My sister, Camille, and I play Cleopatra and Mark Antony. I’m always Mark Antony, and sometimes a slave-girl, too. Camille is always Cleopatra and only Cleopatra.
She likes the dying scene best.
“Together we built this empire,” Camille says, sitting on the front step, on the pillows we took from our beds. “Mark Antony, you are king and I your queen.”
“Yes, Cleopatra, Queen of all Egypt.”
“But look, Mark Antony, our enemy comes. With thousands more than our own army. We’re done.” She sighs and her green eyes look like they might cry. “Let’s drink our last moment of life, then drink from this cup.”
She lifts the silver wine goblet our mother bought for fifty cents at a garage sale. The bottom is uneven and it won’t stand. Camille holds it above our heads.
“Together. We must go together. Hold my hand.” She reaches out from under her yellow bathrobe and takes my hand. “Drink, Mark Antony. Drink!”
I’m supposed to pretend-sip, then gasp, like something is burning in my throat, then grab at my chest and sink to the ground at her feet, twisting in pain. When Camille pretend-dies she just slips off the pillows and lays herself over my stomach.
Sometimes Camille doesn’t drink, but lives on, ordering her slaves to remove my body.
“Take him,” she says. “You may throw him in the river.” Then she walks away saying, “Stupid, stupid man.”
Camille models our mother’s favorite nightgown, the one that’s put away in her hanky drawer, separate from her others. It’s a see-through, gauzy, aqua material with a satin bow in the center, where Camille is developing breasts. Our mother says she wore it on her honeymoon with our father, which was a weekend at the jalopy motel in Borrego Springs, in the middle of the Southern California desert. She has a picture postcard of the motel in the family photo album. There’s a swimming pool in front and short bungalows in back. There are palm trees and red lounge chairs and a blue neon sign that reads HONEYMOON HAVEN — NO VACANCY.
Whenever I look at the picture, I see my parents in the pool, laughing and slapping water at each other. I see them sitting on the lounge chairs, holding hands. Our mother says they were happy, at first. That they held hands and had eyes only for each other. I want to fall in love like that one day. I don’t say that aloud anymore. When I do, Camille calls me a baby and purses her lips like I’m something bad to look at. I’m in the fifth grade. Next year I’ll be moving on to the middle school, and Camille says she won’t even notice me if I don’t grow up. She’ll be in eighth grade and has friends who talk about real love and, she says, holding hands doesn’t measure up.
“What do you think of this?”
Camille has changed into our mother’s Friday office dress, the one that can be worn out to drinks when she adds a scarf and hoop earrings. Camille stands in front of the long mirror behind our mother’s bedroom door. Her feet fit perfectly into our mother’s size seven high heels. She turns, pulls on the hem of the skirt, looks over her shoulder for the rear view, turns and watches her profile through a series of smiles and hair adjustments, examines and pokes breasts that aren’t really noticeable. I tell her this.
“I have more now than you’ll ever have,” she says.
“I don’t care.” But I’m starting to.
“Yes, you do.” She’s so confident about this, she thinks I’ll cry when I’m slow to develop. “Skinny girls are always the last to show on top. You’ll have to stuff your bra.”
“No, I won’t.”
Then she picks up the box of tissues from our mother’s bureau and begins stuffing them into the front of the office-to-evening dress she’s modeling.
“You stuff your bra,” I say.
“Of course.” And that tone is in her voice, the one that says there’s no hope for me.
Our mother met our father in a café off highway 89. Camille thinks it was romantic and our mother agrees. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, peeling vegetables, when Camille asks to hear the story again. Our mother stops cutting carrots and looks past us, into her memory.
“I got on the train in Kirksey, Kentucky, and got off in Peeples Valley, Arizona. The first thing I did was go into that café.” She stops for a minute, frowning so that the lines spreading out from under her eyes crinkle. “Damn, I wish I could remember the name of that place.”
“Millicent’s Country Café,” Camille says.
“Hell, that’s right.” Our mother taps the table with her fingers. “I’ve always said you have a steel trap for a memory.
“Millicent’s Country Café. It sounds pretty, doesn’t it? I thought at the time it did. I remember standing outside that café and reading that sign and thinking, This is a new beginning. I’m going to start my new life right here.
“I walked inside, sat myself down, and when the waitress came over I asked her what she recommended. Do you know what she said?”
Our mother looks at us for the answer, but we both shake our heads.
“She said, ‘I recommend you get back on that train and choose another stop.’ That’s what she said. She was a wise woman. I wish now I’d listened. Of course, then, I wouldn’t have you two darlings.” Our mother smiles at us briefly, then props her chin on her hands. “Instead, I ordered a cheese blintz and a cup of coffee and while I was eating in walked your father.”
She sits back in her chair; her fingers poke at the ribbons of carrot skins.
“You know, my first look at him I thought I was looking at a movie star. I swear that’s exactly what I thought. He was too skinny, of course. But he was tall and handsome, with eyes that looked right at you and made you melt down to your shoes. I think I fell in love with him then and there.”
“Did he love you right away, too?” Camille asks.
“Oh, I think so.” She shakes the carrot shavings from her fingers. “Maybe not the same minute, but soon after.
“I remember the first thing he said to me: ‘That’s nice of you to say, ma’am.’ I watched him walk into the café and sit down at the breakfast bar. He ordered scrambled eggs and black coffee and his voice was like a song. He had this accent from somewhere far away. I knew it was something European. And I walked up to him and told him how beautiful I thought his voice was.”
She gets lost in her thoughts for a moment, until her smile breaks up and she looks at me and Camille with warning in her eyes.
“Your father was very polite. He was a good man to be in love with.” She looks at us across the table, her eyes filling with sadness. “If I’d known I’d end up with heartbreak, I might’ve gotten back on that train.”
Camille teaches me to walk in heels only after she can do it gracefully, with the sway of a willow tree caught in the wind.
It took her some time to get to this point. At first her hips moved like water in a bath tub, swooshing from side to side, because her ankles wouldn’t stay firm. They turned out, or in, and she lost the shoes trying to right herself.
“I have to exercise them,” she said.
She lay on her stomach on the floor, with her feet under the box spring and mattress of her bed, lifting then dropping them, then lifting them again, dropping them. “You need strong ankles.”
Now her walk is as sassy as our mother’s. And she doesn’t want me left behind. Camille says boys don’t date girls who wear sneakers with their dresses.
“I don’t want a date.”
She rolls her eyes. “You will.”
Our mother says she’s one smart cookie. “It takes more than a body and nice clothes to get your stepfather.”
Henrik worked for the government, building fighter planes for our military. When we moved into our new house, our mother told the neighbors, “Henrik is with the government, but we’ll keep that our secret.” She told everyone who came by to say hello or who brought by something to help with dinner.
Our mother met Henrik right before Christmas last year; they got married on New Year’s Eve, with me and Camille standing beside them and a judge in plain clothes and not even a Bible telling us how lucky we were to find each other.
Before that day, I only talked to Henrik once, when I answered the phone. He said the sound of my voice made him miss his own little girl. I asked him if she had a phone, but he took so long answering I hung up.
I’m not feeling so lucky. Neither is Camille.
A month after the wedding our mother went back to her job at the insurance company because that’s what she was doing when she met Henrik. And because life would be a bore if she didn’t have something to do with herself.
Camille says our mother tried crocheting and took a pottery class, but it didn’t fill the holes.
Our mother went back to work for the interaction. She isn’t the stay-at-home kind of mother. She needs to have interests. She needs to think about more than what’s for dinner and does she have enough chicken. She needs to talk to more than the mailman about additional postage and the grocery clerk about the price of cheese. She needs outside stimulation.
Camille says our mother has to work to help support us because Henrik has his own children from another marriage.
“What’s alimony?” I ask.
“It’s when you get divorced,” Camille says. “It’s when the husband pays the wife so she can go on living like she’s used to.”
Henrik is paying for his wife and children, so our mother was married at the courthouse and they went to Ensenada for their honeymoon. We stayed with a sitter.
“For once I’d like to have a real honeymoon,” I heard our mother say. “I don’t suppose that will ever happen.”
“Ensenada will be nice,” Henrik said. “We can lay on the beach.”
“Not this time of year,” our mother said.
“Sure we can,” Henrik crooned. “It’s warmer down south.”
Camille says Henrik was the best at making our mother happy. “He knew a lot of the right things to say.”
The problem was his first wife appreciated it more than our mother did. Three months after Ensenada, Henrik went back to his family.
Our mother blamed it on the honeymoon; Ensenada wasn’t much better than Borrego Springs. “Any marriage that starts at the jalopy motel is bound for disaster,” our mother says.