The Wrong Sister

In the summer of 1974, when I was 14, I lost my older sister Rose to love.

We were living in a suburb of Waltham back then, a green, leafy new development, full of scrubby trees and mowed lawns and clapboard houses painted pastel, just a half hour bus ride away from Boston. We were a family of women, my father having died four years before. He had had a heart attack, falling in the very garden that had been a selling point when we had bought the house. He left my mother enough insurance so that the house was hers, but not enough that she didn’t have to work long hours as a legal secretary, forcing my sister Rose and me to tend to ourselves, often well after dinner.

I didn’t mind. There was no other company I wanted to be in than my sister’s. She was beautiful back then, 16 and reed slender, with my mother’s same river of black hair, only hers wasn’t tied up into a corporate bun but skipped to her waist. She had luminous pale skin and eyes as blue and clear as chips of summer sky. I was almost everything Rose and my mother were not—studious and shy, shaped like a soda straw with frizzy hair the color of rust.

Before Rose fell in love, she adored only me. We had grown up inseparable, a world unto ourselves simply because we didn’t like anyone as much as we liked and needed each other.

Tagging along with Rose, anything was possible. We roamed the woods behind our house looking for the secret landing places of flying saucers. We walked two miles to the Star Market just to steal fashion magazines and candy and cheap gold-tone jewelry we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, for the pure shocking thrill of doing something dangerous. We ate ice cream for dinner with my mother’s wine poured over it as a sauce. We dialed stray numbers on the phone and talked enthusiastically to whoever picked up, pretending we were exchange students from France looking for a dangerous liaison or two. “Adventure is the code we live by,” Rose declared, hooking her little finger around mine to shake on it. We were always going to be together. We were both going to be famous writers, living in the same mansion in Paris, scandalizing everyone by the hard, fast way we lived. We plotted out our books together. They were always about young girls like us on some quest or another, for stolen diamonds or lost love, and the only difference between my books and Rose’s was that Rose’s heroines always ended up riding off on the backs of motorcycles with any boy she felt like kissing, and mine were always teaching school in some quaint little town in Vermont, with two Persian cats warming themselves at her feet.

And then Rose met Daniel, and everything changed for all three of us.

Daniel Richmond was a senior in Rose’s high school, a science major who loved cells and combustions, who said words like mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum as if they were poetry. Rose had met him the first day she started tenth grade, when she had wandered into the wrong room and found him there peering into a microscope. The first time Daniel saw her, he looked stunned. “I’ll take you to the right room,” he said, and by the time he got her there, going the longest way he could manage, he had her phone number, and a date for the following night.

He was Rose’s first boyfriend. She was giddy with the incredulous joy of it. She walked with a new bounce. She brushed her hair a hundred times every night and stared dreamily at herself in the mirror. Daniel called her every night before their actual date. She curled protectively around the phone. She whispered into it and even after she had said goodbye to him, she held the receiver up against her cheek. “Wait until you meet him, Stella,” she told me, out of breath. “You’re going to die.”

The first time he came over, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to dress up, to shine the same way my sister did. Both Rose and I tried on three different outfits. We both braided our hair and took it out again, put on perfume and washed it off, and when the doorbell finally rang, we both went to the front door together.

Rose was beaming. She seemed lit from within. “I told you about each other,” she said to both of us, and pushed Daniel toward me. He was taller than she was and the handsomest boy I had ever seen, with shiny brown hair so long it fell into his collar and lashes so lush, they seemed to leave shadows across his face.

“Stella, so you like science fiction,” he said, and handed me a book, Brave New World. I had never read it, had never even heard of it back then, and I took it gratefully. “I’ll be careful with it.

He shook his head. “No, it’s yours.”

Astonished, I turned the book over and over in my hands. It was brand new. The spine hadn’t even been cracked and broken in the way I liked, the pages hadn’t been stained with fruit juice or chocolate, torn by my own two careless hands. A virgin book, I thought, and blushed.

“See, Stella, I told you you’d like him,” Rose said. Her hands reached out to touch Daniel’s shirtsleeve, his hand, the bare back of his neck, and could only let go to reach on for another part of him. My mother came in, still in her silvery corporate suit, her makeup, and Daniel handed her a bottle of wine. “Rose said you favor red.”

My mother smiled. She undid her top button and gave Rose an approving glance. “You come for dinner tomorrow,” she ordered. “Late dinner. The way they do in Europe. Say around 9:00.”

He came for late dinner the next night, and almost every other night after. It became a sort of ritual. We’d all eat late dinner, huge lavish spreads my mother was delighted to cook for all of us. She loved the way Daniel would engage her in conversation, the way he’d sometimes bring her books he thought she’d like or flowers. “You’re over here so often, we ought to charge you rent,” she said, but she smiled at him. She told him he’d have to taste the beef Wellington she was planning to make the next night.

One day, though, I came home to find the house quiet. “Where’s Rose and Daniel?” My mother shrugged, she put hamburgers into a pan. “They’re out on their own tonight,” she said.

“They are?”

We sat down to dinner, to fries and burgers and a salad, and although my mother put on the radio to make the meal more festive, although she chattered brightly about her new boss, who had taken her out to lunch and flirted with her, who she was sure might not be married, something felt wrong. I kept looking at the two empty seats and I was suddenly not hungry anymore. My mother tapped her fork against the table. “It’s not a tragedy, Stella,” she said sternly. I put my burger down. “I had a big lunch.”

Daniel and Rose began spending more and more time alone. I watched them walking away from our house, and away from me, their hands so tightly clasped, I was sure they must be leaving marks. They couldn’t seem to be together without touching, hands or shoulders or heads. They couldn’t seen to talk but instead were whispering, as if everything they shared were some great, perfect secret, as if they were in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language or know the customs. That summer they sat out under the peach tree in back, a thermos of lemonade between them, and every time I walked by the kitchen, I peered out the back window until I saw them lying on the ground, entwined as if they were one body, kissing, so still, I thought for a moment they were dead. I watched them when they were sitting across from each other at our table for dinner, how Daniel couldn’t pass Rose the salt without touching her shoulder. And even when he brought her home, I peered from the front window and watched them in his car, rolling together, kissing, taking their time before Rose would run back upstairs, back to me.

“Where did you go? What did you do?” I perched on the edge of her bed, but she was suddenly dreamy and distant.

“Stella, it was unbelievable,” she said.” No one’s ever loved me the way Daniel does.” And then she was silent.

They were almost never apart. They even began dressing alike, in the same black turtlenecks and blue jeans, the same white high-top sneakers. She wore his tweedy jackets; he borrowed her oversized Harvard sweatshirt. He sent her love letters that flopped in through our mail slot almost every day, letters she read in astonishment, one hand flying to her face. She kept them hidden so well that even I couldn’t find them. He bought her flowers and windup toys. By the time Rose was a high school senior and Daniel was at Boston University, he was at our house by 7:00 every morning and he sometimes didn’t leave until well after midnight. The neighbors got used to seeing him sitting reading on our front porch, not wanting to wake anyone. They got to know his bruised-looking green car parked in front of our house for hours on end. He didn’t care that Rose never got up until 10:00; he’d talk to my mother and make her breakfast, he’d talk to me. He didn’t treat me like a younger sister meant to be tolerated. “How could I be mean to Rose’s sister?” he asked. Instead, he asked me what I was reading, who I was listening to. We’d be in conversation so deep, he sometimes didn’t even see Rose until she was right there in front of us, and then he would jump up, electrified, kissing her, touching her hair, her face, the tips of her fingers. The two of them would move together, joining like a seam.

I frittered away my time waiting for Rose, waiting for my mother to get home by reading or watching old movies on TV until my eyes hurt. If I were lucky, I could grab bits of Rose’s time, parts of Daniel’s.

One day, while waiting for Rose, Daniel decided to teach me to drive. “I don’t even have my learner’s permit yet.”

He laughed. “I thought you and Rose liked to live dangerously.”

I sat in the driver’s seat. He moved close beside me. “Turn on the ignition,” he said. “Power up.” He put his hands over mine on the wheel. “Here we go.”

I drove around the block, stupefied, once, twice, and the third time, Rose was standing out front, in a sheer summer dress, her hair frilling out, her face pinched with an annoyance I had never seen before. She ran to the car and leaned over. “Where were you? I’ve been waiting.” She glanced over at me. “What are you doing in the car?”

“Daniel’s teaching me to drive.”

“We’re late.” She opened my door pointedly, waiting for me to get out.

“Another time-—” Daniel said to me, and then Rose slid into the car, so close to Daniel she could unbuckle his seat belt. She moved closer and slid the belt around herself, buckling them both in together. “There. That’s better.”

They drove off, leaving me on the hot sidewalk, and when I went back inside, I roamed around Rose’s room. I picked up the perfume on her dresser and opened it, daubing it along my neck, behind my knees the way she did. I slid out of my clothes and went to her closet and put on her blue minidress and stared at myself in front of the mirror. I lifted an imaginary wineglass in a toast. “There. That’s better,” I said.

If Rose were lost to me with a boyfriend, I began to think of getting a boyfriend of my own. I was finally in high school. It was the fall, the beginning of a whole new term when anything might happen. Rose and Daniel had been in love a year and I was 15 and there was nothing to stop me from falling in love, too. There was a dance that September, held in the school gym, and so I went, wearing a blue dress of Rose’s, her long dangling Indian earrings.

The gym looked funny without the usual equipment, the ropes, the volleyball nets. Neon-colored balloons floated from the ceiling. Red and gold crepe paper hung along the walls, and the entire floor was sprinkled with silver glitter. There was no food table, no punch bowl, nothing but too many people for one room and the pulse and beat of an out-of-town band called the Paradox. I leaned against the wall in the sweating heat, my hair pasting along my neck, watching the couples gliding by, pretending I was too interested in the terrible band to care that no one was asking me to dance. Sweat prickled along my back, and I was finally about to leave when a boy stood in front of me. I had never seen him before. He was wearing dark glasses and he smelled of cigarettes.

“Dance?” he said and took my hand. “Happy Together” was playing and he repositioned his grip, clutching me. I was in heaven, right up until another couple danced beside us. The girl was pretty, with a flash of white blonde hair. “Hey, Bobby,” she smirked. The boy with her laughed and nodded at me. “New girlfriend, Bobby?” he said pleasantly. Bobby glowered, and pressed me closer, his hands scuttled along my back like a crab. “So, uh, having a good time?” the other boy said, and the boy let go of me. “Thanks for the dance.” He bit off his words and turned, leaving with his friends, leaving me standing in the middle of the dance floor.

I kept dancing, by myself, as if it were a deliberate choice, as if I were too cool for a partner, as if I were one of Rose’s heroines from the books we used to write. I smiled until my teeth ached, and then I danced myself to the doorway, and stumbled down the stairs and out into the night.

I walked home to an empty house. I took off Rose’s dress and put it in her closet and by the time I went to my room and closed the door, I was crying. My mother was out, Rose was with Daniel, and I banged my hands on the bed, when suddenly I heard a noise in the house.

Footsteps. I bunched the pillow over my head.

The door opened. “Stella?” Rose’s voice. I didn’t move. “Daniel’s here with me. Is it OK if we come in?”

“No. Go away.” I heard their footsteps. I felt her sit on the bed beside me, and then for the first time in a long while, she put one hand on my back. I felt the heat of it through my blouse. “You have to get up,” Rose said quietly.

“Why.”

“Because you’re going out with us now.”

Nobody ever really understood the relationship we three had. Every evening, when Daniel showed up, he showed up for me, as well as for Rose. We three went to movies and concerts and restaurants. We walked around Harvard Square, Daniel in the middle, one arm looped about my shoulders, the other around Rose. “Man oh man, two of them!” a boy called, passing us on the street. “Lend one to me, would you?” I flushed, pleased, telling myself that I might have been the one he wished to borrow.

I told myself that you really couldn’t tell who was with who, not until late at night, when Daniel dropped us off. I always got out first, running up the front walk, letting myself in to my mother’s confused questions. Rose stayed behind with Daniel, sometimes for as long as an hour, the two of them talking. Sometimes he drove off again with her, not coming back until 3:00 in the morning. Then Rose would creep into my room and wake me up and I would relive her life through her. “We went skinny-dipping,” she breathed. She smelled of chlorine. “We broke into the pool at BU and swam. No one else was there.” She laughed. “Guess what?” Rose moved closer. “We’re going to get married. When we’re through college. We went to Sudbury. It’s exactly like living out in the country, only it’s close to Boston. We’re going to have two dogs and three kids, and he’ll do research and I’ll write books.”

I plucked at the sheets, pushing her away. “You’re getting my bed all wet.”

Rose looked startled. “I am?” She turned to leave, but even after she was gone, my sheets smelled of chlorine. I held them up against my face.

And then, when I turned 16, Rose went off to college herself. She didn’t get into BU, where Daniel was, but she got into a school 30 miles away. She lived at school because she said she wanted the experience of living in a dorm, but I thought it was just because she wanted to spend her nights with Daniel. The day she left, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked to the Star market and stole a magazine that I threw out as soon as I left the store. I walked to the Dairy Dip and got a cone, and then I walked back home, where the house seemed so empty I was drowning in it. “She’ll be home weekends,” my mother told me. She sighed. “Do you want to go shopping?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should get some new clothes. You look like a ragamuffin.” I turned away from her. “I have studying.”

Rose didn’t come home that first weekend or the next. “I have a paper,” she claimed. “I have studying.”

“So do it at home,” my mother said, but Rose was immovable.

With Rose gone, you would have thought Daniel would be gone, too, but that wasn’t really the case. He was up at Rose’s school almost all the time, but he still came by for dinner once a week, he still called, and as soon as he walked in our door, we asked him for news about Rose, news we were sure that he, of all people, would surely have.

“Something’s wrong,” Daniel insisted. “That school is bad for her.”

“How is it bad?”

Daniel hesitated. “She’s not herself anymore. She’s confused.”

“How is she not herself?” I wondered.

Daniel looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet.” He sighed and looked at my mother. “You should bring her home.”

But there was nothing my mother could do to convince Rose to come home. “I love school,” was all she would say. She wouldn’t talk about Daniel or what might be going on at school. “Everything’s fine,” she insisted. She took her own time, and when Rose finally arrived back to us, it was winter and everything seemed changed. She came home looking different, more beautiful but more distant. “Jesus, do you have to wear those slippers?” she said to me in disdain. Daniel was coming over to see her. It was the first time he had seen her in a while, and I wasn’t going to go with them. The phone began ringing, and every time I picked it up, it was another male voice, asking for her.

“I don’t know,” she said into the phone, coiling her hand around the cord. “I have another date. Can’t we do it another night?” She looked flustered. “Really? You really mean that?” She smiled, considering. “All right. Pick me up at seven.”

As soon as Rose hung up the phone, she looked suddenly nervous. “Stella,” she begged. “Can you do me this big favor?”

I waited.

“When Daniel comes, can you just tell him I’m sick, that I can’t get out of bed?” She motioned to her room. “I’m just going to lie down there.”

“You have another date?”

“I’m allowed.” She bit her lip. “I’m allowed,” she repeated. “Please, I don’t want to hurt him. I just— There’ll be other dates with him. It’s not like this is the one and only time. But this other guy is going home to California tomorrow,”

“I thought you were going to get married. I thought it was forever.”

“I just—Stella, Daniel was the first boy I ever dated. I was a baby when I met him. Now there’s all these things opening up for me.” She blew out a breath. “Please. Do it for me. Go get pizza with him or something. I’ll make it up to you.” She touched my shoulder. “I promise.”

And so I did it. When Daniel came, dressed in a new tweed jacket, his hair longer, I lied. I told him Rose was sick, that she was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed. He nodded. “Should I get her tea or ice cream?”

“She can’t be disturbed,” I lied. I hesitated. “Want to go get pizza?”

He studied me for a moment, and then sighed. “Sure. Why not? Maybe by the time we get back, she’ll be up and feeling better.” He brightened. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

We ate pizza at Pie in the Sky in Cambridge, seated in a red leatherette booth in the back. There was a noisy, boisterous crowd of students, and when Daniel talked, he talked about Rose.

“I don’t think she’s happy away at school, do you?”

“She seems to like it.”

He put his pizza down. “But she seems different. That’s all I’m saying. Or maybe it’s just because I haven’t seen that much of her. She’s always studying. I said I’d study with her, but she says she has to do it alone, now. I know what she means. It’s hard to concentrate on anything but the person you love.”

We didn’t order dessert. He drove me home silently. “I’ll walk you in,” he said, “check on Rose.” But when we got in the house, my mother was home, and when she came to the door, her face was apologetic. “She went out,” she said quietly. Daniel didn’t even ask where Rose was. He said goodbye and walked back to the car. I peeked at him through our front window. For a long while, he just sat in the front seat, staring out ahead of him.

Rose began coming home less and less. But Daniel showed up at our house more and more. “We should bring Rose home,” he kept insisting. He moped about our house. He helped me with my science papers, he stayed for dinner. My mother was happy to have someone to cook late dinners for, someone who appreciated her chicken Français, her duck à la Waltham. “It’s a phase with Rose,” she told Daniel. “You mark my words. She’s just feeling her oats.”

After dinner, we would all play Scrabble or sometimes go to the movies, and finally, when it hit midnight, Daniel would go home. I got used to his being at the house and I told myself that I was angry at Rose for denying him. I called her at her dorm. “She’s out,” a voice said. I left my name, I said it was important, and although I waited, she never called back.

Rose came home for spring break with her hair three inches longer and a whole pool of new boys who were in love with her. “Should we have Daniel for dinner?” my mother asked and Rose sighed, exasperated. “I broke up with him last month.”

“You didn’t!” My mother shook her head.

“He was just here last night, he didn’t say that—” I said and Rose shot me a look.

“He shouldn’t be coming here anymore.” She flung her hair back, annoyed. She got up from her chair and stared out the window.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Everywhere I look, there he is. He won’t leave me alone. He’s obsessed. He’s making me hate him.” She turned to me, accusing. “Did you know that he follows me around at school? I’ll be coming out of class and he’ll be there, skulking in the halls, waiting. I’ll come home from a date to find his car parked in front of the dorm, watching, waiting. Every morning, no matter how early I wake up, he’s somehow there. He calls me up a million times a day and night just to check up on me, make sure I’m there, and even then he doesn’t trust me. He saw me hugging a friend of mine, congratulating him on getting engaged for God’s sake, but do you think he could understand that? Not Daniel. He called me five times that night, asking me over and over why did I hug him, what did it mean, why was I walking with another man, why was I lying, didn’t I trust him enough to tell him the truth? God! Every day there are five notes from him taped to my door. There are love letters six pages long slid under my door. Doesn’t he go to school? Doesn’t he have a life? I’m allowed to see whoever I want.” She flung off her scarf.

“He loves you,” I said.

“I’m having dinner tonight with this boy who wants to take me to Spain. Next week I’m going to a play with this other boy who’s writing a novel about me. And my English professor is going to let me walk Meredith, his sheepdog, in the Boston Commons with him on Sunday.” Her eyes sparked like constellations. “And tonight, in less than an hour, I’m going out to dinner with a boy from England.”

She breezed out of the house that night. My mother shook her head. “Poor Daniel,” she said sadly.

I felt sorry for Daniel, too, but I also felt something else. Wonder. That a boy would love you that much that he might ruin himself over you, that a boy would risk his own education and maybe his life to be with you and that it all might last forever, love never dying.

Rose might have been orbiting away from me, but now that she knew I was friendly with Daniel, she was openly hostile. “Don’t give him any false hope about me,” she said. “He’ll just hang around me even more.” She was suddenly too popular to go into Harvard Square with me. She scrutinized me. “You could do something about your hair, you know,’ she said. She sniffed with disdain at the music I listened to. “Rock and roll—barf!” she said. When I ran into her in Boston, she ignored me. She couldn’t wait to get back to school. Her conversation with my mother was peppered with new names. David. Roger. Ben. Any name but Daniel’s. Any name but mine.

Gradually, Daniel stopped coming to the house. He stopped calling. My mother stopped making exotic late-dinner menus and went back to her workaday pastas, her ready-in-ten-minutes burgers. “What a shame,” she said, but Rose was immovable. Rose even said Daniel had stopped showing up on her campus, trailing after her. Her mailbox wasn’t full of his love notes anymore. There weren’t two dozen phone messages from him, or personal notes he had scribbled himself, taped up along her dorm room door. “Thank God,” she said, pulling her hair into a ponytail.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “He was nice boy. I miss him.” Then I thought, I really missed him, too, I really had lost Rose, and I had lost Daniel, too.

It was May and school was nearly over for the summer. I was coming out of school, walking down the grassy backyard to the buses. Just that day a girl in my gym class had threatened to beat me up because she didn’t like the peace sign necklace I was wearing. I was saved when she had been caught phoning in a bomb threat. I kept to myself, I told myself soon, soon things would be different, I was going to go away to New York City to college. I would be a famous writer, by myself, without Rose. I would have many boyfriends because at college boys might appreciate a quick wit and a smart mind, curly hair might be beautiful there. I was deep in reverie, and then I heard the two blonde girls whispering, pointing and flirting, and I looked over and there was Daniel walking across the grass toward me and ignoring them altogether. He gave me a big hug and over his shoulders, I saw the blondes staring at me. I put my arm around Daniel and we walked to his car. I got in. The blondes were still watching.

“You know,” he said. “I missed you.”

“God, me, too.”

I waited for him to ask me about Rose, what was she doing, who was she seeing, did she miss him at all? Or maybe he might suggest we go visit her, united we stand, both of us pulling her back to us, but he never did any of that. Instead, he took me to his car. “Let’s go get some muffins,” he said.

We went to the Pewter Pot in Cambridge, where there were no waitresses but “wenches” dressed in tight black corsets and red skirts, bonnets bobbing on their head. We ordered fudge muffins and cranberry butter and hot chocolate with whipped cream. I felt flushed with happiness seeing him.

Daniel drew a double helix in a spill of salt on the table. He smiled. “What’s the gene for stupidity? For false hope?” He smiled again and then reached over and touched my hand. “I’m having a good time.”

“Me, too.”

“Maybe I fell in love with the wrong sister.”

He smiled, the same Daniel, easy, smart, funny. The wench appeared, refilling our water glasses. Tendrils of blonde hair were falling from her bonnet. Her pink lipstick was smeared.

“So,” he said slowly. “Joni Mitchell’s playing at BU. Want to go?”

“Yes, of course I do! It’ll be like old times.”

He shook his head. “No. Not like old times. Like new times.”

He reached over and took my hand again and this time, I let him. The wench walked by and winked at me.

I went home in a confusion. Rose was there on a surprise visit, with a new boyfriend in tow, a blond named Merle who was singing a song he had written about her. “Raven hair and eyes like stormy sky,” he sang. They both ignored me.

“I had cocoa with Daniel,” I said and Rose looked up, seeing me for the first time. She raised one brow.

“He thinks he might have been with the wrong sister,” I said. My heart skated against my ribs. Merle looked at me quizzically. “We’re going to a movie Friday.”

Rose seemed to go rigid. “So?”

“It’s a date.”

She grew silent, and then she looped one arm around Merle’s shoulder. “Date whoever you please. It has nothing to do with me.”

The next day, the news that an older, handsome man had come to the school to pick me up, throwing an arm around me, was all over school. Ned Nickerson, the boy who sat behind me, who used to amuse himself mornings by whispering “ugly, ugly” at me, like a mantra, looked at me with new respect and interest. “What a nice day, huh?” he said pleasantly. Later, in the girls room, while I was staring at my reflection in the mirror, Debby Ryan, a cheerleader, strode in. “I like that shade of lipstick,” she said, nodding at my open mouth.

I felt as if I had tumbled into the wrong school, but all day, things felt different, and I knew it was because of Daniel.

“So who was that guy?” Marisa Filbert asked me in history class. I grinned, blushing. “Daniel.” A thrill shot through me.

“Is your boyfriend a college guy?” She leaned closer.

I nodded. Boyfriend. “We’re going to see Joni Mitchell Friday.”

“What a hunk.” Her admiration washed over me like a cool pour of water.

The night of the date, my mother was out of town on business, but Rose was home again, getting ready for a date of her own. She was in a bare black dress, her hair braided down her back, a single red glass earring dangling from her left ear. She watched me struggling with my outfit, pulling on a new blue minidress printed with yellow peace signs, a dress I now had serious doubts about, especially next to Rose. She frowned as I smeared on lipstick, as I tried to flatten my unruly hair with my sweaty palms.

Rose leaned along the doorjamb. “I just want to tell you,” Rose said slowly, “that I think you are insane.”

I ignored her.

“He doesn’t want to date you. He’s doing this to get at me. You’re making a mistake.” She frowned. “He was my boyfriend.”

“Not anymore.”

She threw up her hands. “Fine. Do what you want.”

When Daniel arrived, Rose made sure to be in her room, with the door firmly closed.

I told myself it didn’t matter where she was, because Daniel stepped inside, dressed in a tweed jacket I had seen a million times before, but suddenly it took on new importance, suddenly even the way he had brushed his hair seemed new and different and wonderful to me. “You look great,” he said. He opened the door for me, and then I stepped out of my house with Daniel and into a whole new life, not once looking back to see if Rose had somehow snuck out of her room to watch us, to feel the same jab of envy I used to feel toward her.

The concert was in an auditorium at the college, so crowded that we ended up sitting on the floor. Joni Mitchell was a pinprick on the landscape. I could barely hear her. I could barely see. The whole time all I could think about was how much older everyone was around me, how the girls seemed to know something I didn’t, just in the way they flipped their hair back or gazed at their boyfriends or whispered to one another. These were girls in blue jeans or long skirts, girls with no makeup and straight hair, and there I was in lipstick and my fizz of curls, in a dress so short, I had to keep tugging it down over my thighs. In front of us, a redhead and a boy with a heavy beard began kissing. He touched her neck; he pulled down the corner of her dress and kissed her shoulder. His mouth was open and wet. She licked at his ear. I stared down at my hands, at the nails I had bitten to the quick. Daniel’s foot touched mine, and I drew my legs under me as tightly as I could.

I was glad when the concert was over, when Daniel pulled me to my feet. I wanted to go home to process this, to think about how I felt, what I wanted to do. “Come on,” he said. He took my hand and we went to someone’s dorm room. The door was wide open and there was a couple lying on a narrow bed together. They were rumpled and laughing, half dressed, and the sight of them was as intimate and shocking to me as a slap. I started, stepping back, unsure of what to do.

“This is Debby and Mike,” Daniel said, nodding at them. T hey rolled closer together on the bed, smiling lazily up at me. Mike swept one hand over Debby’s face. Debby yawned and stretched and snuggled against him. Her white T-shirt rode up, showing a band of pale stomach.

“Don’t think us rude, but we absolutely cannot get up,” she decided. Mike took a rope of her long pale hair and tickled her nose with it.

“That’s all right, we’re going for a drive anyway.”

A drive. I followed Daniel out of the dormitory and back into his car. He was talking nonstop, but I couldn’t snag my attention on any of his words, I put my hands deep into my cotton pockets. The night was thick with clouds. The air was so warm and heavy and yet I was shivering. I suddenly wanted things back the way they had been before, back when he was my big brother, bringing me books and chocolates, teaching me the best way to cook shrimp Creole, the way to appreciate a foreign film. I hadn’t minded when he had looped his arm about me when we were walking down the streets with Rose, when he had come to get me at school, with an intrigued audience making us indelible in their minds, but now, alone, his arm felt like a weight upon me, his interest made me want to flee.

We drove. I sat as close to the window as I could. He put on some music, guitars and flutes. “Let’s drive to Sudbury,” he said enthusiastically. I moved closer to the window. He glanced at me. “You all right?” he said pleasantly.

It started to rain, droplets smearing across the window. When I was little I used to try to match up all the raindrops. I wanted them to all have partners, to never be alone.

“Come sit closer.”

“I think something feels wrong about this.”

He drove deeper into Sudbury. The houses were spread out. The land looked rich. He turned and gave me a half smile. “I think maybe you’re afraid of things you shouldn’t be afraid of.”

“What does that mean?”

He smiled again. “Stella. “ He lifted one hand and brushed back my bangs, so my forehead was clear, like Rose’s.

“I’m not my sister.”

“I have always loved you,” he said simply. “You. Your sister. Your mother. Your whole family. I even loved your house.”

I opened the window. The hot moist air struck my face. The rain beat in. My hair would frizz in minutes, but I didn’t care.

“I loved your backyard.”

“Can you just drive me home now?”

“No, not until you talk to me about this.”

“I don’t think this is going to work out.”

“People say that when they’re afraid to even try. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. I love you. I do.”

He drove faster. “Where are we going?” I said.

“I want to show you the houses out here, how pretty it is.” And then, suddenly I felt like what it must have been like to be Rose, but in a different, more dangerous way. A Chevy slammed on its horn beside us.

“Can you slow down?” I asked.

Daniel slowed but he kept going. “You don’t love me, but that’s all right. There’s an art to loving. Have you read that book? The Art of Loving? Erich Fromm? I’ll bring you a copy.” He looked over at me. His voice was smooth, modulated. It sounded liquid. “Don’t you think I have enough love for both of us?”

I looked out at the road, bordered by tall grassy fields. Cars hummed behind and ahead of us. “You’re not going to take me home?”

“Of course I am. But not while you’re this upset. We have to talk this out. Talking solves things. The problem with Rose and me was we never talked it out toward the end.” He turned the wheel. “I’ll park the car and we’ll talk. How about that?”

“I want to go home. Now.”

“No one will love you like I do.” His voice was matter of fact. He turned to look at me. “You have very pretty hair, all misted in the rain like that. Hair to write a poem about.”

“Please. I don’t feel good. I have to go home.”

“Listen to me, Stella—.”

“Let me out. I have to get out.” I gripped the door handle. He leaned across and grabbed at my hand. “Stella, listen—” he said. “Listen to me—you don’t understand—” but I couldn’t listen.

I couldn’t understand. Not anymore. I opened the car door. The road spun out before me. Less than a foot away was the grass, and then, without thinking, I tumbled from the car.

I curled up and hit the pavement and a bolt of pain zigzagged through me. I rolled toward the grass. I was soaking wet; my tights were torn. I could hear Daniel shouting at me, trying to stop the car, to pull over. The other cars were honking, but I got up, and I saw his car, and then I saw him getting out, coming after me, and then I was all legs and arms and jagged breath, running.

This was suburbia after all, not the country Daniel had proclaimed it. There were lit houses and convenience stores and an open all night Store 24 where as soon as I ran inside, the cashier, a clean-scrubbed girl with a blonde ponytail, reached for the phone and held it out to me. My tights were ripped. I had a gash across one arm and my mascara raccooned along my eyes.

My dress and stockings were torn, and my shoes, ballerina flats from Pappagallo with ribbon soles, the same shoes that had cost me two weeks’ allowance, were ruined. The thin soles had come right off and one of my feet was bleeding. I told her I was all right, that I all I wanted to do was call a cab and go home. “Honey, you sure?’ she said.

It didn’t take me long to get home. The cab driver was an older man who didn’t seem the least bit surprised by my appearance. He didn’t say a single word to me except ,“That will be $10.50,” when we got to my house. As soon as I got out of the cab, he sped away.

The lights were out except for the one my mother kept on at night, to let prowlers know this was not an empty house, even when it sometimes was. It was 11:00 p.m. My mother wouldn’t be home until morning. Rose would still be out, if she came home at all. I let myself in as quietly as I could and walked toward my room, wanting only to burrow under the quilt, to sleep, to forget everything about my life, when there, suddenly, was Rose, in the corridor.

I waited for her to tell me that she had told me so, that I got what I deserved, that the real question was just who did I think I was? Or maybe she would leave me to my own devices and instead go to the phone and call Daniel and demand an explanation. I wavered in the hall. I felt myself listing. Behind me, the phone rang, a sound stinging the air, and for the first time that I could remember in a long time, Rose didn’t rush to answer it. And then Rose moved forward and for a moment, because her face was so unreadable, I thought she was going to strike me, and I put my hands up, to shield my face.

Her arms hooped about me. I felt her warmth, the slow slide of her hair as it spilled against me. She led me toward the bathroom, not letting go. She kept whispering, ignoring the doorbell, which made me jump. She whispered but it might have been Morse code because all I could hear was the soothing hiss of sound, mesmerizing me. She took off my clothes and wadded them into the trash. Then she drew me a bath, all the while still whispering to me.

The doorbell stopped. The phone was silent. She held up one finger for me to wait and disappeared, and when she came back, she held up a blue packet with some French writing scribbled across it. She tore the top and then poured cobalt-colored crystals into the bath, stroking one hand through the water until it bubbled up blue. There was the smell and tang of citrus. She helped me step in, lowering me into the tub as gently as a fine piece of silk.

The phone rang again and I stiffened. I tried to talk, but she simply put her hand to my mouth. “Shhhh,” she said.

And when I started to cry, she sluiced back my hair with her fingers. “We’re always sisters,” she said quietly, and then I shut my eyes, and then I didn’t hear the phone anymore. Instead, I gripped at the hand she offered me, I held fast to her, even as the slow steady waves of the bath water washed over me like a tide.