LEAVING

My sister was a stranger by then.

She had worked for a while in the corner store but she returned home and shut her door and stayed there with the curtains drawn and Pink Floyd turned up loud. Sometimes when I passed her in the corridor she glared at me with such hatred that I began to wonder if she would be likely to kill me in my sleep. I imagined waking up with a pillow over my face and no chance to shout for help.

On better days she would venture out and sit in front of a video and perhaps even speak to me. I was careful with my conversations because she was prone to sudden rages. She would shriek and throw things and then, as if a switch had been thrown, she would suddenly power down. All signs of life gone. She would sit in complete silence, her eyes shut or open, and I would tiptoe around her, worried, but cautious as well, in case I somehow reactivated her.

Her friend from school made the long trip up north to visit and for a while I could see my sister again. The smart playful girl who was fond of setting challenges and forcing you to participate.

When he left I saw the life draining out of her. She took her paints into her bedroom and concentrated on making intricate dark pictures of buff knights and vampire women. Sex oozing out of the images. She would have to leave. I knew she would have to leave.

She applied for university without telling anyone.

I emerged from a restless Christmas break, thin from a regime of starvation, tanned from days of walking back and forth along the access road, and when I glanced into my sister’s room I noticed the difference immediately. She was packed and ready to leave us.

The idea of leaving home was complicated. My aunt never had left home. My mother, in the brief time that she had tried to venture away from the nest, had barely settled. She’d spent most evenings at my grandmother’s, walking between houses with her children in tow. My grandmother exerted an incredible pull, like some vast astrological body, dragging everything in the universe toward her. My mother was sucked back into her orbit but once there she was kept at arm’s length, punished for her small foray out into the world, never again to be accepted back into the idea of home.

Karen would go, and then she would be gone. My mother spent her evenings in tears. She knew the price you had to pay for leaving home. Maybe Karen could do her degree through distance education; she could send her assignments by mail. These were the options that could save her from the ultimate sin of leaving.

My sister used the glamour of a university degree to slip away. My mother had graduated from teachers’ college. My aunt went to tech. Karen would be the first person in the family to be awarded a Bachelor of Arts.

 

 

I went back to school. I sat on the bus with Emily and spent my days mooning over the boy with the clarinet. I was voted school captain and I knew that I was a compromise. The teachers liked me because I was pleasant, honest, and compliant. The students chose me because I didn’t really care. They could smoke in the toilets and I wouldn’t report them. No one really hated me, but they didn’t like me either. I auditioned for the school musical and won the starring role. And then, one day, my sister left.

I could have her room if I wanted it. It was larger than mine and painted a dark and moody purple. There were black sheets. She had left her collection of fantasy novels and I could read them, but I didn’t really want to. I wrote to her once but she didn’t reply. She called home dutifully but there was a distance in the conversations. Her answers were monosyllabic. I wondered how it would be to leave. I knew I would never be brave enough, but maybe I would.

I stood on the stage and sang about love and kissed the leading boy and it was my first kiss. Out there in public, in front of an audience of several hundred, I reached up for his neck and he bent down to my height. He was six foot six, I was five foot one. It was a kind of visual comedy but for me it was real and powerful and I opened my mouth there on the stage. There was an exchange of tongues and when I pulled away I said my line, which was “I love you,” and he said “I love you, too.” We were performing, but we would repeat the kiss in private at the after-party. I would know that even then, without the audience, we were performing an act, but it was an act that I was excited by. I kissed my leading man and I went home singing with the force of the kiss and told my mother that I had been asked on a date—even though, in reality, I had asked him.