I see you everywhere (2 page)

∞

if you’re to hear louisa’s version of what went on last summer, you will also be hearing mine. Louisa’s worst side is the one I call the Judge. À la Salem witchcraft trials. There’s this look she gets on her face that tells the world and everyone in it how completely unworthy it and they are to contain or witness her presence.
Beware!
says that look.
The
Spanish Inquisition was Entenmann’s Danish!
Her new life in Santa Ladeedabra did not seem to have mellowed her out one iota, because when I pulled up at the airport, that’s the look she was wearing, firm as a church hat, beaming her world-weary scorn clear across the state of Vermont. I was late, okay, which didn’t help. It didn’t help either, I know, that it was me picking her up. I wonder sometimes what kind of sisters we’ll be when we’re ancient (if we ever are). Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine: before that visit, you’d have bet the hacienda we’d end up like them. Cold? Suspicious? Resentful? Ever notice how sisters, when they aren’t best friends, make particularly vicious enemies? Like, they could be enemies from the time they lay their beady little eyes on each other, maybe because their mother makes them rivals or maybe because there’s not enough love to go around and—not out of greed but from the gut, like two hawks zeroing in on a wren—they have no choice but to race for it. (Laws of nature, pure and simple. Be vigilant and survive. Altruism? A myth. Share? Oh please. Whatever it is that feeds the hunger, dive-bomb first, philosophize later.) Or maybe they grow apart in a more conscious way, maybe because their Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 8 8

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marriages clash: the guys they choose see each other as losers or sellouts; the women are helplessly loyal. But that’s not our story. No husbands yet, not even a hint of husband.

I’ve always been the favorite—our mother’s, at least. Partly, it’s the animal thing: Mom grew up on a storybook farm where animals ruled life more strictly than clocks. And I happen to be the one who set my sights that way. Saving animals is all I’ve ever wanted to do. In fourth grade, I asked Mom to give me all her shoe boxes. A hospital: that was the plan. I cut windows in the ends of the boxes and stacked them in the bottom of my closet like high-rise condos. My first baby bird got the penthouse. Next day, he was dead. They almost always die, I’d learn. But that didn’t stop me. “You’re my daughter, all right,” said Mom when she saw what I’d built (though her tone made me wonder if the likeness was such a good thing).

Louisa thinks this makes my life easy—being the favorite. She doesn’t realize that once you’re the disappointment, or once you’ve chosen a path seen as odd or unchoosable, your struggle is over, right? On the other side of the fence—mine—every expectation you fulfill (or look like you might, on purpose or not) puts you one step higher and closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world—or plummet in very grand style.

∞

in the car, I let Clem do the talking. She was late to pick me up, and I was glad: it gave me a reason to sulk until I could get my bearings. I was glad to be back in New England, but I was cross-eyed with fatigue. I cannot sleep on planes. So Clem filled me in on the reading of the will and what she called the Great Divide: relatives clutching lists, drawing lots, swarming the house like fire ants. But this time there were no dogfights; everyone, said Clem, remembered the piano brawl. I hadn’t seen the place in five years, and when we arrived, I just stood on the walk and stared. It’s a Victorian, more aspiring than grand, and it Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 9
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had always looked a little anemic, but now it was a wreck. The sallow paint, formerly white, hung off the clapboards in broad curling tongues, and the blue porch ceiling bore the crusty look of a cave complete with stalactites. The flagstones were fringed with moss. The front steps sagged. That the lawn had just been mowed made the house look even more derelict. “How could Dad let her live this way?” I asked. With the edge of a sneaker, Clem swiped cut grass from the steps.

“She insisted. She felt safer this way. No one busts in if they figure you can’t afford a paint job.” She shrugged. “Makes sense to me.”

“But I remember this caretaker guy. . . .”

“Sonny?” Clem laughed. “Lou, do you know how old
he
is now?”

I walked ahead of her into the house. I braced myself for cobwebbed sofas, curtains spattered with mildew, but I was shocked again. The antique tables were polished, the upholstery taut and preened, the glass over the samplers and watercolor seascapes shimmering with leafy reflections. The floor, once oak plank covered with dark orientals, was now a bright field of linoleum, great black and white squares, stretching from parlor to kitchen. I dropped my bag. “What the hell happened here?”

“She told me she always wanted to live inside a Vermeer.” My sister watched me for a moment. “I mean, you’re the artist, you can relate.”

“Vermeer? This is Captain Kangaroo.”

“It was an experiment,” said Clem. “Don’t be so uptight.”

I walked on through the dining room. The same old salt-pocked captain’s table and the five-foot brass candlesticks supported by turbaned Moors now resembled pieces on a chessboard. But the kitchen had become the most eccentric room of all, a time warp. The cabinets were the ones I remembered, their rumpled glass panes framing porcelain platters, ranks of translucent teacups, curvaceous tureens (of which, I now realized, I would have liked to claim a few). In the center of the room, like a relic of Pompeii, the same claw-foot bathtub held court: no faucets, a rusted gas-jet heater below. When I was little and we stayed here, Dad would haul water from an outdoor pump and turn on the gas. After turning it off, he’d press a towel or two against the bottom so Clem and I Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 10 10

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could bathe without scalding our bottoms. Beyond the pump was an outhouse shrouded in lilacs. When Dad insisted on plumbing, Aunt Lucy balked. The compromise was one toilet, a washing machine, and a kitchen sink; after that, to fill the tub, she’d hitch a garden hose to the tap in the big soapstone sink. “Luxe de luxe! Just splendid! My dears, you haven’t a clue what modern
feels
like,” she’d say. “To you, it’s the air you breathe. To me, it’s a foreign country, an Oriental language.”

But the long wooden counter, with its century of scars, now stopped at a double-door frost-free Amana, imposing as a glacier. Lined up along the back of the counter, cheek to cheek, were several brand-new culinary contraptions. A Cuisinart, a coffee grinder, and a microwave, followed by a small turquoise missile whose function I deduced only from its name: Juice King. At the very end, a circular machine with a plastic dome. When I peered inside it, Clem said “It makes bread” and opened the freezer door. Stacked inside were dozens of foil-wrapped cubes. “She sort of stopped sleeping at night, so sometimes I’d stay up, too, and we’d, like, improvise. She never settled for plain white or wheat, no plain
any-
thing.
I’d be a wreck at work the next day, while she’d sleep away the morning. But we had a blast.”

Side by side, we examined the contents of the freezer, its chilly white mist scorching our skin. Each loaf was labeled in Lucy’s Christina Rossetti cursive on first-aid tape: zucchini-birdseed, banana-maple rye, zucchini-chocolate, prune-pecan-cassis. “Harvey’s Bristol sourdough wheat?” I read aloud.

Clem reached past me and took it out. “Awesome with cream cheese. We’ll have it for breakfast.” She closed the door, leaned against it, and folded her arms. Standing there, she looked for just a minute like our mother, sure of her place in a world where she’d landed almost by accident. I laughed.

“Oh good,” said Clem.

“What?”

“You didn’t leave it behind after all.”

“What?” I said again.

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Clem walked toward me and pretended to pull something out of my breast pocket. She held it up, the invisible thing, and shook it in front of my face. “Your sense of humor.” She put it back, giving my pocket a tender pat.

I felt the air shift between us, as if we were finally together somehow. This wasn’t what I wanted. I walked across the room and looked out the window at the backyard. I counted four bird feeders, all filled. My sister, Saint Francis of Assisi.

“The cousins missed you,” said Clem. “Too bad about your deadline. Couldn’t you just have brought your typewriter out on the plane?”

I sat on the edge of the tub. I could tell her that I didn’t work well away from home, but it would have been a lie, and it might have started a real conversation, which I was doing my best to avoid. “How come the place isn’t looted?”

Clem pointed to the kitchen table and chairs. I noticed then that everything wore a claim: a tag or strip of tape marked racine, jackie j., gaia, beau, and so on. The shippers would pack it all up the following week, after Clem left for school. My father would return, to hire painters and talk to real estate agents.

Clem hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She’d spotted my resistance, and I could tell she was contemplating the challenge. “So, you buying me dinner tonight?”

“If you’re buying tomorrow. I don’t remember owing you any favors,”

I said.

Her smile opened wide. I’ve always envied her those perfect teeth: small and square, lined up straight as rails in a banister. “Deal,” she said.

∞

fun was the last thing I expected when Dad roped me into this babysit-the-family-dowager job. But free rent all summer in Vermont: who’d say no to that? So I figured, okay, my hot date’s gone to Alaska to make big bucks on a rig, not an adventure I cared to join, even if I Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 12 12

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could’ve schemed the airfare from Dad (and I would have), and this way I could work with all these amazing creatures—owls, hawks, and falcons, something I couldn’t get paid for without a fancy degree—and maybe get in some serious cycling. Aunt Lucy knew this guy who ran a bike shop; his dad had been her gardener when she’d bothered with a garden. Fine, I figured; so I’d spend the summer fixing things—rusted derailleurs and bent spokes, cracked beaks and fractured wings, my great-great-aunt’s delusions. Bikes and birds I could deal with. Dementia? Well, I’d play that one by ear. Lucy was ninety-eight and a half years old when she died. She was still sharp, if a little slow on her feet, even surprisingly strong. Walking, she reminded me of a cat on a skinny branch: agile but cautious. She ate her meals at normal hours, but she’d be wide awake for most of the night and then sleep, when she did, during the day. That was her only weird habit. I thought back then (back then!) she made an excellent argument for avoiding marriage and babies, and I told my Catholic boyfriend as much. (Luke still goes to church when he goes home. Which I try to ignore.) If she was ever lonely or bored, she didn’t say. The day I arrived at the house, a UPS truck was pulling away. Lucy was on the porch pushing a humongous box through the door, one careful inch at a time.

“Hey, let me do that!” I shouted. I dropped my backpack on the sidewalk.

She looked down at me and said, “Hello, dear one. I am in the process of newfangling my life.” Without waiting for me, she went back to her task. When I got inside the door, she had just pried the packing notice from its sleeve. She held it at arm’s length. Her face lit up like a flare.

“Oh splendid!”

I stood beside her as she pulled an X-acto knife out of her apron pocket and removed its cap with her teeth (her
actual
teeth, believe it or not). Slowly, and with a concentration that totally canceled out my presence, she slit the tape. When she pulled the box open, Styrofoam peanuts exploded upward, reverse confetti. “I hate these dingbats, don’t you? They end up all hither and yon. Like water bugs in a tornado.” The cap in her teeth whistled as she spoke.

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“Yeah, and you know,” I said, “they’ll outlast our species by about a million years. The dingbats
and
the water bugs.” I picked a few off her dress.

She really looked at me then, as if I’d passed a silent test. “I liked the old newspaper stuffing,” she said. “I liked looking at the stories, especially when they came from towns that one is never likely to visit.

‘Mayor’s Nephew Charged with Poultry Theft.’ ‘Tree Surgeon and Dog Catcher to Wed in Fall.’ ‘Cattle Drive Causes Interstate Mayhem.’

Serendipity and fluff. Not always inconsequential, but never of tragic proportions.” She capped the knife, straightened up, and looked me over.

“You have been sent here, young lady, to curtail my amusement. Your father was frank about that. He has also canceled my American Express. As if I were squandering an imperial nest egg. I tolerate Beau’s meddling because he does it from afar. But yours: we’ll have to see about yours. You are the slippery slope toward one of those, I believe they’re called ‘home health attendants’?” She sighed, leaned over, and pulled a tapered plastic tube from the box. She held it up like a flagstaff. “Noses down behind cushions!”

Jesus, I thought, I’m spending my summer with an old lady who goes into raptures at the sight of a new vacuum cleaner. At least she wasn’t in diapers.

So my great-great-aunt, who still wore lace-up pointy-toed boots and long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses in June, had become the consummate consumer. It was like she’d lost her virginity and discovered the tyranny of lust. She loved paging through catalogs, but her new favorite thing was getting out her ’66 Ford Fairlane after dinner and driving to Burlington, where stores stayed open late because of the students. These shopping trips—for which she refused to call the guy who was supposed to drive her places—were what Dad called her “nocturnal missions” (innocent pun, I’m sure). They were the main reason he wanted her under surveillance. So Lucy and I made a deal. I drove, and I had veto power over purchases that were outrageously impractical or way overpriced. I’d come back from the bird station about six-thirty and put our frozen dinners in the new microwave. I’d talk about birds; she’d talk about books. She liked Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 14 14