Читать книгу Henry's Sisters - Cathy Lamb - Страница 15

T hat night we went to see Momma in the ICU. Janie drove her Porsche, which means we got there only slightly ahead of a turtle traveling backward.

Eventually our turtle made it to the hospital.

On the way my brain had a fight with my emotions over Momma. I loved her, but sometimes I hated her. I did.

Nothing I had ever done was good enough for her and I had stopped trying to get approval or kindness from her long ago. Cecilia had never stopped, and Momma still scared the intestines out of Janie.

Momma would never think I was anything more than a wandering, difficult, loose daughter she couldn’t possibly relate to. Not having Momma’s approval about ripped my heart out for years, but somewhere along the way, probably about the time I went home to visit her in my late twenties after being shot in Afghanistan and still had a bandage wrapped around my upper arm and she told me I was a “slut” and a “disappointment” as a child, I had let it go.

I had to. It was let it go or die emotionally. I was already half dead emotionally anyhow, and survival instincts kicked in.

But I wanted Momma to recover. I did.

I’m not that vengeful. Vengeful, but not that bad. Bad, but not murderously so.

But, man, she was a damn terror.

We met with the doctor on call first. Dr. Gordon was about fifty, short, African-American, and had studious glasses and big green-gray eyes.

“How’s our momma?”

The doctor tensed a bit.

“She’s not bouncing back like we’d like. No energy. Physically lethargic. Complains of pain. So you can go in and see her for a few minutes, but her recovery time is going to be lengthened. She’ll need to stay here longer than we expected.”

“Oh!” Janie whispered. “Tranquility. Serenity.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Bummer.”

“That’s hellaciously good news,” Cecilia mused.

“Why good?” the doctor asked, tilting his head.

Cecilia cackled. “Ah. I see. You have not spoken with our momma much, have you?”

“I had the pleasure of making your mother’s acquaintance.” The doctor stared at the ceiling and stroked his chin. “She could hardly speak, but I heard something about how I was too young and too short and was I really black? As in black black? Were my great-grandparents slaves?”

Janie leaned against a wall. I exhaled, slumped. So tactful, our momma. So sweet.

“I believe she also said that I was not, under any circumstances, to burst into any rap songs or play rap music at any time. I had to reassure her I have never belonged to a gang nor did I carry a gun.”

“That would be our momma,” I sang out. “Cheerful and filled with goodwill and love for all.”

Janie and Cecilia and I then apologized at one time. How many times had we had to do that? A thousand? Eighty god-zillion?

The doctor smiled. “Hey, it’s no problem unless I want to join a gang here at the hospital. Come on in. I’ll walk you there.” He politely held the door open for us.

Even I was shocked to see her.

She was white white white, like crinkled paper, her mouth a crooked slash, her eyes sunken. Our tough, Scarlett O’Hara, perfectly made-up momma (when she wasn’t drowning in one of her tarlike depressions) was one step away from a corpse.

“Momma,” we all said together. “Momma.”

There was no response.

I leaned over her and felt her breath on my cheek. “She’s still breathing.”

Janie put a hand on Momma’s chest over her heart.

“Her heart is still beating.”

“Good God!” Cecilia said. “She’s shrunk. Shrunk and shriveled.”

“Shhh,” said Janie, wringing her hands together. “She can still hear you!”

“How can she hear me?” Cecilia said, flicking her blond hair back. “She’s not even fully conscious. She’s whacked out.”

“Do you have to say whacked out?” I asked, my tone mild. I felt like having a Kahlúa snack.

“Yeah, I do have to say whacked out. Because that’s what she is. Watch this.” She leaned in close. “Momma! Momma!” No response. “See? She’s whacked out. For once she’s not nagging. Or criticizing. Or telling me I’m fat, and ‘enlarging’ each day. For once. ”

“You shouldn’t…” Janie said.

“Shouldn’t what, Janie?” Cecilia stage whispered. “Shouldn’t raise my voice? Shouldn’t be honest? Maybe I should be like you. Over there with your hair in a bun and those brown shoes you always wear. Always quiet, cringing around Momma, scared to death, not sticking up for yourself. Don’t you ever want to scream, Janie? Scream because you had a lousy childhood and your momma tells you, to your face, that you’re insane and that you drive her insane? Don’t you?”

“Stop it, Cecilia,” I said, moving in front of Janie. “This isn’t the place for you to slash and dash Janie.”

Janie swallowed hard. “You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m making you nervous?” Cecilia said. “ Too bad. I make myself nervous. My life makes me nervous. Momma makes me nervous. My kids make me nervous. I’m nervous all the time. I want to kill Parker, but at least I don’t hide, don’t cower, don’t mutter to myself.”

“Why are you so mad at me, Cecilia?” Janie said, her eyes filling up, her fists clenched. “Why are you attacking me? I have done nothing to you. Nothing.”

That stopped Cecilia up short.

I pushed my braids back. “Well? What, specifically, has Janie done to you to make you so mad at her?”

“I’m not mad at her,” Cecilia spat out.

“Then you hate me. You hate me. And that’s fine.” Janie’s voice was ragged. She stepped in front of me. “You always have. I don’t care.”

“You don’t care? I do.”

I could tell that Cecilia was pretty miffed about not hating Janie.

“And I don’t hate you, Janie.”

“Must we hammer out our hatred now?” I asked. “Momma is pale and ghastly in that bed. Surely there’s a better time for this?”

“Why not now?” Janie demanded, those tears spilling out. “Momma can’t hear and I want to know. I’m sick of this! Sick of you, Cecilia! Sick of your condescension, your criticisms. Nothing I do is right. You think I’m a head case, a loser. I am not a loser. ”

I could tell that Janie, who was definitely not a loser, was losing it. I reached out to pat her arm. I hurt for Janie. “Janie, chill.”

“No, I won’t! Tell me, Cecilia!” She spoke through clenched teeth, tears pouring down those perfectly carved cheeks of hers. “Tell me. Why do you hate me? Why?”

Cecilia’s anger seemed to deflate as fast as it flared up in the face of Janie’s ragged anguish.

“Why do you hate me?”

Janie’s words were bordering on a scream. “Janie, get ahold of yourself,” I said. “We’re in a hospital.”

“I know we’re in a hospital!” She yanked her arm away from me and swiped at a few stray hairs, her voice pitched and shaky. “And I want to know why that mean, fat bitch hates me!”

Cecilia and I froze. Janie rarely swore. It wasn’t in her nature. Though she might torpedo people with flying saws for her books, she preferred speaking in the same civilized manner as English women in the 1800s.

“Janie, I—” Cecilia started, cupping her face with her hands.

“What?” Janie hissed, charging toward her. She compacted her emotions right into a box of obsessions and checking. I had never seen her this mad. “ You what? Tell me. Do you hate me because I’m obsessive? Compulsive? Odd? Ugly? Frumpy? Which is it? Or is it all of them, Cecilia?” Her nose ran, but she didn’t bother to wipe it. “Because I am sick of not knowing. I am sick of being attacked by you. I am sick of it and sick of you!”

Cecilia sank into a chair.

I should have gone to Cecilia, but I couldn’t. Part of me was glad that Janie had drawn on the war paint. Cecilia deserved it.

“Janie…” Cecilia started, then patted her chest where her heart was. “Janie.”

Some machine blipped, which caught my attention. Why can’t family arguments ever occur at the right moments, the right places? Why do they always explode exactly when an explosion is not needed?

“I’m jealous of you, Janie,” Cecilia said, voice weak.

“Oh, now there’s a revelation,” I murmured. “I’m floored. Shocked.”

“You’re jealous?” Janie sputtered, red and mottled in the face. “Jealous? How can you be? You’ve told me yourself that I’m the biggest head case you’ve ever met.”

“I’m jealous,” Cecilia whispered, finally meeting Janie’s gaze. “You left Trillium River.”

“Not that again,” I complained. I was so sick of that jealousy. We’d been around and through it ad nauseum.

Janie clasped her hands over her ears. “Cecilia, I can’t hear you whine for one more minute about being stuck here. I’ve heard it until I want to throw my pink-and-white china off my back deck at passing boats in groups of four! Please, shut up about that, shut up shut up shut up!”

“Can you let me finish?” Cecilia said, her anger flashing, as she kept patting her chest. “I’m jealous because you left and made something of yourself. You’re a best-selling writer. You’re thin. You have a cool houseboat and cool things. You’re only frumpy because you don’t want attention from men. You play down how naturally beautiful you are. You hide. You try to disappear. I’m frumpy because I’m the size of a cow.”

“I worked to get what I have, Cecilia,” Janie shrieked, her body shaking. “I worked hard. I still work hard. I’m a workaholic. Do you think it’s fun to have murderers running through your head? Do you think it’s fun to have all these crime scenes lurching about on the pages in front of you and you have to study all the sick, tiny details? Do you think it’s fun to watch people get strangled in your mind? Or bludgeoned with hammers? It’s not, Cecilia, it’s not! I write because I have to write. I can’t not write. You get that? I can’t not write.”

“But, Janie, your obsession with writing has gotten your skinny ass famous. You being a recluse only makes you more famous. I’m a kindergarten teacher. That’s it. I teach kids how to count. How to read. We sing clean-up songs and songs about love and flowers and a whale who yodels. I teach the boys how to pee in the toilet without spraying the walls. The other day I got peed on.”

Cecilia tried to lasso in her emotions. “I’m so damn fat. I hate myself. I can hardly move some days. I can hardly get up. I put my fat face in the mirror and all I see is fat. I will probably die young because of it, but I can’t stop myself. Yesterday I had eight tacos. The night before I made myself a stuffed turkey!”

If Cecilia thought her confession was going to soften up Janie, she had another thing coming. “Cecilia, your weight is your issue,” Janie roared, fists clenched. “It’s you who have chosen to stuff your mouth full of food until your guts are gonna explode. You got that? It’s you. It’s your fault you’re fat and I have zero pity for you. You have no right to chip away at me, to find my weak spots and attack, all because you don’t like yourself and the way your life turned out. You’re responsible for yourself and you are a miserable, miserable person and you make me miserable, too. Miserable! Sometimes when I’m with you I want to take a shovel to my own head after digging a grave for myself to fall into!”

Janie did shriek that last part, then sunk into a chair on the opposite side of the room and pulled her body into a tight ball.

Cecilia leaned over her knees and sobbed.

I hardly knew which sister to go to first. I was smack in the middle of a fight. That’s the worst. If either sister thought I was siding with the other, I’d get jumped. I’d be pulled in as sure as a tsunami’s gonna take out the palm trees when it barrels on through. Sisters do that to each other. Neutral doesn’t work.

But then Momma took care of the problem.

“For God’s sakes, Cecilia, stop that infernal snuffling,” she said, eyes still shut. “Janie’s right, you are a terrible bitch to her. She can’t help it that she’s thin and you’re fat and she’s a writer and you’re a kindergarten teacher. What was she supposed to do? Become a gas station attendant so you wouldn’t feel bad? And what’s to feel bad about anyhow? Those little brats love you. God, I cannot stand small children. They make me ill. And, Janie, Cecilia’s right. You are so meek and so odd it makes me feel like smashing my colored-bottle collection. Get it together before we all jump over a cliff.” She sighed. “I’ve raised a fat girl, a slut, and a wacko.”

I snorted through my nose. Now you might think this was insensitive of me, but with Momma you have to either laugh or move to Baghdad to get a little peace.

And if you can’t laugh, then you’ll fall into this black pit infested with horrible thoughts and agonizing aloneness and hopelessness and fear. I should know. I’ve been there.

“And you, Isabelle,” Momma croaked from the bed. “Please don’t make a slut of yourself in Trillium River again. The last time you did, it ruined my reputation as a mother. Ruined it. I was ruined. Ruined. ”

I snorted again. See what I mean about laughing?

“I’ll try, Momma. But I feel some sluttiness overtaking me right now and who knows what your reputation will be like when you get home.”

“I won’t tolerate it, Isabelle,” she wheezed out. “Get out of here, girls. Get out. Out. ”

We needed no further prodding.

We were outta there.

We drove back to Trillium River in silence.

It’s the silence that only simmering sisters can produce together. That rigid, tight, resentful silence that is about as bad as if we started blasting cannonballs at each other’s brains.

Sometimes the silence lasts minutes. Hours. Days. Weeks. It can last years.

Depends on the sisters.

The problem I see with fights between sisters is that the fights can degenerate to scorching meanness so quick, the words cutting right to the marrow, because sisters know how to hurt each other with pinpoint accuracy. They have history and hurts and slights and jealousies and resentment and they don’t know how to rein it in, filter, or how not to be brutally honest with one another.

Sometimes it’s a lovely relationship.

Sometimes it’s a disastrous relationship.

Sometimes it’s both.

Cecilia dropped us off.

None of us said good night.

The silent treatment, I am sure, was engineered and developed by cavewomen fighting with their sisters over who got to spear the mastodon.

The next day we worked at the bakery starting in those wee hours again. It was the weekend, so Cecilia was there, too. She had hired a sitter to spend the night.

The atmosphere was frigid. Like the back of a polar bear’s butt if he’d been sitting on the ice for six years straight. Janie turned on sad classical music and kept looking wistfully at her therapist’s face.

We worked perfectly together, as if we were teenagers again, our steps choreographed, our movements fast but never in the way of anyone else, efficient and quick and good.

We were so good.

Until I heard Janie’s whimper.

Cecilia heard it, too.

Janie went into the freezer and shut the door.

Cecilia and I followed her into the freezer.

“Honey,” Cecilia said, “I’m sorry.”

Janie nodded her head, up and down, like a bobble head. “Me-Me-Me-too. I’m sorry.”

“I love you, Janie.”

“I love-lo-lov-you, too, Cecilia. And Is. Love you, Is.”

We hugged. We were tearful messes, trembling and carrying on with great drama.

Sisters are the worst. And they are the best. A sister can be awful and complicated and loving and protective and petty and competitive, and when you die she is the person you want beside you holding your hand.

Somebody’s gotta organize the potluck after the service and you know your husband’s not gonna be up to the job.

This I know.

I drank my latte with a squirt of Kahlúa in it by the Columbia River the next morning around five o’clock.

The sun was making its usual breathtaking appearance and the sky was golden and clean and soft.

I watched the windsurfer with the purple and red sail glide and fly over the water. It was the same man I’d seen when we drove to the hospital. If I was still a photographer, which I’m not (I ignored that shooting spasm of loss in my gut), I’d snap the shot.

I used to come down to this exact spot with friends and boys during school. I’d had sex in the Columbia River many times, starting in high school.

I hadn’t been a virgin when I arrived. I lost my virginity in a shed with rakes. He was the older brother of an acquaintance. Later he was jailed for raping a hitchhiker. He invited me into a shed and kissed me. That was kind of fun. He was an older boy, a tough guy sort that all naïve girls are attracted to, and he was paying attention to me. Me!

The fun stopped when his hands wandered. I pushed them away, he shoved them back, and shoved me against some fertilizer and told me I’d “like it hard.”

I hadn’t liked it.

It felt as if my body were splitting in half; I could hardly breathe. I was petrified, ashamed, in agony, and trapped because he held my wrists above my head. I struggled; he grabbed my neck and held me down.

“Relax,” he bit out, as he yanked up my skirt, ripped my underwear, and started pumping, my tight body rejecting his, even though he shoved one of my legs to the side to open me up. “Are you frigid or something? A priss?”

I watched his face get redder through a haze of sheer pain, his pumping increasing in speed, his grunting piglike, until his spit sprayed my face one last time and he collapsed over me, his chest heaving. When he could move he squeezed my boobs like you would two sponges, got off, peed in a corner, zipped up, and left. I heard him whistling.

All I remembered seeing was a row of rakes. Rakes for leaves, rakes for gardens, big ones, small ones, tiny ones.

I lost my virginity, through rape, against a sack of fertilizer.

I was almost fourteen. It is a miracle I did not become pregnant.

I didn’t tell Momma about the rake incident because I knew she would blame me. I told Cecilia. She knew something had happened anyhow because her vagina hurt for days and she kept getting in the shower. She felt dirty and thought she smelled.

It was probably the fertilizer. I later dumped the clothes I was wearing, including my bra, which was held together by a safety pin.

Promiscuity followed me after that. Why not? I remembered feeling dirty and damaged, as if I was nothing anyhow. At home there was no dad, no stability, no love, and a momma who sank into a morass of hopelessness on a regular basis. I flirted with boys because I got attention, which I craved. Very unfortunately, I was skinny and sexy, which brought more boys, and amoral men, my way. Things went speeding downhill from there.

I grew to know other girls who were promiscuous in the various towns we’d lived in and we had one thing in common: an absent or abusive father or abuse by other men in our lives.

It was a sad, reckless, damaging commonality to have. We were regarded with disdain, nice boys’ mothers didn’t want us around, and “nice” girls whispered horrible things behind cupped hands and moved away when we came near. We were labeled “sluts,” such a calamitous, hideous burden for a girl to bear.

And yet we were searching, endlessly searching, for the most innocent of all emotions, the purest of feelings, and what the heart longs for above all else: Love.

Only love.

We found rakes instead.