Stuffed (3 page)

Dad watched. Steam shot out of his ears. He tucked in his lips and sucked air. “Chowderhead! That’s not the way to do it. You want to do it the
right
way or
your
way?”

He lined up the letter, held it down with his fingers, and bonged it like John Henry. The letter came out deep and clear.

“I’m afraid I’ll hit my fingers,” I explained.

“You’re not gonna hit your fingers.”

“Well, anyway,” I said, “I want these napkin rings to look man-made. I want them to have errors. I don’t want them to look perfect, Dad.”

“Don’t worry.”

Last year he taught me how to solder. I heated up the soldering iron, cleaned the copper with sulfuric acid, and carefully dripped silver onto the join. Dad stopped what he was doing to inspect the work. I rose from the workbench so he could slide onto my stool. He flipped down his Optivisors and held the solder under his fluorescent lamp. He pulled it. He twisted it. He knocked it against the vise, hit it with a hammer, then slammed it onto the floor.

“That’s a good solder,” he said.

When I was growing up and we lived in Manhattan, my mother liked to throw dinner parties. A typical menu would start with Shrimp Cocktail, then a salad, then Sautéed Veal Baked with Marsala and Cream, Rice Pilaf with Onions and Sultanas, and, in season, Asparagus Beurre au Citron. Dessert might be Baked Alaska Flambé or Chocolate Mousse in a crystal bowl lined with ladyfingers. But before all that, before the ice bucket was filled and the doorbell began to ring, my father would go into the kitchen and prepare the canapés. He’d pull a long white cook’s apron over his head and tie it in the front. He’d roll up his sleeves. He’d stroke a ten-inch carbon steel chef’s knife against a whetstone. He’d take three loaves of perfectly square, perfectly presliced black bread, butter them six at a time, then drape smoked salmon over the tops. When six were complete, he’d cut the bread on the diagonal and trim it. Slivers of smoked salmon would fall off with the crusts. “Open,” my father would say. Like a baby bird, I’d bend my head back and open my mouth. He would laugh and drop the slivers on my tongue and only mine. My sister had been traumatized by a sea robin he caught when she was three and placed on her Mae West. She has never eaten fish since then and wears rubber gloves to prepare tuna salad for her husband. Mattie would be tidying up the guest bathroom and making sure the living-room cushions were plumped. My mother would be getting dressed. So my father and I were alone in the kitchen. And for the time it took to make three loaves of smoked salmon canapés, he was mine.

The Volk Girls with our beloved beagle, Morgen. Together we’ve been on forty-four diets.

CHOCOLATE PUDDING

Beaming down the high school corridor, my big sister comes toward me. Why is she laughing so hard? Nearing her I can see: She is wearing my blouse. The blouse I saved up months to buy. The blouse I’ve never worn. She’s stolen it out of my closet. If rage could kill, I would be dead.

Born eighteen months apart—both accidents—my sister and I fought daily. Knives were thrown. Ribs were kicked. My right thumb was slammed off in a door. Circle fights were the worst. Trapped in a room we’d hiss and snarl, grabbing weapons to maim with—hangers, hairbrushes, shoes—whatever you could reach without breaking the circle. Eventually my sister won. She always did. Then she’d pin me and drip spit on my face.

“Someday you’ll love her.” My mother would smile.

“I wish she was dead,” I’d say.

And yet, and yet . . .

Punished together, banished to our room, instantly we were allies. We plotted escape. We wrote musicals and did the cancan. We midwifed black mollies and developed our own language: A penis was a linga-linga. A fart was a foogee. A pretty girl, a shpagooli, and an ugly girl, a bashalaga. When our parents spoke French so we wouldn’t understand, we made up our own French:

Shock on voo shawn on tain.
Instun tain on poo sha.

On Sundays, when Mattie was off, we’d cook. “Let’s make chocolate pudding!” my sister would say, and we’d race to the kitchen. She’d reach for a box of My-T-Fine from the pantry shelf, then take a bottle of milk out of the fridge. Cream rose to the top then. We’d use all of it, then pour the My-T-Fine into an aluminum pot. The stove was gas. When my sister lit the match, blue flames shot out of black holes toward the ceiling. I stood back. The whoosh could singe your eyebrows.

Since she was older, my sister would stir first. When she’d get bored, I’d stir and she’d tell me what I was doing wrong.

“You’re going too fast!” “You’re going too slow!” “You’re going backward!” Mattie stirred in figure eights, rotating the pot so that every part of the bottom would get touched. But no matter what we did, the pot would scorch and the pudding would stick.

When you saw the first bubble, the pudding was done. We’d pour it into four-ounce Pyrex cups. While it cooled, we’d fight over the spoon. If you cared about quantity, the pot was more desirable. There was more pudding in the pot than the spoon, even if it tasted scorched. But usually the spoon was preferable because it had a well where the pudding was thick, even though it made the pudding taste like wood.

After we’d scrub the pot with Babbo, we’d take the pudding to our parents on a tray. They’d take a taste, say how good it was, then we’d get under their satin quilt. At some point during the snuggling, my sister would kick me or punch me or pull down my pajama bottoms.

“Why did you beat me up so much when we were little?” I ask her.

“What did you do that made me?” she replies.

Last weekend, on a trip to Florida to meet her second grandson, my sister glares at me over a grapefruit. “How could you send the baby that gift?” she smolders. “You sent Daniel a silver cup.”

“I did?” I say. “I’m supposed to remember that?”

“How could you send Matthew a jumpsuit and rattles?”

“That jumpsuit came from a very good store,” I say. “And the rattle thing had twelve rattles in it.”

“They were
plastic.
” My sister says the word like she’s vomiting.

“I thought it was a great gift. It was two things and one of them had twelve things.”

“Well, you should send Lizzie a silver cup for Matthew. That’s what you sent when she had Daniel.”

“Okay,” I say. “Ask Lizzie to send me back the jumpsuit and the rattles, and I’ll get him the silver cup.”

“Girls! Girls!” my mother tsks from her chaise.

“For fifteen dollars more you could have given him a silver cup.”

“A gift is a gift,” I say. “Why do you have to measure it?”

“It’s a terrible gift.” My sister’s eyes go dark.

“What do you think, Mom?” I ask. “You were with me when I got the stuff.”

Mom thinks. “Actually, I thought you’d get several jump-suits,” my mother says.

“It cost me three hundred and eighty-five dollars to fly down here to meet that baby,” I say. “I have to buy a silver cup too?”

I know some sisters who by choice only see each other Mother’s Day, and some who will never speak again. But most are like my sister and me, treasurers of each other’s childhoods, linked by volatile love, best friends who make other best friends ever so slightly less best.

The nicest thing my sister said to me in the first seventeen years of my life was, “Hey, you know, your legs really aren’t so bad.”

I can’t see myself without seeing her. Thanks to my sister, I consider myself short. I may be five feet seven, but she’s five feet nine. Since she’s a great athlete, I’m not. When it was her turn to serve at volleyball, the game was over. I played right field with the glove over my nose, terrified a ball would hit it.

Despite our differences, people called us the Volk Girls. But my sister’s athleticism, academic excellence, and skill at attracting boys forced me to forge my own path. I became a painter. I studied bees. I mastered a stringed instrument made out of goat bladder and had intense relationships with boys who wore torso T-shirts and passed urgent notes in the hall.

When I was lucky enough to join her magic circle, my sister kept things exciting in ways I never dreamed of.

“I’m bored.” She’d yawn and people would scramble to amuse her.

On weekends she’d have three dates a night: the Date, the Late Date, and the Late Late Date. She was the party doll. I searched for soul. The months that separated us were the Grand Canyon. Or was it simply that we were sisters, doomed to polarities, modeling ourselves
against
each other? My sister is on the board of seven organizations. So I wear
Eau de Stay Away.
My sister puts on jewelry to go jogging. I wear the same thing leaving the house the cleaning lady wears coming in. My sister would never buy used furniture. I would never buy new.

I show her my three-dollar tag-sale chairs. I’ve screwed a walnut into the top of each one.

“Look.” I point to the nuts. “Nature’s finial.”

At the moment I was screwing walnuts into chairs in New York, my sister was setting fake rubies into chairs in Coral Gables.

Two thousand miles apart, we both decide to get pedicures, and we both pick Redford Red.

When I slice off the end of my finger on a kitchen mandolin, my sister says, “I did the exact same thing on a mandolin last year!”

Being an older sister, she bandaged it herself and never bothered to tell me. Being the younger sister, I called her from the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, where the top hand surgeon in New York was taking care of me. Thanks to birth order, my sister has something I’ll never have: a need to be brave.

“Do you realize we can do
anything
?” my sister says.

She’s a scuba diver. So now I am too. Last month she got me kayaking. Now I’m a PADI-certified Open-water diver considering buying an Aquaterra.

This morning she called: “I want you to think about something.”

“What?”
I feel like I’m falling.

“I want you to take five days off and come down here and we’ll kayak six hours a day.”

Six hours a day? In a kayak? Can I do that? I’ll have to ask my sister. Because she thinks I can do something, sometimes I can. On the other hand, sometimes I don’t know what’s really me or what’s just not her.

Every morning she wakes up to a yellow Labrador retriever licking her lips. “Hobbesy! Hobbesy!” my sister squeals, kissing the dog back. Then they go into the bathroom and brush their teeth. Do I truly dislike pets or just not love them enough to share a toothbrush? It’s hard to know, since my sister is my frame of reference.

Which doesn’t mean she can’t still make me nuts.

In a restaurant I wipe sleep out of my eye, and she gasps, “That’s repulsive!”

“What?”

“Don’t you realize what you’re doing?”

“Well, excuuuuuse me. I had something in my eye.”

We are sharing a Cobb salad. A huge bowl is between us. My sister is picking out the blue cheese. The blue cheese is vanishing. I wasn’t going to say anything, but now she’s fair game.

“That’s disgusting!”

“What?”

“You’re picking out all the blue cheese!”

“Oh, would you like more blue cheese?” She stabs some globs. “If you wanted more blue cheese, why didn’t you say so?”

Walking through the woods last summer, we decide to take a shortcut through a bog. Twenty minutes into it my sister and I realize we’ve made a mistake. Phragmites grass, ten feet tall, has enveloped us. If you stick your arm out, you can’t see your hand. There’s no turning back, because we don’t know where back is.

“I can’t do it,” I whimper.

“Yes, you can!”

“Let’s just scream.”

“No one’ll hear us.”

“I can’t walk another step.”

“Come on! Try this!” That’s when my sister, the Mensa member, invents the Way to Walk Through Phragmites. She locks her arm around my waist, then clamps mine around hers. She demonstrates how to stick your leg in the air, then form an arc with it. Legs synched, we sweep the stuff down one exhausting step at a time.

“We’re never gonna make it,” my voice wavers.

She laughs. “If I die first, you can eat me.”

On a trip to New York we visit our old apartment. “Was it hard to swing?” my sister asks.

“Piece of cake. I sent a letter ‘To the Occupants of 4E.’ I sprinkled it with phrases like ‘Mem’ry! That strange deceiver!’ ”

My sister laughs.

In front of the building we pause on the sidewalk. This is where we learned to roller skate, play hopscotch, jump rope, and ride our bikes.

“Who was the doorman who gave us Life Savers?”

“Tom. Who was the elevator man who borrowed our comics?”

“Jimmy.”

Inside the lobby I study the bench where she once made me wet my pants by blocking access to the elevator.

“Who was the super with the German shepherd?”

“Mr. Korber. Who was the doctor with an office in the lobby?”

“Dr. Port.”

Then the elevator reaches four, and we are standing in front of our old front door.

“Remember when you locked me out?” I say.

“Yeah.” My sister sounds wistful. “Remember when you sleepwalked to the neighbors, and they found you on their toilet?”

“The Walds. They had angels on the wallpaper.”

We ring the bell. A wary couple opens it, and from zero miles per hour I break into racking full-fledged sobs.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I have no idea why this is happening.”

“It’s all right.” They look worried.

“Omigod!” My sister looks around. “It’s exactly the same!”

“Well, we ripped up that horrible brown linoleum in the foyer somebody put in,” the woman says.

That was our linoleum, state-of-the-art.

“May we see the kitchen?” I ask.

In the kitchen my sister says again, “It’s exactly the same!”

Not to me. It looks tiny. Everything looks tiny. But I was turning twelve when we left, and my sister was full-grown.

“Remember the time I pretended to commit suicide behind this door?” she says.

“Yeah, but you forgot to hide the Heinz ketchup.”

We double over laughing. The people move closer to each other.

In the pantry, we automatically go right. Mattie’s room is a storage closet now. I’d forgotten the wall behind her bed was made of privacy glass. Must have been to let light in, since her window overlooked an air shaft.

In the playroom, there are picture moldings I never noticed.

“Remember when we watched Lux Video Theater in here?”

“We did everything in here.”

In the hallway leading to our mother’s room, my sister says, “Remember when I crashed through the glass door?”

“Weren’t you chasing me?”

The bedroom, which had the same trellised wallpaper Ozzie and Harriet’s had, is peacock blue now, but the bed’s in the same place.

“I used to love when we were sick and got to spend the day here.”

“I used to love when Mom let us try on her green velvet robe.”

“I used to love the way she rubbed Vicks in my chest for growing pains.”

“I used to love the way she played with my hair after a shampoo. She dried it with her fingers. It took hours. Hours and hours and hours.”

“You always had short hair,” my sister says. “It took five minutes to dry.”

The people are following us from room to room. I see pure relief on their faces when we start thanking them for the visit. Then I realize I haven’t seen our old bathroom. I used to think there was treasure behind one of the tiles because it sounded hollow when you rapped it with your knuckles.

“May I use the bathroom?” I say.

There’s a pause. They’re not happy. Reluctantly they follow me to the bathroom. I smile at them and shut the door. I rap on the tiles. Still hollow. I flush the toilet.

Downstairs, I tell my sister I wish she could stay in New York a little longer, that next time she comes, we’ll visit our playground.

“When we’re older, we’ll have more time for each other,” she says.

“The best arrangement for elderly people is two siblings living together,” I say.

“When our husbands are dead and we’re just trouble to our kids, we’ll still have each other,” she says.

So I tell her this Greek thing. “It’s ancient Greece,” I say. “Your house is on fire. Your mother and father are in it. And your child, husband, and sister. Who do you save?”

“Your child,” my sister says. “Of course, your child.”

“Wrong! You can always get another child.”

“Your parents?”

“Nope! Your parents are at the end of their lives anyway.”

“Your husband, so you can make more children?”

“No way! You can always find another husband. According to the ancient Greeks, you save your sister. That relationship is irreplaceable. You can never have another sister.”

“That’s a classic example of sophistry,” my sister says. “Reasoning that seems okay but leads to a false conclusion. Yeah. Definitely. That’s sophistry. I think I remember that. The Greeks were famous for it.”