SYLVIE’S BABY was a boy, seven pounds five ounces, named Jesse, not after anyone, Sylvie explained—it was just that Butch like its sound. He’d taken an extra shift at the bar and wasn’t around much, but the money was great, and little Springtime kept Sylvie company at home. Peabo, Pop’s flying instructor, had given Dolly his frequent flier miles so she could come back to help out, but after she was there for two days Butch said he was sick of tripping over her, and when Ma heard Dolly was at Sylvie’s she pulled out the baby blanket she was knitting and reworked it into a sweater for Teddy instead.
“I suppose you’ve been planning this little visit all along,” she said to me, bitterly. I didn’t answer. I was contemplating the vision of myself as evil genius, devoted to driving my mother out of her mind through stratagems as devious as persuading the bad sister to guard the good sister’s doorway and so, cruelly separating a woman from her firstborn grandchild.
“I suppose your father will be here next,” she said. Yes, Mother, and after that, Albert Speer—I got him a weekend pass; I’ve got connections in Hell. I sighed, and this was apparently an incitement, because Ma said suddenly, and with great force, as if she’d been holding her tongue all this time: “His first act toward you was an act of murder! And now somehow he comes out smelling like a rose, you’re willing to shelter him, to care for him, you don’t even care what he did to me.”
My heart filled with sympathy for this poor aspiring murderer. I was the author of his troubles, but I hadn’t meant to be, and I wanted something to come out right for him, someday.
“I guess I should have learned by now that no one is going to understand me, not even my own child.”
After she got off, I held the receiver button down for a second and then dialed Sylvie, to ask Dolly to come visit me, so I could take her under my wing. I was going to build a perfect replica of childhood for her. I put an old patch quilt on our guest bed, and turned it down the way Ma used to, when she had a moment of respite and was trying to make things nice. And I made Ma’s spaghetti sauce for dinner, and planned a trip to the aquarium the day after she arrived. I went to five different florists looking for Queen Anne’s lace and bee balm to make a bouquet like the ones we used to pick at home.
“Those are field flowers,” a clerk explained, looking at me strangely, so I could see I’d violated some florist etiquette that everyone else understood. “You know, the kind that grow wild. There’s no point in selling them.”
“Well, unfortunately I do not happen to be in possession of a field,” I huffed. The nerve of her, acting as if just because I didn’t have a field I was somehow less of a person and not entitled to the same flowers as everyone else. I felt like bringing her up on a civil rights charge. “I mean, look at this! You have a special on Asian terrestrial orchids!” Was this what was left to the poor and unlanded, a bunch of expensive and probably carnivorous jungle plants that looked like mutated sexual organs and smelled of mouthwash and paint thinner? I turned on my heel.
And there she was, my sister, alighting with her many parcels from the bus across the street from the florist, dropping one glove, then another, bending to retrieve them and losing her glasses, the scarf sliding from around her neck, then, her face lit up as soon as she saw me and she ran toward me across the busy street, though her shoes stayed behind and the bus driver was holding out the purse she’d left on her seat.
As I hugged her I felt her steel herself, as if I were holding her too tight or too long. I stepped back. I had so much to say to Dolly and none of it could really fit into words. We stood there at the curb, looking at each other with hope and suspicion, like people on a blind date. When I last knew her, before I went to Sweetriver, she’d been a mystical nine-year-old who lived according to a mad Talmud of inner rules: she couldn’t go to school without a little bracelet she’d woven for herself out of cherry twigs, and she’d counted Ma’s goodnight kiss as an amulet and refused to speak afterward, answering any question with a flurry of frantic hand gestures meant to illustrate the dangers she’d face if her silence were broken. Since then, I’d seen her once or twice a year in the midst of the squabbling parents, flapping chickens, and barking dogs that constituted our family. I had no real sense of her. And here she was, tall as a woman, uncertain as a girl, scratching the back of her left ankle with her right foot like an ibis or flamingo or some other bird that seems, though it spends its life in water, not to care to wet its feet. A spark of confidence and her face would have been beautiful. What struck me about her, though, was her inquisitive silence: she was full of questions she didn’t dare ask. She’d stepped on too many land mines in her life … maybe that was why she stood on one foot.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said.
“No, no, only a minute … I’m so glad to see you.”
“Yes,” she said, looking left and right as if now that she had crossed the street, she remembered she ought to watch out for cars. “Yes, it’s really nice of you, Beatrice … This is just great.”
She might have been reading from a phrase book. She knew there was some proper way to address formidable me, with my degree and the terrible shadow cast by my sexuality, and now my great big-shot job at the library—but who could guess what it was? I felt terrible for her, having to look up to me, but I knew I was the best she had.
“Welcome to Hartford!” I said.
“Thank you,” she said earnestly. “Oh, you should see the baby! He’s so adorable, his little eyes are so dark and round and curious. You’ll love him, Beatrice, and the trailer is just like a little playhouse!”
“Cramped, though,” I said, in case she was hurt that Butch had sent her away, but she frowned and insisted the place was lovely and spacious, that you’d never guess it was only eighty-four square feet, and furthermore, she could completely understand why it might have been hard for them to have her there, with a brand-new baby and all. “It’s perfect! He’s the most beautiful little baby,” she said again, as if she had to prove it to me, since I was on the Pill and probably believed all babies ought to be killed.
“All they really need is money,” she said. We were back at the apartment and she was looking around at all of Lee’s furniture. “It’s hard, with a baby—they’re doing the best they can, Butch works and works, it’s a hard life.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not money that’s lacking, it’s emotional wherewithal,” I tried to explain. “They’re totally at sea, how can they support each other? How can they make a good foundation for their child?”
She looked at me without comprehension. “I suppose the library hired you because of all the college?” she asked.
“I suppose that had something to do with it,” I said.
“Not everyone has to go to college, Beachy,” she said sharply. “Plenty of people do just fine without it. They learn a trade, they work their way up.”
Was she turning into my father? She’d failed to mold herself completely in Ma’s image, and look what had happened. Dolly had to listen to him, all day, every day. She didn’t know a single person west of the Mississippi, except Pop, and she was in danger of becoming lost in him, of knowing the exact labyrinth where his heart and mind came together, and not one other thing.
I’d escaped; Dolly had followed him into the fire. I wondered if I could pull her back somehow without falling in myself.
“Lots of people do fine without college,” I said, carefully. “It’s absolutely true that there are all kinds of paths through life.”
“Pop never went to college,” she said, recognizing my wariness and resenting it.
“Indeed, Pop never went to college and look at all he’s done,” I said.
“Right!” said Dolly, who was unaccustomed to irony. Her face relaxed. I felt her tension drain away. “I wish more people could understand that, Beatrice,” she said.
Lee came in with a folded towel and washcloth for her, in a very tasteful shade of eggplant—she’d bought them when we moved in, to complement the pink and gray tiles in the bathroom. I checked Dolly’s face—yes, she was properly impressed, she had never seen towels like this. And she seemed slightly uncertain—wasn’t it wrong somehow to have nice towels? I myself had always had a secret lust for towels, and thick rugs, and rose-printed curtains like the ones from my mother’s girlhood, before she got lost in her jungle of rage.
“It’s very nice of you to have me,” Dolly said to Lee. “I’m so glad to have the chance to get to know you.” She opened her bag and set her things on the dresser.
“You look beautiful, Dolly,” I said, because she did, in a very cool way, and because we always said this, out of love, to each other.
A ray of hope shone in her face but immediately vanished. “I can’t look in the mirror, Beachy,” she said. “I know I look just like Pop.”
Like the exact sort of person her own mother despised. She got into bed and Lee and I moved around the kitchen, setting out the breakfast things. “So, I’ll pick up juice at San Juan’s tomorrow,” I said. “And you’ll get the fish at Louie’s?” We’d already planned this, but I wanted to feel like the head of household, whose child was settling down to sleep. It was an accomplishment, this calmness. It was worth the sacrifice.
“Good night, Dolly,” I said at her door, but she didn’t answer, and I thought, She’s at home here. I intended to keep her.
Lee always seemed anxious when she found me reading, as if I might find something in a novel that would turn me against her. She never said as much; in fact, she’d often bring me a cup of tea, or ask if my light was bright enough, but I could feel her discomfort. Once, when I was involved in a book and read right through breakfast instead of looking at the paper, she asked, “What’s it about?” with a kind of irritated disbelief, and later used the phrase “the life of the mind” as code for “an affectation.” So I didn’t read when we were at home together, and once we lived in the city and I began to feel really guilty toward her, I stopped reading at all—I was determined not to betray her. Now, though, I picked up my copy of Middlemarch, with all the notes I’d taken in Philippa’s class, and brought it to bed with me. Lee was asleep. It was dark and quiet, and the bouquet of anemones I’d settled for hovered there in the vase. The étagère stood as serene as if it had been passed down to us through the generations, and I thought for a minute that there might be real possibility in my future, that my promise might be more than some fantasy my mother had cooked up. Stetson saw it too, after all. Falling asleep, I thought of him.
* * *
“IT’S SO nice to have a sister who can take me places, like this,” Dolly said, as we got on the bus to go to the aquarium. I, who’d been planning it all month, was excited as a child, but she sounded mostly dutiful. It occurred to me that she was constantly pretending—to be excited and happy, to rely on Pop, to be fine without Ma … until the pretense took on its own life, protected her so she didn’t have to see herself alone in a desert. She could tell I was happy to be the big sister, the guide, so she was playing the little sister for all it was worth. Well, I was going to show her a better way. There’d been a photograph in the paper of a tank full of billowing jellyfish, “moon jellies,” whose transparency held light so they seemed to glow in the dark. When Dolly saw this, she might know some of the things that were possible if you broke through the invisible barrier around our family.
I’d offered her yogurt for breakfast and she’d looked at me as if I must be out of my mind. She’d keep Ma alive in her absence by keeping to Ma’s ways, and this meant despising yogurt and persons who liked yogurt, and other foods or habits or words. As we walked down the sidewalk to the bus stop, she stepped conscientiously over each crack.
“I’ve never been to an aquarium,” she said, with assiduous awe. If only I could act the parent, and she the child—well there was safety in that, for both of us. The bus ride might take us exactly where we wanted to go, and when we stood before the enormous tanks in the dim undersea light, watching the fish flash by, we’d become the children we were supposed to be, amazed and joyful as the world opened out before us.
“You’re going to love it,” I said, thinking how damned inept our parents were, how I’d show Dolly the world.
I’d seen the aquarium from the bus before, at the intersection of Park and Vine, but there was a new subdivision going up along Vine Street, and where I remembered a little corner gas station set in a tangled woodland there was a landscape of sandy canyons now, with backhoes grinding over them on heavy treads. The light was green, and the other direction seemed to lead straight into the woods, so I pulled Dolly along westward.
“It’s just the next block,” I told her. Vine Street had no sidewalks, just a wide drainage ditch with lengths of plastic pipe laid beside it. One or two houses had already been built—a little boy was trying to pedal a tricycle in a muddy driveway while his mother smoked a cigarette in her open door. I nodded to her and a shadow crossed her face—I felt as if she’d laugh at me if I asked her for directions, and if she laughed at me I’d probably disintegrate, leaving Dolly all alone. We walked on along the street, which had widened to four lanes and curved assuredly through the empty land—it must lead somewhere, and the aquarium seemed the likeliest place.
“It’s kind of barren here,” Dolly said, “I mean, in a very nice way—because they’re improving it.” We could hear the heavy equipment downshifting to climb the hills, which were several stories tall.
“Is it like Wyoming?” I asked.
“Oh, no!” she said. “You know, Wyoming’s got the richest mineral stores in the whole country. There’s no sand there at all—it’s all rock and clay and if you dig down just a foot the earth is all red and gold and green.”
“I meant, is this a little like where you live—a development?”
“I guess,” she said, not wanting to contradict. “Maybe it will be, when it’s done.” We rounded the corner with no sign of the aquarium. We seemed to be in the midst of a choppy sea of sand with no compass, and on the horizon a lowering sun. I picked up the pace, determined on the next curve. It was the middle of March and the pastel sky promised spring but the wind was from the north and right in our faces.
“Do you think maybe it’s moved?” Dolly asked. (In our family it was considered very impolite to suggest someone had taken a wrong turn.)
“God, how would you move an aquarium?” I asked, though if they had moved it, this wouldn’t be my mistake. “No, it’s right around here, I’ve seen it,” I said. “Not much farther now.” The suspicion that I might be walking in the wrong direction only spurred me on: I could not, I would not, be the latest person to lead Dolly into the wilderness; she trusted me and it would be too awful to disappoint her. “Just another minute,” I said.
“It’s nice to have a little walk,” Dolly said. “Stretch my legs.”
“I wish the wind would stop,” was the next thing she said to me. Besides its being cold, the wind was full of sand now, which meant that either it had switched direction or that we had. We’d come to the bend I’d pinned my hopes on, and could see down a long stretch to the light at a distant intersection. There were no longer any trucks or cranes working, and the land was churned up with the trees still rooted in it. We’d walked more than a mile.
“It’s just up at the light,” I said. It was right near a stoplight, I remembered.
“Do you think they’ll have a water fountain?” Dolly asked. I looked over at her—her cheeks were flushed and she was beginning to limp a little—her shoe had worn through the heel of her sock.
“Oh, they have a whole cafeteria,” I said. “We’ll sit down and have toast and tea!”
She smiled in the deepest way—toast and tea was a phrase from our childhood, or really from my mother’s childhood, during which there had been, she told us, department store lunchrooms where tea was served with cream cakes and fresh strawberries. She spoke of it with such longing that we’d longed for it too.
“I don’t know why Pop wants to live way out West,” she confessed suddenly. “It’s not like there’s anything for him to do, really, just sit by the phone and watch the news. I don’t really understand.” She worked at understanding, for a second, but in the end, the idea didn’t appeal. “We’re together, that’s the important thing,” she reminded herself.
We’d reached the intersection, and it was just that—eight stoplights strung up across two four-lane thoroughfares, surrounded by more raw land, with nothing else in sight except one of those impregnable telephone company structures that confound the romantic by being at once so mysterious and so dull.
“I don’t know, Dolly, I can’t find it,” I said. I could hear the disappointed, querulous note in my voice and I stopped talking instantly because I was afraid I was going to cry and I knew there was nothing worse than having the person you rely on fall apart that way.
“It’s okay, Beachy,” she said. “I don’t have to see the aquarium.”
She was so sweet—I wanted to smack her. How wrong, how perverse of her to keep renouncing and renouncing, first for my father’s sake, now for mine. I had promised her something I couldn’t give her, pulling her along the side of a sewage gully to bring her nowhere, and still she refused to be angry, or even disappointed. I sat down on the bank of the ditch and rested my head on my knees. The great flood of cars that had been dammed up at the light gave way suddenly and roared past us.
“I’ve screwed up,” I said then, trying to sound lighthearted. “It must have been the other way. We’ll have to turn around,” I said. “I don’t know what else to do.”
She nodded. “It really doesn’t matter, Beachy,” she said. “It’s just nice to get to spend some time with you.”
She meant to mean it, I knew. I stood up and dusted myself and we started back. We’d come much farther than I’d guessed—miles. I’d dragged her along, walking and walking as if no map were available and no one else would know the way, searching for an aquarium as if it was a single flower in a twenty-acre field. How long had it been since we got off the bus? It seemed to be rush hour already.
“Let’s hitch!” I said, and we stuck out our thumbs the way they do in the movies, but no one even slowed. They didn’t see us, or maybe we looked so pathetic no one dared to stop, lest they find themselves saddled with a pair of foundlings. I began to run, backward, with my thumb out, and to edge into the road as if I might throw myself in front of somebody’s car. Now they swerved in wide arcs around us, eyes still averted.
As we came back to the bus stop, I saw the sign for the aquarium over the trees, about half a block away—it hadn’t been visible from the other angle. Neither of us cared about it anymore, but we did want a drink. As we went up the steps, parched and covered with dust from the excavation, a young woman came out with a ring of keys.
“We close at five,” she said, looking at us sadly. She could see something about us that we could have kept hidden if we hadn’t been running through a dust bowl for hours. She pointed to the clock inside, which showed the time as 5:02. Beneath it was a tank the size of a small room, filled with fish in shades of azure and silver-green. I thought of smashing down the door.
“It’s okay, Beachy,” Dolly said. “We’ll come another day.” She sat down on the step and wiped her face with her sleeve.
“It’s not okay,” I said angrily.
She blinked, and looked at me in wounded surprise—how could it be, when she had done everything just as I’d asked her, and really, she was as good as gold, polite to Lee even while our being Lithuanian was so strange and unnerving to her—rushing to wash the dishes after dinner—she had even insisted on paying my bus fare. How could I answer her so sharply?
“The important thing is that we’re together,” she said.
“That is not the important thing,” I said, through my teeth. “The important thing is…” but I couldn’t think. Maybe nothing was very important. I felt the impulse that had just arisen—to tear all the veils and set my hand on something true—recede. What did it matter, after all, any of it? Nothing would change. We would all go on spinning outward, away from each other, each foolish hope failing, each desperate move leading to a worse consequence, whether or not Dolly and I saw the jellyfish in the Hartford Aquarium.
“You’re right, of course,” I said. “It’s just, I’m so sorry.” My voice, infuriatingly, was breaking. I tried to cover it with a laugh. “Oh, dear, why do these things always happen to us?” I said. The afternoon would shrink away; we would turn it into a neat anecdote that confirmed our sisterhood; we’d laugh to think what we must have looked like to those drivers who’d passed us. It would be funny one day, it would, and we both laughed dully in anticipation.
“If we could just get something to drink,” she said then, wearily—no one could accuse her of complaining. But the museum was closed, the woman had disappeared back into the building, there was nothing in any direction but the lees and swells of bulldozed earth. Thousands of cars sped out of the barren landscape now, heading, it seemed, nowhere, the bus among them. It picked up its passengers and took off again before we could brook the traffic to reach it. the driver staring stonily ahead while I tried to signal him, the passengers looking on mildly, full of their own thoughts. They had seen many more curious sights than this bedraggled woman, waving her arms on a street corner as if she thought she was drowning. We got the six o’clock bus and rode back to Frog Hollow in a silence broken only by Dolly’s earnest expressions of gratitude for the wonderful afternoon she knew I’d meant her to have.