Sister (2 page)

 

In the choir loft above the sacristy, Eva and Serina Oben—still known in their seventies as the Oben girls—take turns singing and playing on the organ, which was purchased last summer from the profits of raffles and summer festivals, and it's important to think about the quilts you helped to stitch or the pies you made or the pine cone wreaths that took all fall to glue and mount on coat hanger frames. My brother, like the other boys, was tacitly excused from tasks like these, but I helped the women with everything, and now the organ is as much my own as the bed I sleep in every night. Each note a familiar voice, holding me in place. Belonging, like my grandmother, to something larger than myself. I remember how carefully she taught me to pray to Mary, to Mary's mother, Ann, to my guardian angel, a little girl who looked just like me. I remember her household shrines, the framed photographs of Mary and Elise in their flower-strewn coffins, the Infant of Prague on top of the refrigerator, the four-foot-high statue of the Virgin behind the house. Altars to family, to women and
children. Even Jesus looked female, with his moist lips and flowing hair, his gentle mother's eyes.

Eight years after my brother disappeared, I married a man who was raised without religious beliefs. Our wedding was a trip to the courthouse in the upstate New York town where we now live; my grandmother refused to acknowledge it. She returned my letters unopened. She hung up the phone at the sound of my voice. She died six months ago, believing that I, like Sam, had been lost for good.

“At least light a candle for her intentions,” my mother said, when I told her I couldn't make it to the funeral. Work, money…I had good reasons, and my mother had heard them all before. Since leaving Wisconsin, I'd visited only once, and that had been ten years earlier. So on the afternoon of my grandmother's burial, I drove to one of the Catholic churches in our town, a town with two universities, six movie theaters, an arts center, bookstores, outdoor cafés; a town thirty times the size of Oneisha and Horton combined. I sat in my car, remembering my Sunday school classes at Saint Ignatius Church, where girls were forbidden to step on the red carpet that sprawled down the aisle. Girls were confined to the pews, while boys got to finger the glittering chalice on the altar. Girls had to curtsy to Father Van Dan, got called into the rectory, one at a time, to place their hands on his Bible and pledge to
keep their virtue
. Girls could never be priests, because they weren't made in God's image. Girls were made to stay home with their babies and raise them; even the latest Pope said that was true. The harder I tried to think about my grandmother, to remember how close we were when I was young, to do the one thing that would have made her happy, the angrier I became. I could not imagine leaving my car and walking up the stone flight of steps into the church. I put my head down on the steering wheel and cried, and then I drove away.

But in dreams I still take my place beside my grandmother, fold myself eagerly into our pew. The voice of the organ is full of
anguish, the rich wood reflecting darts of light that burn larger, brighter, when I—no longer an individual but part of this congregation—rise and begin to sing. How the dust shines in the air! The priest floats into the sanctuary, genuflects before the altar, prepares to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Think of how it feels to behold a miracle. Imagine the power of such a belief, how you might cradle it for warmth, a treasured glowing coal that whispers,
I am loved
. When the priest raises the host above the altar and speaks the magical Latin, that dull bread glistens like a full moon. We burn our faces in its heavenly light.

And then I am bursting through the heavy front doors. It is winter. Ice shines on the chipped stone steps, icicles hang from the railing. I exhale the white dress of an angel, which dissipates into the air. Or perhaps it is a lovely summer day, the sky filled with the faces of high drifting clouds, and still there is nothing I recognize. This is the point when I always awaken, with Adam sleeping beside me, secure in a world I inhabit until my grandmother appears to me and I'm left to wonder, What is this place? This room, this house, this life accountable to no one but myself. My brother's disappearance, my grandmother's death. The feeling after loss finally hits. The deepness of it. The hurtling down.

Church bells ring in the distance, faint as a faucet dripping. First light mists the windows. I slip from beneath the covers, sit shivering on the edge of the bed. It's Sunday morning, early spring, 1995. Icicles drip from the eaves. The clock ticks on the wall. I cannot imagine what I will do next.

I
'm trying on maternity dresses, hand-me-downs from Adam's sister, Pat, all of them childish, ugly. There's a full-length mirror on the closet door, and I twist and pose in front of it. The dresses billow like sheets on a wash line. Nine weeks into my first pregnancy, I cannot imagine how it will be to occupy that much space. “You'll know soon enough,” my mother has assured me, but right now my stomach is its usual soft pouch. If it weren't for this lingering tiredness, I'd think the doctor's test was wrong.

“You want some toast?” Adam calls from the kitchen.

“Yeah. I'll be there in a minute.” But I pull on another dress, turn sideways, stare critically as any teenage girl. Though I look the same as I always do, it
feels
as though I should look different.

Lately, I catch myself studying my body the way experts look at the body of a car, trying to determine where it's been, what it's done. I remember my brother once claiming my father's car had been dented by a hit-and-run driver. My father called the police, and they came after a long, impatient hour, two stout men who questioned Sam about the slivers of wood they found embedded in the paint. “Looks like a hit-and-run phone pole,” the older one
said, his lips pulled back into the wide grin of an unfamiliar dog. Sam was sixteen. His memory frequently suffered these gaps, visible as missing teeth.
Where were you last night? I don't know. What did you do? I forget
. It took him three weeks of community service to pay the six thousand citizens of Horton, Wisconsin, what it cost to fix that pole.

When I try to think of Sam, I see the blurred edges of a figure done in watercolor—I have to stand back before he eases into focus, and even then I can't see him clearly. Did he have wide-set eyes? Large, clumsy feet like my own? Were there freckles in the shape of the Big Dipper on his shoulder, or was that just something I told him once, giggling as he spun round and round, unable to turn his neck far enough to see? Sometimes I worry that the things I've invented outnumber the ones that are true. Then I recite the facts my mother gave to the police: the last time we saw him he was seventeen years old, he was five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred thirty pounds; he had blond hair and gray-green eyes, and yes, he did have older friends, men from Milwaukee we did not know, and yes, though he'd left the house on the afternoon of August 5, 1984, in his usual hurry, there was nothing peculiar about that day except that he never returned. Whatever happened next remains a mystery even now; there are suspicions, speculations, but no concrete clues. The possibilities wander through my dreams, catch me at odd moments like a skipped heartbeat. I have even tried to pray, crossing right thumb over left the way my grandmother taught me:
Tell me, please tell me where he is
.

It's hard to remember being seventeen, but these few things I do remember as I tug the last dress down over my head: the town of Horton, my father's lectures on citizenship, the stinging green odor of alfalfa fields stretching for mile after rippling mile, the brittle feathers of week-old pigeons—
pinfeathers
, my mother called them, and they did feel sharp against my hands when I'd climb into the belly of the silo to visit their nests. Adam is the sort
of person who remembers everything, easily: what we had for lunch, the first time we made love, directions to a pond in Vermont where we swam three years ago. His mind is ordered as neatly as his dresser drawers. Pants to the right, shirts to the left. Socks rolled into balls, their lips pulled back to swallow their own bodies. Every so often, he'll straighten out my clothes, refolding crumpled cotton, stroking creases out of linen.
See, it's so easy to find things now
, he says, but within a day the crisp boundaries blur, long-limbed socks embracing shirts, panties twisted between them.

There are times when finding something only means risking another loss. Close to the mirror, I note the fine lines at the corners of my eyes, the deeper ones crossing my forehead, the slight downward curve reshaping my mouth. My body is slowly dissolving the landmarks of my childhood. Soon there will be others: stretchings and scarrings, a more complicated adult map. But I can still find the dent on my shin from where our neighbor's retarded son kicked me, feel the incredible warmth of the blood as he stood over me on the playground, crying too. I strip off the dress and there are my chicken-pox scars: three along my breastbone, one beside my navel. There is the downy hair on my stomach that made me afraid, for one awful summer, that something had gone wrong and I was turning into a boy. All these things I find and more; perhaps there are others, evidence I've overlooked.

My mother still gets responses from the ads she places in newspapers, at the backs of magazines. Three years ago a woman thought she saw Sam in Salt Lake City; last year a man insisted he waited on their table in New Orleans. By now he would be starting to age the way, at thirty, I am aging, his shoulders creeping forward a bit, his stomach comfortably soft. I wish I could look at my changing body to see the person I'm becoming, not the person I have lost. My earliest memory is of Sam, newly born, one red fist corking his mouth, but though I examine myself from every angle, I can't find one mark, one scar, the slightest clue I ever had a brother.

 

After breakfast, Adam and I sit on the back porch, drinking what we're pretending is coffee. In fact, it's a caffeine-free herbal substitute that tastes a little like dirt. He's already wearing his work clothes: an orange T-shirt, a baseball cap, jeans with a list of Things to Do poking out from the left hip pocket. I'm back in my nightshirt, and whenever I look up from the dun circle of liquid in my cup, the color of the world overwhelms me: tiger lilies along the porch, summer sky, emerald grass. There are butterflies, birds, our marmalade cat, Laverne. There are brown tree trunks and speckled stones and the neighbors' potted geraniums.

“How were the dresses?” Adam asks.

“Polka-dotted. Lots of little bows.”

“That figures,” he says, making a face. Pat is the queen of ticky-tacky things.

“At least there weren't any of those T-shirts that say ‘Baby on Board.'”

He grins. “I'll have to get you one.”

“Save your money.”

“Or maybe one that says, ‘Baby,' with an arrow pointing down.”

“Ugh.”

We are spending the day at home, officially to celebrate our third anniversary but in reality to finish all the projects I've started around the house. There's the partially stripped bureau in the garage. There are the seedlings I haven't transplanted even though it's June: peppers, melons, tomatoes, their tangled white roots peeping out from the bottoms of the peat pots, tasting air. “So what do you want to do first?” he says.

“I was thinking I'd tackle the garden,” I say, and I cradle my cup in my hands.

“Then I'll finish the bureau.” He stands up, whistling, and carries his cup inside. I can see his shape moving around the
kitchen, and it looks like the shadow of another, larger body. It could be my father's shadow scraping the cast-iron pan, loading the dishwasher, wiping the table, except my father never did any of those things.

In Horton, there were names for boys who did dishes, who played indoors, boys who stayed close to their mothers. My father didn't understand when Sam wanted to play with me instead of making friends with boys in town. Sometimes he tried to play with Sam himself, but Sam cringed away from his blunt, tousling hands, his booming voice that always seemed too hearty, too cheerful. Nothing annoyed my father more than what he called
a sissy
. He began to keep a closer eye on us, listen in on our private talks. If Sam picked up one of my dolls, my father asked, did he want to be a mommy? If Sam crept into my bed in the night, frightened by some dream, my father jerked him up out of the blankets and told him he was a big boy, old enough to sleep by himself.

“You look beat,” Adam says from the doorway. “Why don't you go back to bed for a while?”

“I'm OK,” I say, although I feel as if I could put my head down on the table and sleep forever.

The seedlings are waiting for me in the back bay window. Beneath them, the wooden ledge has turned pale from the damp. I carry their trays outside to my little garden, two at a time, making trip after trip. Each year, I buy too many plants for the space that I have. My mother's garden sprawled for half an acre behind our house, well out of reach of the shadow cast by the derelict barn. The doors of the barn were kept boarded shut, but I found other ways inside, and as soon as Sam was old enough I hoisted him in through the broken windows at the back. The old metal poles of the stanchions rose up around us like trees. Cobwebs swam through the air. “Don't tell anyone,” I warned Sam, and I led him through the cow barn to the silo and my secret: the white, glowing bones of mice and opossums and raccoons that had fallen
the twenty-foot drop and died after lonely weeks pacing that concrete circle.

Summers, we spent entire days in the barn. We hunted for field mice nests, stroking the soft blind bodies that were no bigger than our own fingers. We caught the barn swallows that fluttered against the windows, and when we opened our hands to release them, they lay briefly still in our palms, shiny blue, and we felt their beating hearts. Sam was like those swallows when I sat on the edge of his bed at night, his pale throat exposed as he closed his eyes to listen to my stories. I made paper hats for him and tin can shoes. I taught him to make the sign of the cross, top to bottom, left to right.

He was beautiful—you could tell by the way strangers stopped to talk to him, bending their faces too close. “What a waste!” they said about his long, thick lashes, the deep coral color of his lips, his golden-pine complexion. I was the paler, chubby version; I looked adults squarely in the eye. “My brother is shy,” I'd say in my coldest voice, and Sam would duck behind me and grip my hand, my father's old watch rattling on his wrist. The watch was one of my father's bizarre, infrequent gifts; it didn't work, but as Sam got older he began to wear it everywhere. It made him look even smaller than he was, sweet, the little boy pretending to be a man. I hated that watch. It was heavy, scratched, ugly; it glowed in the dark like a disembodied eye, and I didn't understand how Sam could like something I didn't. I was the one who decided what we liked. At first, I tried to swindle it away from him; when that failed I used force, until my mother intervened. “That doesn't belong to you,” she said, not understanding that I wanted not to own it but to destroy it, this thing that distinguished my brother from myself.

I dig holes for the seedlings, add rotted leaves from the compost, sink the frail roots into the soil the way my mother taught me. It seems to me now that Sam began to change when we were first separated from each other—one day, we were simply brother
and sister, and then, abruptly, we became boy and girl,
too old
to share a bedroom,
too old
to play together with my dolls or Sam's small Matchbox cars,
too old
to kiss each other good night, to touch. I did the dishes and vacuumed and dusted and worked in the garden with my mother; Sam mowed the lawn and helped my father change the oil in his car. I was given books to read; Sam was given things to build. I changed too, becoming self-conscious about my clothes, my hair, the too-flatness and too-fullness of my body. As a Catholic girl, I was to model myself on Mary, who was both a mother and a virgin. Mary, who Jesus allowed to suffer most because He loved her best.

The winter before my spring confirmation, I came downstairs wearing the confirmation dress my mother and I had made. It was white, of course, with frail puffed sleeves and two thick rows of lace at the hem. I was eleven, and I moved past Sam on tiptoe, pretending I was holy, a saint, an eager bride of Christ lifted by His breath so my feet wouldn't touch the ground. “That looks fat on you,” Sam teased, and I whirled around and kicked him with my sharp white shoes. To punish me, my mother made me change clothes and then she put me to work lining the highest pantry shelves with fresh Con-Tact paper. The paper was orange and green, and it stuck to my hands. Sweat prickled under my arms as I wrestled it into place, carried armloads of pots and pans up and down the stepladder, all the while smelling my bitter, human smell. I wasn't holy, and it was Sam's fault, and I would make him pay.

It was a few days before his birthday, a particularly cold, gray January. We were still on vacation from school. The snow had drifted up to the windowsills, and the fields around the house stretched vast, empty, as if the soul of the world had been exposed. There was nothing to do except pick at each other, and later, as I sat reading in my mother's rocking chair, Sam began to pester me about his birthday present.

“I didn't get you a present,” I said, even though I had. “I
mean, you're going to be ten now, and that will change everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, you'll be
ten
. Nine is much better.”

“Why is nine better?”

“There's no sense in worrying about it,” I said. “You're going to be ten, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

For a moment, he searched my face for a sign, but I made my expression like the snowy fields, smooth and white and without a landmark. He frowned, his gray-green eyes deep as the eyes of horses, full of want. “Will you love me as much when I'm ten?” he asked, choking on that shameful word
love
, and when I told him no, his face shattered. “I didn't mean it,” I begged him, but he ran down the stairs to his bedroom in the basement and locked the door against me. Until the previous summer, we'd shared the bedroom that now was mine, just across the hall from my parents'. I knew how his body would be twisted on the bed, the pillow tucked to his abdomen, his mouth hanging open and silent between sobs. I knew the flush that crept up his chest to his neck, blossoming in his cheeks, the redness of his eyes. I'd been one and a half when he was born, and my mother has told me how I examined every inch of his tiny, perfect body. How I watched as she bathed and fed and diapered him. How his first word was my name.