Dee was living in the dorms at Mount Mary College and planned to stay on through the summer because, she said, she wanted to take a few summer classes. I also suspected she didn’t want to move back in with Ma for those few months. Ma wasn’t pleased with this arrangement, but seeing as Dee was paying her own room and board, Ma couldn’t really say much about it. Technically, Mount Mary students weren’t allowed to have men stay with them. Maybe, I thought, she could say Erik needed sanctuary. It was a Catholic school, but they were what Ma called those liberal kumbaya Catholics.
I borrowed Leif’s car and drove to Mount Mary to tell her about Erik. The phone lines at her dorm were shoddy and usually jammed with girls calling long-distance lovers or whatever. Everyone knows those conversations can last hours. When I got there, though, I knew she wasn’t alone. She’d marked the chalkboard on her door with a small, polite X. This was the code she and her roommate used to indicate the presence of male guests. I entertained the idea of knocking but instead pressed my ear to the door. I wondered what Frank sounded like when he came. Dee would have chided me for the thought, but I was fascinated by the noises men made when they came. The first time I heard that kind of noise (I lost my virginity when I was fifteen, and he couldn’t have been inside me longer than a minute), I couldn’t discern whether the kid was in pain. The cry sounded so desperate. Men, and maybe women, are their most animal selves when they’re coming; I’d seen it with Leif. He always seemed so vulnerable in that moment, and sometimes I wondered if he resented that part of it, if other men did too. I couldn’t hear much because those doors were so thick.
A girl walked down the hallway and narrowed her eyes. “Do you have a visitor’s pass?”
“This is my sister’s room,” I said.
“You still need a pass,” she said.
“What the fuck are you, the hall monitor?”
The door swung open and nearly hit me in the forehead. The girl looked like she wished it had.
“What the hell’s this?” Frank’s sweaty forehead was inches from mine.
I peered over his shoulder to see Dee slipping her jeans on. “Frank,” I said.
“Margaret,” he said. He reached out to touch my lower back and I jumped backward. “I was just leaving.”
He looked odd in the hallway. His body was too large and too grown for the dorm. It was early afternoon, and he looked like he already needed a shave. The girls’ doors were decorated with pastel-hued paper flowers.
“See you,” I said.
“Good to see you.”
I said nothing.
He smelled sweaty. Dee padded to the threshold, her clothes askew, and he leaned in and grabbed her behind the neck. He pulled her in for a showy kiss with a lot of tongue. “Bye, baby,” he said.
The hall monitor stood there the whole time. “She needs a visitor’s pass next time,” the girl told Dee.
“What about him?” I said. I pointed at the back of Frank’s head as he left.
Dee laughed, pulled me inside, and slammed the door. I imagined the paper flowers floating to the floor. Inside the room, I choked on the smell of sweat and cum. Rooms that small keep everything inside. I threw open a window, and Dee lay back on her skinny bed, her legs hanging off, bare toes brushing the dirty carpet. Mount Mary let the students decorate their own dorm rooms. Dee had repainted hers in dark purple and forest green. They were beautiful colors, but they kept sunlight at bay and made me anxious. And there were canvases everywhere. I think she had more canvases than clothes. Most of them were facing backward, so all I could see were the wooden skeletons of the frames. Paint was splattered on the carpet.
“Don’t you have a studio?”
“I like to keep them close to me. What’s up?” she asked. Her breath was heavy. I had the sudden urge to be close to her, right near her, shoulder to shoulder, but I stayed where I was. I touched my fingers to my sternum and felt the bruise there that never went away. This was where Leif put the heel of his hand when he was on top of me, the whole of his weight concentrated on a few of my flimsy bones. The spot stayed sore. Touching the bruise could be a strange comfort to me.
“I saw Erik today,” I told Dee. She ticked her head to the left, like, Go on. “He needs somewhere to stay.”
She sprang up. “Why? What happened?”
“He said he’s homeless.”
“Fuck,” she said. “He’s still fighting with Leif, then?”
I nodded.
“He can stay here,” she offered easily, as if inviting him to dinner.
“Yeah. He’s worried—”
She stopped me. “He probably said there wasn’t any room here, right?”
I paused. I didn’t know how to say it. Frank. He won’t have it. “Something like that, yeah.”
“We’ll make it work. Felicity is never here anyway,” she said. This seemed true; her roommate’s side of the room was relatively empty of personal belongings. Still, I knew I should bring up Frank, but I didn’t know how. Or maybe I was just afraid of her reaction.
“Thank you, babe.” I sat next to her on the bed and hugged her. She shoved me playfully.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “Of course, he should be staying with Leif.”
I curled up on the bed next to her, and we lay together with our faces close. It was hard to imagine Frank’s big body on the skinny bed. I shrugged. “I know,” I said. “Leif’s fed up with him, though.”
Dee humphed.
“Plus his ma’s on his case about it.”
“Look at you. Making excuses for Leif. Family’s family. You know that.”
“Nope. I’ve been trying to disown you since the day you were born.” I tickled her rib cage. I knew, from when we were little, the spots she hated: touchy tissue between the bones. She laugh-cried and shoved me away. Her ribs felt small between my fingers.
After all three of her children left home, Ma liked to make sure the four of us still met at least once a week to share a meal. Sometimes this was Sunday dinner (and usually the Packers game) at Ma’s; other times we liked to meet at a Milwaukee establishment called Ma Fischer’s. This was a 24/7 diner known for its pies and its recurring grease fires. Aunt Suze waitressed there, so she could comp small items for us. Sometimes, if we went when it was slow, Suze would share a couple of pieces of pie with us and catch up.
I remember one of these meals at Ma Fischer’s the spring before Dee disappeared because the conversation, at the time, felt fun and clandestine. Dee and I worked together to keep each other’s secrets. I still didn’t want Ma and Pete to know I was living with Leif, and Dee wasn’t ready to tell them she was seeing a grown Guido.
We tried to focus Ma’s attention back on Peter. Ma loved Peter in a way Dee and I knew she would never love us, because he was her only son, and because he’d filled our father’s shoes after he’d died. In another sense, I knew Ma would never love me the way she loved Dee because Dee was her youngest, her baby, and the only one of us who had been a surprise. Or that was how she told it. Over breakfast that day, Ma asked Dee if she was dating anyone at school.
“What’s this I hear about an Erik?” Ma asked Dee. My sister smiled at me, and I looked away. “Last time I dropped you off, your roommate was telling me he’s been around quite a bit.”
Dee shrugged. “He’s just a friend,” she said.
“We’ve heard that one before,” Ma said.
I laughed because it was true. Dee used to have lots of “friends” in high school.
“So you’re not seeing anyone, then?” Peter asked with an air of authority that had a bad effect on me; it made me want to spill Dee’s secrets. Had he learned this affect in law school? I had the sudden urge to tell Peter and Ma about the jagged wound I’d seen on Dee’s ribs, and I looked at her across the table, where she held my gaze like she knew. She kicked my shin, and I spilled my coffee on the paper place mat in front of me. I watched the stain spread. Suze rushed over, whisked the place mat away, and with one fluid motion, wiped the table down and refilled my coffee. She ruffled my curls and gave one of my earlobes a tug. Then she rushed away again.
“No, no,” Dee said. “I’m not seeing anyone right now.”
“Well, that’s smart,” Ma said. “Focus on school. Right, baby?”
Dee nodded smugly. Peter blew on his coffee. Neither of our parents had attended college. After getting out of the navy, our father had inherited a filling station from our grandfather. The gas station, and the repair shop he ran out of the station, kept our father busy and away from home a lot. My mother was hired as a typist at a local paper straight out of high school. When computers had made her job obsolete, her union continued to pay her a decent stipend while she worked as a rep.
“And how’s Leif?” Ma asked me.
“Good,” I told her. “He’s still working third shift, but his boss told him if he gets through this summer, he’ll have his pick of shifts in the fall.”
“That’s honest, hard work,” my mother said. I nodded. “Where does he live again?”
“Riverwest,” I said.
She clucked her tongue. “You be careful when you’re visiting him. You’re liable to get robbed over there. In broad daylight.”
I said nothing. Dee smiled at me sweetly. Pete picked up on something there, but I could tell he didn’t know what it was. He eyed me suspiciously.
“So are you still planning on being an English major?” Pete asked me. He said the word English like it was a food he hated.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you still planning on being an asshole?”
Dee giggled. Our mother frowned. Suze’s timing was impeccable. She bustled over with four slices of pie and a bowl of ice cream that she placed in the middle of the table. She spooned a healthy scoop onto each plate.
“When are you taking the bar again, Pete?” Suze asked.
Under the table, Dee rubbed her foot against my shin where, minutes earlier, she had kicked me.
My father used to always say, “Poetry isn’t a job, Peg.” After he died, Pete took up that refrain as if he were afraid I would forget it. Ma and Dee were always more gentle with me about my writing—Ma because I think she dabbled herself, and she understood what writing meant for me, and Dee because she was an artist too, and though she was more realistic about her job prospects than I was, I knew she harbored the kind of dreams that would make a high school guidance counselor shudder. The last summer we lived together in Ma’s house, we liked to trade some of these dreams back and forth. We liked to hear how they sounded out loud. Sometimes we’d be lying in our matching twin beds just staring at the ceiling and dreaming out loud. The dreams we really liked, we used to write in pencil on the part of the ceiling that slanted down toward our beds.
I sometimes suspected that Dee kept many of her crazier dreams to herself. We both understood, at an early age, the difference between words in the world and words in our own heads. But the thing with me and Dee was, I sometimes felt like we shared the same head, especially when we were younger. This theory was tested when we got older and we started to lead lives that intersected only because we forced them to and because we fell in love with people whose mere existence created such massive clouds in each other’s head, it was difficult to make room for much else. I sometimes wonder if that’s really what happened that summer—we were pushing each other out to make more and more room for Frank and Leif in our own heads. We didn’t leave any room to let each other back in.
At home we had a large library, which was filled not just with classics but also with poetry and science fiction, memoir and nonfiction. Ma read to us often, and often it was poetry because it was short and had the feeling of a lullaby, even if the meaning was not there. I started writing poems at eleven. Ma was thrilled, but my father was less excited. I read lots of poetry, but I didn’t understand most of it. Instead, I focused on the feeling of the words in my brain. They made a mark there like they were characters pressed into soft clay. They stayed. I would reread the books I’d read as a child when I was older and living with Leif for the first time. Those imprints in my brain buzzed and came alive anew. You can understand something new about yourself, about the way the world works, how other people’s minds move, any time you read a book of poetry. I learned it was only important to keep your appetite for the words alive. Leif disagreed. He thought this was a ridiculous way to read poetry. He had dog-eared copies of chapbooks with Post-it notes and bookmarks. He looked up every word and allusion. He took apart syntax. He ferociously memorized lines. He read poems like he was wrestling them, trying to pin them to the ground. It reminded me of the times he and his brother used to roughhouse in our flat. Using force to feel.