten me, the bent-necked evil sevens, the pregnant sixes, the snickering twos. I’d squint as I copied assignments from my textbook to the page, but it didn’t help my growing sense of vertigo. The numbers loomed three-dimensional, rising and falling like sharp black lungs, and it was all I could do to guide my pen down between them, to coax a brief, flat line from the tip, to take my pen away before that line began to swell.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother asked frequently. “Honey, you seem kind of out of it.”

  “I’m just tired,” I said. But I started to wonder if maybe my father had a point when he said my mother’s job was hard on us all. It seemed to me that we’d been happier when she’d devoted her time to us alone, greeting Sam and me at the door after school, asking my father questions about his day at work instead of talking about her own. She’d already been promoted to assistant editor. Once, she and the associate editor, a woman named Cindy Pace, met for coffee to talk about ways they could improve the look and distribution of the Sell It Now! My mother came home flushed with excitement, to find my father waiting for her in the kitchen, home early from work as, lately, he so often seemed to be, asking where she had been and who she’d been with and what they had done.

  “A cup of coffee with a friend,” my mother said. “I’
m thirty-seven years old, Gordon. I didn’t think I needed to ask your permission!”

  It was easiest to leave their angry voices behind and disappear into my room, where I’d lie on my bed and listen to the sound my heartbeat made inside my body, feel the pulse in my wrists, my throat. I found myself concentrating on only those things that were exactly in front of me. I peeled my cuticles until my fingers bloomed red; I twisted my hair around and around my second finger; I stared into my lap, or at the soft, smooth knees of my jeans, or at the toes of my sneakers, which I found strangely pleasing, narrow and pointed as the muzzles of dogs. Every day after school, I read the paper, skimming through the pages until I found the word rape. I read hungrily, shamefully, shivering with the same thing I felt when I saw people kissing on TV. Afterward, I felt sick with the cries of women beaten and molested and torn, the wailing of children who were never seen again, the swollen necks of strangled prostitutes, the spidery limbs of teenagers wearing skimpy clothing or too much makeup or polish on their nails.

  One night, my father didn’t read to me from the paper. Instead, he told me something he’d heard at work. A woman’s car had broken down, and she’d last been seen with two men who’d pulled up beside her, offering assistance. Her body was found in a ravine months later. Raccoons had carried away the fine bones of her hands, a small portion of her skull. I imagined my mother’s car breaking down on the dark rural highway from Cedarton, woods for miles around. As I chewed my pencil tip, I saw the truck pulling up behind her, baking my mother in a bright white beam like the probe from a UFO. She was under the hood, knowing it was a hopeless gesture because she wasn’t even sure where the oil went—my father took care of all that business—so she squinted happily at the figures approaching her, blocking the light like coils of smoke. “Am I ever glad to see you!” she sang out, and here my mind shut like a terrible fist, holding in the poison, choking me inside it. That night, when she sat on the edge of my bed to listen to my prayers, the holy words lodged in my throat like bones. The Lord helps those who help themselves: This was something I’d been told for as long as I could remember, and every time I visited my grandmother’s house I read it again, cross-stitched in gold and blue, hanging on the living room wall. My mother was not helping herself. Each time she left for work, she put herself at risk. God had little sympathy for fools, but I asked Him to make an exception in my mother’s case, promising Him all sorts of things even though I knew it was a sin to bargain.

  “You’re so quiet lately, honey,” my mother said, picking bits of nubby wool from my blanket.

  “I’m worried about you,” I said.

  “About me?”

  “What if your car breaks down?” I said. “What if you get stranded on the highway?”

  “My goodness,” my mother said. “I’ll just walk to the nearest house and ask to use the phone.”

  “What if somebody attacks you?”

  My mother looked at me. “Where would you get an idea like that?”

  “It’s in the newspapers,” I said, and I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t cry. My mother kissed me and stroked my hair and told me that nothing was going to happen to her, but I knew that she was just being naive. That was another word I’d learned. My father had used it to describe me.

  The next Wednesday night, I waited in the kitchen, defenseless, not even pretending to do my homework as the owl-shaped clock over the sink chirped the quarter hours. I stared at the owl and I followed the movement of its wings, and still my father did not come in. Finally, I went into the living room, where I found him polishing his business shoes, Sam beside him, half a dozen pairs fanned around them on sheets of newspaper. My father worked carefully, scrubbing polish into the crevices with a bristled brush before passing the shoe to Sam, who patted the excess polish away with an old diaper. The unpolished shoes waited, unlaced and open-mouthed; the room smelled strong and sweet.

  “Finished already?” he said, without looking up.

  “I guess.”

  He didn’t say anything else. I waited for a minute or so, and then I went upstairs to bed. My father never read aloud to me after that, though sometimes he still brought the paper into the kitchen and sat across from me as I worked. “All that fancy stuff,” he told me, shaking his head at my Introduction to French book. “Who do you know who talks French?” It was as if those other Wednesday nights had never happened. Perhaps he stopped because he felt he’d made his point. Or perhaps he simply grew bored with the routine. Maybe he noticed my increasing nervousness and realized he was frightening me far more than he’d ever intended. But I continued to read the paper on my own, furtively, secretly, shamed. Wednesday nights, I thought of my mother stranded on the highway, and the numbers in front of me collapsed into piles of short black sticks. Then I got up, casually, as if to get a glass of juice, or to scratch whichever cat happened to be slouched across the counter. But my father caught me glancing at the door, making sure it was locked. “You’re safe with me,” he’d say. “No need to be so jumpy.” Sometimes he’d even get up and open the door, twisting his neck to peer at the stars, while I stared down at the knees of my jeans, imagining the wolf glide of a man’s shadow slipping from the barn.

  Halloween fell on a Wednesday, and my mother asked if I would mind staying home to wait for trick-or-treaters while she worked late at the Sell It Now! This year, for the first time, my father would be in charge of Halloween, driving Sam to Horton, watching closely while he approached each house, rang the bell, came back with a miniature chocolate bar or a fistful of sweet hard candy. There had been icy rumors about razor blades in apples, arsenic in Pixy Stix. Even Girl Scout cookies weren’t safe; someone had discovered a pin. “You check everything before he eats it,” my mother told my father. “Nothing unwrapped, nothing homemade. I’m serious, Gordon,” she said, because my father had started to laugh.

  “You worry too much,” he said. “Sam’s not afraid of that horse crap, are you, Sam?” and Sam looked between my mother and my father, anxiety creasing his forehead.

  Other years, my mother would have driven us into Horton and dropped us off at the band shell, with strict orders to return by nine o’clock. We were never late. After curfew, the high school kids roamed the streets, the sweet tooth of childhood gnawing in their throats. They couldn’t go trick-or-treating anymore; they were too old, too angry, stiff-legged in their freshly washed jeans. A few of the biggest boys dressed up as girls, while the girls painted their faces in the usual ways—white lipstick, green eyeliner, blush the color of beef. To us, they had become a part of the terror, no less essential than witches and demons. If they found a younger kid scurrying between the houses, the next day at school that child would be without candy, humble, eager for even a few stale pieces of chicken corn.

  This year, I had planned to be an angel, my wings pinned into a clever V to minimize wind resistance. But as my mother pointed out, a lot of kids my age would also be staying home, and I began to enjoy the idea of answering the door, looking over the costumes, deciding if they were worth one candy bar or two. So on Halloween night, I put on my everyday jeans and helped turn Sam into a vampire bat, stapling black streamers to the arms of his shirt for the air to ripple like wings. With his white plastic fangs and spiky bat ears, he looked the way I imagined a real-life vampire bat would. But just as he was ready to try his first flight off the couch, my father announced that costumes were for sissies. “You can be your old man, how’s that?” he told Sam, scrunching his company hat over Sam’s cardboard ears. It was a blue baseball cap, with a bent visor and Fountain Ford scrawled across its brim. “Dad!” I said, but Sam did not say anything, not even when my father plucked the streamers from his arms and took away his plastic jack-o’-lantern, the hollow kind all the other kids had, and gave him a brown grocery bag instead. “It’ll hold more,” my father explained. “This is a bag that means business.”

  Sam spit out his fangs. “Maybe I should carry a briefcase or something,” he said, tilting the visor to
hide his eyes. “So it looks more like a costume.”

  “Not necessary!” my father said. He was bristling with enthusiasm, clapping his hands together the way we’d seen him do at Fountain Ford when talking with the other salesmen about a hot deal. I could see how it was going to be, my father hustling Sam door to door, block to block, jeering him on when he stopped to catch his breath. Sam would have more candy than he’d ever had with me—my father would make sure of it. He winked as he guided Sam out the front door, his hand at the back of Sam’s neck. I did not say good-bye; I was angry with my father, but even more so with Sam, because he did not fight back. The door slammed shut, forcing in a puff of air, rich with wood smoke and damp.

  I finished the dishes and wandered around the house, waiting for trick-or-treaters. I looked out the windows. I opened the refrigerator door and closed it. I examined the row of family pictures hanging on the stairway wall. My parents’ wedding portrait. My mother’s high school graduation, a picture of my grandmother, Auntie Thil and Uncle Olaf. A snapshot my mother had taken of Sam and me when we were very small, sitting back-to-back in a gigantic pumpkin my father had bought from our neighbors. There were no pictures of my father’s parents or his younger brother, Arnold, who had died in the war. No, he said, when we asked, he did not miss them. “How could I miss anybody when I have such a fine family right here?”

  Sam’s favorite cat, Rose, rubbed against my legs, but when I tried to pick her up she switched her tail and stalked away. To console myself, I began to eat the miniature Snickers bars from the candy bowl. The taste was flat and chalky, the way something on sale would taste. It didn’t taste as good as trick-or-treat candy, which was sweeter because you sensed it wasn’t really yours, something deliciously stolen. I imagined Sam in my father’s baseball cap, holding out his ugly grocery bag, and I ate a few more Snickers, mixing the remaining ones with my fingers so it looked like there were more. My mother had said we probably wouldn’t get many trick-or-treaters anyway. Our house was too far from Horton, set back from the highway. The trick-or-treaters we did get usually came just as we were ready for bed, kids from the neighboring farms huddled close for warmth in the open bed of somebody’s pickup. The glowing end of a cigarette watched from the cab, a red devil’s eye.