There was something about her, the men’s faces said, that had become a little off-putting. Gone was the woman who sensed an empty glass behind her, gone the three-part pivots to empty an ashtray and grab the seltzer gun in one go. The quips, the authoritarian bellow when somebody got antsy and started rocking the cigarette machine. The books she had returned to reading any chance she got, dog-eared and underlined in forest green—they were gone, their tenancy of her time vacated and replaced by a cheer they all could feel was suspect.
It was a subtle change, visible to them only because they’d grown so fond of the way she slammed doors and drawers shut with a raised back foot. That equine gesture had not been the first or last that had earned her the commendation a horse worth betting on. Now she took indirect trips between deserted tables and the bar, carrying glasses only a few at a time, and she was inordinately touched by the most minor human expressions, smiling too long at a pair of pilots with their arms around each other’s necks. When business was slow she could be seen with both hands dangling far across the bar, her head pillowed by her forearm.
Her etiquette became exaggerated, rich in apologies, some unnecessary and some when she had forgotten a drink or a meal, another change that became dependable. Charlie, who had retained a more active interest in her business since the episode with Elise, watched Fay with a dark curiosity, sometimes intervening, listening for the drinks she took and reminding her which she had missed, slinging an arm around her hip or slipping a saliva’d finger in her ear when she seemed lost to the room.
They had started closing together again, as they had when Fay had first arrived—still recognizably the girl their parents had groomed, still shocked by the decision she had made to come, in many ways her first.
At the end of a long week together, the corners swept, the nozzles of the cola machine sunk in pint glasses of hot water and lemon, they hung their feet in the pool, their skin made a fluorescent pale green by the underwater light Charlie had saved for and installed herself. They had emptied the pool to do so, and after brought Lloyd and a pack of beers down the steps. The horse had hated it, paced around them making viscous snorts and tipping his head at the world above.
“Fay.”
“Charlie.”
“What is it I always told you?”
Fay rotated her submerged ankle in polite curiosity.
“Happiness is good health and a bad memory. Farts are art. Don’t trust that fuckin’ expiration date. Always a few more days left.”
Her imitation was perfect, the characteristic pointer finger flung toward God.
Charlie caught the laugh in her throat and dismissed it. Grabbing her sister’s hair, she squeezed too hard.
“I belong to you, is what I meant.”
“Ah. That. And the inverse, of course.”
“Which, Fay, is and will be true. But I’m a little worried here. I have this nagging little committee in my head that says maybe I failed you. Maybe this was not the place for you to come, the incessant committee says, or maybe it was, but now it’s not the place for you to stay.”
Fay sewed up her face into something smaller, her lips diminishing, her eyebrows pushing to meet.
“Where would I go?”
“Committee is divided on that. Votes and recalls, all day long. Gavel on the podium. But I’m wondering if back to the parents, maybe just for the time that you’re—”
“The time that I’m what?”
“Oh fuck it, Fay,” Charlie said, the alcoholic impatience showing itself. “Do I have to mime it for you? How long has it been since you bled?”
It had been impossible that she was pregnant, far too expensive a thought, so she had not examined it. She could have been naked in front of her sister, the way she went about feeling herself then, detecting the places where she was softer, acknowledging for the first time the inflammation of her breasts.
“Jesus Christ—was a carpenter,” Fay said. Vestiges of her early life always arrived in her mouth when the present was hard to speak.
She snorted and began to cry simultaneously, a sonic contradiction that amplified as it bounced over the water. Charlie ran her oil-smudged hands over the chest pockets of her overalls, searching for her pack, and in that moment Fay slipped into the pool. The cream of her shift bloomed around her, fat and wide when she floated, slick and straight when she kicked her legs back. She swam hard for ten minutes, surfacing just to tap the curb at either end, and when she finally crawled heaving onto the concrete she looked like something the ocean has rejected and spat back onto sand, each stringy part of her pulled a different way.
Fay turned her cheek and opened one eye in Charlie’s direction.
“I have a friend in LA who could,” Charlie said.
“No,” Fay said, singsong. “I made him. I should bring him here.”
Everything about it, the certainty of keeping it, her unfounded conviction about the gender, silenced Charlie, who could do nothing but slap a hand to the wet pavement in performative solidarity.
Charlie fetched a towel for Fay and some scotch for herself. She moved the rough cotton over her sister’s fine hair without love, not adjusting the pressure when Fay whimpered. They separated soon after to their rooms. Two hours later, Charlie appeared in her window, all her broad muscles locked, having found no way into sleep, and looked toward her sister’s. The room was totally dark, totally still. It was as though the demolition of her life had come as no surprise.
Fay was unconscious ten hours, hardly changing positions, not even when, in the early morning, Charlie pulled away at high speed, the radio on, the gravel fleeing the tires’ rotations, killing the silence of the place.