IN THE BACKYARD OF THEIR LEMON-YELLOW farmhouse was a swing Tom Harrison had built when the girls were young. It hung from the branch of a large sugar maple. A tree as indigenous to the Northeast as the inhabitants of the house it shaded in the summer; a tree no less spectacular for the predictability of its fall colors, the leaves of red and yellow and orange and gold that glistened as if they’d been kissed by the sun. It was a tree with a history predating the couple who’d stumbled upon the house in 1964, a chemical engineer and the bride he’d known barely six months. When Mildred thought of herself back then, she liked the picture that came to mind: an ebullient young woman recently sprung from the dorms of Penn State and deposited into her “real life.” She was so plucky then. So much in love. Within a year she gave birth to her first daughter, and although we now know the significance of that event in the annals of daytime television history, the happy parents had nary a clue their baby girl would grow up to be the first in three generations to leave the East Coast.
After Brooke had settled in Los Angeles, she told Mildred that what she missed most about home was the old maple with its swing and coat of many colors. She remembered vividly the day her father had pushed a silver extension ladder against the tree and tucked beneath his arm the piece of wood attached to two thick ropes before beginning his ascent. In her version of the story Tom was a tall, mysterious man who’d disappeared into the leaves and sent down a swing, the object of her youthful contentment. Brooke could sit on that swing for hours, her shins thrusting back and forth, catapulting her into a world normally inhabited by birds, tiny buzzing creatures, and the occasional Frisbee. Brooke recently told Mildred she’d never been as comfortable anywhere in the world as she was on that swing. In motion. Imagining what it was like to fly.
Mildred would have felt less nervous if their conversation had not been predicated on another speeding ticket and failed breath test that landed Brooke in drunk-driving school, where she said she knew practically everyone in her class and viewed it as a de facto networking opportunity. Such flippancy Mildred could not understand. She feared Brooke’s drinking was becoming a problem, and her traffic violations from major to minor seemed nothing less than insolent. But the young soap star had a predilection for fast cars. What was the point, she said, of owning a roaring red Porsche if you were going to stay the speed limit? It was speed that made driving fun. Made Brooke feel like she had wings. Besides, the fearful succumbed more frequently to accidents than the carefree, Brooke said, reminding her mother of the time Cynthia had let go of the swing and glided into the neighbor’s hedges. Tiny Cynthia, afraid of pumping beyond a forty-five-degree angle with the ground, normally held so tightly to the ropes her knuckles went white. Nobody had imagined she would one day bounce high enough to lose control of the ropes and shoot across the sky. At least that was how it seemed to the eight-year-old Brooke who watched her sister’s torso arch peacefully before crashing into the bushes.
The bloody-faced girl came up wailing. Brooke carried her upstairs where she dabbed her face with a hand towel to assess the depth of Cynthia’s wound. It was worse than she’d thought. Blood gushed from her sister’s forehead, and Brooke could see the white cauliflower that must have been her brain. All the direct pressure in the world wouldn’t close a hole that big. She needed help. Calmly, though, she assured Cynthia it was nothing. She said she was going downstairs for Band-Aids and found her mother in the kitchen. “Whatever you do, don’t stare,” Brooke counseled. “We don’t want to scare her.” And Mildred had obliged her precocious firstborn, knowing how easily Cynthia frightened and realizing she would not go anywhere—especially not to the hospital—without Brooke by her side.
There had been many days when Mildred worried that Cynthia would someday start resenting Brooke for all of the trials the older girl had put her through, all of the games constructed to test her will and her loyalty. But the accident seemed to further entwine them in each other’s identities. Neither girl seemed to have many friends, Cynthia retreating behind her hardcover books and black walls, while Brooke complained of the endless parade of obsequious faces, each willing to do whatever she asked, no matter how rotten she behaved in return. Being on TV could bring out the worst in you, Brooke had confided to Mildred and said she was more grateful than ever for her daily phone calls home. The connection to Blue Bell was the only thing that kept her grounded, the only way she could bring herself to venture out, and she was at a point when making the scene still mattered. For some time she had been auditioning for movies, convinced that elusive part on the big screen would rectify the hardships she’d endured as a daytime ingénue: her second-rate status in Hollywood, the year-round work schedule, and all of those luncheons with screaming fans, benefits for causes she could barely keep straight, and the torturous appearances at shopping malls. She said it was downright degrading at times, and Mildred knew exactly what she meant. They couldn’t walk down the street anymore without hoards of people rushing up to Brooke and hugging her tearfully as if they were part of the family. That was the hardest part for Mildred, the lack of separation between her public and private lives. Brooke said it was like that for soap stars. “All of these emotions are, like, bubbling up to the surface,” she explained. “People start thinking they really know you.” But Mildred couldn’t see how a movie career would make things any better. People would still know her, even more people. Mildred envisioned nonstop drunk-driving and traffic tickets, additional sleeping pills and skin creams. Since she was a child Brooke had attracted epidermal ailments of biblical proportions. Dermatitis, hives, eczema, boils. It often amazed Mildred how porcelain-smooth her face appeared on television.
Cynthia was lucky, the doctors had said. She could have been blinded. As it was, she needed forty stitches above her right eye, which left behind a birdlike scar that spread its wings whenever she raised her eyebrows. Brooke had said the scar was a wonderful symbol of her flight and told Cynthia she should wear it proudly.
Through the years Mildred found it increasingly ironic that Cynthia trod the earth wearing wings when it was Brooke who had always been enamored with flying; Brooke who was routinely described as “angelic,” “cherubic,” and “lamblike,” and who adored her sister even more for the proof of the heavens she carried on her forehead. What Mildred didn’t understand was that Cynthia, too, welcomed her celestial responsibilities. As if the child in her few minutes of flight and its aftermath had made a tacit agreement to bear the weight of her sister’s desires. As Brooke slipped further into the world of impulse on the West Coast, Cynthia took on the mission of spiritual cleanup crew. She had already been leading an ascetic life, sleeping on her air mattress and wearing nothing but drawstring cotton pants, generic sneakers, and sweatshirts. Nor did she indulge in any of the usual teenage vices: cigarettes, beer, diet soda, chocolate, potato chips, cheeseburgers, and the like. Since the age of thirteen she had been a strict vegetarian; she wouldn’t even eat fish or eggs. Yet she was no proselytizer. The last thing she wanted was to convert anyone else to her lifestyle. It was her crown jewel much like the wings on her forehead, a daily affirmation that she’d broken with the teenage world of stadium concerts and slumber parties in favor of a more cerebral existence. She cultivated her mental prowess by watching over her world-famous sister.
Mildred had heard about twin telepathy, which made sense given their involuntary cohabitation in that most sacred sanctuary—it was hard to imagine each ever developing fully on her own. Cynthia’s extrasensory perception, on the other hand, was more phenomenal because she’d chosen it, and Brooke did whatever she could to nurture it as well. Geographically separated though they were, Cynthia swore she knew whenever Brooke was on a bender or fighting a particularly bad strain of insomnia. The minute such warnings came, she called Brooke, often catching her late at night on her car phone as she sped along the highways of Los Angeles. It was her only way of letting off steam, Brooke had said whenever Mildred expressed concern about her driving alone at night. But she wasn’t going anywhere, her mother protested, never fully understanding what Brooke had meant when she said she was more at home in her car than she’d ever been in her apartment. She liked being out on the open road. Part of the world, yet insulated from it. Imagining what it was like to fly. She’d graduated from the swing to that car too fast, Mildred said to herself.
One cold autumn day, she was on her way into the kitchen. Outside the windows, crispy leaves barely clung to the old maple and she could not get Brooke on the telephone. It was Saturday so she wasn’t on the set, although they had been shooting her scenes at odd hours to accommodate drunk-driving school. Perhaps she was with her boyfriend. The young man from the movies. A star. When Mildred was young they would have called him a matinee idol. And perhaps he wouldn’t have had such trouble with the tabloids, something Brooke told her not to preoccupy herself with—there wasn’t a truthful word in those pages.
Mildred filled the kettle with tap water to make a cup of tea and turned on the stove. She searched for a task to occupy herself until the water boiled, but the dishwasher was loaded, the counters wiped clean, the stove sparkling. She sighed and was practically ambushed by an unbridled release of emotion. The day had brought a homebound sadness, its mass rising from her abdomen up through her chest and grabbing her by the throat when the sigh came. Although familiar, the feeling was not one Mildred could quantify or qualify, and, as Brooke might have advised, what would be the point of that? If anyone had asked Mildred Harrison what was the matter that day, she would have responded succinctly, “Life weighs.” She had long ago accepted the particular isolations of marriage and family life.
Her eyes drifted out the kitchen window where she saw Cynthia standing beneath the old maple pushing the empty swing as if there were a person sitting in the seat. A pinch like an epidural shot through Mildred’s spine and she felt as if time had flashed back a few years. After the accident, Cynthia had avoided the swing except to push Brooke back and forth, her own two feet planted firmly on the ground. It suddenly dawned on Mildred that all of Cynthia’s “training,” from her early years as a hot dog to the day she sat quietly in the backseat of their station wagon after they’d dropped Brooke at the airport to begin her work on the soap, were to help her keep the home front alive for Brooke. Mildred’s gloom swelled. She could barely keep her eyes on the forlorn teenager with her short hair and drab clothes without wishing she’d done things differently. If only she had an inkling of what she might have changed.
The kettle bubbled into a whistle, startling Mildred away from the window. She filled her mug with water and watched the tea bag rise to the top. There was no keeping it down despite the battle she waged with her spoon. For some reason this comforted Mildred. She leaned her face into the flowery effluvium and inhaled deeply. The smell of chamomile made her nose twitch. Soon she would remove the tea bag and get on with her day, but first Mildred Harrison did something so out of character she later told Tom she felt as if she’d been possessed by the spirit of the recalcitrant tea bag. For on that blustery fall morning, Mildred Harrison wrapped herself tightly in her lumber jacket, set aside her mug, and walked out back to sit in that swing while her younger daughter pushed.