Mad Hope (21 page)

There was a blindfold, a purple bandana they rolled and knotted, then tied tightly around Annie's eyes. She was their medium, their conduit. ‘One more spin, then stop,' said Samantha, then clasped her sister in a hard hug from behind, pushing her fist into the smaller girl's abdomen to drive out the air. Annie fainted, lay in a heap on the floor while Caroline and Soula conjured love, which meant a boy's hand moving downwards from the small of your back, his hot breath in your ear, which meant a peppery feeling in your extremities, a drowsy warmth in your lower belly, and lower still. Which meant (if you were lucky or cursed) at night, alone, under the covers, something so raw and wracked and already whole that – although it seemed strange to think it – it could not, honestly, ever be shared with anyone else. Annie woke up suddenly, flailing like a fish at the bottom of a boat, fretful with hope. ‘Did it work?' she would gasp. ‘Will they love you now?' And Samantha and her friends would spit out curt thanks, already weary of the conceit.

But things had been different for Annie. As initiations go, hers should have precipitated a haunting more sustained and damaging than any séance could summon. Why, then, is it Samantha who pitches and yearns, is beset by a desire she can only ever faultily fulfill? When Annie, aged nine, told Samantha what had happened with their cousin Bobby – the clandestine meetings, the candy, the caresses that turned toxic – Samantha had swallowed her sister's shame and turned it into the wrong kind of anger.

‘Bobby is a very close friend of mine,' Annie had said, when Samantha recoiled, reproved, denied. ‘He said it was just something for us, a love game, you know? Like the say-once game?'

‘He is not your friend and this makes you a little, well, this makes you a slut, Annie.'

Samantha releases her mother-in-law's hand, excuses herself to the propless man. ‘Just going to the bathroom,' she half-­whispers.

‘Let me get you another drink. What would you like? I'm Max, by the way, a friend of Philip's from work.' He follows her over to a nearby table.

‘Samantha. Nice to meet you. Vodka and cranberry, please. Twist of lime. Two twists of lime.'

‘Gotcha. Two twists.' He winks at her.

Smug polished stones cluster next to the sink beside a pile of dried rose petals resting in a shallow pewter dish, and in the mirror: Samantha's own self, flushed from the wine and the dancing. The hairdo seems prepared to rally, but an anxious musk is mingling expertly with her perfume, clouding out from under her arms, between her legs. She touches her cheek, smooths the shininess from the edge of her nose, taps at her emerging crow's feet, considers lip gloss. But no, stall first. Inside the stall is safe and square, the lock slots into place as it should. She swings her skirt up and forward, gathers it in front and works her underwear down with one hand. Once seated, she relaxes into the pee, her panties pulled taut between her knees. Everything, her whole life, shrunk now, to this stall, which is every stall, every seat where she's ever sat to pee. A room of one's own and all the careful deliberation of the drunken: the narrowed eyes, clasping fingers, the slow tear and the slower, conscientious wipe. The light is pleasantly bright, the walls gleaming and graffiti-free. Samantha is not dizzy, although she is experiencing some of the empty-headed euphoria that accompanies dizziness. Her gaze slides easily up the walls to the ceiling, then back down again.

The door to the bathroom opens. A gulp of ‘Dancing Queen' before it swings shut. Ivory toenails, strappy black patent leather sandals click over to the sink, then into the stall two over from Samantha. ‘Bon voyage!' she calls softly, when she hears a neighbourly flush. Bon voyage! For this is what it has become – the whole affair – watching Annie move slowly away from her, as if on the deck of a cruise liner from the forties. She's fluttering a white handkerchief, pretending, trying on a life that, as children, they could never have conceived.

Marriage: it was a place where dolls lived, stiff-limbed and polite, dry humping on piled-up napkins, a mini Kleenex package for their pillow. And Annie now is stepping into it, as if through a gate in a tall brick wall no one can see past or over. How can this be true? Samantha does not want this to be true. Because the only forts in which she still has faith are those built in the deep days and nights they spent as sisters. If asked
Do you love your sister?
how else could she reply?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
But love is watery thin – impotent! – compared to what she feels. ‘Bon voyage,' she says again, to the impassive tile.
Bon voyage.
To the purse rack, with a queen-like wave. The pomp and circumstance, cummerbunds, tulle and pageantry. The solicitous man, gazing over her shoulder into the gaping crevasse of his future. It is not what Samantha wants. Then what is it that eludes her? She braces herself against the wall to work the panties back up into position. A baby, she has been thinking lately. Or not thinking, but feeling in the ache that ripples through the crooks of her arms, the ghost town of her lap. A baby. She washes her hands, dabs them dry with a paper towel, then shakes them gaily under the blower for good measure.

Back at the table, Max is holding a lime slice in each hand, grinning.

‘Two twists.' He passes them to her. She squirts the juice into the redness, pokes at the ice cubes with her straw. ‘Thanks.'

‘So, what do you do, Samantha? I mean, when you're not cutting a rug.' Max laughs as if he's not sure how.

She likes that:
cutting a rug
, the nervousness. ‘I've been travelling quite a bit, working wherever I can, trying to get a bit of a handle on the way the world works.' She recoils.
How the world works?

‘Really. Where have you been?' He focuses on a point just above her collarbone.

It is possible she is losing him here, and although she is still not certain he is worthy, she wants him to pay attention, to validate whatever Samantha-style missives she can toss his way. She craves the spotlight but knows she'd feel overly warm in the cheeks, fraudulent, if she managed to get there. Has she always been this way? Crippled by self-conscious righteousness? Oblivious to others in all but the most superficial way? It is likely, she muses, that she will produce a maladjusted, misanthropic child – no matter how much Mozart or Mandarin the baby is privy to in utero.

Max clears his throat.

He likes her. So it is settled then. ‘Well, I was working on a farm in Mexico for a while and I've just been teaching in Vietnam – English, to teenagers mostly. Sort of the equivalent of our high school, but more structured and rigid. Which wasn't really a bad thing. I mean, I had some wonderful students, hungry for what I could give them, hungry for what we have. Hard to get them to loosen up though; they've got the weight of the world on their shoulders. So much expectation ... '

‘Right. That must have been challenging for you.' He is feigning or not feigning admiration. Either way.

‘More challenging for them.' She can feel herself being humble and hates it. ‘What about you? Are you in marketing with Philip?' Samantha knows next to nothing about marketing and considers this a fault. Enough people seem to do it, all day, for days on end; there must be something molten and mesmeric at its core.

‘Well, yeah, more the communication side of things, really. Some graphics and copywriting. Not very interesting. I'm in a band, though, and I do some, well, performance pieces, I guess.'

‘Oh.' It doesn't suit him, this revelation. Samantha struggles to match it up with the mannered walk, the missing cane. ‘What kind ... ?'

‘Well, I try to express how the banal, the menial ... ' He is dragging his fingers through some spilled red wine on the table, drawing diminutive snouts and asteroids that glow softly up at them. Samantha considers the weave of his linen suit and the slight lean of his nose and finds they please her immensely.

‘You know, how the universal, the transcendental, can be encapsulated in the small, seemingly inconsequential occurrences that surround us.' Max lifts his eyes to meet hers, his nostrils aquiver with the power of art explained. It is possible she was wrong about marketing, its central mystery. She smiles like a tired sorceress.

‘I mean, I write and sing about whatever happens to me, I guess.' He smiles back at her.

Okay, this is better. ‘There's something to be said for paying attention to the everyday, I suppose.' Samantha nods at him, and keeps nodding, as if weighing things up. But what is now dawning on her, like a lazy sunrise, is the fact that she is no longer living the domestic, or even cannily observing it, but instead attempting, clumsily, to ambush it at every turn. She has become unmoored; she is drifting downstream from her very own life. She is saddened by this, then remembers. A baby –
there
was an anchor, an absolute, a tangible. Without meaning to, she has begun to tap her foot in time to the music, is swaying ever so slightly, a happy reed on the shore newly discovered by the wind.

Max nods distractedly in the direction of the dance floor. ‘Would you ... ?'

‘Yes,' she says, ‘why not?'

To talk while dancing seems awkward and prematurely intimate, but the silent alternative more so. The music canters up and around them, creates not so much a mood as an expectation. Samantha struggles to keep the physical distance between their bodies consistent. She knows any type of rapprochement will require careful diagnosis on both their parts.

Max leans towards her, but with a certain sanitized purpose. ‘I've done a fair bit of travelling, but really, in the end, it comes down to a kind of day-to-day vigilance, a certain faith in the richness of the domestic sphere. I'm not sure there's much new I can learn through the exotic,' he murmurs past her ear.

‘Huh, the domestic. The exotic. What do you mean?' She can't help it; her voice has grown edges. She thinks this Max is trying to put something over on her, and succeeding.

‘I mean, well, to put it inelegantly, to use a cliché, I mean Be Here Now, I suppose.' He sighs showily at his own conversational ineptitude, then applies some pressure to the small of her back, leading her into the centre of the cluster of dancers. Why, thinks Samantha, do people always apologize for using clichés, then seem pleased to have used them in the first place? Annie had once told Samantha, by way of comfort and admonishment, that she expected too much of people. ‘Yes,' she had shouted in reply, ‘yes, I do!'

The song segues into something more rhythmic and cross. Samantha wants to jump up and down, to pump her fist and yell, but she doesn't know how with such an audience. She makes her way back over to the tables and chairs, Max following close behind.

Eliza: There Are Limits

‘Can't say I like this much.' Bea nods towards the dance floor.

The music is hard and bare. A man speaks in nursery rhyme about getting naked over the steady pulse of bass. ‘That's rap, Bea. It's the rage.'

‘Ridiculous.'

And what can I say? I've tried to pull myself by the seat of the pants into the times of today, to keep up with what is televised, but there are limits. ‘Yes,' I reply. ‘Ridiculous.'

Samantha: Mudstick

Somehow – how? – Samantha finds herself dancing again with Philip's mother, a tiny, wiry woman, with dark wiry hair and a quick, wiry mind. ‘Welcome,' she says simply to Samantha, who thanks her, twice, wishing this woman were her own mother as they waltz carefully through the crowd.

Why is it,
really
, that Sandra, Samantha and Annie's own flesh-and-blood mother, has not mustered the courage to attend her own daughter's wedding? In her place is a package the size of a small fridge, around which all the other gifts have been clustered like acolytes. The gift is not a small fridge, although it could well have been for all the care Sandra has put into it. Not that Samantha thinks much of the whole gift-giving enterprise to begin with. There is a rule – made up by a posse of matrons and manners mavens (and marketers, no doubt!) – that insists the amount you spend on the wedding gift must equal or exceed the amount the hosts spend to feed you while you make merry. When had the world become so assuredly crass? But perhaps it had not changed much since the days of the obliging milk cow offered with the mild-demeanoured daughter with decent child-bearing hips. Sandra had called Samantha to tell her she had checked the registry and found a corresponding kitchen mixer on sale in Detroit for one third of the price, a scratch on the finish remedied by a daub of similarly hued nail polish.

But if Annie is upset at their mother's absence, she does not show it. She runs like a sleek, white clown – fresh out of finishing school – towards her sister, who is now standing with Max in the far doorway, as if pausing regally before making an entrance. Only it is too late for such things now.

Annie releases Philip's hand to embrace Samantha. ‘Married. Do you believe it?' she asks, her breath skimming the underside of her sister's chin.

‘Well,' says Samantha. She nods, ducks her head to hide her tears. ‘Our Annie,' she mumbles into her sister's perfect hair.

She had a teen magazine she treasured, has it still, squirrelled under grade-school reports and old tax returns at the back of a closet.
To test your breath before a date
, it instructed,
blow softly into a soda bottle, then sniff
. At the age of eleven, she taught Annie and together they misted up the green glass. ‘Mine smells ... ' Annie always said, so certain and free, even back then. ‘My breath smells like yours.'