THE CREAK OF a screen door settling shut, the gritty squeak of old brass hinges: the sounds of my sister disappearing.
She vanished on a drab January afternoon, while our parents monopolized the main floor with cocktails and slow jazz and a laughing coterie of guests. My two older sisters and I were barricaded, by house law, in our bedroom. Other than Fritzi, whose energy was as spark-lit as ever, we were drained to a dreamy lethargy by the heavy Southern sun. Glasses of sweet tea fogged by the open window, and electric fans whirred in our ears, blowing pink streamers like bicycle tassels.
Mere hours later, Connie would lift herself from where she lounged on my bed, sprawled on her stomach, and a series of sounds would follow her. Each step in her departure would fasten together like ribbons of smoke down our dark halls, instantly gone and yet long lingering, seeping into the walls and curtains. Leading to our backdoor and the burnedyellow dusk outside — and beyond that, nothing.
“That dress is a right fit for you, Bonnie, it suits your hair,” Fritzi said. “Keep it on a minute, let me take a picture.”
The dress was pale lilac, my hair bronzy blond like our father’s. I made a face at my sister. “It’s too hot for it, Fritzi, it won’t look any good.”
I peeled the antique muslin down my sticky skin, taking pains to keep my sweat still, stop my makeup from drooling down my face. Fritzi had painted it so meticulously, her serious mouth pinched and her cold hand holding my chin in place. She had dolled me up to match my costume: a bloom of blush against my cheeks; a silvery sheen over my eyelids; my mouth going muah muah, as instructed, so that my dark lipstick pointed like shadowed pyramids. But it was spoiling itself in the stuffy swell of humidity. I wiped the damp hair from my face and dabbed my chest with the long hem of the lilac dress.
Before the guests had arrived, Fritzi and I dragged a costume trunk from the attic. It was Fritzi’s idea, a way to keep us entertained. There was no leaving the house during Mama and Daddy’s parties, nor joining the guests. We had only our bedroom, the attic, and the landing on the stairs if nobody saw. Fritzi and I had savoured the breeze of the trunk’s lid flying open, a fresh whoosh of release from the spoiled New Orleans heat. We rifled all afternoon through the contents of our late grandma Gerta’s wardrobe — her chemises and sashes, her endless bronze and turquoise brooches — while Connie read our tattered copy of Frankenstein, letting us drape luxurious scarves over her shoulders and assign her magical names.
Connie was quieter than usual. It got to bothering me, and I sat on the floor and looked up at her. “Your eyes are puffy,” I said. “Did you not sleep last night?”
She leaned over and fiddled with the dials on our bulky myrtle-blue radio, but did not look up from the page. I folded my arms onto the bed and rested my chin on my laced fingers. “Connie,” I sang quietly. “Cooonnie.”
Fritzi leaned out the window to see if any guests were mingling in the driveway. She lit a cigarette and let the smoke curl from her nostrils, blowing out the window through the corner of her mouth. “Constance, how we miss you,” she said in a big, pompous voice.
“Hush, I’m trying to read,” Connie said.
“Ain’t that special, she can speak after all.” Fritzi huffed out another messy cloud of smoke. “You don’t have to act so bored. I’m doing my best.”
“Nobody asked you to,” Connie said.
Fritzi looked justifiably bewildered. “Wasn’t aware I had much of a choice.”
I could see Connie’s small quirk of a smile from behind her long, coffee curls. She threw a glance at Fritzi’s cigarette. “You know that’ll turn your lungs to tar.”
“Where did you hear that?” I pinched the cigarette from Fritzi’s fingers, but she stole it back and slapped my hand. “Up all night reading medical journals until your eyes went sore?”
“My eyes are puffy, pet, because I stayed up guarding you from le croque-mitaine.” Connie grabbed my wrist and chomped the air. “If I fell asleep it would have come and eaten your hands clean off the bone.”
Connie was sixteen, only a few years older than I was — Fritzi a year older than Connie, at seventeen — and being tickled or teased or called pet might have bothered some little sisters of my age, but it did not bother me.
“You child,” Fritzi said, laughing. “Try on some of these dresses with us, can’t ya?”
“Did you get me the one from Mama’s sewing mannequin?” Connie asked.
“We did,” Fritzi said, “though you have such a mood about you today we ought not to have.” She lay a sleek black flapper dress, patterned in cranes of gilded thread, in front of Connie. “Get out of bed, see how it looks. I already brushed off the dust.”
Connie ran her fingers along the folds. “It’s the one Grandma wore in Paris, isn’t it?”
“We can ask Mama,” I said, not wanting to engage on the subject. Our grandmother had lost her mind in Paris, many years ago, war reporting like Martha Gellhorn, but Connie’s fascination always fell on the madness, not the war, nor the reporting, not even Paris.
The hours continued to crawl. I sat with my back to the wall and hummed “The Hi De Ho Man” into the fan, listening to it shiver back out, while the more modern music downstairs rose like smoke, and arrived muffled and suffocated through our wooden floor.
Sunlight slid in bars across the room. It caught in the sequins of the masquerade masks pinned over our beds, and cast blue and silver flares on the floor. I wriggled my bare toes in the dapples of light while I watched Connie read; she was so still and calm, like an old cat. I watched her legs swing slowly back and forth, her feet in the air, and how the thin white scars that threaded up her arms peeked out from the cuffs of her sleeves when she turned a page. Now and then she told me where the scars came from: a hunter’s arrow, while rescuing a grey wolf from a trap in the woods; or a fall onto stony, uncovered roots when scaling the last of the duelling oaks with troublesome Suzanna DeClouet. She never told me the real story.
Beside her chin was a small freckle, and I liked to think of it as a keyhole into the thoughts she kept closed off.
A steady breeze had begun to build. It swept in a replenishing scent of mint from our garden’s bergamot, and gave the sweat on my neck a delicious chill. Fritzi was livened by it. She leaned farther out the window to admire the paper lanterns our father had strung through the live oaks around the house. Yet the breeze did not seem to touch Connie. She grabbed a glass of sweet tea from the windowsill and held it to her throat. She looked ham-skinned, a clammy discolouration to her cheeks, though this did not seem so unusual at the time; Daddy always said the heat here could make you stupid, and Connie felt it more than anyone.
Our summers arrived soaked in humidity straight up from the Gulf Coast. They turned people goggle-eyed, made their hair look like they combed it backwards. It was even hot when it rained, but then we could stick our heads out the bedroom window, with our blouses undone and our tongues wagging, a sight for the neighbours and no small embarrassment to our mother. Or run out onto the lawn, barefoot across the wet grass, seeking refuge on the porch to listen to the pitter-patter. Connie and I had long, long hair and would get it drenched just to shake it all over Fritzi like a couple of dogs.
The radio crackled on our bureau: Up next, one of the hottest little ditties of 1955!
Fritzi snapped it off.
“Don’t be a pill,” Connie said, a bored slope in her voice. She turned the dial until out came the listless croon of Eddie Fisher or Perry Como or some other love-kissed singer she knew Fritzi could not stand.
Fritzi tossed a thick cotton coat from our grandmother’s trunk over the radio. “We might as well just stuff our ears with cotton candy.”
“Oh, don’t have a conniption, Fritzi. It’s only a few minutes long.” I fanned the air to show my utter neutrality. “He runs out of ways to say she broke his heart.”
“Poor baby,” Fritzi said, looking to me for a laugh.
“You’re free to plug your ears,” Connie said. “Better yet, wear a hat over your whole head and make Mama’s day.”
The taunt only pleased Fritzi. She was the spitting image of our mother and grandmother in their youth, all three of them svelte and beautiful, with soft features forever antagonized by burning temperaments, and black-licorice waves that hung about their shoulders — until, to Mama’s horror, Fritzi roped her own hair into one thick twist, their eyes locked in some heightened feud, and snipped it off.
“Why do you need the radio on, anyhow?” Fritzi asked. “You’re reading.”
Connie brushed away some of the hair curlers and pins that had collected on my bed. She slid her hand underneath the cotton coat and cranked the radio’s volume. Swinging her legs faster now to the music’s rhythm, she itched lazily at her collar. “The music opens up the room. This house is suffocating today.” She spoke with a spiritless air of declaration and set down the book. “They’ve no right to keep us stuffed up in here, we’re going to lose our marbles.”
“It’s not the poor house’s fault that we’ve been quarantined,” I said.
“You’re right, Bonnie, it’s not the house gettin’ under my skin.” Connie reached out and pinched Fritzi’s waist, giving her a start. “Why are we never invited to Mama’s parties, I wonder.”
Fritzi’s eyebrow perked up. “She’s worried you’ll embarrass her, of course. You don’t know how to behave at proper social events.” Behind a thin veil of smoke, her blue eyes looked chilled enough to crack. “What’s so funny?”
Connie dipped her head over her book and laughed. “You don’t think it’s because of the time you ate a dozen pastries and threw them up all over yourself? In front of everyone?”
“That was years ago! Who would remember that?”
“Who could forget?“ I said.
“Hush, the both of you.” Fritzi turned away from us. She grabbed an old taffeta slip from the trunk and began to shimmy into it before the French window’s closed pane. Her face was flustered but tight.
The afternoon had begun to shed its light for the cindery dimness of early evening. I tugged the chain of our favourite yard-sale lamp, with its waltzing couple embroidered on the shade, and hopped onto the edge of our desk. The light fell against the window, illuminating Fritzi’s figure as she adjusted a black garter on her thigh. Our mother would not let us keep a mirror in the room. Other than the polemic pocket mirror with the blue, porcelain rose cameo on the lid, that for some reason she saw fit to give only to Fritzi, we had to make do with the mirror in the upstairs bathroom, and our bedroom window if the lighting was right.
“Oh, gorgeous,” Fritzi whispered at her reflection. “This will do just swell.”
Connie watched, fiddling with the green-beaded chain of her necklace. It was a dire new piece I assumed had been bought while antiquing on Canal Street that weekend with our father. Its red-black stone, with its unfamiliar markings, slipped away behind the white curve of her collar.
“Mama wouldn’t let you be caught dead in that and you know it.” Connie eyed the pearl taffeta. It stopped at the lower thigh and ran nothing more than sheer fabric to just above Fritzi’s knees. “She told Daddy you’re turning into a hussy.”
“She wouldn’t say that.” I looked at Connie, appalled. “Connie, she didn’t say that, did she?”
Fritzi did not seem to mind. Her choice of fashion was a favourite subject for playful teasing. She touched her fingertips to her chest. “Pardonne moi?”
Connie ducked her head behind her arm with a dozy laugh. “She says you reek like a chimney, too.”
“Mama doesn’t know I smoke.”
“She knows you hang around the Do Drive-In and smoke with Theodore Zimmerman of all people.”
At that Fritzi stiffened. “There’s nothing wrong with Theo.”
“Everyone smokes at the drive-in,” I said, as brightly as I could, “and a lot more, I’ve heard.”
Connie had not noticed the shift in Fritzi’s humour. She gave a little imperial cock of her chin. “Maybe you ought to be more careful who you’re seen with.”
I glared at Connie, a plea for diplomacy, but a bright red smile had broken across Fritzi’s face.
“You would certainly know how that goes,” Fritzi said. “Sneaking out after supper. That necklace I know I’ve never seen before in my life. You’re keeping whoever gave it to you hidden enough. I bet he’s the one you’ve been writing about in your little journal.”
“Connie’s journal doesn’t mention any boys,” I said.
“Not that one.” She stared knowingly at Connie, and for a moment neither of them spoke. At first I assumed they were communicating in that secret silent way they had that drove me crazy, but their biting airs had faded, and Connie had grown pale.
“You didn’t read it,” Connie said. “You can’t have.”
Fritzi tapped her cigarette against the rim of her glass, sprinkling ash over the melted mix of ice cubes and sweet tea. “And what if I did?” she said, looking hard into the glass.
Connie rose from the bed looking like she might be sick. “You wouldn’t talk like this if you had.”
“Would the two of you knock it off?” I said. “Connie, what’s she going on about?”
She turned slightly toward me, her profile a wisp clinging to her hair. “I’m getting cabin fever cooped up in here.”
“Fritzi’s hogging all the fresh air, that’s why.”
“No, Bonnie.” She said it calmly, but her voice caught like a hiccup in her throat. “I’ll just step out a minute.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Sneaking out during one of our mother and father’s parties, before we had tidied after the departure of the last guest, was paramount to jewel theft in our family. She might just as easily have told me she meant to steal the Dresden Green.
“Mama won’t even notice I’m gone,“ Connie said.
“She will, she finds everything out.” I turned to Fritzi. “You always get caught, Fritzi, tell her.”
Connie pulled the door open wider, then paused. She grew serene in the dreamy way of curtains in the breeze, and she seemed to think for a moment before lifting her necklace up over her head and placing it on my mattress. “Keep that, Bonnie, okay? It’s a bloodstone. Careful not to lose it.”
“One week before she drops it down a sewer,” Fritzi said.
Connie did not seem to hear. An impersonal calm had fallen over her. “It’s important that you keep this one, pet.”
She touched my chin and started down the empty hall.
“Constance, stop playin’ around and get back here,” Fritzi called. “Connie.” When Connie did not come back, Fritzi rolled her eyes. “Well, fine — but she better take a jacket, it smells like rain.”
Connie’s footsteps hurried down the stairs and into the kitchen, until the backdoor gave a loud creak. Nobody used that old door. It was a tall, lemon-white relic, with a faded screen that let the sunlight in and kept the flies out. It opened onto the porch, and the mossy trees that darkened the side of our house, and it was the only way to leave without our mother or father seeing from the living room or den.
I picked up the bloodstone from my quilt. It was cold, as if fresh out of the ice box, and I looked down at it resting in my hand. “Where d’ya reckon she got this?”
“Probably found it in a dirty ol’ puddle,” Fritzi said. “Throw it in the jewellery box.”
I walked to the sterling silver jewellery box on our bureau. It was where Connie kept a collection of lost trinkets she found in ponds or trees, or in the grass or baking on the sidewalk. I lifted the lid and looked inside. On the blue velvet lining rested the square face of a lady’s wristwatch, a little knit fanchon hat meant for a doll, a broken piece of a gold-and-pink teacup, and a neatly folded ballet slipper with its laces tied into a bow. The necklace did not belong with them. Connie’s trinket box emitted the warmth and orderly care of a well-tended bird’s nest, but the necklace was cold in spite of the heat.
I squeezed it and placed it in my pocket. I looked at Fritzi. “Why do you always have to push it an inch too far?”
“Eros, c’est la vie. She’s in a mood,” Fritzi said, but she continued to stare into the empty hall.
We packed our grandmother’s clothing back into the trunk in silence. Gingery doo-wop played on the radio from underneath the coat we had not bothered to pull off. The mid-sky sun flooded through the window and pressed hard against my cheek, flat and overcooked and ringed in white like a hard-boiled egg. I wrestled with the notion of reporting to our mother and father what had happened, that Connie had left the house when she was not allowed, but it was too daunting, the task of navigating through a barrage of stiff, swishing dresses, everyone so strangely elegant and spritzed in metallic floral clouds, only to be scolded by Mama in front of her guests, all of them cocktail-drunk and horrible by now.
I ignored my uneasiness at the door squeaking open, clapping shut. I let the feeling trickle in a thin stream from my chest to my stomach, like the sweat down my back.
The evening wore on. I read all of our favourite scenes in Frankenstein, and lay for so long on my stomach that it hurt. When I realized it was dark, I looked up to find Fritzi with her forehead low against her fingertips. She was standing in the one spot untouched by the marmalade light of our lamp, and the night had collected over her like an overhanging shade. “I shouldn’t have let her run off in a huff like that.”
“She’ll be back soon, it’s almost bedtime,” I said. The backdoor, clipping against its frame, sounded a draughty echo through my ears. “She’ll want to be home before Mama sees and throws a fit.”
I rose and leaned against the windowsill beside Fritzi. We stared down at the winding path leading to our house. The sounds of the party travelled out the open front door, between the fluted columns rounding the porch, and blew up to us with the garden’s wild bergamot mint and the dawning nostalgia of dead tobacco. Fritzi rested her arm on the windowsill. Her cigarette was clipped absently between her fingers, and spilled its smoke into the air, weaving long, pale furls over the darkened yard. I looked at my sister. She would not lift her eyes from the empty path, almost taunting now in its bareness, where the light that once fell sylphic from the paper lanterns lay cold beneath the old live oaks.