I huddled over my class notes outside the economics building, certain that the first snap quiz of the semester waited inside. Flipping through pages of my suddenly alien handwriting, I heard footsteps: hesitant, then resolute, then hesitant again. They stopped a few feet away and, as I still sometimes did, I imagined that when I looked up Kate would be standing before me.
I looked up. This time Kate did face me. She’d let her blond hair grow long, and now it was coiled into a knot at the back of her head, a few fringes loose and shining. Her face gleamed in the sun, and when she didn’t turn from my gaze, for one brief and weightless moment I almost believed that I’d conjured her up.
“Hello,” Kate said, trying for a light tone to make the best of this awkward moment. She shifted her artist’s portfolio from one arm to the other.
“Oh, hi,” I offered, somehow able to echo her casual greeting.
Kate cleared her throat with a tight little cough and asked, “How are you?”
“Fine, I suppose—still suffering through my major. How are you doing?” I gathered up my books, waiting to see if she’d take this chance to escape from me and what I knew about her.
Shifting slightly to the side as if to block me, Kate said in a rush, “I’m going to be a cartoonist for the school paper.”
She didn’t try to hurry off. Instead, she tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ears. Still I was wary: after so long, why this small talk?
Kate misunderstood my silence. “It’s true. The art director is in one of my classes. He likes my work.”
“That’s … great,” I ventured.
“The problem is, I don’t have the best sense of humor. But how can I refuse?”
“You’re right. A challenge is a challenge.”
The bell rang inside and I glanced at the door of the economics building. I was going to be late. Kate pulled a sheet from her portfolio. “Do you see anything funny in this?” She handed me a sketch of a snail shell, its rounded spiral imbued with strange life: dark, edgy markings ran along its surface like the mysterious notations of electrocardiograms, recording my excitement as I held the page.
A little dizzy at what she’d done, I managed to say, “Well, it’s not funny ha-ha. Funny weird.”
“Weird?”
“It might help if you added a caption,” I said, and again I examined this shell that now seemed to twirl madly in space. “How about something like … ‘No more carnival rides for me!’”
Kate frowned slightly in concentration. “I think I get it.”
“Well, I know it’s not much. If I had more time I could probably come up with something better.”
“You think you could?” Kate said, the waver in her voice an apology, a confession.
This wasn’t a chance meeting at all. Kate had sought me out. I forgave her, forgave her so easily because she needed me, or at least she needed my words to translate her self- portraits. “Absolutely,” I replied. “Show me a drawing and I’ll come up with two or three lines to choose from. Then we can pick out our favorite.”
“Our?” she said, so softly I might have imagined it.
“Our,” I repeated—I knew all about business propositions. “We’ll have to share the byline too, of course.”
*
I’ve often wondered if I should have made Kate court me more, even at the risk of losing her, yet I never wanted to exact a punishment. I knew how it felt not to be forgiven. We never once mentioned that afternoon in her dormitory room, however its memory may have hovered over us, and instead we devoted ourselves in the following weeks to combining her uncanny drawings with my captions. A straight-backed chair, so alone on the page, said to itself, I remember there was wind and rain, but where? A half-eaten sandwich abandoned on a bench mused Why must I be denied digestion? A flat stone, hurtling in mid-skip across a pond, declared above its echoing shadow, If only I could float!
We called our cartoon strip “True Confessions,” though Kate always preferred her own suggestion, “Thing Thoughts.” Conflating our names, we signed it “Mite,” but no one on campus seemed particularly interested in uncovering our identities. At best, the strip was mildly popular among our small circle of friends. I suspected that the art director, an anxious sort of fellow who called Kate at all hours about each impending deadline, kept the strip running only because he was interested in far more than her drawings. Nearly every work session I’d have to answer the phone and field his halting attempts at nonchalance before he asked if my collaborator was there.
I was willing to double as Kate’s bodyguard because the more we worked together the more it became clear that she and I were kindred spirits. Her desire to both hide and reveal herself made her objects come alive, and understanding this helped me add something of myself to the struggle seeping out of her precisely drawn lines. Kate always considered my captions with a sort of quizzical acceptance, as if my words had all along been her inspiration.
I loved to sit beside Kate and watch her draw. Her fingers barely held the pencil—a light touch for such clarity—and her careful movements became a form of floating, a sign language somehow caught on paper. One evening, as Kate was about to begin another illustration, I placed my hand next to her notepad.
“Draw my hand?”
“Michael. You know—”
“It’s not a person,” I said, “it’s a hand. Quite an interesting piece of machinery, actually. C’mon, give it a try.”
Kate closed her eyes, sighed, and then looked down at my patient hand. Slowly she began sketching the whorls of my knuckles, as if they were separate little whirlpools pulling her in. Next she drew those long-ridged bones that fanned from my wrist, and slowly the individual parts took hold of each other and grew fingers, took on the contours and shadows of flesh.
Finally she set down her pencil. My hand lay twinned before us. I gave her no time to choose between them: I turned mine over, palm up.
“Draw it again?” I asked.
She did, first extending the particular curves and intersections of the lines of my palm, though no palm yet existed on the page. She continued that seemingly chaotic crosshatching until they led to my fingerprints, where she stopped. After a long pause, she drew the outline of my hand, then gave dimension to all the rounded slopes that circled the center of my palm. Again she hesitated, staring at those five fingers and their empty faces. Meticulously she gave expression to the delicate, echoing curves of my prints, adding slight shadows that hinted at sadness and anger, subdued joy, the possibility of laughter.
When she was done I stared at my hand and its image; indeed, both seemed filled with conflicting emotions.
“Now touch it?” I whispered.
Kate hesitated, then laughed quietly with a hint of resignation. She slid one long-nailed finger along the lines of my palm, just lightly touching my skin: now we were pencil and page. But before she could finish tracing me, my fingers reached up and held her hand. Neither of us moved. I pulled her gently toward me. Her eyes narrowed with pleasure, then closed as we settled and twisted on the carpet, and I let her imagine a private sketch of what we did together.
*
And so we began our entry into sexual mysteries that were breathtaking for their very ordinariness: the borders between ticklish and arousing that we’d chart on each other’s bodies; an unexpected stomach gurgling or surreptitious fart mingling with the cries and moans we were capable of; the shifting map of our sweaty scents as we accomplished exquisite unfurlings in each other’s arms.
Before curling into sleep together we’d practice an intimate ritual. Kate would stretch with languid grace and pull a tissue from the box. “Want one?” she’d ask lazily. When I whispered yes she’d lift out another. Then Kate would sop up the excess sperm that dripped from her, while I dabbed her moistness from my penis.
Kate always threw her tissues at the wastebasket in the corner, one by one, and I tossed mine too. We rarely made the target, and our failed shots—crumpled balls of sticky tissue—lay scattered on the floor. Yet in the morning, while on my way to open the bedroom curtains, I saw those little balls as flowers blooming out of the hardwood floor. I’d bend down to gather them up, always surprised how light they’d become overnight—our dried sex was now a delicate white crust, enfolded in the tissues’ twists and curves.
*
At first Kate kept even our artistic collaboration a secret from her parents. “They wouldn’t approve,” she said simply, and though they apparently disapproved of nearly everything she was in no hurry to include me in that long list. As for me, during my periodic phone calls to remind my father that he had another son, I’d occasionally make a few cryptic comments that hinted at a girlfriend, but Father’s terse telephone formality invited little more than another rundown of my latest courses and an estimation of future grades. And Kate was certainly in no rush for introductions. The few stories of my childhood that she could bear to hear made her draw such ugly pictures—the chipped face of a toppled doll, a stain on a rug that looked alive—that I held off any further confidences.
Kate claimed her own childhood wasn’t worth the telling. “I’m glad I don’t have the kind of stories you do,” she’d say, responding to my skepticism. Though ordinary daily details would have satisfied me, I didn’t press her, suspecting that I loved Kate at least partly for her need for privacy—I wanted to embrace whatever was frightened inside her and make it mine. So I was startled, thrilled, and made more than a little anxious when Kate asked me to accompany her home for the Thanksgiving holiday.
*
Kate’s parents met us at the front door, their mild faces so nondescript I couldn’t quite grasp where her delicate features came from. Her blond hair, though, was clearly a gift from her mother, even if Mrs. Martin’s resembled a doll’s wig that had been fussed with too much.
“Welcome, dear,” her mother said with a brush of cheeks before stepping back and adding with a smile, “Oh, your hair will look so beautiful when you finally get a decent cut.”
When Kate winced, I saw for one fleeting moment my sister flinching before Father’s words after her school play. Then Kate’s father reached out and without a word shook my hand, forcing me to introduce myself. We all stood together for a clumsy moment, none of us quite meeting the others’ eyes.
“Well …?” Kate murmured.
“Oh, of course,” Mrs. Martin replied with a glance at her husband, and they led us into a home thick with upholstered furniture and yellow shag carpeting. Heavy living room curtains closed out the crisp blue autumn sky, yet even dull light couldn’t hide the cold gleam of the porcelain figurines lined up in a curio cabinet: a little band of musical frogs, Jack and Jill lugging a pail together, a barefoot student asleep at his desk, a family of elephants, a quartet of drunks crooning beside a lamppost.
Kate vanished into the kitchen with her mother. I settled onto the couch across from Mr. Martin, who grunted as he fit into a chair, turning a bland gaze on me that I’d been warned was deceptive. Anticipating a fatherly grilling, I was especially nervous about any question touching on life after college—I was still marching through an array of business courses without a clear idea of what I’d do with my degree. What I most cared for at school was the comic strip Kate and I worked on together, but this was another of the many subjects that had to be kept secret.
I needn’t have worried—Kate’s father hoarded words as if they were in limited supply. He so efficiently parried whatever conversational gambit I came up with that I began to suspect this was his way of drawing me out, of making me give away something he wasn’t supposed to know. Adding to my unease were the snippets of casual criticism I heard Kate’s mother offer her in the kitchen: “Straighten your shoulders, dear … what do you have against lipstick, anyway?”
Finally Kate murmured an excuse and joined us in the living room. She tucked herself in a corner chair, but instead of speaking she simply joined her father’s lingering silence. In the dim light Kate’s face began to resemble her parents’ bland features, her cheeks so smooth that I imagined her skin was as cold as those tiny figures in the curio cabinet. If only I could reach out and gently stroke life back into her face, her arms.
One slow minute after another passed, and Kate sat so still she might as well have been one of her own sketched objects, waiting for a caption. Afraid she was somehow sinking into her family’s gravitational pull, I realized I had to offer her a way out—with words, words, any words I could think of, and I soon found myself in the middle of a slightly manic rundown of my current classes, piling one trivial detail onto another, from the relative weight of each course’s textbooks to the statistical likelihood that at least one of my professors per semester would smoke a pipe.
At the sound of my voice Mrs. Martin came out of the kitchen and asked me to help set the table. Trying to hide my reluctance, I joined her with a hearty, “Of course.” Then I extended my living room monologue, loud enough so it would carry back to Kate, and commented on the tastefully arranged bowls and serving plates, the lovely blue-rimmed dishes, the impressively ancient silverware. Mrs. Martin moved from chair to chair beside me, hemming and hmming in vague disapproval until we completed the table’s careful symmetries.
The carving of the turkey was a funereal event, Kate’s father silently slicing soft white slabs of meat and setting them in even layers on a serving dish. Then the various bowls were passed back and forth with great solemnity and still Kate said nothing. Spooning cranberries onto my plate, and by now crazy with the urge to keep talking, I announced, “Oh, Cape Cod Bells, the most popular type of cranberries.”
Recalling that experimental corner of my father’s nursery, I embarked on a disquisition on how the cranberry bush grows in sandy soil that has to be drained before the flowering season. Having given up on me as unacceptably chatty, Kate’s parents answered with nods. Kate merely passed the bowl of stuffing yet still I rattled away.
“But what does a cranberry bush look like, exactly?” Kate interrupted, finally joining in, accepting the escape I offered. She faced me, her eyes clear and curious.
“Well, it has small evergreen leaves,” I replied happily. “They’re pale underneath, if I remember correctly, and their edges roll back a bit.”
Kate had heard enough of my nursery days appreciate my former skills, and now she lifted a forkful of sweet potato to her lips and asked, “What do the branches look like?”
“Um, they’re thin, and connected to a woody stem that’s kind of like a creeper. It stays low to the ground.”
“And the flower, Michael? Is there such a thing as a cranberry flower?” she asked, eyes narrowing with pleasure, because of course she knew there must be a flower and that I’d be able to describe it.
“It’s light pink, only about a half inch or so across, I think—”
“So tiny.”
“Yes, tiny—”
“What do the petals look like?”
“Well, they’re … narrow. But they open out nicely.”
By now released from the spell of her parents, Kate’s eyes had almost closed, my words the model for what she limned within herself. Imagining from what strange angle she’d shadow in that flower, I tried to inspire her inner sketching: “Those little petals curl up in the wind, like … arms reaching out.”
“And the stamens? What do they look like?”
Kate’s parents took in our words with a raising of eyebrows that, in this household, was equivalent to assaulting pots with wooden spoons. My Kate ignored them, and we continued our invisible, collaborative illustration.
*
On my lap lay a drawing of a coffee mug so enveloped in darkness it seemed to be melting. The cup’s shadowy edges also suggested a woman’s profile—wasn’t that a cheek, an ear, a wave of dark hair? Perhaps I was wrong. The more I stared, the more it switched from shadows to something like a face and then back again, a frustrating ambiguity that reminded me of that Thanksgiving months ago when I wasn’t sure at first whose side Kate was on. Even now, though we were living together and content beyond what I’d ever hoped for, sometimes Kate’s eyes confounded me as I looked at her across the room or over a spread of pillows—were they blue with gray highlights, or gray with the brightest blue shining through?
Concentrating on Kate’s drawing again, I tried to imagine something hot inside the cup—cappuccino, herbal tea, tangy broth—that would help me guess my way into a caption. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. Kate had effectively moved in since January, but those weren’t her distinctive soft steps that stopped outside the door to my apartment, or any friend’s that I could recall. With an unhappy lurch in my stomach, I wondered if one of her parents had finally decided to discover our secret.
The knock on the door was familiar—light, yet insistent. Before I could place its signature the door opened. There stood my sister in a dark rumpled skirt, her bright red blouse only half tucked in, her gaunt face forcing out a smile.
“Well, hello, Michael,” she said in a small hoarse voice, and then she stepped inside.
Her sudden appearance so surprised me I could only produce a feeble “Laurie?”
She kissed me on the cheek and then collapsed on the couch, kicking her shoes off. “Oh, I want to hear something else—how about, ‘Good Lord, dear sister, you look as if you’ve driven across three state lines without a wink of sleep.”
“You have?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Laurie plumped up a couch pillow. “Wake me up in time for dinner?” she whispered, almost instantly slipping into sleep, a curl of hair easing over her cheek as her breathing steadied and slowed.
I hadn’t seen my sister, had barely spoken to her since she’d gone off to college last fall, so why had she come here, so obviously in some kind of trouble? I almost shook her shoulders to wake her up, but her calm face reminded me of our darkest days with Mother, when I sometimes checked on my brother and sister at night, always startled at how sleep appeared to wipe the worry from their faces.
Laurie’s profile, pressed against a dark pillow, eerily suggested that border of shadows on Kate’s cup. I returned to my quiet struggle with the drawing. It was a woman’s face, I decided. Or at least that’s what I saw now, and my caption would have to make a reader see it too. I feel like my head is filled with hot coffee was a possibility. Occasionally I glanced at Laurie as she shifted an arm or leg in her sleep, hoping for inspiration, and then Kate returned, huffing through the door with two brimming bags of groceries.
Her smile dissolved at the sight of a young woman asleep on the couch. “Who’s that?”
“Laurie.”
She stared without a sign of recognition and I had to add, “My sister.”
“Your sister?” Her voice rose. “Why didn’t you tell me she was—”
“Kate,” I whispered, “I didn’t know. She just appeared.”
“Why is she here?”
“I don’t know that either. She came in and fell asleep like that,” I said, snapping my fingers. “We’ll have to wait until she wakes up.”
Kate nodded, her mouth a grim line, and I could see that my sister’s sudden appearance conjured up what few stories I’d told of my family—and the specter of those I hadn’t. Shifting the bags in her arms, Kate left for the kitchen.
I followed and helped her unpack the groceries. With growing frustration, Kate couldn’t seem to remember where to put the cans of soup, the cookies, the brown rice. “The cereal, where’s the cereal shelf?” she groused, waving a box of cornflakes.
“Hey, calm down.” I touched Kate’s arm lightly, lingering on the sweaty crook of her elbow. She turned and held me, and over her shoulder I saw Laurie stirring on the couch. “My sister needs some rest,” I whispered into Kate’s ear. “She drove a long way to get here.”
Kate pulled away. “Something must be wrong,” she said, her face crumpling at the possibility of a new and gruesome tale.
“No. Not at all.” Unconvinced by my own words and afraid that Kate might draw me into her fears, I returned to the cans of corn and frozen orange juice, assorted fresh vegetables and the tub of butter cluttering the counter. “Look, let me put the rest of this stuff away. Why don’t you try to relax, maybe hit the books? I’ll cook.”
I cleared out the bags while Kate settled at the desk in the living room, her back to Laurie. As I worked up a sizzling concoction of chopped meat and onions, tomatoes and diced eggplant, I tried convincing myself that no emergency lurked behind my sister’s sudden appearance. After all, wasn’t it just like Laurie to make a dramatic entrance? Wasn’t she happy, now that she was far from home and Father’s strictures? I silently repeated these questions until they slowly became assertions, sturdy facts above dispute. Then, above the sweetly dissonant bubbling of dinner on the stove, I heard the murmur of Kate and Laurie’s voices in the living room.
I stood in the doorway. Sitting side by side on the couch, together they turned their faces to me. So, you’re living with a girlfriend, my sister’s amused eyes said, while Kate’s pleaded silently for rescue.
“You woke up just in time,” I announced. “Dinner is almost ready.”
We sat at the three place settings I’d squeezed on the tiny kitchen table and filled our plates. If my sister’s visit had been spurred by trouble, there was little sign of it: she punctuated mouthfuls of my culinary offering with animated patter about her wild, nocturnal roommate, her decrepit dorm, the ratio of bars to churches in the nearby town and, most of all, the ins and outs of her college theater program.
“So in spite of everything, I got the lead, can you believe it? My first try. I guess there’s just something about me that takes to dark little dramas. Anyway, there was more than one jealous thing in the cast who hoped I’d, I don’t know, drop dead during rehearsals.” Laurie waved her fork like a flag and added airily, “But I’m alive to tell the tale, alive to report that the campus newspaper gave me a rave review.”
Except for the punctuation of a few appreciative comments I added little to the conversation, depressed that I’d never heard any of these stories before. My family was losing even the casual intimacy of shared history. Worse, Laurie’s bright, anxious eyes didn’t match her gleeful monologues, and I was sure Kate noticed this too: she waited for my sister to finally announce a tale of woe.
With the meal finished, we all helped clean up, getting in each other’s awkward way. “Hey, how about a round of Scrabble?” I suggested, thinking that with each of us limited to whatever words seven letters might produce, we’d find ourselves on more equal conversational footing.
Kate and I did speak more, even if we commented mainly on the double and triple values of words and letters, bemoaned a dearth or abundance of consonants, or challenged the occasional suspicious spelling. Meanwhile Laurie rattled away, at one point reciting a monologue from her recent theatrical triumph. When we finally tallied up the spoils of our competing vocabularies, it was Kate who eked out a win.
Blushing a little, she accepted our congratulations, then murmured, “Excuse me,” and padded off to the bathroom. Once the door closed I scooted my chair closer to my sister. “Well, what do you think of Kate?”
Laurie flashed a too precisely casual smile. “Oh, she’s nice.”
I sat back, hurt. “Just nice?”
Unfazed, Laurie arranged another polite smile. “And she’s pretty—”
“I know how she looks.”
She sighed, then leaned over and whispered, “Well, she’s just not onstage.”
“What do you mean?” I asked too loudly, ready to defend Kate’s quiet ways, yet also, I vaguely understood, to bully down my own doubts.
“Just what I said,” Laurie returned. “She doesn’t … project out to the audience. And if she’s not where she is, then where is she?”
I said nothing, remembering how sometimes during lovemaking, when Kate’s ecstatic eyes narrowed to slits, I wondered if she shut out more of the world than she took in.
“By the way, Michael, does she know about Mom?”
“Of course she does.”
Laurie raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“And nothing. We just don’t talk about it much.”
“Oh.” Laurie paused and glanced about the room, stopping at Kate’s drawings taped on the walls. She took them in for a few moments and then asked, her voice slightly dreamy, “Well, what do you talk about?”
I heard the distant whoosh of the toilet and said, “Let’s leave this for later, okay?” I listened to the faint sounds of Kate washing her hands, I couldn’t help thinking she was about to make an entrance with my sister and I a secret audience awaiting her performance. Just as the door opened, Laurie whispered in my ear, “So tell me this—which dwarf is she?”
Though annoyed at my sister for asking such a question, I nodded earnestly, pretending she’d confided something important, because Kate stood in the doorway. She lingered there, hesitant, afraid to interrupt a moment of family intimacy, and I loved her for this, loved her for being present and gracious and proving my sister wrong.
“It’s okay, sweets,” I said, and when she sat beside me I hugged her with perhaps too much fervor.
“Michael?” she whispered, gently shrugging away.
“So, what do you do, Kate?” Laurie asked, clearly relishing our little struggle.
“You mean my major? Art.”
My sister leaned forward, projecting great interest, but I jumped in, gesturing at the sketches on the walls with a foolish flourish. “We collaborate on a daily strip in the school paper. Kate does the illustrations—”
“Those, really?” Laurie said. “They’re so … beautiful.”
I fetched Kate’s latest from a bookshelf and handed it to Laurie. “And I write the captions. I was trying to come up with something for this when you came in.”
My sister examined the mysterious cup as though it were some script she needed to memorize, and I tried to see it through her eyes: a shadowy face, perhaps, staring off at its own world?
Laurie looked up from the page and said, “If my lips touched this cup, they might never speak again.”
Kate quickly glanced at me, and I forced out a tiny laugh. “Funny, that sounds like one of my captions.”
“Well, we are brother and sister.”
Kate reached out for her drawing, offering no response to Laurie’s interpretation. Instead she stretched and yawned. “Please, you guys, don’t mind me, but I’ve got a nine o’clock class tomorrow. Anyway,” she added, turning to my sister, “let me get you settled on the couch before I go off.”
While she gathered bedding from the closet, waving away Laurie’s offer of help, I watched Kate’s nervous hospitality and wondered which dwarf was she? Her own, perhaps, one with a secret name still waiting to be discovered.
Kate kissed me, wished us good night and closed the bedroom door. I turned to my sister, now slumped in her chair. Was she already lost in whatever troubles she’d managed to briefly banish? I didn’t want Kate to overhear them, so I tugged at Laurie’s elbow. “Let’s take a walk.”
She blinked at me without recognition for a moment, then recovered and grinned. “Sure, why not?”
I led us across the sprawling campus, waiting for Laurie to begin her unhappy tale. Instead, we walked without a word until she said, “Dad doesn’t know you’re living with her, does he?”
“No, but if he cared enough to ask about my life, I’d tell him. I really don’t know if he’d be upset.”
“You’re not sure what upsets dear Dad? How lucky for you.”
“So that’s it,” I said, stopping short. “You had another fight? Why am I not surprised you still can’t get along—”
Laurie frowned. “Oh, the only way Dad wants to get along is to be left alone, no complications. Why do you think it was so easy for him to fire you?”
I grimaced at those casually cruel words. Laurie stopped and answered her own question in a kinder tone: “Because you asked too much of him.”
“That’s not why. I failed him—”
“Oh, have it your way, Michael.” She turned away, suddenly interested in a hedge that bordered the engineering building, and I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Then tell me this—why do Dan and Dad get along so well?”
Laurie laughed a bitter laugh that sounded too much like Mother’s. “Those two. They’ll murder each other one of these days, I’m sure of it.”
I reached out and held her arm. “Hey, no jokes—what are you saying?”
Laurie giggled at my anxious face. “Oh, not that kind of murder. Well, something worse, actually—no slit throats, but they’re killing each other, just the same. The more Dan tries to be like Dad, the more Dad hardens that awful front of his that Dan’s trying to imitate. Before you know it, they’ll be the Zombie Twins.”
We continued across the quad and I couldn’t speak, filled with the memory of Dan coming home from the nursery, shaking with frustration over some minor difficulty ordering spring bulbs. Father calmed him down with an insistent patience until they sat in a deepening shared silence on the living room couch. The Zombie Twins. Even though bringing my brother and father together had been disastrous for me, I’d never considered it might be so for them, too.
“Is that what you came to talk about?”
“Oh Michael, nothing so selfless—I’m here for me.”
We stood among a grove of trees leading to the observatory, their dark leaves rustling above us. “So tell me.”
My sister watched me so carefully I believed she knew how afraid I was of what she had to say. She shook her head and pulled back a step. “When my first semester’s grades were sent home, Dad saw I was taking theater classes. So we’ve had our share of … telephone chats. It’s bad enough that I’m still pretending, but he really can’t stand it that I’m doing better in theater than anything else. Last night’s call was just too much, Michael—he said if I take theater again my sophomore year he won’t pay for school.”
“Laurie, you know why he’s worried—”
“I don’t care! When he says I have to drop theater, he’s saying that what I care about doesn’t matter, or worse, that I really don’t matter.” She shuddered. “He’s trying to erase me, rub me out! Just like he did Mom. Well, he’ll never get another chance, not one more. I don’t need a degree to wait on tables, and that’s what I’ll be doing until my big break. So why not quit school?”
“Now there’s a wonderful solution. Come on, Laurie, that’s nuts—”
“I have to be an actress, Michael. I just have to. Did you ever hear of St. Vitus’ Dance?”
“No, what’s that?”
“Ha—there’s what a business major will get you. St. Vitus’ Dance, dear brother, was a very weird epidemic in the Middle Ages.”
“So why don’t you major in hist—”
“Let me finish. People started dancing like crazy, whole towns sometimes. They danced all day and night, bopped ‘til they dropped, and when they woke up they danced again. It was like a plague.”
I stopped walking and knelt down, filled with a ridiculous urge to tighten the laces of my shoes. “You seem perfectly normal to me. No tap dancing at the moment, that I can see.”
“Not here,” Laurie said, wiggling a foot. She pointed to her head. “In here.”
I held my sister, placed my ear against her hair. “Nope, I don’t think so,” I said. “I can’t hear a single dance step.”
She pushed me away. “C’mon, Michael, get real. It’s acting I’ve got inside. And it goes way back, back to when we were kids and things were so crazy. I just hated it when Mom and Dad had those arguments alone in their room, working so hard to keep things quiet. They were playing out scenes we couldn’t see—the most important ones, the ones that changed our lives.”
“So?” I managed.
Laurie eyed me coldly, then said, “If I’m not in a play, I make up my own. When anyone leaves a room or goes off for a walk, I can’t help it, I want to know what they’re doing—who they meet and what they say. Dialogue, speeches, scenes start pouring out inside me. I can’t stop it.”
“C’mon, Laurie,” I said, unable to contain a tremor in my voice, “what are you talking about?”
“Dad’s got it all wrong. He thinks that if I become an actress, I’ll become like Mom. He’s wrong. If I don’t become an actress, then it’s time to worry.”
“Look, don’t you think—” I began in protest, but Laurie ran ahead and leapt in the air, her legs extended like a ballet dancer’s. She twirled along the path, her dark skirt rippling, her arms sweeping away imaginary’ branches.
“Hey, Laurie, come back,” I called, but instead her entire body shivered as she improvised steps to some frantic music I couldn’t hear. A few students coming from the pub paused to stare at Laurie, and I hurried after her. “Will you stop?”
She shook her head no, turning her reply into part of that impetuous dance, her body swirling around and around. Then, after a series of skittering steps, she dashed up a steep path behind one of the dorms. I followed, beset by an echo of my long-ago scramble up the roof after Mother, and then I realized I’d have to play along with Laurie’s performance.
“Bravo!” I called out, clapping.
Laurie bowed briefly, but still she wouldn’t stop and twirled away. So I huffed along after her, improvising a review: “Last night … across the campus of the state university … Laura Kirby, a young visiting artist, gave a stunning display of physical endurance … dancing all night before the smallest of audiences …”
She ran ahead of my praise, her arms waving in uncanny concert with her steps. I could have caught my sister and forced her to stop, but I was afraid to touch her, afraid she actually was host to something contagious.
What was left for me to do? “Look,” I finally asked, “do you want my advice?”
Laurie stopped, her skirt swaying about her legs. Chest heaving, she gasped, “Quick … thinking … big brother. Why … do you think I… came here?”
We sat together on the steps to the library, and Laurie’s gulps of air echoed my own inner breathlessness. Why was she asking me, and what should I possibly say? A terrible fear took hold of me: all my past good intentions had only brought on disasters—finally exposing Mother’s cast of characters, bringing Dan to the nursery. “I don’t know,” I began hesitantly, “I’m afraid you might become like Mom.”
“Mom made up her own stories. That’s what I don’t want to do. I want to memorize scripts, move where the director points me. That’ll keep me safe.”
“Great. You want to follow orders.”
“No, Michael, no. I’ll be acting. And I’ll be accountable—to the audience, the other actors, even the stagehands. I won’t leave anybody behind. Can’t you see that?”
She spoke so fervently that I wanted to believe that this was what she needed. But when I tried to speak no words came out, and I heard Laurie’s own words from long ago, calling up to Mother on the roof: Come down, please, please.
I had to speak. I turned to my sister and almost flinched at the sight of her expectant eyes. “You have to consider, consider how Mom got swallowed up. I’m really worried about you, Laurie, worried that you’re making a mistake.”
“That’s your advice?”
I nodded.
Her mouth curled to an oddly satisfied pout. “Well, I’ll think about it.” She stood, smoothed out her skirt. “Can we go back now?”
We retraced our path across campus in silence. My sister had asked for my support and thought I hadn’t given it. With each step I reconsidered my words, wondered if I should reverse them. I sighed, walked on—perhaps I’d see more clearly by tomorrow morning.
When we approached the apartment, Laurie pointed to a battered import. “Here’s my car.” She opened the door and slipped behind the steering wheel. “Time to go.”
“Hey, wha—”
“I got my nap, Michael. And I got your advice. Now I’m going to drive back.”
“Laurie—”
She offered a farewell wave and drove off in her rusting hulk, the sorry remains of the muffler sputtering into the night air. When her car disappeared in the distance, I concentrated on that faint mechanical grumbling, idiotically hoping to hear it all the miles she’d be driving. But quickly enough it faded into the background purr of traffic.
I turned away from my apartment and returned to campus. If Laurie was imagining me in a scene without her now, she might be surprised to discover that I liked to wander past the university greenhouses. I sometimes stopped and peered inside at a vibrant world of leaves and tendrils, wishing myself inside and breathing in the warm damp air, my hands moist with loamy soil.
One of the greenhouses tonight was brightly lit, a glass beacon that drew me, and already from a distance I could see the tropical palms and orchids, the thick stands of bamboo that seemed to shine from within. A shadow passed overhead and I looked up at a streak of wings lit by the greenhouse. What sort of bird would be out so late?
With another glance at the creature’s swooping, I recognized the shivering wings of a bat. It hovered in the night air, switching to a swift dive, and then the bat rose up, floating briefly before plunging down again. I stood and watched its quirky arcs and spirals until I finally realized they were a kind of hungry skywriting: this creature preyed on whatever flying insects were drawn to the light of the greenhouse. I turned away from the acrobatic display—so unpredictable and yet so inevitable—and walked off at a quick pace until I was almost running by the time I reached home.
Kate was already asleep, her body bathed by the gray glow of a half-moon shining through the bedroom window. I undressed and curled beside her, listening to the steady rise and fall of her breath. I touched her eyelids lightly with my finger. Her lashes trembled—she was dreaming. I imagined the moist inner walls of those lids were another kind of sketchpad, where Kate created scene after scene, a star on a stage of her own making.
I was the one offstage. Perhaps I could join her. Leaning over, I kissed Kate on the ear, a few strands of her hair tickling my lips, and her hand swept up, sleepily shooing away this disturbance. I kissed her again, on the border of fine down at her temple, then her warm cheek. My legs slid against hers until our toes touched, the first steps of a slow motion twining of limbs. Kate murmured at this budding pleasure, and however distant I might be from the intricacies of her dream, I was approaching, surely approaching.