WHEN MY SISTER was a sophomore in college, in Philadelphia, she fell in love with a sallow-skinned, lank-haired boy whose chief interest in life was the effects of hallucinogens on the neurochemistry of white rats. This was in 1973. Ed was two years older than Alex, and when he dropped her, she came unglued. She left school and returned home to Kentucky. One morning in March, after eating half a grapefruit and casting a cold eye on the saucer of vitamin pills my mother had set before her, she went back upstairs, swallowed most of a bottle of barbiturates, and sat down in the reading chair in my bedroom. By the time my mother found her, Alex was in a stupor; her head lolled, her hands were clammy, her blood was pooling, not moving. My mother, who had been on her way to church to tag items for a bazaar, called an ambulance and got Alex to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped. Later, the doctor put her in Queen of Peace, a columned and porticoed institution that sat on a hill about a mile from the new county zoo. Because the windows to the rooms were sealed shut, it was unlikely that a patient would hear an elephant trumpet or a peacock shriek or a lion roar. But Alex said there was a man in her morning group therapy class who complained that the animals kept him awake every night. As for Alex herself, she heard nothing at night, just a whispering in her head, like a breeze passing through fir trees.
A few days after my sister entered Queen of Peace, I took the bus home from college. My father picked me up at the depot downtown. I asked how Alex was, and he said, “Your mother thinks she might be hypoglycemic.” I looked puzzled, and he said, “Something about a low level of sugar in the blood.” He didn’t tell me what he thought. Three stoplights later, we fell silent. Eventually, he turned on the radio. The car filled with opera—it was a Saturday—and then he dialed around until he got a basketball game. “Now here’s something in English,” he said.
My father led me into the hospital and up a broad, curving staircase, which I pictured women in long dresses descending, on their way to meet men who wouldn’t have resembled me or my father in his raincoat that looked as if he’d slept in it. At the top, Dad remembered that my mother had sent along a sack of vitamins for my sister. He left me at Alex’s door and went back to the car to fetch the sack.
My sister was sitting up in bed. Next to her, on the nightstand, was a fish bowl, and above her, on the white wall, was a small plaster crucifix; the bony Jesus, his head downcast, looked as if he’d given his last cry. Alex wore a black shawl over a white blouse that was buttoned to the throat. I’d never seen the shawl. It made her look dramatic, in a formal kind of way, like someone in a painting from another century and another country. Alex had always liked to dress up, and I thought it was a good sign that she hadn’t stopped. I didn’t know if it was a good sign that she’d tied her hair back, leaving her brow so exposed.
“Don’t worry, Peter,” she said gamely. “I’m just having a run-of-the-mill nervous breakdown. Isn’t that right, fishy?” She tapped on the bowl. The goldfish, the only truly bright spot of color in the room, streaked away. It was a gift from Bobby Tarr, a guy Alex had dated in high school.
“Mom thinks I’m chemically unbalanced,” Alex said. “And spiritually at sea. And that I go out with the wrong boys.” She looked out the window. It was an erratic mid-March afternoon, full of clouds one moment and bursts of sunlight the next.
“What do you think?” I touched the too-small black beret on my head. I’d bought it at a thrift shop. I’d hoped it would make me look worldly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess some of my boyfriends haven’t turned out too hot.” She glanced toward the doorway, as if love might be there, waiting.
I saw a wimpled nun walk past, then another. I expected to see a third—didn’t nuns travel in threes?—but she didn’t materialize.
I said, “You’ve had some OK boyfriends. What about Bobby?” Bobby was three years older than Alex; he’d dropped out of college by the time she met him. At the moment, he was the leader of a band called the Tarrdy Boys and clerking in a store on Bardstown Road where you could buy incense and peasant shirts and Tarot cards, among other things.
“Bobby can be nice,” Alex said. “But I’m just one of his chicks.”
“And Mac?” Mac, whose actual name was Eldon McRae, was my age. Alex had first gone out with him when she was a sophomore in high school and he was a senior. Mac was shy and awkward, except on the basketball court, where he became someone who could make fallaway jumpers with his eyes half-closed. Alex found Mac’s shyness appealing—that and his soft, blond, almost feminine looks. Mac felt flummoxed by his shyness, and as a result, he drank more than was normal in our group. When he drank, he sometimes did stupid, shy-boy sorts of things. Once, he tried to pole-vault into Alex’s second-story bedroom, using a long metal rod he’d stolen from a construction site. He’d risen briefly into the air, like a pioneer of flight, and then had fallen on his shoulder, dislocating it. Like me, Mac had been a solid B-minus student, and we’d ended up at the same college, a boys-only institution, on a mountain in Tennessee.
“Mac got so bombed sometimes,” Alex said, “he missed my face completely when he tried to kiss me.” I saw her watching Mac’s face float by again.
“Well, anyway,” I said, “Mac said to say ‘Hi.’”
“‘Hi’ back.” Alex gazed at her fingers, which a flare-up of eczema had reddened, and made a church out of them, loosing silence upon the room. She was burrowing into herself, her nose leading the way. She had the Sackrider family nose. The sharp tip suggested that it would be worth your while to tell her a joke or a story.
“How are the nuns?” I asked.
“Les zeros?” She roughened the r expertly; she used to practice her French in the shower, bouncing accents argus off the tiles. “They’re watchful.”
My father appeared in the doorway, the sack of vitamins in one hand and a tweed motoring cap in the other. The cap was a Christmas present from my mother, something to make him look more sporty. He was a judge, and as a rule he dressed like one, though he sometimes failed to notice that his dark suit coat didn’t match his dark suit trousers. After all, there were motions and petitions to be pondered, precedents to be considered.
Dad told me he was going to wait outside in the car. “I don’t want to intrude on your discussion,” he said, stooping to kiss Alex on the forehead. “We love you, Moony Tooth.” My father had a whole hatful of names for my sister: Izzy Woo, Alexosaurus, Babes, Miss Graham Cracker. The last was derived from Alex’s full name, Alexandra Bell Sackrider.
After my father left the room, Alex said, “Dad told me a story about how some East Coast girl had snubbed him when he was in college and how he’d been down in the dumps for days. Then he came back home for Christmas, and he saw Mom at a party, standing under mistletoe.”
“Mom under mistletoe? Wasn’t she a member of a Trotskyite cell back then?”
“Allegedly,” Alex said. “Anyway, Dad kissed her. ’I took the liberty,’ was how he put it, ’and I started living again.’”
“Didn’t it take Dad about seven years to persuade Mom to marry him?”
“He left that part out,” Alex said. The goldfish darted around the bowl, filling the room with its agitation. “I guess he was trying to tell me to hang in there.” She pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders.
Ten minutes later, when I left Alex’s room, it was snowing. It shouldn’t have been snowing in Kentucky in mid-March, when green was surging through everything, but there the flakes were, all fat and wet. They fell on my face, like kisses from somebody—an aunt, say—who hadn’t seen me in an age.
I found my father in his gray three-on-the-tree Chevrolet Biscayne, a car as unstylish as his old raincoat. He was leaning his forehead against the steering wheel.
When I got in, Dad sat up straight and adjusted his cap. The steering wheel had left a mark on his brow. “I was thinking of that fish Alex caught in Lake Cumberland. Fall of sixty-two. You remember that?”
I remembered our fishing guide, a narrow, dilapidated man named Bristow who rolled his own cigarettes. He was so quiet that he’d essentially finished talking for the day after he’d said “Morning” to you.
“Alex was the happiest girl in the state when she caught that fish,” my father said. “A little old crappie. And now she’s inconsolable because of this fellow Ned.”
“Ed.” I watched the snow fall, as thick as a plague of moths. “But I doubt it’s just him.”
“What else do you think it is?” He pushed his glasses up his nose. Maybe my father loved the world too much to imagine that someone’s sorrow could lead her to want to vanish, to forgo the chance to drop a line in the water once more.
I said, “Sometimes you lose your grip and you start sliding down the slope and you can’t stop.”
“Yes,” my father said. “You need something to hang on to when it gets rough.” He fired up the Biscayne, turned on the windshield wipers. “Isn’t it peculiar, this snow?”
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, when every dogwood in Jefferson County was in bloom, Alex sat at the table in my parents’ kitchen, smoking one of Willie’s Salems. Willie, who had worked for our family since before I was born, sat across from Alex, snapping the ends off green beans. There was sunlight in the room, a springtime flood of it. It washed over the cut-glass sugar bowl and the three china monkeys (See No Evil, etc.) on the lazy Susan, over the faint hairs on Alex’s wrist, and over the cast-iron pot Willie dropped the beans into.
“Last night I dreamed I was on a Greyhound,” Alex said, “and this soldier kept falling asleep on my shoulder. And when I’d wake him, he’d scratch his head and say, ’Excuse me, ma’am, is this the Silver Dog to Bozeman?’”
I thought it was a good sign that Alex was having travel dreams. Since coming home from Queen of Peace, she’d rarely ventured out of the house, except to see her therapist. Once she’d driven to Frisch’s Big Boy and ordered a cheeseburger and a shake, but had left before the curb girl could deliver the food. On another afternoon she’d gone with Bobby Tarr and his friend Pipe Cleaner Man to see a show at the planetarium.
“Don’t talk to no soldiers on Greyhounds is my advice to you,” Willie said. Willie handed out advice without much prompting. She snapped the stem off a bean. “You getting ready to leave us, Alex?”
“I’m just telling you my dream,” Alex said. Cigarette smoke hung around her like a cloud, then slid out the window. She looked pale and a bit undernourished, but not without resources. I watched her trying to work out things behind her large brown eyes. A thought sped by; she touched her temple. Another thought, a longer one, it seemed, unfurled itself and lingered near the corner of her mouth, which curled downward.
“What do you think I should do, Willie?” Alex asked.
“Well,” Willie said, “if I was you, I wouldn’t be sitting here in my bedclothes at three in the afternoon with the sun shining. That’s first. And second, I don’t know that I’d be fooling with that boy Bobby and his friend, the one that looks like a Halloween skeleton.”
“Pipe Cleaner Man,” I said.
“He has a good heart,” said Alex, who was drawn to socially marginal boys, boys whose brows were unclear, boys who liked to sleep in their labs with their rats and gels. “He can’t help how he looks.”
“All that reefer don’t improve him any,” Willie said. “And you neither.” Her eyes, bloodshot from too much work or too many cigarettes, aimed daggers at me.
“I wonder what Bozeman is like,” Alex said, giving the lazy Susan a push. The three monkeys glided by, two of them clearly grinning.
“Never heard of it,” Willie said.
“Cowboys, rednecks,” I said. “What would you be thinking of Montana for?”
“Bobby’s sister lives there,” Alex said. “She’s a weaver.”
“Cowboys, rednecks, and a weaver,” I said, reaching for one of Willie’s Salems.
“You can leave your money on the table,” Willie said to me, carrying the pot of beans over to the stove. She was short and wide, a formidable squarish shape, like something not easily knocked over, though she walked on the sides of her feet and her white shoes were split at the seams.
“What about New York?” I said to Alex. I was thinking of moving there when I graduated from college, later that spring. “We could go together, find an apartment.”
“I hear they got rats as big as suitcases in New York,” Willie said. “Rats that eat children.” She took an onion out of a bowl on the counter and slipped off its brown jacket.
“New York’s too close to Philadelphia,” Alex said, looking out the window. Our mother was kneeling at the edge of the garden, her trowel flashing in the sunlight. Hugo, our old dachshund, lay nearby.
“Where would you go, Willie,” Alex asked, “if you were trying to think of someplace to go?”
“Walter took me to Chicago once,” Willie said, “but I didn’t think much of it.” Walter was Willie’s husband; he worked in a mattress factory and shot more pool than Willie believed was good for him. “When I was a girl, I used to like to visit my Great-aunt Alberta down in Hardin County. She had a horse and some Seckel pear trees. Sometimes she’d wrap the pears in newspaper and stick them in a drawer to let them ripen.” Willie pushed chopped onion off the cutting board into the pot of beans. “But Hardin County might be a little slow for you.”
Alex rubbed her temple with an index finger; a thought had lodged there, apparently. “Maybe I should be a nun.”
“You’re just talking,” Willie said. “Anyhow, you ain’t Catholic.”
“The Episcopal Church has nuns,” Alex said. We were Medium High Church Episcopalians, except for my mother, who practiced Episcopalianism but kept her ears open to the teachings of Baptist fundamentalists and Catholic mystics who lived on nuts and berries.
“You got to stay in the nunhouse on Saturday night if you’re one of them,” Willie said.
“Mac asked after you,” I said, blowing a smoke ring that wobbled over the lazy Susan before collapsing.
Alex peered at me through the haze of smoke and sunlight. “How come you keep promoting Mac?”
“He’s my friend,” I said. “He likes you.”
“Is that the boy who tried to fly into your window like he was some kind of spirit?” Willie asked.
“The same,” Alex said. “If drunks had wings.”
“Yeah,” Willie said. “Then they could fly upside down and sing to you like Smokey Robinson.”
Alex studied her hands. Eczema had chewed up her fingers, but they still flexed and wandered and grasped. Outside, sunlight washed over the figure of my mother kneeling among columbine and coralbells, Hugo dozing in the abundant green grass. Alex said, “Maybe I’ll go get dressed and play some piano.”
“PIGS ARE SMART, you know,” Mac said. He was telling Alex about Ben Franklin, a pig he’d kept as a pet for most of our last semester in college. We were in a johnboat on a lake east of Bardstown—my father in the bow, Alex and Mac in the middle, and myself in the stern, my hand on the tiller of a six-horsepower engine. It was a hot late-June afternoon, the sky the color of steam, no more than a shred of breeze. None of us had caught anything in the three hours we’d been on the lake. Alex and Mac still had lines in the water, but only my father, who secretly believed that catching a fish could make your blood rush and your soul expand all at once, fished as if he meant it. He was using a green popping plug, something that had worked for him on other occasions. Twenty times, the plug fell out of the sky into dark, weedy water near the shore, and twenty times my father slowly reeled in, flicking his rod now and then so that the open-mouthed lure made a sound—bup-bup—intended to excite bass. And twenty times the plug reached the boat slathered in algae.
“Where did the pig sleep?” Alex asked. She lifted her bait out of the water—a night crawler that resembled a knot of blanched viscera—and then dropped it back in.
“He slept in my dorm room in a box, until he got too big. I got him a student ID with his picture on it.” Mac grinned. The sun had turned his fair skin a bright pink. His little blond mustache, which he’d worked on for months, was barely perceptible.
“Maybe I should try one of those weedless jigs,” my father said. He opened his tackle box and took out a yellow-skirted lure. I saw a hawk cruise the pines at the far end of the lake, then dive out of sight.
“Is that the end of the story?” Alex asked. “I bet not. I bet that pig didn’t live happily ever after.” She glanced at Mac from underneath her baseball cap.
“I sort of donated him to my cultural anthro class,” Mac said. “I gave him to my professor. We were studying hunting cultures and how they relate to animals.”
“So then you barbecued him,” Alex said.
“Eventually, yeah,” Mac said, sighing a little. “But first I had to shoot him and cut his throat. Except I screwed up and missed the jugular. So then the pig gets up all of a sudden, all zonked on adrenaline, and starts flying around the pen in the professor’s yard, splattering blood everywhere. And everybody in the class is silent, like this is a secret ceremony or something.”
“The class watched you do this?” Alex asked.
“Yeah,” Mac said. “So the professor and I caught the pig and cut the vein. I needed a keg of beer when it was over.”
My father cast his yellow-skirted jig toward a stump, the monofilament gleaming as it arced across the water. It was possible that he hadn’t heard Mac.
“What was the hardest part?” Alex asked Mac. Her knee was almost touching his, and she moved it away. “Shooting the pig? Slicing his throat? Or eating him?”
“Shooting him, I guess,” Mac said, glancing at me. Mac had omitted from his account the fact that he’d been near tears as Ben Franklin flung himself around in that last mad rush of adrenaline, and the fact that it was the professor who had finally cut the jugular. “You’re supposed to shoot him between the eyes. It’s cleaner that way. But the pig wouldn’t stand still while I was trying to sight him in. He kept moving his head back and forth, like he was on amphetamines, sniffing the dirt. I kept waiting for him to look at me.” Mac didn’t say that his hand had been shaking and that his first shot had hit the pig in the shoulder.
“If I’d been that pig,” Alex said, “I would’ve looked at you. I would’ve wanted you to feel all my dying pig thoughts.” She stared at Mac.
“Yeah,” Mac said, turning away.
Alex reached over and pressed the sunburned flesh above his knee with her thumb. “You’re going to fry, if you don’t watch it.”
My father reeled in his jig, and proposed that we move toward the end of the lake that lay in shade.
We scooted across the water, stirring up a breeze. Mac put a fresh night crawler on his hook and offered to put one on for Alex, but she said she’d do it herself. When I turned off the engine and we began to drift through the shade, my father said, “There’s a fish waiting for you here, Moony Tooth.”
“If you say so, Dad.” Alex tossed her rebaited line into the water, and set her elbow on her thigh and her chin on her fist.
My father’s yellow jig flew toward a fallen tree near the shore and the bass that surely slept there.
Mac watched his bobber. “Come on, fish. Bite.”
A dragonfly landed on the bill of Alex’s cap, its four wings in repose. “I’ve decided to move to Montana,” she said.
My father reeled in his lure, which wiggled like a grass-skirted dancer. I could see him pondering the distance between Kentucky and Montana. He and my mother had wanted Alex to stay in-state for a while, spend a semester at U of K or U of L. “Long enough for her to get her feet on the ground,” my mother had said. When I’d argued that I thought Alex had her feet on the ground—I’d still hoped she’d come to New York with me—my mother had replied, “Do you know what you’re talking about? Depression doesn’t just go away, like the chicken pox. It follows you around, and then one day it’s sitting on your chest again and you can’t breathe.” My mother talked with her face turned aside, as if to spare me some of her indignation. “Can you imagine what it would be like for your sister to fall ill in a desolate place like Montana, where she doesn’t know a soul, except for Bobby Tarr’s sister?”
The dragonfly flew from Alex’s cap. I considered the distance between Montana and New York, and I thought I saw Mac calculating the distance between Montana and Nashville, where he would begin work later that summer, selling pool tables for his father, who owned a chain of billiards stores in the mid-South. Anyway, I saw Mac’s pink face darken, as if some slim hope had fled. Alex had a hold on Mac’s imagination, the more so since she’d tried suicide. It was as if she knew things now—what pigs felt, why space curved.
“Montana,” Mac mused. “Do they have daily mail delivery in Montana?”
“Are you going to write to me every day, Mac?”
Mac stroked the fuzz on his upper lip and studied his bobber.
My father looked out across the lake, which was flat and glaring where the sun struck it. Perhaps he was thinking of the winter he’d spent in Wyoming. He was fresh out of college then. Having been deemed unfit to serve in the Army—his eyesight was unacceptable, he was thinner than a darning needle—and having no good idea of how he should spend his professional life, he took a job at a private school in Sheridan founded by an oilman’s wife. Dad had told Alex and me this story at dinner a few nights before. “Oh, it was as cold as Billy Blue,” he’d said. “I thought spring would never come. I couldn’t wait to get back to Kentucky.” When he’d finished the story, Alex said, “I’ll be sure to take some warm clothes with me, if I decide to go.”
Now my father removed his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. The lake was still. All the dull weight of the afternoon seemed to lie on it. Then Alex’s bobber went under and her rod bent. The line ran parallel to the boat, then doubled back. Her face was intent, as if she were in the grip of a revelation.
The fish she pulled out of the water was a silvery yellow, with dark stripes. It wasn’t much longer than her hand.
“A bluegill,” my father said. “You saved us from being skunked, Moony Tooth.”
“A lunker,” Mac said.
“It’s not always the size that counts,” Alex said, grinning, showing Mac some of her fine, straight teeth.
“That line’s older than my grandmother,” Mac said, grabbing hold of the fish as it twisted in the air.
“Still applies,” Alex said.
Mac wrestled with the hook—it was in deep—until the blue-gill squirted out of his hands, landing on the slatted floor of the boat. I picked it up, felt the muscle bunched beneath its scales, then watched it shoot out of my hands. Alex took off her baseball cap and scooped the fish into it. Her loosened hair fell across her face.
“I’ve got a hook disgorger somewhere,” my father said.
“That’s OK, Dad,” Alex said. “I can do it.” She pushed her hair out of her face and bent over the fish, which she held on her lap in the cap. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said to the fish, working the hook back and forth. When the hook finally came free, she placed the fish back in the water carefully, as if she were setting a vase of flowers on a table.
“Go!” she said.