It was the morning of the vacation. “Mother, Una’s out there throwing a tantrum at herself,” said one of the sisters. “She’s beating her head on the car hood,” said the other.
Una could hardly hear them. They were behind her like they were in a jug and she was the one who was out because of her temper.
The car hood was cool; her head was hot. “You just give yourself such awful hurts,” her father said. He stopped her, held her with his right hand, and soothed her with his missing left hand. This made them both look down to be sure his gloved artificial hand was touching. A long time ago he had lost his hand and part of his arm in a power company accident. He tried to always wear a long-sleeved shirt, and a black glove covered the appliance, which he hated.
This whole morning tantrum had started when Una came to the door to see when they were leaving. She’d been asleep and dreaming. Then she’d seen they were all ready and she was the one out of step—the last one, the cow’s tail again. Her father had called toward her darkened shadow stuck in the screen door, “Is that you, Una? Let’s get going. Are you still in your birthday suit, darling?”
Of course, her two silly sisters had laughed and said, “Look what she’s wearing for vacation.”
“It’s just my pajamas!” It had made Una angry at them, and angrier at herself. She’d rushed to her room, shucked off the pajamas, and wadded up the hateful new sundress with a hole in the back top of it. “I’ll stick to the car upholstery.”
“Don’t tie knots in your clothes like that,” said her mother. “They’re new and you wanted to be different from your sisters. They’re in yellow; you’re blue. I know you hate to look like them.”
“I had been resting,” she said. Resting like she’d swallowed a pool of sleep and could breathe underwater. When she woke she’d felt sleep had tripped her. “You moved me secretly.”
“Just to the front room, so we wouldn’t forget you.” Her mother kissed her while talking.
She didn’t want to have anything to do with her mother anymore and didn’t know how to get rid of her. Her finger came up to stamp the kiss right off.
“Why does she have to start things ugly?” one of the sisters said.
“Why do we have to start vacation so early?” Una bit back. “When I’m sleepy.” She had been up late spying on her parents.
“Now you just calm down, you little viper,” her father said.
“Don’t call her that,” her mother said.
“Don’t take up for me,” said Una, her mouth as bitter as if she’d eaten grass for breakfast.
“All that’s wrong is you pulled her from a deep sleep. You scared her.” Her mother handed her the broken ring of a glazed doughnut. “Your sisters ate too fast. I took only a bite and then realized it was the last one and you love them.”
Una would not eat after her mother. “I don’t like the last of anything,” she said. “And I see you even put the pet birds in the car before me.” The cockatiels were in their big cage in the middle of the back seat with their cover folded alongside. A morning halo of loose feathers hung over them, came apart, and drifted down to their feet and the cage bottom.
She got in the front seat next to the shift to sit beside her father. The older she got, the more she loved him and the less she loved her mother. The hole design in the sundress felt like a rash on her back.
“Cover the birds so they won’t get the a/c draft. And they can go back to sleep now,” said her father.
“I wasn’t ready to wake up either.”
“Next time, honey, give me a sign,” said her father.
Marie and Rita, the sisters, were quiet for a minute, the bird cage between them.
“You just can’t keep ‘honey’ off your tongue,” said her mother. Something still wasn’t settled.
Last night, in their room, there had been trouble between them. Una had not slept, but stood on her rock in the grass outside and watched them through the windows without being able to hear more than a few words at that distance. It looked like the same subject to her—her father’s women—where he would admit he had broken the promise again. He’d failed them all. One moment everything would be fine and the next he would be sinking into a terrible sadness he alone carried. It was always a woman that got him past it—but separated him from his family.
There was never any violence. Only Una was violent, with her temper tantrums. But they were surely mad—her mother with her father, her father with himself. She would give her forgiveness over and over again until he took it. As Una watched, she took his one hand in hers and kissed his shoulder.
In the back seat, Rita and Marie peeked under the cage cover. The birds stretched their wings to balance when the car started moving.
“We don’t want to sit next to the birds,” said Marie. “They smell like seeds and they’re dusty. But we don’t want Una cause she talks with her feet. She won’t keep them still. And she keeps things in her pockets that poke us.”
“I don’t! It’s my hipbones,” said Una.
Rita said, “Look at her hair, she hasn’t even combed it.”
“I can’t,” said Una. “It’s wrinkled.”
When she turned her head to them, they said, “Don’t let her look at us with those old dark eyes of hers; they’re so dark you can’t even see the pupils in them.”
“The Twins,” Una called them because they generally came up with one thought between them.
“We don’t bang our heads on the hood so Daddy’ll come running either. We’re more subtle than that,” said Rita, who did the best at school.
Loud and slow, Una drew their share of air-conditioning into her lungs and held it.
Soon they were out of town, their father driving one-handed, the other in its black glove resting lightly with the wheel running between unfeeling glove fingers. The map was unfurled. Their mother lifted it crinkled in front of her and their father literally drove up the corner of New York State and cut into Vermont. As the road switched and turned, the birds would shuffle on their perch and crack little seeds in rapid succession.
“We’ve got empty husks floating from under the cover and all over us,” complained the sisters. “We’re going to smell like birds in Vermont.”
Now all the unfamiliar towns were way back from the road. The sisters drank thermos water and wanted to stop for bathrooms, but they kept going. The trees had more space between them until the fields won and the trees were dark nests hovering at the edges. “Wildflowers look like silk growing in grass fields,” said their mother. “Flowers just spreading out everywhere.”
The sisters ate Lifesavers.
Then they read the “Welcome to Vermont” sign. “We’ve crossed over,” said their father. Their mother read the next sign on the opposite side of the road. Its back to them was tattooed with spray paint. “Vermont for Vermonters. Turkey, go home.”
Their father began to sing about cows and then he said, “If you stick your fingers in a cow ...” Their mother stopped him, but he started again. “Stick your fingers in their mouths, they’d suck on them.”
Una was sewn up silent by it; she never laughed at adult jokes.
“Daddy, you’re disgusting,” the sisters said. Their voices spiraled and darted.
“Look,” shrieked Una. “A covered bridge.” As they entered it, she ducked. The shadow of it climbed into the car and rode with them. The tires had a hollow beat inside this thing, as if the car now had heavy hooves. It was suddenly cool. The passing through had been like a little nap for them.
Una and her father looked straight ahead. The others looked sideways to see Vermont’s grass flying by. Una would not turn to watch the grass because she felt like she still had herself by the neck; tantrums really did hurt.
“Weeds can be so delicate when they’re wild,” said their mother.
“And look at that,” said their father, when he gave a glance. “A bull just got up with wildflowers stuck on his big pee-pee thing.”
The sisters in the back buzzed with astonishment.
“Men,” said their mother—her voice broke on the word.
The birds dropped to the cage bottom. “Who shook my birds down?” asked their father, exasperated.
“No one. They fell.”
“Perhaps they just suddenly saw the sky,” said their mother. The Vermont blue was high and made Una feel like she’d dropped her gravity.
Not long after, they got to the place they were going. “Snakes!” the sisters in the back cried. “We see snakes.”
“I’m not scared of them,” said Una.
“Why not?” asked their father.
“Cause I learned,” she said.
“Well, you were once a little snake,” said their father.
“Stop,” said their mother. “You’ll hurt her feelings.”
“Ah, that’s just low wind parting the grass for us to get to our cottage.” Then he poked Una with his artificial hand. “The only snake in the grass is me.” She wouldn’t answer him or let go of his other hand.
“Oh, the country is awful,” said the sisters, but they liked the cottage and the stone rise, a mound of granite that rose right behind it. They went to it immediately while their father unloaded.
The rooms of the cottage were small and opened into each other like chambers of a shell.
The sisters came down from the granite outcropping and their mother followed. “There’s a pool in the middle of the rock,” said Rita. They were always dressing and undressing for something, so first thing, they skinned themselves from traveling clothes into tight, brief bathing suits.
“I’d better check,” Marie whispered to Rita. Una watched their lips move, but actually the sisters kept their voices so low to each other they all had to read lips. Una knew what this was about. One’s period had come several months back and they were expecting the other’s. And the one who got it was on a hop, skip, and jump schedule. “As regular as a cut-rate sheet,” their mother said.
“No freckles in my pants,” Marie said.
Then they began testing everything in the cottage—drawers, mirrors, doors. Una and her father unpacked, arranged, smoothed feathers, and settled into their new temporary place.
Their mother had changed to long walking shorts. “I don’t want to go in yet,” she said. “Not on the late half of the first day.”
They walked up to where they would swim later. “Such blue,” said their mother. In unison, they looked down. “Try up,” she said. She was talking about the sky over the quarry that was only reflected in the water.
It had been a rock quarry, so it was somewhat scary. “Harvesting rocks, for heaven’s sakes,” Rita, with the good grades, said. Only the sisters went in together and dabbled and never quit holding hands, except when coming out—there were two ladders. They said the water was a wonder if you didn’t look down. “It’s a blue hole all the way through to the bottom.”
“But where’s the bottom?” asked their mother.
“You’re not supposed to be able to reach the bottom of everything,” their father told her.
“Come with me, Una,” said her mother. “We’re going hunting.” Her mother set out for a fenceless field. Una crisscrossed her mother’s path while her mother named wildflowers out loud. She had a good eye, a field guide, and patience to have a gentle hand to look at them carefully.
“But you don’t let flowers into our house,” said Una. “Why?”
“I don’t like flowers in vases or cold flowers from the florist shops. Because they make me think I’m sick.”
“Were you ever sick?” said Una.
“Almost,” her mother said.
When they circled back, the sisters were halfway out, coming up, naming the ladders—mine, mine, they said. They took over one of everything.
“Disgusting,” said Una. “It looked like you were taking a bath. You didn’t swim.”
“We’ll swim tomorrow,” they said.
When they came in the cottage, their father was in the bathroom, his clothes empty on the big bed. He could be heard this time removing the appliance that was his missing arm; it slipped and clicked against tile. They listened to him shower in private, free of the thing which he even wore in sleep.
The sisters said, “Girls at school fall in love with our father because he only has one arm.”
“What?” Their mother shuddered and shook out her blouse. Dressing, she was forever losing and finding her jewelry, so there was a little flutter before dinner that mildly upset the birds, who had been watching the sky for wings.
In the main house’s dining room, their mother ordered a salad. When it came it was huge and deep in a dish. She said over it, “Well, shall I eat the Garden of Eden now?”
This shamed Una, though her mother was slender in her clothes. She hated to see her mother eat the wrong salad, big instead of small. Una distrusted food. Their father got her a steak and a potato, which she mostly cut and made patterns with.
The sisters discussed what they would do on their vacation now that they were here, and it sounded like it had already happened. Una never liked either their surprises or their plans.
On the way back, their father stopped by the linen closet and took extra towels for the birds, who slept safe under towels hung on their cage. Moonlight was out and moonlit air was the purest to breathe, their mother said. And Una got a mosquito up her nose that kept singing there all night, she said.
Their mother could not hold their father’s one hand now, she carried iced raspberry tea in a glass with her. “I just loved each swallow so much,” she said, “I couldn’t and wouldn’t stop drinking it.” It looked like stained glass and she finished it. If you got close enough to her lips, and their father did, she smelled like a raspberry.
They walked while making sleeping arrangements and then sat outside their cottage on the granite and watched the moon, which didn’t do anything. In the moonlight, Una suddenly said her strongest word, “Mother, you’re pretty.” And their father said, “My God, yes.” She looked so young, her skin like the flesh of a flower, she could have been her own child waiting for the mother to come. Mother and father backed up, sitting, put their spines together, and rocked each other almost into a dream. The sisters got nervous, they didn’t want their parents to dream and they got itchy when they saw that side of them.
Later, inside, the birds wiped their beaks and fell asleep standing. Late, late night, the sisters kept at their vacation, trying not to sleep in it but stay up for it, reading everything—cards, heads, contents of pockets, and then they got to hands. “Una has fingernail marks in her palms, Mother.”
“She makes secret fists,” their mother said. “It shows up in all the family pictures.”
Since her feet were too strong and wouldn’t stay still, they wouldn’t sleep with her. They put her on a pillow pallet on the floor at the feet of their father and mother so she’d be safe.
Then the sisters said, high and almost together, “I’m lonely.”
“I’m not,” said Una.
The sisters sat with her then and scratched her back and played with her loose hair. They had curlers in theirs. Back in their bed, they clicked into sleep like insects in their shells.
For a while Una played with her own broad, flat ribbons of hair. Then she woke her mother by tapping lightly, one finger on her forehead as if it were a door to something.
“Can we leave a light on?” Una asked.
“We don’t need to, dear.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re all here inside, together.”
“Daddy would turn on a light for me. He lets me have everything.”
But everybody was still and quiet and riding in sleep, their father in his long-sleeved pajamas, his deep male breath in the room, rocking them.
Una left them to get to her pockets. She’d brought two small sea-shells, small as seeds; she planted them now in front of the mirror, which the moon made into a long, cool light on the wall.
The next morning she said to their father before both of his eyes would open at the same time, “Daddy, my seashells walked last night. Just a little.”
“What . . . they couldn’t have, Una. There’s nothing in them anymore. They’re empty.”
“Ugh.” That excited the sisters. “Dead spirits of snails, snail ghosts,” they screamed. Their imaginations, unforgivably, were just alike.
Una made a dimple of spit on the mirror to mark their place. “It’s just an experiment,” she said. They giggled, which sounded like something running around in circles.
“Mother, Una’s starting to pout,” said one of the sisters.
“I am not. My face is just different from yours.” To her mother, softly, she said, “Did you argue with Daddy last night? I heard you.”
“No, you didn’t,” her mother said. “You heard a light rain. It came to wash things quickly for tomorrow, which is right now, you better be ready.”
Their father said he was first awake before everybody, but stayed with his eyes closed, letting the sun get to his face in bed. “Fire me up from inside, cure me like a pot of clay.”
Una put on fresh underpants even before her bath because she wanted to set out now. Dinner had embarrassed her, so she’d give herself breakfast alone—an apple from the trip in one pocket, old bread in the other, where the seashells had been. Her parents let her separate from them like this. She wanted to finish breakfast early so if she fell into the quarry pool she’d have long since eaten and cramps wouldn’t drown her.
But her doing something different, and being allowed to, set the sisters in a mood. Also, their bangs had come up in their sleep and wouldn’t come down again. So they made fun of Una. “She can’t ever get married, Mother. Cause she won’t take off her underpants. She sleeps in them.”
“She wears three pairs in twenty-four hours,” said their mother. “And I remembered to pack extras for her.”
Angry, the sisters wore their bangs like fins to breakfast.
The bright light, going the other way, hit Una’s eyelids and made her feel like she’d suddenly run ahead of herself and the earth had slipped out from under her feet.
The quarry pool wasn’t yet blue. In the new light it was colorless. So the family went to the dining room while she tried to find what new birds, butterflies, and worms were in Vermont. When their parade got back from breakfast, their father visited the cage. The birds ducked because he came back with coffee breath. Then a bird jumped on his left shoulder; he turned and it winged. Una thought he liked birds because they didn’t have two hands either.
Una’s shells were checked by everyone; they had not moved and the dimple had dried to a glass defect.
The sisters felt three flat bathing suits. “Dry, dry, dry.” One was their father’s; he hadn’t worn it, but it was out waiting. It was he who’d wanted to come and swim—the one thing he was so good at younger that he’d almost had to give up. “A place where I was perfect and won medals.”
Their mother had disappeared and now she gave the order from behind the bathroom door, “Everyone close your eyes.” They heard her step out past the brush of the door. They opened to see her with her breath held and her stomach tight.
“As beautiful a shape as before anyone was born,” said their father. He kissed her for her joy in accomplishing this feat.
Then, when their mother’s breath was out, there were soft rolls at her waist. “Oh, well,” she laughed, “one too many babies.”
Their father changed and looked funny to Una, a long-sleeved shirt, a black bathing suit, and his two legs showing.
Their mother said, “When I bend over, this tight bathing suit bottom hurts like I was having a baby again.”
Una changed. In the bathroom, quickly. She’d seen enough of herself one time—with a hand mirror. Her pubis. She was cloven there, but closed, like two tiny hooves pressed together.
The minute she walked toward the pool, her lean cheeks began chewing away at her bathing suit bottom. By the end of the day, she knew, it would feel like a man-eater—several times she would have to snap it from its jaws. It won her attention by the ache it caused, constant, tiny, which seemed to be already on the way to her heart.
The sisters’ lips were white with Noxema. They had already screamed and run, then carefully dunked themselves in the water, wet, their bangs pressed flat against them. They dipped, came out to bake; they were using water as a magnifying glass to get sun on them.
It was apparent their father would go in wearing the shirt and the black glove that matched his bathing suit.
Their mother now was wrapped in a white sheet taken from the cottage bedroom.
He only paused, and rethought. Then his body curved, gave a slow fall with a slight twist toward his incomplete side, one arm forward, one dangling at his side. The water bent under his masculine weight and took him beneath it without even a gulp. He left a crown of breaking bubbles on top to mark his place.
When he did not pop right back up in them, Una was afraid that he had gone to touch bottom and she knew the bottom wasn’t there. Then he was on top, seeming to float standing straight up, not touching anything but his chin to the water line, and his fingers of one hand swimming. He began moving. Would he swim like a bird with a broken wing? Then Una saw he wanted to swim in circles.
She watched a little, and listened. Her sisters had accused her of having ears like antennas. “They pick up overseas stations.”
“We’re waiting,” their mother called to their father, her voice like the drone of bees half put to sleep by the sun.
When the white shirt was wet, you could see through it and through the sleeve, and it was alarming. Through her split-lid look that she couldn’t control, Una saw the appliance and what remained of her father’s real arm.
Actually, she was watching the sky when it happened. The moon was out where it didn’t belong. She found it in one far corner of the sky with the sun. In daylight, the moon wasn’t rock at all; it looked like the cloth in the water, like one layer of thin skin. She was waiting for courage. She had time because the water was too much for her. It took her balance in it, and with that water penned in the quarry, the whole rock felt like it was moving. She wanted time to see what she would have done on her vacation that was special. The stars and sun and moon together—that was what she wanted. She closed her eyes to wish all of a sudden and felt like she was falling. It was too high up here in Vermont. She made a small wad of herself, crouched on warm quarry rock. Extra nerve, she was waiting for it—and for the apple and bread she’d eaten to settle down before she looked up to the spinning sky again.
Then she heard with her tuned ears the sounds her father was making and trying to keep to himself. He was panting and exasperated, sucking at the sides of his mouth.
One of the sisters cried out like a cat.
Una was on her feet, running right off the edge of stone and into the water. She was in and over and under and up. The water was flying around her and around them. Her father was so hard to catch, she wanted to hold onto him and save him. He kept giving her the wrong hand, the false gloved hand, and she kept knocking it down and away from her.
The quarry’s water was not cold. It was hot, coiled inside her, real air now felt like tight rings in her nose.
She had never seen her father’s face in anguish this close up before.
“What’s going on? Make her leave Daddy alone,” the sisters screamed. She heard them outside; she was trapped in the water with her father.
Where in the world to hold onto her father? She got him around the hips, her arms tight, hard little lifesavers, and her feet kicked, kicked them up.
They bumped against the side. But her father wouldn’t get out. Then his good elbow hooked, and his bad one followed. She was like a step beneath him, a moving step. And then there was a sheet flapping, popping at the quarry side—the sail took him up and in. It was her mother’s sheet and her mother’s hair rose and filled and flew with her joy and her moan.
The sisters waded tiptoe into the clear splatters around him. Their backs to her, they screamed, “Oh God, God, Una!”
“I’m up and out,” she said. “My feet are strong.”
“How? Did you get out from slick water and up straight rock and not go to the ladder?” Rita asked.
“I got myself by the hair and pulled, lifted myself out by my own hair,” said Una.
“Impossible,” said their mother.
“And here I am,” said Una.
“Saint Una,” the sisters said and giggled, but then they cried and were so scared they couldn’t even look at their father.
“Ladder?” said their father. “Ladder?”
“Two! Didn’t you even know? Didn’t you even look for one? What were you hoping to do about getting yourself out?” He closed his eyes when their mother kissed him. He took his good arm and put it around her. “I couldn’t pull myself out with just one arm. My shirt tired me and the appliance hurt in the water.” She put his other arm around her and started shivering. At the same time, she was squeezing Una’s hair dry.
The way her mother stepped in to get her kisses from her father made Una fierce. “I’m the one who saved you, not her,” she told him. This time, quick, she drew blood under her fingernails down her mother’s arm.
And this time he raised his hand to her. “Did you hurt your mother again? Did you scratch her?”
“He’s never spanked her; only us,” one sister sniffed, “but now he will.”
“He’ll spank her in the face. Good.”
He retrieved her mother’s protective white sheet and carefully wrapped it around her, put it on her as if she were coronated. Then he told her to go inside. He wanted to talk to Una. He told the sisters to stay beside their mother.
The sisters, for once, didn’t bolt ahead. They wore their sun shirts now and held knots in the sheet and waited to follow.
“No. You leave Una alone,” her mother said. Her voice had holes in it from nervous breath.
“Don’t take up for me.”
“Sit down, Una,” her father said.
“No,” her mother said.
“Is ‘no’ all she can say?” Una said. “Make Mother go away. I mean disappear. I hate her.” When she looked, her mother had gone, the sisters pulled along behind her. Only wet sun pieces were there, stuck in their footsteps.
“You’re going to stop talking like that,” her father said. “I’m going to stop you now.”
Una made knuckles out of her toes. “I won’t sit down. I got water in my bathing suit. It’ll make funny squishing sounds and you’ll laugh at me.”
In the cottage, the sisters did.
He looked at them behind the screen, serious, as if he were going to guess their weights and ages. “Your sisters were born too close,” he said. “That’s what’s the matter with them.” He seemed mad at everybody after just having been saved. “We hit fallow between them and you.”
“Fallow! Daddy’s talking dirty again, Mother.” The sisters were laughing, scared.
“I’m drunk on pool water and fear,” he said.
Her mother’s voice sieved through the screen, aimed higher than Una’s head, as if he alone could hear. “You didn’t do wrong alone; we’re married.” There it was—the old argument come back on vacation. Worry was the sound of rain, it had whispered last night to Una. “We decided together no more children. I was the one who broke it and then refused.”
“Who? Who?” the sisters screamed.
Una’s nostrils closed like doors to dark closets. She pinched her nose and tightened her eyes, her wet lashes tied together. “I don’t like this old argument today,” she said.
“We do, Daddy, tell us.” The sisters, looking hopeful, crossed their fingers and slid their hands into their shirt pockets.
Their mother said, “I made the appointments and cancelled. I changed my mind after I had promised.”
“Now I don’t want to know. This is a big deal,” said Marie, who always chickened out first.
“It’s the Scarlet A,” said Rita, who really did listen in school. “Abortion. He didn’t want to have any more of us.” They laughed, terrified.
“The last one was me,” said Una. “And there was nothing I could have done about it.”
“Una was the mistake!” the sisters said, shocked. The words were magic. Their mother and the white sheet were gone, disappeared from the screen.
“It was then she told me she had two hearts inside.” It was their father talking. “She told me to leave. She said I was missing, not an arm, but a heart. See, Una?” their father said. “You have to stop making me your only one. You must let your mother love you.”
Their mother appeared, her sheet folded in her arms.
As if there were two answers to everything and they had them, the sisters pulled their fingers from their sun shirts and held up one hand apiece. Each hand held an empty shell.
“Stolen!” cried Una. “Mine! Don’t touch them. Mother, make them stop taking my things.”
“They walked to us, Una,” said the sisters. “And we caught them and saved them for you.” They had lied many times against her; this time they lied for her.
Their mother, face pressed against the screen, was flat as a photo of herself.
“Don’t you cry, Mother,” said Una. “You know you’ll upset the birds. These birds talk. We have to be careful what we say.”
Behind them, the birds found sun on their perch and stood in it. They mumbled between their beaks, understood only each other; they had private matters, too.
“Now can you see? I love you, Una,” said their father.
“Ow,” she said.
“Look, Mother, Una’s tears are falling. And they’re huge.”
When they all looked down, the quarry rock was speckled as a mackerel, drops of silver and black depending on which side of the eye and sun you saw. It looked like her eyes falling around her.