Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (67 page)

My father had died six years earlier. We had made our peace. Through the grace of my mother’s faith in goodness, we had managed to get beyond the anger that had raged between us for years. My mother — who had always been loving and kind, who had believed in God and redemption — had been slipping away from us a little at a time over the past three years. Small strokes — sometimes no more than a tingle in her lip, a loss of balance — had been destroying brain cells until, finally, she lay, aphasic, in a nursing home. I lived far away from her and on my visits — usually two or three times a year — I was always shaken by how much her condition had worsened. She had stood by, silent, while my father had whipped me, while in my teen years our anger had spurred physical confrontations. She had always seemed so helpless in my father’s house. All she could do was endure and trust to God. Eventually, the thousands of prayers that she must have said saved us. But I could do nothing to save her from the strokes that were taking her away.

I knew little of Katrina’s own journey from childhood, only that she had married young, as soon as she had graduated from high school, that her mother had died from cancer soon after, that Katrina had worked for a time in a shelter care facility for mentally and physically challenged youths. I knew those facts, but they told me nothing of what she carried inside her — what private pains, demons, joys, fears. Once, I had felt as close to her as I would have a sister, but I couldn’t see, then, the span of our adult lives, stretching out ahead of us like the long shadows our child bodies made when we were at play in the late afternoon sunlight. I didn’t know the different directions a life could take, how far someone could spin away from home, from himself, from the people he swore he knew and loved.

“Lee.”

I heard my name and turned, and there she was. Although more than twenty-five years had passed since the days when she had come for me and escorted me across the fields to her house, I recognized her immediately. Her dark hair was flecked with gray, but her face was still the face I had cherished all those years ago at a time in my life when I had needed her bright eyes, her kind smile.

“Hello, Katrina,” I said, and I felt something open inside me, a door back to the boy I had been, timid and afraid.

“You remember me,” she said, and I was stunned to think that she had imagined I wouldn’t.

She introduced me to her husband, a friendly man who seemed as if he would be at ease in whatever situation he found himself. He wouldn’t be afraid of barbed wire snagging him as he crawled through a fence, or bees stinging him, or terrier dogs nipping at his ankles. And, if trouble found him, he wouldn’t turn into a madman, wrestle someone to the floor, bang his foe’s head on the cement.

Katrina told a story about the day I fell off her horse. “Do you remember that?” she asked me. She was smiling, her eyes sparkling, and I could see that she was taking great pleasure in telling this story.

“No,” I said, and it was true. I had absolutely no memory of the event she described.

“I boosted you up, and I told you to hold on to the reins. Before I could get on, Lightning took off at a gallop. He hadn’t gone but a few feet when you fell off.”

Her husband chuckled, the way he must have on the drive to the funeral home when Katrina had surely told him the same story. “You don’t remember that?” he asked.

“I really don’t.” I wasn’t sure which would be more shameful: to acknowledge the event or to display a faulty memory of it. “Was I hurt?” I asked Katrina.

“No, you weren’t hurt. You were just scared. Poor little guy.”

At one time, I would have given anything for her sympathy. Oddly enough, on the day of my mother’s funeral, I wanted none of it. I wanted no reminder of the timid boy I had been, the one for whom Katrina had felt sorry. Both of my parents were now dead. I was the last to survive our turmoil, our shame. I was on the verge of the rest of my adult life, and the last thing I needed was to be reminded of what a “poor little guy” I had been.

“You know where we live,” Katrina said to me. “Out on the highway. That big white house on King’s Hill. Stop in and see us sometime.”

“I will,” I told her, but, of course, I never did.

Rebecca McClanahan

 

REBECCA MCCLANAHAN
has published nine books, most recently
Deep Light: New and Selected Poems 1987–2007
and
The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings
, which won the 2005 Glasgow Prize in nonfiction. She has also authored four previous books of poetry and two books of writing instruction, including
Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively.
McClanahan’s work has appeared in
The Best American Poetry
,
The Best American Essays
,
Kenyon Review
,
Georgia Review
,
Gettysburg Review
, and numerous other publications. She has received the Wood Prize from
Poetry
, a Pushcart Prize in fiction, and (twice) the Carter Prize for the essay from
Shenandoah.
McClanahan lives in New York City and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University, Charlotte.

 

To be the sister of a sad and beautiful woman is to lie down in the memory of a grandparents’ attic, your ear pressed to the floor vent. The grownups are talking, arranging the family constellation — your sister the luminous star, chased by a tail of stuttering light (that would be you).

Not that she is older, that is not why you chase her. It is her beauty, wanting to be close to something that shines. You are the age when dolls are real. You touch your sister’s cheeks, her soft hands. You look into her brown eyes. You want to protect her, to claim her, to lift her up like some glittering bauble so that others will smile at you. She fills your lap.

You’ll ruin your eyes, your mother says, but you decide the books are worth it. This one is about stars: Stars appear to be fixed, maintaining the same pattern in the skies year after year. You close your pale eyes and think about this a while. Your sister runs for the waves, bronzed goddess in yellow bikini. You dig your head deeper into the sand of the book, pull the umbrella closer, adjust the hat, button the long shirt, pull its collar high. You are aware of your neck, gooselike, awkward: quack quack honk. You look down at your white thighs, the rivers of blue veins. Your mother has them too, but the doctor says he’s never seen them — childbearing veins, he calls them — in someone so young. You suspect you will never have children. You decide you will never wear shorts again.

Your sister begins to win contests. Once, for her perfect posture, she wins an expensive king-size mattress, which she presents to your parents. They sleep on it for years and years. In the meantime, you win fifteen dollars in an essay contest sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in which you make an admirable case against alcohol, which you have never tasted. From the bedroom you share, your sister has begun disappearing at night, climbing out the window and leaving pillows molded into her shape.

You watch her closely. Does she polish her skin? How can it shine just so? When you answer the door for your own first date, you feel her warmth passing behind you in the hall and you watch his eyes wander, watch them travel over your shoulder. All evening you are sure he is elsewhere, that when he looks into your face, he is trying to locate her.

Not that he will ever find her.
You
can’t even find her. Sometimes you try, you ask Where have you been, I’ve been worried, but she doesn’t answer. She talks in her sleep and you listen but it never makes sense. Your mother says you talk in your sleep too, that sometimes when she passes the door to your room you are both talking in your sleep to each other, making no sense.

To be the sister of a beautiful girl is to answer the phone and take messages. Boys are calling, modeling agents are calling, they are taking her picture, her portfolio is filling. Because she is too young to manage such beauty, your mother accompanies her to photo shoots to be sure no one takes advantage. The phone keeps ringing, and you keep leaving your book to answer it. When you return to
Our Town
, Emily is asking her mother if she’s pretty. Pretty enough for all normal purposes, her mother answers. You wonder what normal purposes are.

One glory crowns you, though, and it keeps growing. You imagine the boys climbing it like Rapunzel’s tower. You brush it every night and arrange it as though it belonged to a doll: chignons, braids, French twists. Sometimes you set it free, toss your head so that the sun will grab the hair, set it to shining like the
shook foil
in Hopkins’ poem about the grandeur of God. Sometimes you allow it to fall down around your face as you study the books in the library.

What makes her even more lovely is that she doesn’t realize she is. She is like the girl in the Richard Wilbur poem you are reading, the girl coming down the winding staircase, “perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.” There is a large heart at your sister’s center, a pulsating bright heart, but no one bothers to see it. Beauty is its own excuse for being, why look farther, deeper? Sometimes you feel her heart beating wildly inside
you
— as she caresses a kitten’s ears or gathers stray puppies into her arms, or knits, stitch by patient stitch, afghans to give away. If I looked like her, you think, I wouldn’t worry with any of that. If I had what she had, I would just sit all day and shine.

When you are a beautiful girl turning into a beautiful woman, others want to hold you, to possess you. Some want to hurt you for your beauty. It is too bright: they will show you. Sometimes when she climbs back through the window and into the bed you share, you feel a great sadness radiating from her center. In the pillows it finds its voice in ragged breaths and tears that bruise the air. Twenty years from now she will tell you about the boys in the van, what they did to her. But in this moment all those years are ahead of you. The night, as the song on the radio is saying, has a thousand eyes. But you don’t, and when the tears finally stop, she turns her back to you and floats away. The distance is immeasurable.

Certain stars which appear single to the naked eye are, in fact, double, and share a mutual revolution.
You are in the library again, your hair falling over a book. Someone notices. He notices so hard that after a few months he names it love, and because love has set you free and it is April, you put on a pair of shorts and walk toward the door. You’re not wearing shorts out in public, are you? he says, staring down at your veins. Of course not, you say. On the honeymoon he makes you promise you will never cut your hair. You promise, and you don’t, but he leaves anyway. You sign the papers that arrive in the mail, thinking fine, I’ll be fine, if that’s the way it must be. Then one morning you cannot get out of bed, it hurts to breathe and why bother anyway, you want to die but it’s too much trouble. Stay right there, your sister says over the phone. Then she is there in the room, smelling sweet like she’s been rolling in flowers. She takes off her shoes, crawls in beside you, covers your hand with hers, and begins to rock you back and forth. You can’t die, she says, you don’t want to die. Don’t talk like that, she says.

Not long after the divorce you discover to your surprise that the goose neck you’ve been hiding beneath turtlenecks and scarves might be precisely what the bookstore owner said it was. The day was hot and dusty, as were the books:
One type of double star is the eclipsing variable, composed of bright and dark components. Sometimes the dark star eclipses the bright one.
Finally, in heat and desperation, you removed the scarf. My my, the bookstore owner said in a foreign accent that made what followed sound almost like cool water flowing over rocks: You have the neck of a swan. How beautiful. Another day, passing beneath trees, a man tells you your eyes are the most incredible green. So you learn to wear that shade, to walk beneath trees, submerge your white body in lakes, your face bobbing just so, above the green water. In your mind you divide the spectrum of luminous radiation, the way you once divided the bedroom you shared with your sister. She can have the warm side, the sun bronzed oranges, yellows, reds, browns. You’ll keep the cool greens and blues.

Man after man circles her, chases her light. Sometimes they look for her in the wrong places and find her there. Maybe he’s not what he seems, you tell her. I am afraid for you. What if? It’s my life, she says, as if your life and hers could never touch.

Man after man, it does not work out for you, though you wear long gowns and dim the lights. Then one night, one man, it does. Moonlight is streaming through the window, the stars are too bright to turn down, and he lifts the long gown over your ankles, your knees, over your white, perfectly imperfect thighs. He kisses your veins, one by one. It is a proposal, and you accept.

At the foot of the birthing bed you stand beside her husband and smooth the sheets. The nurse has placed a golden light above your sister and her swaddled, dark-eyed daughter: luminosity no astronomer could chart. It’s what your sister was meant for, what will save her, you think. No more mornings when you find her exhausted, the bedroom drapes drawn shut. No more phone calls waking you from sleep, her husband’s voice in the background, words flying.

Stars are not made of heavenly ether, but of the same corruptible elements that comprise earth.

One rainy March morning two years later, the phone rings. Do you want the Indian pictures? she says. Their eyes make me sad. Because of her voice, you rush over. When she answers the door, the framed pictures of the chief and the brave are stacked by the door, the babies are crying, kittens are mewing, and darkness circles your sister’s eyes. You hope it is from sleeplessness but you’re not sure. I’ve got to do something about all this, she says, spreading her arms to include the brown sofa, the vinyl chair, her husband’s tray of stale ashes. She has five dollars in her purse. You have twenty. Today, she says. We have to do something today. You pack the children into the car seats and pull away from the curb in search of spring. Clots of leftover snow dot the street. The sky is pewter. Not one crocus, one daffodil, surprises you along the way. At the discount fabric store you choose shiny green with huge flowers and hummingbirds sipping nectar. All day you measure, cut, stretch, staple until the sofa is covered in spring. It won’t last, you’re sure of that, but it will get her through the day.