The Good Sister (15 page)

Roxanne watched Johnny, saw the word register, and waited. Her neck tightened in anticipation of his explosion. The sprinkler
clicked from side to side.

He put his hands on Simone’s shoulders and turned her so she faced the silver-framed mirror between the bookcases. She winced
under the pressure of his fingers.

“What do you see?” he asked.

Roxanne’s neck ached with the strain.

“Answer me.”

“I see me, Johnny.” Simone spoke in her little girl’s
voice, the one that wheedled and begged and cajoled so well. “And I see you too. I see us.”

“What d’you see, Rox?”

“Let it be, Johnny.”

“You know what I see? I see a murderer.”

Simone’s face spasmed. Roxanne moved closer to Johnny.

“Leave her alone.”

“I see a baby-killer.”

“You son of a bitch.” Roxanne slapped him so hard that she felt the blow vibrate up through her arm and into her shoulder.
For the thinnest, razor-cut sliver of a fraction of a second, she thought he would slap her back.

Simone rushed between them.

“He was just talking. He says things but he doesn’t really mean them. You’re sorry, Rox. I know you are. You didn’t mean to
hurt him.”

“Are you deaf, Simone? Did you hear what he called you?”
Did his tone of voice even register?

“It’s only words, that’s all. I don’t care about words.” Simone waved her hand between them as if she could that easily erase
the scene. “But I love you both so much, I can’t stand it if you fight.” She spoke rapidly in her sweetest voice, the voice
Roxanne remembered hearing all her life when things went wrong. “I need you. Both.”

Light-headed, Roxanne moved toward the door.

Simone grabbed her arm. “Everything’s fine. Honest to God, none of this matters. Really. Don’t leave me again.”

Sometimes, just when Roxanne thought she had seen every one of Simone’s performances, the curtain went up on something outrageously
new. First: Simone strong and determined, taking charge of her life.
Knowing.
Independence. Abortion. The pill. And now: mewling and needy.
Everything’s fine. Don’t leave me again.

Again?
When have I ever really left you, Simone?

“You said you’d take care of the girls.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t promise anything.”

“We’re counting on you,” Johnny said, and slipped his arm around his wife’s waist.

Roxanne was living in a movie where reality shifted from frame to frame.

“Just answer me, Simone. Did you hear what Johnny said to you?”

“Oh, of course I heard him.” She dipped her head with what Roxanne knew some might see as a beguiling femininity. “He didn’t
mean it, Rox. You know Johnny. He gets upset, that’s all.” She elbowed him gently in the ribs. “Isn’t that right? Say you’re
sorry for being so mean.”

“I was way out of line, Roxanne. I get mad, I say things….” He rubbed his cheek. “You’ve got a hell of a right cross there.
Married people have these… flare-ups. You’re practically a newlywed. You’ll know what I mean in a few years.”

“Are you telling me you don’t want to terminate this pregnancy, Simone?”

“The ultrasound was a shock, that’s all. I just got a little loopy.” Simone made a corkscrew gesture beside her head and leaned
into the protection of Johnny’s arm, a posture that seemed both voluptuous and childlike at the same time.

It came to Roxanne how little she actually knew about her sister’s marriage. Maybe Simone’s plan to end her pregnancy had
been a hormonal outburst or an excuse to make a scene. That business about
knowing
something was just more talk. All she really wanted was a bit of drama to punish Johnny for giving her another daughter or
to provide him with a reason to rant at her for firing Franny and get it out of his system. Maybe he was hiding his anger
now or maybe Simone’s two-step and sashay had worked, he’d lost his temper and that was that. Behind closed doors his name-calling
might be nothing out of the ordinary. All Roxanne knew was that in some way to which she was not privy, a bargain had been
struck between husband and wife. Theirs was a marriage that permitted scenes like the one she’d just witnessed. Perhaps required
them.

E
llen Vadis’s earliest memory was of the sweaty summer afternoon she was attacked by yellow jackets.

It was too hot for a nap. Wearing seersucker shorts with a torn pocket and a cut-off, no-sleeve white T-shirt inherited from
her father, she crept barefoot down the narrow back stairs for a drink of cold water and a sugar cookie; but when she heard
them arguing she changed her mind, her stomach suddenly heavy. Sometimes she threw up when her mother and grandmother had
fights.

Instead of going into the kitchen she tiptoed along the back hall, through the laundry room, and out the screen door, into
the ripe summer heat. Wet sheets hung on the carousel clothesline, and from across the grass she smelled the bleach her mother
used to make them white. She thought she might find her father in the shed where he sometimes fixed things like the rusty
plow he told her was a beautiful antique. It looked plain old to Ellen, but she believed what her father said because he was
a soldier.

In the hot, murky shed, spiderwebs drooped across the corners from the rafters and the air smelled of oil and sawdust. She
imagined a black widow spider crawling up between her bare toes and ran out the door, back onto the grass. She didn’t want
to look behind her because she was afraid of what might happen. The world was strange and mysterious and maybe black widows
could swell up to the size of her whole body and they had all those legs to chase her. She sat on the back steps, breathing
hard but safe. A drop of sweat rolled into her eye, stinging.

Ellen wished she lived at the beach.

She heard a buzzing sound like Daddy’s electric hair clippers coming from a blue wheelbarrow tipped on its side under the
pink crape myrtle. She walked across the yard and smelled rotting nectarines. Looking down, she saw a pile of squashed fruit
crawling with yellow jackets, the black-and-gold wasps that buzzed against the kitchen window screens when Ellen’s grandmother
made fig jam. They piled over each other, fighting their way to the sticky sweetness.

The tangy fruit smell made the inside of her nose feel like the sound the yellow jackets made. As she lifted her hand to wipe
her sweaty forehead, some of the striped buzzers boiled up off the fruit and orbited her head. In an instant they were in
her ears and on her eyelids, at the corners of her mouth. Their tiny feet walked on her skin. Screaming, she ran for the clothesline
and twisted herself in the wet, bleachy sheets.

*       *       *

She remembered another day, this one a few years later, a winter day after a week of slow, cold rain. A thick tule fog blanketed
the Central Valley and radio newscasters reported multicar pileups on Highway 99. She stood between her mother and grandmother
on the porch of the big house, looking down at her father where he stood beside Grandpa’s Hudson in the driveway, a duffel
bag over his shoulder. Ellen wore woolen pants and a blue sweater and a pair of Buster Brown shoes scuffed to a dull orange
at the toes.

Daddy looked serious, but his eyes were jiggery: she could tell he was excited and trying not to show it. He had orders he
told her came from Washington. Dressed in his army uniform, as handsome as Dana Andrews in the movies, he was shipping out
to Japan, and then he was going to Korea to shoot some Reds. He had shown Ellen where these places were in the big map book.

A disembodied voice in the fog said, “Wayne.” Sitting in the Hudson, Ellen’s grandfather flashed the headlights on and off.

Ellen’s grandmother said not to drive too fast and watch out for black ice on the roads. Daddy nodded, but he didn’t look
at her because his eyes were on Mommy like if eyes could eat they would swallow her up. He came up the stairs two at a time
and held her in his arms for such a long moment that Ellen became impatient. Mommy started crying and he turned away and went
back down
the stairs. Ellen’s grandmother told Mommy to get hold of herself.
Don’t make things worse!

At the bottom of the stairs Daddy turned and held out his arms and Ellen jumped into them. He said she was his crackerjack
and swung her up and then gave her a bear hug so tight his medals dug into her skin. She liked medals and it was a good hurt.

Ellen had a lot of memories of the time after her father went to Korea, some of them bad, a few really good; but mostly they
were no more than glimpses of people and events and places that mattered so little, she wondered now why they took up space
in her mind: lines from songs, snapshot memories of her mother crying and staying up all night putting together jigsaw puzzles,
of school and friends and Jimmy Nissen teaching her to smoke in the seventh grade, chugging Olympia beer under the bleachers
at football games and in cars parked by the reservoir. She remembered driving the Hudson into a ditch in the fog; and the
old man, mad as a yellow jacket, saying in his quivery voice that he didn’t know where on God’s green earth Ellen had come
from.
Sure as holy hell not my family.

Her father went to live in Texas and got a new wife and other children; and after a long time, Ellen’s mother stopped crying.
From then on all she thought about was ranching and stretching pennies and organizing the breath of life out of Ellen. The
fights they had were worse
than the ones Ellen grew up hearing between her mother and grandmother.

One Sunday morning Ellen stood in the kitchen and screamed, “I hate you! When I grow up I’m leaving this dump and I’ll never
come back.”

The day after high school graduation, Ellen boarded the Greyhound to Los Angeles. In school she’d been a mediocre student
except in the business courses, where she won the Future Executive Secretary Award three years running. By the time she went
looking for a job in LA she typed almost ninety words a minute on an IBM Selectric and took shorthand fast enough to get hired
at a Pontiac dealership on Pico Boulevard even though she was only eighteen. There were boulevards all over Los Angeles, streets
lined with skinny palms like giant swizzle sticks, stoplights at every intersection, department stores and movie theaters
with towering neon marquees.
Boulevard
. Sometimes Ellen repeated the word aloud, loving the luxurious, Southern California sound of it.

Being around a car dealership was a great way to meet men. But she never lost her preference for a uniform.

Years later, when Ellen was a grandmother and twice a widow, she started meeting men online and hoped for a retired officer,
a colonel maybe, a commander or a captain. San Diego was full of retired military, and it seemed a reasonable expectation.
Instead she had met a chief and a couple of master sergeants and each with the
disheartening look of years and hard work on them. She knew BJ would tell her that the world needed machinists and plumbers,
but she didn’t.

She had been about to give up on the whole enterprise when Dennis Dwight responded to her online message. He said he was fifty-two
which probably meant he was close to sixty. (No matter how fit and good-looking, sixty was the border no one crossed in the
online dating world.) Ellen had told Dennis she was forty-eight, an age she thought she could pull off when she made an effort.

Though not a military man, Dennis had much to recommend him. He knew the Central Valley and had grown up in Modesto, which
was bigger than Daneville but just as much a dead end. Like her, he couldn’t leave home fast enough. He spoke in a vague way
of having worked overseas and mentioned Kuwait, Istanbul, and Saigon. She interpreted his cryptic answers as meaning he did
government work he wasn’t at liberty to talk about. After a few weeks of e-mailing, they had begun to speak on the phone,
often late at night in the hours when Ellen would otherwise be lying awake, missing BJ. On the phone Dennis had a deep and
reassuring radio voice, and a wonderfully quick and easy laugh. He told her jokes that were just a little bit dirty, but never
offensive. He asked her what she was wearing when they talked, and she began to dress for their calls. She bought a white
silk nightgown at Neiman’s, backless and sheer.

She thought BJ looking down from heaven would
understand if she lied about her age. And he would forgive the nightgown and the things she said things to Dennis on the phone
that made her blush when she remembered them the next morning.

They had made plans to meet this evening for the first time. Tuesday was a strange night for a date, but never mind. If things
worked out, they would have all the Saturday nights in the world. With other men she had insisted on a quick coffee first,
what she thought of as a tryout date. It didn’t seem necessary with Dennis. They had talked so much and about so many things
that she knew they’d be compatible.

Even so, she was nervous and had gone to some lengths to make the right impression. That morning she’d had her hair cut and
colored, a manicure and pedicure. She held up her hands and admired the new polish the color of raspberries. In the salon
that morning, the Vietnamese woman who did her nails had told her it was a very nice color, very pretty. The women in the
salon talked constantly in their complicated language as their thin white hands filed Ellen’s nails and massaged her feet
in a way she wasn’t sure she really liked. She tried to ignore them, but she suspected they were gossiping about her. When
she tried to imagine their San Diego lives away from the salon, ordinary lives with husbands and children, what came to mind
was the stretched and puckered scar where BJ had been shot in the shoulder.

*       *       *

Sometimes Roxanne forgot that there was a time before everything about Simone became so fraught. She made an effort to remember
the endearing tyke who collected round white stones for a snow garden and, when she couldn’t find enough of them, painted
any round stone she could find with white-out from BJ’s desk, the three-year-old who wouldn’t eat her ice cream until it “got
warm,” who climbed into Roxanne’s bed in the morning and whistled in her ear to wake her up.